Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: Martin Scorsese

Under the Influence, Part 1:  On Artistic Inspiration, Finding One’s Voice, and Tarantino’s Formative Faves

June 26, 2024 / / 26 Comments

Let’s play Ten for Ten!  To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of this blog, which launched on June 26, 2014, here’s an appreciation for ten of my formative cinematic influences—an examination of why these movies resonated with me when I first saw them, and how they permanently informed my aesthetic tastes and creative sensibilities.  This post is presented in three installments.

“Under the Influence, Part 1” informally ponders through personal example how an artist develops a singular style and voice all their own, and offers an analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s essay collection Cinema Speculation, the auteur’s critical look at the movies of the ’70s that inspired him.

In “Under the Influence, Part 2,” I spotlight five films from my ’80s childhood that shaped my artistic intuition when at its most malleable.

And in “Under the Influence, Part 3,” I round out the bill with five selections from my ’90s adolescence, the period during which many of the themes that preoccupy me crystalized.

It takes an unholy degree of time and stamina to write a book.  Consequently, it’s advisable to have a really good reason to take a given project on—then see it through to the finish line.  Before typing word one of a new manuscript, it behooves us to ask (and answer):  Why is this project worth the herculean effort required to bring it into existence?

I wrote my debut novel The Dogcatcher (2023) for the most elemental of motives:  I ached for the kind of bygone horror/comedies on which I’d come of age in the ’80s, an era that produced such motley and memorable movies as An American Werewolf in London (1981), The Evil Dead (1981), Gremlins (1984), Ghostbusters (1984), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), The Lost Boys (1987), The Monster Squad (1987), The ’Burbs (1989), and Tremors (1990).  Where have those kinds of movies gone? I wondered.

Hollywood, to be fair, hadn’t stopped making horror/comedies, it only long since stopped making them with any panache.  I have spent many a Saturday night over the past decade in a binge-scrolling malaise, surfing numbly through hundreds of viewing options on Netflix or Prime or Hulu or whatever, when suddenly my inner adolescent’s interest is piqued—as though I were back at the old video store and had found a movie right up my alley.

I certainly sensed the stir of possibility in Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020), about a group of teenagers from my hometown battling undead gentrifiers.  Night Teeth (2021), featuring bloodsuckers in Boyle Heights, seemed equally promising.  And Werewolves Within (2021) is set in a snowbound Northeastern United States township already on edge over a proposed pipeline project when its residents find themselves under attack by a werewolf.

“Vampires vs. the Bronx” (2020) seemed like the perfect mix of Gen X–era throwback and Gen Z–era social commentary

All of a sudden, I felt like that sixteen-year-old kid who saw the one-sheet for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) while riding the subway to work—“She knows a sucker when she sees one,” teased the tagline, depicting a cheerleader from the neck down with a wooden stake in her fist—and knew he was in for a good time at the cinema.

No such luck.  Vampires vs. the Bronx, in an act of creative criminality, pisses away a narratively and thematically fertile premise through flat, forgettable execution.

Night Teeth, meanwhile, answers the question:  How about a movie set in the same stomping ground as Blade (1998)—inner-city L.A., clandestine vampiric council calling the shots—only without any of its selling-point stylistics or visual inventiveness?

And Werewolves Within establishes an intriguing environmental justice subplot the screenwriter had absolutely no interest in or, it turns out, intention of developing—the oil pipeline isn’t so much a red herring as a dead herring—opting instead for a half-assed, who-cares-less whodunit beholden to all the standard-issue genre tropes.

Faced with one cinematic disappointment after another, it seemed the only way to sate my appetite for the kind of horror/comedy that spoke to me as a kid was to write my own.

On the subject of kids—specifically, stories about twelve-year-old boys—I haven’t seen one of those produced with any appreciable measure of emotional honesty or psychological nuance since Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986), based on Stephen King’s 1982 novella The Body.  That was forty years ago!

Storytellers know how to write credible children (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Home Alone, Room), and they know how to write teenagers (The Outsiders, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Clueless), but preadolescent boys are almost invariably reduced to archetypal brushstrokes (The Goonies, The Sandlot, Stranger Things).  The preteen protagonists of such stories are seldom made to grapple with the singular emotional turbulence of having one foot in childhood—still watching cartoons and playing with action figures—and the other in adolescence—beginning to regard girls with special interest, coming to realize your parents are victims of generational trauma that’s already in the process of being passed unknowingly and inexorably down to you.

For all of popular culture’s millennia-long fixation on and aggrandizement of the heroic journey of (usually young) men, our commercial filmmakers and storytellers either can’t face or don’t know how to effectively dramatize the developmental fulcrum of male maturation.  George Lucas’ experimental adventure series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992–1996) sheds light on Indy’s youth from ages eight through ten (where he’s portrayed by Corey Carrier) and then sixteen through twenty-one (Sean Patrick Flanery); the complicated messiness of pubescence, however, is entirely bypassed.  Quite notably, those are the years in which Indy’s mother died and his emotionally distant father retreated into his work—formative traumas that shaped, for better and worse, the adult hero played by Harrison Ford in the feature films.

Lucas’ elision seems odd to me—certainly a missed creative opportunity1—given that twelve-going-on-thirteen is the period of many boys’ most memorable and meaningful adventures.  King and Reiner never forgot that, and neither did I, hence the collection of magical-realism novellas I’m currently writing that explore different facets of that transitory experience:  going from wide-eyed wonder to adolescent disillusionment as a result of life’s first major disappointment (Spex); being left to navigate puberty on your own in the wake of divorce (The Brigadier); struggling to understand when, how, and why you got socially sorted at school with the kids relegated to second-class citizenry (H.O.L.O.).

This single-volume trilogy, I should note, isn’t YA—these aren’t stories about preteens for preteens.  Rather, they are intended, like The Body/Stand by Me before them, as a retrocognitive exercise for adults who’ve either forgotten or never knew the experience of being a twelve-year-old boy to touch base with that metamorphic liminality in all of its psychoemotional complexity.  They’re very consciously stories about being twelve as reviewed from middle-aged eyes.

As I’ll demonstrate in “Part 2” and “Part 3,” both that WIP and The Dogcatcher take inspiration—narratively, thematically, aesthetically, referentially—from the stories of my youth, the books and movies that first kindled my imagination and catalyzed my artistic passions.

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Book Review:  “Heat 2” by Michael Mann + Meg Gardiner

December 15, 2022 / / 19 Comments

This article discusses plot details and scene specifics from Michael Mann’s film Heat (1995) and his novel Heat 2 (2022).

John Carpenter’s dystopian classic Escape from New York (1981), set in 1997, opens with an expository intertitle:  “1988—The Crime Rate in the United States Rises Four Hundred Percent.”  Though that grim prognostication amounted to an exaggeration, the issue itself had nonetheless become a big deal here in the real world by the early 1990s:

In 1993, the year President Clinton took office, violent crime struck nearly 11 million Americans, and an additional 32 million suffered thefts or burglaries.  These staggering numbers put millions more in fear.  They also choked the economic vitality out of entire neighborhoods.

Politically, crime had become one of the most divisive issues in the country.  Republicans called for an ever more punitive “war on drugs,” while many Democrats offered little beyond nebulous calls to eliminate the “root causes” of crime.

David Yassky, “Unlocking the Truth About the Clinton Crime Bill,” Opinion, New York Times, April 9, 2016

Clinton’s response was the measurably effective (if still controversial) Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, otherwise known as the 1994 Crime Bill, coauthored by Joe Biden, the provisions of which—and this is just a sampling—added fifty new federal offenses, expanded capital punishment, led to the establishment of state sex-offender registries, and included the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (since expired) and the Violence Against Women Act.

It was an attempt to address a big issue in America at the time:  Crime, particularly violent crime, had been rising for decades, starting in the 1960s but continuing, on and off, through the 1990s (in part due to the crack cocaine epidemic).

Politically, the legislation was also a chance for Democrats—including the recently elected president, Bill Clinton—to wrestle the issue of crime away from Republicans.  Polling suggested Americans were very concerned about high crime back then.  And especially after George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election in part by painting Dukakis as “soft on crime,” Democrats were acutely worried that Republicans were beating them on the issue.

German Lopez, “The controversial 1994 crime law that Joe Biden helped write, explained,” Vox, September 29, 2020

Given the sociopolitical conditions of the era, it stands to reason—hell, it seems so obvious in hindsight—the 1990s would be a golden age of neo-noir crime cinema.  The death of Michael Corleone, as it happens, signified a rebirth of the genre itself; Martin Scorsese countered the elegiac lethargy—that’s not a criticism—of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part III with the coke-fueled kineticism of Goodfellas (both 1990).  Henry Hill shared none of Michael’s nagging reluctance about life in the Italian Mafia; he always wanted to be a gangster!

Reasoning that was probably true of audiences, too—as an author of horror stories, I certainly appreciate a healthy curiosity for the dark side—Hollywood offered vicarious trips into the criminal underworlds of Hell’s Kitchen, in Phil Joanou’s State of Grace (1990), and Harlem, in Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City (1991), both of which feature undercover cops as major characters.  So does Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992), about a police officer (Laurence Fishburne) posing as an L.A. drug dealer as part of a broader West Coast sting operation.

The line between cop and criminal, so clearly drawn in the action-comedies of the previous decade (Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop, Stakeout, Running Scared), was becoming subject to greater ambiguity.  In no movie is that made more starkly apparent than Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992), about a corrupt, hedonistic, drug-addicted, gambling-indebted, intentionally nameless New York cop (Harvey Keitel) investigating the rape of a nun in the vain hope it will somehow redeem his pervasive rottenness.

And it wasn’t merely that new stories were being told; this is Hollywood, after all, so we have some remakes in the mix.  Classic crime thrillers were given contemporary makeovers, like Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), as well as Barbet Schroeder’s Kiss of Death (1995), which is mostly remembered, to the extent it’s remembered at all, as the beginning and end of David Caruso’s would-be movie career, but which is much better than its reputation, thanks in no small part to a sharp script by Richard Price (Clockers), full of memorably colorful Queens characters and his signature street-smart dialogue.

Creative experimentation was in full swing, too, as neo-noir films incorporated conventions of other genres, including erotic thriller (Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct [1992]), black comedy (the Coen brothers’ Fargo [1996] and The Big Lebowski [1998]), period throwback (Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress [1995]; Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential [1997]), neo-Western (James Mangold’s Cop Land [1997]), and, well, total coffee-cup-shattering, head-in-a-box mindfuckery (Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects; David Fincher’s Seven [both 1995]).

Christ, at that point, Quentin Tarantino practically became a subgenre unto himself after the one-two punch of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), which in turn inspired an incessant succession of self-consciously “clever” knockoffs like John Herzfeld’s 2 Days in the Valley (1996) and Gary Fleder’s Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995).  By the mid-’90s, the crime rate, at least at the cinema, sure seemed like it had risen by 400%.

Tim Roth lies bleeding as Harvey Keitel comes to his aid in a scene from the film “Reservoir Dogs,” 1992 (photo by Miramax/Getty Images)

As different as they all are, those films can almost unanimously be viewed as a repudiation of the ethos of ’80s action movies, in which there were objectively good guys, like John McClane, in conflict with objectively bad guys, like Hans Gruber, in a zero-sum battle for justice, for victory.  It was all very simple and reassuring, in keeping with the archconservative, righteous-cowboy worldview of Ronald Reagan.  And while those kinds of movies continued to find a receptive audience—look no further than the Die Hard–industrial complex, which begat Under Siege (1992) and Cliffhanger (1993) and Speed (1994), among scores of others—filmmakers were increasingly opting for multilayered antiheroes over white hats versus black hats.

Which begged the question:  Given how blurred the lines had become between good guys and bad guys in crime cinema, could you ever go back to telling an earnest, old-school cops-and-robbers story—one with an unequivocally virtuous protagonist and nefarious antagonist—that nonetheless aspired to be something more dramatically credible, more psychologically nuanced, more thematically layered than a Steven Seagal star vehicle?

Enter Michael Mann’s Heat.

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In the Multiverse of Madness: How Media Mega-Franchises Make Us Their Obedient Servants, Part 2

May 3, 2021 / / 30 Comments

Editor’s note:  Owed to the length of “In the Multiverse of Madness,” I divided the essay into two posts.  If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read Part 1 first, and please feel welcome to offer feedback on that post, this one, or both in the comments section of Part 2 below.  Thank you.

Previously on “In the Multiverse of Madness,” we covered the three engagement strategies (and correlating tactics) transmedia mega-franchises deploy to keep us consuming each new offering in real time:  by leveraging FOMO via “spoilers”; by encouraging “forensic fandom” with Easter eggs and puzzle-boxing; and by reversing “figure and ground.”  Now let’s talk about why 1970s-born adults have been particularly susceptible to these narrative gimmicks—and what to do about it.

X Marks the Spot

Mega-franchises are dependent on a very particular demographic to invest in their elaborate and expanding multiverse continuities:  one that has both a strong contextual foundation in the storied histories of the IPs—meaning, viewers who are intimately familiar with (and, ideally, passionately opinionated about) all the varied iterations of Batman and Spider-Man from the last thirty or so years—and is also equipped with disposable income, as is typically the case in middle age, hence the reason Gen X has been the corporate multimedia initiative’s most loyal fan base.  Fortunately for them, we’d been groomed for this assignment from the time we learned to turn on the television.

Very quickly (if it isn’t already too late for that):  From 1946 through 1983, the FCC enforced stringent regulations limiting the commercial advertisements that could be run during or incorporated into children’s programming.  However:

Ronald W. Reagan did not much care for any regulations that unduly hindered business, and the selling of products to an entire nation of children was a big business indeed.  When Reagan appointed Mark S. Fowler as commissioner of the FCC on May 18, 1981, children’s television would change dramatically.  Fowler championed market forces as the determinant of broadcasting content, and thus oversaw the abolition of every advertising regulation that had served as a guide for broadcasters.  In Fowler’s estimation, the question of whether children had the ability to discriminate between the ads and the entertainment was a moot point; the free market, and not organizations such as [Actions for Children’s Television] would decide the matter.

Martin Goodman, “Dr. Toon:  When Reagan Met Optimus Prime,” Animation World Network, October 12, 2010

In the wake of Fowler’s appointment, a host of extremely popular animated series—beginning with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe but also notably including The Transformers, G.I. Joe:  A Real American Hero, and M.A.S.K. for the boys, and Care Bears, My Little Pony, and Jem for young girls—flooded the syndicated market with 65-episode seasons that aired daily.  All of these series had accompanying action figures, vehicles, and playsets—and many of them, in fact, were explicitly based on preexisting toylines; meaning, in a flagrant instance of figure-and-ground reversal, the manufacturers often dictated narrative content:

“These shows are not thought up by people trying to create characters or a story,” [Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children’s Television] explained, terming them “program-length advertisements.”  “They are created to sell things,” she said.  “Accessories in the toy line must be part of the program.  It reverses the traditional creative process.  The children are getting a manufacturer’s catalogue instead of real programming content.”

Glenn Collins, “Controversy about Toys, TV Violence,” New York Times, December 12, 1985

This was all happening at the same time Kenner was supplying an endless line of 3.75” action figures based on Star Wars, both the movies and cartoon spinoffs Droids and Ewoks.  Even Hanna-Barbera’s Super Friends, which predated Fowler’s tenure as FCC commissioner by nearly a decade, rebranded as The Super Powers Team, complete with its own line of toys (also courtesy of Kenner) and tie-in comics (published by DC), thereby creating a feedback loop in which each product in the franchise advertised for the other.  Meanwhile, feature films like Ghostbusters and even the wantonly violent, R-rated Rambo and RoboCop movies were reverse-engineered into kid-friendly cartoons, each with—no surprise here—their own action-figure lines.

I grew up on all that stuff and obsessed over the toys; you’d be hard-pressed to find a late-stage Xer that didn’t.  We devoured the cartoons, studied the comics, and envied classmates who were lucky enough to own the Voltron III Deluxe Lion Set or USS Flagg aircraft carrier.  To our young minds, there was no differentiating between enjoying the storyworlds of those series and collecting all the ancillary products in the franchise.  To watch those shows invariably meant to covet the toys.  At our most impressionable, seventies-born members of Gen X learned to love being “hostage buyers.”  Such is the reason I was still purchasing those goddamn Batman comics on the downslope to middle age.

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State of Grace: How a Movie No One Saw Heralded the Last Days of Old New York, Old Hollywood—and Even My Own Innocence

March 28, 2018 / / 40 Comments

Last month, we talked about the subject of creative inspiration:  that an artist’s many influences affect his worldview and sensibilities in ways totally unique to him, and that they, along with his particular life experiences, constitute his voice.  In time, those influences become so embedded in his subconscious that he is no longer necessarily aware of the sway they hold over the art he produces, and as his confidence in his craft intensifies, his intellectual capacity to identify them in his work diminishes in kind.

As it happens, a week or two after posting the treatise, I received an object lesson in its very proposition.  The experience was an acutely emotional one for me, though not at all unpleasant or unwelcome, and a reminder of what storytelling at its best can do:  A story can comment on its times while reflecting timeless truths.  It can depict a very specific world that is nonetheless universally relatable.  It has the power to preserve a moment or an episode in all its emotional complexity, serving as a time capsule that can continue to yield new insight with age.  A good story changes the course of history, in some unquantifiable measure, influencing subsequent real-world events and artistic works in ways that, I think, go mostly unconsidered.

Here’s how one movie no one’s ever heard of exerted appreciably more impact on my personal and creative evolution—and even on my forthcoming novel—than I’d heretofore considered, and how it had something profoundly meaningful to say to me, both then and now.

Two years ago, I published a post with recommendations for Irish-themed movies to help celebrate St. Patrick’s Day; among them, a long-forgotten crime drama from 1990 about the Irish Mob in Hell’s Kitchen called State of Grace, which had the cosmic misfortune of opening the very same week as Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas.  The latter, as I’m sure you know, was a box-office hit that deservedly claimed an immortal place in the cultural consciousness, while the former—starring no less than heavyweights Sean Penn, Ed Harris, Gary Oldman, Robin Wright, John Turturro, John C. Reilly, and Burgess Meredith—quietly disappeared from theaters within two weeks of release and promptly faded into obscurity.  No one really saw it, and the bankruptcy of its studio, Orion Pictures, soon thereafter assured that it mostly remained unseen in the years to follow.

Sean Penn (as Terry Noonan) and Gary Oldman (as Jackie Flannery) in Phil Joanou’s “State of Grace”

My cousin’s husband owned a video store out in Jersey at that time, and he was always bringing by screener copies—sometimes even bootlegs—of current films, which was how I first experienced both State of Grace and GoodFellas when I was fourteen.  For a kid that had up till that point subsisted on a cinematic diet of almost exclusively Spielbergian fantasy, the comedies of John Hughes and Eddie Murphy, and the action extravaganzas of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, those two movies—‘cause I hadn’t yet seen The Godfather—were nothing short of revelatory.

State of Grace was a particular favorite, and I even managed to score a copy of the promotional one-sheet from my local video shop in the Bronx when they were done with it, which hung in my bedroom throughout high school.  The movie was my introduction to newly minted Oscar-winner Gary Oldman, and he delivers a searing, unsettling, heartbreaking performance that made me a fan for life.  But by the mid-nineties, my secondhand VHS of Grace had gotten misplaced, and given the scarcity of the film’s availability, I haven’t had occasion—despite trying in 2016 for that best–of–St. Patty’s post—to see it since.

Until this month, when I found a wonderful Blu-ray reissue, limited to 3,000 units, and, like the story’s troubled protagonist, I ventured back into Hell’s Kitchen to reunite with some very old faces…

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