Why Didn't You Help Me?

[Spoilers for Stuart Gordon's Stuck follow]

Stuart Gordon’s Stuck is based on the true story of Chante Jawan Mallard, who, one night while driving drunk and high on Ecstasy, ran into Gregory Glen Biggs with such force that his body was thrown halfway through her windshield. Instead of stopping, she drove home with Biggs, who at this point was still alive, stuck there. She parked her car in her garage and left him, where he died about two hours later. Which means there was plenty of time to save his life, but Mallard, a nurse, never called anyone to help. Until after he’d died, that is, at which time she sought help from her brother who helped dispose of the corpse.

This was in 2001, and was a big news story, as tends to be the case when someone behaves in a fashion either so brutal or so callous that most people (let’s hope) have a hard time even processing the information. The case was mined for TV episodes here and there, but the only person to approach it cinematically is Gordon, he of Re-Animator and From Beyond fame. Though Stuck is regularly categorized as a horror film – and the material could certainly have been used that way – it’s closer to Edmond among Gordon’s work, and is still different from that film in that it is really a crime film (a fact which would seem to pair it off naturally with Gordon’s King of the Ants, except that nothing pairs off naturally with King of the Ants) about, as so many crime films are, moral decay. Very sudden moral decay, moral decay depicted via time-lapse photography. In the film, Mena Suvari plays Brandi (Stuck is heavily fictionalized, so the characters’ names have all been changed and so forth), a nurse at an elderly care facility, as was Mallard. Intriguingly, she is shown early in the film to be good at what she does, and caring. This is done in a very Stuart Gordon-ian way by having one of her patients defecate in his bed, a regular occurrence, the nasty clean-up of which the patient always insists be done by Brandi (not out of any kind of demented cruelty, we gather, but because she is a comforting presence for the old man). I can’t really imagine doing a job like that, day after day, so from where I sit Brandi, at this early stage, occupies a higher plane of selflessness than I can claim for myself. She doesn’t perform this task, or any part of her job, with huffy disdain, but as warmly and professionally as she can. She is good enough at her job, in fact, that her boss (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon) hints that she is being seriously considered for a promotion.


But as we will soon learn, Brandi is nowhere close to being perfect. In her off hours, she associates with drug dealers, such as her boyfriend, Rashid, played by Russell Hornsby. It is after a night of revelry, or debauchery, depending on how you approach such things, that Brandi thinks nothing of driving home high and intoxicated, and plows into Tom (Stephen Rea), whose sad state of affairs, which includes joblessness and homelessness, has been playing out in parallel with Brandi’s day. Outside of one homeless man (Lionel Mark Smith), among whose ranks Tom now finds himself, no one has treated him with any kindness on the day that would appear to be his last. He’s been given several choices – by his awful landlord, by an obnoxious case worker at a job interview – that offer no choice at all. Vacate your apartment and leave all your belongings until you can pay the rent, or else. Fill out and mail in the form that got you this interview in the first place, but which has been lost, or have no shot at the job. Now that he finds himself near death and pinned by broken glass in Brandi’s windshield, the choice is all Brandi’s. And of course, she considers it no choice at all: go to prison, or let the man die.

Here is where Stuck deviates pretty drastically from the case of Mallard and Biggs, because Stephen Rea's Tom doesn't die. As Brandi goes about her life, albeit more hysterically and more recklessly, Tom, his legs shattered, struggles to live. This is not to imply that Biggs didn't do the same, but that he probably couldn't. Gordon makes it possible for Tom to survive as a way to gain for Biggs some measure of revenge. I don't claim to know that Stuart Gordon was trying for this, but Stuck works that way all the same. Stuck becomes a film about moral choices, which should go without saying, and it carries a strong contempt for those who refuse to make them.

I'll mention here that the film came under some small amount of fire, from various quarters, for changing the race of the female perpetrator -- Mallard was black, Suvari is white -- but any hint of PC cowardice that you might think is implied by this choice is washed away by actually watching the film. But never mind why -- I'll go ahead and continue to assume things about Gordon's motives and say that to introduce the race issue would be to confuse the issues Gordon cares about. Stuck is a film that is neither PC, nor interested in appearing ostentatiously un-PC. It's an angry film that refuses to set up easy targets (except for maybe the landlord and the job interview guy, but it's necessary to depict Tom at his lowest point when the car hits him). He does this by pulling from Mallard's life the fact that she was a nurse and caregiver who is outwardly good and helpful and selfless, but only so long, perhaps, as she's paid to be that way. It may not even be that cynical, though. It may simply be a touch more misanthropic. To paraphrase Chinatown, Stuck could simply be acknowledging that in the right place, and in the right time, people are capable of anything. You're only as good as the choices you've been forced to make. It's not hard to understand the difficulty of Brandi's choice, and lesser circumstances have driven people to murder before, but as Tom is reminded again and again, sometimes, even when presented with two distinct choices, you have no choice at all. Brandi (and Mallard) had to choose between their own well-being at the expense of another, and saving a life in an act that would land her in jail. Morality demands only one option.

The most bracing aspect of Stuck is its revenge-from-beyond-the-grave ending. Tom lives, and escapes, and brings down, both directly and indirectly, those who would let him die (or murder him outright). His choice in the film is death or self-preservation, and finally self-defense. When faced with the option of killing someone who he's now rendered helpless, he doesn't do it. But that person, the one who is helpless before him, dies anyway because they still can't face the consequences. This act is not like all those films where revenge comes after the hero has removed the gun from the villain's head and grunted "You're not worth it!", only have to have Gary Busey or whoever pull a gun at the last second, giving the audience the death they wanted without the taint of revenge. It's an awfully craven way to go about depicting revenge -- I'm perfectly happy, and entirely prefer, my revenge to be straight-up. But in Stuck, Brandi's fate is sealed by her character. Everything she does, including the last thing she'll ever do, follows logically from her decision to drive home with a dying man stuck in her windshield. Once that kind of selfishness takes hold of one's nervous system, it can be hard to shake loose.

So in Gordon's world, Biggs gets to live, and Mallard, who is still in the first long chunk of a very long prison sentence, has to endure more than she did in reality, and who can blame you for thinking what Gordon has imagined is only fair?

The Collection Project: Regular Guy

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King of the Ants (d. Stuart Gordon) is a strange movie, even by the standards of the man who also directed Re-Animator and Edmond. Based on a book (which I haven't read) by actor/screenwriter/cult English novelist Charles Higson, it's a crime story, of the type that features no policemen, only criminals. It stars Chris McKenna (who is quite good here) as Sean Crawley (crawl-ey, because of ants), a drifter and doer of odd jobs who appears to win the approval of fellow house painter Duke Wayne (George Wendt). Duke senses a certain level of amorality in Sean, and takes him to Ray Mathews (Daniel Baldwin, looking and sounding at times so much like his more famous brother as to make any difference negligible), a shady businessman who susses out the same level, if not more, of amorality in Sean as Duke did, and pretty soon Sean has been hired by Mathews to follow around Eric Gatley (played seemingly out of nowhere by Ron Livingston, of Office Space and Band of Brothers) and report back on whatever it is Gatley's up to.

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What Gatley's up to is investigating malfeasance, as practiced by Ray Mathews and his company, and Gatley is pretty soon so close to blowing the lid off things that Sean comes home one night to find Mathews, drunk and waiting outside his apartment. Mathews makes it clear -- in a monologue beautifully delivered by Baldwin -- to Sean that what he'd like to happen now, is he'd like Sean to kill Gatley. Sean negotiates a fee, and says okay.

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One of the things that's strange about King of the Ants, at least as a movie, if not as a part of the crime genre, is that Sean Crawley is given no background, no history, and no psychology beyond what we can glean from this story. This makes his very easy, though nervous, acceptance of the occupation "hitman" a little jarring for some. I've seen this specific complaint -- I thought he was a normal guy, why'd he find it so easy to kill that person, why doesn't he feel guilty, people don't do that -- leveled at similar stories before, such as Scott Smith's novel A Simple Plan (which was the source of the Sam Raimi film). What I might suggest is that if you find yourself unable to understand how anyone could find themselves in any way capable of killing another human being for money, then this is a good thing, and shows you have a good, basic moral foundation. I would also suggest that stories like A Simple Plan and King of the Ants aren't about you.

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Now, while Sean does agree to kill Gatley because he sees dollar signs, it's pretty obvious that he's never killed anyone before. The scene in which he does kill Gatley is, I think, a small masterpiece, and one of the most gut-churning of its kind I've encountered. "Gut-churning" not because it's particularly graphic, but because Sean is so inept and terrified -- the fact that he doesn't know what he's doing would count as a mark in his favor, if he wasn't going ahead and doing it anyway. He kills Gatley in Gatley's own kitchen, using whatever comes to hand: a statue, a flower pot. He does whatever he can to keep distance between himself and his horrible task. When he first greets Gatley, the man is wearing a hat, which flies off in the ensuing violence. When Gatley is lying on the linoleum, immobile but conscious, Sean asks (rhetorically) "Where's your hat?" He needs the hat, we learn, so that he can put it over the poor man's face (and therefore not have to look at it) before tipping the refrigerator over onto him.

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The entire stock of morality, or almost all of it, of King of the Ants can be found in this section of the film. Everything that's especially complex in that regard -- it's always unnerving when an audience finds itself wishing the killer would just grab a knife or something, so that the victim could be more quickly done away with -- is concentrated here, and when Crawley doesn't collapse from guilt, but instead aggressively, but naively, pursues the money he was promised, Gordon and Higson ditch any idea that Crawley might somehow be salvageable. The idea that he might not be the worst person on screen is soon given quite a lot of weight, but it's a little hard, while watching what follows, to forget that refrigerator crashing down, followed by Crawley saying "Where's my money?"

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What follows, by the way, is much more strangeness. As the director of Re-Animator, From Beyond, Dagon and so on, Stuart Gordon's reputation rests primarily on his career as a subversive, low-budget, gonzo-practical-effects-and-make-up horror filmmaker, and a loose adapter of a number of H. P. Lovecraft stories. Minus his early effects collaborator Brian Yuzna, Gordon is nevertheless still able to work some Brian Yuzna-esque magic on King of the Ants, when Mathews, who never really wanted to pay Crawley the $13,000 he promised, decides that the best way to deal with this suddenly annoying loose end (Crawley has worked it out so that if he dies, evidence that incriminates Mathews and his crew will go to the police) is to take him out to his ranch in the desert, and, along with Duke, Carl (the late Lionel Mark Smith, one of David Mamet's regular ensemble, and friends with both Gordon and Wendt from their Chicago theater days) and Beckett (Vernon Wells, "Wez" from The Road Warrior), beat the shit out of him with golf clubs until he turns into a vegetable.

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The first time I saw King of the Ants, this plot development was tough to swallow. Watching it again, it became easier, for a couple of reasons. One, is that I could see it working, and the other is that in the film it doesn't work. The strangest thing of all of King of the Ants's strange things is how much stuff it tries to cram into its last third. The torture of Crawley -- and the ensuing, rather alarming, hallucinations, which feature Kari Wuhrer as Gatley's widow doing all sorts of bizarre and horrible things, and looking all sorts of bizarre and horrible ways -- are the film's centerpiece. When the film breaks away from that, it becomes a revenge story and a romance, all in about a half an hour. Now consider that the object of Crawley's romance is Kari Wuhrer, and that he doesn't even meet her until that last half hour has begun (his previous hallucinations were fed by having seen her on the news following her husband's murder). It becomes tempting to think that King of the Ants might have benefited from a little streamlining. Adding to my list of gripes is the fact that one major character dies from an injury that at worst should have made them wince a little, and possibly want to lie down for a bit (I have a similar complaint about Michael Winterbottom's recent The Killer Inside Me, but that's for another time), but here causes instant death. King of the Ants isn't aiming for naturalism, but that's no excuse for the filmmakers to say, as I suspect they did here, "Fuck it, nobody'll notice, nobody cares."

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Even so, Gordon's film does manage to pack the kind of skinned-alive jolt that similarly problematic low budget films like Combat Shock and Maniac (both, also, for another time) did in the 1970s. The presence of so many familiar faces in King of the Ants does sort of rob it of the experience audiences had with those earlier films, one that led them to question what the fuck they were watching, and why the fuck they were watching it. But that's not the kind of thing I'm apt to hold against any film, and don't hold against this one. If nothing else, King of the Ants is one of those movies that almost nobody has ever heard of, so the likelihood of it being rented out of blind curiosity by any number of people ("Dude, George Wendt is in this!") who then find themselves completely blindsided by the resulting insanity, is fairly high. That's a rare enough thing these days.

Stealing from Jonathan - DVD Edition

As I have nothing original or even really personal to offer any of you today, I am going to blatantly and remorselessly steal the topic of purchasing DVDs from Jonathan Lapper. He and I seem to run into similar obstacles, largely self-imposed, when it comes to building our DVD libraries, and both of us have gone through periods of not feeling especially proud of our collections -- for instance, I own a lot of horror movies that I don't like, such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, because I want to have a good collection of that genre (the same goes for my books, but that's another topic). I bought it because of its place in horror film history, as sad a statement as that may be, and because it had good extras. Or perhaps it should be "good" extras, because given that I don't like the film, why would I give a shit about the making of it, or its history, or any of that noise? (The original isn't as bad as any of the sequels I've seen -- in other words, Freddy Krueger never pokes anyone's eyes out and says "I'll be seeing you!" -- but it's still poorly acted, and I also think it's high time horror fans admitted that Wes Craven isn't any good. Outside of the Scream movies, all his stuff is unbearably clumsy, sometimes to the point of being painfully awkward. And the Scream films aren't any good anyhow. I know that many people long for the return to form of John Carpenter, a wish I understand, but a fair number of those same people are also eagerly awaiting Wes Craven to stage his own comeback. What would a Wes Craven comeback look like? The Last House on the Left? Spare me). I also recently bought Stuart Gordon's Dagon because it didn't cost very much, despite the fact that I'd never seen it before, and I don't like Stuart Gordon, outside of Edmond and about 45% of King of the Ants (I'll say this, though: It's better than A Nightmare on Elm Street).

Why do I do these things? Because watching Dagon or Walk Hard on a Sunday afternoon when I'm starting to completely feel the tension of the coming work-week is an idea that's a lot easier to get behind than watching 8 1/2. That's why. Pretty simple, really. And probably not worth its own blog post.

But on Friday night, I was browsing in my favorite local DVD store (which I won't name, for fear of being labeled a sell-out and losing any street cred), and after checking to see if they had any used Criterion DVDs (they do, sometimes), I alternated between browsing the horror section and the "classics" wall. I was seriously considering picking up a used copy of Sunshine, the Danny Boyle and Alex Garland SF/horror movie, and I actually was in this store specifically to pick up Angel Heart (they were out), but when I checked out the classic DVDs I realized that the money I'd set aside for this outing would have to go elsewhere, because there, in rapid succession, I found My Darling Clementine, How Green Was My Valley (which I haven't seen) and the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, all for prices it would have been ludicrous to turn my back on. Sunshine is a perfectly decent film, but it would not lend the air of genuineness and sincerity to my ever-growing DVD library that those three would. All of which begs the question: What, exactly, does it mean to be proud of one's DVD collection? They're just DVDs, they're just movies, and I had nothing to do with the making of any of them. What do I have to be proud of? I don't know, but I've been proud of making good menu choices at restaurants before, so I don't see why I should be so surprised.

Epilogue:

That was Friday night, and I didn't have time to watch any of my new DVDs that night. The next morning, my wife and I headed out of town to see my family. We came back this afternoon, and on the way, at a gas station, my wife picked up Sunshine for me. So everybody wins. And then when we got home earlier today, we watched Friday the 13th on cable. Sometimes, I really don't understand what it is I think I'm doing with my life.