DEATH BECOMES HER 1992

In today's digitized, high-definition world—in which real-life, flesh and blood humans from the most mundane walks of life willingly subject themselves to near-medieval levels of torture in an effort to achieve the burnished, robo-mannequin sheen of Photoshopped magazine covers—I don't think it's possible to lampoon our culture's extreme youth-addiction and obsession with physical perfection. 

Happily, in1992 (ten years before Botox, and back when Cher and Michael Jackson were the reigning poster kids for plastic surgery excess), director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forest Gump) made this demented and dark comedy which broadly burlesques contemporary society's two most dominant religions: the worship of beauty and the fear of aging.

"Wrinkled, wrinkled little star...hope they never see the scars."
In the original screenplay, the line was "Wrinkle, wrinkle, go away, come again on Doris Day."
The exact words Elizabeth Taylor said to her reflection in The Mirror Crack'd (1980).

In this self-professed nod to Tales from the Crypt (the comic-book-based HBO anthology series for whom Zemeckis co-produced and occasionally directed), Death Becomes Her is a comedy-of-the-grotesque cartoon that posits the dream of eternal youth as an upscale zombie nightmare. Set in a baroque,  just-barely exaggerated vision of Beverly Hills where the thunderclaps and lightning flashes all hit their marks and know their cues, Death Becomes Her spans 51 years (1978 to 2029) in chronicling the ongoing competition between two college frenemies. A bitter rivalry every bit as combative and twice as deadly as Batman vs. Superman…only with better dialogue.

Meryl Streep as Madeline Ashton

Bruce Willis as Dr. Ernest Menville

Goldie Hawn as Helen Sharp

Isabella Rossellini as Lisle Von Rhuman

Former Radcliffe classmates Madeline Ashton (Mad for short) and Helen Sharp (Hel for keeps) are the kind of friends that only a shared alma mater could produce. Though we ultimately come to learn that they are but two antagonistic sides of the same counterfeit coin, when first glimpsed, the artificial Madeline and the apprehensive Helen couldn't be more dissimilar, appearing to be friends in name only. 

Plain-Jane Helen, an aspiring author of diffident, soft-spoken character, unconcerned with appearance, has a history of having her boyfriends stolen by the ostentatiously glamorous Madeline. Madeline, an obscenely shallow, superhumanly self-enchanted actress of questionable talent, is all surface charm and charisma, but otherwise appears totally devoid of a single redeeming character trait. She concerns herself with looks and appearances to the exclusion of all else. 

"Tell me, doctor...do you think I'm starting to NEED you?"

The women's heated rivalry temporarily assumes the guise of a romantic triangle when beginning-to-show-her-age Madeline sets her sights upon (and effortlessly steals) Helen's fiancé, the bland-but-gifted Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Ernest Menville. Of course, there's no romance to this romantic triangle at all, what with Madeline's interest in the colorless dolt being solely of the self-serving variety (she gets to assert her desirability superiority over Helen while simultaneously securing a lifetime of free nip/tuck services); but this last-straw betrayal by both fiancé and friend proves enough to send poor milquetoast Helen right over the edge. 

What's The Matter With Helen?

Cue the passage of fourteen years. Everybody is miserable, and nobody winds up with what they thought they wanted. Madeline, career and looks in decline, is blatantly unfaithful to husband Ernest, and goes to Norma Desmond extremes to stay young. Meanwhile, emasculated Ernest has succumbed to alcoholism and is reduced to plying his surgical skills on corpses. 

But it's Helen who rises like an Avenging Angel from the doughnut-crumbed, canned-frosting ruins of her nervous breakdown. Magnificently svelte, newly glamorized, channeling her inner Madeline, and, after several years of therapy, imbued with a Dolly Levi-esque sense of purpose ("For I've got a goal again! I've got a drive again! I'm gonna feel my heart coming alive again!"). Naturally, Helen's goals aren't near as lofty or honorable as those of that musical matchmaker: Helen's newfound purpose is to reclaim her life by eradicating Madeline's.

Hel Goes Mad and Dedicates Her Life To Making Mad's Life Hell

Alas, Helen's strength of resolve is all well and good, but homicidally speaking, the best-laid plans of mice and men are doomed to failure when the man in question (Ernest) is an indisputable mouse. By the same token, it's not the best idea to wage a to-the-death battle when both combatants, thanks to the supernatural intervention of a raven-haired sorceress and her immortality potion, can't really die.

I saw Death Becomes Her for the first time on cable TV in the mid-'90s, and I immediately regretted never having seen it in a theater. I thought it was outrageously funny, and I imagined seeing it with an audience would have been an experience similar to my first time seeing What's Up, Doc?: the laughter being so loud and continuous, you have to see the film twice to pick up all the lost dialogue. I've no idea if public response to Death Becomes Her was anywhere near as vociferous (it's a weird little film), but I found it to be one of the most consistently funny comedies I'd seen since the '70s heyday of Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, & Madeline Kahn.

Incorporating comic book sensibilities and B-horror movie tropes into a dark satire of those frozen-in-time animatronic waxworks endemic to the environs of Beverly Hills, Death Becomes Her provides director Robert Zemeckis an ideal vehicle to indulge his fondness for absurdist special effects. The screenplay, a best-of-both-worlds/Frankenstein collaboration between TV sitcom writer Martin Donovan (That Girl, The MTM Show) and action/adventure writer Martin Koepp- (Jurassic Park, Mission impossible), deftly maintains a balance of broad action (think Tex Avery cartoons or Bugs vs. Daffy Looney Tunes) and oversized characterizations.  

Late-director Sydney Pollack (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?)
contributes a hilarious unbilled cameo 

Which brings me to Death Becomes Her's most vital attribute: its cast. Streep, Hawn, and Willis—talented professionals all—had, at this stage in their careers, fallen into that movie star rut of delivering precisely what was expected of them, nothing more. A look back at their film output during this time reveals each actor contributing reliable-but-unexceptional performances in so-so films. Professional, journeyman-like performances devoid of either spark or surprise.

But Death Becomes Her—in casting against type—taps into something fresh in each of them. With abandon, they lose themselves in the outlandish, outsized characters they're called on to play, blowing away the cobwebs of predictability from their individual screen personas. Together they form an unholy trinity of bad behavior while treating us to the liveliest, most unexpected, enjoyably over-the-top emoting of their careers.

Madder' n Hell
(Mad, Ern, & Hel)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

When television broadcasts changed from analog to digital, and I purchased my first HDTV, one of my strongest recollections is of how dazzlingly crisp and clear it the images were. Simultaneously, how clinically unforgiving it was to human beings.

Television programs I had grown used to watching in their natural, fuzzy state were suddenly all so clear! The images so sharp I could make out the weave knit twill fibers in Fred Mertz's jacket.

But my lord, the havoc it played with people's faces. It was like you were looking at everyone through a dermatologist's magnifying glass—bringing to mind that line from Cukor's The Women "Good grief! I hate to tell you, dear, but your skin makes the Rocky Mountains look like chiffon velvet!" 

Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep- two longtime favorites of mine,
really come alive as zombies

I don't know what it was like elsewhere, but the cumulative effect HDTV had on local Los Angeles newscasters and even minor TV personalities was to have men and women scrambling to the plastic surgeons in a mad rush reminiscent of the final reel to The Day of the Locust. 

Over the last decade or so, the already youth and looks-obsessed entertainment industry has seen a normalization of the kind of rampant surgical restructuring that once caused Mickey Rourke and Cher so much tabloid grief. The artificially enhanced appearance has now grown so common, it has become its own aesthetic.

What Price Beauty?

And while everybody seems fine with health-related elective surgeries like dental and Lasik, people still harbor strong opposing opinions about those who turn to medical science in order to turn back the clock, retard the aging process, or sculpt and reconfigure themselves to fit a particular beauty standard.

Death Becomes Her is no serious treatise on our culture's preoccupation with youth and slavish devotion to beauty, but by addressing these hot-button issues in a comical, larger-than-life framework—it manages to be one of the sharpest and to-the-point commentaries committed to film.

PERFORMANCES

Broad, farcical comedy of the sort employed in Death Becomes Her is awfully hard to pull off (1991's Soapdish comes to mind…unfavorably). In fact, the main reason I didn't see Death Becomes Her when it was released was because the trailer so turned me off. Not only did it look far too exaggerated and silly (it recalled Streep's She-Devil, a film I absolutely hated), but in addition: I never much cared for Bruce Willis; Goldie Hawn's post-Private Benjamin output had grown increasingly derivative, and the continued forays into comedy by Streep-the-Serious (Postcards from the Edge, Defending Your Life) had the effect of subduing her talent, not showcasing it. 

It surprises me a bit to glance over Bruce Willis' long list of credits on IMDB and come to the conclusion that Mortal Thoughts (1991) and Death Becomes Her are the only films of his I like. He's so good here. Funny and touching, he provides a grounded emotional contrast to his co-stars' magnificent maliciousness

But what always brings me back to rewatching Death Becomes Her is how all the elements gel so smoothly. Everyone from composer Alan Silvestri to the film's vast army of FX wizards are all on the same darkly comic book page. Best of all, the actors and their pitch-perfect performances are never dwarfed by the dated but still-impressive special effects.

The comedy is perhaps too dark to be to everyone's taste, likewise the tone of exaggerated non-reality. But for me, all these disparate elements coalesce to create a howlingly funny film that feels like a major studio version of those reveling-in-bad-taste underground/counterculture comedies like Andy Warhol's BAD or John Waters' Female Trouble (which could serve as Death Becomes Her's subtitle).

The arresting Isabella Rossellini is a special effect all unto herself.
Alluring and dangerous, she is a dynamic, indelible force in her brief scenes.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

A major highlight of Death Becomes Her is getting to see the great Madeline Ashton in full diva-fabulous mode appearing onstage in a misguided musical version of Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. A play, appropriately enough, about an aging star making a comeback. The time is 1978, and, as described in the screenplay, our first glimpse of 40-ish Madeline is of her "Singin' and dancin' up a storm seemingly without benefit of training in singin' or dancin'."

The song she's singing is a riotously vainglorious paean to self, titled "Me," and the accompanying dance production number is a garish compendium of every star-gets-hoisted-about-by-chorus-boys Broadway musical cliché in the book. The number is terrible—from the song itself to the costuming, choreography (they break into "The Hustle" at one uproarious point), and the over-emphasized "stereotypically gay" voices of the chorus boys—and therefore, it's also absolutely brilliant.

What's great about the number is that without benefit of inserting any intentionally comedic elements (save for a ceaselessly shedding feather boa), it manages to be side-splittingly funny and cheesy as all get-out merely by channeling any number of '70s variety shows. As a quick glance at YouTube will attest, this isn't a spoof or parody at all. Nothing about Madeline's dance routine would be out of place on an episode of The Hollywood Palace, The Ed Sullivan Show, or take-your-pick Mitzi Gaynor TV special.

Although Madeline is supposed to be awful, Streep is actually quite marvelous. Her musicality and phrasing are spot on. Her movements are sharp, she never misses a beat with any of her gestures, and there's an effortlessness to the number of small bits of comic business she's able to insert into the performance without ever losing her stride. What really makes the number so hysterically funny is the level of Las Vegas showroom self-satisfaction Madeline radiates throughout. In her mind, she is clearly laying them in the aisles. The joy she takes in her own wonderfulness and sincere obliviousness to just how ridiculous the number is makes for a priceless moment in wince-inducing musical cinema.

The first time I saw Streep perform "Me," what immediately popped into mind was the 1986 Academy Awards telecast. That was the year Teri Garr opened the show with a truly cringe-worthy production number around the song Flying Down To Rio that was every bit as atrocious as Madeline's First Act closer (even down to the same tearaway skirt and hyperactive chorus boys). Further cementing the recollection: Meryl Streep, who was nominated that year for Out of Africa, when interviewed about the show afterward, expressed her enjoyment of Garr's performance and her wish to someday be invited to sing and dance in a production number like it. She got her wish.

Late actress Alaina Reed (Sesame Street, 227) as the psychologist
who inadvertently sets Helen on her murderous course 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Like Sweet Charity, Fatal Attraction, and the musical version of Little Shop of Horrors, Death Becomes Her is a film whose original ending was jettisoned due to unfavorable preview response.

Grotesquely disfigured and unable to maintain themselves with any level of precision,
Madeline & Helen attend Ernest's funeral in the year 2029

In the original version, after escaping from Lisle's, Ernest fakes his death. He runs off with Toni (Tracey Ullman, the entirety of whose footage ended up on the cutting room floor), a sympathetic owner of a local bar he frequented. Jump ahead 27 years, Madeline and Helen, still beautiful and perfect, are in the Swiss Alps, bored with life and each other's company. In the distance, they glimpse an old, hunched-over, toddling married couple. Madeline comments on how pathetic they are; Helen, as she watches them walk away, hand in liver-spotted hand, is not so sure. We learn that the couple is Ernest and Toni, now very old, but very much in love. Fade Out.

I absolutely adore that ending! Test audiences claimed the more poignant conclusion didn't fit the more cartoonish flavor of the rest of the film, so rewrites and reshoots resulted in the very good, very funny ending currently in place. It's not a bad ending at all, and based on the success of the film, it is perhaps more in keeping with the tone established at the start; but honestly, I just love the idea of the jettisoned ending. I think it would have provided the perfect coda for a wonderful film.

Helen and Madeline, talons sharpened, have become living gargoyles

BONUS MATERIAL
Goldie Hawn discusses her preference for the film's original ending HERE

The original theatrical trailer features many scenes that never made it into the final film. HERE

 

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2016

THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? 1969

I know of many parents who indulge their young children - always sons, for some reason - by allowing them to watch PG or R-rated horror films and aggressive, comic-book action movies. In each instance the parent is quick to point out that it's always at the child's insistence, and (being the good parents they are) should things on the screen start to get hairy, they're at their kid’s side, reminding him it's all just fakery and only a movie. A sort of Parent's Magazine reversal of The Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange, I guess. Terrific. More kids desensitized to, and made tolerant of, depictions of violence and brutality.

Since a great many of the films that have meant the most to me were films deemed "mature" for my age when I first saw them (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?- age 11,  Midnight Cowboy - age 12), I obviously don’t have a problem with young people being exposed to so-called "age inappropriate" movies. However, I do have two problems with the scenario described above, wherein a film's artificiality has to be routinely reinforced in order to stave off kindertrauma.

The Santa Monica Pier 1932

1) Movies are one of the few realms of fantasy that life still affords us after we reach the pragmatism of post-Santa Claus/Easter bunny adulthood. It thus seems a shame to rob a child of the transgressive magic of film by hammering them over the head with reminders of its contrivance. Yes, movie images are indeed "fake," but the emotions those fake images are capable of evoking are not. One's emotional response is the only real thing about the filmgoing experience. To watch something and be encouraged not to respond emotionally to what you see suggests training a child to be impassive and cut off from his feelings. 2) Why are the mature films these kids allowed to see always these loud, violent, brainless, ADD inducing, explosion-a-thons and never movies that promote empathy and sensitivity to the human condition?

Films like They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (which I saw when I was 12) should be mandatory viewing for all adolescents and a great many adults. A gut-wrenching contemplation on the fragile durability of hope in the face of life's ostensible futility, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? uses the allegorical setting of a grueling dance marathon set in Depression-era Hollywood (all the participants seem to be wannabe movie stars) to look at the devastating ways in which the human necessity to connect is so often thwarted by the equally human need to erect walls of defense to shield ourselves from the pain of living.

Jane Fonda as Gloria Beatty

Michael Sarrazin as Robert Syverton

Gig Young as Rocky

Susannah York as Alice LeBlanc

Red Buttons as Sailor

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is framed around a deceptively simple, character-driven plot - two dissimilar dreamers in 1932 Hollywood are thrown together by fate (the embittered, pessimistic Gloria and the naively good-natured Robert) to tragic effect. By placing the action within the unfamiliar, almost freak-show atmosphere of a marathon dance contest whose chief requirements are desperation and a masochist's tolerance for pain, the film makes many perceptive, still-relevant points about the way the dangling carrot of hope can be used to manipulate and exploit those most vulnerably in need.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? both cast 1930s Hollywood (as embodied by the movie industry) as a Lilith leading men to their doom, but the films adapted from these novels differ significantly. While I love both movies, there is something so humane about director Sydney Pollack's approach to the material that makes it the more compelling piece. The penny-ante aspirations of the protagonists are never belittled, nor are their character flaws looked upon with anything other than empathy for the suffering that lay at their core. 

If the characters in The Day of the Locust are rendered grotesques due to their ofttimes willing surrender of their souls to valueless dreams; the dreamers in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? are guilty of little more than being misguided in their fruitless, potentially hopeless, quest for something to believe in.

Before Reality-TV: People are the ultimate spectacle

"The crowd has got to have something to believe in. Once they stop believing, they stop coming."

PERFORMANCES

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? represents the best film work of virtually every member of its talented cast, but the recent deaths of co-stars Susannah York and Michael Sarrazin add an extra layer of poignancy to two performances that already significantly tug at the heartstrings. Portraying two Candide-like innocents left broken and disillusioned by what could best be called the neutral cruelty of existance, the impossibly young duo are agonizing in their vulnerability and both give memorably moving performances.

Alice on the Edge: York's haunting breakdown scene

Robert...always seeking the sun

Gig Young, whom I had heretofore only known as an annoyingly glib presence in smirky sex comedies from the '60s, gives one of those naked, laying-it-all-on-the-line performances (like Ann-Margaret's in Carnal Knowledge) that seems to give vent to years of frustration at being a talent underutilized.

The same can be said of Jane Fonda, who functionally changed the course of her career with this film. Though perhaps a tad too beautiful and angularly delicate to physically embody the life-hardened heroine of McCoy's novel (imagine Ann Savage from 1945's Detour), Fonda is nonetheless emotionally right on target and gives off an edgy electricity that jumps off the screen. Hard-bitten and brittle, nervous and as alert as a junkyard cat, Fonda is impossible not to watch.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The only movie I know of to use America's short-lived marathon dance phenomena for a dramatic backdrop (I'd never even heard of a marathon dance before I saw this), They Shoot Horses, Don't They? confines itself almost exclusively to a single indoor set, yet still manages to be vividly cinematic. Employing an intimate, if not invasive, shooting style that makes imaginative use of hand-held cameras, a stiflingly claustrophobic environment of a precise time and place is evoked in a way that never once feels stagy or set-bound.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I have seen hundreds of films over the years, so it doesn't surprise me that I've forgotten so many. But what does surprise me (as the years pile up) are the films which have never left my mind, and the images that remain as clear to me now as the day I first saw them.  

Which brings me to the incredible "derby" sequence: a virtuoso bit of filmmaking employing music, fast cuts, and dizzying hand-held camerawork to create one of cinema's most powerful visual representations of hopeless desperation. It's my absolute favorite scene from the film. 

In 1969 the use of slow motion hadn't yet become the movie cliché it would eventually grow into, so the agonizingly protracted sequence depicting a cluster of over-fatigued individuals racing in a circle to a discordant calliope arrangement of the optimistic anthem "California Here I Come" (thus rendered a perverse, human merry-go-round), was an image so poetically grotesque, yet hypnotically beautiful, that I never forgot it.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is my idea of a truly "adult" film: a film of ideas and insight that compels you to be aware of and sensitive to the frailties of others. I can't attest to whether or not my youthful penchant for R-rated films ultimately did me more harm than good, but I'm glad that the mature films I did seek out were indeed that - films of maturity. I'd cried at movies before - at some sad action like Bambi's mother being killed or some hero shot trying to save his best friend, but They Shoot Horses, Don't They?"was the first film that made me cry just because the characters onscreen were so wounded and in so much pain.

"Maybe it's just the whole damn world is like Central Casting. 
They got it all rigged before you ever show up."

Copyright © Ken Anderson