Tag Archives: Science fiction

Saturday Matinee: Split!

Posted on by
Reply

Fractal Accidents: Attachment and Agency in Chris Shaw’s ‘Split’

By Jonathan Lukens

Source: We Are the Mutants

As a young man, I felt that most people conceived of memory differently than I did, believing that failures of memory were errors of playback more than of recording. This idea, that memory works like a vinyl record in which everything we experience has its groove, supposes that it’s just a matter of knowing precisely where to put the needle down to replay the experience. In contrast, my younger self operated with the also erroneous belief that our memories are only hazy recordings of what we have somehow deemed worthy of recalling—that memory is like finding old semi-legible notes to ourselves written in an old notebook and trying to  figure out what they mean.

It was with this theory of memory in mind that I had begun to consider Split, a movie that I thought I remembered renting from a video store up the street from my childhood home sometime around 1990. For over a decade, my occasional recollections of the film, often spaced years apart, might prompt a web search with no results, which would then introduce a sense of disorientation: I could not experience the instant gratification of finding some online mention that might confirm that what I remembered was real. Was Split (that was the name, right?) just an Easter Egg written into the script of my past—some sort of Berenstain (sic?) Bears thing? After all, and with all due respect to the films’ creators: if my adolescent mind was going to fabricate a memory, this is the sort of thing it would have come up with. 

Originally released theatrically in 1989, and subsequently on VHS in 1991 by Futura Home Video, Split was reissued on DVD in 2018 by Verboden Video and is also available through Alamo Drafthouse’s streaming app, which is how I was able to confirm its existence and watch it again. Spoilers of the film follow, but only insofar as my synopsis is veridical to the plot—a nested disclaimer I wouldn’t need to make if the film were less fractured. Whether its cracked mirror nature is a deliberate mindfuck, the result of freshman filmmaking hamfistedness, or both, is not something I can tell you. 

The film opens with Starker, our hero, wandering the streets of San Francisco. His ripped jeans show his bare rear end, and he’s wearing the sort of jagged and discolored false teeth that might have been advertised in old comic books alongside fake vomit and squirting flowers. He walks through a parking lot full of city buses, suddenly looking directly at the camera and yelling, “Stop following me. Leave me alone.” At first, we believe he is addressing us, the viewers, and breaking the fourth wall, but the camera cuts to two men dressed in a mid-‘80s Ivy League casual style—like they just walked out of a JC Penny catalog shoot. One sits at a computer; the other, older and mustachioed, is framed over his right shoulder. The younger man was surveilling Starker, and, as the dialogue reveals, the populace more broadly. He rewinds a recording of Starker’s camera-facing monologue and consults with the older agent, who says Starker is just crazy, but capitulates to the younger agent’s desire for further observation.

They run a face recognition program, presented as a musical montage, in which we see Starker’s head rendered as a 3D model as the camera hops around a black and white grid of similar hairless heads looking for a match. The sequence is still enthralling and somewhat hypnotic after 30 years. This isn’t a real 3D scan of a human head; rather it’s a painstakingly created proof of concept showing us what the technology that would soon become ubiquitous might look like. It dances. We hear pitch-shifted human voices of the sort we might associate with Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” and they create a synthetic and escalating harmonic pattern as the facial recognition nears completion.

This is the first of a few similarly rendered and soundtracked scenes that make Split worth more attention than it will ever receive. Analog processes are used to pre-mediate future digital operations, and there is a lo-fi poetry to them. These skies are the color of the ancestors of our flat-screen TVs, their saturations and frequency roll-off the stuff of a time when there really were dead channels, and tuned-in heads bobbed to the tangible yet barely audible click that the phone made just before it rang. Different media have different dispositions, and I explain these in the hope of being descriptive, while mindful of any argument about the veracity of concepts of authenticity.

Jittering a bit and mumbling, Starker heads into a diner and has a seat at a booth. He orders coffee from a waitress we’ll meet again later while speaking in a hybrid of fake European accents. Making a mess while examining a ketchup bottle, then pouring a packet of artificial sweetener onto the table and snorting it up his nose like cocaine, he talks to himself as the surrounding patrons begin to grow nervous. One of them gets up, takes him by the shoulder and leads him outside. At one point the camera lingers for a moment—letting us know that a brightly colored fabric pouch that Starker has left behind means something. 

As the film progresses, we watch Starker give the agents surveilling him the slip. After being knocked out and having his jacket tagged with a tracking device, he discovers the device, removes his jacket, and changes clothes to elude his pursuers. To illustrate the process of his being tracked we are treated to a primitive color representation of a 3D vector map of the city. It’s like an isomorphic video game built of an extruded and pastel colored De Stijl painting that says, “Welcome to the control society. Now you’re playing with power.” The whole sequence provides a taste of the ‘90s to come, bringing to mind critiques of the automatic production of space and tactical media projects like the Institute for Applied Autonomy’s iSee and the performances of the Surveillance Camera Players.

Starker retrieves the brightly colored fabric pouch from the trash outside the diner. He dons a new—and more ridiculous—disguise: a stick-on mustache and goatee paired with wire-rimmed glasses, a brown turtleneck, and a beige corduroy sports coat. Setting the scene for an art gallery opening, a lovingly blocked shot of Starker creates the sort of recursion we would associate with a Magritte or Escher through a row of champagne flutes. The camera lingers over a series of paintings reminiscent of Basil Wolverton’s or Erol Otus’s more psychedelic work. Gallery patrons talk trash about the paintings and each other while Starker shoves food in his pockets—John Belushi in Animal House style—as a lovely minimal synth piece by Robert Shaw, the director’s brother and creator of the computer generated effects seen through the film, begins to warble and flutter.

Conversing with the fictional creator of these paintings (in reality those of writer/director Chris Shaw himself), a flat-topped New Waver wearing a mustard yellow dinner jacket over a t-shirt, our ludicrously costumed hero mentions preparing to “wake people up.” As they discuss the artwork hanging on the gallery walls, they stop to look at a storyboard—which we realize is the storyboard of the current scene. As the artist begins to realize the same truth, he becomes enraged. He screams, but none of the patrons seem to notice or care.

The film meanders for a while, if it was not already meandering. We see the junior and senior agents discuss an analysis that reveals no discernible patterns in Starker’s behavior, and they escalate their attempts to find him. Now at the artist’s apartment after the art opening, Starker is coaxed into revealing his plan: “All we have to do is change the program!” he says, later addressing the painter’s skepticism with, “I have the way. The way is here—in my package!” Removing the pouch from an inside coat pocket, Starker then opens it to reveal a white plastic disc approximately the size of his hand. The artist remarks that it resembles a urinal deodorizer.

Starker goes on a tear: “Science is a jealous god.” The mystical “separates us from robots.” “What I am holding is a mutant biological organism.” He almost immediately contradicts himself and says the substance is just a placebo because people require a scientific reason to believe in something and that that is necessary for “the dream” to have power. He explains that he is going to dose the city’s water supply with this substance and then it will spread around the world as people excrete it through their urine. Sort of an Amanita muscaria re-trip meets infrastructural schwerpunkt: The MacGuffin is Elan Vital as urinal cake.

A few meaning-laden but plot-insignificant scenes later, Starker heads back to the diner. After a scuffle in which he startles Susan (the waitress we saw earlier) and she kicks him to the ground, he pressures her to let him hide out at her place. Reasonably viewing him as a crazy and potentially dangerous creep, she declines his offer. But, after following her to her car, he convinces her to relent by claiming that he used to be a veterinarian and that he may be able to explain the lethargy of the cat in a carrier in her back seat. The absurdity of this caged animal suddenly appearing to move the plot along is rendered even more absurd when Susan later explains that she already understood that the cat was lethargic because she had had it sterilized earlier in the day. There is something so metaphorically overt about this detail that I can’t tell if it’s a bad joke or a catastrophic mistake. In any event, Starker seems no less concerned about going home with a woman that left a post-op feline in the back of a car all day than Susan is about bringing home a man who claimed he was being followed and sat in her place of business snorting Sweet and Low through a straw while ranting in a fake French accent.

I will omit a lot of interpersonal awkwardness, strange dialogue, and things that may be significant to alternate interpretations in revealing that Starker crashes at Susan’s place (Pop Tarts and chill). The time they spend together only serves to make her subsequent death at the hands of the Starker’s pursuers insufficiently tragic to motivate his subsequent attempt at revenge. Discovering her murder at the hands of the Izod-clad archons, Starker—now in drag and blackface—follows the agents back to their bosses’ HQ. They enter through a large circular metal door, and Starker, who they don’t realize is following behind, is unable to enter.

Their boss, perhaps too obviously referred to as the “Agency Director” in a film about agency panic, laments his “monstrous” newly installed cybernetic arm. In an abrupt spasm of the plot that seems to indicate that the Director’s body is deteriorating, a lab-coated flunky soothes him by explaining that he has created that ultimate mad-scientist expression of mind-body dualism: a machine that can transfer a mind into another body. The camera cuts to Starker, unseen on the Agency Director’s CCTV, who is loading a pistol. He tries to find a way to open the door while the minions inside hurry to find a body to receive the Agency Director’s mind. The agents open the door and grab Starker, having seemingly no idea that they have apprehended the very person they were relentlessly pursuing earlier. Starker drops his gun in the struggle, and they strap him to a chair and lower a brain transfer apparatus over his head.

“Let me out! It worked!” Starker says, but it’s not clear if the process was successful or if Starker is trying to convince the agents that it was. We’re left to wonder if this Camp Concentration-style mind transfer worked at all. It’s set up as a techgnostic climax that never happens, as if this cyberpunk yacht rock anthem makes it to the guitar solo just as the amp blows. The enraged Agency Director yells and tells his minions to get rid of “her.” They throw Starker out, not seeming to care that this random person just entered their secret bunker, and still not realizing that it was Starker himself. 

The final quarter of the film involves agents pursuing Starker while the Agency Director’s body is gradually replaced with a mechanical one. The music is great here and evokes both a sort of period instrumental soft rock call-center hold music and early Chrome. Someone with disposable income should release a proper soundtrack.

Now looking like a lo-fi Robocop or a reject from a Shinya Tsukamoto film, the Agency Director’s cybernetic augmentations (or too on-the-nose self-amputations) have endowed him with new powers. He accesses satellites while issuing abrasively vocoded directives that also appear on a camera-facing screen, perhaps to ensure intelligibility to the audience. Starker’s location is revealed on a map as crescendoing lo-bit sound effects accompany synth pads and drums. “Eradicate!” The Agency Director yells in a Davros-like moment. The camera cuts to Starker hopping over fences and traversing a roadside embankment, while the Agency Director seems to glitch out as he installs one last bionic eye into his head. 

Now fully metal-skinned and ambulatory, he walks over to a pool of water inside headquarters. Elsewhere in a meadow, Starker stumbles into a pool himself, grabbing the white disc he revealed earlier. Somehow, both pools have become a sort of fold in space—the Agency Director reaches through and grabs Starker. They struggle, each remaining primarily in their own physical location while their arms bend through each others’ space. Starker breaks free and releases the chemical in the white disc. White dust floats in the air.

The end credits roll (well, melt, actually) and no further explanation is given.

***

Ultimately, outside of the beauty of the graphics and soundtrack, the joy and frustration of Split is that we are confronted with something that we can’t quite classify. Foregrounds and backgrounds of plot and image oscillate and change places, but so do the cues we’d typically use to determine whether or not we approached the material as comic or tragic, accidental or deliberate, high brow or trash stratum.

Watching Split (had I really seen it before?) left me with the distinct feeling that I just missed five minutes of it without leaving my seat. Shaw never really makes it clear what we should focus on, and the director’s commentary on the DVD doesn’t provide much help. There Shaw describes the film as “a dream that doesn’t really explain itself.” He does, however, talk a bit about chaos—not just disorder, but the branch of mathematics we might associate with Lorenz, Mandelbrot, the butterfly effect, and fractals. While history might provide examples of minor perturbations in complex systems causing them to collapse or toggle into alternate states, it seems here that chaos is really just used as a sort of “magic” (in the same way that “science” is used in superhero comics) to attempt to explain how Starker has a capacity for action that exceeds that of the archons that surveil him.

Really thinking about agency as contingent and distributed means something quite different and perhaps far more unsettling. I’d like to tell you that Split reveals a negotiation between ideas of cowboy individualism on one end, and on the other an appreciation of the behavior of complex adaptive systems of which human “individuals” are both composed of and parts of. In reality, the film presents 20th century ideas of autonomy and individuality taken to such an extreme that they become a bit goofy. The film presents an inverse relationship between attachment and individuality. Take, for example, this dialogue between the two primary agents who discover and begin tracking Starker, in which the frustrated junior agent asks:

How can he make it? We all have something: our family, our friends, something, but he… he gets by on nothing. How can he be that free? No human needs, no weaknesses, no feelings, nothing.

As they discuss their pending report to the Agency Director, the senior agent explains that they will just have to tell it like it is:

       No recurrent behavior, no attachments, no soft spots: superman.

So, the superman, the “free” man, is the man who cares about no one and has no routine. Attachment to others is presented in the same way that an ascetic might present an attachment to material things, but also as a commodity that the system of surveillance capitalism depicted in the film exploits. In the world of Split, one can either be “free” and thus detached from social forces one can’t actually detach from, or part of some sort of winkingly self-aware Matrix.

Many of the characters, including Susan, the painter, some street crazies, and the pursuing agents, seem to have some awareness that by participating in society they are being had. It’s as if they are wearing the glasses from They Live (1988) but realize that if they call attention to their alien overlords they will just be ignored anyway.

Shaw’s broader argument seems to be that as an “individual” who is truly “free,” Starker exists without a data-body; he’s an Übermensch who cannot be profiled or reduced to his so-called statistical self. As such, Starker stands outside of culture—the infrastructure of shared social and material substrates that both the one and the many call upon to act. But he still has the magic urinal cake, the fulcrum and lever by which he is super empowered.

Like a bad haircut, dosing the water supply with mutagenic hallucinogens seems cool in high school, when we are naive enough to dream that control is simply a matter of centralization and that shocking the dupes out of their somnambulism is something they will high five us for afterwards. But while portrayed as some sort of systems-disrupting black swan herald of a “new age,” maybe Starker—and the film itself—just represents a dance around the collapse of any sort of shared systems of meaning. After all, at the climactic moment when Starker releases the mutagen, the end credits roll. Were not shown what comes next—just the end of the now.  

Saturday Matinee: Psycho Goreman

Posted on by
Reply

[Movie Review] PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN

By Sarah Musnicky

Source: Nightmarish Conjurings

It’s not often that you find a movie that is completely batshit crazy, all the way extra, yet entirely wholesome all in one package. Yet, this is what we have in PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN. Coated with ounces of blood, campy humor, and adolescent sassafras, audiences will be taken through a wackadoo journey that will have their heads spinning. While not quite the type of family film one would put on family night, there is enough family-fun goodness to add this to the list once all members are grown and prepared to have their eyeballs explode. By film’s end, you’ll find yourself unexpectedly wanting the best for everyone, even if it means pure, utter destruction is the end result.

Siblings Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna) and Luke (Owen Myre) accidentally awaken an ancient alien overlord with no name from a millennia-long prison sentence. Why was this overlord imprisoned you ask? Well, he attempted to destroy the universe after working under an oppressive system that exploited his labor. While the creature has no chill, Mimi is undaunted, especially when it’s discovered that she is in possession of a magical amulet that enables her to force the creature to obey every single command she makes. Every. Single. Command. If you know children well, you know this is an absolutely awful idea.

They decide to give the evil creature the name Psycho Goreman (Matthew Ninaber), which they shorten to PG to keep things easier. PG’s re-appearance, though, triggers attention across the galaxy. There are those who want to destroy him, remembering the destruction he caused eons ago. And there are others who wish to help him, for a price that is. As the galaxy’s creatures start to zero in on this small Earth town, the fate of the galaxy may be up to Mimi and Luke. But first, we get a heavy dose of sitcom-style shenanigans, which sow the seeds of heartwarming payoff that we experience at the film’s end.

Where should anyone really begin when discussing this film? First off, PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN is a practical effects wet-dream. From slowly crawling brain-boys to a suicidal melty zombie police officer to every alien character having their own specific costume that almost reminds of classic Power Rangers episodes mixed with Doctor Who flair, there is so much craft-based love in this film that it made this reviewer positively giddy to see what we’d see next. Knowing the amount of work that went into the effects onscreen, it’s an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking in this day and age. But, in all honesty, it is so worth it to see it come to life onscreen. Forever pro-practical all the way!

With the practical effects aiming to seduce our hearts, we have to keep in mind that this is not all that writer-director Steven Kostanski is bringing to the table for us to consume in PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN. The writing and the delivery of performances from the actors really help to sell the chaos that is taking place onscreen. Matthew Ninaber’s PG’s sinister, almost deadpan delivery contrasts nicely against Nita-Josee Hanna’s manic over-the-top energy she delivers for Mimi. While this reviewer would have loved more levels in Hanna’s performance, the direction and delivery of her character performance still worked well for the over-the-top nature of the film. Adam Brooks is also a notable standout, with his comedic timing and everyman performance providing a much-needed contrast to the adventures of the children onscreen.

The script itself is hilarious and heartwarming, with lines about hunky boys coming out of PG’s mouth that would seem out of place in any other film. Yet, this is a heartwarming, tongue-in-cheek type of film that lends itself to these subtleties, where each character undergoes their own spiritual journey. Just, with wallops of blood, gore, and viscera. These little moments are subtly interwoven in, which maximizes their impact upon arrival due to the black comedy that Kostanski leans into. And, if that isn’t enough for you, the various homages paid to family-style shows in the script really help remind the viewer of the lengths this film will go to remind of what PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN is really about – love and finding your own family. Even if that family consists of a psychotic girl, a mom-turned-administrator of misguided justice, or – even – a bloodthirsty alien warlord.

Overall, PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN is a film that would make an epic Midnighter event at any film festival. It would have been a crowd-pleaser pre-COVID and it certainly will after. This reviewer would argue that it’s the alien warlord version of the little girl paired with bodyguard/former military turned babysitter trope. It’s heartwarming, bloody, incredibly fucked up, and extra as all get out. And, while at times the performances can be more one-note than not, the film just really works. It’s a family film gone wrong, which seems perfectly fitting for the age we’re in now.

Watch Psycho Goreman on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/14004800

Saturday Matinee: Virtual Nightmare

Posted on by
Reply

“Virtual Nightmare” (2000) is an Australian television film adaptation of the 1955 science fiction short novel by Frederik Pohl. It was directed by Michael Pattinson and written by Dan Mazur and David Tausik (who two years earlier collaborated for a tv adaptation of Brave New World). Like the stories of Philip K. Dick and the late 90s wave of gnostic films such as Dark City, Fight Club, eXistence, Pleasantville, The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, The Truman Show, etc. (some of which were inspired/influenced by PKD), the plot centers on protagonists piercing the veil of a superficial and hegemonic consensus reality.

Astute viewers may also recognize plot elements reminiscent of a couple of other literary works which Pohl’s source novel predates: Eight O’ Clock in the Morning (1963) by Ray Faraday Nelson (a short story adapted into the 1988 film They Live and whose author happened to be a close friend of PKD’s), and The Futurological Congress (1971) by Stanislaw Lem (a satirical dystopian novel loosely adapted for the 2013 film The Congress).

Visually and technically, Virtual Nightmare is comparable to made for television and direct-to-home video sci-fi fare of the late 90s and early 2000s, but where it stands apart is its intelligent and compelling storytelling. It’s a prime example of how limited budget/FX and occasionally subpar acting can be transcended by a narrative addressing eternally relevant questions.

A big shout-out to Tom of Montalk.net for bringing wider attention to this diamond in the rough via random tweet.

Saturday Matinee: Star Trek Acid Party

Posted on by
Reply

Saturday Matinee: Dark Star

Posted on by
Reply

“Dark Star” (1974) is a science fiction comedy directed and produced by John Carpenter and co-written with Dan O’Bannon. The film originated as a USC film project from 1970 to 1972 and expanded to a feature length project in 1974. It plot follows the mentally deteriorating crew of the starship Dark Star, twenty years into their mission to destroy unstable planets that might threaten future colonization of other planets.

Dark Star was the feature directorial debut for Carpenter, who also scored and produced the film. It was also the feature debut for O’Bannon, who also served as editor, production designer, visual effects supervisor and actor.

Tears in Rain: ‘Blade Runner’ and Philip K. Dick’s Legacy in Film

Posted on by
Reply

Blade Runner, and the work of Philip K. Dick, continues to find its way into our cinemas and minds. How did the visions of a paranoid loner become the most relevant science fiction of our time?

By Sean Bell

Source: PopMatters

You are an unusual man, Mr. Asher,” the cop beside him said. “Crazy or not, whatever it is that has gone wrong with you, you are one of a kind.”– Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”
— Roy Batty, Blade Runner.

Los Angeles, 2019. The script simply reads: “Ext. Hades – Dusk”. Chemical flame bursts into the perpetual, post-nuclear Los Angeles gloom from skyscraping smokestacks, rising out of an industrial landscape Hieronymus Bosch might have envisaged. Flying cars flit through the darkness like fireflies. The camera moves slowly over impossible architecture with the immensity and decaying grandeur of ancient Egypt; a phantasmagorical megalopolis strung with necklaces of neon. The music rises.

The last war is over and nobody won. The Earth is living on borrowed time. Science has destroyed all boundaries between the real and unreal except those we choose to impose. Policemen are murderers, androids are lovers, nobody can be trusted, and everybody dies. Welcome back to the world of Blade Runner. Every time we return, it becomes more recognisable. Perhaps we never left.

Santa Ana, 1981. By now, Philip K. Dick — author, religious visionary and possible schizophrenic, who once said “You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood” — has read and approved the shooting script for Blade Runner by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, as well as viewed a test reel of the movie’s groundbreaking special effects. In an effusive letter to Jeff Walker, the man in charge of the film’s marketing. Dick makes his prophetic opinion clear.

“Let me sum it up this way,” he wrote. “Science fiction has slowly and ineluctably settled into a monotonous death: it has become inbred, derivative, stale. Suddenly you people come in, some of the greatest talents currently in existence, and now we have a new life, a new start. As for my own role in the BLADE RUNNER project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by BLADE RUNNER… It will prove invincible.” (‘Letter to Jeff Walker regarding Blade Runner“ on Philip K Dick.com)

Dick, with a writer’s knack, chose the right words. Blade Runner has survived everything that could be thrown at it, including its initial critical reception, successive unsatisfactory edits, and dilution by both the science fiction genre and the film industry, which would plagiarise its vision with varying degrees of shamelessness for the next three decades. Yet nothing has been able to replicate its unique synthesis of elements, melding equal parts noir, action, romance, cyberpunk, dystopia and a meditation on what it means to be human. Whether praised or disparaged, ignored or overexposed, it has seen off all critics and challengers. Blade Runner‘s invincibility endures.

Unfortunately, the inimitable artistic fortitude of Ridley Scott‘s best work also allowed Hollywood to practice its favourite hobby of missing the point. The novels (or rather, in the film industry netherworld, ‘properties’) of Philip K. Dick — a writer largely unappreciated in his own lifetime who, at his lowest, claimed he he could not afford the late fee for a library book and infamously sustained himself on horse meat from a local pet store — have become highly prized and sought-after by studios eager to import intelligent ideas, rather than go through the hassle of conceiving their own. In the (twisted) spirit of Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale“, no need for originality, we can develop it for you wholesale.

Question the nature of identity with Colin Farrell’s Douglas Quaid /Hauser as he flees the futuristic gunfire in the remake of Len Wiseman’s Total Recall (2012, an adaptation of an adaptation, as it were). Consider the limitations of free will with Tom Cruise’s Chief John Anderton (a well-known fan of unstable science fiction writers) in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2012) while wondering how short he really is. Watch Jon Woo’s Paycheck (2003) and wonder how much Ben Affleck is actually being paid to appear in this piece of shit.

The names change, but the formula remains the same. Each summer, there must be blockbusters, and to fill the gaps in between the explosions with the barest bones of a Phil Dick story is, to the studio mindset, to buy instant, ready-made philosophical depth and artistic worth. Just add CGI!

Improbably, with 11 films based on his work and more in the pipeline, Dick has become the most adapted science fiction author in cinema history… And I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

“It’s a film about whether or not you can have a meaningful relationship with your toaster.” — Harrison Ford on Blade Runner in an interview with The Washington Post, 11 September 1992

That Scott is a director second only to George Lucas in his determination to tinker with a bygone masterwork until it meets his ultimate, exacting satisfaction (at last count, there are seven different versions of Blade Runner floating around the ether, finally culminating in Scott’s so-called ‘final cut’ in 2007), when a startling new interpretation of the film appeared online this June to wild acclaim, he had nothing to do with it. Instead, it was the work of the artist Anders Ramsell, who painstakingly recreated every frame of the movie’s opening 13 minutes with 3,285 gorgeous, haunting, impressionistic watercolours.

Dick, with a writer’s knack, chose the right words. Blade Runner has survived everything that could be thrown at it, including its initial critical reception, successive unsatisfactory edits, and dilution by both the science fiction genre and the film industry, which would plagiarise its vision with varying degrees of shamelessness for the next three decades. Yet nothing has been able to replicate its unique synthesis of elements, melding equal parts noir, action, romance, cyberpunk, dystopia and a meditation on what it means to be human. Whether praised or disparaged, ignored or overexposed, it has seen off all critics and challengers. Blade Runner‘s invincibility endures.

Unfortunately, the inimitable artistic fortitude of Ridley Scott‘s best work also allowed Hollywood to practice its favourite hobby of missing the point. The novels (or rather, in the film industry netherworld, ‘properties’) of Philip K. Dick — a writer largely unappreciated in his own lifetime who, at his lowest, claimed he he could not afford the late fee for a library book and infamously sustained himself on horse meat from a local pet store — have become highly prized and sought-after by studios eager to import intelligent ideas, rather than go through the hassle of conceiving their own. In the (twisted) spirit of Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale“, no need for originality, we can develop it for you wholesale.

Question the nature of identity with Colin Farrell’s Douglas Quaid /Hauser as he flees the futuristic gunfire in the remake of Len Wiseman’s Total Recall (2012, an adaptation of an adaptation, as it were). Consider the limitations of free will with Tom Cruise’s Chief John Anderton (a well-known fan of unstable science fiction writers) in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2012) while wondering how short he really is. Watch Jon Woo’s Paycheck (2003) and wonder how much Ben Affleck is actually being paid to appear in this piece of shit.

The names change, but the formula remains the same. Each summer, there must be blockbusters, and to fill the gaps in between the explosions with the barest bones of a Phil Dick story is, to the studio mindset, to buy instant, ready-made philosophical depth and artistic worth. Just add CGI!

Improbably, with 11 films based on his work and more in the pipeline, Dick has become the most adapted science fiction author in cinema history… And I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

“It’s a film about whether or not you can have a meaningful relationship with your toaster.” — Harrison Ford on Blade Runner in an interview with The Washington Post, 11 September 1992

That Scott is a director second only to George Lucas in his determination to tinker with a bygone masterwork until it meets his ultimate, exacting satisfaction (at last count, there are seven different versions of Blade Runner floating around the ether, finally culminating in Scott’s so-called ‘final cut’ in 2007), when a startling new interpretation of the film appeared online this June to wild acclaim, he had nothing to do with it. Instead, it was the work of the artist Anders Ramsell, who painstakingly recreated every frame of the movie’s opening 13 minutes with 3,285 gorgeous, haunting, impressionistic watercolours.

The painting technique employed to create this effect is known as aquarelle, which also acts as a sly commentary on Blade Runner‘s repeatedly-rejiggered legacy: because of its transparency, with aquarelle nothing can be painted over — once a mistake has been made, it has to be lived with. But as I watched what Ramsell called his ‘paraphrase’ of the movie, the familiar scenes and faces and voices emerging from the flickering, sensuous wash of colour, it seemed all the more appropriate. Other than Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, I can think of no other film that so looks like a painting without paint — a piece of art that evokes other art, and yet remains entirely itself.

This is all a long way of saying that Blade Runner is beautiful, in almost every way possible. This has, ridiculously, sometimes been described as being to its detriment: Roger Ebert, one of the film’s more famous naysayers, wrote in a contemporary review in the Chicago Sun-Times that “It looks fabulous… but it is thin in its human story,” (11 September 1992) an oddly myopic remark to make about a parable on the nature of humanity. True, Blade Runner has an embarrassment of style, but never at the expense of substance, much like the best examples of the Cinema du look movement, which was just emerging in French cinema at the time of Blade Runner‘s release. Indeed, in appearance and atmosphere, Blade Runner is so distinct that it changed the aesthetic of science fiction, and new subgenres have since been invented simply to describe it — ‘future noir’, coined by the critic and filmmaker Paul M. Sammon, being the most enduring.

To those who have yet to experience the film, I wonder what to say that has not been said elsewhere. Based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner somehow manages to be simultaneously the truest adaptation of Dick’s work yet produced — in spirit, if not plot — and also the freest in its interpretation of the material.

The central premise remains in both book and film; Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), halfway between policeman and bounty hunter, makes his living by tracking and killing androids that are almost entirely indistinguishable from humans, living amongst us under false identities. The supposed test for distinguishing real from unreal humans is that of empathy, but as Deckard methodically adds to his ‘artificial’ bodycount, he begins to question who is really the unemotional machine.

Blade Runner dumps much of the novel’s narrative furniture — Scott justified this to Dick by saying: “You know you’re so dense, mate, that by page 32, there’s about 17 storylines” — in a way that, in almost any other adaptation, would be considered sacrilege. Most noticeably, in the novel, Deckard is trapped in a barely functional marriage, while in the movie, Harrison Ford’s laconic protagonist is the classic bachelor gumshoe.

Also prominent in the book are ‘Mercerism’, the religion based around its followers’ empathy for a man whom others were throwing rocks at, and the ‘Mood Organ’, the household device which stimulates any mood the user wishes to experience, and which much of the population now depends on in order to face another bleak, post-apocalyptic day — two tragicomic creations typical of Dick, but too wry to fit with the Blade Runner‘s overall tone. Despite such changes, Dick’s reading of the screenplay convinced him that this film could express his ideas in a way he had not thought possible.

The production could hardly be called smooth. Even before its release, troubling rumours had begun circulating, and as Paul M Sammon wrote ,”by the time BR (Blade Runner) officially completed principle photography in July on 1981, the gossip has become more specific — BR‘s workload had been horrendous, its shooting conditions miserable, and its director, difficult. Moreover, the whispers went, BR’s moneymen were unhappy, its leading man had clashed with his director, and the crew had been near revolt.” Some of these stories were indeed true, but one should bear in mind that movie moneymen are nearly always unhappy, and Harrison Ford will always be the man who told George Lucas that “you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can’t say it.”

Paranoia Runs Through Blade Runner Like a Knife Edge

When Blade Runner was first released, the reviews ran from lukewarm to underwhelmed to baffled, a fact that many critics have been doing their best to forget in the intervening years, polishing the film’s legend in a frantic effort to make up for missing the boat first time round. Considered today, in our gleaming plastic future of bad credit and worse politics, where we are reliant not on humanised robots but dehumanising gadgets, and where much of the movie’s retro-futurism appears as quaint as it does prescient, what is left to say about Blade Runner?

Should I recite the plaudits that have become ritualistic? Should I point out the Roy Batty’s (Rutger Hauer) ‘tears in rain’ monologue is among the most moving and eloquent ever written or performed? Or that Vangelis revolutionised jazz, electronic music and film scoring simultaneously in one of the best soundtracks ever composed? Is it really necessary to highlight the acting of all involved; Harrison Ford as one of the best soulful detectives to grace noir of any kind, an understated and heartbreaking Sean Young (as Rachael), a dangerous but innocent Daryl Hannah (as Pris), or Rutger Hauer’s mixture of the psychotic and the Shakespearean? Do I need to praise the costumes, the set design, or the script which balances so many themes, so many hidden or implied meanings, with such grace and economy?

Well, yes. You want a criticism of Blade Runner? I would’ve liked more of Edward James Olmos’ Gaff. He’s cool. I also want Deckard’s coat.

But we need to be reminded of these things, every now and again, as each new generation discovers the film afresh, and especially when the next logical question becomes: how did Blade Runner get it so right, more so than any other adaptation of Dick’s work since? What did it understand that they did not? To try and answer that, we have to go back to the source.

“Phil acknowledged that his talk sometimes sounded like “religious nonsense & occult nonsense” — but somewhere in it all was the truth. And he would never find it. God himself had assured him of that.” — Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick.

In 2000, at the one and only Disinfo Con — a friendly gathering of millennial deviants concerning all things ‘counterculture’ — Grant Morrison, a writer who could arguably be counted as one of Dick’s prodigious bastard literary offspring, opened his keynote speech marvelling at the fact he spent his youth reading Robert Anton Wilson and now, all these years later, “we’re standing here, we’re talking about this shit and it’s real.”

Fans of Philip K. Dick have been feeling like that since at least the ’70s, when the dark realities on the other side of the Drug Revolution and the true possibilities of an all-powerful Nixonian surveillance state were becoming painfully apparent. Then as now, we use Dick’s paranoia to express our own.

Dick once commented that, with the making of Blade Runner, what had once been a private world that only he inhabited was now open to all; they would live in its murky depths, just as he did every day. At first, one might think that a paranoid and delusional visionary — and I use the word in its most literal sense — would want nothing more than for others to see and experience what he does. But perhaps Dick didn’t want anyone in his world. Maybe he didn’t think his world should be suffered by anyone else.

The fantastic, tortured mind of Philip K. Dick has been discussed, analysed and treated like an object of supreme curiosity since his death in 1982 (a few months shy of Blade Runner‘s release) and before. He had eked out an impoverished existence writing science fiction since the ’50s, when it was less a genre than a ghetto, and could only make a living by producing at a furious pace which he fuelled with huge amounts of amphetamines, at one point producing 12 novels over the course of two years.

But Dick was ever a seeker of truth, which made him, strangely, something of an oddity in science fiction. Within these novels, beneath the aliens and spaceships, moon colonies and interstellar wars, was arguably the best satire being done in science fiction on American life outside of Kurt Vonnegut‘s oeuvre, the philosophical undertones and untrammelled, often gothic imagination of which called to mind Jorge Luis Borges more than Isaac Asimov. The uniting thread that runs through his work — and, eventually, his life — is the notion that reality, as we know it, is fundamentally untrustworthy.

As the ’60s wore on, Dick’s involvement with the drug culture increased, adding a psychedelic aspect to both his ever-evolving philosophy and his ever-present paranoia. In 1971, Dick experienced a defining moment: his home was broken into, his safe blown open, and many of his personal papers burglerized. He never discovered who was responsible, though he had many suspects — local drug addicts, Black Panthers, the police, the FBI, the Soviets, or any of these, pretending to be one of the others.

The effect it left on Dick was to give him proof, unexplained and terrifying, that his paranoia was somehow justified. There had been comfort in simply telling himself he was crazy. But after years of grappling with his mental health, someone, it seemed, truly was out to get him.

“I mean,” he told the Aquarian magazine in a 1974 interview, “it’s a very frightening thing when the head of a police department tells you that you better leave the county because you have enemies, and you don’t know who these enemies are or why you’ve incurred their wrath.”

When one is peripherally aware of one’s own tenuous psychological condition (which we must be, we tell ourselves, if we have any hope of overcoming it), the uninitiated cannot imagine the sheer anguish, the self-doubt, the fear that follows when you know you cannot trust your own mind, and you cannot trust anyone to help you. The luckiest paranoids are also egotists, or better yet, megalomaniacs; they face the lurking forces of imagined persecution with a defiant roar or a knowing smirk.

Dick, on the other hand, was a sensitive, fragile, frightened soul, as well as a possible undiagnosed schizophrenic. His subsequent religious experiences — a series of hallucinations in which a beam of pink light connected him with a “transcendentally rational mind” — may have been his brain’s attempt to soothe his paranoia, or merely the next stage of his mental instability. In either case, as always, it provided inspiration for another novel.

Critics and biographers often talk about Dick’s paranoia and delusions like they were shocking fashion statements or extreme political opinions — just another interesting aspect to the bizarro image of a literary titan. What they don’t say, although the evidence is all around us, is that Dick’s paranoia is ours, as well. Ours may not have such colourful outlets or dramatic results, but we shall always carry our paranoia with us. It cannot be blotted out. There will forever be dark fears lurking in the deeper pools of our mind about our untrustworthy friends, co-workers, policemen, criminals, the FBI, the CIA, the Communists, the aliens, or God himself… and beyond. Existence will always be open to question, forever taunting us with its uncertainty. We can’t trust reality, but we have to live there.

This paranoia runs through Blade Runner like a knife edge. You cannot trust others, or yourself. You cannot trust your memories, your past, or your future. The entire world may be against you, even if it doesn’t appear to be. Then again, you don’t have to like it.

The heroes and villains of Blade Runner do not like, or accept, the oppression of the paranoid worldview. Deckard fights a series of seemingly impossible battles, even against what he thought was true, and finds romance where it should be impossible. Roy Batty, the leader of the renegade replicants, fights against death itself, seeking to extend and outlive his designer-mandated expiration date. The inhuman fights to become human, so humans must prove their humanity. This is the message at Blade Runner‘s core, and it has never been replicated.

Near the end of Dick’s 1976 novel Radio Free Albemuth, the protagonist, an author surrogate for Dick who also writes pulp science fiction, is faced by a gloating representative of the government conspiracy that the writer has become entangled with, who coolly informs him they will continue to put out books under his name — lurid trash scattered with a few of the author’s trademark concepts to keep it recognisable for his fans, but encoded with non-too-subtle propaganda messages designed to keep its readers afraid and unenlightened.

At our most cynical, it’s sometimes difficult not to think of Hollywood the same way: trading on Dick’s name and style and core ideas, but discarding the message and the mind behind them.

Authors often have to face a string of misfires and misinterpretations before their work gets the cinematic treatment it deserves; Dick, on the other hand, got a masterpiece on the first go. And it remains ours to enjoy: Blade Runner, as Dick wrote, is invincible.

Maybe it’s finally time for Hollywood to leave the legacy of Philip K. Dick at the local bookstore, where it belongs.

“What matters to me is the writing, the act of manufacturing the novel, because while I am doing it, at that particular moment, I am in the world I am writing about. It is real to me, completely and utterly. Then, when I’m finished, and I have to stop, withdraw from that world forever — that destroys me… I promise myself: I will never write another novel. I will never again imagine people from whom I will eventually be cut off. I tell myself this… and, secretly and cautiously, I begin another book.” — Philip K. Dick, “Notes Made Late At Night By A Weary SF Writer”, 1968.

Saturday Matinee: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Posted on by
2

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978) is a science fiction horror film directed by Philip Kaufman (The Wanderers), with a screenplay by W.D. Richter (dir. Buckaroo Banzai) and starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum and Leonard Nimoy. It is a remake of the 1956 film of the same name, also based on the 1955 novel “The Body Snatchers” by Jack Finney. The plot involves a San Francisco health inspector and his colleague who discover that humans are being replaced by physically identical alien clones devoid of emotion.

Saturday Matinee: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai

Posted on by
Reply

No Matter Where You Go, Here It Is

By Peter Sobczynski

Source: RogerEbert.com

Practically from the moment that I first saw it at the age of 13 during its very brief run at the long-defunct Golf Mill Theaters (thanks for the ride, Mom) in the fall of 1984, “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension” has been my all-time favorite movie. And yet, it occurs to me that while I’ve been lucky enough to write at length about any number of favorites over the years, I’ve never had the occasion to do so for that particular film. Oh sure, I’ve proclaimed it as a favorite many times and have made reference to it every now and then—I even gave “Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens” an extra half-star for nodding to it—but I haven’t had the opportunity to properly explain my love of the film. Happily, it is now making its long-awaited Blu-ray debut in a package from Shout! Factory that includes all the bells and whistles that members of its ever-widening cult could possibly ask for. Even more happily, it gives me a chance to sit down and once and for all explain why I love this film so much.

Of course, that is easier said than done because, as anyone who has seen it can attest, it’s not exactly the kind of movie that can be summed up in a sentence or two. Even the most basic, no-frills explanation of it will send many heads reeling, either out of excitement or confusion. Perhaps the best place to start is to look at its hero, the one and only Buckaroo Banzai himself. The Japanese-American son of a pair of brilliant scientists, he first studied medicine and became a brilliant neurosurgeon. However, he chose to become a modern-day Renaissance man and soon branched out into particle physics, designing high-powered automobiles, occasionally saving the world with the aid of his band of Blue Blaze Irregulars and performing with his other band, the hard-rocking Hong Kong Cavaliers, a group made up of geniuses from other scientific endeavors. (All of this is summed up for viewers in an opening roll of text not dissimilar from the ones that kick off the “Star Wars” films).

As the film proper opens, Buckaroo (Peter Weller), along with his men and mentor Dr. Hikita (Robert Ito), are ostensibly preparing to test a new Jet Car with the capacity to drive at the speed of sound. The real experiment, however, involves the Oscillation Overthruster, a secret device that they hope will let them drive through solid matter. This is not the first attempt to make a go of the Overthruster. In 1938, Dr. Hikita was working for the eminent physicist Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow) when he tried to pass through—the experiment was a botch that lodged him partway through a wall, and landed him in the Trenton Home for the Criminally Insane. In 1955, an attempt by Hikita and Buckaroo’s parents was sabotaged by crime lord Hanoi Xan via a bombing that killed his parents. (A flashback to this scene was cut from the original release but can be seen in the deleted scenes, where we discover that Buckaroo’s mother was played by Jamie Lee Curtis.) Buckaroo, however, succeeds and not only manages to drive through a mountain with nary a scratch, he has returned with some kind of alien organism attached to the Jet Car. Upon hearing this news, Lizardo breaks out of the asylum, claiming that he is going home. (Get ready because now things are about to get a little confusing.)

As it turns out, when Lizardo was trapped in the eighth dimension all those decades ago, he had his mind taken over by Lord John Whorfin, a fearsome Red Lectroid who was banished there alongside many of his followers after an unsuccessful attempt to take over their home world of Planet 10 from the more peaceable Black Lectroids. Before being locked up, he managed to bring many fellow Red Lectroids to Earth, where they have been living in plain sight and are now running a defense contracting company based in Grover’s Mills, New Jersey that is currently in charge of building a new bomber for the US Air Force. What they have really been doing with the government’s money is building a spaceship that will allow them to rescue their comrades still trapped in the 8th Dimension and return to take over Planet 10 once and for all. Now that Buckaroo has perfected the necessary Overthruster, all they need to do is steal it and they are home free.

After receiving a mysterious electric shock that allows him to see Lectroids as they really are and prevent the attempted theft of the Overthruster during a press conference, Buckaroo learns of the existence of Yoyodyne. But when the Hong Kong Cavaliers hack into their computer database, they discover that every single employee has the first name of John, a bizarre surname and an application for a Social Security card dated November 1, 1938. Around this time, a Black Lectroid emissary arrives with a message from their leader stating that if Buckaroo is unable to stop Whorfin/Lizardo from using the Overthruster to return to the eighth dimension, they will protect themselves by faking a nuclear attack that will start World War III. With the fate of the world now in his hands, Buckaroo and his team, including new Hong Kong Cavalier recruit Sidney Zweibel (Jeff Goldblum), a neurosurgeon and piano player who dresses up in full cowboy gear (including chaps) and calls himself New Jersey, and Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin), a mysterious woman who meets Buckaroo after being accused of trying to shoot him during a concert (she was actually trying to kill herself but was accidentally bumped by a waitress at the key moment), set off to do battle with the Lectroids, recover the Overthruster, save humanity and if time permits, explain exactly what that watermelon is doing there.

In other words, “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” is your typical sci-fi/action/comedy/rock&roll/kung-fu/political satire/neo-western/guys-on-a-mission extravaganza. The film was the brainchild of writer Earl Mac Rauch, who had written a couple of novels and co-wrote the screenplay to the Martin Scorsese musical “New York, New York,” and W.D. Richter, who had already established himself as a writer of quirky screenplays through such films as the goofy action comedy “Slither” and the masterful 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” One day, Mac Rauch dreamed up this character that would eventually be called Buckaroo Banzai and Richter encouraged him to write a screenplay involving his adventures. Supposedly, Mac Rauch would start one, get about fifty pages into it and then abandon it to try again with a new story. Eventually, Richter and producer Neil Canton formed a company to make “Buckaroo Banzai” and got Rauch to write a new treatment, using material from his previous attempts, that was then called “Lepers from Saturn.” Although it was rejected by many, it got noticed at MGM and studio chief David Begelmen agreed to finance it. Unfortunately, the project was then delayed for nearly a year because of a writers strike and Begelmen left MGM after a number of his expensive projects died at the box-office. However, Begelmen formed his own production company, bought the script back from MGM and made a deal with 20th Century Fox to produce it.

This would prove to be good news and bad news for the project. On the one hand, it was Begelmen’s enthusiasm that eventually got the film up and running. On the other hand, he apparently saw it as a straightforward action film in the mold of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and either overlooked the weirdo humor in the screenplay or just assumed that Richter and Mac Rauch would dump all of that nonsense somewhere along the way in order to ensure that it would be a hit. Once it became evident that the weird stuff was not going by the wayside, Begelmen began battling with Richter, Mac Rauch and Canton over the most inexplicable things in a misguided attempt to exert authority and make the film that he wanted. For example, Richter has hired the great cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, whose credits included such titles as “Brewster McCloud,” “Altered States” and, perhaps his most famous work, “Blade Runner.” The story goes that Begelmen agreed to his hiring as long as he didn’t make the film look in any way like “Blade Runner” but after several weeks of shooting, he decided that it was indeed looking like “Blade Runner” and had Cronenweth replaced with Fred J. Koenekamp, who had shot such epics as “Patton” and “The Towering Inferno.” At another point, he threatened to shut down the production over a pair of red-rimmed glasses that Buckaroo wore in a couple of scenes on the theory that heroes don’t wear red glasses.

The struggles to make the film were equaled only by the struggles to get it released and find an audience. Perhaps realizing early on that trying to sell the film to a mainstream audience at first might not be a wise idea, Fox decided to promote it at sci-fi conventions in the months leading up to its release by stressing that it was a cult movie in the making. Unfortunately, this approach wound up backfiring as the sci-fi audience was understandably wary of anything announcing itself as a cult movie before anyone had actually seen it—in their eyes, a cult movie is one that is discovered and nurtured by a loyal audience, not one that arrives in theaters proclaiming itself as such right from the get-go. “Buckaroo Banzai” was originally scheduled for a wide release on June 8, 1984 (which would have pitted it against the opening weekends of “Ghostbusters” and “Gremlins”) but was bumped at the last minute to a much-reduced opening in a few cities in mid-August that barely made any impact, though it did receive good reviews from the likes of Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby. Over the next couple of months, it opened in a few more cities before finally disappearing from theaters altogether.

And this is the point where the film and I finally crossed paths. Back in the prehistoric days before the Internet, a kid obsessed with the world of film would have to get himself down to the local bookstore or newsstand to purchase magazines that contained articles about upcoming releases. One such magazine was Starlog, which was dedicated to new and classic films in the sci-fi/fantasy genres and even though they were not necessarily favorites of mine, there were usually enough items of interest in each issue to make it worth the purchase. Now, 1984 provided a bumper crop of titles for genre fans—this was the year of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Ghostbusters,” “Streets of Fire,” “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,” “Gremlins,” “2010,” “The Last Starfighter,” “Dune” and the proverbial many more—and while not all of them may have lived up to the hype, they sure looked tantalizing at the time. As good as most of those looked, it was this “Buckaroo Banzai” thing that looked most intriguing to me. Even at the borderline precocious age of 13, I had already fancied myself as someone who knew more than a thing or two about movies but I had never seen or heard of anything like this before. Needless to say, that June release date couldn’t come quickly enough and even though the August delay was frustrating, my enthusiasm did not wane. However, it was devastating to discover that Chicago was not a part of that August release and that when it did finally open locally a month or so later, it was only in a couple of theaters with the nearest one located about 40 miles away. Thanks to a supremely indulgent mother, I made it to that theater during its opening weekend and sat down in what was, aside from myself, my mother and maybe five other people, an almost totally empty house to finally bear witness to the film that I had been obsessing over for months. I must admit that as the lights went down, the pessimist in me was thinking “What if this isn’t that good after all?”

Fat chance of that happening. Not only did “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” live up to all of my insanely inflated expectations, it somehow managed to exceed them. I loved that it took any number of film genres and slammed them all together into one crazy-quilt narrative. I loved the idea of a hero who was valued more for his brains than for his ability to beat the bad guys into a pulp. I loved the funky New Wave aesthetic. I loved the decidedly offbeat humor, especially since one of my problems with science-fiction has always been its tendency to occasionally take itself a little too seriously at times. I loved the idea that all of the spaceships on display looked more like seashells or rotting fruit than the gleaming craft that whizzed through space on “Star Trek.” I loved the jaw-dropping performance by John Lithgow as Emilio Lizardo, a hilariously audacious turn that saw him using “frothing mad” as a mere stepping-off point to a level of pure craziness that at times seems more like a possession than a performance. I loved the sight of Ellen Barkin in that slinky pink dress. (Hey, I was a 13-year-old boy.) I even loved the end credits sequence that found Buckaroo and the Hong Kong Cavaliers traipsing through an empty L.A. aqueduct to the tune of the film’s jaunty theme music while the titles breathlessly promised that they would return in “Buckaroo Banzai vs. the World Crime League,” despite sensing (correctly, as it turned out) that the lack of people in the theaters meant such a prospect was unlikely at best. Watching this film, it was almost as if someone was tapping directly into my mind’s idea of a great movie and projecting it before my eyes. (For those of you who are curious, venerable Mom wound up enjoying it as well, though the few other patrons seemed more than a little bewildered when the lights went up afterwards.)

However, unlike a lot of things that seemed cool back in the day and eventually look fairly silly with the wisdom of age, my admiration for “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” has only grown over the years as I have been able to appreciate just how innovative and groundbreaking it was. For example, while genre mash-ups are a relatively common occurrence these days, they were fairly non-existent back then—the fear being that such things would be impossible to market to people who preferred a undiluted take on their preferred genre over one that mixed up with with several others—and it is amazing to see how well Richter and Mac Rauch juggle the various generic tropes in ways that clearly have fun with them without crossing the line into overtly making fun of them. Additionally, I love the way it dropped this bizarre and complicated mythology in the laps of viewers without any elongated explanations and assumed that they would have the intelligence to figure things out as it went along. Now this wasn’t a completely unheard-of approach—“Star Wars” began in much the same way—but it was taken to such a level here that it almost felt like you were watching chapter five of a serial where you had already missed chapters one through four. Admittedly, this approach may have alienated as many viewers as it enchanted—some reviewers complained that they felt as if they were watching someone else’s private in-joke that made no effort to let them in on the fun—but to these eyes, the notion of creating this oddly detailed world (with stuff practically bursting out of every jam-packed frame) and then immersing viewers in it was an audacious approach that paid off beautifully. If you ever wondered what might have resulted if Robert Altman had ever been given the reins of a large-scale science-fiction project (not counting “Quintet”), this film may be the closest that we ever come to answering that question.

Another aspect of the film that may have bewildered viewers but now seems startlingly prescient is how it depicts a world in which popular culture has extended its tendrils into all areas of life in unexpectedly goofy ways. No matter where one goes in the film, there is an odd cultural reference there to comment upon it. During the Jet Car experiment, we see a scientific gauge labeled “Sine” that is eventually followed by ones marked “Seeled” and “Delivered.” When it is announced that Dr. Lizardo has escaped from the asylum, he is mistaken by one person for Mr. Wizard. During Whorfin’s manic speech rallying his men as they prepare to leave for Planet 10, he sort-of quotes the Beach Boys cover “Sloop John B” by exhorting “I feel so broke-up, I want to go home!” Orson Welles (“The guy from the old wine commercials?”) is the basis of a couple of gags, one fleeting (when we get a glimpse of the President of the United States, played by Ronald Lacey, he is made up to look exactly like Charles Foster Kane) and one that inspires one of its funniest conceits. As it turns out, the infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast was not fiction at all—it was Lectroids landing in New Jersey, not Martians, and they hypnotized Orson Welles into broadcasting that it was all made up. Even Buckaroo himself is often depicted as a pop culture hero just as much as he is a regular hero—we see his face plastered upon comic books and video games and he is, to be sure, the rare hero who tops off a day of derring-do by playing a sold-out concert with his band that finds him belting out an especially soulful cover of the classic “Since I Don’t Have You.”

And yet, the oddest and perhaps most arcane cultural reference is the odd connection the film shares with the works of legendary author Thomas Pynchon. Not only does it share a certain thematic similarity with the dense narratives and weirdo humor prevalent in Pynchon’s work, his cheerfully surreal novel The Crying of Lot 49 was largely centered around an shadowy aerospace manufacturer known as Yoyodyne Systems. In fact, one could argue the case that long before the arrival of “Inherent Vice,” “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai,” at least in a metaphorical sense, was the first real stab at bringing the Pynchon perspective from the page to the screen. (The plot thickened when Pynchon published his 1990 novel Vineland, which itself contained a couple of not-so-subtle references to “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai,” leading to speculation that either Richter or Mac Rauch actually were the reclusive novelist.)

As for the performances, all of the actors clearly found just the right way to connect with the admittedly quirky tone of the material. Some have slagged Peter Weller for being a little stiff at times but they are missing the point—this is a character who is so cool and above the fray that he doesn’t have to be constantly calling attention to himself. More importantly, he serves the necessary duty of being the anchor of the film that keeps it from flying off amidst all of the other oddball characters—it is a smart piece of underplaying from an actor who has never quite gotten his due despite starring in two all-time genre classics (the other, of course, being “Robocop”). Jeff Goldblum had already proven himself to be a more-than-reliable supporting player by the time he did this film and his ability to put a unique and often hilarious spin on even the most seemingly mundane bit of dialogue never shone brighter than it did here. (He also deserves credit not only for donning one of the goofiest Western outfits ever seen but somehow making it work against all odds.) As Penny Priddy, the one female character of note (perhaps the one aspect of the film that does not date very well today), Ellen Barkin more than holds her own with the guys. Christopher Lloyd turns up as John Bigboote, who has been in charge of the goings-on at Yoyodyne over the past few decades and whose name inspires a great running joke involving Whorfin repeatedly mispronouncing it as “big booty,” and he is a blast throughout. However, the scene-stealer of the bunch—indeed, one of the scene-stealing performances of all time—is unquestionably John Lithgow as Emilio Lizardo. Given the rare opportunity to play a character where going too far over the top is simply impossible, Lithgow pulls out all the stops with his astoundingly flamboyant turns in which everything from his accent (which genuinely sounds like an alien trying to approximately an Italian dialect) to his wardrobe (which finds him wearing two of everything) is cranked up to maximum effect. And yet, even though he is playing a character who is clearly out of control, the performance never is—Lithgow knows exactly when to go for laughs or menace and hits those beats perfectly every time. He also gets many of the film’s best lines as well and I guarantee that after you see it, you too will be quoting (no doubt in your best approximation of the accent) such classic lines as, “Laugh while you can, monkey boy!” and “Sealed with a curse as sharp as a knife/Doomed is-a your soul and damned is your life!”

Although the film tanked in theaters, it eventually began to develop a genuine cult following once it hit cable and home video and brave viewers were given the chance to experience it for themselves. The promised sequel never emerged (due in part to a tangled situation involving the rights and the bankruptcy of the original production company), but “Buckaroo Banzai” has continued to live on in the pop culture firmament in odd and unusual ways. A couple of installments of the “Dick Tracy” comic strip made arcane references to the film and the finale of Wes Anderson’s “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” paid homage to the end credits sequence (and, of course, included Jeff Goldblum in the mix). After a long delay, the film came out on DVD in 2001 in an edition that deepened the meta-textual joke, positing that Buckaroo Banzai was indeed a real person and that the film was actually a docudrama depicting real-life events. Strangely enough, in 1998, Fox attempted to develop a TV adaptation that was to be titled “Buckaroo Banzai: Ancient Secrets and New Mysteries” that never got off the ground save for a brief bit of test computer animation that can be found as an extra on the new Blu-ray. Even more strangely, it was announced earlier this year that another attempt to bring it to television was being attempted by none other than Kevin Smith and that Amazon Studios might be producing it.

Whether or not this particular endeavor pans out remains to be seen. However, until it happens, the new Blu-ray should more than tide over fans of the film. The two-disc package contains all the material from the original DVD release—the original commentary with Richter and Mac Rauch maintaining the illusion that what they are presenting is fact, deleted scenes, the alternate opening with Buckaroo’s parents, a short featurette and the trailer—along with a new commentary from sci-fi experts Michael and Dennis Okuda. More importantly, there is “Into the 8th Dimension,” a full-length documentary that chronicles every possible aspect of the film from its strange beginnings to its occasionally tortured production to its long and fruitful afterlife that is packed with fascinating tidbits of information. For example, we learn that when Richter first found the actor he wanted to play Buckaroo, Begelmen refused to cast him on the belief that he would never become a movie star—so long, Tom Hanks.

Of course, the best feature of all is the film itself in all its crazy, one-of-a-kind glory. For decades, I have loved this movie beyond all others. Watching it again, I realized that love had not been misplaced in the slightest. Now, those of you who have never seen it before may not react in quite the same way as I did, but I can pretty much guarantee that you have never seen a film quite like it—maybe the one that came closest to approximating its wild mixup of genres and strange humor was “Big Trouble in Little China,” on which Richter served as a co-writer—and that if you are able to accept its offbeat nature, you are in for the cinematic ride of your life. And when it is all over and you begin to delve into the special features, you will even finally learn exactly what that watermelon was doing there.

 

Watch the full film on Hoopla.