So, stunning action sequences involving human flesh being torn apart by really fast and agile giant spiders, and giant spiders being torn into grisly yellow gooey masses by heavy artillery, are neatly interwined with Luke–Leia–Han-esque love triangles and the sadness of watching happy-go-lucky, optimistic children become cynical, soulless zombies of death in order to survive. Kind of like Red Dawn (see here), but with big eight-legged space beasties replacing Communists, and a more despairing subtext about humanity fighting and fighting and fighting for no reason at all except that that’s what it always has done.
Oh yeah . . . and seeing Barney from How I Met Your Mother emerge at the movie’s end as a futuristic Gestapo commandant complete with long black leather coat and laconic arrogance, and not knowing whether to cheer or be very, very afraid, is just one of the many strokes of unsettling genius in one of the finest of all science-fiction films.
THE FACULTY
1998
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Clea DuVall, Elijah Wood, Laura Harris, Shawn Hatosy, Jordana Brewster, Usher Raymond, Salma Hayek, John Stewart, Bebe Neuwirth, Piper Laurie, Robert Patrick
Dir.: Robert Rodriguez
Plot: Invasion Of The Breakfast Club At Dawn Of The Dead By The Bodysnatching Things From Another World.
Key line(s): ‘Do you notice anything off today here at school?’ ‘I’m from The South. We’re all off.’
Herrington High School’s a tough school. It’s a Kevin Williamson school, so, like Scream (see here), a film about it begins with a genuinely dark and frightening prologue; a woman being chased – and caught – by a homicidal male molester-monster for reasons unknown. The action then switches to the light, bright, punk-poptastic grounds of school in the morning, where the social groupings and status of lead characters are quickly flagged up according to whether they arrive by flash car or yellow bus, whether they are alone or surrounded by friends, how hot their girlfriend is. But this school is especially extreme. Elijah Wood gets smashed in the face by the elbow of an unknown assailant, and apologises pathetically through force of Hobbit. Girls are dragging other girls out of cars and cat-fighting in the street. Plus the gothy Stokely is played by the godlike Clea DuVall, and when that girl sneers at you your testicles turn to stone . . . and whether you read that as good or bad is your call, and I’ll come back to it later.
The Faculty is astonishingly like a splattercore feature-length episode of Buffy and, like The Greatest TV Show Ever Made, it uses a horror concept as a metaphor for a universal coming-of-age experience. In Buffy, the shared schooldays-are-hell experience is simply rendered by basing the first three series in a school built on the mouth of hell. In The Faculty, the idea is just as ingenious.
Think back to your teenage school days. You are standing in the playground at break time, and there is a lull in the conversation between you and your so-called friends. You zone out and look around you. Everywhere people scurrying aimlessly or talking aimlessly or playing aimlessly. To your right, a serial bully is beating up on a kid he knows can’t fight back, and people you thought you liked are cheering, faces lit up with hysterical excitement, baying for the weak kid’s blood. To your left, your favourite teacher, shuffling towards his or her next class, and for the first time you really look at them and see just how tired and unhappy and demoralised they are, by low wages, by repetition, by disappointment. Just in front of you the girl you are hopelessly in love with is staring in awe at a spotty kid with absurd flares and a feather cut, whose family happens to be rich . . . at least, that’s what he says, to every girl. And it works. Meanwhile, that girl you used to like has just seen an Asian boy walk past her and held her nose and complained about the ‘Paki smell’. Just behind her, you see a group of boys who all play for the football team and you can vaguely overhear them calling various girls ‘fish’ and howling with laughter every time one of them says ‘spunk’. There is one pale girl sitting on a wall reading a book and a fat girl with BO, who leads a gang of fat girls with BO, knocks the book out of her hand and the boy sitting next to the pale girl . . . laughs. Then you remember that the next lesson is some time-wasting shite called Social Studies or somesuch, and that exams are coming, and that teachers keep telling you that you must knuckle down and pass these tests because your only hope in life is O levels and an office job and marry, breed, keep your mouth shut and die. And you feel yourself grown small and distant, as if you’re suddenly outside of your body and floating above this hostile, unhappy place and you get this awful fear: You’re not supposed to be here. You’re not one of them. Some awful cosmic mistake has been made because you don’t understand why these creatures act like they do and why you stay here. Maybe you’re not human. Or maybe . . . you are, and absolutely no one else is. Nobody else seems to notice how weird and terrible this place is. You’re growing away from friends you thought you loved. Maybe they’re not those people. Maybe aliens came and took them away and everyone here is an impostor . . .
And that’s The Faculty. Aliens really did come and take everyone at school away and replace them with evil doppelgangers. The teachers are injecting alien brainwash goo straight into your ears in the nurse’s room and old ladies are invading the men’s showers and stripping off . . . their skin, their hair, their scalps . . .
And only you realise; you and a very small group of other kids who you neither like nor trust but now you have to get past the fact that they’re a jock/geek/freak/dyke/bitch/drug dealer and trust them because that’s all you have. And your only weapon? Drugs! Loads and loads of homemade recreational drugs! Cool, huh? I hate Kevin Williamson. He has the ideas I wish I’d had.
The Faculty has many great, scary and funny things to recommend it. Its peril is genuinely perilous, the special effects make you gag and the gags make you laugh and there’s a girl’s head with octopus legs. It is slickly shot by Robert Rodriguez, the best big-budget B-movie maker of his generation, a man who has the technical skills to pay the exploitation bills and who genuinely understands the fun and the smartness of the genre movie. The ensemble cast are fabulous, successfully ensuring that the movie’s deliberately stereotypical post-Breakfast Club (see here)/Heathers (see here) jock and nerd and Bad Boy and Goth Girl and Teen Queen become rounded characters you grow to like very quickly. Because Kevin Williamson scripts are always tributes to his favourite movies, his castings of Robert Patrick and Piper Laurie doff an affectionate cap to The Terminator 2 and Carrie (see here) respectively, while the plot and scenario gleefully pastiches Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers, John Carpenter’s The Thing and Assault On Precinct 13 and the George A. Romero zombie movies. There are unlikely cameos from The Daily Show satirist John Stewart, Frasier’s missus Bebe Neuwirth and Salma Hayek, and they work because it seems like the entire cast are having big fun playing at being in horror movies. It effortlessly slips into that adorable Breakfast Club thing where the characters all start falling in love with the person they’re not supposed to, and we learn how not to bow to peer pressure and judge books by their covers and hug and grow and whatnot. The Alien Queen turns out to be the person you least suspect, until you think about it for around three seconds and realise that it was obvious the whole time. The day is saved but not without some seriously comic bad taste splatter. It’s a movie I watch repeatedly and, although it’s not quite as brilliant as Rodriguez’s peerless From Dusk ’Til Dawn, it ain’t too far behind.
But there are reasons, way beyond film-buff(y) stuff, that I adore this movie. Actually, reason, singular. Its name is Clea DuVall. The Faculty has much Clea DuVall. And I’m not even going to pretend this time that this is just about her abundant acting talent, although she has that, in abundance. Let’s not beat about the bush: I heart her. So much so that I would probably stalk her if I wasn’t terrified of the police and extremely lazy and could afford the flight.
If you’ve been reading the whole book up to this point you’ve probably noticed a subtextual theme. One of the reasons I love teen movies is because they fill me with nostal
gic emotions about the girls I was infatuated with as an adolescent. If you’d asked me at the time, I would have insisted, with every last pretentious right-on post-punk breath in my (much skinnier . . . sigh) body, that I didn’t have a type. But I lied like a bad rug. The girls I fell for were all the same.
Pale of skin and dark of hair and clothes. Loners. Excited suspicion and misunderstanding among their peers who were not deep and sensitive enough to understand them because they didn’t have my pure heart and beautiful soul. Listened to Crass, The Cure and The Cocteau Twins. Read Sylvia Plath, Interview With A Vampire and the monthly newsletter from the British Union Against Vivisection. Womanly of body shape and always wore billowy, Oxfam-shop clothes to try and hide it, unless they were tomboys, in which case they wore boys’ clothes. Never tanned, even in heatwaves. Changed hair colour every three months, but never blonde. Heroically refused to shave or diet and mocked girls who did. Always smelt of Patchouli oil . . . hey, gotta be a drawback somewhere.
But the clincher was . . . The Sadness. Their faces were like a dying kitten in the rain at Skegness, even when laughing uproariously at the dumbest joke on Earth, which I could usually be relied upon to tell. Some mysterious thing had befallen them when very young which had given them a kind of existential despair about the world, and when they weren’t looking like they were about to burst into tears for the fate of the entire human race, they looked angry. Frighteningly, I-may-turn-axe-murderer-if-you-play-that-Kid-Creole-record-one-more-time angry. And that scowl was always what I fell for.
Clea DuVall is that scowl in full-body form. It’s like every fibre of her being has been engulfed by lofty disgust for life itself. God, she’s beautiful.
As you can imagine, this appeal hasn’t given Jennifer Aniston any stiff competition in the box office cheesecake stakes. Men whose idea of the perfect woman is Medusa The Teenage Witch and the women who admire that are mystifyingly thin on the ground. Someone found the perfect role for her in But I’m A Cheerleader (see here) and when that wasn’t a unit-shifter – and no one loved her in the unlovable Girl, Interrupted – she drifted into a world of TV bit parts and indie movies no one’s seen, taking time out to take promotional photos for a feminist girl band who named themselves after a P.J. Harvey album. And if this gets any more like the ideal woman I’ll faint before I’ve finished this entry.
So . . . deep breath . . . The Faculty. It’s funny, scary and stars my imaginary girlfriend. Is that Clea?
PLEASANTVILLE
1998
Starring: Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon, Kevin Connor, Natalie Ramsey, William H. Macy, Joan Allen, Jeff Daniels, J.T. Walsh, Don Knott
Dir.: Gary Ross
Plot: What’s black and white and red all over?
Key line: ‘There is no right house. There is no right car.’
A TV screen flicks through channels at the speed of low attention span and finally lands upon one that specialises in nothing but vintage shows in black and white. It is plugging the Pleasantville Marathon, 24 hours of a 1950s soap from ‘kinder, gentler times’. The buoyant announcer voice is drenched in upbeat irony as we see short clips that represent the show’s cosy, pre-’60s vision of middle-class small-town life. One of its calling cards, according to the announcer, is, ‘Of course . . . safe sex’, and we’re looking at twin beds set feet yet miles apart.
Cut to future Spider-Man Tobey Maguire, looking cute but kinda nerdy, as he so often does. He is asking out a pretty blonde girl. The way the camera frames them separately as he talks and she smiles lets you know that this isn’t really happening. And it isn’t. The next shot shows the pair standing yards but miles apart, and she is talking and walking with the buffest muscle-hunk imaginable, and our boy is alone.
Cut again to high school classrooms. Teachers are delivering lectures to silent pupils about the realities of the modern world: the impossibility of finding a good job; the spread of the HIV virus; the collapse of the ozone layer. We are being dared to prefer the modern world to the clean and gentle ‘family values’ of the Pleasantville show. In each shot, the camera begins at the back of the room, and moves slowly towards the teacher, and then fades away before we make any connection . . . inches away but miles apart. Pleasantville is consumed, visually, with distance: between people, between reality and fantasy, between the ’90s and the ’50s, between what we could be at our best and what we are at our worst, beautifully encapsulated in the vital role played by a television that won’t work without a remote control. It takes a brand new cinema technology and, instead of presenting something that is all about the gimmick, uses the gimmick to write a visual poem about teenage angst, the price of freedom, the cost of repression, the American right’s relentless attempts to reject progress and reason and roll back time, the distance between our hopes and our disappointments, the pleasures of unpredictability, and, of course, love. Pleasantville is one of the best movies of all time that is almost never presented as such, and it has profound things to say about us, yet does so in such a way that you can lie back and watch the film as Back To The Future-meets-The Truman Show popcorn fun and gain just as much pleasure. The fact that it is not routinely hailed as a classic wins its own argument about our jaded times. It dares to be idealistic and optimistic without ever becoming about one person’s struggle against the odds. It’s a socialist film. It therefore remains, like socialism, underrated and loved only in secret.
Pleasantville was the first film to be entirely shot and cut on digital machinery. It’s this new technology that enables the movie’s central visual conceit: a contemporary world in colour and an imaginary ’50s world in black and white. The movie was shot in colour and the Pleasantville scenes were made monochrome by a gizmo called a Spirit DataCine. Easy-peasy now. All new in 1998.
David (Maguire) and Jennifer (Witherspoon) are middle-class teenage twin opposites. He is shy, nerdish and lousy with girls; she is brash, horny and spoiled. So every day is Geek vs Mean Girl, and you suspect, without too much back-story, that that usually ends in the predictable way. David is immediately sympathetic and Jennifer immediately annoying, and you naturally take sides when, left on their own in the house, David wants to watch the old ’50s show he has become geekily obsessed with, and she wants to watch MTV before going out with her latest hunky-but-stupid conquest.
This is also a wry comment on a truth about kids. When you meet a teenager there’s a quick way to tell if they’re an essentially well-adjusted and decent human, or angry kid who is already working out how best to undermine and humiliate you. Nope, its nothing to do with hoods, baseball caps, mobile phone or glottal stops. You just mention some undeniably cool old thing. Could be The Beatles or Public Enemy. Could be Reservoir Dogs or Some Like It Hot. Could be rockabilly clothes or hippie clothes. If they go, ‘UHH?’, and make some face like you crawled from a rock, and start texting furiously . . . Ah well. If they get all excited and start asking you if you’ve read anything by Jack Kerouac and listen to Marvin Gaye, you’re on to a winner. The more retro a kid is, the more they read, the more engaged they are with the world, the less axe they have to grind. If a kid’s only interest is what’s hot this very second, all hope is lost. Consumerism and peer pressure’s got ’em. Pleasantville is about all this, too.
Anyway, the TV remote gets lost, they ring for a repairman, and this old weird guy (Knotts) who is just a little too obsessed with Pleasantville shows up. A couple of presses on a brick-like remote control later, and David and Jennifer are now called Bud and Mary Sue. They live in black and white, are wearing Grease cast-offs and negotiating the kind of breakfast – pancakes, bacon, sausages, eggs, all drowned in syrup – that would make any vain and health-conscious modern clean teen turn bulimic.
Despite their horror, Pleasantville does have its fringe benefits. The sexy basketball captain Skip (Connor) fancies Jennifer/Mary Sue. The monochrome sun is always shining. The fire department only rescue cats because fire does not exist.
Gradually, Pleasantville itself beco
mes a comment, not on old TV or ’50s values, but middle-America 1998. When the teacher explains in a geography lesson that nothing exists outside the two main streets of the town, and the kids beam with relief, this is a modern America that still only watches local news, won’t travel, is frightened of what lies outside of its own neighbourhood. And when David discovers that every basketball goes in the hoop, no matter where and how you throw it, this is an America that only loves winners.
The problem is that David and Jennifer shouldn’t be there, and therefore cannot help but disturb the (un)natural order of things by having a need – to return home – that isn’t part of the show’s script. When David/Bud advises Skip that he shouldn’t ask out Mary Sue/Jennifer, and therefore fulfil his TV destiny, Skip is immediately plunged into a kind of existential despair. He throws the basketball in anger and . . . it doesn’t go in the hoop. And the world begins to tip into chaos.
Eventually we come to realise David and Jennifer’s purpose in this world. They are here to free the repressed, cause a revolution, paint the town red and . . . invent the 1960s. How they do so is a pure joy, largely involving a symbolic court battle against McCarthyism and Creationism, and introducing the good folk of Pleasantville to the joys and agonies of sex and violence.
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