There is tongue-in-cheek character naming with Kelly Houge as a newscaster played by Kelly Preston (known for her modeling work at the time). The naming of the Fuller family (Jacob, Kate, and Scott) is a conscious reference to Sam Fuller, seminal director of pulp fiction cinema. The naming of Sex Machine is a gag for the director playing him (Tom Savini) and that he will become a blood-seeking “machine” like the other vampires in the film. Casting includes figures chosen more for their physical appearance or notoriety in other spheres rather than acting talent, like Frost (former NFL defensive back Fred Williamson). Rodriguez, known for his ultra-low-budget breakthrough hit El Mariachiin 1992 at the Sundance Festival, also appears in the band in the club and edited the film too.
However, the most interesting aspect of the film falls not so much in the vampire element but in the film’s first 20 minutes. In this we have George Clooney, Dr. Ross of ER, being rude and disrespectful to an old motel keeper, subsequently punching another old man, a pastor no less, and threatening to shoot him in the face in front of his daughter. Clooney’s character swears aggressively at his captives, and from the very opening sequence and the information given to us via a TV bulletin, he and his brother seem prepared to kill others in order to escape. He is a bad-mouthed, ruthless killer. He is prepared to indulge in homophobic and racist abuse, asking Jacob (Harvey Keitel) and Scott (Ernest Liu) if they are “a couple of fags,” and assumes Scott is Japanese before Richie corrects him that Chinese is more likely.
There is an interesting paradox here. Seth promises that he will release them unharmed if they help them get through the border to Mexico. Jacob must have faith in the word of another and Seth must decide if he will keep “his word” (given earlier to the unfortunate female hostage left in Richie’s care). Issues of faith and belief run under the relationships here, not just in the obvious sense of a pastor who cannot bring himself to preach any longer after the tragic death of his wife. This is also reflected in the language of the script with Seth declaring that giving up a percentage of ill-gotten gains to the local crime gangs is “scripture … So it is written, so shall it be done.” He operates under different conventions of morality than Jacob, but the need for some form of order and rules permeates both criminal and religious codes of belief.
Clooney makes a visually striking villain here, dressed in black, with cropped hair and a snake-like tattoo rising up his neck. He is shot several times in the opening section from extreme low angle (from the back of the car as he unloads food at the motel and later holding a gun to Scott and Jacob in their room). Kate (Juliette Lewis) describes him as a “creepy guy” when their bus first almost collides into him, but his salute with a beer bottle and his usual smoldering look do not really convey “creepy,” suggesting Kate is using such terminology to deny her own attraction to him. Verbally, he alternates between being bullying and charming, encouraging Scott and Kate after they have followed orders, like a personal coach.
Ten years before David Cronenberg’s brutal opening in A History of Violence (2006), we have two apparently amoral robbers, prepared to kill to get what they want from small-town motels. Agent Robert Newman describes the film as “being about a couple of serial killers,” but while this may reflect the disturbed side of Richie, it misrepresents the character of Seth Gecko.1 Particularly important, Seth is defined in opposition to his brother Richie, to whom his sibling loyalty overcomes any qualms he might have about Richie’s deeply disturbed and sick attitude to women. Richie is the real evil here. His sly, predatory glances at any nearby female are clear from the outset, and his delusional fantasies in which Kate invites him to perform an intimate act on her, which, Rodriguez’s close-up subjective shot of her makes subsequently clear occurred only in his head, mark him as the dangerous sex offender.
The episode in the motel defines the distinction between the nature of Richie and Seth. Left alone with a hostage, Richie retires to a back room to watch TV and pats the bed next to him, indicating that his petrified woman should join him. When Seth returns, it is only some minutes into his conversation that he freezes with a choice of burgers in hand and no hostage to give it to. Rodriguez’s camera pans to an empty seat and Richie explains in a casual offhand manner, pointing at the bedroom, “She’s in there.” In stepping into the doorway, Seth occupies this position, just looking, trying to make sense of what he is seeing, for over 35 seconds without a cut. There is no conventional reverse shot, giving us a privileged view of action, but we share with Seth a series of very fast flash-cuts as key images are seared onto his consciousness (a bloodied phone, blood sprayed on furniture, and perhaps most shocking, a blood-covered body with a head covered with a pillow, marked with the scorch marks of several pistol blasts). A category error is occurring in Seth’s mind. A hostage has been altered into an abject dehumanized corpse, a map of Richie’s perversions, with a key clue in the tape that was on his hands now used to bind those of the woman. It is only after Seth turns away that Rodriguez allows us a partial view of the room, the central gruesome sight blocked by Seth’s body (as if he is shielding us from our own worst impulses in looking).
He asks a question, essentially rhetorical in nature (“What is wrong with you?”), and the answer, which he himself provides himself, almost reads as a definition of the Clooney on-screen persona and brand: “I’m a professional fucking thief. I don’t kill people that I don’t have to and I don’t rape women.” He may have played occasional amoral characters like Jack in The American but outright, unredeemable evil of the sort represented by Richie here has not appeared in his résumé. Even in the opening scene, he shoots the storekeeper because he threatens them with a gun, not like Richie’s random shooting of the ranger (claiming the victims were trying to signal to one another). Seth struggles to assert some kind of order on events, even a sense of a code of honor among thieves, forcing Richie to admit by brute-force grabbing hold of his lapels that what he (Richie) is doing “is not how it’s done.”
In the store, in the motel, and in the bar, Seth is the one with the patter, the one who makes the threats, who defines the situation. Rodriguez gives us a stylized medium close-up of Clooney, holding a gun in a threatening pose in a low angle, exuding threatening cool in all three locations with the gun blurred in the extreme foreground. Such a role seems credible for Clooney from early on in his film career, even though he was far from first choice for the part and was cast only once John Travolta, Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, and Christopher Walken all passed. However, there is some wilful blindness in his character here as clearly Seth does know “what is wrong with” Richie whose promise under compulsion not to do it again has the sense of a schoolboy promising not to be naughty. This is very much a sibling bond based on inequalities. Seth as the elder, more responsible brother makes the sensible plans (getting to Mexico, meeting a contact, and lying low in El Rey), looking after his brother like a nurse, buying food, redressing the wound, and telling him to put his “bit” in while they drive to stop him grinding his teeth. Most obviously, Seth uses hostages to gain some advantage rather than just killing them. Richie whines childishly and complains about having to give a percentage of their loot to a local gang but Seth accepts the situation more realistically. Where Richie is impulsive, vicious, and sadistic, Seth is calm and brutal only for a purpose (interrupting Richie’s later complaining in the van, for example, by knocking him out rather than letting him give them away). The fact that Seth is not Richie is a clear point in his favor, but the fact that he so easily forgives him is not.
Richie’s lust for Kate is signaled by a whooshing, rumbling sound effect when he projects his fantasy onto her (a similar distorted, rushing sound is used later to convey the vampire’s desire for his bloody hand), and Rodriguez gives us his distorted subjective point of view with a wide-angle lens as he picks up the car keys at her feet. In the van, we cut between a series of dissolves of Richie looking and (apparently nonsexual) parts of Kate’s body, especially her feet. Rodriquez’s use of Jimmi
e Vaughan’s “Dengue Woman Blues” (1996) in the score here with lyrics like “You’ve got me all crazy” is a disturbing assumption of a sex attacker’s point of view, not only literally but also seeing complicity on the part of the desired individual.
Tarantino rejected the offer of directing the picture so that he could concentrate more fully on his own performance. Originally, Tarantino’s script had all the Fullers and Geckos survive but slimmed this down to a representative member of each group. Although he had written other scripts, and in the chronology of his subsequent career From Dusk Till Dawn seems to come after his breakthrough successes of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), this was actually Tarantino’s first official, paid writing job, with early drafts dating back to 1991. The initial stand-off with the family is reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs with male, aggressive robbers, dressed largely in black suits, pointing handguns at targets in quite a choreographed, stylized manner at angles from one another and Seth even turning his pistol sideways for no reason other than to look cool. Later, in the club the camera circles Seth and Richie, back-to-back as they attempt to hold off the vampires, and as in the opening sequence with Vince (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) in Pulp Fiction, they are framed in a two-shot, firing their pistols at the same time to shoot down Chet. The lengthy quotation from Ezekiel 25:17, climaxing with a threat to “raise vengeance,” which eventually finds its natural home in Jules’s speech delivered before killing people, was in early drafts of the script here.
Mexico represents freedom from U.S. law and, at a personal level, freedom from moral prohibition. The club, the unsubtly named Titty Twister, is a liminal state, a place where the normal rules of life no longer apply, making it a suitable place for the appearance of the supernatural. Chet’s monologue on the steps of the club, listing the various types of sexual service on offer, also reflects the sense of carnival and excess that operates here. As the film’s title suggests, its borderline status is also related to chronology during the hours of darkness, literally from dusk till dawn—according to folklore, the period when vampires may operate.
There is a further generic twist in the club, as the out-of-tune piano of a western is replaced by the diegetic music from the band and particularly the act of Satanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek, overcoming her phobia of snakes), so named after a 1975 Mexican horror film, which Tarantino saw while working in a video store. A large saloon brawl becomes a fight to the death with female vampires, and Seth shoots down the chandelier in an updating of a Zorro-style stunt, so that the structure stakes Satanico. The same iconic setting of scantily clad dancing women, a snake, and the foot-in-mouth act appears in Ramstein’s video for “Engel” (“Angel”) (Zoran Bihac, 1997).
As a vampire narrative, it hardly stretches the conventions of the genre, beyond the film’s opening. The use of masks, animatronics, and computer-generated imagery represents the state of special effects technology in the mid-1990s for a relatively low-budget movie (although it had crept up to $17 million by the time of its release). The action even halts after the initial outburst of violence so that Seth can organize a regrouping and a gathering of knowledge about vampires (mostly derived from films), possibly also for audience members unfamiliar with the genre. It is confirmed that they (vampires, not viewers) can be repelled with crucifixes, even makeshift ones, that they need to be staked through the heart, and to kill them you need garlic, sunlight, or silver (although they are not entirely sure about the latter point). The entities include some that have very little connection with vampires. The creature that almost pins Seth and that is dispatched by Kate is more an indication of the special effects genesis of the script. The film, given an extensive rewrite by Tarantino, was based on an original idea by John Esposito and Robert Kurtzman, whose background in special effects meant that first drafts of the script were really just contrivances for plenty of gore and makeup. Esposito created similar monster scenes in Graveyard Shift (Ralph Singleton, 1990), where a potential allegory of an industrial machine literally eating its workers morphs into a random creature attacking humans in tunnels.2
Like the buddy movie dialogue at the end of the opening sequence, in the middle of the film there is a moment of philosophical reflection, which sits uneasily with the trashy generic markers around it. After the pastor has punched Seth after taunts about his faith, Seth asserts that despite having no religious faith himself, if the creatures outside represent pure evil, then there must also be a heaven. It is unclear at this point whether he is just trying to rationalize what he has seen with his own eyes or trying to act as a catalyst in reigniting the pastor’s faith, so that this can be used as a weapon, in blessing holy water for example.
The film seems to drift further into cliché with Sex Machine starting to recount a lengthy Vietnam anecdote (ironically the sort actually experienced by Savini personally), but Rodriguez takes advantage of the empty dialogue to take the volume down and cut back to Savini, who has been bitten, and the voices that he is starting to hear. With almost a comic touch, we see the physical signs of transformation in his hand that he tries to hide behind him. This is continued in the shot in which Savini’s anecdote continues, but as he faces the camera (and the other characters) a pair of gnarled, vampiric hands slowly appears on his shoulder. The impossible gradually invades a realistic shot. There is a playful element in the dialogue, not just in Satanico’s resolution to make Seth her slave dog and call him “Spot” but in Seth’s rejection of slavery with the quip (improvised by Clooney himself) “No thanks, I’ve already had a wife.”
The film has overtones of the work of John Carpenter, not just in linking ethnicity with a sexually deviant social underbelly as in Big Trouble in Little China (1986) but more explicitly in his later Vampires (1998), where we also see a modern-day narrative set in the American West with vampires, apparently unkillable unless staked, bursting into flames on contact with sunlight, especially seen breaking in shafts of light through a building at daybreak. There are even minor Carpenter tropes like the use of jump-cut dissolves as Seth stakes his first vampire with maximum effort, unseen just out of shot. As with Carpenter, the jump cuts seem to suggest a reduction of time and yet the slow dissolves act in the opposite direction, producing a curious effect, mixing compression and elongation of time within the same sequence.
By the end, the club has been destroyed, but since we do not see the source of the vampires their complete destruction is impossible to ascertain. The pastor, Scott, Richie, and countless others have been killed, but Kate and Seth survive, the money is intact, and Seth gets to meet his contact. Kate seems to inherit the motor home and a new sense of independence, driving off alone. The very final shot, pulling back to reveal the back of the club, which seems half landfill site and half Mayan temple, suggests that the club may not be a solely modern manifestation of evil but its crude style also makes it more of a nod to the kind of grindhouse cinema to which Tarantino seems drawn.
There is a bond of sorts between Kate and Seth, who have lost both a brother and perhaps their innocence about things supernatural. As he lets her go with a wad of cash, Seth’s final piece of dialogue underlines the difference between himself and his late brother: “I may be a bastard but I’m not a fucking bastard.” Exactly what Kate is euphemistically offering, when she asks if he wants “some company,” is a little ambiguous but the George Clooney persona is not ready to be linked with associations of exploitative sexuality. Although operating in a very different genre, both here and in One Fine Day, his on-screen character keeps his word and comes to represent the values of reliability and paternal protectiveness. In both roles, there is also a quick-thinking, resourceful element, whether it is using a security guard to speak Spanish over the phone to help reach a key interviewee in the earlier film or improvising makeshift crucifixes here.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (the Coen Brothers, 2000)
Pete:
That don’t make no sense.
McGill:
It’s a
fool looks for logic in the human heart.
The parallels between Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro), and Delmar O’Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson) as they escape from prison and Homer’s The Odyssey are clear from the outset with the text appearing on screen (“O muse”), the first line of Homer’s epic poem. However, in an irony suitable to the quirky nature of the film, it was nominated for an Oscar for both Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay. The classic tale is evoked in several names, like the central character, Ulysses, as well as the Reform Party’s candidate for governor, Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall), the incumbent governor, Menelaus “Pappy” O’Daniel (Charles Durning), and McGill’s ex-wife Penelope (Holly Hunter). Even Big Dan Teague (John Goodman), with his eye patch, alludes to the monstrous Cyclops. Like Homer’s Odyssey, the narrative opens with an escape from imprisonment and climaxes as Ulysses returns to Ithaca (here in Mississippi), disguised as an old man (he dons a terrible false beard at the final concert) to prevent his love from marrying a rival.
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