actor profiles mailing
list
animation
book reviews
director profiles
documentaries
experimental &
avant garde
exploitation
film festivals
film noir
film reviews
gay & lesbian
hong kong films
horror
interviews
japanese cinema
music & musicals
silent film
tranny cinema
- - - - - -
To be automatically notified when the next issue is posted, join our mailing list.
writers
gone wild!
Keep up with Bright Lights between issues by
visiting our companion blog, Bright Lights
After Dark.
our
space at MySpace
Visit us at MySpace.
support
Support Bright Lights and get something nice for
yourself, too, by shopping at Amazon via
this link
Jean Peters and Richard Widmark in Pickup on South Street
To Slap a Dame
Sexual Violence in the Age of Reason
The guy socks the girl in the jaw and we laugh. We have to understand, if not embrace, that this is an American tradition in the most classical sense of the word. It has vein-thin but sturdy European roots: caricatures of domestic violence tokenized by guignol, circus, and burlesque theatre. It first cinematized as the mindless single-reel slapstick of Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, and The Three Stooges ("mindless" as in corporeal, championing the grace and symmetry of the human form as it bludgeons it). It owes additional debts to lump-headed depression-era male stereotypes as well (although it's constantly being reimbursed by wealthy descendants). Like most traditions, its heyday encompassed tirelessly infinite variants: the textbook use as punctuation that promoted it to cliché (James Cagney and his delicately shoved grapefruit toward Mae Clarke), or even the decadently homosexual inversion (Bogart dominating the pasty-faced effete Peter Lorre as he wails "This is the second time that you have laid hands on me!" and in one sentence Lorre is no longer an obliquely feminine foreign espionage agent availing himself of America's underground but a Germanic drag queen entrenched in quite a separate underground).
In most cases we hit women to knock sense into them; we are gender doctors performing temporary hysterectomies. But at a barely subconscious level we hit them for fun, too. This pleasure is fleeting — found in perhaps 8 or 10 of our 24 frames — and so we never recognize it as cruel, not on the screen. These are swings of the fist we can enhance with our pride and joy because they cross no man's (no human's) land, both violating and enforcing the order of common chivalric decency on a crusade of reason. It is taboo to strike women because they are the weaker sex, but this rule becomes its own exception when they act unreasonable, or unmanageable, or start putting on crafty airs: we must strike women because they are the weaker sex, because they cannot strike at themselves. And we laugh, we innocent bystanders in the audience, because it isn't abuse — these aren't men and women, wife-beaters and their lowly chattels — it's a guy and a girl. Not a boy and a girl but a guy, an average "nice" guy, a red-blooded hard-working joe, aiding the girl's ascension to the golden haven of womanhood she's momentarily fallen from.
We laugh at this partly because we're bewildered; bewildered and amused to see gender roles simultaneously underscored and imploded. We also laugh, however, because of the onomatopoeic poetry leaping like airborne popcorn kernels from the soundtrack. The bitch-slap and chick-punch and ditz-whack are the territory of the foley artist just as much as of the chauvinistic male archetype: the ranchman, the private dick (an irresistibly appropriate moniker), the crooked insurance salesman and the sound editor are all cut from the same ideological cloth.
It's hard to argue a violence/laughter conditioning syndrome as a cultural universal. But there's almost no telling when brutality and hilarity will bleed into each other. Rather, it seems the most perplexing challenge of contemporary cinema to calibrate the former to transcend the latter. Mississippi Burning has screened in college classrooms, and a pattering of guffaws has drowned out the sight of Frances McDormand bruised and broken on a hospital bed. The filmmakers did not intentionally make the domestic abuse flourishes humorous — although they invite us to laugh at a distressingly fascist scene where Gene Hackman grips a Klan member by the balls. In one instance the display of masculinity seems a terminal and personal threat; in the other, an act of showmanship. And yet they both work marvelously well as punchlines (literally). Even an act with historically unspeakable connotations such as sodomy cannot escape this. What are rednecks and predatory pawnshop owners but families of cartoon fetishists exploring their own creative masculine ethic? Who are those that restore order by chastising them but cartoon victors of a merely alternate masculine ethic? Humor is a decidedly masculine concept: turgid, glib, and recklessly decadent.
We have only stopped laughing at our
own violence a handful of times, and the number shrinks further when we
consider only acts of violence against women. The two most significant
examples of this are found under Nixon and Bush the Elder. It is less
than surprising that in these times the mid-century American male
archetype of John Wayne and Frank Sinatra and Manny Farber's Underground
Films and even quieter, contemplative, democratic voices like
Henry Fonda/Tom Joad fell under a fusillade of doubt, suspicion,
conspiracy, and embitterment. The American Male has survived these eras
primarily as a satire, a withered joke he clearly does not understand —
nor does he wish to. When Clint Eastwood now bares his once supple,
marble-chiseled chest he gets bigger laughs than if he attempted to
pummel any broad with his instruments of world-weary wisdom. In the
1970s (and later, with more barbed vengeance, in the '90s), those Midas
knuckles began to shift from pure symbols of occidental patriarchy to
blunt objects that undercut any expediency remaining in the law of
father's tattered, honey-toned parchment. The fists were yesteryear,
they were Old Testament, they were strength without smarts, arms
without memory (as Iran Contra taught us). Puissance was "in." Social
conscience was "in." We stopped laughing in part because western men
could no longer teach us anything about a mass culture that had
succumbed to ambiguity, and to ambiguity not just as a fact of life to
be weighed accordingly but as a God-given, inalienable right, a religion.
American men were black and white, They Were Expendable. And they were
spirited away — by vague, nihilist priests carrying cattle bolts
who viewed cosmic justice as a foreign concept lost in translation.
It is appropriate, then, that the two most notable times we stopped laughing were the direct result of implications — not ejaculated threats but eerie whispers — that defied not only the proper order of gender roles and patriarchy but of natural law, of the beauty of evolution and biology. Philosophy was "out," genetics was "in." Sodomy still gets laughs because it is a cyclical and self-contained form of expression — the act itself is its only legacy. Incest, on the other hand, is not just a sex-as-fetishism but a science-as-fetishism; it is one of the few sexual fetishes that are also a form of genetic engineering (although what is the choosing of a mate, the exclusion of physical features from one's ideal, but de facto genetic engineering?). Science is often found married to the fairy tale in an idyllic cottage (Bruno Bettelheim would have signed the marriage certificate); it is no different here, where bedding one's sister or father or mother or cousin raises a legion of warped mutants, of Cains bearing hideous, throbbing marks (the Bible is not the only fairy tale, but it may be at least the most scientific, if unintentionally). These tales of the arabesque have been so lovingly ingrained in Judeo-Christian culture that even the slightest incestuous allusion rings a red circle around itself and seeps through the document at hand, melting everything in its path.
We stop laughing at Jake Gittes in Chinatown as he hustles Evelyn Cross Mulwray because she gives him what he wants and he immediately realizes that he doesn't want it anymore. This is the motif of the insuperable male sex drive turned in on itself, horniness as Ouroboros. He slaps her in the face repeatedly, but her confession of fatherly love and illegitimate offspring/sibling encapsulates itself into a thin lead bullet and fires into his groin. We're not laughing anymore because he has had unprotected sex with Evelyn, and therefore — teen issues teaches us — also with her father Noah (a misstep if there ever was one, we don't need Genesis as a clue to this mystery). Jake is emasculated, revealed as a fool for punching through his ignorance. The almighty father has hernias, a blank stare, and shriveled testicles.
We stop laughing at Roy Dillon sixteen years
later under Bush (and
directly after Reagan, the oldest man ever elected to office and a
former Hollywood star) because we never start laughing, at least not in
that scene. Myra Langtry, like Evelyn C. Mulwray, clocks Roy beneath
the belt but, worse, it isn't provoked, it's practically an act of
recreation. Roy won't team up with her, he's learned from the best that
con artists don't have partners, and more importantly they don't have
families. This second rule becomes useful to Myra when she begins
suggesting an Oedipal affair between Roy and his formerly estranged
mother Lilly (also a con artist, and therefore exempt from "family"
status). Roy slaps her twice and spits vulgarities at her but none of
it seems sufficient retribution; we've just witnessed the cardinal
accusation of vulgarity, delivered playfully ("You like to go where
you've been . . .") and almost seductively.
Of course, we never believe Roy is a real man anyway — he's a lousy con
with the sexist streak of a six-year-old from the suburbs — so the
force of his emasculation isn't as powerful as it could be. But in 1990
it doesn't take a real man — a Bogart or a Cagney
or a Hayden or even a Nicholson — to get taken to task; the ideal of
manhood has shifted from authentic patriarch to ironic patriarch, and
the original tragic-ironic patriarch is Oedipus.
Roy is too much of Oedipus when his mother leans in for a wet, open-mouthed kiss at the film's end, he is too much of Oedipus when his mother swings a briefcase full of money at his temple and shatters a glass of water in his hand, sending icy, freak-accidental shards into his jugular. He has not even committed the crimes of Oedipus, he has merely conjured them — and in doing so has conjured Oedipus' doom. But afterward, as Lilly writhes in grief on the floor over her dead son as though viciously straddling him, further blurring the already barely visible lines between mourning and sex (le petit mort), Oedipus is lost in the fog; Lilly becomes Isis. At this, perhaps, we laugh, but only retrospectively.
Incest has become the ultimate postmodern fear. It is fitting that it dethroned the politics of demagoguery from this regal office, an exercise able to seduce entire nations (Ionesco could have saved stage producers time and granted them flair if he had instead made his infantry of metamorphosing rhinoceroses a wayward pack of pimps and prostitutes — who were Hitler and Stalin but a cunning mix of devil, Machiavelli and Sweet Sweetback?). But the fears of the collective conscious have abstracted since World War II; we now cower under the sheets considering how few of our desires can be usefully organized, and more importantly mitigated, by reason and science. There is nothing inherently evil (forget social responsibility for a moment) about the act of incest, although the esteemed council of Moses, Gabriel García Márquez and David O. Russell have decreed that the universe has its punitive way in the end: incest cheats fate, too, and fate responds accordingly (Louis Malle would have been shouted down at this symposium, John Waters was politely ejected). Likewise, there is nothing definitive withholding or encouraging arousal while in close proximity to family members; studies have uncovered patterns, drawn tenuous relationships between household dynamics and nearly universal sexual barriers. But then are aberrations truly aberrations?
The source of the incestuous urge lies at the base of a seemingly bottomless well of sexual desire; we know the water is there, like an oily bubble of poison with the potential to contaminate the entire supply, but our buckets of consciousness only descend so deep. The hedonist may refuse to draw any negative energy from this nefarious phantom, but the rest of us have become so compulsively obsessive that incest has become a stock crime, an easy stop to pull out toward the end of a pulp novel, standard fodder for a mystery that needs solving or a skeleton that needs extracting from a closet. Sexual perversion has replaced sociopolitical perversion. Today's noir villains are child molesters (another act with a similar if less archetypal stigma) and perpetrators of incest, where yesterday the landscape was populated by spies, petty crooks looking to score big, Neo-Nazis hunting WMDs, and . . .
Communists. In 1974, during the Vietnam episode and at the height of Chairman Mao's Republic, the film Chinatown was released, a neo-noir about an incestuous father/daughter relationship and a detective too smart/too cool for his own good but not smart or cool enough to figure it out who got embroiled in the aftermath. In 1990, exactly one year after George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev declared the Cold War's close, The Grifters was released, a sub-neo-noir about a "family" of con artists that gradually develops into a romantic love triangle (or, at least, a fuck triangle) between mother, son, and girlfriend.
The
distance between the two films in theme and in content, as well as in
time, is telling. Chinatown
acts like a calm, slow-to-boil spy thriller almost all the way through.
It's as though a studio could have swiped the script and in an hour or
two bowdlerized all references to incest and simply made Noah Cross a
sneering red ally. Or, to take the matter further, it feels as though
the script could have begun as a "Red Scare"
B-feature and then changed because a zinger was needed. Roman Polanski
and Robert Towne were rewriting prior mystery material with modern
motives. Of course, The Grifters is rewritten too —
it was originally a novel by pulp impressionist Jim Thompson — but
where Chinatown is an old-fashioned Dashiell
Hammett story with American and Judeo-Christian archetypes, The
Grifters is a family melodrama as noir with clear deference
to Greco-Roman (and Egyptian) archetypes. Chinatown
was a post-Woodstock, post-Manson experiment in new kinds of fear, the
sort that would haunt us with the caliber of nightmares two generations
previous enjoyed under threat of Soviet missiles. Like films with
commie agents, the hero seems to be acting not only for the good of the
girl but for the future of the country — in this case under vicious
patriarchal rule that corrupts industries of natural resource and
stains bedsheets with his own daughter's soiled virginity. The
Grifters, however, has no hero, and no mystery, and no big,
creamy "con" at the center of its plot lollypop a la The
Killing or Asphalt Jungle. The
Grifters is incest not as twist or as communist substitution
but as a mutually exclusive noir subject — it's like the best and worst
of the Reagan years, Dynasty juiced to a grimy pulp
and laced with rat poison.
Most noir films aspire to one end of this hard-boiled plot spectrum — that is, crime on the one end and family on the other — but amid the din of working definitions and theses kicking up the dust of our cinema's sordid backstreets, one hero manages to be on both sides of the coin at once. He's the only one that isn't quite a hero but manages to be heroic anyway, the only one that enacts incest (as well as sodomy) with one hand and bats away communists like flies from a dung pile with the other. He was, ironically, born under Eisenhower, along with Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, the "new look" Cold War, and the inclusion of the phrase "Under God" into the pledge of allegiance. Even more ironically, he resides in the midst of a major Hollywood studio with Uncle Hays standing by. Richard Widmark's Skip McCoy is a slightly lighter prototype of the transient Johnny from Mike Leigh's Naked (another new noir with social scandal as its main premise, that one under Margaret Thatcher's cloud). He is quick-witted, streetwise and skilled at his trade, but callous and imperious, as well as a firm believer in misogyny as a means of survival. He lives, if it qualifies as a life, down at the docks in a sub-sea-level shack sans electricity but where, as he sneeringly tells two cops who try to bust him, the beers are always cold (he keeps them lowered in the icy bay along with an airtight tin of loot). Skip is himself a cheap, cold, salty beer with a tangle of seaweed forever wrestling with his moral ballast — a nickel-and-dime pickpocket, a (to use the lingo) three-time-loser with only one chance left to leave the dames on the subway alone.
But Skip, like most American males when it comes to the unmentionables of fine young women, cannot help himself. He swipes a wallet from Candy, a scrumptious blonde, in the film's wordless opening and, in the process, unwittingly stalls the sale of a bomb recipe between U.S. commie sleeper cells and a Russian agent with tentative diplomatic immunity. This act alone has the feel of nascent sexuality to it; like a boy caught cribbing condoms from mommy and daddy's cookie jar, Skip has no clue what he has stolen but recognizes its importance by the aura of yearning about it. Everyone else seems to want it, so he automatically wants it, too — arbitrary desire by conditioning. Like a boy somehow hoping — and expecting, because he misreads platonic affection as sexual desire — to score in mommy's undergarments, Skip deftly handles the strip of film he has purloined and alternately plays it dumb, smart and sexy to cops, Candy, Moe (a local underground snitch and geriatric tie saleswoman) and Joey.
The last of this laundry list, Joey, is an interesting near-foil to Skip — he's the American commie, and an ex-boyfriend of Candy still using her for her street knowledge and airheadedness (he manages to convince her to make the bomb secret drop-off herself by lying through his teeth about the exchange's political implications). In a slightly less mainstream (that is, less anti-communist) film, Joey might have embodied even more accentuated characteristics of the American male archetype: in an indie film with appropriate sensibilities today, he might have been a camp he-man in the spirit of John Phillip Law, with Skip a sly, if pip-squeaky, queer. As is it, however, the relationship between Joey and Skip is still nothing less than remarkable for 1950s cinema. Joey is a sweaty, nervous, gun-toting communist, a tough coward who seems to have gone socialist simply so he can make money selling secrets to the reds. Skip is a sniveling, shifty-eyed loser without a sense of decency or responsibility who still manages to come out ahead in the end because, God bless him!, at least he's not red (the underground in this film has its own laughable moral code — when Joey asks Moe what she knows about communists she simply replies "I know that I don't like them"). To organize the dynamics of their relationship, Joey is the "top," Skip is the "bottom," and they're both screwing each other and screwing each other over to win mommy's love (in this case, mommy is the "score" of the filmstrip bearing the explosive algorithm). Candy is the go-between, the female stuck in the middle with allegiance to Joey and foolhardy love for Skip who bears the brunt of their incestuous frustrations.
In almost every scene Candy is
beaten mercilessly by one of these two men. Joey beats her for losing
the filmstrip. Skip beats her for attempting to steal it back. She acts
as mediator between these two sour business associates turned lovers
and, though not as essential to the triangle as say, Myra Langtry or
Evelyn Mulwray, her disposable nature makes the film all the more
subversive and brutal. While Candy's presence in the story is
essential, her actions do very little to move the primary plot along
until the third act when the film decides to change into a love story.
She's light years from the scandal in her midst since she doesn't know
what's on the filmstrip; the script sets her up as the unblemished,
sacrificial lamb. She tries to tell this to Skip as he attempts to
abuse what she knows out of her, but of course he thinks she's feeding
him a line, and she pays for it with slaps, fists, strangles. These
beatings are some of the earliest nihilist poetry in mainstream film: there's no
narrative purpose for them since Skip can't learn anything from Candy,
which we suspect he knows as a pickpocket with a precision bullshit
detector. His impish, almost vampiric smile gleams in the thin rays of
light that strike his face along the dock as he drags Candy outside for
what is probably the most gleeful activity he's had in years as a
overgrown, undersexed street urchin. He gets to play futile gender
doctor, striking the sense into an impossibly senseless woman (to
highlight her senselessness, Candy falls in love with Skip in spite of,
or perhaps as a result of, the perpetual bruising). He gets to play
daddy, chastising his daughter for not knowing better. He gets to play
son, too — although he circumvents a potentially Oedipal fate by
expressing his incestuous desire as violence rather than sex initially.
Would that Jake Gittes modeled this maneuver.
Candy, communism, and the filmstrip form a kind of mother unit, or mother trinity in this film — their bastard sons are Skip and Joey, Cain and Abel respectively, vying for mommy's favor. Candy, as the only true "woman" in the trio, therefore accepts the role of martyr (the Jesus role) who gets stoned for her purity (represented in this case with ignorance, the highest form of social purity). Her tawdry attempts at self-defense (she blackjacks Skip in the skull at one point and escapes with a small portion of the filmstrip) pale in comparison. And though she is not the only woman to suffer abuse — Joey, the good son, the Abel, shoots Moe in the head after she mouths off to him — she is the only one whose abuse seems to offer the boys release. The unspeakable fears in this film bleed between communism and incest until the two are both the same blue, puffy shade of Candy's wounds. And watching it all, we almost stop laughing . . . but not quite. Candy's martyrdom encompasses our condescending slings and arrows, too, not to mention those of the filmmakers who forced upon her such a facile, sexist shell of a character.
It must be noted that while Joey's violence in the film is orderly, necessary for his unholy cause, and mostly cold-blooded (he's an agent serving a higher power), Skip's beatings are cloaked in confusion and ambiguity. At first we think him to be traumatized, acting out some childhood drama rather than simply punching his way through social Darwinism, but then it becomes clear that abuse is a sexual mechanism for him (as it was to Johnny in Mike Leigh's Naked). He takes pleasure in manipulating fools, that's why he's a pickpocket; his hand movements toward Candy on the subway are only a few steps from masturbatory, from frotteuristic (further highlighted later when he swipes Joey's gun, also on the subway). He is almost certainly the first "complete" anti-tragic American film hero, identified with endless sexual contrasts: he is violent but occasionally cerebral, virile but dainty, handsome but slender and stiff like a blonde pipe cleaner. He is sexist but somehow sympathetic to the plight of women, too. He's just as likely to bash Candy's face in after accepting her tender kisses, and yet he willingly takes on the task of burying Moe's corpse, who not twenty minutes previous had sold the location of his residency for a meager price. Pickup on South Street is less a spy thriller and more a glib psychological landscape (typical of Samuel Fuller) where we observe the clashing of geological formations — namely Skip's sex impulse, Skip's Oedipal impulse, Skip's aggressive impulse. The central battle of the film occurs not on the screen between Skip and Joey or America and Russia but within the minds of audience members as they attempt to decipher how they're supposed to feel about Skip. I have said that Joey and Skip are Abel and Cain, which should make the decision between them intuitive — but the curiosity is that in this film, Cain wins. The ambiguous, conflicted turpitude of the urban underbelly wins over the hard but sure evil of communism (it's almost as though Joey had to be communist and cowardly — anything less would have made Skip too unlikable by comparison). How is this possible?
Because Cain is
the original
American hero. Cain did Oedipus one better by slaying his own brother
from a mix of envy, sadism, and homoeroticism. Cain was, in Biblical
terms, the first male with a mother, and thus the first male to suffer
the Oedipal conflict. It might also be said that by killing Abel, Cain
was enacting an Oedipal gesture — violating and undermining the rule of
"the father" (God) and vowing demented allegiance to a nonexistent
mother figure. God — the Biblical God — is the only father without a
mother, thus the Oedipal conflict is useless and hedonistic, a
vestigial reflex not far from sodomy. Cain was banished. And so he
represents the apotheosis of, if not all American male stereotypes,
than at least the noir anti-hero: Cain is civil war, not just brother
against brother but mind against body, id against ego. He committed the
first act of violence coupled with the first act of incest: like Skip,
he operates in the space where crime and family commingle. And also
like Skip (at least at the start of Pickup on South Street),
Cain is marked for life, a sullen nomad with little hope of redemption.
Cursed. And yet he seizes with a cavalier spirit all that the American
male embodies in its ideal state. He possesses strength and fortitude.
He wrangles the upper hand from his opponent by any means necessary. He
builds a unique ethical (and economic) universe all to himself that is
followed to draconian extremes. He understands when to break rules, and
is vicious when expedient. He is internally troubled. He is a momma's
boy. He is a liar, a thief, and a charlatan, an expert at subterfuge
who only loses out in the end because God can see all (and how can he
compete with that?). And most importantly, he is alone
— a solitary sentinel keeping watch over the gates of psychosexual
conflict.
The Cain archetype is the father of all American archetypes in that it enables our vague antisocial behavior and promotes it to the status of a sanctified rite. The story of American society, and its blithe misogyny, is essentially the story of Cain tweaked and retold a thousand or more times. We can only stop laughing at it, and at ourselves, when the latent knot of oppositions that Cain comprises rages to the surface of the narrative spurting blood from its blowhole. Chinatown and The Grifters smear our noses in our own excrement, in the fact that we despise sex for its putrid potential and paradoxically itch for it all the more because we do. Pickup on South Street is like a hybrid of those two films (or are they fragments of Fuller?); we can still laugh at the violence, at the betrayal, and at the sexual repression Skip exhibits because his Cain-ness doesn't seem to fit into the film's larger themes (communism, cheap thrills). He's a postmodern manic-depressive that got caught pinching on the subway four decades too early. Confusion is easy to point and laugh at. So is psychosis, when it doesn't get under our skin. But whether we laugh or not, Cain is already there, subcutaneous in everything American.
Which is not to say that Cain is never punished for his deeds in American film. Occasionally, and inevitably, those that smack dames around for fun go too far. George Eastman in A Place in the Sun found only the electric chair at the delta of his deceitful rainbow — and yet he is nothing if not a sympathetic murderer (Shelly Winters' death is even staged like an accident after Eastman decides, grudgingly, not to go through with drowning her). He even gets to devour his cake in the end when Liz Taylor's character, the siren calling to the perilous rocks, visits him in prison to confess her love one last time. Scenes like these, and others in the American canon, seem to think one thing and proclaim another — in other words, they seem to say that we can learn from the errors of Cains who bend the law of the land so far it snaps in two. They are at heart both cautionary tales and therapeutic dramaturgy.
Cain is what drives Jake Gittes to keep pursuing tangled answers with rotten fruit hanging from their branches. He's what drives Noah Cross to impregnate his own daughter and deny Los Angeles the right to its own water. He's what drives Walter Neff to help Phyllis Dietrichson off her husband for the insurance money, then tire of her under the seductive spell of business partner Edward G. Robinson (who wouldn't fall for Little Caesar?). He's what drives Frank to help Cora push the old, impotent Nick off a precipice in a calculated moment of lust and then (unconsciously) slaughter her in an automotive accident. He's what drives Cody Jarrett (in a ridiculous parody of the Oedipal principle) to shriek "Top of the world, ma!" pre-suicide, clamoring for mother's approval until the very end. He's what drives to Anthony John to submerge in Shakespearean psychology and awaken from the baptism an Elizabethan killer (his victim is, interestingly, Shelley Winters, perhaps Hollywood's most prominent victim of Cain). He's what drives Bruno Anthony to strangle Guy Haines' cheating wife in a pair of eyeglasses and then demand that Haines return the favor (fittingly) on Anthony's father. He's what drives Skip to mercilessly beat Candy as though she were the mother that wouldn't spread her legs (and what drives Skip to, in the same breath, shed a tear for Moe at the other edge of femininity).
Pickup on South Street
is anomalous in the Cain canon in that it suggests an instantaneous
rehabilitation for Skip. At the end, after foiling the commie plot,
Skip and Candy reconcile; she's lost the wounds and he's lost the
disgusting sneer, and they both tell the cops to take a hike as they
walk out of frame to some presumably romantic (not to mention hormonal)
bliss. This coda is perhaps the most forced ever tacked onto a
screen anti-romance, not to mention noir; even a Hays code conciliation
like the denouement of Suspicion doesn't come
close. We can't imagine a life for these characters beyond the film,
especially not since the primary conflict has been entirely resolved;
Fuller gets us in and out of his cardboard microcosm the quick and
dirty way. Even more unsettling, we are forced to imagine domestic life
between the two lovebirds — stuck in a shack by the docks, Candy must
cope with Skip's erratic behavior. But then, she fell in love with the
beatings, with the verbal barbs, with the treat-me-like-I'm-trash
behavior, didn't she? And so Skip has his way with mommy after all.
Were this a perfect world, the film would end with one slight change:
we would notice new scars of affection adorning Candy's face, her eyes
swollen shut and haloed with unhealthy purple.
August 2008 | Issue 61
Copyright © 2008 by Joseph Lanthier
Jon Lanthier is a writer, multimedia artist, coffee drinker, and cultural autodidact from Berkeley, CA. Cinematic obsessions include Powell and Pressburger, New York filmmakers, the post-digital era, surrealism/absurdism, and international animation. He is convinced that the best film criticism is one-third academic analysis, one-third personal essay, and one-third conspiracy theory. He welcomes ad hominem attacks on the gaping holes in his rhetoric by clicking here.
ALSO: More film reviews
