Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  At the film’s end, only Curt leaves small-town heaven/hell. As his plane departs, onscreen captions tell us of the boys’ fates, telling us what we already know: that Curt’s escape is the beginning of a fulfilling creative life while his three friends are trapped and doomed. Despite this potentially elitist theory, the feeling that Lucas somehow leaves you with is that the Big Bad 1960s were out to get American manhood, and that if it had just left these ordinary boys alone, they could have driven around the same town with their childhood sweethearts for ever, listening to corny doo wop and leaving that nasty Dylan and Hendrix music to a few beatnik weirdos in the kind of Big City colleges where they wouldn’t know a good automobile if it ran ’em over, and let’s hope it does, Yessirree, ah tell you what. That feeling is reinforced by Curt’s future as a writer . . . in Canada. Perhaps he was just dodging the Vietnam draft that kills one of his friends. Or maybe the only way to escape the horror of ’60s America is to leave it completely.

  You do feel haunted by this now-familiar revelation of characters’ futures in caption form. And particularly by the film’s biggest victim John Milner, who may have seemed cool but was destined to drive in circles, dogging an ever-shrinking pool of available women, risking his life in drag races no one in the big wide world will ever see, at least for a little while before getting dead drunk. He’s the working-class no-hoper who peaked too soon, a boy all of us knew at school.

  By the time American Graffiti had its way with the teen movie it had irrevocably changed the entire genre. Films about youth went on to mostly avoid the linear beginning–middle–end narrative, properly reflecting the unfocused, hormonal energy that dominates teenage life, as well as noticing that coming of age is the start rather than the end of a tale. All crazy kids will soon become sane adults in an insane world, and American Graffiti’s final roll-call of the boys’ futures feels like the moment when, in what seems, superficially, like a more shallow film than the likes of The 400 Blows (see here) or If . . . (see here), the teen movie finally – yup – came of age. Among the gags and car fetishism and nostalgic jukebox soundtrack and dirty talk and sex and romance, there’s a poignant melancholy about the inevitability of adulthood, as if a small part of Lucas really wanted to be John Milner, cruising for ever with pack of Camels tucked into sleeve of tight white t-shirt, refusing to accept the inevitability of adulthood, forcing time to stand still.

  It’s this that drew such huge audiences at a time when the optimism of the ’60s had curdled into the anger and pessimism of the ’70s, as people wondered whether sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and protest would have been best left alone and waited for Star Wars and Ronald Reagan to close Pandora’s Box and offer the simple comforts of good, evil and The American Way.

  BADLANDS

  1973

  Starring: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates

  Dir.: Terrence Malick

  Plot: When they met, it was moider.

  Key line: ‘He was handsomer than anyone I’d ever met. He looked just like James Dean.’

  In November 1958, a young man called Charley Starkweather, who had just turned 20 years old, embarked on a road trip through Nebraska and Wyoming with his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate. It began with Starkweather shooting Caril’s father, and ended in late January 1959, with a further ten people dead. Often labelled the first modern American serial killer, Starkweather was executed by electric chair in June ’59, and Fugate spent 17 years in jail. She was still in jail in York, Nebraska when she served as an informal consultant on a movie about her crimes. The movie changed the names and moved the action to South Dakota, but made no real attempt to cover up its true-life subject.

  The maker of the movie, an Assyrian-American called Terrence Malick, became a sort of myth in himself, partly because he has gone on to make just four further films in the ensuing 38 years, and partly because he has steadfastly refused to be either interviewed or photographed by the media. In fact, just about the only sighting of Malick is in this very movie, where he has a small role as a man who knocks on a door. Martin Sheen reckons that the only reason the scene is there is because Malick was let down by an actor and Sheen refused to reshoot the scene with someone else. So now we know that Malick was a tall, dark-skinned, chubby but handsome guy in 1973. Nice.

  This first Malick film, discounting a 1969 student short called Lanton Mills, was, in part, a film about celebrity, because Malick’s version of Starkweather, Kit Carruthers, played by Martin Sheen, is convinced he is one because he murders people. When he is caught, he doles out souvenirs to the arresting cops and poses self-consciously for imaginary cameras, a kind of rockabilly version of Gloria Swanson at the end of Sunset Boulevard, waiting for his imaginary close-up, delighted by the fact that one of the cops thinks he looks like James Dean (see here). It is haunting and chilling and funny ’cos it’s true and probably tells us why Terrence Malick ain’t gonna be showing us around his beautiful home in the pages of Hello! any time soon.

  Because Malick has scarcity value he is routinely referred to as a genius. I don’t know about that – The Thin Red Line was a pretentious mess – but I do know a thing or two about Badlands because it has fascinated me ever since I first saw it as an 11-year-old. If Malick’s reclusiveness makes him cinema’s very own J.D. Salinger, then Badlands is his Catcher In The Rye: a tale of American youth that seems to both encapsulate the darker impulses of teenager-dom and say something far wider and deeper about America and the world. In many ways, Malick uses incredible shots of the American landscape, a soundtrack of subtle, bucolic optimism (courtesy, mainly, of a gently undulating xylophone instrumental called ‘Gassenhauer’ by Carl Orff, an insidious repeating motif with an almost Aboriginal feel) and the charisma of Sheen and co-star Sissy Spacek to suggest that serial killers are beautiful things. Not the killings, mind . . . they are nasty, brutish and short. But the young killers, with their worlds of deluded fantasy that protect them from their actions.

  The movie is (unreliably) narrated by the skipping southern drawl of Spacek as Holly Sargis, and hers is the voice we hear as the film innocently begins with a girl playing on her bed with a dog. We soon meet Kit, who is a dustman. His entire demeanour, even when dumping garbage, is a knowing take on rock ’n’ roll juvenile delinquent, with his slouchy swagger, side-parted quiff, cowboy boots and wiry frame squeezed into white t-shirt and bluest blue jeans. At times Sheen looks so much like his magnificently errant son Charlie that it’s just plain weird. Of course, if this was a Charlie Sheen movie he’d just be down the local bar trying to get laid and having a good time succeeding. But Kit has other ideas about love.

  While attempting to court Holly after spotting her twirling her baton, Kit gets fired, leaving him with much too much time to devote to hitting on his under-age quarry, despite his next job on a farm, which he of course glamorises as being a cowboy. While Holly regales us with her love-struck narration, words and images clue us in to their incipient madness. Why does Kit want Holly when she’d ‘never been popular at school and didn’t have a lot of personality’, especially as ‘he could’ve had any girl in town’? She changes their ages to suit her fantasy, subconsciously reminding us that Kit is, in essence, a paedophile. He plays with dead animals like a naughty child and she throws gasping fish into the garden because they’re ‘sick’, and you can feel the sickness they’ve spotted in each other, even while the music skips lightly and their picnics in the Montana countryside look like paintings by Manet. Their conversation is stilted to the point of banality. Kit takes Holly’s virginity like he’d just performed an annoying chore. Meanwhile, Holly’s father, played by the ever excellent Warren Oates, is too busy working on his own paintings to notice that his child is going out with a grown man.

  There’s 20 minutes of this mesmerising visual poetry before the surreal road movie rampage begins. There is no rhyme or reason to Kit’s actions. People just get in his way, in shacks and mansions, amidst stunning landscapes and immaculately designed interiors, and h
e dispatches them like a man swatting flies. He shoots his friend Cato in the gut, and Holly perches on a seat in front of Cato, mildly interested in his inevitable death, and asks him about a spider he keeps in a bottle. This is madness evoked as something almost innocent, a mere extension of a child’s mix of curiosity and low attention span. But even here Sheen and Malick come up with something special. When Kit runs, shoots, moves, he seems almost impossibly kinetic, and lighter than air. As if he was built to kill.

  And, all the time, Kit points out which souvenirs people could keep to tell of his coming, revelling in his status as the most wanted man in America. He is the star of his own hit movie, a lurid melodrama that, as Holly explains, makes him dread ‘the idea of being shot down alone without a girl to scream his name’.

  But when the end comes, Holly abandons Kit anyway. She is not a victim of hopeless love, prepared to risk her life for a daredevil escape. She’s just a spoiled girl whose story about being loved by the handsomest man in town got out of hand. She doesn’t get to scream his name. But then, he doesn’t die a cinematic death. He’s just caught, like any other criminal.

  The irony is, of course, that the two cops who catch Kit are happy to be cast in his movie. Having caught an outlaw who has been handed mythical status by the media, they are stars now, too. The older one is less impressed, throwing Kit’s hat out of the cop car when he begins to patronise them in his brilliantly insane way. But the younger one is awestruck, in the way you would be if you’d met your favourite action movie star. He asks Kit why he did it. ‘I always wanted to be a criminal, I guess,’ Kit replies, sucking in his cheekbones. ‘Just not this big a one. Takes all kinds, though.’ The three grin conspiratorially and you don’t know whether to laugh or take a shower.

  So the cop tells him he looks like Jimmy Dean and we’re suddenly in an aircraft hanger watching Kit, strapped to a light plane, holding court. The soldiers and cops surrounding him aren’t peace officers any more. They’re journalists. They fire questions at him, press conference style.

  ‘Who’s your favourite singer?’

  ‘Eddie Fisher. Who’s yours?’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Don’t you read the papers?’

  Kit and Holly have a final inane conversation – ‘Too bad about your dad’ – and Malick adds some final bleak jokes. A shot of a father holding up his small child and pointing out the famous serial killer is contrasted with a quicker shot of a postman carrying a sack of mail, oblivious to the star in his midst, holding the evidence that life carries on and Kit is now yesterday’s news. Holly informs us, in voiceover, that, once Kit got the electric chair, she was set free and married her lawyer. A cop remarks that Kit is ‘quite an individual’. Kit gives him a dumb insolent, open-mouthed stare, and sneers, ‘Do you think they’ll take that into consideration?’ Holly grins shyly and we fly into a perfect sunrise. What a fucking ending.

  Kit Carruthers is in the Jim Thompson tradition of Southern Gothic psychopaths: men with good manners and bad intentions who are much smarter than they appear, but far less smart than they think. And Malick’s debut is a perfect film, utterly complete in its making on a budget of next-to-nowt, but so full of loose ends and unresolved implications that you never get to the bottom of it, no matter how many times you watch. It was showered with acclaim upon release, but bombed at the box office, possibly because, after Arthur Penn’s 1967 Bonnie And Clyde, the public had had just about enough of sympathetic travelling serial killers who symbolise youth rebellion.

  Back in the real world . . . when Caril Folgate was released from prison in 1976, she began a new life as a medical aide. She never married. At the trial, Starkweather had maintained that she had carried out some of the murders. The jury didn’t believe him, but they didn’t believe Folgate’s claims that she was an unwilling hostage either. She has continued to maintain her total innocence to this day.

  But the existence and cult popularity of Badlands means that the world will always see Folgate as a delusional child, living in a fantasy world where life and death are irrelevant. It seems strange that she was happy to advise on a film that made her look like that. But then, the important thing about celebrity is being famous, not what you happen to be famous for. Kit Carruthers would surely have approved.

  BLACK CHRISTMAS

  1974

  Starring: Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder, Keir Dullea, John Saxon, Andrea Martin, Marion Waldman

  Dir.: Bob Clark

  Plot: The post-hippy Agatha Christie flick that invented the teen slasher.

  Key line: ‘Lick it! Lick it! Let me lick your pretty pinky cunt! HEEHEEEHUEUGHHEEHEE!!!’

  When horror geeks discuss the origins of the teen slasher movie, Black Christmas never gets a mention. Perhaps it’s because it’s Canadian. Because all of the basic genre tropes are present and correct, a full four years before Halloween (see here) was unleashed upon the world. A suburban setting. A crime scene in a spooky college sorority house. An unhinged, unseen maniac. A politically dodgy connection between adolescent sexuality and grisly demise. Hapless cops. An ending that doesn’t end. Even A Final Girl. Unlike the majority of its progeny, there is a large whodunit element and a last twist, rather than a last scare. But otherwise . . . this could easily be read as the template for any movie which involves nubile young women attempting to survive the irrational violence of an other-worldly male monster. Admittedly, it isn’t quite as memorably suspenseful as Halloween or cartoonish as A Nightmare On Elm Street (see here). But its dark humour, evocative setting and ghastly slayings make Black Christmas a peculiar, stylish and prophetic little movie.

  There is a good reason why Black Christmas didn’t become a megahit, though. Writer A. Roy Moore and director Bob Clark thought it would be an interesting idea to make a movie about killing where you never saw the killer. This is Black Christmas’s cleverest and creepiest innovation, largely involving innovative camera operator Bert Dunk climbing up walls and down stairs with a camera harnessed to his shoulder, and the rare, hugely effective glimpse of the killer’s wild eyes peaking through shadows.

  But we would all soon learn that money-spinning horror franchises were built out of memorable monsters who were barely off-camera; killers with humanoid bodies but alien faces, who became ironic heroes to horror fans who would happily pay to watch increasingly awful sequels to Halloween, A Nightmare . . . , Friday The 13th et al. In Black Christmas, much of the stalking and slashing is done by us – that is, Dunk’s subjective camera, prowling the claustrophobic staircases and corridors of the sorority house, forcing us to see this small, dark world through the eyes of the killer rather than the victims.

  This means that a great deal of the fright work in Black Christmas is done by inspired sound design. Carl Zittrer’s rumbling, groaning avant-garde music, made by attaching household objects to the strings of his piano and playing with the music’s speed, mingles with the breathing and babbling of the killer. And then there are the phone calls.

  Billy – the killer does have a name – is fond of calling the sorority house and freaking out the girls. But this guy is the obscene phone caller to end them all. Wes Craven revives the idea in Scream (p. 339) but plays it for arch laughs. Here, the calls are the work of a gibbering lunatic, so schizoid that he can become completely different voices, possessed of knowledge about the girls that only a friend could know, calling them cunts and whores, or, more often than not, just making nightmarish squealing and gurgling sounds.

  The first call is a shock to the system. Taken by heroine Jess (Hussey), it begins with the usual heavy breathing, but then grows in volume, intensity and madness, courtesy of director Clark actually employing five different voices – including his own – to mix into one impossible diatribe. The caller sucks and gasps and gurgles and unleashes a series of pig noises before breaking into uncontrollable laughter. Soon we’re into liberal use of the ‘C’ word: he wants to lick it. He wants his ‘fat juicy cock’ sucked. When hard-living bitch-queen Barb (the
ever excellent Kidder) takes over the call he continues his sexual tauntings with increasing hysteria. When Barb taunts back, refusing to be impressed or intimidated by his rapist verbals, Clark pulls his masterstroke. Suddenly, the killer says, in a measured, matter-of-fact and entirely human tone: ‘I’m going to kill you,’ and hangs up. Barb, like us, knows that he means it, because, when the lunacy is switched off, our caller sounds serious about his work.

  The calls are heavily influenced by the bizarre, demonic noises that emerge from the possessed Linda Blair in The Exorcist, easily the most successful and influential horror flick of the early ’70s. But coming from someone invisible, entering your home from somewhere unknown, the calls are profoundly disturbing. Without them, and the insane interior dialogue Billy continues to maintain while stalking, our killer is nothing more than a camera walking around a dimly lit building.

  The plot itself is actually slight. Billy breaks into Toronto sorority house while the girls are having a Christmas party. He makes his calls and begins to bump off the few that haven’t gone home for the holidays. We suspect a couple of the boyfriends, especially Peter (Dullea), self-obsessed pianist boyfriend of Jess, who doesn’t react well to Jess’s decision to abort the couple’s unplanned baby.

  The cops try to hunt the killer and trace the calls but get nowhere. Finally, after murders by way of plastic clothes-bag and a big hook on a pulley, plus the violent demise of an unfortunate pussycat and the two best characters – alcoholic House Mother Mrs MacHenry (Waldman) and foul-mouthed tough chick Barb, who gets stabbed while angelic children sing ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, drowning the sounds of her suffering with their infernal Christian rhyme – we get to the inevitable showdown between killer and Final Girl Jess. Jess wins and everyone thinks the drama is over. But we know different. The movie ends with still-undiscovered corpses in the attic, and the whispers and mumbles of the real killer, as the camera pulls away from the attic window, leaving a house alone with its failure to understand that the enemy was always within, and us with no real idea of who Billy is and why he’s killing these women, and the increasingly deafening ring of an unanswered phone.