After Hours

After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985) "Different rules apply when it gets this late, ya know what I mean? It's like...'after-hours.'"

Radio monologist Joe Frank died January 15, 2018 and several podcasts who have depended on the spoken word for their medium of choice remarked on his passing. 

But, what seldom came up was the lawsuit. 

Joe Frank sued the producers of After Hours for similarities to his monologue called "Lies." Details of the settlement have never been disclosed, but when you listen to "Lies" and you watch After Hours and it is obvious down to some very specific details that the movie's first portion is a bunch of "Lies." I mean, "bagel and cream-cheese paperweights?" That's the sort of detail that can't be dismissed as the coincidence of two competing "Earth-hit-by-asteroid" movies or "Truman-Capote-writes-"In-Cold-Blood"" movies.* That sort of "coincidence" is right on the proboscis.

Soho

Lawsuit aside, After Hours is one of my favorite Scorsese films** (and I have several of those) as it perfectly captures the bizarre sense of a city's nocturnal side, especially when one is "up" past one's comfort zone due to circumstances beyond one's control with looming consequences once the sun decides to crash the party. I've had nights like that, wandering for miles in the dead of night in the one section of town that doesn't seem to have a gas station at any close proximity—would it be open if there was? But, stuff happens. It just doesn't pile up like this: 

"My God, Marcy finally met Mr. Right"

Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is a corporate drone where he...oh, who cares what he does, it isn't important, but it has something to do with computers or computer training ("I'm just a word processor, for Christ's sake!" he will scream to the heavens at one point). Whatever. It doesn't matter. But, after droning away another day, he goes back to his meticulously arranged apartment, checks out what's on cable—and nothing's on—he goes to eat a lonely dinner at a lonely diner, head down in a book (Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer"***) when he looks up and sees Marcy (Roseanna Arquette) watching him. They nod, they smile, and they start to talk...

They talk about "Tropic of Cancer"—she likes it, can quote from it ("'This is not a book, it's a prolonged insult; a gob of spit in the face of art; a kick in the pants to Truth, Beauty, God' something like that...that's all I remember")—and it seems they have a lot in common...enough to continue the conversation. About the cashier "making these strange movements," about how she's going to her friend's loft downtown Soho and she's a sculptress making plaster-of-Paris paperweights of bagels with cream-cheese. She gives him her friend's phone number and later on, he calls her and she's had a fight with a friend and is feeling vulnerable—why doesn't he come over? She's glad he called.

And that's all it takes.

After a "Mr. Toad's wild-cab-ride" that is so violent he loses the $20 bill he was going to use to pay the fare, he goes up to the apartment of Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino), who is working on a sculpture of Edvard Munch's "The Scream." Marcy's not there; she's at the all-night drugstore ("She all right?" "It's under control") although she calls ("Well, of course he's here, you invited him...it's your problem, Marcy, I'm not gonna tell him...) and Kiki asks him to help with the sculpture. His shirt gets messed up and Kiki offers to launder it, giving him a replacement to wear for his "date". They talk about how the plaster is hard work and screws up your shoulders and Paul offers her a massage and after he mentions she has a good body, she agrees, remarking that she doesn't have any scars—"some women are covered with them head to toe...horrible, ugly scars...I'm just telling you now"). He brushes that off, starting a story of how, as a child, he'd spent a night in a burn ward and, before he can get to the meat of the story, she falls asleep. Then, Marcie walks in.

They retire to Marcy's room and her first question is "What'd you do to her?" which makes Paul defensive, and Marcy shrugs it off just as quickly. Saying that she's going to take a quick shower, she asks "I hope you don't have to get up early or anything. Because I think you're somebody I can really talk to. Tonight, I feel like I'm gonna let loose or something. I feel like something really incredible is going to happen here. I feel sooo..excited. I don't know why. I feel it. I'm glad you came." And she laughs semi-hysterically. And then she winks, which Scorsese emphasizes with a forward-travelling shot. 

Marcy's phone rings and Paul hesitantly answers it: "She can't come to the phone now." "Tell her Greg called" and hangs up. Kiki appears in the door-way, stripping off her bra: "She back?" Paul can only lamely answer: "Yeah." She sulks away, and Paul can only shake his head. Weird. He takes advantage of Marcy's shower-time, to look at her bag—the prescription she got was an ointment for second-degree burns, then the shower stops, and Paul hurriedly puts the ointment back in the bag just in time to not be detected. It's then that the conversation takes on what Frank describes as "a slightly pathological cast." "Hey, I thought I told you to stay on the bed..." (she hadn't), then tells him to wait. At that, point Howard Shore's original score kicks in with a back-beat of ticking (Paul is constantly checking the time on his watch) as barely-registered whispers between Marcy and Kiki can be overheard in the next room.

Marcy pokes her head in the doorway, looking troubled. "Did you say something?" (He hadn't) "I thought I heard you say something." (He didn't). Her mood changes and she tells Paul that she'd been raped in that very room. Paul is horrified. "It's alright, it was an ex-boyfriend of mine. I slept through most of it" A change of subject and venue seems called for and they go out for coffee at a diner, run by Peter (the late and sadly-missed Dick Miller), who knows Marcy well. Paul asks about "Franklin" the name on the door-bell of the apartment and she tells him that's her husband. Paul registers another pause, trying not to react—he'll do that a lot. Seems they weren't married very long, that he lives in Turkey and is a film-freak, whose favorite movie is The Wizard of Oz. In fact, on their wedding night, when they were making love, he kept yelling "Surrender, Dorothy!" "Naturally," she says, as he takes his hand "I don't like to talk about it." "Can we get the check?" Paul asks suddenly.

It's then that Peter delivers that signature line at the top of the post. "It's on the house," he says. "After-Hours." Marcy and Paul go back to the Franklin loft, where he tries to make out with Marcy, but she starts to break down, they retire to her room, Marcy has another whispering session with Nikki, and then Paul turns petulant, as if all of the delays, intrigues, and feints have worn thin. He becomes a real jerk and Marcy goes crying to Nikki (ostensibly so Paul can buy one of their bagel and cream-cheese paperweights—"...as we sit here chatting, there are important papers flying rampant around my apartment 'cause I don't have anything to hold them down with!") and Paul goes out into the night where it is pouring down rain, and he becomes soaked. But, he can't get home, even by subway, because he only has ninety-seven cents...and fares go up to $1.50 at midnight.

Paul can't even go the Men's Room without being confronted with dread.

That is just the first half-hour of After Hours, and already it is so filled with a sense of dread, mystery, paranoia, miscommunication and misdirection that if Kafka were in the audience, he might run to the comfort of the lobby to soak his head in hot butter.

Paul will spend the night as it ticks away in an increasingly threatening waking nightmare. During the course of the evening, he will lose $20.00, find another, and lose that and his apartment keys, discover a dead body by suicide and be suspected of murder, as well as being a burglar, a pervert, and nearly having his head shaved, on top of being chased by a vigilante mob who know him because his face has been plastered on ever corner light pole. The very boundaries of Soho are a trap that he can't reach, without being attacked, killed (or worse) being accused of something else, by an increasingly misunderstanding and self-obsessed citizenry.

What makes the screenplay (and resulting film) interesting—and what sets it apart from Joe Frank's original source—is its intricate machinations in setting up this Kafkaesque Soho-scape of incomplete information and missed opportunities. But, it does so in a limited scope where Paul Hackett is only one among the Soho nighthawks who knows the complete story (or as much as he can) and his very knowledge of what's going on in the moving, changing landscape is what makes him suspected of the activities that the people he encounters are sensitive to. He's the stranger in a strange land, walking into an established and tenuously connected environment that he, by his movements—and resulting twists of Fate—disrupts. Soho has a barely functioning cohesion to begin with, but Paul's presence sends it spinning off its axis. He may ultimately be blameless for what happens, but it might not have turned out this way were he not there—making him totally to blame. Consider him the anti-George Bailey from It's a Wonderful Life, whose existence determines the difference between Heaven and Hell (or, specifically, Bedford Falls and Potterville). Maybe they should've called this "It's a Horrible Night." 

The world is an intricate mechanism, but throw your shoes into it and you're a saboteur. Rather than be a boon to the community, Paul is the salt in the sugar-shaker, and, as a result, he gets plastered for it. All he can do is retreat to familiar surroundings and know his place, while the rest of the world moves on around him.

After Hours, despite its opening "lifts," is a wholly derivative but amazingly original film. And it's one of my favorites in the Scorsese output.

* Curiously enough, there's an "L.A. version" of After Hours that came out about the same time: the more plot-driven Into the Night, directed by John Landis and starring Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer.

** The first choice of director was Scorsese, but he was embroiled in pre-production of The Last Temptation of Christ, and so producers Amy Robinson and Griffin Dunne turned to neophyte director Tim Burton, after they'd seen his short "Vincent." Plans to start went into place and then The Last Temptation of Christ fell through, which put Dunne and Robinson in an awkward position: how to tell Burton. When Burton was told that Scorsese was interested, he immediately responded: "I gracefully withdraw from the project. I do not want to stand in the way of anything Martin Scorsese wants to do." Burton would make his feature directing debut with Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985, and Scorsese released The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988.

*** A very After Hours section: "One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. ... I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair. One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers. Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing."

Zootopia

Kumbayopolis ("You've Got to Be Carefully Taught")
or
The Silence of the Sheeple

I have to confess that I've delayed and delayed seeing Zootopia for awhile because whenever I've gone, there have only been four seats left in the theater and it was usually half-filled with...children. And children are...sticky.

And...they're under-educated.

This one, from Disney, has to be for children, right? After all, why should adults be taught a simplified lesson about prejudice—they practice it every day. They've become experts.

So, Zootopia isn't The Lion King, with its inherent tribalism, this is a satire, along the lines of "Animal Farm," where we get to see our foibles and predilections grafted onto beasts (like they wanted or needed them) with a "Can't we all just get along" message, and forgetting that the animal kingdom is, in fact, "red in tooth and claw"—for the simple reason that the subjects get hungry every now and again and they have no viable economic system, not even in the trafficking of pelts.

Through a quick introduction via school play (written and performed by young bunny Judy Hopps—voiced as a child by Della Saba) we learn the history of this cartoon-world where animals evolved into a productive world of potential, out of the savagery that once was. And just as they have risen above such blood-thirsty territoriality (except for those poor unicorns that seen to be absent), so, too, can we have a whole new small world (after all) where even she, a humble bunny, might realize her dream of becoming a police officer and help those in need and do good in the animal world. Even if there never has been a bunny police officer before because...you know, bunnies are cute...oh, sorry, only bunnies can use the "c" word around each other, as it's considered offensive. Or patronizing. Or...well, don't do it.

Judy's train-ride to The Big City is beautifully animated
and feels like an opportunity for an "I Want" song.

Anyway, despite the ministrations of her parents (Bonnie Hunt and Don Lake) to stay in BunnyBurrow (population: steadily increasing) and be a carrot farmer like everybody else,* she goes to the Mammalian Police Academy where she trains (in a sequence equal parts The Silence of the Lambs and Full Metal Jacket), excels against all odds, and graduates with full honors to be sent to the City Central Police Department at Zootopia.

But graduating with honors doesn't make things easy: Judy is looked down upon—she IS pretty short—and just because she's made it that far doesn't mean she can hack it out on the street. Even if she's given a chance. For instance, her first day on the job, when the Chief (Idris Elba) hands out assignments on the hot "14 Missing Mammals" case, she gets assigned work as a meter-maid. 

A meter-maid.

But, plucky rarebit that she is, she makes the most of the job, setting a record for number of traffic-tickets given out before noon and, despite her own prejudices about the type of animal, reaching out to help a fox (Jason Bateman) facing specism when he and his son go to get a treat at an ice cream parlor only catering elephants. Judy feels good about herself in that she's overcome her prejudice of foxes, until she finds out that the fox...is a fox, the son is an adult posing as one, and it's all an elaborate scam of major proportions becoming minor portions.

It was about then that I got a little consciously irritated with Zootopia, but let us continue...

Judy is irked by her naivete and the fox's deviousness, and so (in a display of her own deviousness) she blackmails the larcenous fox, Nick Wilde, into helping her get clues to solve the ongoing 14 Missing Mammals case. That mystery, where fourteen of Zootopia's citizenry have gone missing, will reveal itself to have ties to the prejudice theme of the story,** its ramifications extending throughout the strata of the society, even to the political structure, of Zootopia. Here's a movie about prejudice that even The Trumpster might like, as it warns about a government trying to enforce PC sensibilities through social engineering. At least, that is what will be cherry-picked to focus on.

 

Me, I'll cherry-pick other things. That underlying plot-point seems a bit odd, because the movie wants to warn the kiddo's away from treating people based solely on their own individual fears, while also reinforcing those prejudices, and creating new ones by making the true villain of the piece be an agenda-laden least likely suspect.

Nick and Judy attend a mole-wedding with echoes of The Godfather

It's animated little heart is thumping cartoonishly in the right place, but its message is a little messy, compared to what is presented, and made light of, in the visuals. If anything, Zootopia, is one of the most specist places in this or any other dimension. Take, for example, the structure of Zootopia—it's trains have sections catering to different sized animals and nobody blinks—the trains have separate entrances/exits for giraffes and mice, and, yes, it's practical, but, on the other hand, it smacks of...well, would they actually be called "Jim Crow" laws in a world of mammals?

And the neighborhoods of Zootopia are even more segregated than they are in our time and place. The mice have a tiny-town that the larger animals (if they're allowed in) galumph through like Godzilla with gerbil trails of overpasses and travel-tubes. Again, it's practical given the size considerations, but in this Kumbayopolis with the "why can't we all just git along, little doggie" philosophy, it's a cartoon art-work done in mixed messages—the words say "don't treat mammals differently" while the pictures are pointing out just how different everything is.

And, leapin' lizards, that's just the mammals, nothing is made of any fish (although Judy's train passes by "FishTown") or reptiles, who must certainly cry "fowl" over their lot in this mammalian babel. Fish would certainly be considered "special needs" in this environment. Prejudice is rife in this place, but it is ignored as long as everybody keeps to their sector and causes a problem. It's the same passive-aggressive racism that is in our world—out of sight, out of mind and not my world/not my problem. We look after our own.

This is a cartoon, I shouldn't be thinking this stuff. And the movie talks and talks and talks about treating everybody the same, while the visuals put a lie to it. What the movie is concerned about is "the outliers," the predators, who would inspire fear in the "prey" animals and fear inspires prejudice in the herd. And Zootopia is all about herd instinct. And that's the thing about prejudice. It is born of "the tribe," "the herd," "the posse," and "the 'hood." It's "us" against "them" and drawing boundaries between the two—houses, fences, walls. Prejudice disappears when it's taken down to the singular, because at that point, it is neither reason or excuse. It's just one on one and at that point, the only excuses are ourselves and of our own making. It takes strength to admit that maybe your problems might not be in the stars, the fates or other people, but, just like Hamlet, in yourself. 

A sequence in a secret "holding area" has a strong "Silence of the Lambs" vibe
(while reminding one of an after-hours "Petco")

Tribalism creates prejudice. But, alone, the individual is weak. One of the things that beats my prejudice is commuting. Think of it, all those individuals, all in their own vehicles with one goal in mind. 99.9% of the time they get there, without any mis-hap that impedes the progress of the whole. That is an amazing work of the collective, and most of the time it works, with nary any communication between the participants. It's that goal that gets us places, creates cities and communities, gets things done. We are capable of making great things, even if it's a cartoon, and we all brings individual gifts to make those things a reality.

That's what I think, any way...but I'm prejudiced.

* My aptitude tests said I had a good career ahead of me in forestry.

** Not unlike Silence of the Lambs, again, which wraps its girl-power agenda in a story about a particularly grisly serial killer, who targets women solely, and showing in all extremes, the pervasiveness of sexism.