TWILIGHT's Cinematic Ancestors: THE WIND, DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, MOROCCO, TITANIC, PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, LITTLE WOMEN

I'll always stick up for TWILIGHT (the films at any rate) because I love the death drive, and what other series is the lead girl allowed to have an unrepentant disdain for life? That's so ninja! What other teen series is it not only sanctioned but wholly recommended to die for love? That's pre-code woman's picture Hollywood, as old and venerated as Lilian Gish and D.W. Griffith. In refusing to be embraced by the positive life energies of the social order that pines for her, Bella becomes an Antigone-by-way-of-Camille tragi-diva. She may be a virgin, but she's not afraid to give it all up for the idea of love.

It's important for hand-wringing moralists to remember that most everyone in the world knows the difference between fiction and reality, so these kinds of death drives are meant for films -- films are their outlet. They are death on a stick, 50 cents a seat. In a dream, does it really matter if you live beyond the credits? Doesn't Oscar prefer a gloriously overwrought death scene over a happily-ever-after fade to nothing?  Don't we love to pretend to die as children? To achieve true immortality the ideal lover must become only a memory, a twinkle in Gloria Stuart's eye, rather than one who ages into her sofa and squintes at the crosswords through dirty bifocals.

TITANIC (1997)

What could be more functionally Goth than the frozen Arctic ending of this film? I was deeply surprised the frosty hair, pale skin, chattering teeth and purple lip look didn't sweep the world as a fashion trend after this film came out. Sometimes in cultural hypothermia a lag effect doth dwell. A decade or so later, TWILIGHT sped the lag to a close.

LITTLE WOMEN (1994)

I saw this in the theater the same weekend as INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, and was hungover and repentant both times and cried at each. For the purposes of this post, however, WOMEN trumps VAMPIRE. Why? Here's why: a) Brad Pitt's ethical guilt tripping over biting folks in VAMPIRE gets soooo tiresome, and b) Tom Cruise as Lestat? Who cares if he was actually good at it? It's just wrong, no matter how sexy is the Antonio Banderas.

LITTLE WOMEN, meanwhile, has super young Christian Bale, Kristen Dunst (not quite as good as she was in VAMPIRE but who cares), Clare Danes (I cried a thousand drunken times over My So-Called Life reruns on MTV) and Winona Ryder! And even today, the film has a weird charm, like you're staying over at the spooky-cozy mansion house of a group of very, very cool girls in long nightshirts and candles, and that sense of 'belonging' to a cool group of beautiful people is really what TWILIGHT hinges on. Also, Ryder's combination of brainy, brunette and no bullshit-taking becomes a steampunk version of Jo that's a clear forerunner to the whole Kristen Stewart-Bella Goth thing, which Ryder basically invented anyway, six years earlier in BEETLEJUICE.

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (1951)

Here's a love story where the guy is a legendary romantic hundreds of years old and only true love will set him free from sailing on into the horizons for centuries, eternally alone. He's willing to give up his chance at salvation when he meets Pandora, though. She's a free spirit who all the boys kill themselves, and each other, over. As Pandora, the girl whom a macho toreador, a dry British sportsman motorist, and the wise older archaeologist who narrates the tale all pine for, Ava Gardner lolls languorous and luxuriant under the painterly camera eye of Jack Cardiff. And the parallels with TWILIGHT are, like, super obvious. The coveted 'full of life' mortal beauty giving up her mortality to be with her centuries-old cursed lover; he, meanwhile, giving up the chance for her to give it up because her life means so much to him. And even with all the rivals fighting over her, she chooses the immortal with the British teeth. No matter the thousand pleasures of the land, this is for her the chance to become mythic, this earthly plane be damned... 

DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY (1933)

Death is played by Frederic March, who poses as a count and meets a far-away-eyed debutante (Evelyn Venable). She's death-obsessed enough to make Bella seem like Mary Poppins and her Edward ain't some deer-blood drinking Puritan but the Grim One himself. Love + Death = Modernism is a cry-in-your-whiskey highball tradition. This isn't available on DVD, except as an extra on the two-disc Meet Joe Black (Ultimate Edition), which since you can pick it up for under nine dollars, is worth getting just for Venable's haunted performance if nothing else (avoid JOE BLACK itself, and I say this as a man who deeply adores Claire Forlani).

MOROCCO (1931)

Marlene Dietrich's cabaret chanteuse courts androgyny and shuns rich Adolphe Menjou (the Jacob), knowing he'll eat it up. She's defined more by what she's not than what she is, and that's why she falls for 'tall drink of water' Cooper, a shadow in the Foreign Legion who, like her, is bored with the opposite sex throwing themselves all over him. They're each surprised by their deep yen for one another, but both are so used to being pursued they barely remember how to actually do the pursuing. Not to worry, since neither one gives a damn about life or death and Dietrich's final renouncement is as valiant and Goth as anything in the back of Bella's death-drivin' mind.

THE WIND (1929)

Silent (or sound) films have seldom spun along with such crazy spirit as in THE WIND: Lillian Gish is the poor virginal girl who gets way less than she bargained for when she moves in with her deep dish dust bowl dirt-dwellin' mail order husband. His homestead is so windy she spends the bulk of the day sweeping sand out of the shack, and repelling her husband's would-be rapist friends. The whole thing works well as a metaphor for virginity and the loss thereof, the endless sacrifice and loss in exchange for nothing but maybe love. In a way, it's the most sexually and emotionally 'mature' film of the lot. It's the REPULSION of the silent era! Don't miss it, and don't front if you have to read intertitles, or you may never understand DOGVILLE. You been warned! Smarten up! 

Secrets of 2012, or the "The Day of a Million Relapses"

Sorry to be so late to the party in loving/trashing Roland Emmerich's 2012, but I got so much to say, You HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME! We're running out of time! First, First, I love the insecure way Emmerich steals bits not just from himself but from James Cameron, and Michael Bay -- they steal bits from each other, as if there was only one 99 cent bag of tired action movie cliches and they had to share it between them, and make it last three hours. Emmerich of course is the worst, stealing everything while sticking to what he knows best - destroying the world on a bigger and bigger scale and refracting the escapes and deaths through the on-the-street perspectives of an an offensively cliche'd cross section of 'everypeople'-- each a unique distillation of stock characteristics defining their Ameri-racial heritage.

There's enough great carnage in 2012 to forgive it its trespasses, of course: Las Vegas collapses into a giant flame hole, all of Los Angeles gets a long fly-over as it sinks back into the earth, the Vatican (!!), and other tourist spots collapse and a joyous time is had by all, though it's rather like having a lover who covers up the fact they don't have an erection by performing an elaborate courtship dance. 

But hey, we've all died before in other lives, we know it's hard, and Emmerich makes sure we all are represented by one stock character or the other. Me, I resonated most with Harry (Blu Mankuma), the beautiful old African American jazz man father of the bleeding heart geologist son (Chiwetel Ejiofor). The two have a nice farewell via ship-to-shore phone (Harry's pianist in residence on a cruise liner) and upon hanging up--his responsibility to his son completed--Harry grabs a Jack Daniels off a passing waiter's tray. His old sax man (George Segal) remarks: "Harry, you haven't had a drink in 25 years!"

Harry doesn't even answer, and our movie makes sure we actually get to see him drink that first drink in 25 years, a healthy swig, thus letting us know that (a) he's cool and b) he's doomed, and c) he's relapsed and doesn't give a shit! As someone with half his 'time,' I can't help but cheer!! Someone in that scriptwriting pool knows the score!

Sadly, the next time we see Harry he's not abusive or sprawled on the floor, or staggering around on his second fifth of bourbon, or even playing some mournful blues on the lounge piano as the room fills with water and waiters wade by in slow motion (they're on a cruise). So many missed opportunities... but finally a disaster movie actually put in what every sober alcoholic waits for--the unshakable excuse to relapse. There's an old saying in AA that I made up about promising to drink again when hell freezes over: one day we're bound to find ourselves on a Zamboni machine heading down into the flames.

So that's 2012 for me, and I don't even have to tell you the rest of the plot: A perennially late divorced slacker dad (John Cusak, flailing wildly) racing to pick up his kids for the weekend from hot, beachwood-aged-wife (Amanda Peet) and her shallow dork of a plastic surgeon, lawyer or stockbroker boyfriend/husband (Tom McCarthy). Cusak is one of those dads who talk baby talk to their children long past the expiration date that such condescension passes for parenting. Dude, your daughter's watching the world cave in around her and you're the one panicking like a hysterical over-acting ninny.

I'm always glad to see that Hollywood for all its smarm is deeply concerned about micro-managerial parenting and the crippling anxiety it creates -- especially in men, causing them to run away from responsibility and dread every weekend of custody, terrified the kid will slip and fall on their watch. Like Tom Cruise in Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS remake, our spazzola action movie everyman is caught at ground zero of immanent catastrophe right at the time he's most anxiety-prone: child custody weekend. His first thought once the meteors start is to return the kids asap so he can be free to die with dignity. Is this how real fathers feel, or is it what teenagers are afraid they'll feel as fathers?

I'm childless, no kids y'all, and the whole "road not taken" fascinates me,  not in a fuzzy way but in a queasy way -- like watching your friends fall into a giant threshing machine and come out looking thirty years older, but with a nice shiny 'warm-colored' patina, telling you in their pod person voices "Once you have a child, your whole outlook changes, you appreciate life." Thus, God opens the door right as the floor falls away behind you, and he expects you to jump through only at the last possible second, your mouth agape, going "Ahhhhhhhhhhh!"

Next thing I love about this film? The covert condemnation of liberal bleeding-heartedness. I mean, can we be honest? Do we really care if four billion people die, or an extra hundred crrazy idiots get to come on the ark or not? Would you really care so much, Holly, if one of those little ants down there stopped moving? Either way, why INDEPENDENCE DAY and DAY AFTER TOMORROW did this so much better was by eliminating the whole ark crap. The mad chase across the globe to fight to get on some escape craft is a kind of hack ploy to show a lot of different lands getting wiped out, but a close reading opens up all sorts of THE BOX-style Pandora-ish issues of empathy and survival instinct that  come off best either being addressed in Brechtian reflexivity or in a film noir-style survivor guilt way (ala 28 MONTHS LATER) or not at all. Don't lecture us for enjoying watching ant-sized people falling out of burning skyscrapers if that's what got us in the seats. We didn't come for character development.

The moral quandry is brought up and simultaneously side-stepped by this strategy. Ejiofor plays his bleeding horn whenever he learns someone he knows has died, demanding everyone drop their own issues to acknowledge that these people he knew had NAMES, feelings!  Meanwhile, the "self-preservation" other of the equation is Cusak as the kind of dad who promises his kids front row seats to Justin Bieber  and on arriving at the stadium (without tickets) and learning the show's sold out, panics and proceeds to storm the doors, blow the family fortune on scalpers, sneak in through the back, make a big scene with security about how much it means to his kids, cries and pleads, traumatizes everyone-- not just his kids--and eventually incites a small riot and burns down the stadium, and the kids don't even really care about Justin Beaver, at all; they hadn't the heart to tell him.

There are men who can act rationally when faced with crisis, and men can't, men who've just bled too much from their liberal martyr hearts to see the forests from the trees. These are men who will freak out because they can't find one girl's lost daddy and so righteously go around yelling even as huge fissures are erupting under the makeshift med unit and thousands are dying and burning all around. The only time this scene has been done right was in 1939's GONE WITH THE WIND (left), when Scarlett walks out of the makeshift confederate army hospital to get help and just keeps going right on home, after seeing the mass carnage spreading into the horizon. But Scarlet's morality was inherently dubious, what with slavery and all, and because Selznik hewed to the book, Scarlett was, almost by a fluke, allowed to be totally mercenary and immoral. (Everyone wants to make a film as sweeping and memorable as GONE WITH THE WIND, but have they actually ever seen it? The lead character's an unrepentant bitch, y'all!) GWTW could hardly even be made like that today, with such a ruthless, self-centered heroine. If the suits remade it, Scrarlett would probably end up a saintly single mom, and then all her capricious manipulations and treacheries would be solely to care "for the child" and therefore saintly.

To show you how bad things get without ambivalence and naked self-interest, let's return to 2012 and the only two guys with any maturity in the whole picture: Woody Harrelson as a Yellowstone hippy DJ who greets the huge volcanic eruption of old Faithful with a head full of mescalin (I'm guessing) and Oliver Platt as a blustery political something or other who soon regrets inviting Ejiofor along on the ark, especially when he starts to make emotion-cracked pleas to open up the arks to the unwashed masses rioting outside. Platt screams at him: "You might have gotten us all killed but as long as your conscience is clean." Amen. When Oliver Platt is the only one with any sense, that's a sad crazy day.

My fellow Americans, many must die so that John Cusak and his two rugrats may live and have last minute escapes, one after the other until the law of averages shrugs and walks away as if from his friend's nonstop video game playing. Of course if you really really really want to live, then come on! We have to get on that plane and take off before the earth splits apart but first I have to slowly do five things! There's a saying in AA, you know you're an alcoholic when you have to choose between believing in God or dying drunk, and need time to think about it. If to live you had to endure John Cusak's overacting, there shouldn't be a second thought.

Like, am I the only one who just wishes everyone died in this film? Why be loyal and liberal bleeding hearty to CGI stick figures? Let them die! That's what they're for!!! I remember in 6th grade, my friend and I drew stick figures killing and dying elaborate horrible deaths in each other's notebooks during class - it helped blow off steam. The teacher thought the drawings were cool (it was 1978) but we should pay more attention to class topics. If we pulled that in a 6th grade class today we'd be red flagged and the parents would be called-in, and the teacher would worry and admonish the way Ejiofor does to Oliver Platt: "Those things you drew - they're just stick figures to you, but they have NAMES, feelings! They represent real people!"

Like everyone's going to crack up with cheering and weeping if Cusak (who in his Jar-Jar spazzing nearly destroys all humanity) survives. If he had been a real hero, he would have just let his ex-family die like everyone else -  he'd be spared all the running and flailing, but no, he's that kind of dad, a total victim of the idea of "proximal morality" -- that is, the condition wherein something is important based on its proximity. You might be running to stop a bomb in a crowded restaurant, but if you pass a dog with a thorn its paw, you have to stop and pull the thorn out. That dog has a NAME, feelings, people! The dog's proximity preempts the bomb in the restaurant, cancels it out -- the squeaky wheel-greaser dad in action.

Thus, the ambivalence of Scarlett lives on in a passive aggressive display of parenting anxiety: Worrying about his children exempts him from responsibility for all the billions of lives that are being left to die. In this manner Cusak's no different from Billy Zane in TITANIC (1997, left), muscling his way into a lifeboat by claiming to be the guardian of some random kid he scooped up. If it was actually his own kid, he'd be considered a saint,. And aren't we all children of God, Nic? I mean John? Now which way is the bar on this sinking tub?

POST SCRIPT: See also on Bright Lights:
Shyamalan's a Ding-dong (Will Smith is a great dad, please)
Dads of Great Adventure: A Guide to Cinema’s Post-Apocalyptic Hyper-Parent