The success of Clueless (it spawned a TV spin-off series and cash-in books) and its clever Austen concept also sparked a brief trend for teen adaptations of classic novels and plays: from the excellent Les Liaisons Dangereuses remix Cruel Intentions (see here) to the not-so-great likes of Ten Things I Hate About You (1999 – The Taming Of The Shrew), O (2001 – Othello) and She’s All That (1999 – Pygmalion). Baz Luhrmann’s whizz-bang take on Romeo And Juliet (see here) is a little different because its dialogue remained true to the original text. But it was given permission to exist by Heckerling’s simple discovery that a proven idea can always be remade about and for the modern teenager.
Clueless follows the plot of Emma fairly closely. Spoiled but essentially decent girl with wealthy widowed father interferes in everyone’s love lives until finally learning that love is too irrational to be based upon logic and status, and therefore finally finding love herself.
Everyone lives happily ever after, but the plot was never Emma’s point. It was a sly satirical comedy of the upper-middle-class manners of its time, and this is where Heckerling works her magic. She makes merry sport with the American high school mores, stereotypes, consumerist obsessions and popularity-at-all-cost values that had become the lingua franca of teenage image since the ’80s impact of the classic John Hughes movies, with the added ingredient of wonderfully conceived exaggerations of the slang of the period.
Hur. Sorry. Writing the word ‘period’ has reminded me of the bit where Cher describes her monthlies as ‘riding the crimson wave’. Hur. Brilliant.
Sorry . . . back now. But no matter how skilled Heckerling’s writing and directorial comic touches are, the film would embody exactly the kind of superficial self-regard it parodies without a fabulous lead performance by Ms Silverstone. She carries almost every second of the movie with effortless aplomb and gigantic amounts of the crucial element: charm. Even those of us who have little time for vapid American blondes are forced to swoon at the sheer force of her optimism, the naivety of her relentlessly positive view of life and people, and her really good dress sense. She personifies that hugely annoying but essential person in your life who always, by smiling and flirting and flattering you with just the right balance of gaucheness and irony, gets you doing things you don’t want to do for no reward, like that scene in How I Met Your Mother where they all find themselves helping Barney move into his new apartment on their one day off, and look at each other and say, ‘How the hell did that happen?’ She’s the angelic mirror to Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick in Election (see here): Tracy could somehow control you, too, but, afterwards, you’d hate her and yourself. Cher would use you and make you love it.
The entire ensemble cast are great, especially Dash, Breckin Meyer as slacker surf dude Travis, baby-faced comedy assassin Paul Rudd as Cher’s pseudo-intellectual stepbrother, and, of course, the much-missed Brittany Murphy as Cher’s very own Frankenstein’s monster, Tai. When Ms Murphy died suddenly in December 2009, aged 32, in one of those drug-related celebrity deaths which never gets adequately explained, cinema lost one of those rare lead actresses whose beauty and talent were buoyed by the kind of rough edges possessed by women who live in the real world. She doesn’t quite steal the show from Silverstone here, but she is quirky, and funny, and just a little sad.
So . . . favourite scenes. At one point, Cher’s past tense voiceover opines that she felt ‘impotent and out of control, which I really hate. I needed to find sanctuary in a place where I could gather my thoughts and regain my strength.’ Cue a rumble of kettle drums building to a lush, romantic orchestral theme of Gone With The Wind proportions – and a shot of the Westside Pavilion shopping mall.
Then there’s the bit where teacher Mr Hall announces that Travis has the worst record for punctuality and, buoyed by the applause, Travis walks up to Hall’s front-of-class lectern and makes an Oscar-style acceptance speech: ‘This is so unexpected . . . Many people have contributed to my tardiness . . . I’d like to thank the LA city bus driver for taking a chance on an unknown kid . . .’
And the freeway scene. You see, Americans give driving licences to rich kids as easily as British governments give control of vital national institutions to Rupert Murdoch, so, when Dionne gets into the wrong lane while driving badly around their leafy, car-less suburb and ends up in actual traffic, mayhem – marauding bikers, middle-finger-raising grannies, hilarious screaming – ensue. It’s a neat way to say that these kids are institutionalised within their wealthy enclave and have not been prepared for . . . well . . . people. Donald Faison, who plays Turk in Scrubs, is very good in this bit.
But despite establishing so much of the language, the look and the tone of future teen screen comedy-drama, Clueless remains an unusual teen comedy. While the satire at the expense of the rich and vacuous is the whole of the point, the lampooning is affectionate and good-natured. The characters are all essentially lovable and there are no bad guy ciphers or mocked victims. The relatively high presence of black teens in this definitively Caucasian milieu seems like a little white lie told with good intentions. The sex gags are sly innuendo rather than gross-out; tongue in cheek, not penis-in-pie. There is little slapstick or clowning – the laughs all come from dialogue (particularly the brilliant narration) and wry visual jokes, like the terrible portrait of Cher’s dead mom, Dionne’s outrageous hats and, often and uniquely, very pretty, peppy girls smiling just a little too enthusiastically at the camera. While almost every other American teen movie snarls at the rich, the film that satirises them with the greatest enthusiasm is charmed by them. Not with any serious, pro-conservative cheerleading for greed or privilege; but more of a philosophical shrug and a wry smile and a suggestion that, when all is bought and sold, the rich are people too. An unfashionable thought, but certainly one worth considering. Watch back-to-back with Society (see here) and the truth about the Hollywood wealthy undoubtedly lies somewhere between the two.
LA HAINE
1995
Starring: Vincent Cassell, Hubert Kounde, Said Taghmaoui, Karim Belkhadra
Dir.: Mathieu Kassovitz
Plot: Why do ‘they’ riot? It’s just not a black and white issue.
Key line: ‘Do you know the one about the guy falling from a 50-storey building? To reassure himself, he keeps repeating: “So far, so good. So far, so good . . . ”’
La Haine is one of the most powerful, controversial and acclaimed films of the 1990s. Its shock value derived from learning that the ‘Hate’ – to give the film’s title its English translation – of the urban young for the modern world we have made for them was exactly the same in Paris as it was in London, or Baltimore, or Palestine or Rio de Janeiro.
It was shot in black and white, making it feel timeless and movable to any city or era that the viewer chose to project upon it. It reflected the confusion that each new generation felt about race, as we met a Jewish skinhead who hung out with an Arab and an African, and it foreshadowed the sharp rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme right Le Front National party in France. It was inspired by the 1993 shooting of a young Zairean boy while in police custody in Paris, and went on to predict that the kind of anti-police riot that results from such incidents would become less politicised and more opportunistic. But it is also about the masochism of people who protest by destroying their own neighbourhoods, destroying in seconds what friends and neighbours have taken years to build. It began with real footage of Parisian riots that began in 1986 and have never entirely gone away. It won its director, a French-Hungarian Jew who admitted that he had taken part in some of those riots, the coveted Best Director prize at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, and launched the career of a major international star in the malevolently charismatic Vincent Cassell. And its influence looms over every subsequent juvie movie, from City Of God to Kidulthood to The Class, because it is an object lesson in how to make a political film exciting to someone who rejects politics by way of tight, dynamic plot, snappy authentic dialogue, brilliantly shot action scenes, and the
kind of profane and nihilistic humour that is the major survival mechanism of the urban underclass.
The story begins with a news report about an Arab youth called Abdel, who has been badly beaten while in police custody, and the resulting street battles and lootings. We then cut to a housing project on the outskirts of Paris, and meet three boys who have nothing useful to do. Said (Taghmaoui) is an Algerian pretty boy who likes to graffiti on police vans while they’re busy looking scary and paramilitary. Vinz (Cassell) is a crop-headed Jewish muscle-boy who prefers pretending to blow people away as he practises Travis Bickle’s ‘You talkin’ to me?’ speech from Taxi Driver in the mirror. Hubert (Kounde) is a charming black boxer and dope dealer who owned a gym that has just been destroyed in the previous night’s rioting and who, after being punished for attempting to do something positive for the community, now just wants to escape the conflict and poverty of his sink estate.
They amble around their dystopian environment full of riot-fucked buildings and cars and scrawled with graffiti like ‘Your Mother Sucks Bears’, smoking dope, talking amusing macho bollocks to each other and their fellow hooded and track-suited youths, discussing their response to the endless provocations of the tooled-up police who hang around the estate, gagging for trouble.
As the trio graffiti us a picture of one day in their aimless lives, they are interrupted by the arrival of the Mayor on a media walkabout to show his concern; cops who attempt to move any assembly of youths to somewhere else, in the hope that they will either go home or riot; TV news crews trying to get good shots of disaffected yoof; younger kids telling directionless stories about what they saw on TV last night. And a cow. Can’t forget the cow.
Eventually, Vinz confesses to his two compadres that he has found the gun that a cop lost on the estate in last night’s disturbances. The suspense of what Vinz intends to do with his newfound power grows organically with the rising tension on a riot-torn estate that is sitting around waiting for night to fall.
Any attempt to escape the estate just reinforces the fact that these kids are not wanted in the rest of France. A visit to the hospital to see their injured friend ends in arrest for the three musketeers. They enter a police station that has obviously been attacked in the riot, and the cops glare at them like gunslingers in a western, thirsting for their blood. They escape unscathed because of the decent Arab cop who has taken them in. But Vinz won’t acknowledge this copper’s attempts to build bridges. With his endless talk of ‘pigs’, he dehumanizes the police in the way he perceives he has been dehumanized. Hate doesn’t see individuals or judge by content of character.
A shooting and arrest on the estate brings out the riot police. Vinz pulls a gun on a cop, is prevented from using it by a Hubert right hook, and the three are on the bus to the big, bad city, Vinz exhilarated by the experience, Hubert sinking further into sullen introspection. The movie becomes a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress through a surreal Paris, with the three conjuring political and philosophical bon mots while encountering numchuck-wielding coke dealers, corrupt police sadists, the shooting of a nightclub bouncer, an old man with a story about shit, a party in a bourgie art gallery, posters telling them that the world is theirs and, on a giant TV the news that their friend Abdel is dead. The crunch comes when, after all those lectures from Hubert about Vinz’s gun fantasies, Vinz uses the gleaming Magnum 44 to rescue Hubert and Said from a beating by racist skinheads – and you are watching a Jewish skinhead consider murdering a Nazi while his black and brown friends try to stop him, and your short-circuited sympathies are all over the place, and Cassell is incendiary.
As the ending says, it isn’t the fall that matters, it’s the landing. And La Haine lands in a self-perpetuating and tragic place that deliberately calls back through the years to The 400 Blows (see here) and asks you what you are going to do to stop it. Its soundtrack ticks like a time-bomb. But the film is in black and white and there’s no way to tell which colour wire to cut to defuse it.
SCREAM
1996
Starring: Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Matthew Lillard, Drew Barrymore, Jamie Kennedy, Rose Macgowan
Dir.: Wes Craven
Plot: Slasher master brutally slaughters his own creation.
Key line: ‘They’re all the same. Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act who’s always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door. It’s insulting.’
Scream’s opening scene is a writing, directing and acting masterclass. It has to be, to earn the rest of the movie’s right to eat itself. If we’re going to watch a horror film based entirely on wry jokes about horror films, and it’s not going to just be Airplane! with fewer belly laughs, then Scene One has to draw us into the possibility that this film will be genuinely scary.
Drew Barrymore is alone in one of those houses that hollers ‘wealthy suburb. No one can hear you scream.’
She is making popcorn. The phone rings and the guy has a wrong number, but he keeps calling back. He has one of those voices which can sound perfectly charming at one pitch, and genuinely creepy at another. He phone-flirts with her and she engages. He is asking her whether she likes scary movies. He lets slip that he’s watching her.
She begins to panic and hangs up. He calls back and makes it clear that she’d better not hang up again. It’s a cordless phone, and the camera follows her around this light, bright beautiful home with the huge, leafy garden and the picture windows as it begins to feel like a pretty prison. The music builds with drones and carefully placed echoey thumps when the caller tells Drew something she doesn’t want to hear. Incidentally, the legend that is Ms Barrymore is playing a teenage girl called Casey Becker, but there’s something about the scene that makes you feel that you’re watching Drew Barrymore being terrorised. The fact, perhaps, that they don’t make her change look or demeanour in order to seem teenage. We love Drew Barrymore, and we don’t want her to die.
It turns out that our caller has Casey’s boyfriend tied up in the garden, where she can see him. The only way she can save him from being slaughtered is by answering trivia questions about teen slasher movies. The level of terror that Barrymore generates here is extraordinary. Her complete meltdown is what ensures that the scene is not remotely funny.
Turns out her horror movie knowledge is poorer than she thought. She forgets that the killer in the first Friday The 13th is not mutant baby Jason, but Jason’s mom Mrs Voorhes. Boyfriend’s a goner, she’s next. Home is invaded. Chase ensues.
She eventually escapes into the garden with the cordless phone and tries to make a run for it. She is chased down and caught by a man (we assume) in a black cape and a mask modelled on the anguished face in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. At this point, we assume that someone (her parents are on the way home) will save her. This is the opening scene and this is Drew Barrymore. If you’ve shelled out the money to get Drew Barrymore in your dumbass slasher flick, you don’t kill her off after ten minutes . . . do you? But Ghostface has a big knife and the cavalry ain’t coming. He stabs her, repeatedly, with convincing sound of sharp implement sinking into flesh.
Mom and Dad have arrived home. They see signs of struggle, panic. Mom picks up the phone. She hears the unmistakable gurgling sounds of her daughter dying. They run out into the garden. The horror registers on Dad’s face. Their daughter’s broken and beaten body is hanging from a tree, like those sickening pictures of lynched black men from the 1920s. The camera zooms into her mutilated face. Cut!
I still remember seeing all this for the first time at the cinema. I was as bewildered as I was horrified. All the reviews had banged on about how this was a horror spoof where director Wes Craven takes the piss out of himself with an overload of references to movies like Halloween (see here), A Nightmare On Elm Street (see here) and Prom Night. I, and the rest of the audience, was not prepared to see Drew Barrymore convincingly and sadistically butchered. In fact, nothing so seriously scary happens anywhere else in S
cream. But the first scene leads you to believe that it will. The jokes flew thick and fast, and various characters goofed around, and you had your fun picking out which 15 movies got referenced. But you were constantly tensed for something that actually hurt. The opening scene makes the movie work.
Scream is often credited with single-handedly reviving the horror genre. It was a huge box office success and has spawned three (increasingly lame) sequels to date. Its life-imitating-film-imitating-life postmodernism fulfilled its own destiny in two very different ways.
In 2000 an Airplane!-style take on slasher movies called Scary Movie was released and became a hit. Not only was Scream its major source of gross-out laffs, making it a postmodern spoof of a postmodern spoof, but also Scary Movie had been the original title of Scream before producer Bob Weinstein came up with his clever one-word idea. Like Scream, Scary Movie is now a sequel-spawning franchise, complete with spin-offs like Epic Movie, and so on and so forth.
On an even more dispiriting note, Scream was accused of inspiring copycat murders. In 1998 and 1999, detectives investigating two killings involving teens found Scream paraphernalia – including the Ghostface mask – among the killers’ possessions. The resulting moral panic got as far as members of a US Senate committee being forced to watch Scream’s opening scene while tutting loudly. Kevin Williamson’s screenplay was initially inspired by a real-life killing spree by notorious serial killer Daniel Harold Rolling aka The Gainesville Ripper, who murdered five students in one night in 1990, killed eight people in all, and was executed by lethal injection in 2006. Is this what they mean by ‘the circle of life’?
Having written the most self-referential script ever, Williamson actually had an answer prepared just in case anyone accused his horror movie of inspiring violence. He put it into the mouth of one of his Ghostface killers in Scream itself: ‘Don’t blame the movies, Sid. Movies don’t create psychos. They make psychos more creative.’
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