STARMAN
Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Jaeckyl. Dir. John Carpenter, Columbia, 1984Sometimes I think I don't collect films so much as directors. Since I don't know the specific wording of the "auteurist theory," I don't suppose you can call me a proponent thereof, but I pay attention to directors and I go looking for work by those I admire. Which is why this blog's address is John-Ford-Is-God. That's why I've written up so much of Clint Eastwood's work. And Michael Mann. And over the next few days, John Carpenter and Steven Spielberg.
I gave myself standing directives when I started collecting a few years ago. One was "buy any western made before 1980." Another, "Buy anything directed by or starring Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola." These days, I'd add Carpenter, Spielberg, and Jonathan Demme.
John Carpenter has been on my radar ever since HALLOWEEN became a sensation in 1978. I was in sixth grade, then, already into movies and horror, and everyone was talking about, trying to see, or claiming to have seen it. My parents didn't go for horror movies & didn't understand their appeal, which was/is exactly the same as roller coasters. They scare you within an inch of your life and then the lights go up and everyone's safe, riding a big-ass adrenaline high. Coasters work the same way, only substituting extreme speed for darkness. Regardless, while I could ride roller coasters at Kings Island all day with my parents' blessing, I would not be seeing HALLOWEEN in the theater.
I think I've talked before about the process of becoming more than just a guy who likes a good flick once in awhile. At four, when Mom & Dad took me to my first movie - BEDKNOBS & BROOMSTICKS - I thought movies were some kind of literal magic. I knew about Hollywood & that films came from there, but the process of making a film and then making it appear on my local screen may as well have been alchemy. It was a real pleasure, even a thrill, when my critical faculties started to kick in right around 1979 and I stopped responding to films based on how they made me feel and started noticing what they - and their makers - did with a camera to MAKE me feel that way.
I assume most film fans go through a similar process. I hope so. I recall the years of 1979 to 1982, the years where I first woke up to the real-time, practical-magic of moviemaking, as heady ones, a time of intense discovery and immense joy. John Carpenter is one of the filmmakers present at my creation.
HALLOWEEN first aired on NBC in 1981. I was 13. I want to tell you that I sat right down and watched it straight through and that at the end lights flashed and I fell prostate to the floor moaning "NOW I UNDERSTAND," but my history of becoming a film fan isn't ever that convenient. What I can tell you is this:I saw the first half-hour before Mom sent me to bed, but in that half hour I saw something that changed my awareness of what you could do with film, with how you can tell a story, and got John Carpenter onto my radar as a filmmaker to watch.
It was the mask scene, at the start, where we see everything from Michael Meyers's perspective. Michael Meyers bends down, picks up a Halloween mask and dons it, making the audience see through the eye-holes in the mask as Michael does. I may seem a hopelessly naive 13 year-old to have been so knocked out by such a simple idea, but I don't care. I have few enough moments of pure epiphany in this life and that's one of them.
Carpenter's became a directorial name & career I followed. Unfortunately, follow most of what I did. From afar. Though most - maybe all - of Carpenter's films function as indirect homage to the films and filmmakers of Golden Age Hollywood, particularly Howard Hawks and his classic western RIO BRAVO, they're genre films. Mom & Dad took us to a genre pictures but only the ones a critic said transcended/parodied genre restrictions - which explains going to Sneak Preview of Stanley Donen's MOVIE MOVIE - or stuff like STAR WARS or Disney's THE APPLE DUMPLING GANG.
Point being, I could read about Carpenter and films such as THE FOG in Fango - and did - but my parents weren't buying what he wanted to sell. As a consequence, I wouldn't see any of his films on a big screen until 1983's Stephen King-adaptation, CHRISTINE. To date, I think it and THEY LIVE are the only ones I got to see at the 'plex.
By the time I first encountered STARMAN on VHS in perhaps 1986, I had seen most of Carpenter's films (god bless Movie Channel) between HALLOWEEN & itself and Carpenter wasn't simply on my radar but a filmmaker whose work I greatly admired, though I couldn't articulate why beyond saying that I liked the stories he told & the way he told them. I couldn't have told you he transcended low budgets by making films so rich in character & story he didn't even have to make them look as good as they did because when, on occasion, a seam became visible - palm trees pop up in HALLOWEEN, set in Haddonfield, Il. - the story and characterization allow the viewer to gloss right over those moments. We read any number of pieces on HALLOWEEN's $350k budget, but seldom followed up by a jeering, "And it shows! Count the palm trees in Haddonfield! It's Oct 31st - where are the leaves?? Why is everything green? Michael Myers has been insitutionalized since he was six - how the hell can he drive a car???"
The reason no such inventory follows is simplicity, itself. It's irrelevant. I doubt there's a hardcore HALLOWEEN fan doesn't know producer/co-writer Debra Hill emptied a garbage bag of collected & preserved autumn leaves in front of a wind machine to simulate fall weather - the same leaves in each take being rebagged - or that ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK saved money for set pieces by eschewing a fancy opening sequence, but how often does it come up in conversation? Almost never, because the stories work so well and are told with such confidence we simply don't pay attention to the gaffes or cut corners, other than to admire them at times like these, and even I've said my fill.
In his commentary for ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, Carpenter notes that the film, though inspired by RIO BRAVO, ended up having as much in common with Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Maybe that somehow gives me a pass for spending so much of my writeup for STARMAN discussing HALLOWEEN. I was predisposed to enjoy STARMAN going in. I liked everything with Carpenter's name on it, and I did like it. A lot. It was a film I seemed to catch often on cable in the mid-late '80s and would happily watch anytime.
Like many movies, even the ones I enjoy, STARMAN faded. Got lost in the deluge of films yet to see. If someone mentioned Carpenter in conversation, I might mention STARMAN as an example of his best '80s work, but I might just as often mention ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK or THEY LIVE, instead. I don't intend to find myself in the position of sitting down to watch a film I recall enjoying after a 30-year layoff, but it happens. As it did both a month ago when I sat down with STARMAN, and again today.
What I recalled enjoying in the '80s I now call one of the best films of that decade. It's certainly among the most enduring. Quentin Tarantino dismisses most of the '80s canon for being gutless films with grafted-on, nonsensical happy endings. An '80s teen, I hold a more indulgent view of certain titles than Quentin, but he is not wrong. I experience his truth more and more as I rewatch '80s "classics" over the last few years. STARMAN, even well before its bittersweet ending, holds up better than maybe as much as 80% of '80s heavy hitters. I don't find Oliver Stone's work that compelling anymore. Most of those Murray/Ayckroyd/Chase-driven comedies feel like tired cocaine humor to me, now. STARMAN, after a 30-year layoff, felt richer, more truthful and affecting in 2022 than it did in 1985. And I teared up in '85, too.
Watching the movie last month, I didn't consider a number of things, particularly: 1.The size of STARMAN's budget relative to the basement-budget wonders he made a name with. 2.That after paying homage to Howard Hawks in ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, HALLOWEEN (the Sherrif's name is "Lee Brackett." LEIGH Brackett wrote the screenplay for RIO BRAVO) and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (the tracking shot of Russell walking away at the end was a Hawks signature), and adapted a Stephen King bestseller, Carpenter was eager to essay his version of a road movie/screwball romance a la Capra's IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT.
His version. Crucial phrase. One reason it didn't occur to me Carpenter's film is a riff on the grand masters of light comedy is that it isn't that funny. Don't mistake me:the film's filled with good, solid laughs, but much of the interplay between Bridges and Allen is more dramatic than funny, and often more touching. Given that Bridges plays an alien entity inhabiting the cloned body of Karen Allen's dead husband and abducts her at gunpoint to drive him to meet his people in Arizona within 36 hours (starting on the shores of Superior in Northern Wisconsin), it's apt that Bridges and Allens' tentative relationship and growing trust play as more than just wacky hijinks. Better, it makes those occasions where a fish-out-of-water bit does lead to some banter, especially one concerning the meaning of traffic light colors, that much funnier.
Carpenter says STARMAN is one of his favorites of his films. It ought to be. If you take it as a typically-Carpenterian variation on a classic idea or as a fun and surprisingly affecting road movie with a cool scifi underpinning, it doesn't make any difference. Either way will be a pleasure, the response to being well & truly entrtained by a good story featuring relatable, engaging characters by a master storyteller, the kind of filmmaker who can make a road movie with a cast of four princpals feel like a cast-of-thousands epic.
Though Carpenter's love affair with Hawks is well-known, in many ways the first two decades of Carpenter's career hew as close to DIRTY HARRY-director Don Siegel. Siegel specialized in finding inventive ways to shoot b-budget genre pictures, specializing in compelling storylines and rich, relatable characters. Sound familiar? ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, Carpenter's first big budget picture, cost a whopping $6M and his first three, legendary films together cost less than $500k. Like Siegel, the Carpenter films we discuss today are the cheap ones. They're the ones that hold up, that entertain so efficiently, that work so effortlessly it's always a pleasure to experience them again. It may have been 30 years since I saw STARMAN last month, but it was only a month to the first rewatch. It may not be that long to the next.
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