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A Christmas Commodity: SCROOGED

From the Chicago Reader (November 25, 1988). — J.R.

SCROOGED

* (Has redeeming facet)

Directed by Richard Donner

Written by Mitch Glazer and Michael O’Donoghue

With Bill Murray, Karen Allen, John Forsythe, Bobcat Goldthwait, Carol Kane, Robert Mitchum, Michael J. Pollard, and Alfre Woodard.

It must have been in the late 50s or early 60s when, as a teenager, I happened across a story in a movie fan magazine, probably Photoplay, about the pop/movie star Fabian. Fabian, the magazine explained, was getting so popular that he couldn’t go out on a date without being besieged by reporters and photographers. Recently, however, he’d eluded them and been able to take out a lovely lady; the magazine was celebrating the event — I swear I’m not making this up — with a two-page spread of photos and captions that chronicled the evening from beginning to end, from the moment he called on his date to the good-night kiss on her doorstep. “An intimate look,” I think they called it.

A comparable game for the gullible is performed by Scrooged, which attempts to obfuscate its own apparatus as thoroughly as that magazine did 20-odd years ago. I know we’re all supposed to be more knowledgeable and therefore more cynical about the media today. But the popular equation that’s currently being made between knowledge and cynicism seems to me an attitude that is every bit as shortsighted as the naivete that cynicism is supposedly an improvement on. In order to fall for Scrooged, one must accept the premise that the commercialization of Christmas is somehow distinct from the movie and its attack on the commercialization of Christmas. But whether audiences fall for Scrooged for naive reasons or for cynical ones doesn’t really matter: the end result is the same.

Consider the overall context. A kind of ersatz Dickens adaptation (in contrast to a genuine Dickens adaptation like Little Dorrit, perhaps the best to date, which will open at the Fine Arts in the weeks ahead) with only a rudimentary relation to its model, Scrooged is one of several Christmas pictures shrewdly released before Thanksgiving in the hopes of reaping benefits throughout the remainder of the year. The others include Ernest Saves Christmas (a sequel to a feature-length spin-off of a TV commercial) and two cartoon features, Oliver & Company and The Land Before Time.

Both of the animated features belong to the Disney tradition in many respects, including their mystifications of sex and class. The Land Before Time has as its hero a young dinosaur named Little Foot, the last of his species, who, after the death of his mother, journeys to a place called the Great Valley to survive. We’re told at the end, after he arrives, that his species continued for many generations, but how this biological feat is pulled off is left to our imaginations. In Oliver & Company — which, like Scrooged, transposes Dickens to a New York setting — a similar sleight of hand resolves without confrontation all of the class differences and resentments that even a loose adaptation of Oliver Twist has to bring up. Fagin becomes human, sympathetic, and non-Jewish — the hapless pawn of the evil waterfront boss he works for — and only the canine pickpockets in his charge are allowed any ethnic identities. Oliver is a stray kitten taken in first by the dogs, then by a wealthy little girl, and the competition between the two for Oliver’s love is magically eliminated before any real contest can develop.

These are the kinds of everyday lies that are usually told to children in Disney features (Oliver & Company actually comes from the Disney studio and apes the late Disney manner of 101 Dalmatians; The Land Before Time comes from Lucas/Spielberg and aspires to the grace of a prehistoric Bambi), and the least that can be said for these two movies is that neither is especially moralistic. Scrooged, on the other hand, purports to take on the moral agenda of A Christmas Carol without sacrificing its yuppie priorities for an instant. This requires a sleight of hand that is a good deal cruder than anything Disney ever attempted, even when he was welcoming Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to Hollywood in the mid-30s.

The movie obliges us to take Bill Murray — described in Time as “a master of comic insincerity” — as the youngest network president in the history of television and a modern-day equivalent to Scrooge named Frank Cross. Cross is a selfish tightwad who exploits Christmas to the hilt on his network until a series of ghosts — his network predecessor (John Forsythe), the Ghost of Christmas Past (David Johansen), the Ghost of Christmas Present (Carol Kane), and the Ghost of Christmas Future (a special-effects skeleton) — show him the error of his ways.

What are some of Frank Cross’s errors? He puts on a crass, live TV production of Scrooge on Christmas Eve, and hypes it with a violent promo that gives an old lady a heart attack, an occurrence that delights him for its free publicity. He fires a critical subordinate (Bobcat Goldthwait), a hapless executive who then loses his wife, goes on a bender, and becomes the butt of some humiliating slapstick gags. Frank also decides to give his brother James (John Murray, Bill’s brother) a towel instead of a VCR for Christmas, exploits his black secretary Grace (Alfre Woodard), and ignores the fact that her little boy Calvin (Nicholas Phillips) hasn’t uttered a word since he saw his father killed. He also manages to alienate his compassionate girlfriend Claire (Karen Allen), who helps the needy and homeless, and then refuses to give two bucks to a homeless man (Michael J. Pollard), who subsequently freezes to death.

When Frank finally sees the light and repents, his good works include rehiring and doubling the old salary of his subordinate (who has been firing at him with a shotgun) and putting him in charge of programming. Frank then interrupts his own production of Scrooge in midstream, attacking the audience for watching such a show on Christmas Eve, while the subordinate holds the control booth at gunpoint and humiliates one of Frank’s rivals (John Glover). Frank also apologizes at length on national TV to his brother and to his former girlfriend, who is so delighted she leaves the needy and the homeless. She flags a cab to the studio, where she can join in the delight shared by the vagrant who froze to death, but who is now an ecstatic angel hanging out with the approving ghosts. Frank tells the TV audience that on Christmas they should buy the needy and homeless a sandwich, or maybe a blanket. At this point, the mute Calvin is so overpowered by this show of “goodness” — Frank interrupting a TV special for the sake of elaborate personal messages to his brother and girlfriend, insulting and giving detailed moral instructions to his audience, calling himself a schmuck — that he miraculously chimes in, “And God bless us, every one!” A final rendition of the 1969 Jackie DeShannon hit “Put a Little Love in Your Heart” sums it all up.

In other words, this year’s Christmas message, to paraphrase Chevy Chase, is “I’m Bill Murray, and you’re not.” The puritanical double standard in Scrooged invites us to feel morally superior to both Frank and the TV audience while glibly sharing their jaded tastes on the sly. In his evil period Frank Cross insists on showing the nipples of the dancing girls in Scrooge in order to improve his ratings, which is apparently meant to be different somehow from the movie’s showing the same thing — in order to reveal Frank’s amorality and to win a few fans of its own. Along the way, we get lots of cameos of celebrities or at least recognizable actors playing the needy: Miles Davis performing “We Three Kings” on the street; Michael J. Pollard, Anne Ramsey, and Logan Ramsey in a homeless shelter listening, enraptured, to Frank’s terrible impromptu Richard Burton imitation. With all those luminaries out in the cold, the notion of real homeless people is made quite comfortably remote; all we have to do is buy Michael J. Pollard a sandwich, or drop a coin in Miles Davis’s cup.

There are a few half-funny moments in Scrooged, nearly all of them founded on cruelty: At one point Frank suggests using staples to attach fake antlers to the mice in his Christmas show, and Carol Kane’s Ghost of Christmas Present, dressed like a sugarplum fairy, kicks Frank in the balls and beats him black and blue, adding some tangy S and M to the holiday cheer. (There are also a disembodied eyeball and plenty of decaying flesh for horror movie freaks.) The jokes that aren’t cruel are mainly SCTV or Saturday Night Live staples, such as a TV ad for Bob Goulet’s Old-Fashioned Cajun Christmas, although for a pointed spoof of turning Christmas into coin, Stan Freberg’s 50s record “Green Christmas” has everything in this movie beat by miles.

One may also derive some minimal pleasure from seeing so many familiar faces — from Robert Mitchum to Buddy Hackett to John Houseman — flit across the screen. But the sleaze of Scrooged ultimately tends to tarnish everyone that it touches. The object of the verb in the title isn’t only Bill Murray; it’s the audience — his own self-absorbed reflection — in the bargain.

Published on 24 Sep 2011 in Featured Texts, Featured Texts, by jrosenbaum

Full Moon Over Blue Water

Set mainly in and around a lakeside establishment called the Blue Water Grill in Texas, this is a small film, but within its own terms a delightful and virtually perfect one. The characters–the dreamy grill owner (Gene Hackman), who compulsively watches home movies of his long-vanished wife; his grumpy yet serene father-in-law (Burgess Meredith); a slightly retarded handyman (Elias Kotias); and a bus driver (Teri Garr) who has her sights set on the grill owner–all seem to come out of Erskine Caldwell and Tennessee Williams, but Bill Bozzone’s capable script, Peter Masterson’s deft direction, and Fred Murphy’s handsome photography all show them off to best advantage, and the movie’s playlike story moves effortlessly. Funny and appealing, this is the kind of quiet and assured Hollywood movie that used to be more common in the 50s; the local flavor is caught perfectly, and every member of the cast shines. (Deerbrook, Ridge, Golf Glen, McClurg Court, Oakbrook, Plaza)

Liberals Kick Ass [THEY LIVE]

This appeared in the November 18, 1988 Chicago Reader. –J.R.

THEY LIVE

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by John Carpenter

Written by “Frank Armitage” (John Carpenter)

With Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, George “Buck” Flower, Peter Jason, and Raymond St. Jacques.

John Carpenter has managed to remain one of the few genuinely personal writer-directors left in genre moviemaking, having returned to relatively low-budget features with last year’s Prince of Darkness after the debacle of Big Trouble in Little China. From his clean ‘Scope compositions to his throbbing minimalist scores, he projects a simplicity of conception and a usually deft approach to story telling and straight-ahead action that are both refreshing and reassuring in an era of filmmaking when these modest virtues can no longer be taken for granted. As a disciple of Howard Hawks, he might even be said to preserve a scaled-down version of some of the familiar Hawks trademarks: cranky individualist heroes, flaky male/female relationships, camaraderie among professionals, confined spaces, and usually clear lines of demarcation between friends and foes.

All of these qualities are present to some degree in They Live, a paranoid science-fiction thriller about alien invaders loosely based on a short story by Ray Nelson. But a new element has been added to the Carpenter formula that upsets the usual balance of genre elements, for better and for worse, and places him in a separate universe from Hawks. A contemporary satiric thrust makes this movie, according to Lewis Beale in the Tribune a couple of weeks ago, “the most anti-Reagan film ever to come out of Hollywood.” Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t; but if it is, it seems to me that the Hollywood cinema as a whole has a lot to answer for.

The central premise of They Live, which the nameless and homeless hero (Roddy Piper) and his itinerant black co-worker Frank (Keith David) gradually uncover, is that aliens from outer space have already taken over the world — or the United States (the two are regarded as interchangeable). These aliens cannot be seen without the help of special sunglasses. Once the hero and Frank put on these sunglasses (and later, undetectable contact lenses), they can see that large portions of the ordinary populace are in fact hideous monsters with silvery, bulging eyes, protruding teeth and gums, and dark splotches on their faces, and that ordinary posters, magazines, and consumer products are in fact projecting subliminal messages, such as “Obey,” “Conform,” “Marry and reproduce,” “No independent thought,” “Watch TV,” “Submit,” “Buy,” “Consume,” “No ideas,” “Surrender,” “Stay asleep,” and “Do not question authority.” Dollar bills say, “This is your God.”

It turns out that most of the population is either under hypnosis (from TV signals) or consciously collaborating “for business reasons” with the aliens in their mission as “developers.” They want to turn the earth into “their third world,” contaminating the atmosphere so it will be like “their atmosphere,” and treat all the hypnotized humans as cattle — a jaundiced view, in short, of the Reagan agenda. The only organized counterforce, whose mission is to alert the populace to what’s happening — “They Live, We Sleep” is one of their slogans — is a pathetically small minority working out of a small black church across from the shantytown where the hero and Frank stay. Later, after the police raid the premises and destroy the shantytown, the group meets at a warehouse, which is raided in turn. After attempting, without much success, to broadcast on TV information about what’s happening, they conclude that their only hope is to destroy the aliens’ TV transmitter.

Carpenter has been in the past a conservative director. But there’s no mistaking the film’s satiric intent, which he expounded upon in his interview with Beale. There Carpenter linked Reagan’s presidency to “fascism” and “the rise of the fundamentalist right and the kind of mind control they’re putting out.” Oddly, Carpenter underestimated his audience intellectually while overestimating them economically by concluding, “My prediction is a few folks will get [the allegory], but most will say: ‘What is he talking about? Is he talking about me?’ Then they’ll get in their BMWs, drive home, take off their expensive clothes and Rolex watches and slip into their Jacuzzis and say, ‘Nah, that’s not about me.’” For whatever it’s worth, both times that I saw They Live, the audience seemed to be fully clued in to what the film was about, and I sincerely doubt that any of them owned a Jacuzzi.

In fact, the movie is a confusing blend of anti-Reagan satire and genre conventions that make the film every bit as crass, amoral, and mulishly blinkered in its many rightwing assumptions as the attitudes it is ostensibly attacking. It all adds up to an ideological incoherence that is rather suggestive in relation to the recent presidential election. How, one may wonder, could a majority of voters have opted for a one-time wimp who, if one accepts the persuasive evidence of the recent Iran-contra documentary Coverup, is one of the world’s biggest drug dealers yet got elected on promises to deal harshly with drug dealers? How does one reconcile this campaign’s designation of “liberal” as a dirty word — by Democrats and Republicans alike — with the plethora of liberal promises and sentiments sprinkled into Bush’s speeches? If such contradictions can’t be reconciled, we can at least try to understand some of the processes (such as combining liberal sentiments with right-wing rhetoric) that make them possible; and They Live may offer a few clues about how we’ve arrived at such an impasse.

Ideologically speaking, Carpenter’s films generally project an innocence and naivete in relation to their conservative or reactionary underpinnings that are very much in keeping with the influence of Hawks (as well as Hitchcock). This naivete is quite contrary to the borrowings Carpenter’s films have made from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, an independent, non-Hollywood effort whose conscious satiric thrust is liberal or radical. As Robin Wood noted about Carpenter’s first two features in Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan, “The film-buff innocence that accounts for much of the charm of Dark Star can go on to combine (in Assault on Precinct 13) Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead without any apparent awareness of the ideological consequences of converting Hawks’ Fascists (or Romero’s ghouls, for that matter) into an army of revolutionaries.”

Carpenter’s macho heroes — played most often by Kurt Russell (and in They Live by ex-wrestler Roddy Piper) — are fond of snapping out acerbic John Wayne one-liners, and his villains are as faceless and as unambiguously malignant as those in Hawks’s Rio Bravo and Hitchcock’s The Birds. Romero’s ghouls, on the other hand, are both individuated and often associated with groups considered marginal: ghetto blacks, Hare Krishnas, bikers, nuns, etc. The aliens of They Live, significantly identified as “ghouls” in the credits, are essentially gooks to be wiped out by the hero and Frank, who charge with guns through their midst Rambo-style, mowing them down. Whether they might represent not merely Reaganites but Japanese and Iranian businesspeople taking over Los Angeles real estate is more debatable, but the least that can be said is that the xenophobia of most American war films is emulated rather than contested by Carpenter’s overall treatment.

The combination of a left-wing message with right-wing rhetoric isn’t, of course, the exclusive property of a Carpenter, and it must be admitted that he handles the fusion more convincingly and less equivocally than Dukakis did when he boarded a tank and donned a helmet during the campaign. It’s a tradition that stretches back to many of the populist stances of Huey Long and George Wallace; the assumption is that hyperbolic macho bluster is the only acceptable way to make any political point and be taken seriously. Movies, like candidates, look for one-liners to tie into ad campaigns, and the designated one-liner in They Live could probably work just as well for Bush/Quayle if they run for reelection in ‘92. It’s delivered by the hero when he bursts into a bank with a gun and ammo belt: “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass.” (Pause for dramatic effect.) “And I’m all out of bubble gum.”

Other one-liners figure when the hero wants to comment on the ugliness of female aliens (male aliens, of course, never occasion such epithets): “You know, you look like your head fell into a cheese dip in 1957.” Or discriminating between a female human and a female alien: “You, you’re OK. You, you’re fucking ugly, formaldehyde-face.” Or to a female alien primping before her reflection in a shop window: “That’s like pouring perfume on a pig.” The sexist glee of these giddy thigh-slappers, made “acceptable” only because they’re directed at aliens, is supposed to be mysteriously linked up with anti-Reagan satire, but the mixture won’t wash: it isn’t the moral ugliness of Reaganism that we’re being asked to laugh at.

Like political campaigns, movies generally traffic in myths rather than ideas, and the conspicuous absence of ideas in They Live (apart from the loose central premise) can be partially accounted for by its abject submission to mythology. Roland Barthes describes the mythologizing process clearly in his essay “Myth Today” when he notes that “myth is depoliticized speech,” and goes on to explain its function as follows:

“One must naturally understand political in its deeper meaning, as describing the whole of human relations in their real, social structure, in their power of making the world. . . . Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. . . . In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, without any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.”

This is the world — the only world, alas — in which Carpenter’s antiyuppie and anti-Reagan satire has meaning. It helps to explain why, before Frank is willing to look through the special sunglasses and see what the hero sees, he has to engage in a fistfight of mythical dimensions with the hero. This nasty, pounding battle lasts over six minutes — a veritable showstopper that makes even the alien invasion appear secondary.

Although this protracted bashing session makes very little sense in terms of character motivation or plot, there are plenty of ways it can be explained or justified. There’s the Hawksian explanation: buddies have to slug it out before they can become friends (see, for example, Red River or Hatari). There’s even, as a friend points out, a Marxist explanation: workers are pitted against one another rather than against the ruling class that enslaves them both. (Frank’s subsequent wistful comment about the aliens supports this: “Maybe they’ve always been here — loving it when we hate each other, kill each other.”) There’s also the commercial explanation: former wrestler Roddy Piper gets to show his stuff. And finally there’s the satiric explanation: some people would rather get their heads bashed in than see what’s right in front of them.

On the crude level of this latter explanation, Carpenter’s satire makes a certain amount of sense. But there’s a moment in the movie’s delightful coda — after the aliens’ transmitter explodes and the hypnotic spell is broken, showing the aliens for what they are — that is sadly and ironically telling. One of the fleeting gags shows us Siskel and Ebert as aliens fulminating on TV about “filmmakers like George Romero and John Carpenter” who have “gone too far.” One gets the point, and it’s nice to see Carpenter identifying with Romero’s camp for a change. But unfortunately the parallel doesn’t pan out. Unlike Romero, he hasn’t gone far enough.

The Land Before Time

Ironically, it is this Spielberg-Lucas collaboration–directed by Don Bluth, and scripted by Stu Krieger, Judy Freudberg, and Tony Geiss–not the Disney studio’s new Oliver & Company, that comes closest to reviving the classic character animation of Disney in its heyday. In this case, what we get is a kind of dinosaur Bambi featuring an all-prehistoric cast. It’s a tale about growing up as well as an adventure about a trek for survival. Reportedly, Spielberg found the original version of this too scary and violent, requiring expensive changes, and it must be admitted that some of the action sequences feel abbreviated–but the overall handling of landscape and character is well done, and some of the old Disney mysticism about parental and ancestral roots manages to shine through. Not a masterpiece, but a nicely crafted piece of animation. (Biograph, Chicago Ridge, Edens, Nortown, Orland Square, Ridge, Water Tower, Woodfield, Ford City East, Yorktown, Hillside Square, Norridge)

Commissar

Perhaps the most striking instance of a suppressed Soviet film thawed out by glasnost, this 1967 first feature by Aleksandr Askoldov was apparently controversial only because it expresses overt sympathy for the Jews who were persecuted during the Russian civil war, and because the lead character is a pregnant woman whose combined characteristics challenged traditional stereotypes. As a first feature, the film is in many respects remarkable, if not an unqualified success. The black-and-white ‘Scope images are often clearly influenced by the silent Soviet masters, and the uses of subjective camera are especially striking; but the film’s effectiveness as narrative only works intermittently. Still, for anyone with an interest in the subject and in the Soviet cinema, this shouldn’t be missed. (Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, November 18 and 19, 6:45 and 9:00; Sunday, November 20, 5:00 and 7:30; and Monday through Thursday, November 21 through 24, 6:45 and 9:00; 281-4114)