Now more than ever, we're remembering the pre-CGI sci fi horror golden age, and it turns out to be the 1980s. We had it so bad that two semi-big budget films came out about vampire teens, with almost the same story, the same year, 1987: Near Dark and The Lost Boys. Both involve a vain teenage hunk--in a single parent family with a younger sibling-- ready for his first big mistake, falling for a hot young vampire who lures him into her weird pack, which includes a small child vampire and a wildman. And lots of moral hand-wringing about drawing one's first drop of innocent blood. Ugh, there's the rub.
I refused to see either films in the theater at the time, because I hated seeing the 'brat pack' spill over into my favorite genres. And seeing them now they're fun and brooding in their measure, but man, I've had it up to her with these cute youngsters who dig the percs of being vampires and don't mind blood if a hot vamp girl feeds blood to them from her own wrist, but won't go around killing humans for food, because that would be 'wrong.' Oh Prunella! Oh Heaven forfend!
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| The Cool Kids (Top 2: Near Dark) |
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| The buzzkills (top: Near Dark) |
Both films assume we know and respect the hierarchy of attractiveness in boys --but boys who aren't doe-eyed hunks and used to getting any girl they want aren't about to identify with these clowns--and we're the ones who watch these movies 100 times instead of going out on dates. We end up loathing these self-righteous mooches with a passion that lasts far longer than our ugly duckling phase, lingering on the edge of our beautiful manipulative older male swan phase, and re-surging in the old reprobate phase, where it gradually dissipates only when we begin to beam nondescriptly at their moody foibles as we would our own grandsons'.
Jason Patric in Lost Boys is exhibit A for me, as I've written in the past. When he sees Jami Gertz in a big beachside crowd gathered around an open air stage, he starts following her around as if he's already pissed at her for walking away from him without falling onto her knees and kissing his ring. He acts like his physical beauty is a sacred church and therefore there should be no laughing or running around in his presence. This overconfidence gets a comeuppance when he's goaded into a dangerous beach moped race to one of the cooler vamp cavern hideouts and manipulated into drinking vampire blood. These scenes are the best in the film, and director Schumacher ably captures the adrenalized swirl of energy around hooking up with a group of wild new friends, the need to belong weighed against the warning signs going off deep in your sacral chakra.
Star it turns out has chosen to initiate a new member to the clan, with Kiefer's approval - but dumbshit Patric can't figure out what's happening... chalking it up to some ecstasy or something in the blood wine he was given. Next day he's a pale, shaky mess who can barely keep his feet on the ground, man maybe he's right. Some of us back in the 90s had to fill our high heels with sand just to stop from floating away.
Almost the exact same plot serves Near Dark, but instead of Schumacher's ingenuity with packed beach boardwalk scenes, thousands of coordinated extras, colorful taxidermy gardens, pumping anthem rock, and ingenious literalizing common phrases of parents at the dinner table (if your new friends jumped off a bridge, would you?), there's Kathryn Bigelow's moody Badlands-esque emptiness. Vast fields like skin, the few straight roads like arteries begging to be punctured with gas stations, phone booths, and silos. one of the more realistic looking biker bars--caked with dust and the muted loneliness of the aging regulars, all the fight leeched out of them slowly, drip by drip from the numbness of time's passionless faucet and the emptiness of the landscape--and seedy motels.Near Dark wins the contest just because it at least thinks to critique its doe eyed hunk's willingness to literally leech off his girlfriend rather than nut up and kill his own dinner as a metaphor for the hypocrisy of today's consumerist carnivores, who get super indignant when confronted with evidence of their butcher's slaughterhouse crimes. They'll eat all the meat you can serve, provided as they don't have to look into its eyes. i.e. serve the brains jellied inside the cow skull, you're a serial killer, just the usual rump stake, and you're simply a nice host. Serve honey roasted grasshoppers, you're a freak; fried shrimp? A true surfside chef! If we all had to do a few days work in the slaughterhouse, co-op style, how much you want to bet this country would be easily 70% vegetarian? No wait, I don't gamble. It might send the wrong idea to children!
Amid this hypocrisy it's indicative of the filmmaker's conscience in each how this moral high ground climbing hunk is handled. I'd love to see one of these films wherein the girl vamp deliberately turns a tortured nerd instead --he could struggle the other way, killing off his old bullies, bad teachers, employer... finding out only too late the fantasy of revenge doesn't quite blot out the reality of existential guilt.? Hell, that guilt is something else. I feel it every time I leave my cat in the morning, or when I go to the zoo. I never got comfortable even fishing. Even throwing them back I wince at the pain from imagining a hook in my cheek. Even knowing its faked for the movies, it's too easy to imagine it wasn't. Rules of the Game is very brave in that - what other comedy shows dozens of bunnies and birds being shot, for real? And though the characters don't flinch, you can tell Renoir does.
I tried being vegan during my big spiritual awakening of last fall (see 'Scrooge Satori Apocalypse', The Holy Madman, and my site Pswar of the Saints for proof!) but simply got too dizzy in the end to keep it up. My body delighted in shedding all the crap from my system, but then ran out of stuff to shed, and began feeding on itself. One simply can't be holy these days without one's own private cook, or a lot of money, patience, and interest. And whatever happened to the apocalypse? Aside from the trans-galaxial enlightenment I and dozens of others received either from galactic alignment or placebo effects, nothing happened. Not even ice cream. Going back to dairy and meet took its toll though, and now I'm blind in one eye again, so I don't have to think about the pain and bottom line-minded torture my dinner went through to reach me.
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| Tony Scot's parallel lines |
But then... a miracle happened. The year 1994 came--back when I was still drinking, with a vengeance--and washed the lack of sin off the screen. All that bad faith ended with a triple threat of charismatic young leads who got away with cold stone murders: Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, and The Last Seduction.
Looking at them now they're still cool -- but what was so energizing about them has been forgotten by the skin deep imitations - and what was that? That the lead characters all got away with murder. They killed innocent, not-so-innocent, and other people and robbed and arranged murders and in the end got away scot-free.
There are no words to describe our exhilaration after having to suffer through so much leftist moral hand-wringing over onscreen killing. Superheros crashing Humvees through shopping malls like maniacs but then braking to not hit the main villain; whole crates of ammo being fired in The A-Team without one guy being hit; Cameron having to show that the hundreds of cops Arnold shot in T2 are only clipped in the leg (Fatalities = 0, it says on his monitor), it all got to be a serious buzzkill. But then came True Romance (1993), and the crazy couple got away with the loot, for once, and the girl didn't browbeat the man for killing her pimp! Hallelujah. The next step was 1994, the year phony moral killjoy mania bit the dust!
Naturally there has been some kickback. A couple of dumbass kids out in the boonies went on a killing spree after being inspired by Mickey and Mallory Knox, but their parents' lawsuit against Oliver Stone was unsuccessful!
Sadly, as they have always done, the Hollywood imitators of the Tarantino mythos got the surface right but missed the point. The skinny black ties and pop culture referenced didn't make the films great, it was the flatline savvy about death, about understanding that cinematic death doesn't equate to real life death, but that in realizing this the onscreen deaths actually become more real, more vivid, the more they are recognized as cinematic expressionism rather than glum social sermonizing. As Godard once said, it's not blood, it's red. When we want insincere Hollywood hedonists to lecture us about the sanctity of life and death we'll ask them. Go ahead and bite a neck or shoot a man, Billy! You've got nothing to lose but your fear of flying, zipless. Can't you even learn to let go of the handrails, even in a dream?