Bella's Big Bounce - TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN - PART II (2012)

To those of us who recognize her special gifts, who know how to appreciate the beauty of reticence, part two of BREAKING DAWN proves a deeply Jungian-delible feast where we get to see a new, ass-kicking side of Kristen Stewart. Now officially a vampire, she looks more alive than she used to. She was meant to be this way, born to become a vampire, the 'I wish someone had tried to save my soul before I too was turned' types complained but she knew what she was doing, like that kid who's compelled to seek out LSD despite the warnings of his friends and finds, in his travels, God and leaves those friends far behind--and since Bella is a "newborn" she can outvamp all those who previously lorded over her. Gone is the usual insecure adrift ghostly-pallored innocent! In her stead, a monster mom.

Forgive me if I sound enamored of it all. I'm now almost old as Bella's dad, Charlie (Billy Burke), was at the start of the series (2008) so my view of the series has changed, from bemused, slightly intoxicated outsider fondness (and nostalgia for my year of living in the Pacific Northwest) to mopey adoration for NEW MOON's whole 'Baby Jane-en-verso' aging ur-text to weary respect. Now with the final installment I am already way past the point of feeling a direct connection to my old awkward high school passions. See, when I was Twilight-appropriate age I was all in the comic book Elfquest, and had fantasized my way into a very similar tribe, the Wolf Riders. I tried, really tried, after one achingly perfect, mystical dream, to disappear into the Elfquestverse, the way I'm sure kids do today with the Twilight; they're similar tribal fantasias of belonging with the cool weird beautiful people clique but enough time's passed that the dream belongs to someone else, some different assemblage of cells and thoughts, one still strung-out by public school days and lonesome comic book night teen trauma. Now all I want is a comfy coffin. I'm like the world-weary seen-it-all Volturi member, Marcus (Christopher Heyerdahl). But I still kind of an in love with Alice, the psychic vampire who wins over Charlie and effortless makes every moment special.

With my  first praiseful post on the Twilight series, over at Bright Lights in 09,  I felt I was was a defense lawyer for the series, trying to justify my intellectual curiosity against the pooh-poohing of my critic peers, culminating in my opus "Someone to Fight Over Me."  But all that gazing into the pool of youth left me aging rapidly and the generations of hyper-evolved youth just keep coming, as do new apps and platforms and operating systems for my Mac; the technology grows at an exponential rate and I can no longer keep up. I'm a reverse vampire, aging faster than a regular mortal, crumbling to dust like David Bowie in THE HUNGER.

That's why in this last and final incarnation, the TWILIGHT saga is no longer a contrast or fantasy or escape but a breath of misty old growth forest air. I appreciate that ADD trendiness is ignored by these teen Methuselahs. Their every... sentence... takes whole Antonioni films to come out... but... the molasses pace... can prove a dreamy kick and Robert Pattinson is a master at making certain phrases twist and turn in the waves like frogs. One has time to wrestle with the Big Issues of life, not just as a teen girl or old man in a young man's body, but both rolled into one immortal soul, a Benjamina Button conjoined twin set, one aging chronologically the other the reverse, until they meet as grandparent and newborn child, and then disappear beyond the veil.

In this fifth and final installment the Cullens assemble a host of quirky vamp clans to stand firm against the onrushing Catholic stand-in, the Voltari, who plan to wipe out said Cullens. The clans are all ageless of course, so include hunks from the Civil War to the days of the ancient Romans, allowing a vast new array of options as far as fantasy-adoptive families. The film is carefully crafted to create just such a sense of belonging, the 'teams' of Edward and Jacob have just expanded to a whole league, and they would never say a word like 'yolo'. Every character in the clan is unique: creepy, hot, or creepy-hot; as long as the viewer stays unseen in the vampiric dark he or she fits right into the mix.

I may not be able to see the youth clearly now... the world in my ball has gone dim... their outlines alone shimmer in the glow of their digital screen surroundings and my glasses seem to work less and less well with each passing film--but I can still meet them halfway, at the forest of one of their own primal mythic worlds, where everyone is centuries-old and frozen at youth on TCM, or how I still see myself as 21 in the bathroom mirror when the Baby Jane clarity is fogged by the steam of showers. I can still meet them at the halfway point where those who strive for eternal youth settle for an early death. Call my deconstruction of the series dangerous to its intended youthful demographic if you prefer, but there is a rich modernist ancestry to that subtext, as I've pointed out in a past post, particularly to films from the 1930s like DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, THE WIND, and MOROCCO.

Any true horror fan knows, that real ambivalent attitudes towards life and death are rare even in the classics. So many filmmakers looking for a quick signifier mistake gore for subversion. In Meyers' work, moral ambivalence isn't avoided just because the Cullens are 'vegetarians' - i.e. hunt only deer and cougars. The parallels with some kind of cult or drug scene are never avoided and parents should be scared that their impressionable TWILIGHT fan daughters will be predisposed to roll with the next pale, good-looking junky clan that happens by, and soon they're learning all the tips of how to not seem stoned out of her gourd when having 'serious talks' with her parents (the other vamps have to remind Bella to blink once in awhile and to wear non-red contact lenses, the way stoners use Visine.

Such worries by parents are perhaps dispelled, allegedly, originally, through the popular press's misinterpretation of the series as advocating celibacy, but celibacy isn't always adherence to a restrictive social order. It can be a renouncement of societal expectations and a stand against the impetus towards unconscious reproductive urges, marriage, peer pressure, and male desire. Not only do Edward and Bella wait for their wedding to 'do it' but once 'it's' done 'it' triggers an accelerated pregnancy that kills the mortal Bella. Not since SPECIES (here) has a fantasy film so cleverly tapped into our secret revulsion towards the Cronenbergian biological express train nightmare underbelly of sexual desire. Once you slow down time you can speed it up too but God drags pregnancy out as long as possible so the full horror of it doesn't have time to settle; it moves along to slow to defend against. In her brilliance, Meyer floors it, so the full monstrousness of the 'right to life' idea is revealed.

And you can fault the mopey teen trappings all you want, but this last installment especially has the guts to go deep into the more taboo realms of mating and pair-bonding: Much time is spent explaining that Jacob is not a pedophile just because he's 'imprinted' on Bella's baby girl, Renesme. It's "not like you think!" he explains over and over as all react in understandable disgust. A normal film would prove just how much 'it's not like you think' by cutting out that whole sub-plot, lest any unsightly criticism be drawn. But with the substantial heft of Stephanie Meyer's franchise behind it, the ickiness goes unfiltered, and that's so punk rock!

Another punk element is the scene with Bella at he first hunt, crouching up on a rock like a feral stalking beast, and later coming home and trying to explain why she's not dead to her one-note worrywart dad Charlie. He doesn't like it, but what choice does he have? Where can you find a deprogrammer in rural Washington State? In the 00s? Meanwhile, his granddaughter grows way too fast, and Bella's cold to the touch and has weird eyes, or uses eye drops so he won't see how red they are, like any good daughter grass smoker. But if Charlie says anything to anyone about how weird it all is, Bella's going to do an even bigger bounce and he can't deal with that and thus it is yet again that Bella uses her dream child to dominate not just Edward (she forced his hand so he had to turn her into a vampire, finally, at the end of Part I) but her father as well. To create a situation where your father has no choice but to allow you freedom to be stoned and/or stone, to leave you and your bad boy alone as immortal statues left for centuries in overgrown gardens, hidden from his meddling overprotection, is devoutly to be wished by any and all 6-17 year-olds.  Bella has indirectly attacked Charlie via nightmare screaming in previous films, and attacked Edward via a reckless pursuit of danger (the only thing that makes a phantom image of Edward appear as if a symptom of adrenalin-poisoning) but nothing beats a miracle gro baby as a tool for moral high ground. And besides, dads in coming-of-age myths exist mainly to be ignored.

Understanding the lost ability of these kind of 'child as tool of revenge' sagas can shed light on our darker instincts and help us in understanding just why American folk heroines are so different than Europe's Red Riding Hoods and Gretels. Through myth we can embrace the irony: America's population is composed of wanderers and the descendants of wanderers: Ellis Island, Vikings, colonialists, and slave-owning ex-Irish penal colonists. The rest of the world is full of people willing to stay where they are, their fidgety neighbors who used to ramble on about their plans for exploring are all long-since moved to America. And so it is that we in the USA find fantasizing about wandering an unrewarding use of time. We have to do it for real, as our ancestors did, or not at all. Our fantasies are of staying still, but surrounded by cool peers-- Hogwarts, the Shire, Forks--as long as parents aren't there. Those who paint the best fantasy homes get visited by others, until a world beautiful is created online, only to have marauders break in and slaughter everyone during the big wedding.

This is our history as a nation and a world, but for vampires it's history without the forgetfulness that goes on as generations snake forward through the tunnel of time, shedding memory skins with each incarnation, leaving only bad habits and alcoholism, and debt. In the Twilight realm, the original explorers who left Europe in the 1800s are all still here, and still look like they're in their early 20s, and willing to be friends with your sorry ass, thus elevating you to some Wagnerian height of 'belonging' ecstasy, a height missing from your usual high school experience. Here at last those troglodyte wallies are devoured and forgotten. If each successive generation is just a little more slackjawed than the last, gone soft from suburban slovenliness, then these vampires and shape-shifters represent a chance to undo them all, to clean house, to eradicate the slow moving herd members.

Lastly, perhaps there's no more common dream archetype than that of the instant, fast-growing baby. By putting digital transplants of one actor's face (Mackenzie Foy) over the younger and older versions, she seems truly creepy, all the more so for being cute. Her smiling face adheres to various younger bodies as she grows so that by the time she's actually wearing her own face the damage is done and she's still creepy cute. The total effect works to make her every appearance as uncomfortable as stumbling onto a baby skeleton in the lowest ebb of the uncanny valley. It serves the story, though, as well as in a probably unintentional but nonetheless valid metatextual frisson. The drama centers around the child having to prove it's not a full vampire but she's also a hybrid between digital and 'real; her CGI-edged face all but matrixes out of the screen in some 3-D Final Cut-layered feedback... even in the simulacrum she's a devouring simulacrum, the kind of child born to make haunted videotapes and project images onto film even from the bottom of the well.

If you've read the book, then you know what happens and then doesn't happen never happened, but it's still a pretty great surprise, a Sam Peckinpah / Walter Hill style bloodbath even Kate Beckinsale and Milla Jovovich franchises at their bloodiest couldn't match. There's an eerie silence that results when characters you've spent the movie getting to know are suddenly absent, with a snap or a blam, as final and startling as an introduction to the finality of death as any child could hope to find. If you do manage to become involved in the Peckinpah-ish finality of it, and if you know the sad desperation of the lonesome teenage suburbanite for whom no amount of friends and super powers can compete with that Truman Show sense of isolation, then you know how such blanket cold can radiate so warmly, like a wedding cake corpse cooling in an unheated winter theater. In our lonesomest hours we'll risk our lives just to feel connected, even if that connecting involves the sacrifice of the last few vestiges of reality on the altar of the fantasy franchise, as long as you both shan't live.

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Natasha Henstridge versus the Coordinated Cockblock Quintet: SPECIES (1995)

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Condoms are for Quitters: XANADU (1980) and the Death of the Naked Rock Musical

 

Once a proud and shirtless beast, the rock musical has all but vanished from the landscape. Fringe events like REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA or DR. HORRIBLE or 'jukebox' fare like ROCK OF AGES and MAMA MIA do not count. The first are freak, fringe events, the latter incorporate only tried and tested tunes written long before their Broadway shows.  CHICAGO, LES MISERABLES or PHANTOM don't count either. But there was a time when the rock musical soared on wings of brilliance. I'm talking of course of the late 60s-early 70s -the age when impassioned singing met electric guitars and funky bass, and bi-curious guys in silver make-up and long hair strutted shirtless, and God was not ignored.

This was the era of Vietnam, and Times Square was not a place to bring the kids, at least not at night.  Grindhouses, adult bookstores, prostitutes and flashy pimps, bums, hippies, sadomasochists, junkies and--most shocking of all to our Anita Bryant-poisoned minds--queers. When their later film versions came around, JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR (1973), GODSPELL (1973), and HAIR (1979) had to be toned down, the nudity dropped if there was any. But meanwhile crazy Brits like Ken Russell gave us TOMMY (1975) the satiric Brit-quivalent, and Broadway was going even farther, showing the all-nude musical revue OH! CALCUTTA! Surrounded by the sleaze of Times Square, Broadway's mere nudity and simulate coupling managed to stay somehow clean and so showed Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public that those scruffy homeless kids on the street might be disguised angels, so treat them right and tip the girls. Books like Erica Jong's Fear of Flying with its ode to the "zipless f-ck," the tawdry glam gossip of Rona Barett, and the cute old lady sex specialist, Dr. Ruth (below, right), all created a sense that women were enjoying their new orgasms all across the country and it was as healthy and normal as going to church or making dinner for your family, and the world was just a little less uptight and it was healthy, and we kids were listening in, soaking up the loose prana with our hungry spinal snake-sponges.

But in the midst of all this came the arrival of my least favorite drug, cocaine, and with it disco, single's bars, and tawdriness. With its dance-friendly music and glittery fashion, disco was crossing boundaries the Christian-pagan neo-decadent arias of Broadway and the best-seller list never could, for children of all ages could revel in disco too. The homosexual and coke aspects were sublimated deep by the time it all got to TV, and we kids loved the costumes and were dancing to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack at each others' birthday parties (we learned disco moves in gym class).  And whatever 'free love' had represented before the mid-70s was being swallowed up into blue collar triumphs (ROCKY in 1977) and old school nostalgia. Hordes of films set in the 20s, 30s, and 40s saturated the theaters. THE STING won best picture in 1973, and set the tone (see my piece The Period Piece Period), as if America was waking up after Studio 54 coke binge and trying to escape their hangover and the stranger in their bed by rummaging back into the past, to before disco or rock or the summer of love ever happened.

But then in 1980 disco tried to go back into the past itself, and it had a heart attack right on the dance floor --which had already been converted into a roller rink -- and how did it do that, you ask?

XANADU (1980)!

Little newborn disco wasn't without parents and grandparents; it was of course the glitzy empty shell throwback to the 30s-40s dance music scene, the swing and sweet, as it was called. Swing was the 40s version of rock, cooked up by Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman (at least for mainstream white America), and sweet was sappy ballads by radio tenors, meant to lull nervous brides waiting for the men to come home from WW2, and ease the worry of 19th century-born parents that their children's generation was going to hell. It was only natural then that the re-emergence of cocaine, the drug of choice for turn-of-the-century soda fountain barflies, would lead to re-emergence of the sweet/swing emptiness of pure 'dance' music. Donna Summer and the Bee-Gees replaced the Byrds and the Eagles at the top of the rock charts, and we disco balled our way back into this sexless yet tightly-trousered sweet/swing dichotomy. Rock vs. disco, you had to pick a side.
 
We kids had long pondered the electric strangeness of the Hair album cover in our parent's record collection (though not as nightmarish as Sgt. Pepper's), but we loved John Travolta from Welcome Back, Kotter, so seeing him on the Saturday Night Fever cover made everything all right. He had the working class Italian vibe we were now familiar with via ROCKY, and the Fonz (and Cha-Chi, and Carmine) but he could also sing and act stupid with a winning smile that let you know he was far smarter than he'd ever let on. As long as he was connected to it, disco could cross over to suburbia, where, as I've said before, we loved The Village People because they were dressed like all our favorite icons as kids - cowboys, Native Americans, motorcycle cops - and not one of us ever imagine they were, you know... not straight.

Meanwhile we kids also found the sudden relative sexlessness of, say, variety shows like The Captain and Tenille, Donny and Marie, and Shields and Yarnell very soothing. I recall that towards the end of the 70s, when I was 12-13, sex was starting to get on my nerves. I had a lot of 'pent-up' energy by then. Not that anyone molested me, on the contrary - I molested two babysitters, my dad's secretary, two of my mom's friends, and one very nubile young daughter of one of said friends, all before I was ten years-old. And in the malls I would sneak into Spencer's Gifts and marvel at the dirty novelties and thumb though Fear of Flying and get massive 10 year-old boy hormonal surges.

And mind you I had no orgasms during this stretch -- I had been led to think that the orgasm discharge was a gush of blood, and thus I was terrified to even try. Masturbation was considered a deranged, sad act. Wet dreams were discussed, in terrified tones, at the playground, but if they happened it was out of our control. It was only natural with all that stored venom that when the right bad influence friend came along I would give up girls and turn my attention to WW2, and with war arose the need for 'clean' home front entertainment, the sort that wouldn't make my 'situation' any more painful than it needed to be. And so.... XANADU did a stately 80s pleasure-free dome decree.

Sandahl Bergman at far right

By 1979, GREASE had broken the mold on 'the past' (it played in theaters for years) and Happy Days were here again. And you know what else was a hit on the charts? Some piece of crap called "Disco Duck" - the guy who 'sang' it (Rick Dees) wondered what to do for a follow-up. He came out with "Disco Gorilla" - i.e. "Discor-illa" (It's so cheesy I can't even post it but you can check it out here). Disco was almost solely in the realm of children. And even we sneered at the Disco-rilla. We inherited all the fads and crazes after the adults had moved on but this was going too far.



GREASE (1978) and its late 50s greaser milieu helped kill disco and was helped by the enormous popularity of Happy Days. Henry Winkler aka Arthur Fonzarelli was wanted to play the part that later went to Vinne Barbarino aka John Travolta. Some angel was looking out for Travolta, because he made a vast fortune just from appearing on the cover of both the Grease and Saturday Night Fever albums! They were beyond huge and sold consistently for years and years, comparable only to Fleetwood Mac's Rumors and Frampton Comes Alive! But while the film of Saturday Night Fever was dingy and depressing in its lower-strata blue collar Bronx-ishness, GREASE was smartly moved to the sunny safety of Burbank, making the greaser haircuts and cigarettes and unwanted pregnancies little more than rich kid slumming. Fine with us, we in the suburbs didn't know the difference, only that the environment of GREASE didn't make us want to kill ourselves from depression over graffiti and urban blight.

Cleaned Travota on Captain and Tenille

Anyway, it was a monster hit. And so why not merge the GREASE with the NIGHT and add the then emerging roller disco craze? Throw in a fantasy element and an old duffer or two, and whammo! You do for the 40s big band zoot suit sound what GREASE had done for the 50s do wop.

That was the plan.

However, 1980 was not 1978. And while great as Swan (from THE WARRIORS), Michael Beck was no Travolta. They made him a frustrated artist forced to reproduce album covers for a living (ala Travolta's frustrated dancer forced to tote paint cans in FEVER) and cast Olivia Newton John as the literal muse who inspires him and old duffer Gene Kelly to join forces and open up a post-modern roller-rink, where time collapses and wartime big band sound collides in a roller skating accident with ELO, The Tubes, and lots of static long shots where you can see the edges of the sets and the studio darkness all around the backdrop.

Just compare the two stills below - top from DOWN TO EARTH, a 1947 comedy musical that XANADU more or less remade. In EARTH, Rita Hayworth is Terpsichore, a muse who comes down from Olympus when she learns a Broadway show is mocking the old gods. 

Xanadu - What were you, blocked in a barn?

You can smell the weird blend of child-friendliness, coded homosexuality, old character actors, nearly empty sets, and cocaine that made these sorts of musicals uniquely ahead of and behind their time, literally here as ELO and The Tubes jam unsuccessfully with a Glenn Miller-style ghost ensemble and Olivia sings "Forget about the blues / tonight!" --it's like a remote control fight between your older brother and grandmother while your mom's off at a bridge game.
 

Top: New York, New York (1977); 1941 (1979)

It could have been meant to tie-in with the expected blockbuster success of Spielberg's zoot suit-encrusted mega-shrillfest 1941 which came out the year before, and Scorsese's big band ego-fest, NEW YORK NEW YORK (1977). But that was the wrong horse to bet on. While 1941 was not a flop it wasn't a hit either, and neither was NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- and for the first time since he broke big, Spielberg had laid a non-golden egg.

What happened in a sense was America's taste in retro memories was flattening out. The age of three channel TV was ending, and with it the need for 'variety' shows that appealed to children, the elderly, and adults all at the same time. And So without long hair and sleaze to produce rock gravity, the empty glitz of disco was just another toot up nostalgia's porous straw. By the time it got to us, disco had become sexless, leaving us with no choice to find the stuff straight from the source.

And so it was that as children our interest in sex was rekindled with the rise of the VCR.

Among other things it brought a chance for us all--parents and kids alike-- to finally see X-rated movies. As with any huge sea change, the censors and critics need time to catch up and for awhile, freedom reigned and for awhile every child above 12 saw all there was to see, all at once. Censorship had chastened TV for so long we felt protected from anything it could deliver on our invulnerable home screen. The huge backlash against pedophiles and Satanic child molestation rings presumably all over the suburbs was no doubt inspired by seeing just how base our fellow man was now that we could see all those films we'd been afraid to see at the drive-in or inner city theater back in the day. In the 70s we had never been ashamed of our bodies or our desires, perhaps because we just never really saw them so nakedly.

You're dead sons, get yourself buried: Sgt. Peppers, Can't Stop the Music

So that's why now XANADU seems so hopelessy cheesy and antiquated. Old people--as embodied by Gene Kelly--were supposed to now be cool; everyone was invited to the roller rink, ala GREASE, so we dutifully trudged as massive multiple family packs to see it, and then fell asleep. While the older kids were disappearing into midnight showings of THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME (1976) we in the too young for R category had dutifully seen SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (above, 1978) starring the Bee-Gees, but that was at the drive in, so if something sucked you just went off towards the screen and rode on the swings and then fell asleep in the back seat. XANADU we saw in the theater, so there was no escape. When we emerged, sick from popcorn and Olivia Newton John sweetener, we found the world had changed. Disco was dead, crushed in the roller rink stampede. The concurrent style of rock and roll, i.e. the Tubes and ELO, would survive the disaster, to mutate into hair metal with the rise of cable and MTV, but disco was over. Cocaine gives you a terrible hangover... and you can see a little of it in Olivia Newton John's sickly yellow aura and devil eyes below. Surely we could do better... we needed to renounce our sins! We needed to 'phone home...' and ET was summoned.

Meanwhile, Alan Carr--one of the key figures behind the huge hit GREASE (and on Broadway, LA CAGE AU FOLLES), had troubles of his own, namely a huge disco flop centered around the Village People, Bruce Jenner, Nancy "You're soaking in it" Walker, hottie Valerie Perrine and struggling songwriter (and tight white pants enthusiast) Steve Gutenberg, known as CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC (1980). Like XANADU it cost $20 million, but bombed far worse. And in the case of both of them, very little of that money is visible on the screen. Sure there's dancing and glitz but the blocking, pacing, and acting is a mess. Now I'm just speculating, understand, based largely on a book I'm reading about Carr. But cocaine is all over the 1978-80 wave of films and the budget for a decent DP seems to have gone nostrilwards in both.

In short, 'family entertainment' could only make it as far back as the 50s for nostalgia, which our parents remembered and we loved because of the Fonz and was perhaps the first true youth culture anyway ever. Any further back and no one really cared, except old people who got senior citizen discounts anyway so they didn't impact the box office. The days of romancing a past decade with music and glamor were over, at least until the 90s when suddenly the 70s looked like the last great, free unprotected moment America was ever going to have, until of course, Leonard Maltin's 'Forbidden Hollywood' series came out and we saw with agape jaw the racy forward thinking brilliance of the 1931-34 pre-code era.

But on the plus side, we have Turner Classic Movies. So forget about the blues / tonight! 

And never take condoms from strangers.

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CinemArchetype 22: The Outlaw Pair Bond

"Didn't you realize when we started," asks John Dahl of Bonnie Cummins in Gun Crazy, "we'd never be able to ask anyone for help again, not even if we were dying?" It's this that separates the outlaw couple from the normal, accepted one. Lovers feel sometimes they are the only ones in the world, alone on a star. The outlaw couple lives that. In outlaw pair bond movies, being in a monogamous couple means cocooning yourself from the outside world. Once you've had sex you're supposed to spend the remaining time together, parting only after whatever furtive sleep you've managed. Even a few hours or minutes of sleep and you're not the same two people who went to bed together the night before. Falling in love is the best thing ever but it's also scary; the volume on the rest of the world is turned way down. Awash in warm neurochemical radiance, you barely notice the danger signs that used to paralyze you with dread. If you're lucky enough to be in a screwball comedy and you never die or kill anyone chances are you're going to end happy, but in outlaw pair bond movies, there's not even jail to look forward to at credit's knell. Or as Maria once sang: "When love comes so strong / there is no right or wrong / your love is your love."

While this archetype is perhaps the most instantly derivative, all seeming to stem from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) on one end, which in turn was inspired by Gun Crazy and Don Siegel's trashlarious 1964 rendition of The Killers (1964) on the other, (all of which inspired Pulp Fiction), it's worth including as an example of how a strong pair bond can transcend any sense of grounding in the social construct. It starts as a simple series of escalating dares, a sudden accidental homicide, discovering and grabbing of a suitcase full of drugs or money, or maybe just the right hitch-hiker in the right car at the right time. Even just the heady allure of flirting can spin a pair bond out of social orbit and into the fast lane of a shared private reality. All their friends shake their heads confusedly and dad holds the weeping mom close --her baby's going down. Their friends and family don't get to benefit from the glow of the couple's charisma, reading about them in the paper, or being grilled by the cops. But we do --we're the couple's unborn, lost potential child.

Part of the effectiveness of the outlaw pair bond hinges on their having just the right chemistry. Hey sometimes it's not even there and that's the chemistry. But if the passion is there then there's too the velocity that lets them bust loose from the bonds of the social order. We can thrill to the romance and the velocity of their escape and dread the existential payback: their eventual death. Or maybe if they pass all the hurtles, escape... always to the same place: Mexico.

The other keys are the availability of guns, cars, and lots of space to hide in. The real Bonnie and Clyde came to prominence in a perfect storm of Depression-era factors: the wide open expanses of the middle west; a public hatred of banks; the dawn of the American highway (a by-product of the FDR's New Deal; enough gas stations to make cross state-line driving easy at a time when the FBI was still in its infancy; and sensationalist journalism that made heroes of the outlaw.

Lastly, this archetype is perfect for low budgets and high energy. We all long to just drive with some dangerous man or fertile hottie we pass on the street, just hop in her or his car and leave our shitty little life behind. These films allow us that cathartic thrill, and when they get finally caught, if they do--we're suddenly grateful that this was all a fantasy. Our hatred of our shitty life is, after all, just a passing mood, as is our appreciation for it. Once we acknowledge our inconsistent outlook we are free even from the urge to take it on the lam.  

1. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
The key moment is Bonnie's freakout when she learns Gene Wilder is an undertaker and she throws him and his date out on the side of the road. She may be enjoying the moment but she sees the writing on the wall, that there's no way out of her current velocity state except death or incarceration. Their romance can't quite stem that icky feeling, perhaps because he is impotent, but more likely due to the uncouth loud boorishness of their other gang members.

Movie lovers tend to be sensitive types, easily bruised by the uncouth loudness of odious relatives. In her wincing at the loud hillbilly roaring of Clyde's brother (Gene Hackman) and his whiny wife (Estelle Parsons), Dunaway resembles the lovely Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), forced to put her sexual longing on hold in favor of tedious episodes of lowbrow Americana.

The film's release got off to a notoriously slow start but grew to a runaway hit after steady promotion by producer Beatty and a glowing review in The New Yorker by Pauline Kael.  This was a better time for word of mouth and intelligent press, as films could circulate the country for years, a handfulof prints slowly gathering critical acclaim and this is what Bonnie and Clyde did until it took off into legend, where it gave rise to a whole deluge of period films recreating the 20s-30s crime era, such as Corman's Bloody Mama (1970), Big Bad Mama (1974), Boxcar Bertha (1972), and The Lady in Red (1979). Bogdanovich's Paper Moon... (See full list)

It makes sense that Beatty originally thought of Godard or Truffaut for this film as it has a very New Wave feel - the sheer Hollywood glamor of Dunaway and Beatty set them apart from the rest of the cast, all of whom resemble dust bowl portraits. That they regularly send in photos and poetry to the newspapers helps draw the parallels between the burst of creativity from young auteurs in the 70s and criminals. And like all the good films of the outlaw couple, here's the sense that once velocity is achieved there is a collapse of the imaginary, symbolic, and real, especially as involves that most sacred of outlaw spaces, the interior of the car.

2. John Dall and Peggy Cummins - Gun Crazy (1950)

"One of the American cinema’s finest and most influential B-movies — and one of the archetypal “fugitive couple” films — Joseph H. Lewis's legendary, made-on-the-cheap Gun Crazy moulds the cheesy clichés of 1940s crime melodrama into a manic tour-de-force of technique and deadly eroticism. John Dall, as a gun-obsessed sap, and Peggy Cummins, as a predatory femme fatale, are the film’s pistol-packing doomed-couple-on-the-run. Said to have been an inspiration for Godard’s Breathless, admired by the French surrealists as a rare illustration of genuine amour fou, and certainly a seminal influence on Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, this off-beat, original and utterly stylish work has been lauded by the likes of Martin Scorsese and widely hailed as a cult-movie masterpiece. Lewis’s other notable noirs include My Name is Julia Ross and The Big Combo. "The art seems to grow right out of the trashiness...Gun Crazy builds up so much power that comparisons to Tristan and Isolde do not seem entirely farfetched" (David Denby). "Far more energetic than Bonnie and Clyde — the most famous of its many progeny — its intensity borders on the subversive and surreal" (Geoff Andrew, Time Out). 

3. Cathy O'Donnell and Farley Granger - They Live by Night (1948)
To watch a beautifully restored print of THEY LIVE BY NIGHT is to understand why the French New Wave fell over itself over old Nicholas Ray. His young lovers are framed by the car interiors in such a way as to make the whole of the screen their sacred space; external to its confines is a world out to kill them but inside they're safe, like a kid's fort made from couch cushions, with only terrifying darkness of the lava floor playroom without. These kids never want trouble but don't know how to say no to sleazy uncle Chicamaw, they just know how to keep running until the darkness of the long arm of the law finally makes it's grab.

4. Burt Reynolds and Sally Field - Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
Smokey and the Bandit was the 'other' big hit of '77 (after Star Wars of course). Burt Reynolds became a huge star with this, a-number one. Not that it fazed him, or inspired better films, but he's superbly funny and even believable as a good old boy who knows how to drive real good. As a runaway bride who hopes into his Trans-Am, Sally Field resonates charm and sass in perfect measure, showing that even an actress with formidable chops can whoop it up when necessary. She knows not to show off when sparring with a naturalist like Burt, so instead she starts out from scratch, jumping into his car a full-blown cipher, keying her mannerisms into his, like a jazz bassist keying into the drummer. It's here in this list because it's emblematic of a time when not just the youth wanted to get in a fast car with a dangerous man and run from a fat lawman, but everyone, even our parents. It was the seventies -- the closest we came as a nation to all liking the same things at the same time. Parents learned new curse words by taking their kids to see Bad News Bears; we all danced to "Macho Man" never imagining the Village People were gay; and wife-swapping was as normal at bridge parties as kids sneaking down to steal M&Ms and sips of whiskey sours. Mmmm. A whole fleet of trucker CB radio-style films were dumped on the market after this, and they're all on Netflix streaming if you want to check them out. I tried.... good lord.

5. Geen Davis and Susan Sarandon - Thelma and Louise (1993)

“People complained about our suicide,” said Sarandon in an interview with Richard Ouzounian of the Toronto Star. “But I didn’t hear a peep when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did pretty much the same thing. 

Author/activist Judy Rebick, president of the feminist National Action Committee in 1991, liked the movie for its portrayal of a powerful female friendship. “They fought back…they were free. They liberated themselves,” she said in a telephone interview with Diebel. The movie showed Melanie Caplan, fragrance consultant in her 50s, that you can be powerful and not give in. “They controlled their destiny when women were [and still are generally] being portrayed as victims.” In a world where they are expected to be rescued by men, I might add. Near the end of the movie, the sympathetic Arkansas police detective played by Harvey Keitel—their shining knight—does try and fails to “rescue” them.  

That’s what the controversial ending was about: not giving in. Not giving in to a false “god”. Not giving in to the imposed rules and strictures of an androcratic* world. Not giving in to feelings of unworthiness and victimization. Not giving in to the oppression of the sacred feminine wisdom, the goddess in all of us. Celebrating The Bitch. ” --Nina Munteanu (The Alien Next Door)

6. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette - True Romance (1993)
I thought about putting in the Winona Ryder-Christian Slater mix of the very popular and influential HEATHERS, but I object to its 'bad faith' philosophy: Winona's character rejects her handsome beau's homicidal impulses after only one murder, and moves to save the school and prevent further mayhem. It's like bitch, who do you think you is? Are you going to go all Loretta Young and confess your involvement in the earlier faked suicides? I freakin' doubt it. This is supposed to be a revenge fantasy against all the hateful subgroups of high school, so indulge a little! As if we didn't know the difference between films and real life! As if we might see a film like Heathers and start shooting up our schools.

Quentin Tarantino is a great one for redressing these kinds of choices in other movies, even if here he only wrote the screenplay and the late, great Tony Scott directs. There's a key scene that reflects the key difference early on: Slater has just killed his new wife's old pimp and shot up the brothel / drug den where she used to work and has returned to her all bloody and hopped up on killing. She starts to freak out and he and we brace for another moral lecture like we had to endure from Winona in Heathers five years earlier, but NO!!! She's just deeply moved by the true romance of his gesture. This, my friends, is a woman of the new wave!

7. Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen - Badlands (1973)

Now TRUE ROMANCE has that weird steel drum soundtrack and this is its clear inspiration. Director Terence Malick is now known for big pompous masterpieces of cinematography like TREE OF LIFE but before all that, he made this cult favorite. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek both became stars overnight and from then on every time a redhead was cast in a film you had to shoot her hair reflecting the setting rays of the evening sun, framed in the darkness of a dark red barn.

What's brave about this film is that it acts as kind of sobering counter-dote to the giddy high wire bullet-huffing of Bonnie and Clyde and all their breakneck escapes from the sheriff. These kids might be playing outlaws on the run but really they're just sick people. Spacek's voiceover narration (another tac borrowed for True Romance) lets you know she's not playing with a full deck, on the other hand, maybe she's faking to avoid too much jail time. Starkweather/ Sheen meanwhile, just rolls with his death wish, anxious to get his picture in the paper even if he reads that paper at his death row breakfast.

In its odd, beautiful, quiet way the film is like a broken down Chevy at the crossroads between the ugliness of Columbine era / Natural Born Killers and the old-fashioned fantasias of They Live By Night and Gun Crazy.  The outlaw couple romance exists in this film, but only as long as the lovers are completely isolated, adrift in the empty off-road spaces of the midwest, their own desolate forest of Arden, where their mutual craziness can intertwine like two sick vines that make an even sicker vine, one that will bear bitter fruit, the Shadow knows...

8. Anna Karina and Jean Paul Belmondo in Pierrot le Fou (1965)
Now it seems marvelously modern, hip and edgy, because after several viewings it becomes apparent that Belmondo's jaded intellectual husband is fully aware this sexy babysitter he's running away with is only going to ruin his life. All the best noir heroes have no delusions about the unfaithful duplicity of their femme fatales, and they just roll with it anyway, aching to see how their dicking over is going to happen. Even if it means you're going to die fairly soon, and are already knee-deep in gun-running and terrorism, you just got to know. Karina makes Belmondo's defection from life, lover and liberty understandable; Belmondo adds self-reflexive distance cool. Even if you don't understand half of the fractured stuff he's saying, it's hilarious. And they get a second chance the way few of their types get. They get, in fact, the sky and the sea, or at least blue ektachrome.

9. Billy the Kid and Captain America - Easy Rider (1968)
The problem with these kids is, they want to be outlaws but got no one to run from. We're supposed to believe a guy in a gooney chopper like Fondas' is going to fill his gas tank with enough rolled up hundreds to retire in Florida with? And one piddling yayo deal with Phil Spector is going to fund it all? And why would a good-looking boy like Fonda want to retire in Florida with a dimwitted stoner like Billy? Different times, man. It's only when Jack Nicholson hitches on for awhile that they find any kind of soul. Even their acid trip is murky, sad, and fish-eyed. Dig, man. Dig. But there's a lot more going on here. The Lazlo Kovacs photography is heaven-sent and I've seen it a hundred times, yet not once in the last 20 years!

10. Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw - The Getaway (1972)
Here's a pair of actors that became romantically entangled over the course of making a film, and it shows, while Peckinpah's camera still captures the initial coldness of a couple who've spend the last few years apart and missing each other, only to find a huge wedge between them once they're finally outside of a wire screen (he's been in jail for armed robbery). But they work it out through ballets of orgiastic violence against a bunch of slimy, cold-dead rednecks manned by sleazy Texas politico Ben Johnson, who insists Steve pull a bank job with Bo  Hopkins and Al Lettieri. Naturally things go bad really fast. But Peckinpah is in peak form, the driving is insane and it has the best escape-through-a-garbage-truck in the history of chase outlaw cinema, as well as some controversial and realistic slapping. Based on a book by the amazing Jim Thompson and coated with sweaty, vivid detail, the ending comes as a legitimate surprise. And as far as archetypal couples on the run go, this is one of the rare ones where the couple are already married, both badasses, and neither much of a gabber. And when they finally start rekindling it's so slow and natural, with ebb and flow of attraction and disdain just like real couples, that you genuinely root for them to make it; for once there actually seems to be something at stake.

11. Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci - Monster (2003)

A lot of us didn't know what to expect going into this film, and it delivered. Ricci's blah performance is totally overshadowed by the scary power of Theron's Aileen, adding tons of poignancy as we realize the loveless horror that has been Aileen's existence has made her delusional. My favorite part - Aileen gets Ricci into a motel room, scores some beers and smokes, and then realizes she hasn't really planned beyond this point, and any kind of romantic warmth she idealized is kind of unrequited by her flatline of a partner. I've been the romantic drunkard Aileen is in this film (except for the killing and prostituting parts), so I sympathize; the brass ring of total happiness seems always a drink away, and you gradually get spinal fatigue from years of fruitless cross-carousel reaching. 

 12. William Powell and Kay Francis - One Way Passage (1932)
The chemistry between Francis and Powell is electrifying yet urbane and smooth. He’s a caught criminal sailing home to face execution and she only has a few weeks to live. An ocean liner trip from the far east to San Francisco is all the time they have. Romantic comedies nowadays are full of children in grown up bodies, trying to make mothers out of each other so they can cry in a lap again. ONE WAY PASSAGE, by contrast, is laden with grown-ups, and not a drop of stuffy morality taints their beautiful inherent decency as they walk to their deaths like it’s just another ocean voyage. Unlike the 'sea and sky' of PIERROT LE FOU, their love lives inside broken champagne glasses, the stems crossed forever... until the broom of a new year.

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