30 Years Ago: Predator 2 (1990)

The opening shot of Predator 2 (1990) is a remarkable one. 

Director Stephen Hopkins’ camera rockets over a dense jungle landscape, thus reminding audiences of the 1987 John McTiernan film and its Central American locale.  

Then -- as the camera continues to speed over myriad tree tops -- it pans up to reveal…modern Los Angeles, the urban jungle, on the horizon.

This composition is a great visual way to connect the two films in the franchise, and a sure sign that Hopkins boasts an active intellect and more to the point, a great eye. 

It’s as if the last moments of Predator have become, literally, the first moments of Predator 2.  

Predator 2 is also appreciated by many horror movie fans because it provides the first cinematic evidence of a “shared” universe with another beloved franchise: Alien (1979).  

During the climax of this sequel cop/warrior Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) finds his way aboard a grounded Predator spaceship and sees a trophy room that boasts a Giger-style alien skull. 

At first blush this might seem like a throwaway moment, but, certainly, it paves the way for the Alien vs. Predator movies of the 2000s. Already, Dark Horse had seen success by pairing the two monsters in a comic series, but Predator 2 is the first such evidence of a shared universe on the silver screen.

Whether that’s a good thing or not, I’ll leave up to you, the reader, but Predator 2 intimates a shared history between two great movie monsters in a way that isn’t entirely obvious or craven (like, say, Freddy’s finger knives dragging Jason’s hockey mask down to Hell.) 

Instead, the reveal of the alien skull in Predator 2 is an awesome moment that expands significantly both franchises.We now know that Predators have defeated the acid-dripping, silver-jawed monstrosities, and likewise that those monstrosities have been around since well before Ripley’s first encounter with them. This moment in the film thus succeeds in the manner that was intended.  It tantalizes us with possibilities, and with a history/relationship we don’t fully understand...but can imagine. 

 

This sequel also shares much with another science fiction film of 1990: RoboCop 2.

For example, both Predator 2 and RoboCop 2 feature moments that suggest the tabloidization of American news, the rise of such fare as Inside Edition or A Current Affair. Both films also worry about runaway crime rates in America at the time, and obsess on the notion of our streets becoming the battleground for drug and gang wars.  

And both films -- truly -- are anarchic in visualization, graphic violence and tone, suggesting that the near future will be a time of visceral, bloody horror, sensational news and beleaguered infrastructure. 

In both films, the cops can barely hold their own.

Predator 2 never quite reaches the provocative and anarchic highs or lows of RoboCop 2 but -- to its ever-lasting credit -- the Hopkins sequel is more than willing to acknowledge the humor inherent in its central scenario. 

At one point, the hulking Predator ends up in the bathroom of a cranky old woman, and at another juncture attacks a busload of commuters (including a Bernard Goetz character…) simply because they are all armed. 

This scene may represent the best argument for gun control ever put to genre film: Don’t carry a weapon on your way to work, because the Predator -- while on safari -- interprets all gun-owners as “soldiers” and wipes them out with extreme prejudice. Seriously, this film imagines Bernard Goetz-vigilantism as the norm of 1997, and it's a commentary right in line with the imaginings of the RoboCop films.

I admire many aspects of Predator 2 and consider it a worthwhile sequel overall, yet I don’t see it necessarily as an equal to its predecessor in terms of suspense and storytelling. The movie occasionally suffers a bad case of Alien-itis too: cribbing too liberally from 20^th Century Fox’s other space monster franchise.

That tendency doesn’t help the film to cement its own individual identity, and works against the director's best efforts.

“Shit happens.”

In the near-future year of 1997, Los Angeles is choking under perpetual smog, and its streets are a war-zone.  

There, rival gangs -- the Jamaicans and the Colombians -- duke it out for superiority. One of the city’s best cops, Mike Harrigan (Glover) attempts to bring order to the streets, but soon finds that a third, chaotic element has been added to the summertime bloodshed.

In particular, a stealthy alien hunter or predator has arrived in L.A. and begun picking off gang members, as well as cops like Harrigan’s trusted friend, Danny (Ruben Blades).

When a federal agent, Keyes (Gary Busey) begins interfering in his investigation, Harrigan suspects a dark secret.  

He soon comes face to face with the intimidating alien hunter, and learns that Keyes and his men are planning to capture it…

“There’s a new king in the streets.”

When I think back on Predator, the images that stay with me, in particular, come from the last third of the picture. There, Arnold’s character, Dutch went up against the Predator with no advanced technology in a primordial jungle, and won.  

The battle could have occurred in prehistoric times.

Obviously, a sequel to Predator couldn’t plumb the identical imagery or locale, or even concept, and so Predator 2 tries hard to carve an original space for itself.  The sequel notes, for example, that in the 1990s, “cops” are the warriors of civilization, fighting back criminals on the streets and protecting an endangered populace.  

This is a valid concept, and also feels very much of the epoch. If you gaze at the 1990s, and consider series such as Law and Order (1990 – 2010), or movies such as The First Power (1990), Fallen (1998), Resurrection (1999) or End of Days (1999) it’s not difficult to see how the police procedural format became incredibly popular, and dominated genre entertainment.

Predator 2 fits in with that trend, and Danny Glover makes for a very different kind of “soldier” than Arnie did. Both men are fiercely protective of their teams, but Harrigan is -- living up to his name: “harried” -- forced to accommodate multiple levels of hierarchy and bureaucracy in a fashion that Dutch simply did not.  Dutch eventually had to deal with Dillon’s duplicity (as Harrigan deals with Keyes’ secrecy and cover story), but Harrigan is more constrained from the get-go based on his job, his heavily populated “arena” of battle, and other factors of late 20th century human civilization.. 

One way to gaze at the Predator franchise is simply as a study of soldiers, an examination of the qualities that go into the making of a good one. Predator, Predator 2, and Predators (2010) have different things to tell audiences on that topic, and all the observations are intriguing. Certainly, Predator suggests that  good or advanced weapons don’t make for the best soldiers.  

Predator 2 seems to suggest that a good soldier succeeds by overcoming not his enemy, but those unofficial enemies who make his task more difficult. Harrigan must contend with the presence of innocent civilians, bureaucrats, and infrastructural impediments on his mission to stop the alien hunter. Meanwhile, Predators seems to suggest that real soldiers are a breed apart, and that breed seems to span all cultures.

The downside to Predator 2’s approach is simply that as soon as you have a rampaging alien creature in familiar, city environs, some moments there are going to read as…funny. You can’t play on the feelings of isolation that you might in the jungle setting.  

So when a Predator crashes through a bathroom wall here and nearly runs into an old woman brandishing a broom, you’re in a whole different kind of territory. The last act of the film suffers from a tonal ping-pong between action, comedy, and horror. I prefer the back-to-basics, straight-on approach of Predator’s finale in the jungle. It’s more pure, somehow; more consistent.

Predator 2, at times, seems to verge on camp. If the film featured a more pronounced, consistent social commentary (as is clearly the case in the gonzo-crazy RoboCop 2), the tone-changes in Predator 2 might have tracked better. I like Gary Busey just fine, but his presence -- and line readings -- ratchet up the tongue-in-cheek aspects of the film.

Lions, and tigers and bears. Oh my.

In the introduction, I also noted creeping Alien clichés in this film. There’s one scene here in which right-thinking Harrigan watches on a row of high-tech monitors as wrong-thinking Keyes leads an ill-fated attack against the Predator. The Predator decimates the team, and Harrigan -- tired of being on the sidelines -- steps up to save the day, or win the battle.  

This scene is an exact mirror of a scene in Cameron’s Aliens (1986).  There, Ripley watches on a row of monitors as the Colonial Marines get their asses kicked on Sub Level 3. She must take action herself, because she is right, and Lt. Gorman is so clearly wrong.  

There's even a similar deer-in-the-headlights moment in Predator 2 for  one Gorman surrogate, Garber (Adam Baldwin).

Similarly, Harrigan appropriates a Ripley-ish line from Alien, while talking to Keyes. “You admire the son of a bitch,” he realizes. 

This is also what Ripley realized vis-à-vis Ash and the xenomorph in the Ridley Scott 1979 original

It’s just baffling that a film seeking so aggressively to artistically break free from its successful predecessor would mindlessly ape another film series at the same. These moments are transparently derivative, and undo some of the creative success Hopkins achieves with this sequel.

Still, I appreciate the final revelations of Predator 2. These moments prove chilling. One of the final scenes, inside the spaceship, features not only an alien skull, but evidence that the Predators have been interacting with humans for a very, very long time indeed. They have been here, are here now, and will return soon.  

That’s a creepy thought, and I love how the old Predator leader demonstrates grudging respect for Harrigan, his prey, by gifting him a gun from the 1700s…a souvenir emblematic of their differences, and shared history.

Writing for The Washington Post, review Rita Kempley wrote persuasively of Predator 2’s “dismal irony” and “brooding fatalism” (November 21, 1990). 

I like those qualities too, and I enjoy this sequel quite a bit. I’ll take it over AVP: Requiem (2007) or Alien Resurrection (1997) any day. Predator 2 doesn’t scuttle its franchise, and in some ways it expands the cycle's reach in a wonderful, creative way.   

And yet the tonal lapses into comedy and rip-off territory prevent Predator 2 from being a truly great sequel to one of the best action-horror films of the eighties.

Anthony Perkins Binge: Pretty Poison (1968)

In 1967, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde immediately proved a counter-culture sensation by portraying its stylishly-dressed youth heroes as violent, hip, sexy and absolutely righteous. The protagonists’ mantra of “we rob banks” was deemed heroic in the Great Depression of the film’s setting, and a statement of Robin Hood-styled virtues to boot.  

In 1968, Noel Black’s film noir Pretty Poison, however, turned Bonnie and Clyde’s romanticism about crime and violence on its head.

Indeed, such flights of romantic fantasy about crime and violence are explicitly critiqued in the Black film, the story of a young man and immovable object, Dennis (Anthony Perkins) who lives in a day-dream world until that day-dream runs smack into an irresistible force: “all American” high school student, Sue Ann Stepenek (Tuesday Weld). 

Sue Ann is, as we eventually discover, a stone-cold sociopath, and Dennis learns the hard way what his caring parole officer Azenauer (John Randolph) has been attempting to tell him all along about life:

“You’re going outside into a very real, very tough world. It has no place for fantasies.”

Pretty Poison concerns Dennis’s persistent inability to step out of his fantasy land, and then dramatically permits him a final, memorable moment of grace regarding it. In an instant of clarity, Dennis offers a staggeringly insightful coda about people like his femme-fatale lover, and the world that nurtures them.

Additionally, Pretty Poison muses on what kind of society could give rise to a person like Sue Ann, and through association with all-American symbols -- like the aforementioned high school marching band  (waving an American flag, no less) -- suggests a spiritual sickness sprouting like a weed inside our borders.

Unremittingly dark and at times extremely suspenseful, Pretty Poison wonders, essentially, what happens when Bonnie and Clyde get together but aren’t exactly on the same page regarding their violent exploits. 

One of them, Pretty Poison informs us, is going to take the fall. Hard.

“Would you like me if I weren’t a CIA agent?”

Young Dennis Pitt (Perkins) is released from incarceration, and is told by his kindly parole officer, Azenauer (Randolph) that a job at Lowell Lumber and Supply has been arranged for him. Pitt moves into a trailer at Bronson’s Garage, and begins working at the job.

Bored of the mundane and highly-repetitive work, the fantasy-prone boy begins to confabulate stories about being a secret agent on top secret assignment.  When Dennis is drawn to a beautiful high school girl, Sue Ann Stepenek (Weld), he pulls her into his fantastic stories too. Together, they plot to sabotage the Lumber and Supply building, which Dennis insists will be used to contaminate the town’s drinking water.

But on the night of the raid, Sue Ann wantonly commits murder and steals a loaded gun. More and more uncomfortable with her behavior, Dennis feels “the pressures closing in.”  Eventually, Sue Ann arranges for Dennis to be a patsy in the murder of her mother (Garland), promising him that they will flee to Mexico together once the deed is done.

Dennis is arrested for the crime of murder, after turning himself in at a phone booth, and sent to jail.  Meanwhile, Sue Ann -- reveling in her freedom and power -- meets another man whom she can use for her own sinister purposes.

“You know, when grown-ups do it, it’s kind of dirty.”

Dennis Pitt did a very bad thing in his youth. He started a fire that killed someone he loved, his aunt. And yet Dennis weeps when he speaks of his crime, and seems truthful when he claims that he never knew his aunt was at home during the arson attempt. He never meant to hurt anybody. Perhaps because he is unable to reckon fully with how his actions caused the death of another human being, Dennis dwells in a perpetual fantasy world. It is a safer place, he seems to understand.

“I’ve been taking a secret course in interplanetary navigation,” Dennis tells Azenauer at one point. “I had hoped to be appointed to the first Venus rocket.”  The comment is a joke, of course, but it reveals the truth about Dennis. He can’t remain tethered in a dull, mundane world where his talents, he believes, are wasted.  

Other worlds, other fantasies, seem to beckon him.

When Azenauer gets him a job in a lumber yard, Dennis blows it. He causes an accident on the assembly line because he is day-dreaming while doing his work. In particular, he is day-dreaming of Sue Anne, remembering her performance in the marching band.

These scenes are especially important in terms of visual presentation. Dennis’s job in the mill requires him to gaze through an over-sized square scope that enlarges the bottles passing before his eyes, thus making inspection easy. 

Yet the scope looks completely distorted, and therefore functions as a symbol of Dennis’s distorted perspective or vision.  Like the scope which enlarges some items at the expense of others, Dennis’s vision doesn’t reveal the world as it is, but in a tricky, untrue way.

Similarly, Denis first gets close to Sue Ann after watching a parade involving her marching band by pretending to be a secret agent. He asks her to hold onto something important -- a bottle of that red liquid from the mill (mercury?) -- because he is allegedly under surveillance. Sue Ann is tantalized by this game and does as Dennis asks. Their first date afterwards, importantly is in a movie theater: a place of fantasies come true.

Little-by-little, Sue Ann appears to be drawn into Dennis’s web of fantastic lies involving his life as a secret agent, and his plan to raid the paper mill factory before the drinking water can be contaminated.

Yet a close watching of the film reveals another truth.

From the very beginning, Sue Ann wants to be rid of her bossy, controlling mother (Beverly Garland), and no matter the flight of fancy that Dennis engages in, he is used by Sue Ann to make that plan become a reality.

Sue Ann pulls the trigger, but Dennis is her patsy, the man with a criminal record who goes to jail for the crime she commits. Thus Pretty Poison pulls a nifty little dramatic trick on the viewer.  We believe, for the longest time, that Dennis is deceiving Sue Ann about who he is, and what he is really doing with her. In fact, it is Sue Ann who is the great deceiver, leading Dennis down a road which will see him charged for murder and jailed. Sue Ann puts the thought in Dennis’s head of fleeing to Mexico, and before long, Dennis is mindlessly dreaming of a Mexican beach, as we see in several brief cuts.

It is clear that Sue Ann wishes to be free, and that she uses Dennis for that purpose, to procure her freedom.  It is also clear that though she knows she wants her mother dead, Sue Ann isn’t certain, even, that her mother’s death will make her truly happy.  “I feel empty,” she notes at one important juncture, and it seems like an important admission. Sue Ann may not be able to feel empathy, or any emotions for others. She may only feel that emptiness, and so resorts to violence to alleviate it. She looks like a normal person, but is something else, a truth revealed by compositions in which Sue Ann appears upside down in the frame.

Twice in the film, Sue Ann shows real enthusiasm and excitement during the act of murder. First she bludgeons and then drowns a guard at the lumber mill. In this scene, she mounts the dying man (who is face down in the water) and rides him in a perverse mockery of the sexual act. In the second case, she shoots her mother at point blank range, and even that isn’t enough to sate her desire.  She fires again and again, over and over, as if trying to recapture the thrill of murder repeatedly. To put it indelicately, the only thing that seems to get Sue off is killing.

So where Dennis – perpetually playing at being a secret agent -- notes in mock-heroic dialogue that “emotions can be fatal in times like this,” Sue Ann seems, in reality, unable to express emotions except in the prosecution of murder or other violent acts.

Importantly, Pretty Poison also suggests, albeit obliquely, that Sue Ann has done something like this before.

On the dresser in her bedroom is a photograph of a mysterious soldier. Dennis looks at the photo and asks who it is. Sue Ann lies and claims she doesn’t remember. It seems entirely likely that this mystery man was the last victim who fell for her charms (and is now conspicuously absent). This seems especially likely given that after Dennis goes to jail she picks up with another mark, planning to lead him into trouble as well.

Contrarily, the photo could be of Sue Ann’s absent father (as a young man), who she reports died in Korea.  Perhaps she lied to Dennis, and she had him killed, just as she plans to have her mother killer.

Either way, the photograph exposes Sue Ann, which is why she refuses to explain it in any detail.

Dennis realizes too late what Sue Ann is, but refuses to testify against her because, in his experience, people “pay attention” only those things they notice themselves. This means that society at large will have to determine what Sue Ann really is. Dennis, oddly enough, seems to feel safe in jail, away from the “pretty poison” he encountered in the outside world. He is reflecting on his own lesson in a way when he makes this important remark. He didn’t believe Azenauer that the world is cruel and tough place, with no room for fantasy.  Now, after his experience with Sue Ann, he believes it.

What remains so shocking about Pretty Poison is the way that Sue Ann’s pathology slowly comes to the surface. She is a beautiful, blonde, All-American high school girl, ensconced in the marching band, and curious about life, and what the future holds. Scratch the surface a little, however, and one detects that seething appetite for violence, and her slick, seductive way of operating. She uses her youth, her appearance and her very sex to cow those around her.

Eventually someone will notice, right?

Pretty Poison is a smart, stunningly-performed film noir because it suggests that some people -- not unlike Dennis -- are drawn to romantic visions of rebellion and forbidden love; very much like the imagery featured in the (great) Bonnie and Clyde.

But by the same token, Pretty Poison suggests that such fairy tales have little practical use in reality, and those who believe them will be “poisoned”, in a sense, by their expectations that such stories represent how the real world really works. They can offer only a distorted lens.

So if Bonnie and Clyde, an icon of the counter-culture youth of the day, raises important questions about violence, crime and love, Pretty Poison voices a somber, frightening answer.

Anthony Perkins Binge: The Trial (1962)

"It's a film inspired by the book, in which my collaborator and partner is Kafka. That may sound like a pompous thing to say, but I'm afraid that it does remain a Welles film and although I have tried to be faithful to what I take to be the spirit of Kafka, the novel was written in the early twenties, and this is now 1962, and we've made the film in 1962, and I've tried to make it my film because I think that it will have more validity if it's mine."

- Director Orson Welles, on the subject of The Trial (1962), from an interview posted at Wellesnet.

Both impenetrable and surreal, Orson Welles film adaptation of Franz Kafka's (1883-1925) novel The Trial is a challenge to comprehend, at least in traditional movie-going terms.  

  

This is especially so if one is hung-up on following a conventional, logical narrative from point A to point B, all the way to Point Z.  

  

Like the celebrated literary source material, the Welles film is maddeningly vague about details that we -- as conditioned film-goers -- expect.   

  

What crime has Josef K  (Anthony Perkins)  been charged with? Or on an even more basic level: where is the court room where he is scheduled to be arraigned for this crime?  What city is this story occurring in?  And in what year does this tale happen?  

  

If you walk through this one particular doorway in the clerk's office, how do you get...somewhere else?

  

Should a viewer step inside Welles' The Trial seeking such clarity of detail and traditional narrative developments, that viewer is missing the point, and will be truly disappointed, and possibly even a little angry.  Welles' film uniformly rejects all attempts to make the narrative accessible in the fashion that audiences have come to expect and even demand.  

  

In The Films of Orson Welles (University of California Press, 1970, page 162), Welles scholar Charles Higham famously wrote that "For me, The Trial is a dead thing, like some tablet found among the dust of forgotten men, speaking a language that has much to say to us, but whose words have largely been rubbed away."

  

Yet if one  views The Trial as a two-hour visual expression of one man's subconscious terror and frustration at being devoured "by the System" (or by "The Law"), Welles' work emerges as something not moribund, but something vibrantly and eminently alive: a breathtaking formalist masterpiece that harnesses form, literally, as content.  

  

The task upon us here is not to "understand" intellectually the experience of Josef K. through the (occasionally banal) dialogue or repetitive episodic interludes, but rather to read and interpret the powerful images as they arrive, and thus feel what it means to be in Josef K's shoes; lost in a bureaucratic system -- a maze -- of impenetrable shape and dimension.   Welles' production design, his selection of angles, his choices in casting even, all enhance these feelings of entrapment and bewilderment. 

  

Or to put it another way, The Trial is a film that you fully experience; that immerses you.  Shot in stark black-and-white, and loaded with expressive angles, Welles imagines a world totally lacking in reason...even the reason assured by the laws of Physics.  For in this world, you can be arrested without reason, feel guilt without reason, and step from one interior chamber into an entirely different landscape, equally without reason.  

  

Everything is connected to everything else, and yet nothing makes sense.  Circular logic holds sway.  And every stepping to stone to reason is instead uncovered to reveal corruption. 

  

One might successfully make the argument that Welles has taken a crucial step away from the literary Kafka in forging this particular cinematic universe.  For one thing, the director fashions a more absurdist, less serious ending for the book's hero, Josef K.  

  

For another-- and this is perhaps of primary importance -- Welles supplants the book's small, almost quaint locales with more cavernous, industrial ones.  He has modernized the book's settings to take into account 20th century technology and automation, among other things.  One of the most powerful visuals in the film remains a jaw-dropping tracking shot of Josef K. traversing his office, a colossal, seemingly endless hall where 850 anonymous workers dutifully pound out bureaucratic work around the clock on their typewriters. 

   

Still, as author Chris Barsanti suggested in Filmology (Adams Media, 2011, page 90), "the alienated spirit of the film remains resolutely true to that of the book, an awesome achievement given the prickly and untranslatable nature of Kafka's work."   He's right, except in the instance of finale, where Orson Welles lets in a glimmer of  hope, and Kafka left none.  The literary Josef K. died like "a dog" and the movie Josef K, at least in some fashion, dies on his own rebellious terms. 

  

"I am sane.  I am innocent.  I've committed no crime."

  

One morning at 6:15 am, Josef K (Anthony Perkins) is awakened from a sound slumber in his lodging house by the unexpected presence of a police man in his bedroom.  

  

In a low angle shot of the doorway and door frame, order is promptly over-turned as a man-in-black invades the immaculate white-on-white bedroom. 

  

Josef is promptly informed by this interloper that he is under arrest, but that he doesn't have to report to the station.  Rather, he is expected to show up at "the Interrogation Commission" at an undisclosed time and place. 

  

Josef is unaware of what crime he has been charged with, but his every move and word is dutifully recorded by a triumvirate of policemen, who want to take his belongings, since he won't be needing them.   

  

Soon, Josef's Uncle Max comes to visit, and helps the accused Josef retain the services of an imperious old Advocate (Orson Welles), a man who enjoys his powerful position and lords it over his clients, one of whom he apparently keeps imprisoned in a small cell inside his home.   

  

Josef further descends into the strange world of "The Law," and on that journey he readily admits "there are so many passageways and lobbies I'd never find my way."  After a time, he encounters a painter and expert in the legal system who tries to describe for Josef the precise, technical differences between "ostensible" acquittal and "indefinite" acquittal.  Neither one sounds like exoneration. 

  

The problem is that, after any such a brand of acquittal, Josef K. could be arrested and charged for the same non-descript crime all over again.  In which case, he'd have to begin the laborious process of acquittal again too. It's a never-ending loop of arrest and acquittal, with guilt always assumed but never proven. 

  

Finally, the State attempts to execute Josef K.  First, two executioners toss him into a crater on a blighted, industrial landscape, and  hand him a knife to do the job, but he refuses to do their dirty work for him.  Then, from a distance, the executioners throw a bundle of dynamite at Josef, ending his "trial" once and for all.  A small mushroom cloud rises from the rubble in the crater... 

  

"What are you Insinuating?

  

Orson Welles' The Trial opens with a "pin-screen" depiction of a parable found in Kafka's book, entitled "Before the Law."  

  

After the parable concludes, Welles' voice-over narration notes that "the logic of this story is the logic of a dream...or a nightmare."  

  

In the very next instant, we see Anthony Perkins' Josef K coming to consciousness, in a visual transition that affirms the dream-like, surreal nature of the narrative.  He may not be waking up at all. 

  

Understanding The Trial's story as one of "dream" logic provides the key to making sense of The Trial's anarchic narrative and visual structure.   In dreams, the idea of geography is often sacrificed.  In a nightmare, you can walk from your bedroom straight into a grave-yard; or find yourself rolling out of bed into your old high school English class.  The mind's imagination while dreaming is not limited to concrete reality, and so, in The Trial, every door opens into a new reality, and no door ever leads to the same destination twice.  This is part and parcel of the film's absurd or surreal tapestry.    

  

There is simply no way to navigate this bureaucratic maze, and the rule that held sway a minute ago is not the rule that holds sway in this moment, or in the next one, either.  

  

In Cinema 2: The Time Image, author Gilles Deleuze made specific notation of Welles' provocative use of space in the film.  "It is the topography of The Trial...which calls on a depth of field; places that are very far apart or even opposed in the foreground are next to each other in the background," he writes.  "To the extent that, space, as Michel Clement puts it, is constantly disappearing.  The view, as the film develops, loses all sense of space and the painter's house, the courthouse and the church are from then on in contact with each other."  (Continuum Intl. Publishing, 1989, page 290). 

  

What happens to Josef K., over the course of the film, then, involves the visual contraction of his personal  "freedom."  As the above-passage notes, his space in the world grows smaller, and smaller, until there is no distance between any locations in his life.  This is the invisible vise of "The Law" tightening the noose around his neck.  The Law eats up his space, taking over his life.   It's almost imperceptible at first, but soon the contraction of space around Josef K. becomes undeniable. 

  

What remains so amazing and pioneering about this visual approach is that "The Law" or "State" is not represented by any particular voice, person, or locale in the film.  Instead, the idea of "The Law" is presented as this crushing, amorphous, intangible thing.  And no matter how hard you try, you can't fight (let alone defeat) something that is intangible.  The law, as the film gets at, is an "abstract." 

  

Amy Taubin, critic for The Village Voice, brilliantly observed Welles' success in creating this dream logic dynamic and amorphous, crushing threat in The Trial:  "It's the nightmare aspect of the novel that Welles captures with great ingenuity, she writes. "He turns the vast, crumbling lobbies, arcades, and tunnels of the Gare d'Orsay into a dreamscape, constructed according to Freud's definition of the primary processes of the unconscious: condensation and displacement. One minute the law court seems adjacent to K's office; the next it opens into the apartment of K's lawyer. K is forever opening doors and finding himself where he never expected to be: a corridor jammed with abject petitioners, a closet hidden away in his own office where the accused are tortured. Framed almost entirely from an extremely low angle, the film plays with the danger inherent in even the most familiar spaces. K's paranoia has a kinetic dimension. Perpetually disoriented, he oscillates between claustrophobia and agoraphobia. The cluttered interiors and vast, bombed-out exteriors both have the potential to bury him alive." 

  

Yet if Josef K is the "dreamer" in this dangerous realm, then the over sized law that threatens to bury him alive is also, undeniably, a result of some persecution complex, or some deep, firmly-entrenched sense of guilt.  He confesses this ever-present, nagging feeling of guilt to a fellow lodger, the cabaret dancer Miss Burstner (Jeanne Moreau).  He notes that he has always, for some reason, felt guilty about...something.  So his dream world takes that shape.  It  is apparently expressing -- and punishing him for -- that pervasive sense of guilt. 

  

What might the film's version of Josef K. feel guilty about?  That's best left to personal interpretation, no doubt, but certainly there's an undercurrent in the film involving homosexuality, as Roger Ebert notes in his excellent review of the film.   The Trial, Ebert writes, "could be interpreted as a nightmare in which women make demands Joseph K is uninterested in meeting, while bureaucrats in black coats follow him everywhere with obscure threats of legal disaster." 

  

The presence of Perkins in the role is of paramount importance. As he discusses with police "subversive literature and pornography" and verbally slips on the word phonograph, saying it as "porno-graph,"  we get the idea that there is more to this bureaucrat than meets the eye.   Welles himself famously said that in his film, Josef K is not innocent, but absolutely guilty. 

  

Guilty of what?  Not conforming? Harboring an alternative sexual persuasion?  It isn't exactly clear, but like so much in the film, the question of sexual identity roils just beneath the surface, between the images.  For instance, Josef K. continues to be put into situations where he crosses some undiagrammed sexual line.  The Advocate's mistress (who bears the "physical defect" of webbed fingers) attempts to have sex with Josef K., and that act threatens his case.  Josef's boss on the job sees Josef's fifteen-year-old niece and assumes that Josef has been acting improperly with her.  

  

Again and again, Josef is involved in sexual indiscretions that he is forced to refute his involvement with.  Did his attempted kiss of Miss Burstner in her lodgings initiate her desire to move?  Josef isn't certain, but by the end of one particular scene, he is literally carrying her "baggage" around with him, from place to place, trying to find somewhere to put it down.  

  

In another sequence, Josef K is even threatened by a mob of adolescent girls, who peer at him through splits in a wooden wall -- symbolically splits in his public face or armor.  These screaming girls then chase him through an almost Gothic landscape and tunnel which look like something out James Whale's Frankenstein.  Josef is the monster, and the girls are the villagers determined to kill the apparent abomination in their midst. 

  

As film critic William Arnold suggested on the eve of the film's restoration in 2000, "what the world now knows about Perkins' personal demons in the wake of his death -- his paranoia, his complex sexuality and the lingering impact of Norman Bates on his life -- makes him seem an eerily perfect fit for Joseph K., and gives a power and weight to his performance that wasn't at all evident the first time around."

  

I agree with that assertion.  It's entirely possible to read The Trial in another, non-sexual fashion, but in some ways this cinematic tale seems to really be about a man who feels very guilty about his sexual relationships.  He fears that the State will literally strangle the life out of him for his failure to conform. 

  

Another way to interpret The Trial is as a critique of the mid-20th century, post-World War II industrial, totalitarian state (Hitler's Germany, or Stalin's Russia).  As Josef travels further and further up the food-chain of authority in this world's regime, he uncovers depravity and corruption.  The cops who arrest him want to take his belongings, and are willing to take bribes.  In the magistrate's "case book," Josef finds a pornographic picture stashed between the pages.  The Advocate keeps a mistress, not to mention a prisoner.  One woman -- the wife of a legal official -- gives herself bodily to "the accused" and others.  

  

The idea that "power corrupts" is certainly a platitude, but what's important here is the film's sense of irony about such corruption.  The likable, not-bothering-anybody Josef K is accused of a crime by an entirely corrupt and criminal upper class.  Who are they to be pointing fingers? 

  

In contextualizing the story in this fashion, one can see how Josef K. ekes out his final victory.  Two representatives of the state attempt to kill him...but they don't want to stab him themselves.  Again, Josef refuses to conform, and doesn't go happily and willingly to his deathbed.  If the State desires him dead, they will have to do it.  They will have to get messy. 

  

Importantly, the representatives of the State recoil, and can't kill Josef with a knife.  Instead, they retreat and use a bomb to kill Josef...from a safe distance.  Surely this is Welles' caustic commentary on technological totalitarian states, mid-20th century;  perhaps that real heroism isn't required to serve and propagate them... only cowardice.  Easier to drop a bomb (and rely on technology) from some point distant.  That way, the murderers don't have to see or feel the effects of their terrible actions.  They can then deny responsibility for them. 

  

Gazing back at The Trial today, one can see how Welles and Kafka had two very different approaches to telling the same story.  Kafka's writing is almost matter-of-fact in tenor, whereas Welles uses every expressionistic tool in his film maker's quiver to suggest the absurd nature of the story.  Where Kafka went for a sense of reality, Welles reaches for a theatrical, dream reality that portrays the State as something akin to a suffocating cloud; an amorphous, intangible monstrosity that can nonetheless oppress, obfuscate, and kill. 

  

Would you like The Trial?  

  

Well, "like is a feeble word," to quote the film. 

  

You may not enjoy Orson Welles' The Trial in any conventional sense, but you're likely to find yourself carried away -- and blown away -- by the director's skill in visualizing this nightmarish, surreal tale.  In The Trial, dreams are reality, the medium is the message; and form is content.  And in a world where so many movies are the cookie-cutter results of groupthink and corporate-messaging, The Trial fiercely reveals how a director can make the form entirely his own playground.

Anthony Perkins Binge: Psycho (1960)

Based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) remains a turning point in the horror cinema for a number of significant reasons, but first and foremost because it knowingly and brazenly flouts the decorum of its age.  

Psycho features not only nudity, extreme violence, and the early death of a beloved protagonist played by Janet Leigh, it also happens to feature, on-screen, views of…a toilet.  

Today, all that -- especially the bit about a toilet -- doesn’t seem like much to get worked up about. 

But when the film premiered, Psycho unsettled audiences because its explicit failure to conform to conventional, Hollywood standards meant that all bets were off, and that, likewise, audiences could see and experience anything.  

Accordingly, Psycho’s audiences felt endangered. The narrow parameters of Hollywood decorum and standards of acceptability had sheltered them in previous movie-going experiences, and by deliberately treading outside of those parameters, Psycho suddenly possessed the capacity to shock on a new, previously unplumbed level.

Every now and then on Amazon.com or some horror site, you’ll read a review by someone very young who goes back to watch Psycho and just doesn’t get why it is important, or so revered. This viewpoint arises because Psycho, like all films, must be considered and examined in its historical context.  And some folks forget that fact.

Before Psycho, no one had seen anything like it.  

Since, Psycho, filmmakers have been using the same playbook for over fifty years.  

Some films and filmmakers have surpassed it, too, to be certain (Tobe Hooper and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974], Brian De Palma and Sisters [1973], perhaps), but in its day Psycho shattered formula and blazed a new path. 

Yet the mere fact that other filmmakers have so often imitated the film's approach to its material doesn’t take anything away from what Psycho accomplished in the first place.

What makes Psycho truly great, even today is the manner in which Hitchcock meaningfully connects the film’s form and content. The narrative is shocking and unconventional, the imagery is shocking and unconventional, and, in fact, Psycho’s very structure is unconventional too. 

Virtually every decision Hitchcock makes as a filmmaker here -- save for the very last one (to restore order) -- thus creates and nurtures anxiety in viewers.

With its blunt looks at an unmarried couple having a sexual liaison, a brutal murder, and even a flushing toilet, Hitchcock -- frame-by-frame, shot-by-shot -- makes audiences feel that they crossing threshold after threshold. 

As the taboos fall away, so does any sense of confidence or certainty about what the filmmaker may show us. Psycho continues to impress today because of Hitchcock's virtuoso technique, but also because it moves with a kind of diabolical, elegant purpose.

And that purpose is, simply, to shoot down your defenses one at a time and, in the final revelation of Mrs. Bates' secret, leave you breathless and shocked.

“We’re all in our private traps.”

In Psycho, beautiful Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) wants very much to marry her boyfriend, divorcee Sam Loomis (John Gavin), but monetary concerns keeps him from committing to her.  

One day, at work, Marion is tasked with taking $40,000 dollars to the bank, but in a moment of desperation, she decides to steal the cash and flee town.

Marion escapes from Phoenix, AZ and even switches cars to avoid detection, looking forward to surprising Sam in his home-town, Fairvale.  

After a long drive, however, Marion decides to call it a day. She spends the night at the Bates Motel, a small, out-of-the-way establishment that stands in the shadow of a giant, dilapidated Gothic mansion.  

The motel is run by young, lanky Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), a lonely man who apparently lives with his old, invalid mother.

When Marion shares a meal with Norman, she learns about his mother’s brutal treatment of him, and realizes how Norman has become trapped at the motel, and in an unhappy life. Marion vows not to trap herself, and decides to go home, return the stolen money, and face the consequences of her actions.

Resolved to set her life right, Marion decides to take a hot shower…

“This is the first place that looks like it’s trying to hide from the world.”

There’s a feeling, watching Psycho (1960), of viewing the world outside typical Hollywood parameters. 

Hitchcock fosters this feeling from the film’s earliest shots. After a pan across the city of Phoenix, and arriving, finally, at a cracked hotel window, Hitchcock’s camera sneaks in through that narrow portal, exploiting the opening to reveal two attractive – unmarried -- young people (Marion and Sam) after an afternoon of love-making.  

It’s as though, from the very start, Hitchcock not only pries open a literal window, but the metaphorical window of Hollywood standards and practices.

Hitchcock's other choices in vetting this adaption of Bloch’s novel are just as startling. First, he unsettles the audience by fracturing the role of the protagonist.The audience's focal point of identification in most Hollywood thrillers is one person: a man or woman who follows the predictable arc of increased learning and ascending knowledge as the three acts progress satisfyingly to a conclusion. 

The arc of "learning" on the part of the movie audience, presented through the experiences of the lead character, is usually a straight line traveling up and up, until, by the movie's denouement, the character and the viewer reach an apex, or zenith.  Apotheosis has occurred. Audiences have learned everything they need to know to understand the film's narrative, theme, and message.

But in Psycho, the protagonist role is unconventionally splintered into three or even four characters: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), Arbogast (Martin Balsam), Lila Crane (Vera Miles) and Sam Loomis (John Gavin). 

Learning still occurs over the course of the film’s plot, and the audience still attains that final plateau of knowledge through a psychologist's detailed and clinical "explanation" of Norman Bates' psychosis.  

Yet importantly, the process of learning is fractured and jumbled by the three acts and the changing point of audience identification. Each protagonist dominates center stage, very roughly, in one particular act.  

Marion does so in the first. 

Arbogast assumes that role in the second. 

And finally Lila and Sam become the point of identification and the hub of learning in the final act. We especially fear for Lila and Sam’s safety because we have seen, in gory detail, what has become of Marion and Arbogast, our two earlier leads.

Since Psycho revolves around schizophrenia -- around a splintering of a single mind into more than one individual -- the film's very structure actually reflects this state of existence not only in its villain, Norman/Mother, but in the variety and differentiation of its protagonists.  

In some sense, it's as though Hitchock is trying to impress this schizophrenic state upon us, the audience. We are asked to meet, accept, follow, root and then grieve for one protagonist after the other.

In simple terms, then, Hitchcock punishes the audience -- and ruthlessly unsettles it -- for emotionally investing in the characters. 

First, Hitchcock makes the audience fall in love with adorable and sexy Marion Crane through her ongoing interior monologue during an extended road trip. This soliloquy of sorts regards the theft of 40,000 dollars, and what the acquisition of the money and the perpetrating of a crime could mean for her life personally, professionally, and legally. Marion berates herself and mocks herself in these passages, like we all do when we talk to ourselves.

The device of the interior monologue, in conjunction with the preponderance of gorgeous close-ups during these moments in the car, actually accentuates the feeling of connection to the character and her plight. 

And of course, that forging of a close emotional connection is intentional. Hitchcock wants audiences heavily invested in Marion's imagination, her potential, her crime; the very things that make her human and therefore sympathetic. In other words, the director sucks us in with a likable character and her crisis.

And then, Hitchcock rips Marion, the star of the movie, away from the audience in the notorious shower scene. 

We watch helplessly as all our expectations and hopes for Marion -- namely that she will return the money, seek a life with Sam, and escape her personal purgatory or trap -- run down the tub drain with her spilled blood.  

Suddenly, everything the audience has taken for granted as "important" in Psycho, including Marion's dilemma regarding stolen cash is now rendered, categorically, unimportant. 

The result? The audience is rudderless.  Vulnerable.  

The only thing left to cling to, again, is that stolen cash, and the hope that another human being, perhaps sweet, harmless Norman, will find it and use it to escape from his trap, from his Mother.

The movie goes on, and the audience still feels lost without Marion. Thus it soon seizes on laconic, world-weary Arbogast as the focal point of identification. 

Yeah, he's the guy who's going to get Norman's Mother and set things right, for the memory of Marion.  He's got the chops.  He's got the professional background.  No one's going to pull the wool over his eyes. 

And then Hitchcock violates traditional narrative structure and decorum again.  He pulls the exact same trick a second time.  

He kills Arbogast before our eyes in another visually dazzling murder scene, set this time upon a staircase. And for a second time, the audience loses the focal point of identification.

Finally, identification transfers to Sam and Lila, but by this point -- on a first viewing of Psycho, anyway -- the audience is surely thinking "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me," and therefore reluctant to embrace this couple, not out of loyalty to the dead; but out of the fear that, for a third time, Evil will triumph.  

Is there another reason it is difficult to warm to Lila and Sam?  Absolutely. 

They begin to seriously question and threaten Norman Bates, but at this point in the proceedings, the audience is still invested in him and his escape from the motel, and from his twisted, overbearing Mom. Viewers don't want to see Norman railroaded for what they believe his mother did.  They think Sam and Lila are barking up the wrong tree.

The unconventional presentation of the protagonists and antagonists in Psycho is all part of Hitchcock's masterful manipulation, his gleeful manner of misdirecting attention and subverting expectations. Yet he doesn't merely subvert by way of conveying story points; he does it via the actual narrative structure; by exploding movie conventions. 

The "Janet Leigh" trick as I sometimes call it, isn't the only trail-blazing, convention-shattering aspect of Psycho.  It's harder to appreciate this second factor given the direction of our culture since Psycho, but Hitchcock further shatters Hollywood decorum by revealing to the audience shocking imagery it had not often, if ever, seen depicted before. Things like an afternoon, pre-marital assignation in a cheap hotel room between Sam and Marion, or, simply, a toilet being flushed.

And then there’s the notorious shower scene.

Arriving in 1960, Psycho broke a critical rule/taboo in film history. It showed a vulnerable person virtually nude in the bathroom and then depicted that character brutally murdered in nothing less than a murderous frenzy.   

Many film critics and Hitchcock scholars have written expertly and at length about the staging and cutting of the Psycho shower scene, but the important thing to remember is how it plays. 

It is a visualization of frenzy, rage, and madness at close-up range. The helter-skelter pace of the shock editing and the very closeness -- intimacy? -- of many shots transmits the inescapable impression of a trapped animal being murdered in a blinding, fury-filled rage.  

Before Psycho, no one had ever seen anything like this. Violence, close-up, with adroit film technique embodying psychosis and powerful anger. And we weren't seeing a bad guy or some random character being killed.  Rather, a woman whom we had, as viewers, fallen in love with. To dispatch Marion when she is vulnerable, when she has so many reasons to live, and to do it in such indecorous, nay un-chivalrous, fashion, is...bracing to say the least.  It's a literal shock to the system.

The presentation of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) represents another shattering of tradition too.  Hollywood often lives by the edict that what is beautiful must also be good. And young Anthony Perkins, like Janet Leigh, is certainly beautiful. He is innocent, boyish, graceful, handsome and charming.  Simultaneously, he is a brutal murderer when "possessed" by Mother Bates. The film asks us to countenance competing visions of Norman, that he can be both innocent and guilty; a good boy and a very naughty boy at the same time. 

In large part, Hitchcock was able to get away with this complexity involving the characters, and particularly with Norman, because of the burgeoning popularity of pop psychology in the American culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Horror films such as The Bad Seed (1956) began to ask very pointed questions about human "monsters," thereby exploring the eternal nature vs. nurture debate. To a very large extent, that's the terrain as well of Psycho.  Norman is a good boy, perhaps, by nature. But a very bad boy via nurture, by his mother's parenting. Nurture is stamped over nature, in his case, and the result is psychosis.

This focus on human psychology represents an important turning point in horror history: a period wherein supernatural and fantasy can be subtracted from the genre formula and the human being can take his -- rightful? – role as the pre-eminent "Monster" in the cinema, thus paving the way for a slew of slashers and serial killers. 

Indeed, this is the point in horror history where many "monster" horror movie fans cut bait: preferring their monsters as more fantastical creations like vampires, Gill Men, or the Mummy.

Here, in Psycho, Dracula’s castle still lurks large in the frame, in the form of the Gothic Bates House, but the monster lurking inside is purely of man’s nature, not of the supernatural

Despite its brilliance and trailblazing, Psycho end with nod to decorum and tradition. Hitchcock closes the film with a restoration of the sense of order. 

Norman is captured, processed, categorized, diagnosed and understood. A psychiatrist, played by Simon Oakland, explains everything. In this way, an audience might leave a showing of the film knowing that it need not be afraid in real life. The good guys still come out on top; the dangerous bad guy is punished, or at least apprehended. 

In the years following Psycho, directors like Tobe Hooper and Brian De Palma would go even further than Psycho to break established movie decorum. Hooper denied the audience (and Chainsaw's characters) the act of learning in toto; and in Sisters, De Palma did not bother to re-establish order, instead leaving the film's heroine a confused amnesiac.

But those bold, innovative steps in the genre could not have been broached had Hitchcock not re-written the rules of the game first, with Psycho.   

If you ask yourself why the 1998 remake of Psycho failed, the answer rests not just with re-casting.  It is not only because of color photography. It is not, even, because of Hitchcock's absence in the director's chair. These are all factors, of course. But that notable failure occurred because that remake failed to re-structure its narrative and format in a pioneering fashion; in a way that would have actually honored Hitchcock and the spirit of the original film. 

Thirty years after Hitchcock fooled everyone, nobody was going to be taken in by exactly the same bag of tricks  Chainsaw and Sisters are more valid remakes of Psycho, in the sense that they pursue the same aims, the shattering of standing conventions and decorum.

Despite over a half-century of imitators, Psycho is still a standard-bearer for the genre because of its historical context.  Also, on a recent re-watch, I felt too that the film had something very valuable to share with audiences about human nature. It’s sometime easy not to look at the film’s actual story, because Psycho’s form is so exemplary.

Yet pay close attention, and one starts to see how Psycho is the story of how the things we do to achieve happiness don’t actually bring us happiness. 

In Psycho, we see that people will steal, fuck, and commit murder in attempts to find happiness.  Instead, invariably, they find “traps” of their own making, not freedom, or satisfaction.  Marion created a shit-storm for herself by stealing forty-thousand dollars. But she did it because she wanted to be with Sam…and he needed money. 

And Norman is so desperate to feel happy again that he has resurrected his “mother” as a hectoring, violent shrew. He has re-imagined her as a jealous lunatic, and now once he has her back, he can’t get rid of her. She has taken over a part of his very mind.

Again, there seems to a corollary visual to go with this idea.  Marion finds a point of clarity on the road. She drives through the rain, through a storm, and comes out the other side. After the deluge, she should be cleansed, free. 

But the place she ends up is the Bates Motel: a location not where she will turn her life around, but die violently. The message seems to be that the plans we make are the very thing that lead us to destruction. 

Or, to put it in proverbial terms, Man proposes and God disposes.

Today, we all know the stylistic twists and turns that make Psycho such a classic horror film, but one need re-watch again it to remember clearly the feelings it engenders. We feel real loss when Marion is killed and Norman, despite his insanity, is a little boy lost who holds our sympathy. Their “private traps” are terrifying ones, but also ones that, surprisingly, still affect us on an emotional level sixty years later.