Volume 8 - After Hours and the Sleepless Nightmare

The last three double features we've talked about have covered three of the best topics humanity has to offer - faith, love, and honor. But life doesn't always go that well for people, especially us ordinary folks. In fact, I'd be willing to theorize that life is best summed up by an ancient Chinese proverb I once heard. It goes something like this:

"So no one told you life was gonna be this way. Your life's a joke, you're broke, your love life's D.O.A. It's like you're always stuck in second gear. When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year."

The thing the movies don't always tell you about life is....wait.....just a minute....

OK, you're right. That was the theme song from Friends. I got mixed up for a minute there. To be fair...it sounds like Confucius.

I don't see another author here; I'm running with it.

The thing the movies don't always tell you about life is that it might not work out the way you expect it to. Sometimes you go looking for adventure and you think you're gonna get to the chorus of the Friends theme song and you think someone's gonna start screaming how they'll be there for you (when the rain starts to pour). But if that doesn't happen, you might end up stuck in a situation where you've got to improvise. Especially if it's late at night, when you might start to think you're living in a nightmare.

This week we're going on a couple of late night adventures with a couple of ordinary guys. They won't be adventures that go the way their characters expect them to, and that's part of what makes them so entertaining for us viewers.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

After Hours

1985, Directed by Martin Scorsese

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is a word processor. Which means, I think, that he types things for a living. And we don't even meet Paul when he's typing things, we meet him when he's teaching a co-worker, who just happens to be Bronson Pinchot, aka Cousin Balki from Perfect Strangers, how to type things. Does that sound like an exciting job to you? I mean, I like typing things (obviously) but that's because I'm writing them. Typing other people's things? And teaching people how to type? That just doesn't seem too fun to me.

Paul doesn't seem enthusiastic about his job either. That night, while eating at a diner near his apartment, Paul finds himself striking up a conversation with a beautiful woman named Marcy (Rosanna Arquette). She's much more interesting than word processing, and we can quickly see that he's intrigued by her presence in his life. She gives him the phone number to the apartment she's staying in, and he doesn't wait for a better opportunity -he calls her up the same night.

Marcy started this conversation with Paul because she loves the book he's reading, and that book tells us something about Paul's outlook on life right now. The book is Henry Miller's once banned Tropic of Cancer, which details the author's struggles with feeling alone and feeling irrelevant in a big city (in his case, Paris) while also chronicling his sexual encounters. Marcy likes the book because it's "a kick in the pants to truth, beauty, and God." Paul doesn't get the chance to explain why he likes the book, because Marcy cuts him off to start a conversation about a weird cashier before he can finish his sentence. He doesn't need to say it, because Paul's tone and appearance in these opening scenes show us plenty about why he relates to someone who feels alone and longs for more exciting and romantic nights in his city.

Paul's not scared to meet up with Marcy as he ventures into the New York night, yet the film makes it clear early on that he doesn't have as much control over his night as he thinks he does. During his cab ride to Marcy's Soho apartment - when the only $20 he was carrying blows out the cab's window - we start to get the feeling that this night probably won't go quite the way he thought it would. 

It would be a disservice to explain the plot of After Hours from this point forward, because what comes next is a string of unlikely coincidences that Paul definitely wasn't prepared for. A cast of fantastic actors and actresses - Linda Fiorentino, Will Patton, Teri Garr, John Heard, Catharine O'Hara, and Cheech & Chong, to name a few - each bring something different into Paul's evening as he bounces from one strange encounter to the next. Marcy is the siren that leads him toward a romantic evening - it's easy to see why he's smitten with her when she blows a kiss to a friendly diner cashier played by the great Dick Miller(!) - so when things don't go the way he expected with her Paul's night intensifies quickly.

Walking away from this evening becomes increasingly difficult for Paul, who finds himself broke and alone as he tries to find safe transportation back to his apartment. Dunne does a fantastic job of showing us the character's frustration as the night goes on, and it starts to feel like a waking nightmare where every action he takes is met by the most unfathomably random reaction. Near the end of the film, when it almost feels like a lynch mob is following him through the streets, he finally breaks down to the point where his only response to a question about what's going on is "I just want to live."  At the beginning of the night he might have said the exact same sentence with a hopeful and optimistic tone. Now it feels more like a plea to the heavens.

My favorite singer/songwriter, Warren Zevon, at least once described Martin (Marty, as he calls him) Scorsese as "the man who makes the best movies in the world." (It was when he dedicated Accidentally Like a Martyr to Marty on September 29, 1982; you're damn right I have references.) My favorite thing about After Hours might be that it feels like the kind of cynical tale that Warren would have written a song about. The whole ordeal leads to a hilarious gut punch of an ending, making it clear that Scorsese just spent an entire film lacing a comedic premise with a playfully macabre tone. The ending leaves the viewer grinning thanks to its absurdity - it's as if Paul shouldn't have even tried to change his life, but it's not a total tragedy - yet there's certainly a warning that reads like something out of a folk tale packaged with it. 

What is that warning? "Be careful what you wish for?" "Expect the unexpected?" "Don't go chasing waterfalls?" Maybe it's all three. I'll leave that decision up to you.

So, what do we want from a double feature partner?

• Paul is a great lead because he's basically a sponge that's soaking up everything around him. He doesn't really know what he's looking for as he heads out for the night, he just wants something. We need another lead like that, though I'm thinking it might be interesting to meet a man who approaches his night a little differently
• This has become something of a recurring theme in my posts: the big city setting really makes things feel more ominous as the night goes on. We have spent a lot of time in New York City so far in our double features, so maybe this time we should shake it up and take a trip to another city. Perhaps we should head to the city that Warren Zevon called home. 
• If this was Family Feud and the category was "What would make a man go on a late night adventure?" - the number one answer would most likely be "A woman." So we might as well pick another movie where we end up following a mysterious woman into a tricky situation.
• The nightmarish aspects of After Hours are what really make it so fun, because you never quite know where it's going to go next. Guys like Paul don't have a script for nights where everything seems so random and everything that could go wrong does. We need another movie that uses that uncertainty to create a frantic environment.
• After Hours gets a lot of mileage out of the constant parade of recognizable faces that show up as it moves through the plot. Scorsese was obviously a well respected director and that made it easy for him to line up so much talent, we could use a film by another director with a lot of friends who are willing to show up and chip in.

When it came time to pick a partner for After Hours, there were a lot of films running through my mind. Unlike some of the other double features I've planned, I ended up going with a film that follows a similar predicament but offers up some tonal differences. Still, I think it's a great fit.

Into the Night

1985, Directed by John Landis

After Hours and Into the Night aren't quite polar opposites - they're both films about dudes who end up lost in a city late at night thanks to a beautiful woman and their desire to do something/anything - they are coastal opposites. Unlike Paul, Ed Okin (Jeff Goldblum) lives in sunny Los Angeles. Unfortunately it's not so sunny for Ed, because he's an insomniac. Paul seems to be looking for something new and exciting; Ed just wants to get away from his sleepless existence.

Ed can't get over a lot of the little things that are boring about his life, like the fact that his wife doesn't say anything more than "Have a nice day." to him before he heads to work. He can't keep up at work, much to the chagrin of his supervisor played by David Cronenberg(!), because he forgot to switch from one arbitrary form to the next a few weeks back. So he goes home, finds his wife having an affair - and doesn't even react to it. He's too tired to even care. (In this regard, there are days when I relate to Ed so much.)

Following the advice of a coworker (Dan Aykroyd), Ed takes off on a late night drive to the airport. He doesn't really have a plan of what he's doing, so when he parks his car and stumbles upon a young woman named Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer) who's being attacked by a quartet of Iranian henchmen (one of whom is played by director John Landis), he probably surprises himself when he springs into action and helps her escape. Ed is surprised by Diana's arrival in his life, and he quickly becomes interested in helping her. He doesn't really say why, he's just content having something to do.

Paul had several women directing him through his night in After Hours, and one of the major differences between the two films is that Diana and Ed are locked together for most of the rest of this film. It's clear to see why Diana is interesting to Ed - she's a jewel thief who dresses like the lead character in another late-night-in-L.A. classic, Rebel Without a Cause - and another major shift from Paul's descent into gloom in After Hours is that Ed seems emboldened by her presence. 

As their situation becomes more perilous - crossing paths with an international rogue's gallery that includes those Iranian henchmen, a kidnapping Frenchman (Barbarella director Roger Vadim), a Greek crime boss (Irene Papas), and a British hitman (David Bowie!) - Ed's demeanor shifts from a dejected "My life isn't working out somehow." to an optimistic "Somebody had to help her, I just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time." Unlike After Hours this isn't a constant onslaught against him and there are moments of levity during the couple of days he spends with Diana. Ed knows things could go wrong at any moment, but as he moves through his sleepless existence he continues to become less afraid of anything he sees.

There are plenty of things Ed should be afraid of, and that's where the random surprises of Into the Night match up so well with After Hours. Perhaps the best sequence in the film has Ed following Diana into an upscale apartment with a bunch of televisions, all of which are simultaneously playing Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Everything is still as Ed moves through the rooms, and the loudest thing we hear is the audio from the film which - even to the trained horror fan who can tell it's the classic spoof - starts to feel like a sinister soundtrack. The payoff to this nightmarish setting doesn't disappoint, yet it's one more moment where Ed reacts more calmly than he probably thought he would when he faces danger alongside Diana.

Into the Night doesn't end with cynicism like After Hours does (Clu Gulager shows up to help wrap things up, there's nothing cynical about that!), which makes it a good second half for this double bill. Both films take us into a sleepless existence where things get far more serious than Paul or Ed ever imagined, yet the directors' wildly different skill sets provide us with two very different nightmares. After Hours and Into the Night play like the yin and yang of 1985 late night walkabouts, and maybe after they're done, you'll want to head out on your own late night adventure.

If you do, don't say that the Friends theme song and I didn't warn you that things could go wrong.