I'll Watch Anything

Die Hard 

No action movie from the 1980s is as heralded today as is John McTiernan’s 1988 film Die Hard.  When considering the competition (George P Cosmatos’ 1985 Rambo: First Blood Part II, James Cameron’s 1984 The Terminator), it becomes clear that what makes Die Hard so thrillingly exciting, so stunningly unique, is its accessibility.  Bruce Willis’ John McClane is the everyman that Schwarzenegger and Stallone never could be.  He’s strong, sure, but he isn’t the veined beefcake that Rambo is, and, though he can negotiate the under-construction interior of a high rise, he isn’t technologically disposed enough to use a straightforward lobby computer.  Instead, Willis’ McClane is a sarcastic detective who is more likely to roll his eyes than throw a punch, more willing to deliver a cutting one-liner than open fire.  Indeed, McClane constantly seems astonished by his own actions and antics, with Willis channeling in his performance the astonishment of the very audience that made Die Hard a blockbuster.  While the Terminator fears nothing, while Rambo grits his teeth in the face of debasing torture, McClane cannot help but wonder aloud how he got himself atop a building that is about to explode with nothing but a flimsy fire hose preventing an uninterrupted forty story fall.  As willing as he is to provide a smarmy remark concerning California liberalism, eighties corporate business culture, troubled marriages or villainous Europeans, McClane is just as prepared to question himself, making him perhaps the most approachably human action film protagonist of the blockbuster era. 

That Die Hard’s narrative is more akin to the family melodrama than to a science-fiction fantasy only opens the film further to audience participation and understanding.  Die Hard is, at its core, a tale of familial sacrifice, of fighting for what one holds most dear.  McClane is willing to walk barefoot over broken glass to save his wife, willing to drop down an elevator shaft to preserve the family structure in which he decreasingly finds himself necessary.  Die Hard is the comedy of remarriage seen through an action movie lens, an uncomfortable family dinner conversation with explosions and gunfire.  Taking the personal problems we’ve all experienced and writing them large across the screen allows Die Hard to become a mirror to the very culture from which it emerged.  We see ourselves in this hero, holding McClane close to the chest while externalizing even further Alan Rickman’s scheming, fiscally obsessed, well-informed and well-dressed Hans Gruber (the greatest villainous performance in any action movie, period).  While Die Hard deals with issues permeating eighties culture, such as an increasing global awareness and a growing yuppie corporatism, McClane acts as an anchor, reminding us that behaving morally matters more than three-piece business suits and doing cocaine while reading Time magazine.  Much as McClane’s dry wit questions the culture to which he is an outsider, Die Hard as a film shares such a camaraderie with its own audience, allowing us to be in on the joke that eighties materialism can be destroyed as easily as the skyscrapers that symbolize it, while we nonetheless truly feel for, and relate to, the film’s hero.  It is a feat few action films before or since have achieved. Yipee-kay-yay, motherfucker! 
 
 

The Silence of the Lambs 

If any film from the early 1990s defies generic trappings, it is Jonathan Demme’s 1991 The Silence of the Lambs.  While I resolutely believe the movie to be a horror film, many are not ready to categorize it as such, due to the film’s gritty realism and denial of the fantastical elements more frequently found in horror cinema.  To most, the film is a drama, and quite a powerful one.  Having won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director during its year of release, most cannot accept that a horror film could be either so successful or so relevant.  But while The Silence of the Lambs has no ghouls, ghosts, or young girls emerging from television sets, it certainly does have monsters, who are all the more frightening and affecting for the very real possibility that they could exist.  Indeed, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins, in perhaps his most shattering performance), while certainly a madman, would never engage in the deranged perversity a Jeffrey Dahmer would eagerly perform.  Yet, during one of the most climactic cinematic reveals of the recent past, he greedily uses another man’s face to disguise himself during an escape from police custody.  (He wears another man’s face.  It’s horror.)  One of the many feats Demme’s film performs is to raise the horror genre out of the cultural mire in which it is continually understood to exist.  The Silence of the Lambs emphatically declares that horror can be relevant, it can be dramatic, it can be craftily made, and it can be powerful. 

And if The Silence of the Lambs is both a drama and a horror film, we can also understand it as a romance, one of the darkest variety.  In Jodie Foster’s strong, emotive and intelligent turn as FBI trainee Clarice Starling, she more than matches Lecter, her deranged paramour, pulling the strings and “rolling the dice” in their relationship.  Lecter obsesses over her as a cat might over a mouse, but only at first, his appreciation for this young woman growing exponentially as they continue to engage in an analytic – and therapeutic (for both) – repartee.  Starling, meanwhile, learns to question perceived authority through her interactions with the serial killer, while gaining a startling knowledge of self that can only come from close relationships with others.  Starling and Lecter strengthen one another, sharing a mutual respect that emboldens both parties.  The genres of romance, drama and horror never had it so good – films rarely take the time, and directors rarely have the skill, to construct such profound interpersonal relationships onscreen. 

Finally, in terms of filmmaking craft, The Silence of the Lambs is also exemplary.  No film in recent memory has used medium shots and close ups to such a powerful effect.  The horror genre, as a ‘lesser genre,’ opens itself to being an arena of cinematic experimentation, where directors and cinematographers have perhaps more leeway than they might otherwise (note Frank Darabont’s chilling use of the fade out in his 2007 film The Mist).  The Silence of the Lambs is all about the faces of its individual characters, particularly their eyes.  Hannibal Lecter’s chilling stare, as he sits in an ornate cage reviewing an FBI case file, burns into both the celluloid and our memory, his eyes filling the screen in its entirety.  Though we might describe Clarice Starling as an innocent when compared to the characters she communes with and hunts, the persistence of her expression and the intense eagerness of her gaze defy the innocence that is her initial impression.  These traded stares, presented in stunning close-ups, create an emotional intensity, and immensity, between viewers and characters, between audience and film.  The Silence of the Lambs is both an extraordinary horror film and a powerful, sumptuously visual character study.  In Demme’s masterful movie, the eyes have it.