OBSESSION 1976

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review. Therefore, many crucial

plot points are revealed and referenced for the purpose of analysis. 

It’s Déjà vu All Over Again 

I'm not sure which is worse: being a living, still-functioning film director and having to endure reading about every film school upstart and wannabe hailed as the "new" you, "next" you, or heir to your throne or being a young filmmaker striving to make your mark, only to have your work evaluated exclusively in terms of homage, pastiche, tip-of-the-hat-to, or outright rip-off of an artist you admire.

For as long as I can remember, from Henri-Georges Clouzot (Diabolique) to William Castle (almost everything he's ever done), Alfred Hitchcock has been the go-to comparison name for directors working in the suspense thriller genre. Director Brian De Palma, from the days of his breakout 1972 feature Sisters (whose poster prominently featured the Hollywood Reporter quote: "The most genuinely frightening film since Hitchcock's Psycho!"), has been saddled with—and openly courted—comparisons to Hitchcock.

In our label-centric, brand-driven culture, this certainly makes it easier for critics and studio marketing departments to pigeonhole artists and brand them with an identity, but for film fans, it's all a bit like settling for a tribute band after the genuine article has cut back on touring. You may enjoy how much the tribute band sounds like the original and how it evokes fond memories, but no matter how good they are, they're an imitation. Plus, in focusing so much on how successfully the tribute band has approximated the sound, feel, and experience of the real deal, you never give yourself a chance to appreciate how talented the tribute band is (or isn't) in its own right. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but making do with a copy can sometimes feel like an act of willful self-deception.

As it just so happens, willful self-deception describes both the theme of Brian De Palma's Vertigo-inspired film Obsession and my own personal viewing experience. 

Cliff Robertson as Michael Courtland

Genevieve Bujold as Elizabeth Courtland/Sandra Portinari

John Lithgow as Robert Lasalle

Following on the heels of the sleeper success of Sisters (which openly culled from Psycho, Rear Window, and featured a score by Hitchcock-associated composer Bernard Herrmann) and the undeserved flop of 1974s Phantom of the Paradise (a De Palma departure from type that seized upon the glam-rock zeitgeist mined in 1973s The Rocky Horror Show); the relatively high-profile Obsession gave Brian De Palma his first mainstream commercial success. A modest success, to be sure, but in grossing $4.47 million on its $1.2 million budget, Obsession was a surprise hit. A hit that flew in the face of Columbia Studio's over-cautious distribution strategy. After having sat on the shelf for almost a year after production was completed, the studio tentatively released Obsession with an indifferent ad campaign during the "dog days" of August.

Alas, before Obsession had the chance to build up much steam or word-of-mouth, Carrie, De Palma's second 1976 release, opened in November, its overwhelming critical and boxoffice success (the film grossed $15.2 million against a $1.8 million budget) fairly obliterating Obsession from theater screens, and, until very recently, a great many people's minds, as well.

Florence, Italy 1948

Written by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) from a story by Brian De Palma after the two had taken in an L.A. County Museum screening of the then long-out-of-circulation Hitchcock classic Vertigo, Obsession is a romantic thriller about love, loss, grief, guilt, deception, and emotional fixation. Pretty much everything you've come to know and expect from Hitchcock and those who seek to sincerely flatter the Master of Suspense through imitation.

But while Paul Schrader's derivative screenplay borrows copiously from Hitchcock, calling Obsession a romantic "thriller" (the film was promoted with the tagline: "The love story that will scare the life out of you") would be a bit of a stretch. Inarguably romantic in theme and possessed of several intense moments of emotional conflict, anyone coming to Obsession expecting the kind of excesses of violence associated with De Palma after Dressed to Kill or Scarface would do well to be reminded that Obsession is rated PG, and its thrills (mercifully) on the restrained side. So, if I'd have to label it at all (oh, and I do), I'd call Obsession a romantic suspense film or romantic mystery.

Changing Partners
Paul Schrader's original screenplay for Obsession (titled Deja Vu) called for the prescient use of Patti Page's 1953 song "Changing Partners" for this scene in which Michael, Elizabeth, and Amy waltz together at their 10th wedding anniversary party. Perhaps it was initially used and eventually overscored by Bernard Herrmann's sweepingly romantic "Valse Lente" 

The time is 1959. Michael Courtland (Robertson) is a successful New Orleans real estate developer whose beloved wife Elizabeth (Bujold) and 9-year-old daughter Amy (Wanda Blackman) are kidnapped. A botched effort to capture the kidnappers without paying the ransom results in the violent deaths of both wife and child, a tragedy for which Courtland blames himself and is haunted by for years.

A great many of Brian De Palma's by-now trademark stylistic flourishes are in full evidence throughout Obsession. His familiar swirling camera effect is put to particularly effective use in a 360° pan that takes Michael Courtland from grieving widower in 1959 (top) to morose obsessive in 1975.

A broken man consumed with guilt over the role he perceives himself to have played in his family's death, Michael is stuck in 1959 and unable to move on with his life. Even going so far as to thwart the desires of friend and junior business partner Robert Lasalle (Lithgow) by allowing a prime piece of valuable New Orleans real estate to lie undeveloped for the sole purpose of erecting a doleful monument to his wife and child on the site.

In an effort to dislodge Michael from his crippling depression, Lasalle persuades Michael to accompany him on one of his frequent business trips to Florence, Italy. It's there that Michael, while sentimentally/morbidly visiting the church where he and his wife met in 1948, catches sight of an art restorer who (wouldn't you know it) happens to be a dead ringer for Elizabeth. 

Restore the Original or Uncover the Copy?
This is the question - both literal and existential - put to Michael Courtland by Italian-born art restorer Sandra Portinari (Bujold, again) as she preps a Madonna and Child altarpiece by
Renaissance painter Bernardo Daddi. Clues aplenty, folks!

Upon being reassured by Lasalle that the Italian-style doppelganger was no mere hallucination or trick of the brain, Michael, thrown into a tailspin by the uncanny coincidence of locale and resemblance, becomes consumed with the idea that fate has offered him both a second chance at love and a stab at redemption.

Embarking on a whirlwind course of seduction consisting of stalking, persistent courting, and matrimonial proposal, Michael, in due course, whisks Sandra back to his New Orleans home, where whatever remaining line between fantasy and reality can only become even more blurred. And it does.

While awaiting their rushed wedding day, Michael, happy at last, exhibits a marked improvement in disposition and demeanor that his friends and associates interpret (with good reason) as his becoming more detached from reality by the day. Meanwhile, Sandra--ensconced in his shrine-like home and left on her own to study Elizabeth's old photos and diaries for hours upon end--cultivates an obsession of her own. She becomes so immersed in the past life of the dead woman that she begins progressively making herself over in Elizabeth's image.

Love and desire figure into all this somewhere, but it takes a backseat to the morbidity of Michael and Sandra's escalating Folie a Deux: a double-fantasy/shared-delusion speeding headlong on a collision course toward an inevitable, preordained destination...the reenactment and hoped-for reversal of that fateful night that changed Michael's life forever. But can one really repeat the past? And if so, how wise is it to do so?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I'm not sure if you can make a really riveting film about obsessive love if you approach the material academically. I have no idea what Schrader and De Palma had in mind after they watched Vertigo and struck on the idea to collaborate on a film, but I would hope that each had something particular and personal to say on the topic of love unending that turns into an all-consuming fixation. Not having read the entire original screenplay (said to have included a whole third act, which was jettisoned before filming began), I can only say that the finished movie plays out like the most expensive film school thesis project ever made.

Mind you, I say that not as a put-down, but from the impression I got that Obsession came out of Schrader and De Palma being impressed with Vertigo from an intellectual perspective, not an emotional one. They clearly wanted to try their hand at a similar style of film, but forgot to add either intensity or urgency. Their success in achieving their academic goal impresses me, for Obsession is a fine, handsomely-mounted romantic mystery that does all that I believe it sets out to do. From a filmmaker's perspective, that is. From the perspective of a guy sitting in the audience waiting to be swept up in madness by proxy, Obsession is what I might call a Transfusion Film: it has no blood of its own. 

Sandra immerses herself in Elizabeth's past 

Obsession has all the technical and stylistic pluses of Vertigo, but it lacks the crazy. Michael and Sandra are characters caught up in something neurotic and deeply rooted in pain, but the film kept me at an emotional remove. I don't feel it. I didn't feel any of the eerie undercurrents one would expect from a story this unusual.
Vertigo, for all its late-1950s restraint, is one weird movie. There's a creep-out factor in Jimmy Stewart's portrayal of Scottie's character, which informs his actions. An actor I've never felt comfortable admitting I've never warmed up to (I mean, who doesn't like Jimmy Stewart?), to me, Stewart always came across as disturbed and creepy even when he's supposed to appear normal. 

But Vertigo chiefly benefits from Hitchcock's personal demons and obsessions seeping through the edges of every frame. Hitchcock himself doesn't seem to be aware of it, but by his very treatment of the story, he keeps providing inadvertent peeks into the darkest corners of his own psyche. All of this gives Vertigo that quirky, kinky kick that didn't exactly sit well with audiences in 1958.

On the other hand, Obsession is a meticulously crafted genre film that manages to hit all the right stylistic marks but comes off short by lacking the requisite feverishness of its overheated premise. Robertson's Michael Courtland looks tortured and haunted, but he never seems capable of being out of control. 

Perhaps this is due to the discarded third act, which begins where the current film ends and would have placed the characters in 1985, involving them in a third episode of obsession. Or maybe it's the studio's insistence that the unappetizing incest subtext be removed and reworked through editing (a pivotal scene that was to occur in real life between the characters has been changed into a dream sequence). Whatever the source, there's a big hole at the center of the rather sumptuous package that is Obsession, and it feels like the film functionally sidesteps touching on any aspect of Courtland's passion that intersects with perversion.

Sandra visits Elizabeth's grave

PERFORMANCES

Brian De Palma had this to say about making Obsession in the 2015 documentary De Palma: "I think the weakness of the movie is Cliff and the greatness is Geneviève. I mean, she carries the movie."

Citing Robertson's awareness that Bujold was taking over the film, De Palma states that Robertson resorted to tricks intended to sabotage her performance and that, overall, he found Cliff extremely difficult to work with. Clearly having an ax to grind, De Palma goes on to relate an anecdote conveying his frustration over Robertson -- playing a man who is supposed to look drawn and pale from having locked himself away out of grief -- insisting on applying coats of bronzer to his face. So much so that the cinematographer one day forcibly placed Robertson against the mahogany set, shouting, "You're the same color as this wall! How am I supposed to light you?"

While I don't share De Palma's opinion that Robertson is the weakness of the film (he hasn't much range, but his Michael Courtland is rather heartbreaking), I wholeheartedly agree that without Bujold, I'm not at all certain Obsession would have worked for me at all. A longtime favorite, she is an endlessly resourceful actress of intensity, warmth, and complexity. An intelligent, natural actress like Bujold doesn't have the ethereal vulnerability of Kim Novak, but what she brings to the table is an emotional verisimilitude that does wonders for making the implausible feel real. And in this film, this quality alone is worth a king's ransom. Bujold (as always) is a stunner and gives Obsession its mystery and, ultimately, its poignancy.

In this, the first of three films he would make with De Palma, John Lithgow plays a character described in the script as "The slightly souring cream of the old south." I mention this because, without that knowledge, Lithgow's performance comes off as a tad overripe. Southern accents have to be pretty solid not to sound like dinner theater Tennessee Williams, and if Lithgow's doesn't exactly convince, its inauthenticity fits the potential duplicity of his character. Not helping matters much is that he's also saddled with an absolutely terrible fake mustache (at least, I hope it's fake) and an arsenal of cream-colored suits straight out of Rex Reed's closet. That all of these potential drawbacks more or less work in Lithgow's favor has as much to do with the actor's talent as it does with his character needing to come off as both smarmy and charming in equal measure.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Without a doubt, the most persuasive obsession on display throughout Obsession is Brian De Palma's love of film and reverence for Hitchcock. When it comes to the De Palma arsenal of visual tricks (split screen, swirling camera, weird angles, deep focus through the use of split diopters…), I honestly don't know which are genuinely his or which are attributed to Hitchcock's traditional style. In essence, it shouldn't really matter, but the problem presented by the rash of young 1970s directors who built their careers on paying homage to the films they grew up on is that they invite you to pay attention to such things. 

Making A Spectacle
The thick glasses worn by Courtland's therapist (Stocker Fontelieu) in Obsession evoke
Kasey Rogers' pivotal eyewear from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train

When, under normal circumstances, all I want to do is sit back and enjoy a film on its own merits, this league of self-conscious, self-aware, and self-referential filmmakers (Peter Bogdanovich comes to mind) invites me to participate in an insider's game. One side of my brain is supposed to watch the film as a direct narrative, while simultaneously, the other side of my brain is induced to play "catch the reference."

Keeping track of all the cinematic references, comparisons, re-creations, and outright thefts can be a lot of fun for a film geek like me, but it comes at a price: all that attention to style keeps me at an emotional remove from the story being told. Each visual nod to a well-known film, each insider homage to a beloved filmmaker's technique, is like a tap on the shoulder, reminding me not only that I'm watching a movie, but that the director is drawing attention to themselves. 

I watch the film, even enjoy the film, but since the filmmaker is "toying" with the cinema technique...I never surrender to it. 

Scissors figure prominently both in Obsession and Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder

Obsession is a film bursting at the seams with style. It looks great: Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) bathes the film in a dreamy, diffused-lit glow that creates an appropriately unreal reality. It sounds great: This is perhaps my favorite Bernard Herrmann score. It's a compelling mystery, well-told: distracting as it may be, no one can say Obsession's showy visual style isn't perfectly suited to the story. 

But for all the engaging performances and cinema storytelling savvy, for the life of me I can't say the film ever swept me up in the obsessions that are the key to making the film really work. There's a lot going on that keeps you in your seat and keeps you wondering (and even caring) what will happen next, but a film like Obsession should be haunting. 

Once the film is over, there should be something about this eerie narrative that is difficult to shake off. Personally, I think if half the care lavished on the look and atmosphere of the film had been applied to the characters and performances, Obsession would have been the De Palma film you couldn't forget instead of the De Palma film almost no one remembers. 

The Vertiginous Circle
The camera swirling around two individuals locked inside
their own world is easily my favorite effect

In writing about the Hitchcock style that runs throughout Obsession, I suppose it's worth noting that in 1976, Alfred Hitchcock released his 53rd (and final) feature film, Family Plot. It opened in theaters four months before Obsession was released (and perhaps played a role in the shelved Obsession finally getting a release date). 

I don't recall if critics made any comparisons between who was more Hitchcockian at this point: the pretender or the real-deal; but I do remember that so much nostalgia was attached to the release of Family Plot (Hitchcock was 77 and ailing) that few dared hint that the Master of Suspense's latest effort was not really all that memorable, either.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
There's an old axiom in film that goes something like: They'll forgive you anything if you have a good ending. Screenwriter Paul Schrader has been on the outs with Brian De Palma ever since (under the insistence of Bernard Herrmann) he dropped Deja Vu's third act. I've no idea how the original ends (the uncut screenplay is featured with the UK DVD version of Obsession), but for my money, the ending as it stands is sheer perfection.
Many a good thriller finds itself fizzling out to a so-so or anticlimactic conclusion after a promising buildup. Obsession is the exception. Starting with a great, albeit familiar, premise, the film builds methodically and atmospherically throughout, even managing to sustain suspense as the key to the relatively easy-to-figure-out mystery reveals itself.

Late in the film, things grow worrisome as it appears as though Obsession's measured pacing is to be abandoned in favor of a hasty denouement; but De Palma has one more trick up his sleeve and it proves to be so good that you honestly do forgive the film its implausibilities (big and small) and its short-shifting of character and motivation.

The ending is a suspenseful, startling, and very moving bit of pure cinema. Pure cinema because it is gratifying in ways that have nothing to do with narrative logic or reason, but everything to do with the overwhelming power of the mechanics of style. The sequence works simply because it visually fulfills, in those final minutes, all the romance, passion, and mystery its premise had always promised. Perhaps it's an example of too little too late, but it's only during the film's final scenes that Obsession finds its "crazy." And when it does, it's simply beautiful. Too bad that crazy passion took so long to rear its head.

Past or Present? / Original or Copy?

BONUS MATERIAL

"Obsession" 1976

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2017

DEAD RINGERS 1988

David Cronenberg’s profoundly creepy Dead Ringers is a film that defies pigeonholing as deftly as it eludes any single interpretation of what it all adds up to. Ill-suited to pat, genre classification and easy summation, the stylish surrealism that is Dead Ringers combines Cronenberg’s by now trademark technology-fetish / body-horror motifs with the most compelling elements of the psychological suspense thriller, the romantic triangle drama, and the horror film.

Dead Ringers is a fictionalized treatment of a true story about prominent New York physicians, Stewart and Cyril Marcus: identical twin gynecologists who made headlines in 1975 when their bodies were discovered in their Manhattan apartment a week after their deaths, the result of trying to kick mutual barbiturate addictions. The story was dramatized in the 1977 novel Twins by Bari Wood &Jack Geasland, and it is from this source that screenwriter David Cronenberg and Norman Snider draw their inspiration for Dead Ringers.

Jeremy Irons as Elliot Mantle

Genevieve Bujold as Claire Niveau

Jeremy Irons as Beverly Mantle

In Dead Ringers, the functional dysfunction of the psychologically and emotionally co-dependent twins Beverly and Elliot Mantle (Irons), threatens to unravel when Beverly (the introvert to Elliot’s self-possessed extrovert) falls in love with a patient they share (both professionally and sexually, albeit unknown to her). Claire Niveau (Bujold) is a famous movie actress with a slight masochistic streak and a functioning drug problem (“It’s an occupational hazard”) who arrives at the twins’ fertility clinic to discover why she can’t get pregnant.  When the doctors discover that the source of her infertility is a trifurcate cervix—a rare condition branding her a “mutant” in the eyes of the doctors—Elliot reacts with clinical detachment while Beverly responds empathetically. This fundamental psychological difference in the makeup of the otherwise identical, obsessively-attached brothers, coupled with the introduction of an intelligent, self-aware female into their otherwise male-centric existence, is the catalyst for a disturbing series of events culminating in a darkly tragic conclusion that is as unexpected as it is inevitable.

Dead Ringers is an irresistibly offbeat psychological drama that generates tension not only from its examination of the mystifyingly synergistic relationship between identical twin brothers (with all its attendant homosexual panic and latency), but from a unerringly pervasive sense, sustained throughout the film, that at any moment this dark-hued character study can erupt into unimaginable horror.

Claire: "I think you two have never come to terms with the way it really does work between you."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Typically, if one wants to see a film about heterosexual men both afraid of and repulsed by women, yet have no recourse but to have sex with them lest they be forced to confront the broader sexual identity ramifications of their deeper emotional and psychological affinity for men; one has to go to a Judd Apatow movie or watch one of those reprehensibly misogynist romantic comedies unvaryingly starring Gerard Butler or Katherine Heigl.

In dramatizing a narrative wherein two gynophobic men share an emotional and psychological bond between them that is infinitely deeper than either is capable of with a woman (a childhood flashback reveals the brothers to be fascinated by the prospect of sex without touching, and their interest in females never more than clinical. “They're so different from us,” laments Elliot), Dead Ringers and the story of the Mantle twins works as a macabre metaphor for the kind of casual misogyny one encounters frequently in motion pictures about male/female relationships. Only this time, the ugliness lurking behind the oh-so-subtle "bromance" jokes and anti-female subtext is writ large and in blood.

A History of Violence
The threat of female-directed violence runs through Dead Ringers like an exposed nerve. In this scene where Elliot visits Claire on the set of her film, Cronenberg provocatively stages the scene in the makeup trailer with Bujold sporting false bruises and injuries. 

Dead Ringers is set in the world of gynecology. A world nevertheless presided over by condescendingly patriarchal men who make use of women's bodies, often with little regard for their feelings in the name of research and medical progress (per the unexplained scene of a woman leaving Elliot's office in near hysterics). Elliot and Beverly's casual disregard for women is manifest in their habit of interchangeably treating (and sleeping with) their clients without benefit of disclosing their true identities. The latter habit effectively keeping at bay the twins' nervously unaddressed issues of homosexuality; a prominent element in the novel that is merely hinted at in the film.

Think What You Can Keep Ignoring
Woman as smokescreen for homosexual anxiety

Similarly, the brother's deep-seated curiosity about (and revulsion to) female anatomy not only reflects a common cultural attitude (director Cronenberg discusses on the DVD commentary track how the film's gynecological setting was enough to scare off many studios and several prospective leading men), but when coupled with the psychological fallout of the twins' crippling interdependency and drug use, their propensity to see women as "the other" and the "disruptive element"; leads to the nightmarish invention and utilization of gynecological surgical instruments more befitting instruments of torture.

PERFORMANCES

While Dead Ringers ranks as my absolute favorite David Cronenberg film of all time, I can well imagine that its considerable unpleasantness and inherent creep-out factor contributed to it being thoroughly being ignored by the Academy come Oscar time. Which is really a pity, because you’d have to look far to find a braver, more persuasively committed job of acting than what Jeremy Irons archives in his performance(s) as the tragically conflicted Mantle twins. No matter what one feels about the movie as a whole, there’s no getting around the fact that Irons carves out two distinctly separate personalities by means of the most intriguing subtleties. His refusal to resort to showy and obvious means of conveying the differences between the brothers roots this fantastic story in a reality which makes Dead Ringers a thriller both horrific and deeply moving. (Irons must have felt the same for in 1991 when he won the Best Actor Academy Award for Barbet Schroeder's Reversal of Fortune,  he thanked David Cronenberg in his acceptance speech.)

Jeremy Irons’ virtuoso dual performance is Dead Ringers’ main attraction, but for me, in spite of its technical and stylistic brilliance, the film wouldn't have worked at all were not for the incisive and grounded contribution of Geneviève Bujold. A film rooted in laying bare the adolescent male fear of women and their bodies would simply not work were the primary female role handed over to one of those indistinguishable Hollywood actress types molded to fit into the standard objectified fantasy image of womanhood. 

Geneviève Bujold, an actress whom I've always admired (although I will never understand what the hell she was doing in Monsignor) and whose praises I sing in my post about her breakout role in Coma, is always assertively, intelligently herself. She's an image of woman as a real, complex, flawed individual. A human being, not a fantasy or fetish figure As portrayed, her Claire Niveau stands as a credible threat to the union of the brothers because no matter how hard they may try to see her otherwise, she remains a mature, fully fleshed-out person, not an object.

Beverly: "My Brother and I have always shared everything."
Claire: "I'm not a thing."

Bujold is such a vibrant catalyst that Dead Ringers suffers a bit when her character disappears for a long stretch during the film's second act, but I derive so much pleasure out of what she brings to each scene that she absolutely makes the film for me. It's so integral to the plot to have the Mantle twins' stunted image of women contrasted with a decidedly dimensional, fleshed out example of woman as she is, not as she's perceived. And in the casting of the always-intense and interesting Geneviève Bujold, Dead Ringers hits home the discrepancy between male adolescent sexual fixation and a mature emotional and physical attraction to a human being of the opposite sex.

Heidi von Palleske as Dr. Carey Weiler
A casualty of  Dead Ringers having so many fascinating central characters is that Elliot's relationship with Carey is barely fleshed out. Although von Palleske is an intriguingly sensual presence of somewhat ambiguous allegiance, her role is so sketchily drawn that I had no idea until researching this post that she was a fellow physician. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

As one might well guess with a film about identical twins, themes of identity, duality, and role-playing figure prominently in Dead Ringers. In one scene, a pair of identical twin call-girls arrive at Elliot's hotel suite and he asks one of them to call him by his own name, the other to call him by his brother's. Bujold's Claire is not immune to identity issues either, for while she has a strong sense of herself as a person, in her profession she is called upon to assume the identities of many different people. In her private life, she likes to role play as well, in the form of gently masochistic sexual games.
Elliot: “She’s an actress, Bev, she’s a flake. She plays games all the time. You never know who she really is.”

In the case of Elliot and Beverly, the two exploit the inability of others to tell them apart, yet their own nebulous sense of identity make them susceptible to the same subterfuge. In spite of thinking of themselves as individuals, in all things emotional and psychological, neither of them can really ascertain where one ends and the other begins.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

People who know me might be surprised to find a film as morbid and depressing as Dead Ringers listed among my favorites, for as is my wont, I tend to shun (on principle) movies I consider to irresponsibly wallow in the gross and violent for the sake of sensation. Of course, the key factor here is responsibility. For as long as I've been a fan of movies I've held to the belief (not a particularly popular one) that movies do indeed affect, influence, and condition us. I feel that as a viewer, I am in a vulnerable position with a filmmaker (one cannot “unsee” what has been shown) and I expect them to respect the power their images have. Nothing bores me more than when weighty issues like death, pain, human suffering, and violence are treated as purely escapist entertainment by geek directors wallowing in perpetual states of arrested development and using film as a venting mechanism for their sensation-deprived childhoods.

I don’t trust directors like Quentin Tarantino, Eli Roth, and Michael Bay, because, as far as I'm concerned, their sensibilities are stuck somewhere between middle school and Mad Magazine. They have nothing to say to me. Directors like David Cronenberg (add to that David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Nicolas Roeg, and of course, Roman Polanski) may have taken some time to find their artistic voice, but they understand that you can deal with any subject in film if it is dealt with honestly and responsibly. That honestly being that violence, cruelty, and death come at a human cost, and that there is attendant pain and suffering as a result of people's action. I find I can watch a film about any dark subject when it is dealt with it in a manner true to human experience, and by doing so forge a deeper understanding of personality, humanity, and behavior. Violence rendered as a cartoon, for something to ooh and ahh over, for conscience-free consumption...that's about as close to a definition of obscenity as I can imagine.

Dead Ringers is a film I can watch repeatedly and still marvel at the visual cohesion it has with its subject matter. It's a beautifully bleak-looking film with a haunting, mesmerizing score by Howard Shore. It's intelligent, daring, and unflinchingly honest in the depiction of its characters and in the exploration of its themes. Dead Ringers is not perfect, but I personally consider it to be David Cronenberg’s  best, most mature, and fully-realized work. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson

COMA 1978

Like counting the rings of a tree, there will likely come a day when a person’s age can be calculated by the number of films released in that individual’s lifetime that have fallen prey to the dreaded remake. Of course, such calculations would be mathematically calibrated to allow for the increased percentage numbers afforded genre films (Carrie, The Shining, The Stepford Wives, Psycho, et.al,) obviously Hollywood’s favored source for idea-harvesting.

This iconic image of coma patients eerily suspended by wires was used extensively in the promotion of the 1978 film. Today what I find most shocking about this photo is how impossibly fit all the patients are. It's like they're harvesting the organs of the US Olympic Team.

Coma, one of my favorite '70s thrillers, has recently been given the TV miniseries treatment. And while I wish it luck (ever the bullheaded traditionalist, I didn’t watch it and don’t plan to), seriously…can any remake ever hope to replicate in any dramatically meaningful way, that transcendent feminist moment in American cinema when heroine Geneviève Bujold doffed her wedged espadrilles and pantyhose before crawling through the bowels of Boston Memorial Hospital in search of the cause of all those suspicious coma cases? After years of women in thrillers and horror films falling victim to their feminine finery (running in heels and twisting an ankle being the genre standard), this small act of practicality was such a revolutionary repudiation of a sexist genre cliché that on the opening weekend screening of Coma I attended back in February of 1978, the audience I saw it with actually broke into applause!

Genevieve Bujold as Dr. Susan Wheeler

Michael Douglas as Dr. Mark Bellows

Richard Widmark as Dr. Harris - Chief of Surgery

Elizabeth Ashley as Mrs. Emerson

Rip Torn as Dr. George

Lois Chiles as Nancy Greenly

Tom Selleck as Sean Murphy

Ed Harris as Pathology Resident #2 (film debut!)

The plot of Coma, like many a good thriller, is marvelously simple: at prestigious Boston Memorial Hospital a higher-than-normal percentage of routine surgery patients are ending up in irreversible comas. Resident surgeon Dr. Susan Wheeler (Bujold) grows suspicious after both her best friend and a recently admitted healthy male patient both slip into comas following routine surgeries. Yet no one else at the hospital seems to share her concern. What follows is a paranoid suspense thriller that plays on our basic fears of hospitals and our vulnerability in the face of the sometimes callously impersonal medical profession.

The post-Watergate years may have been depressing as hell, but all that resultant disillusionment and cynicism was a bonanza for the suspense thriller genre. The pervading sense of skepticism and uncertainty that was the cultural by-product of such a large-scale political betrayal fueled and found catharsis in a great many fascinating films of the '70s. We had thrillers about conspiracy theories  –  The Parallax View (1974); morally confused private eyes – Night Moves (1975); and personal privacy paranoia  – The Conversation (1974). Coma remains one of my personal favorites because it ratchets up the tension of the conspiracy theory thriller by combining it with the combative feminist-era sexual politics of The Stepford Wives.

Dr. Wheeler's run-ins with the hospital's patronizing male staff can be viewed as a larger commentary on society's vulnerability to patriarchal institutions which would assume to know what's better for us than we do ourselves 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and Klute rank high on my list of unforgettable thrillers because each is a genre film (horror film, suspense thriller, crime mystery) that seizes upon an element of the cultural zeitgeist to create something marvelously new and chilling out the rote and familiar. The medical thriller at the center of Coma is intriguing enough (are patients deliberately being put into comas, and if so, why?), but the paranoia is amplified by having the usual disbelieved protagonist be a woman doctor in a field where women number in the minority and their concerns dismissed by patronizing superiors. 

The Men's Club
Coma uses institutionalized sexism as fodder for a marvelously engrossing paranoid thriller

The day-to-day condescension Geneviève Bujold’s Dr. Wheeler faces from her male co-workers takes on an increasingly ominous air when her growing anxiety and rational concern that something nefarious is afoot at Boston Memorial is met with “Don’t bother your pretty little head about it” disregard from her superiors. Especially the creepily paternal Chief of Surgery (Richard Widmark), who treats a serious professional discussion with Dr. Wheeler as if he's Andy Hardy's father, asked to give a heart-to-heart.

It’s established early on in the scenes between Dr. Wheeler and her professionally ambitious boyfriend, Dr. Mark Bellows (Douglas) that she is hypersensitive to the sexism and lack of respect she's expected to just accept as part of the price of working in semi-hostile, all-male environment of professional medicine. The film makes a point of showing us scenes where the in-hospital workplace talk is full of men making casually demeaning comments to or about women. 

If Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives gave us a paranoid thriller born of male anxiety about feminism, Coma takes the female perspective and devises a thriller in which female alienation from a male-dominated world inspires self-reliance and resourcefulness.

Much like in Rosemary's Baby when Rosemary’s pregnancy itself is diagnosed (by men) as being the source of her paranoia about her neighbors; Dr. Wheeler’s feminism and relationship troubles are viewed as being part of her perceived-as-hysterical suspicions about the male staff at her hospital. As her frustration mounts from not being able to convince anyone at the hospital that there is something to be concerned about, reactions from the male staff (she seems to be the only woman doctor there) range from flat out dismissals to bristling at the audacity of a woman daring to challenge the knowledge and authority of men. It's a wonderful add-on device that lends to Coma a subtext that fuels paranoia with extra layers of workplace frustration born of women not being taken seriously in male-dominated spaces. 

The best paranoid thrillers have a way of making the ordinary look really creepy

PERFORMANCES

I had the grave misfortune of having my first-ever exposure to Geneviève Bujold occur with the movie Earthquake (1975); a film whose most terrifying image was that of the lovely French-Canadian actress canoodling with the Skeletor-like countenance of Charlton Heston. In the ensuing years, I’ve enjoyed her performances in several notable films (1988's Dead Ringers is a must-see), but I guess I have a special place in my heart for Coma. As her first real starring solo venture, I thought it was to be the film that launched her to stardom. As I’ve said in a previous post, Bujold represented to me the direction I thought films were going to take in terms of motion picture leading ladies in the '70s. She was quirky, radiated intelligence, and embodied a non-traditional beauty coupled with remarkable acting skills. As the '80s fate of Debra Winger attested, Hollywood still preferred their leading ladies vapid and pliable, so the promise of Bujold was never realized (at least to my satisfaction).

In a nice reversal of the "supportive partner" role usually allocated to women in motion picture thrillers, Michael Douglas, fresh off of several years on the TV series The Streets of San Francisco, plays Bujold's allocated-to-the-sidelines boyfriend. 

Still, Bujold is terrific here, spunky and sharp with that great throaty voice of hers and those darkly intelligent, inquisitive eyes. She adds so much dimension to her role that she keeps character and motivation at the forefront, preventing Coma from becoming mired in its medical thriller plot. Unlike the kind of actress usually cast in roles like this (I call your attention to Lesley-Anne Downs’ implausible Egyptologist in Sphinx, another film based on a Robin Cook novel) Bujold is actually believable as a physician and is not required to scream every 15 minutes.

At the Ballet
Fans of A Chorus Line might recognize the short-haired brunette at the front of Bujold's embarrassingly cheesy dance exercise class as Kay Cole, the original Broadway production's "Maggie." By odd coincidence, Coma co-star Michael Douglas would go on to star in the woefully misguided 1985 film adaptation.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Unable to convince anyone of her suspicions, Dr. Wheeler's quest takes her to the architecturally foreboding Jefferson Institute. The scenes taking place at this futuristic chronic care facility (whose actual purpose I won't reveal here) are Coma's big set-pieces, and they really don't disappoint. A concrete and steel variation on the typical thriller haunted house, the Jefferson Institute scenes are notable not only for the poetic-nightmare images of roomfuls of bodies suspended in techno limbo, but also for the unforgettably bizarre performance of Elizabeth Ashley as Mrs. Emerson, the Institute's equivalent of a gargoyle at the gate. 

By Coma's midpoint, when the film's well-established atmosphere of tension is just about sunk by an interminable "romantic weekend" montage, Ms. Ashley appears and reboots the film back into high gear. Her introductory scene with Bujold is a classic that I remember had the audience laughing in a way that brought them even more into the film. You want to know if she's a real person or a robot. As the unblinking and inscrutable head of the Institute, Ashley carves an indelible impression and is one of my favorite characters in the film.

The Jefferson Institute
Coma knows that in real life, a large, impersonal medical building
like this is far more terrifying than any Gothic castle.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

No matter how clever the plot, a suspense thriller has to have thrills. Coma mines the already fertile creep-out atmosphere of hospitals for all its worth. It does so by allowing us to witness (to great effect, I might say) the day-to-day casualness with which doctors, nurses, and anesthesiologists regard that which is unnervingly life-and-death to us patients. If there is a level at which Coma scores its biggest points as a thriller, it's in giving the audience the impression that hospitals regard patients as a mechanic would a car on a lift; a bunch of billable parts in need of fixing. 

"You'll be getting a bill from each of us in the mail."

And then, of course, Coma has plenty of the good, old-fashioned kind of thrills too.

Remakes get a bad rap, but for every totally pointless rehash of a classic (Straw Dogs), there's a film like 1978's marvelous Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a retread that's really a re-imagining. I'm not sure what the remake of Coma will seize upon as a justification for its existence (the feminist subtext - which to my way of thinking is more relevant than ever - might be perceived as being dated), but unless it devotes itself to correcting some of this film's flaws (a few loose narrative threads, that mysterious hired killer), I think I'll stick to this imperfect but ever-so-satisfying relic from a time when even genre films felt that it was also important to comment on the world we live in.

AUTOGRAPH FILES

In 1982 I had the opportunity to see Elizabeth Ashley co-star on Broadway with Geraldine Page and Carrie Fisher in the play,  Agnes of God. As one might imagine, the experience was electrifying. Although very faded, Ashley's signature is on the bottom of the Playbill above.

To read more about Coma:
Another informative and fun post on "Coma" at Poseidon's Underworld

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2008 - 2012