During the entire decade of the 1980’s Martin Scorsese chased after the success of his earlier years. He released Raging Bull in 1980, generally agreed upon to be one of the best films ever made, but failed to achieve another success on the same level until Goodfellas in 1990. The King of Comedy bombed hard at the box office, After Hours also failed to live up to commercial expectations, The Color of Money saw him jump into mainstream film making, and The Last Temptation of Christ barely succeeded in making back its budget, but very successfully pissed a lot of people off. It’s arguable that the most successful thing Scorsese created during the 80’s was the Michael Jackson Bad music video, although I won’t be the one making that argument.
What I find most influential of this decade of work is the film After Hours. Starring Griffin Dune, the film marks the first time in over ten years a Scorsese film was not headlined by Robert De Niro. Dune, for his part, plays the part in way similar to De Niro probably would have, as the character of Paul Hackett, who desperately wants to go home after what has to be one of the worst nights anybody has ever had. The film begins in a coffee shop, where Paul is reading one of my favorite books, Tropic of Cancer. He meets Marcy Franklin (Rosanna Arquette), and after some quick literary analysis she gives him her phone number and they part ways. He calls her a little later, and goes out to meet her.
What follows is a tale of utter misery. I felt miserable just watching it from behind the safety of my computer screen. Paul quickly decides he’s not interested in her, so decides to book it on home, but without any money he can’t get on the subway. He accidentally causes Marcy to kill herself, gets part of his head shaved off at a night club, gets chased down by an angry mob who is convinced he’s a thief, and in the end gets trapped in a body coffin of harden plaster in the back of Cheech and Chong’s van. All of this goes down after nightfall and before sunrise, with a clock ticking endlessly in the background reminding Paul that he has to get to his crummy job in the morning.
Watching this film I had to wonder to myself how many Germans have watched this film. This tale of living through absolute misery seems to come up again and again in German films, and two films in particular I felt must have drawn heavy inspiration from it. The 1999 film Gigantic (Absolut Giganten) tells the story of three friends who go out into the city for one last night before one of them leaves for a new life, and they reach comparable misery in the night, as they bet all their money in a game of Fussball, get mixed up in a car chase with Elvis impersonators, and rush a young girl to the hospital after she’s had too much to drink. Although this film has a happy ending, it is comparable to After Hours for the misery they experience throughout the night. The other film it reminded me of was the 1997 film Life is All You Get (Das Leben ist ein Baustelle), which is not about a single night but rather shows how in every way a mans life crumbles around him, as his father dies, he finds out he may or may not have HIV, and he loses the girl that he loves. I believe that for both of these films Scorsese’s film must have been some sort of influence, as all three share the same dark humor in their misery. In the awful situations the characters find themselves in, all the viewer can do is laugh at the absurdity.
When I was a kid I used to watch Home Movies on Adult Swim, a show about kids who try to make movies with a hand held camera. I remember the main character, who was the director, saying at one point that he was going to switch roles with his friend and become the actor, because every director wants to act, and every actor wants to direct. Hollywood keeps proving this statement true. Spike Lee regularly appears in his own movies, Tarantino has done it, Kevin Smith wrote Silent Bob for himself, David Lynch acted in Twin Peaks, Martin Scorsese, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Fritz Lang, the list goes on of directors who have appeared in their own films. Then there are those who have had full time jobs as both actors and directors, most notably Orson Welles and Clint Eastwood. Both of them can be studied in either context, and often appear in their own work. But what I’m getting to are the actors, who make it big in Hollywood, and then try their hand at directing. These films are what interest
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