Lifeforce - and my negligible personal experience with it

Tobe Hooper,

1985, UK

Screenplay: Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby

+ uncredited: Michael Armstrong and Olaf Pooley

 

-1- “concerning my negligible personal connection to the film”

Throughout my youth, I lived in a maisonette with my room three storeys up overlooking fields. Across the fields, I had a clear view of the peak of the clocktower of what had been a Masonic Boys’ School but was now “The American University”, and that’s how one night I saw a glimpse of the filming of Tobe Hooper’s ‘Lifeforce’. There’s the scene where the characters helicopter in to a sanatorium grounds in pursuit of the killer alien, and that’s what I saw: the helicopter buzzing around the clocktower one night. In the “making of”, there’s the tale that Hooper was instructing the pilot to go nearer to the clocktower, dangerously, and certainly the proximity of the shot in the film does feel a little too close for comfort. And I am sure I saw some of the lightshow at the end being filmed too.

 And over a decade later, I found myself working at that location: it had not been a university for a long time and it was now just a “campus”, hosting summer schools and film crews. Ostensibly I was a general cleaner/custodian (my boss was American) so I was making up rooms for summer schools and picking up after film crews. It wasn’t unusual for me to turn a corner and bump into ‘Eastenders’ (Dot Cotton once joked that I had stolen her make-up), or a kids show being filmed, or to walk out into the quad to see a Bollywood dance routine underway. Before it closed and was turned into luxury apartments, I lived on campus for a few months on the set of ‘Children of Men’, but that’s another story. All to say that the moment in ‘Lifeforce’ where they arrive in the helicopter and you see people wandering along the walkway cloisters in the background, I used to sweep those walkways daily. It was an incredible location and I still have the fondest memories of wandering and working around it.

 When the ‘Lifeforce’ characters go to visit the woman in her apartment, that’s what was called The Headmaster’s House, and a Shiek lived there for a time when I first worked there. I walked up those stairs many times. When the character’s go inside the asylum, that mustard colour on the walls is one I knew so well: this was the colour inside every dormitory tower. There was a time when my boss had the chance to repaint, but he forked out extra money for the very same mustard colour to be specially mixed, which we staff could never understand. Anyway, for this alone, ‘Lifeforce’ will always have a particular place in my affection, for tiggering memories of a building that I loved and spent a decade in.

-2- “concerning the film itself”

 The last time I saw ‘Lifeforce’ was probably in the Eighties on VHS, so when I saw it again, streamed a couple of years ago, my first thought was that it had never looked so good. And it certainly looks great, the opening space sequence with John Dykstra’s effects being both state-of-the-art glorious and just the right side of old-school cumbersome. And that’s true of the whole film. It captures that feel of enjoyably bad-it’s-good 50s b-movies perfectly without ever quite falling over the edge… well, not if you’re a genre fan, surely.

According to the “making of”, the production of ‘Lifeforce’ was quite drug-fuelled and shambolic. An adaptation of Colin Wilson’s book ‘The Space Vampires’ (I mean, with a title like that…) by Dan O’Bannon and Don Jakoby – and with O’Bannon, you know you’re in assured b-movie hands – the plotting is crazed, going from sci-fi to zombie apocalypse and carried along by the threat of a nude woman in the most gleeful pulpy, exploitation manner. It’s a fun merger of sci-fi and gothic tropes. There are several memorable set pieces: the astronaut’s exploration of the spaceship – looking like a birth canal as well as space castle – and the wonderful/hilarious zombie puppets; a zombie dashing itself into dust against the bars of its cell a particular highlight. In this era, this kind of thing rarely got such a big budget. It’s a curio.

It’s a film for the boys. CH Newell says, “At its core, Lifeforce is the dark heart of all humankind’s anxieties about extraterrestrials” and locates the films basis in fears about aliens; but it’s even closer to home, surely, being about man’s fears of womanhood. Women are alien and in control of men’s libido, which men are helpless to, etc. There are a couple of token women at the start, but otherwise it’s mostly Mathilda May with the stunning body walking around in the nude, with other women as mostly interchangeable. There is a moment when a woman needs to be slapped around to reveal her duplicitous nature; and even in a man’s form, she’s treated aggressively into revealing herself. The naked female vampire’s sex drive is linked to death and causes an apocalypse: whole planets can be decimated by her seduction and the giant phallus in orbit. In the end, a bewildered male besotted with her must sacrifice himself heroically to her sexuality. It won’t win anything for any insight or interesting viewpoints on gender.

Henry Mancini’s score is turned right up to bombastic, featuring that militaristic undertow that b-movies of yore often had. The acting is properly earnest /wooden with only Steve Railsback overacting (perhaps appropriately) and Peter Firth enjoying playing it as superciliously as he can (“I’m a natural voyeur.”). And you have Railsback shouting at Patrick Stewart, “Listen to me, you bitch!” There’s camp value too.

I will throw ‘Lifeforce’ in with films such as ‘Killer Klowns from Outer Space’ or ‘Shrunken Heads’ or ‘The Monster Club’, or even things like ‘The Man from Planet X’: thoroughly enjoyable cheesy fun that I find myself repeatedly coming back to, although they’re no one’s idea of prime cinema.

2001: a space odyssey

Stanley Kubrick, UK

screenplay: Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C Clarke

My experience of ‘2001: a space odyssey’ begins was when I must have been around nine or ten and a man told me its story. I was dragged along for my parents’ visit to a friend, and the friend’s lodger sat with me in the lounge and he explained the tale as he played the soundtrack. The details of the moment remain very vague, but I consider this a formative childhood experience: I still remember vividly how I imagined the story’s final journey as a spaceship caught in a kind of black hole of multi-coloured crystals. And thus, my love for storytelling was taken to a brand new level. I wouldn’t see the film for a few years yet.

This was one of those films that I saw several times as a kid, every time it came on TV (pre-video era, youngsters). I don’t know when was the last time I saw this, but it must be decades. Nevertheless, it remained a vivid memory in my mind. And of course, production stills of its imagery in popular culture have never gone away so there’s always a reminder. Recently, my friend said he was going to see it at London’s Prince Charles Cinema and I thought that was a great way to see it again. It’s a film that demands the big screen.

Even as a kid, I found it enticingly abstract but hardly baffling. I knew enough science fiction as a preteen to know it was all about the ascension of man, escalating to a higher life-form, et cetera. I don’t remember such ideas ever being mystifying, although evolution wasn’t quite something I could name: after all sci-fi and religion and mythology are loaded with such transformations. These evolutionary leaps made by humankind are facilitated by the obelisk that appears to him, firstly when he is perhaps fixed in a more primal state and again when he has developed enough to go out into space and to find the next obelisk. The whole early history of man is captured in one seminal temporal jump from a bone thrown in the air to a spaceship on its way through the void. Later, it will take the form of a psychedelic light show.*

What I was struck by, seeing it now, was how Kubrick insists on conveying man’s presence in space as workmanlike and prosaic: this is all just another working day for people. When crises happen, the spacemen are cool-headed and rational, exactly as you would expect professionals to be: compare to the unimpressive hysterics of the military team in Cameron’s ‘Aliens’; the reaction of Mark Watney (Matt Damon) to his situation in Scott’s ‘The Martian’  is a natural and convincing extension of ‘2001’s sensible Kier Dulla’s Dave Bowman.  It’s a substantial imagining of working in space – meeting in space station lobbies; taking a moment to call home; media reportage – that, despite some of it’s datedness (females will be space stewardesses and, of course, how computers look), is still credible. The screens on tables, for example, surely resemble laptops and screen-calls are ubiquitous now, etc.

And then there are the spacecraft models: in an era of CGI where we are used to seeing the amazing all the time, the tangibility of these models in loving long takes are a delight. For example, see how, if you look closely, the engine vents on the craft are painted black as if from exhaust fire. Modern CGI effects extravaganzas are so used to being set on continuous “dazzle!” that this is mistaken for awe-inspiring. To think that Kubrick’s imagining of future space work was happening at the same time as the first moon landing and that it still remains credible is testimony to its attention to detail. Later, Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ and John Carpenter’s ‘Dark Star’ will add the grime of the workplace and a slacker grubbiness to space jobs. ‘2001: a space odyssey’ remains awesome.

This is achieved by themes and pace where the understatement of the human action is juxtaposed with the stunning “in space” visuals and effects, with the seminal, transcendental use of bombastic classical music. It’s use of classical music is so influential that it has by association defined the works of György Ligeti, Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss. Ligeti’s ‘Requiem For Soprano, Mezzo Soprano, Two Mixed Choirs & Orchestra’ evokes the obelisk’s eerie presence; Richard Strauss’‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ signals the moments the obelisk supercharges mankind to the next level; Johann Strauss’ ‘The Blue Danube’  treats the movement and interaction of spacecraft as a dance, for example. There are truly very few narrative beats to the story, taken from Arthur C. Clark’s ‘The Sentinel’, but the deliberate pace and the prolonging of moments allows the audience to both attune to its low key evocations and to be overwhelmed by the experience where necessary, and overall.  

To see ‘2001: a space odyssey’ on the big screen now, in all its cool majesty, is to note how much genre cinema is bombast and juvenilia. That’s part of what the sci-fi superhero genre is, so I can accept that, but offerings like ‘Ready Player One’ and ‘Alita: Battle Angel’ are thematically and dramatically stunted by comparison. For further comparison, even ‘Akira’, although set on “dazzle!”, has a sense of pace and theme, a maturity, that allows the awe-adainspiring to take hold. 

 It remains a zenith of the genre and artform, a pure visual experience with some big existential questions. ‘2001: a space odyssey’ remains awesome.

• My interpretation, even as a kid, has always aligned with what is apparently footage of Kubrick himself explaining the ending.