Christmas song (12/24/96)
____________
Barb Wire. [David Hogan, 1996.]
Disturbing rumors had reached my ears regarding the narrative antecedents of
Barb Wire, the new futuristic action/adventure/mammaryfixation feature produced by everyone who could get a piece of it and starring the celebrated megabimbo Pamela Anderson (Lee), but I’d chosen to ignore them. My tastes, after all, are simple: I’m fond of these vehicles that serve to introduce the latest B-girls to the virtual drive-in, and if you tell me, as in the case at hand, that the year is 2017 and a dedicated Resistance is waging a heroic twilight struggle against a despotic central government, I’ll expect, at worst, leatherclad punkerbabes careening round the postindustrial ruins of the western deserts in rusting hotrods: boobs and bazookas;
Mad Max Beyond Wonderbra.
But big-budget filmmaking is itself an exercise in the action/adventure genre, filled with comicbook characters, colorful explosions, and women whose clothes keep falling off, and when too much money starts chasing an illconceived project, it may, like the stuntman’s motorcycle, hurtle off the road into empty space. It’s unfortunate, therefore, that the Hollywood imagination contains so much empty space: you might strike another planet before you strike a fresh idea; or (more to the point) the appropriate stale one.
Which is to say, alas, the rumors all are true. Barb Wire is a note-for-note remake of
Casablanca, with: an evil dictatorship called the Congressional Directorate as the Nazis; Steel Harbor (“the last free city in America”) as Casablanca; an industrial-warehouse nightclub called the Hammerhead as Rick’s; a magical pair of contact lenses which render the wearer undetectable to retinal scans as the stolen Letters of Transit; a conscience-stricken renegade government scientist named Cora D. as Paul Henreid; a bland hunk named Axel Hood as Ingrid Bergman; a slimy hood named Schmitz as Peter Lorre; a corrupt cop named Willis as Claude Rains; a repellent thug named Colonel Pryzer as Conrad Veidt; the last helicopter out of Seattle as the last train out of Paris; a corpulent mob boss named Big Fatso as Sydney Greenstreet; Wild Turkey (thanks to energetic product placement) as the hitherto anonymous whiskey Rick swilled to drown his sorrows; a catchall Daddy Warbucks clone named Curly to stand in for S. Z. Sakall, Madeleine LeBeau, Leonid Kinskey, and Dooley Wilson; and, preposterous though this may seem, an emphatically three-dimensional lady terminator named Barb Wire (the redoubtable Ms. Anderson) as Humphrey Bogart. Who said the fundamental things apply?
Not that this isn’t fun to watch. True, art is usually supposed to be the pure work of the imagination. But then again (as Edison said) genius is at best one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. And whatever the quality of their inspiration, no one can fault the work ethic of our authors, who send vital fluids pumping to the remotest extremities from the first frames of this opus, opening with a stunning title sequence, a flamboyantly-lit rock-video montage of Pam, solo, performing a dazzling striptease while swinging on a trapeze and being hosed down, apparently, by most of the Steel Harbor fire department. — One must admire such uncompromising candor. Feebler characters might attempt somehow to appease the critics. But Mr. Hogan and his colleagues make it clear they have nothing to offer us but blood, toil, tits, and sweat.
This introduction concludes (in apparent homage to Ursula Andress in
The Tenth Victim) when our heroine — who is, it develops, performing in front of an audience — takes offense at the attentions of a particularly obnoxious patron and nails him between the eyes with a skillfully-thrown stiletto heel — passing sentence on him with her signature line: Don’t Call Me Babe. Indeed, perish the thought.
I don’t know about Pam, but here I had to pause to towel myself off. When I returned I found the story developing along familiar lines: Ms. Wire, proprietor of the Hammerhead, is an embittered former Resistance leader who moonlights for illdefined reasons as some kind of mercenary/private-eye. Her distinguished position (sooner or later everybody comes to, etc.) ensures that the magical lenses drop neatly into her lap; pursued, naturally, by her ex-boyfriend and his new spouse Cora, who flee, in turn, the evil Congressionals/Nazis. This entails the familiar dilemma: should she sell the lenses for her own profit and fly away to Paris? or give them to the good guys, and let them run the blockade to Canada?
What renders the original
Casablanca distinctive, of course, is the ambiguity of the character of Rick, whose intentions remain unknown and unreadable until literally the last moment. Indeed, famously, no one — not the writer, not the director, not the actors — knew how the story would end until they’d filmed one version of the final scene, looked at it, and decided not to film another. Modern audiences, however — not to mention modern writers, directors, and would-be actresses — do not embrace such nuances gladly, and, accordingly, Pam (who is nothing if not unambiguous) is provided with a blinded war-hero brother whose welfare she’d unselfishly be advancing if she were to take the money and run. Naturally this means a way must be found to kill the sibling off before the denouement; but that’s a relatively minor detail of the narrative machinery, which must in any case effect the transformation of the oldfashioned dramatic tension which animated the antique melodrama into the now-essential third-act bloodbath. And they say there’s no such thing as progress.
In the course of this action we explore a couple of beautiful warehouse sets and an elegantly distressed shipyard, observe a number of colorful detonations, learn some really cool twentyfirst century brainscanning interrogation techniques (which, fortunately, don’t seem to have eliminated the necessity of torturing naked women), meet a junkyard dog named Camille with an amusing taste for biker dick, and study Pam attentively as she experiments with a dazzling variety of arresting postures from which to fire her many weapons. At the last, naturally, we welcome the richly-deserved demise of all of the bad guys; and find ourselves trying to take seriously the barely-disguised implication that the Second World War would have been just this simple, had the Allies displayed the appropriate combination of attitude and fashion sense.
The finale, now (in the absence of suspense about Pam’s intentions) a mere coda, is letter-perfect, complete with airplane, rain, umbrellas, fog, and the row of landinglights in the background as our heroine walks off into the night — sans faux-Claude-Rains, of course, who simply doesn’t seem to measure up. (As indeed who could: Tommy Lee must already be perusing catalogs for marital aids.) — And though none of the principals can be persuaded to wear anything so pedestrian as a trenchcoat, given the obvious effort the costumers put into designing leather bustiers, one simply can’t complain. — Again (as I think of it) though I’d have to put a call through to Joe Bob to be sure, I suspect the scene in which Pam leaps from the tub to gun down an intruder while clad in nothing but strategically-deployed soapsuds may be unique in the history of cinematic bubblebath.
Of course the moral of this spectacle is problematic.
What the narrative conveys (I find that I’m unable to throttle the urge to refer to it as the ideological substrate of the filmic text) is, at bottom, determined by the fact that it is a translation of the original
Casablanca into the action/adventure genre. Though it’s easy to make fun of this, the exercise is not illegitimate a priori: after all, Kurosawa obtained brilliant results translating
Macbeth and
King Lear into samurai movies (
Throne of Blood and
Ran, respectively); projects which, before the fact, might have seemed equally silly.
In fact the problem doesn’t necessarily lie in the idea of making
Casablanca over as an action/adventure picture; it lies instead in the rather narrow contemporary interpretation of that genre, which is peculiar to the culture of Hollywood as presently constituted and to the audience Hollywood has trained to share its preconceptions.
For the modern action movie instantiates a sort of demented Calvinism: throughout the gunbattles, the carchases, the explosions, and the slaughter, there are the few, God’s elect, the chosen, who will survive to make the sequel; and the many, the fallen, the mere casualties, who (riddled by bullets, flattened into road pizzas, impaled on meathooks) will not. The former are named above the title, receive gross points, and are profiled in
People magazine; the latter are enumerated at the end of the closing credits, get union scale, and are lucky if they’re listed in the Internet Movie Database.
There are winners and losers, in short; and about them the classic statement is now that of Sean Connery to Nicolas Cage: “Losers are always whining that they did their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.” Clearly this is an idea that must seem profound in Hollywood, a town populated exclusively by prom queens and the guys who fucked them.
But
Casablanca is a movie about losers. It is set in 1941: the war in Europe at this point has been horribly lost. If there is a prom queen to be found here, she is Paris; and the Wehrmacht is having a gangbang at her expense. Thus the story, insofar as Hollywood could now discover one, is already over; and had no happy ending. The characters who populate the scenario are the powerless — refugees, émigrés, the damaged and the dispossessed, helpless and desperate fugitives on the run; they are not larger than ordinary men and women, quite the contrary, they are eccentric, individual, small, mean — though gradually it may dawn upon us that this is something like life and not like a movie and that these are in fact just like real survivors, the quick and the fortunate who are not the dead. Indeed the purported hero, Rick, is singled out not as the bravest or the strongest but only as the quickest and the cleverest: the first rat to have fled the sinking ship. And though the modern action picture must be constructed around some kind of superman who can walk out into the street and face down, say, the German army, as Stallone or Arnold might, with a few karate kicks and some random gunfire — in fact just as Pam faces down the Congressionals — in
Casablanca it is quite the opposite: the supermen are the Germans; they are invincible monsters, beyond the capability of the protagonists even directly to confront, let alone to overcome. Certainly Rick will not confront them; not until the last, and then not by choice.
Worst of all, and most unthinkable, he has to give the girl away. And though it’s always easy, really, to forget the prom queen, it is absolutely impossible to forget Ingrid Bergman.
But the moral of
Casablanca is just the moral of the last good war: that one must learn to lose gracefully. For it may be that if you keep your head, wait your chance, watch for your moment, you may not have lost for good and all. That caution, a cool head, and a calculated persistence will eventually prevail, that they are in the end infinitely more valuable than brute strength and theatrical bravado; that even the nobility and élan of a Victor Laszlo, however admirable, can accomplish little against an ultimate evil wielding overwhelming force; that what will finally prevail will be the consistent exercise of rational intelligence, even manipulative cunning — the qualities exemplified by Rick.
None of this is new. In the first action movie in the Western tradition — the
Iliad — the Trojan war was won not by the martial exploits of the hero Achilles but by the cunning stratagems of the wily Odysseus. — Though now, naturally, you have to wonder whether Homer would be able to get an agent; and, if anyone were to hire him, what kinds of notes the studio executives would give him on his scripts.
Why does
Casablanca seem so alien to the contemporary culture of Hollywood? Perhaps it is no accident that the strutting Nazis who march into Rick’s expecting the best table as the right of the conquerors would not seem out of place in the restaurants where the brokers of the motion picture industry take power lunch. For (in fact) as the theology of Hollywood is Calvinist and its culture is elitist, the ethic of its most characteristic product, the action/adventure, is fundamentally fascist. Thus it should be no surprise that the essential lessons of
Casablanca — that diversity must prevail over elitism, democracy over fascism, pluralism over monism — cannot be reproduced in a modern (major) motion picture; and certainly not in this one. There were a lot of blonde bimbos in leather in the real war against the Nazis; but they were all on the other side.
One apparent subtext begs mention: save for the obligatory overhead shot of Barb and her ex kissing in a descending freight elevator (completely unmotivated as always, but, as always, who cares: it’s a great shot), romance is absent, and (in fact) Ms. Wire seems always to choose to spurn her many suitors with fatal gunfire. I presume that this is meant to convey some kind of Revolt Of The Sex Object; with which I’m sure in other circumstances I might sympathize. But, really, when these gestures originate with a character who spends most of the movie changing her clothes in front of the camera, a character depicted by a young woman, incidentally, whose nude poses fill volumes, whose lips are now swollen to the size of bicycle tires, whose mammaries have metamorphosed into silicone footballs, and whose honeymoon video mysteriously materialized on the desk of the publisher of
Penthouse on the very eve of the release of this motion picture, these protests lack, shall we say, a certain resonance.
And, indeed, whither Pam? No doubt it is presumptuous to try to guess what inspiration may next descend from Olympus onto the laureled brows of the high priests of high concept, but I can’t help but wonder: Pam as Klaus Kinski in
Aguirre, The Wrath of God? Pam as Orson Welles in
Touch Of Evil? Pam as Toshiro Mifune in
The Seven Samurai? Pam as Erich Von Stroheim in
Grand Illusion? But take my vote for this last. I rather fancy Pam the fallen aviator ensconced in her medieval castle: screwing in her monocle, clicking her bootheels, toasting her Allied prisoners in champagne, sniffing sadly at her lone geranium, tucking herself into an amazing variety of corsets. And say what you will about Von Stroheim — that he was a great artist of the cinema, a genius, a grand auteur, a master of mise-en-scene, though nonetheless a spendthrift, a poseur, the selfinvented epitome of European decadence — The Man (in short) You Loved To Hate — say what you will about Von Stroheim, you must remember this: no one ever called him Babe.
____________On “Cogito, ergo suck” (7/23/96)
