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October 6th 2020

Guest Picks: Academic Dr. Pete Falconer

Guest Picks: Academic Dr. Pete Falconer

The collective experience of audiences in a cinema watching great films is at the heart what Park Circus is about. We love films, shared stories and escapism, and have asked some of our friends from across the film industry to recommend some of their favourite films for audiences to enjoy when it is safe for cinemas to reopen.

Dr. Pete Falconer is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Bristol.  His work focuses on the forms and genres of popular cinema.  His book, The Afterlife of the Hollywood Western, was published in April 2020.

Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)

I will start with an example from Park Circus’ main From the Love of Cinema programme: Get Out. The theme of escape is right there in the title, but it doesn’t suggest the comforting escape usually associated with escapism. This is a more forceful, imperilled kind of escape: get out while you still can. Or alternatively, it is more hostile, a rejection: get out, you are not wanted here.

When I saw Get Out at the cinema in 2017, it felt like the first new film in years that evoked the spirit of 1970s horror. It had the political daring and urgency that I associated with films made by George Romero, Larry Cohen, the early Brian De Palma. It’s clear that Jordan Peele is steeped in the work of this sort of filmmaker; he’s a literate director that knows his horror movies.

In Get Out, Peele combines his genre literacy with a wonderful sense of timing. Before he was a filmmaker, he was of course known as a sketch comedian, and this background is apparent in moments throughout the movie. When Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) goes upstairs during the party and everyone downstairs suddenly stops talking, this has the timing of a joke. The moment lands like a punchline and is then stretched out into something more tense and sinister.

Escape is central to Get Out, but it is used, not to provide comfort or reassurance, but to highlight the problems that make it necessary. Although the film uses elements of fantasy and science fiction, it addresses itself squarely at the world from which we are watching, and some of its very real problems: racism, exploitation, imbalances of power.

The plot, in summary form, feels more blatantly symbolic in its treatment of these and other issues than the film does when you actually watch it. The political resonances are handled intelligently, integrated into the overall construction so that they seem like the unavoidable implications of the story being told. One of the ways in which Get Out is able to achieve this is by starting small, building on the sad plausibility (and for many, the familiarity) of casual, everyday racism and gradually ramping up to the more overt evil that reveals itself later in the movie.

The fantasy elements are also crucial here. The possession and mind control tropes and the hypnotic motif of the Sunken Place carry powerful symbolic suggestions without lapsing into easy allegory; they do not stand straightforwardly for any specific real-world problems. The Sunken Place does not equate to any single, extractable aspect of African-American experiences of racism. Instead, the film’s symbolic features are richly suggestive, with the potential to reflect a wider range of issues and problems relating to racism. In this way, the film can dramatise Chris’ escape from the racist monsters that he encounters in the movie without also suggesting that we have managed to overcome these problems in the wider world.

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Get Out (2017)

The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

I was always going to find a way to include this, my absolute favourite film, in this list. Nonetheless, I think it fits nicely. Like Get Out, The Night of the Hunter tells a story of escape. Specifically, it is about two children, John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), escaping from their wicked stepfather, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum).

I use that last phrase intentionally, because the film has a fairytale quality to it, with its siblings, reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel, making their way through a dark, stylised world, particularly in the dreamlike sequences in which they drift downriver in a boat. This points to another link to Get Out: both films have a fantasy component to the worlds that they depict, but in neither case does this make for a world that most of us would probably choose to inhabit. These are not fantasy worlds into which to escape.

The parallel extends further. The world of The Night of the Hunter, for all its fantastical trappings, echoes many of the problems of our own world, especially the vulnerability of those without power or status. At one moment of particularly overt symbolism, an owl swoops down and snatches up a rabbit; Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish) laments that “It’s a hard world for little things.”

The film is set during the Great Depression. The kids’ real father is hanged for robbery and murder. There is a scene later in the film, when John and Pearl are on the run, where a group of homeless children arrive at a woman’s door begging for food; she gives them one potato each before shooing them away. The film combines the drab, unforgiving reality of 1930s poverty with its more magical, fantastical components. In a way, it is the emptiness and depletion of the Depression setting that create an opening for the eruption of big, mythical forces.

The forces in question are a heightened version of good, embodied by Rachel Cooper, and a heightened version of evil, embodied by Harry Powell: the fairy godmother versus the wicked stepfather. While the two characters are clearly opposed, they belong to the same order of reality; both are larger-than-life mythical figures who stand out in the stark 1930s setting.

Both sides of the film’s mythical divide are compelling in their own way. Harry and Rachel both offer something a little grander than the world around them. Harry is a charismatic monster. He can hold an audience with his hellfire preaching, bamboozle people into thinking that he is morally upstanding and wield an apparently hypnotic power over at least some of the women that he encounters. But he is also a greedy, volatile, destructive misogynist. Conversely, Rachel, the wise, strong grandmother figure, protects her adopted brood of lost and abandoned children fiercely. As comforting as Rachel is, however, she and Harry are products of the same world, with her goodness seeming almost like a direct, balancing response to his evil. There remains a lingering connection between the means of John and Pearl’s escape and what they are escaping from.

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The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)

My next film, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, also presents us with a fantastical world. As in The Night of the Hunter, everything is heightened and amplified, but if the earlier film is gothic and mythic, the fantastical world of Kill Bill: vol. 1 is much more that of the movies. It is a world of martial arts films, action movies, spaghetti Westerns – the kind of world populated by elite bands of female assassins, gangs of masked yakuza and master samurai swordsmiths that can be coaxed out of retirement.

Escape isn’t as prominent a theme as it was in my first two examples, but the film invests heavily in features associated with escapism. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 revels in the kinetic pleasures of the movies: movement, action, music. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the climactic sequences, the big fight at the House of Blue Leaves and the subsequent showdown between The Bride (Uma Thurman) and O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) in the snow garden.

In his excellent book on Quentin Tarantino, Edward Gallafent (my old PhD supervisor) compares the ending of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 to a musical number, a satisfying song and dance climax. The showstopping sequence is anchored in the film’s narrative – a story of progressive revenge – but allowed to take on its own significance as an enjoyable, if gruesome spectacle. There is little pressure on the ending to provide a major resolution. As the first part of a two-part story, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 doesn’t need to have an ending; it can just have a climax.

This may sound crude, but typically for Tarantino, this seemingly throwaway dimension is worked through more deliberately. Consider the beginning of the film; there is a brief prologue, but the main story starts with the Bride’s second act of revenge, the second name on her death list. Effectively, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 starts after the beginning of its story and finishes before the end. It is as if it has neither, but instead is one long middle, an extended excursion into delirious movieland. We might compare it to a ‘Monster of the Week’ episode of a TV show, liberated from contributing much to an ongoing narrative and able to focus on getting the most out of its more immediate material. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is an exercise in delivering the characteristic pleasures of this thing in front of us, without worrying too much about tying things up.

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Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)

3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves, 1957)

There had to be a Western on my list somewhere. I recently published my first book, The Afterlife of the Hollywood Western on Westerns from more recent decades, but the one I have chosen is the 1957 version of 3:10 to Yuma. I have written elsewhere about the 2007 remake, but the earlier film remains one of my favourites.

As films of action and adventure, set in a mythical American past, Westerns are often regarded as traditionally escapist. To Europeans like myself, more removed from the national history on which Westerns (loosely) draw, they have a different escapist quality. For many Europeans, the Old West, as depicted on film, is a repository of exotic Americana. It is strange – a different world with its own logic, much like America remains from a European perspective – but familiar, its details elaborated across hundreds of movies. This attraction to an exemplary form of American popular culture is what prompted so many Europeans (most famously Italians) to make Westerns of their own.

When explaining what I find special about the original 3:10 to Yuma, I sometimes compare it to one of the biggest Westerns from the same decade, Shane. Van Heflin, who plays Dan Evans in 3:10 to Yuma, also played Joe Starrett, a key supporting character in Shane. These are similar characters: everyday working men, struggling to support their families. In Shane, the glamorous hero (Alan Ladd) fights on behalf of men like Joe; in 3:10 to Yuma, the ordinary Dan takes on the heroic role himself. I sometimes characterise 3:10 to Yuma as “The People’s Shane”.

Thinking about the theme of escape, though, we might compare 3:10 to Yuma to another classic Hollywood movie: It’s a Wonderful Life. Both films centre on a struggling husband and father, not wholly happy with his lot. In both, this character is offered the possibility of escape from his responsibilities. This offer is presented by a devilish figure, confronting the hero with temptation.

In It’s a Wonderful Life, this figure is rich old Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore); in 3:10 to Yuma, it is Ben Wade (Glenn Ford), an outlaw gang leader. Ben embodies a dangerous, alluring freedom; unlike Dan, he can say and do whatever he likes. Dan is presented with different opportunities for escape. Transporting Ben to prison offers him the temporary escape of a meaningful mission, a few days away from his farm doing something that seems more purposeful and impressive. Ben also offers Dan a more permanent escape: more money than he has ever seen, to buy water for his cattle, clothes for his wife and make life less exhausting.

Dan, like a good Western hero, ultimately makes the honourable choice. He refuses the easy escape offered by Ben and unleashes more powerful forces of redemption. The film’s mythic ending might be a little much for some people, but I find it an eloquent way of emphasising the moral weight of Dan’s decision. The film scholar Douglas Pye compares the ending of 3:10 to Yuma to Arthurian legends of the Holy Grail, so we’re in some deep mythological waters here.

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3:10 to Yuma (1957)

Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986)

My next pick, Labyrinth, is the first new release I ever saw at the cinema, at the age of four. Like 3:10 to Yuma, Labyrinth is about escape from responsibility. Here, however, the escape is into a more overtly magical world.

In 3:10 to Yuma, the hero is a grown man, with an established place in the world that he is fighting to preserve. In Labyrinth, the heroine, Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) is a teenage girl. This puts the escape into a different context, that of the coming-of-age story. The fantastical world in which Sarah finds herself when she wishes that the goblins would take her baby brother away is clearly linked to childhood; it is a fairytale world of heroes and monsters, high stakes and heightened proportions.

The magical fantasy in Labyrinth is presented as both a luxury – something excessive, an escape from responsibility that goes too far, and from which it may not be possible to return – and as a necessity. It is dangerous and disruptive, but also vital and nourishing. This is reflected in the film’s depiction of its world, which is vivid, funny and exciting, drawing on a rich pool of sources and influences.

Just as I compared 3:10 to Yuma to It’s a Wonderful Life, we can compare Labyrinth to another classic Hollywood movie: The Wizard of Oz. In both films, a restless young woman is transported to a place both wonderful and terrible, where she goes on a quest, gaining three new friends along the way. Labyrinth belongs, then, to a tradition of classic children’s stories.

At the heart of the labyrinth, however, is not an old wizard, but Jareth, the Goblin King. Jareth is played by David Bowie, an inspired casting choice who brings a fey virility to the character. He represents, in distilled form, Sarah’s ambivalent, contradictory relationship to the fantasy world, blending attraction, temptation, menace and corruption. While still a kids’ movie, Labyrinth is also a female psycho-sexual bildungsroman, reminiscent of Angela Carter.

If this sounds rather serious, it is offset by the film’s absurd, distinctly British humour. The screenplay, by Terry Jones from Monty Python, is supported by Bowie’s willingness to be ridiculous as well as imposing. The humour in the Labyrinth does not disrupt the fantasy; it brings its details to life.

Central to the film’s presentation of its world are its many animatronic and puppet characters; Labyrinth was directed by Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets. As with some of Henson’s other projects in the 1980s, like The Dark Crystal and The Storyteller, some of the puppet designs make powerful use of the grotesque. Nonetheless, a friendlier, more Muppet-like quality remains. Many of the creatures that Sarah encounters – such as Ludo, the big, gentle, auburn-furred beast – are monstrous and adorable at the same time.

Labyrinth does not reject its fantastical escape. It is not about putting away childish things, but gaining control over them. The film recognises the value of Sarah’s escape, but insists on the importance of her escaping on her own terms. The magic words that she utters near the end of the movie are “You have no power over me.”

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Labyrinth (1986)

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

My final choice presents a different kind of escape: the pleasure of getting away with it, of doing something transgressive and suffering no serious consequences. Trouble in Paradise is a romantic comedy about a couple, Gaston (Herbert Marshall) and Lily (Miriam Hopkins), who insert themselves into the life and household of a rich young widow, Madame Mariette Colet (Kay Francis).

Gaston and Lily are international master thieves. The skill and poise with which they commit their crimes is celebrated throughout. This moral stance was tenable in an American movie in the early 1930s, but would have been much more difficult only a couple of years later, as the Motion Picture Production Code was more strictly enforced in Hollywood.

A recurring motif in Trouble in Paradise is people not being who they claim to be. For Lily and Gaston, this functions as a form of escape. They lack social status or inherited wealth, but are able to get ahead through deception. They transform and reinvent themselves by performing their false identities.

This is showcased early on in the film, where the couple come together in a celebrated scene of mutual seduction. They display their pickpocketing virtuosity, each revealing that they have robbed small – sometimes intimate – items off the other’s person. In their flirtations, Gaston and Lily continue to call each other by fraudulent titles – “Baron” and “Countess” – despite making it clear that they know these to be false. They do not so much expose each other’s fakery as invite one another to share it.

Trouble in Paradise emphasises the liberation of fakery, presenting it as a way of controlling one’s own destiny, of transcending unfair situations and imbalances of power. This gives the film a political edge. It depicts criminality, as embodied by the central couple, as a perverse meritocracy. Lily and Gaston succeed by virtue of their wits, rather than their background or connections. Gaston describes himself as a “self-made crook,” and it is clearly his skill, intelligence, charm and sophistication that allow him to be the thief that he is. Lily juxtaposes her love and admiration for Gaston the crook with the disappointing prospect of him giving up his independence and relying on Madame Colet, becoming “one of those useless, good-for-nothing gigolos.”

The film is light and funny – there are many wonderful comic moments and performances, from the main cast and from character actors like Edward Everett Horton – but also complex, deliberate and intricate. Not only that, but it contains some of the most erotically-charged doors in the history of cinema.

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Trouble in Paradise (1932)