Threads

Threads

Director ~ Mick Jackson

Writer ~ Barry Hines

1984, UK

Stars ~ Karen Meagher, Reece Dinsdale, David Brierly

 

Certainly one of the grimmest of watches, and a show that surely terrified everyone that saw it, and sees it. It’s not comfort viewing, but a Nuclear Age warning. There is an inimitable grubbiness and rawness that only British television early 80s/post-70s television can convey. Dazzling effects are beyond the budget, but melting milk bottles signifies that the cosiness and discipline of civilisation is gone in an instant, and the aftermath is full of dead pets, hands, trainers and charred mouths sticking out of rubble. Civilians just dying slowly upstairs and bickering bureaucrats in the bunker. It’s just horrible, relentlessly so. Even births must be accompanied by violently barking dogs or deformed faces. No-hope nuclear fear confirmed with British TV miserabilism.

The message is loud-and-clear. Look at all the experts listed as advisors at the end, their advised facts and figures conveyed by a voiceover familiar from any public information film. And rarely has the faux-documentary aesthetic been so chillingly applied. The familiar television blandness of the opening family soap opera dramatics is wisely placed to compare with where it ends up: a post-apocalyptic world where looters are shot and the new generation survive on scraps of language and empathy. If it goes fully science fiction at the end, it’s still invested in the consequence of nuclear war and the outcome is nothing but unbearable.And in that way, a rebuke and tirade against the politics of the day.

I lived an adolescence under the dominant cultural fear of nuclear war. Pop songs in the charts regularly reminded us of the possibility. Even the fantasy post-apocalypse of ‘Planet of the Apes’, even though made the in the previous decade, seemed to have the burden of prophesy: mankind wants to and will self-destruct. But ‘Threads’ was something else, looking like the budget-compromised TV fare we were familiar with; it’s deliberate soap opera/documentary aesthetic – intertitles with horrible estimates and information on the devastation of civilisation; a chillingly detached narration omnisciently commenting and relating like a grim wildlife programme – brought it closer to home and more recognisable than it had ever been, surely. Written by Barry Hines (‘Kes’), this came like a mash-up of the mockumentary technique of Peter Watkins’ banned ‘The War Game’ and the soapier ‘The Day After’. You were worried before? This is what it looks like.

‘Threads’ was shown in schools to traumatise a generation.  It is the kind of film that quantifies that the medium isn’t just for entertainment, but for putting cultural nightmares on screen. Possibly the ugliest watch, and all the more stunning and unforgettable for that. A unique masterpiece of horror. But you'll probably only want to watch it once.

The Rules of Attraction

 

The Rules of Attraction

Director ~ Roger Avary

Writers ~ Bret Easton Ellis, Roger Avary

2002, USA, Germany

Stars ~ James Van Der Beek, Ian Somerhalder, Shannyn Sossamon

The fractured stream-of-consciousness ensemble nature is perhaps makes this the film to capture the truest sense of Brett Easton Ellis’ style, with the superficiality of the characters made compelling by aesthetic and panache. The venality; the assholeness; the privilege. At the time, Viktor’s hi-speed European trip segment was a blast of something new (and like the credits of ‘Enter the Void’ or ‘Seven’, now assimilated into everyday narrative techniques), but the rewind affectation is utilised with a confidence that says this should be thrown in with the pool with the likes of Nicolas Winding Refn and Gaspar Noé. Certainly, the Reversing Time trick is used with elegance during the opening credits and still raises goosebumps. The TOMANDANDY score and needle-drops, the wandering selfishness and loneliness, the influence of the film’s disaffection and sly nihilism over American High School cinema is probably underestimated. This and ‘The Breakfast Club’ have a lot to answer for. 

 

The cast are having a great time, going against the shallow wholesome grain that made their reputations (the Fred Savage cameo being my favourite), and are all thrilling to watch. It still retains an edginess with its formal play and character narcissism. The nadir and lack of thought comes from its date rape scene that is played with a shock-jock attitude and without any consequences or more than a flippant acknowledgement from the victim. Similarly, the suicide doesn’t have any repercussions. But the apathy is the point. Even littering an empty bottle in the corridor is a tell to the lack of caring or consideration that pervades. And of course, all this is why detractors will hate it. Much of this is the youthful affectation of “cool” and rock’n’roll posturing and one might even argue that there is a hint of growing up, of true self-reflection come the ending. Just about.

A sort of ‘Kids’ for the privileged, but Avery isn’t interested in delivering any tacked-on moral message, just leaving his protagonists baffled by themselves with no one getting what they want.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Director ~ David Lynch

Writers ~ David Lynch, Robert Engels, Mark Frost

1992, France-USA

Stars ~ Sheryl Lee, Ray Wise, Mädchen Amick

Begins with Lynch’s imitable humorous non sequiturs and eccentricities and notable cast/cameos (Isaak! Bowie! Sutherland!) with only the discordance of Badalamenti’s score to hint at what’s to come. Then, when this set-up is over, the twang of Badalamenti’s iconic theme tune kicks in and triggers a rush of instantaneous bliss for Twin Peaks fans as that beguiling Americana suburban rock’n’roll-retro-fantasia kicks in. This being a film (yes yes, it starts with the declarative destruction of a television set), there’s extra gore and the nastiness is less oblique as Laura Palmer mood-swings and spirals her way down to the inevitable. On the way, several series regulars stop by to make appearances and there’s a pitstop to a sublime Julee Cruise number. For all the dream-like and nightmarish textures, there’s always the sense that we’re only a thin layer away from the worst, from ugly neo-realism. Even the unknowable motivations, enigmas and violence of this ugliness is dressed up in the otherworldliness of the red room. Or, as Michael Wilmigton called it: "horror kitsch".

Widely critically panned at the time of release, actually it always seemed within Lynch’s spectrum. Perhaps people were expecting his more comedic, goofy side after ‘Wild at Heart’ (which I consider Lynch’s comedy), but its tone was no surprise if you were familiar with his earlier works. And for all its eccentricities, which had served him well for the series, ‘Twin Peaks’ was always about the ripple effect the murder of Laura Palmer had on the whole community and focus on her story is not a nice one which goofiness would serve well. Rather, having enticed the audience in with oddball humour, it descends into in increasingly claustrophobic nightmarishness with little reprieve. As befits the tale of a murdered girl. Lynch took the opportunity in film to show what could only been alluded to in the show ~ drugs, breasts, blood, general smalltown degeneracy.

Lynch’s insistence that dreaminess and nightmarish are interchangeable, or at least divided by a wafer-thin membrane of dissonance, is integral to his particularly unique grasp of tone. Lynch has always conveyed bleakness through this dreaminess, with the uncanny and the supernatural the only way to articulate the nightmarish forces against you and within you. Or at least to represent the cognitive dissonance plaguing the characters such as Laura Palmer. Lynch’s projection of this liminal space through both a fetishisation-homage of the mythology of an American Rock’n’Roll era and a modern horror sensibility creates something singularly appealing and disturbing. ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’ certainly shed the more superfluous Lynch fans as he headed into increasingly nightmarish supernatural cryptograms, ‘Straight Story’ excepted, and finally landed in the near-impenetrable ‘Inland Empire’.

Sheryl Lee gives a great performance, veering from wholesome to off-the-rails to traumatised as demanded by the troubled Laura Palmer. While Moira Kelly makes for a rather unmemorable Donna Hayward, it is Ray Wise that is never to be forgotten, following Willem Defo and Dennis Hopper as another Lynchian almost cartoonish portrayal of violent, unhinged, toxic masculinity. And just a glimpse of Bob clutching a chest of drawers remains an indelibly unnerving ‘Twin Peaks’ tableau.

 

 

‘Twin Peaks’ surely holds the unique position in TV history as even the dream sequences in ‘The Sopranos’ seemed permitted by Lynch’s wilful weirdness and play with the repressed. For a while after the initial series, everyone tried to be “weird” and “eccentric” (my favourite is ‘Eerie, Indiana’), but arguably it was only when the freedoms of the initial streaming age occurred that the legacy of ‘Twin Peaks’, which showed just a little loosening of the tie was popular, would reach full fruition. We have a lot to thank Lynch and Mark Frost for, even as ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ can be seen as Lynch reiterating his more oblique agenda.

And, of course, we now know there was more to come.