Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Things didn’t go too smoothly for any of those four so Rourke ended up in a fine tradition. He made awful films like 9½ Weeks and Angel Heart, he went mental, no one would hire him, he decided to become a (terrible) professional boxer, he destroyed his face in what seemed like a dedicated mission not to be what fans of Rumble Fish and the excellent Diner wanted him to be. So here is the only place where you really get to see the short-lived myth that was Mickey Rourke: Next Big Thing.

  What ‘happens’ in Rumble Fish is that Rusty James (Dillon) and his mates Smokey (Cage) and B.J. (Penn) fight, while his girl Patty (Lane) and his sensitive, intellectual, bespectacled friend Steve (Spano) worry. Rusty James’s brother The Motorcycle Boy (no other name present or necessary) used to lead the gang but now heads off to who-knows-where (he says California, all-American symbol of sex, sun and freedom) on his sickle. But he has returned to the hood, much to the chagrin of evil cop Patterson (Smith).

  The Motorcycle Boy wants Rusty James to leave the gang life. He is enigmatic, withdrawn, occasionally prone to getting all sweaty and twitchy when no one but a fish-eye lens is looking. So everyone thinks he’s gone nuts. They go to visit alcoholic Dad (Hopper, chowing down on innocent scenery like only Hopper can) who posits the theory that The Motorcycle Boy takes after absent Mom . . . that is, too mystical, intelligent and ephemeral to hang around with born losers like him and Rusty James. The boys get into more fights.

  The Motorcycle Boy is obsessed with those colourful Rumble Fish in the pet shop window, what with them being things born to fight that have been imprisoned and long to be free. One night, he breaks into the pet shop to release the fish and the rest of the animals. Officer Pattinson shoots him, as you do when confronted with pet shop desperadoes. Rusty James frees the fishes in the muddy river.

  The final shots are of Rusty James on – and if you’ve been reading thus far, or have a working knowledge of everything influenced by the French new wave, you’re way ahead of me – the beach. He has made it to Cali, albeit without his Zen-thug big Brando bro, who sleeps with the rumble fishes.

  The look and sound of the characters . . . the wife-beaters and bandanas, the broad working-class accents, the glamorised view of being trapped in Nowheresville with lowlifes with colourful names, always reminded me of the New Jersey boardwalk world conjured by Bruce Springsteen on his first three albums, especially when you compare the lyrics of ‘Born To Run’ with a doomed rebel known only as The Motorcycle Boy . . . although it’s actually ‘Streets Of Fire’ that plays in my head while I watch it. It’s also a Boy’s Own fantasy of the perfect, heroic big brother.

  In truth, Coppola’s folly was simply a film made out of time. In the 21st century fans of genre and action movies have got used to both rock video and the heavily stylised, impossibly sexy violence of Asian extreme cinema. An audience raised on Old Boy or Battle Royale (see here) would get Rumble Fish, especially if it ratcheted up the blood and guts. But this movie bears no relation to anything else made in the 1980s, not even its soapier twin The Outsiders. It’s pure spectacle, but without the colourful explosions and emotional manipulations of Coppola’s friends/rivals Lucas and Spielberg. It assaults the senses and bypasses the heart.

  You can also understand why it got booed in New York. It rejected American film-making tradition completely and gloried in the aesthetic of Jean-Luc Godard at his most brash and existential. It implies that emotions are weak and sentimental, and that visual panache and iconography are all. Even pure exploitation movies, from The Blackboard Jungle (see here) to The Warriors (p. 175) acknowledged, on some level, that working-class teen gangs were a real problem. Kids really do rumble and sometimes die in tribal battles. Young people are led into lives of crime and addiction that they can’t escape from. Adults who do are left physically and emotionally scarred by their experiences. People who live in areas dominated by gangs live in real fear. Despite the elegiac tone of S.E. Hinton’s original teen novels, the sad waste of teen gang violence is most of the point.

  Coppola is patently uninterested in any of this. Gangs simply exist to enable Coppola to shoot fights full of hot young boys throwing shapes choreographed by Michael Smuin, a co-director of the San Francisco Ballet. The knives that take children from their parents glint beautifully in the spotlight and sing when they are unsheathed, like swords in Samurai movies. The characters are barely characters . . . they exist to look lost and delicious while riding motorcycles, walking down alleys or posing with fags hanging out the corners of their pouty mouths. There is – and I can’t believe I’m even writing this in a book where I’ve tried to find meaningful themes in the likes of I Was A Teenage Werewolf and Dirty Dancing – absolutely no meaning whatsoever in Rumble Fish. So much so that that feels like its USP.

  The closest anyone can find to a point to it all is that Coppola meant Rourke’s Motorcycle Boy as a loving tribute to his own big brother August. The fact that he has to stamp this onscreen at the end of the end credits is kind of a giveaway . . . The Motorcycle Boy is such a stylised amalgam of every mysterious, cool rebel since Dean, Brando, Elvis and Jean-Paul Belmondo that no one could possibly imagine that he was based on a human being.

  This really doesn’t matter. Rumble Fish is a film moulded from our most florid dreams about the sexiness of doomed teenage rebels. What is it rebelling against? The real world, where teens fart, and have zits, and grow up, and Tom Waits isn’t the barkeep at the local pool hall. I’m with Coppola.

  WARGAMES

  1983

  Starring: Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, Barry Corbin

  Dir.: John Badham

  Plot: Ferris Bueller starts World War 3.

  Key line: ‘A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?’

  WarGames features the only key line in this book which is uttered by a machine. But the most striking thing, initially, about WarGames, is the first two people you see on screen. The two nuclear missile operatives on their way to a personal conflict which leads to America’s nuclear artillery being taken out of human hands are Leo McGarry out of The West Wing and Mr Blonde out of Reservoir Dogs. It isn’t just the surprise of seeing Michael Madsen and the late John Spencer playing tiny support roles in a high-concept teen sci-fi movie. More the pleasure of watching The White House Chief Of Staff and a psycho gangster having a natter about Buddhist chanting and growing your own dope. Weird.

  This is the only surreal thing about WarGames. What distinguished this big commercial and critical hit was how convincingly writers Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes and director John Badham presented the terrifying idea that a scary new kind of juvenile delinquent called a ‘computer hacker’ could accidentally trigger a nuclear holocaust. Despite its light, bright, post-Spielberg adventure movie tone, WarGames made more people lie awake at night worrying about The Bomb than all those dark nuke movies like Dr Strangelove and The War Game. It was bad enough when you believed that human life was in the hands of sabre-rattling warmongers. But the idea that humans could be taken out of the equation completely and that annihilation could all be down to one hasty hit of the return button was pretty sobering, particularly when mooted by a film that was largely aimed at children.

  The opening non-teen scenes, full of Arctic missile bases, giant computerised maps of the world and the full military might of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command) are key. They present a scenario you are vaguely aware of, but never (want to) think about: that every day of our lives, a couple of ordinary human beings go to a place where they could end the world. They go through their procedures, chatting, perhaps, about growing your own, in denial about what they could, potentially, be asked to do. If you were that person, and, suddenly, the right lights blinked and the correct alarms wailed and you were given the correct codes that confirmed that you were now required, as Mr Spencer says here, to kill 20 million people . . . would you do it? Would any halfway sane person simply follow orders and unleash Armageddon
? Suddenly, you completely buy the idea that some nutter might decide that this very special job is too important to be given to humans.

  After the missile silo scene, we are quickly introduced to WarGames’ neat twist on Armageddon movie tradition. In earlier films, we generally see the trigger-happy hawkish military man who has to be controlled by the liberal-intellectual man-in-a-suit. Remember that line in Taps about the screen’s ‘insane’ military leaders? The speaker of that line, George C. Scott, had played one of the most famous of those military mad men, General Buck Turgidson, in Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 satire Dr Strangelove.

  WarGames turns that familiar schtick on its head and instead goes back to that ’50s B-movie favourite, the Mad Scientist. Except that, by 1983, mad scientists aren’t loonies in lab coats and they are not yet cuddly Einstein throwbacks like Back To The Future’s Doc Brown. They are technocrats. They wear suits. And, in the shape of Dabney Coleman’s John McKittrick, they are the extremists who believe that, when it comes to obliterating humanity, humanity should be taken ‘out of the loop’.

  This is especially clever because, as soon as we meet Barry Corbin’s General Beringer, we’re sure that he is going to be the Turgidson-style Big Problem. He is fat and dumb-looking. He wears his uniform and puffs out his barrel chest to display his string of medals. He speaks with a southern accent and patronises the well-educated suits around him with down-homeisms like ‘we’ve had men in these silos since before you were watching Howdy Doody’. He is the only working-class man in the room and the only one who believes that the fate of the world should, ultimately, be controlled by humans.

  Who else can bring this eternal class conflict to a head but a kid? We’re soon meeting David Lightman – great name, pointing out his lack of substance while also alluding to the blinking lights of the computers he is obsessed with. David is bright but uninterested in school. He’d much rather use that brain power sitting at home, alienated from real life and healthy pursuits, hacking into his school’s computer and making his failed grades into passes. And geniuses who are not at one with society, who spend too much time in fevered isolation . . . well, they’re a class apart. In no time, his I-can-hack-anything hubris – partly inflamed by his attempts to impress fellow academic refusenik Jennifer (Ally Sheedy) – has wormed its way into the mad scientist’s perfect plan and royally fucked it up.

  From there, we have a little post-ET terror of the military-industrial complex as David is tracked down by the government and accused of being a Soviet spy. We have another, more glamorous, Oppenheimeresque mad scientist called Professor Falken (Wood), who invented the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) system, which is programmed to play the war games that have become horribly real. In despair at the realisation of what his invention will inevitably be used for, he is living under the scientist equivalent of witness protection, and has to be shaken out of his resigned nihilism by teen optimism, and brought back to help stop his machine, which he has named after his dead son Joshua, from destroying the world. This computer must have a name because, like cinema’s most famous out-of-control computer Hal from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it has developed a will of its own, but, like many an errant child, without the ability to listen to reason.

  And then we have suspense. More suspense than should be possible when you’re watching a movie which you know, because of its comedy-thriller feel and David’s obvious need to prove himself smarter than the grown-ups and be redeemed, is not going to end with the world blowing up. The suspense is built so gradually and expertly by Badham that I feel no guilt at all about giving the end away in the following couple of paragraphs. If you’ve never seen WarGames, trust me, you will still form a deep and lasting attachment to the edge of your seat. But it is a film that can’t be written about without reference to its ingenious endgame.

  Each attempt to stop Joshua playing the ‘game’ of a nuclear war between the US and the Soviets has locked it further into a loop where it believes it must finish the game to fulfil its primary objective. Because the misguided McKittrick convinced the President to share his mistrust of human failing, there is now no one in the silos to provide a failsafe. If you just pull Joshua’s plug, it assumes that NORAD has been destroyed and launches the missiles anyway. Humanity ‘out of the loop’ is looking like a seriously flawed idea.

  The world is minutes away from buying the farm when David comes up with a bright idea. Joshua is programmed to play games. Perhaps playing one of the games in its system might allow humanity back in.

  One of the games is tic-tac-toe, or, as we know it here in Blighty, noughts and crosses. As any school-kid knows, if two people play the game logically, it always ends in a stalemate. What better way to make Joshua understand that some games, like, for example, mutually assured destruction, can’t be won?

  It’s a stunning sequence. As we’re carried along by the suspense of Joshua gradually locating launch codes number-by-number, we see, on a giant hi-tech screen, in a room full of soldiers and boffins, a huge game of noughts and crosses that spells out the no-win nature of nuclear war. Finally, Joshua gets the point and, in a spectacular firework display consisting of every possible bomb-dropping strategy that the superpowers could play out, the computer comes to its senses just in the nick of time. Joshua has discovered the essence of futility. And the makers of this smart, thrilling and poignant piece of mainstream entertainment have found a way to explain the utter stupidity of adults in a manner that the smallest child might understand.

  The action sequences, largely based around the teen heroes’ escape from and then back into NORAD’s mountain base, are decent. Broderick and Sheedy are a great deal more charming than your average alienated teen. Badham was not interested in the teen fashion and music of the time, so, ironically, WarGames has not dated visually as much as most of its peers. But that is contrasted, amusingly, with unavoidable nostalgia for times when Space Invaders was cutting-edge video game technology and when computer hackers were seen as geniuses rather than annoying bastards that keep forcing you to change your email password. The leads are all solid, fill their archetypes with a little depth, and pull off convincing reactions to imminent disaster quite nicely.

  But everything great about WarGames is in its initial ideas and the way they are played out in one thrilling room lined with big flashing images. The movie’s end leaves you feeling genuinely relieved and a little drained. And it’s definitely the only family movie that forces you to wonder who, exactly, has their finger on the button, right now. And, if that finger slipped, whether anyone is still in a position to teach the system the true meaning of noughts and crosses.

  A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

  1984

  Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Johnny Depp, Amanda Weiss

  Dir.: Wes Craven

  Plot: The bloody birth of Fredward Scissorhands.

  Key line: ‘I know you too well now, Freddy.’

  The first things that strike you about Johnny Depp’s film debut are his big ’80s hair and his powder-blue tank top. The King Of Cool with a peacock fringe and pastel clothes . . . eee-yeww! The second is that, even under those sartorial and tonsorial conditions – the guy looks exactly the same. The guy hasn’t aged in 27 years! Is Freddy Kruger really more sinister than that?

  And the third is that Dorian Depp’s first onscreen girlfriend is toothy plain Jane Heather Langenkamp, and within ten minutes . . . she’s turned down a shag. From Johnny Depp! Forget dream-dwelling serial killers with knives for fingers . . . this is where A Nightmare On Elm Street really loses credibility.

  And the fourth thing is the excellence of the long scene that plays under the opening credits: in an industrial boiler house full of steam, dripping dirty water, filth you can touch . . . and a passing lamb. The nursery-rhyme synth music is definitive; the blonde girl in a nightdress a vivid image of innocence and vulnerability. All leading up to the fantastic jump shot, where Fred ‘not Freddy yet’ Kruger pops up from
beneath and behind her. All we know so far is that he has metal attached to his hands and he wears something that is a deep, rich red. How could any of us know that this creep would not just become familiar and famous, but strangely . . . cuddly.

  Wes Craven, who had already made low-budget cult horror history with Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes, puts all his cards on the table early. The first act of the film is a breathless scramble of dream sequences, teen dirty talk, blood, guts, teen sex and the subtext about absent fathers, as it’s revealed that local tough, handsome cop Lt Thompson (Saxon) is the father of heroine Nancy (Langenkamp), and that he and Nancy’s Mom (Blakley) are divorced and squabbling over whether their adolescent darling is being raised right.

  By that time, we’ve also seen Fred Kruger (Englund), a bogeyman deluxe made of flat hat with brim and filthy red and green-striped sweater, disfigured face, crazy extended arms and metal fingernails that scrape along walls and shred your nerves before he shreds your innards.

  And we’ve also had the first murder . . . and one that immediately raised the bar on teen slasher imagery. That same blonde girl (Amanda Weiss) not just ripped apart by those finger-knives, but lifted by something invisible and thrown around ceiling and walls as she screams in agony and finally expires in a lake of blood. This is the special effects skill and sick imagination of adult horror post-The Exorcist applied to a story which rejects the Black Christmas/Halloween (see here and here) formulas of mysterious stalker and normal killing. Apart from the grand guignol, the concept of a hideous monster that can butcher you in your dreams is fiendishly smart because the one thing you can’t run away from is your own subconscious. And also, by the end of the movie, you’re more frightened by the thought of never being able to sleep again than you are by old Fred.