Thots

Hannah went out of town for a work thing. For four days I will be…A MAN ALONE.

Day Two. Weirdly, Man on Fire turned out to be a lot better than I remembered.

I mean, it was definitely an extremely dumb, overwrought movie, that’s unintentionally hilarious in more than one scene. But, sort of like with Michael Bay movies, it’s really only when you compare it with lesser films that its artistic worth emerges.

(Um, spoiler alert, I guess.)

Man on Fire is directed by Tony Scott (for some, this will be all that need be said)1 and stars Denzel Washington as a former CIA assassin2 who’s descended into a miasma of alcoholism and self-loathing. With nowhere else to go, he ends up in Mexico City,3 where he gets set up with a job as a bodyguard for a wealthy Mexican businessman (played by Marc Anthony — OF COURSE).

The complication is, and I actually like this premise, Marc Anthony comes from a rich family, but he himself is on the brink of bankruptcy, burdened by massive debts left behind by his father. However, he has to be able to keep up appearances, which for him means propping up an opulent household, supporting a beautiful blonde American wife, and sending his young daughter to the best schools, etc.

Now, the movie is primarily concerned with the endemic kidnappings in Mexico City, which is so prevalent as to have become part of everyday life. Wealthy families are targeted; a member of that family is kidnapped, ransom demands are made, and if the demands aren’t met, body parts start showing up in the mail. It’s such a common thing that wealthy Mexicans buy kidnapping insurance as a matter of course.

Marc Anthony’s dilemma is that he can’t afford a decent bodyguard for his daughter, but he can’t get kidnapping insurance unless he has a bodyguard. So his sleazebag attorney (played by Mickey Rourke — OF COURSE) advises him to hire a cut-rate bodyguard, get the insurance, then fire the bodyguard at the first opportunity. So Denzel applies for the job. He’s wildly overqualified, and when Marc Anthony asks him why his asking price is so low, Denzel says, matter-of-factly, “I drink,” and proceeds to tell him that, despite his credentials, if anything amiss actually occurs, the quality of his response will be commensurate with his pay. Marc Anthony is just like, “uhhhhh,” which I think is actually an intentional bit of comedy so it doesn’t count as an Unintentionally Funny Moment.

The core of the movie is Denzel’s relationship with his young charge, Pita (played by Dakota Fanning — OF COURSE). This part is actually genuinely charming. Since Denzel’s all world-weary and beaten down and shit, naturally at first he wants nothing to do with Pita on any personal level — he wants to keep things strictly professional, with a minimum of conversation, so he can just get through the day and go home and crawl inside a bottle. Understandable.

Pita, however, is so sweet and totes adorbs that Denzel can’t help being charmed by her. Despite his resistance, Denzel eventually succumbs and falls in love with adorable Pita, becoming the attentive father figure that her actual father isn’t. So of course it sucks pretty bad when Pita is kidnapped and killed, setting Denzel off on a gruesome rampage of vengeance.

Dakota Fanning totally saves this movie. She was probably about nine when this film was made, but as we all know she was a super precocious little kid, and this film makes the most of that, making Pita not just your typical wisecracking movie kid, but a genuinely smart, witty, open-hearted little girl, so there’s nothing remotely forced or contrived about Denzel becoming smitten with her. This is basically the story of that Looney Tunes cartoon with the gruff bulldog (named Marc Anthony, actually) who falls for the sweet li’l kitten, but then has to continually keep saving the kitten’s life.

Anyway, Pita totally brings Denzel out of his self-loathing death spiral4 and gives Denzel something — someone — to live for again. Then she’s kidnapped and killed.

So, what I remembered as the biggest chunk of this movie, but which surprisingly doesn’t take up that much of the running time, is a super-grim, dead-faced Denzel going on the hunt for the people behind Pita’s abduction. This is where the “orgy of destruction” stuff kicks in. Fingers are amputated. Bombs inserted into rectums. Fingers are blown off. Either the writer or director has an obvious fear of finger trauma. It really is pretty extreme, and I don’t buy the defense of it that it isn’t sadistic because Denzel only tortures/kills people for information and/or justice. That’s true, but the torture is also very much about audience gratification — we’re all pretty messed up by Pita’s death, so we just really want to see these guys hurt.

It’s all incredibly over-the-top and overwrought,5 but you know, it still kinda works. Gimmicks that seemed vulgar in 2004, like all the arty rapid-fire montages of heavily treated, distorted images, are now fairly commonplace and don’t seem all that bizarre. And although it wields an incredibly blunt hammer of cornball sentimentality (yes, there is a stuffed bear that Pita names after Denzel’s character), it at least comes across as sincere and uncynical.

What really helped redeem this movie in my eyes is the next movie I watched that day — Taken 2. And let me just say that I knew exactly what I was getting into when I watched this movie. I blame no one.

Here’s really the only thing I need to say about Taken 2. Afterwards, I was telling Hannah about the movies I’d watched that day, and I went from Man on Fire to Drive, and knew I’d seen something in between, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I struggled to remember what film this was, but the title and anything about the story just wouldn’t come back to me. This is a movie I’d watched about four hours ago.

The thing is, Taken 2 is a bad movie, but if you put it up right next to Man on Fire, which is also a bad movie, you can, or should be able to, discern a huge qualitative difference between the two. They’re both bad, but one is on a far more insidious plane of badness. Man on Fire is ridiculous in a lot of ways, but what justifies it, for me, is that it at least tries to say something. It tells a recognizably human story that wants the audience to give a shit about the humans involved.

Taken 2, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. It’s a completely soulless, perfunctory exercise in big-budget, professionally crafted thrills ‘n’ violence. The complete indifference can be felt in every numbed-out, by-the-motions scene. I mean, Man on Fire is big-budget, professionally crafted, and slick, but it actually takes itself seriously, whereas Taken 2 — and Taken was exactly the same way — for all its glumly serious tone, is virtually devoid of any authentic emotion. Bleah.

So then I watched Drive, which I honestly believe is one of the most perfect films ever created. Before that, though, I did watch another movie, or at least a few minutes of one.

One of the very first movies I remember watching — looking at the dates, it must have been one of the first, since I was only a little over two at the time — was 1971′s The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston.

Now, I was obviously way too young to be watching a post-apocalyptic action-horror film about mutant vampires. And to parents who agree that kids shouldn’t be taken to scary grown-up movies, but think it is okay for babies, since they don’t understand what they’re seeing, take heed of my story. Because yes, The Omega Man completely fucked me up.

The part of The Omega Man that fucked me up isn’t actually any of the mutant vampire stuff, which I barely even remember. It sounds silly to my own ears to hear what it was, but remember that I was two years old at the time. What the traumatic thing was — uh, spoiler alert, I guess — was the very last shot of the film.

Charlton Heston’s been impaled with a spear and is bleeding to death in a fountain. There’s an emotional farewell with the human survivors, who drive off in a van or something, leaving Charlton Heston to die in the water in a spectacularly super-subtle crucified-Jesus pose.6

But then, just before the end credits roll, something crazy happens:

Yeah, the image polarizes!

Now, again, bear in mind that I was two years old. I suspect now that I had never seen this effect before. I understood the concept of movies, but I don’t think I’d ever seen a transformation like this. It fucking terrified me. I mean scared shitless. That polarized Charlton Heston haunted my nightmares for years afterwards, and even as I grew up and my memories of the film (which I never watched again) warped and faded with time, I never forgot that one horrific image.

(So, parents, please take this into consideration. You don’t know and cannot predict what crazy, random thing will be the thing that screws up your child forever. FOREVER.)

I thought about it again recently in talking to Hannah about something — I can’t remember now what it was, but I think it was actually on a Drive To Place episode. Anyway, my memories of that film were really fuzzy, and I could no longer recall exactly what the context was of that polarized image. Then a mind-blowing thought occurred to me: why don’t I just download the movie and watch that last scene?

I’m not kidding that this thought was mind-blowing. It’s one thing to be all, “hey, remember that one Nine Inch Nails single?” and then go download it or look it up on YouTube. But when it’s something like The Omega Man, it doesn’t automatically occur to me to try to find it on the Internet. For 42 years, it’s been fixed in my mind as something that belongs to my memories, and is therefore inaccessible. It’s not even like a classic film that one has enjoyed for decades and periodically rents or streams or downloads or whatever. It’s just this strange, scary memory that only exists in the recesses of my brain.

The idea of pulling the actual film up and watching it again seems astounding to me — it feels like time travel. I mean, imagine some incident from your early childhood. If you could peer through some sort of window through time, and witness that exact incident, in every detail, as a spectator from your present-day perspective, that would basically be time travel, right?

If I had watched The Omega Man more than just that one time, maybe every few years throughout my life, the idea of watching it wouldn’t seem that bizarre. It would be like It’s a Wonderful Life, just part of the fabric of my existence. Not watching The Omega Man since I was two has transformed it from a mere film into one of the oldest artifacts of my past.

So on Sunday I thought, what the, I could actually just go and download that movie and watch the actual scene that has haunted me my entire life. So I went and did that. And, well, okay. First of all, the whole thing is absolutely ridiculous. It’s beyond cheesy. It actually transcends cheese to inhabit its own cosmos of ineffable wacked-outedness. Just, like, wow. Two is probably the correct age for me to have seen that movie and not just howled with laughter through the whole thing.

Second, it’s really odd how different that last scene is from the way I recall it. In my memories, the shot right before the final Charlton Christ Superstar shot is the survivors all standing around him as he lays dying in the fountain. But the actual scene is not like that at all. I don’t know why I remember it that way. What actually happens is so much lamer — basically the (uber-hippie) survivors are just all, “thanks for everything, see ya!” and pile into their van and drive off, leaving Charlton to bleed out all Jesus-y in the water.7

But what is exactly the same as I remember is the tone of the scene. Between lines of dialogue, it’s very quiet and still. That’s another thing that spooked me about the movie when I was a kid. That quietness. I don’t know why. Something about the quietness and the dying together. But forever after that, there’d be times when I was, like, killing bugs in the backyard, or psychologically and physically tormenting another kid, and suddenly I’d be aware of how quiet it was, and I’d be consumed with existential horror.

Man, just writing that makes me feel like a goddamn psychopath. If I lived with me, I’d periodically shine a flashlight into the crawlspace under the trailer, just, you know, in case.

And third, the polarization thing still scares the shit out of me.