By Matt Zoller Seitz
The following piece was written in conjunction with The Robert Aldrich Blog-a-thon, an Internet-wide criticism event coordinated by Dennis Cozzalio, propietor of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. For a complete list of Aldrich links, click here.
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Calling Kiss Me Deadly one of the darkest detective thrillers ever made, or the ultimate film noir, doesn’t do it justice. Director Robert Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzeride’s 1955 version of Mickey Spillane’s novel – in which our thug hero chases a mysterious, all-powerful “Great Whatsit” in pursuit of fortune and glory -- doesn’t merely exemplify those two genres and identify the places where they overlap. It defines the difference between cynicism and nihilism, then throws down with the nihilists, if for no other reason than to show you what it means to live in a world where nothing matters. Cynics expect the worst of humanity and are rarely disappointed, but in their hearts, they hope for some evidence that humans are innately kind and that morality is more than a sucker’s game. 
Cynicism is pre-emptive disappointment; you can’t be let down by anyone or anything unless you secretly nurse a kernel of hope. A nihilist, on the other hand, knows that the difference between cynicism and optimism is a matter of degrees. Like Neo in The Matrix blocking the agents’ bullets and then suddenly understanding, truly and deeply, that the world he's long accepted as "real" is just an intellectual prison built of ones and zeroes, the true nihilist has had his moment of cosmic disillusionment, and his accompanying realization that democracy, religion, equality -- hell, the Golden Rule itself -- are all just scam jobs sold to sheep by wolves; that everybody’s mainly concerned with playing the angles and getting ahead in the here and now, even if they pretend otherwise. After realizing that morality and ethics, religion and philosophy, good and evil are illusions of various sorts, and that there’s no percentage in decency, guilt and shame vanish and life becomes a present-tense proposition, a zero-sum game played by beasts that wear suits and drive cars. 
Aldrich’s protagonist, Mike Hammer, has a suit and car, plus the power of speech, but that’s about all that separates him from any other randy carnivore that ever walked the earth. He is a nihilist’s nihilist – a brute who asks a lot of specific questions in the course of his job as a private detective, but mentally translates them into more general and immediate queries: “Can I take this asshole in a fight?” “How long till I fuck this broad?” and “When do I get paid?” The Mike Hammer of Spillane’s bestselling fiction wasn’t completely irredeemable; like a lowbrow cousin of Dashell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, he was a consummate bastard with ice water for blood, but deep down, he had a moral code and an Old Testament sense of justice; in his own twisted way, Hammer exemplified Chandler’s description of his own detective hero as a “knight errant” stalking the mean streets of 20th Century America, righting injustice by subterfuge and force. Other movie and TV Hammers retained at least a trace of Spillane’s righteous thuggery. Check out the 1980s CBS version starring Stacy Keach as Hammer, or Armand Assante’s psychologically rich rendition in 1982’s otherwise horrid I, The Jury; their Hammers were cynics, ass-kickers and male chauvinist pigs, but they had their standards, and they were still capable of being shocked, then roused into doing what was right (as opposed to what made them happy). Aldrich and Meeker’s version of Hammer has no such redeeming qualities. He’s a burly jackal who slams people’s fingers in drawers, deploys his loyal secretary and masochistic sex toy, Velda (Maxine Cooper), as bait in adultery cases, then uses the evidence he’s gathered as a springboard to blackmail. He’s an overgrown teenage stud, vain and petty, enamored with his own handsomeness and proud of his bitchin’ wheels; he’s such a brute that the film’s few concessions to “sophistication” – Hammer seems equally well-versed in boxing and opera – play like sick jokes on the notion of private-dick-as-Galahad. 
But as Aldrich makes clear that Hammer’s exactly the sort of hero this shitty world deserves. Aldrich’s high-contrast, super-dark images and crazy Dutch angles push noir conventions to cartoon extremes; in earlier noirs, these visual affectations implied moral instability, but here their exaggeration signifies a moral vacuum bereft of ethical and spiritual moorings. The characters bob like lost ships in a tempest while buccaneers like Hammer jump from deck to deck, grabbing whatever they can. Aldrich’s justly celebrated opening sequence – which still feels shockingly contemporary despite a half-century ellipse – illustrates the director’s nihilistic pose through pictures and sounds rather than in words, conveying the idea of “no moorings” by denying the viewer the usual geographical markers: beneath opening credits (which roll backwards!) a barefoot, trenchcoated young woman named Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman) stumbles out onto a highway, obviously terrified and disoriented, her frazzled outline temporarily obscured by the flash of cars whizzing by on a highway. Desperate for help, she flags down a car that just happens to be Hammer’s, and the dark odyssey begins, complete with flirty/predatory/expository/cryptic dialogue.
Christina Bailey: You have only one real lasting love.
Mike Hammer: Now who could that be?
Christina Bailey: You. You're one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself. Bet you do push-ups every morning just to keep your belly hard.
Talk about in medias res: if you don’t know the source material or the plot of Kiss Me Deadly, you don’t know who this woman is, or who Hammer is, or where you are, or what’s at stake, or whether you’re watching a mystery or a horror movie. (The only recent American film I’ve seen with such a disorienting beginning is Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, which plunges the viewer into an opening nightclub raid before it has even revealed the heroes’ first names.) Shockingly but appropriately, Christina’s predictably ugly fate doesn’t jump-start Hammer’s moral awakening, as it would in almost any other private eye film; it just hips Hammer to a shot at making a lot of dough by tracking down the movie’s MacGuffin, a mysterious substance/ device/ something-or-other. "An ordinary little girl gets killed and it rings bells all the way to Washington," Hammer muses, intrigued that Christina's death drew government attention. "There's gotta be a pitch... I picked up a girl. If she hadn't gotten in my way, I wouldn't have stopped. She must be connected with somethin' big." 
The exact nature and purpose of “the Great Whatsit” is never satisfactorily explained, but its eventual appearance – accompanied by one of the greatest and most lovingly imitated Pandora’s Box images in film history (see the title object in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the briefcase in Pulp Fiction and the alien remains in Repo Man, which also apes Aldrich’s backwards credits) – makes for a perfect ending. Much has been made of the film’s supposed pretensions to Cold War allegory and its poetic allusion to death by nuclear hellfire; the Whatsit contains radioactive material, and the gigantic explosion that stops, rather than traditionally ends, the movie is shaped vaguely like a mushroom cloud. (There's been some critical confusion over whether Hammer and Velda survive, thanks to a discrepancy in shot sequence between 35mm and 16mm prints of the movie -- for details, see Alain Silver's indispensible article, "So What's With the Ending of Kiss Me Deadly?" -- but in both versions, Aldrich's apocalyptic intent is crystal clear.) Nevertheless, there's more going on here than ripped-from-the-headlines fantasy. Beyond a pulp meditation on what it means to give humankind the capacity to exterminate itself (a theme he would revisit in 1977's underrated Twilight's Last Gleaming), Kiss Me Deadly is a generalized statement on the fragility of intellectual and philosophical structures that keep society from collapsing. In his typically backwards-ass and thus strikingly original way, Aldrich confirms the function and necessity of morality by showing us a Hobbesean universe without it.
In this sense, Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly ups Spillane’s ante and calls his bluff, foregrounding noir's base appeal – the sexiness of being bad, of doing what you want and not giving a damn – and then shocks us to our senses by showing us what a world comprised of nothing but dark identification figures would look like. Aldrich’s universe is as foul as its protagonist; it could be snuffed like a candle without the rest of the universe caring, or even noticing. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” boasts a more sympathetic hero than Hammer, but the song's final few lines could be his epitaph: “Nothing really matters/Anyone can see/Nothing really matters/Nothing really matters to me.”
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
State of nature: The Moralistic Nihilism of Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly
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13 comments:
Wonderful piece, Matt. I always thought Ralph Meeker made the best fit as Mike Hammer, although I've liked others in the part. Spillane himself played Hammer in The Girl Hunters, but I haven't seen it. You write that Aldrich's characterization might have taken things even further than Spillane's conception and that may well be. I've only read a couple of the books and Meeker comes closest to the Mike I envision.
I always loved the Pandora's box idea. The topical 50's atomic bomb reading you hear a lot is too narrow, I think. It's much bigger. It's the ultimate MacGuffin -- the MacGuffin that ate the world. (Or stopped a movie, anyway.)
Sidenote: What is Robert Aldrich's signature shot? Does he even have one? After reading through some of these blog-a-thon posts I'm starting to think that it's the overhead shot that looks down through the rafters. Anyway, his mise en scene seems to favor having foreground objects that partially obscure his subjects.
My first exposure to Mike Hammer was the one-two punch of the Assante movie (with Barbara Carrera as the sex interest -- good casting, that) and the Stacy Keach series. Assante was a good Hammer -- he had that I-could-give-a-fuck sullen macho quality that Al Pacino would later amp up to 11 in Scarface -- but I always gravitated toward Keach, even though the CBS series had this bizarre central conceit that Hammer was a 1940s guy superimposed on the 1980s. It never really worked; you'd watch Keach wandering around in his fedora and walrus mustache calling women "dames" and you'd just think he was insane. Meeker's Hammer, while even more of a a brute caricature than Spillane's, was the first one that I really felt nailed (ahem) the essence of both the character and the mentality of the author who created him. And there was just something funny, and revealing, about Kiss Me Deadly; watching it, I felt as though Aldrich understood Spillane better than Spillane understood himself. The attitude seemed to be, "Let's call a pig a pig." I love that the world Hammer destroys through his selfish curiousity is one that was not really worth saving anyway; the reading feels very honest, true to the implications of Spillane's extreme brand of tough guy existentialism. If nothing really matters, why not blow it all up?
As for Aldrich's signature shot, I'm not sure what I'd pick, either. Through-the-rafters is a possibility, but he's also fond of low-angled medium shots that foreground a victim looking up at a tormentor towering overhead. And he likes to film menacing figures from a distance, their movements partly or wholly obscured by windows, doorways or various obstructions (think of Telly Savalas' rampage in The Dirty Dozen.)
Apropos of nothing except The Dirty Dozen, my brother Richard was casing a laserdisc closeout sale in Los Angeles about six years ago and happened to see Donald Sutherland wandering the stacks with an armload of movies featuring him in the cast. He was thumbing through the "D" section, and when he pulled out The Dirty Dozen and looked it over, Richard approached him. As casually as possible, he said, "That's a pretty good movie." The actor smiled and said, "Yeah, and I hear that Sutherland kid is all right."
I was always fond of the Stacy Keach series. I recall an old TV Guide interview with Spillane when the show first aired that addressed some of those anachronistic aspects. The way I remember it, Mickey Spillane had put his foot down, setting the conditions under which CBS could use the character -- he had to wear a fedora, he had to carry a .45, he couldn't leave Manhattan, ect. The walrus mustache probably wasn't part of it. And all those women in 80's dresses, every office gal and receptionist that adorned the Spillane universe, just had to melt for him!
At the time, I thought Keach's one-liners and come-ons were terribly funny. Somewhere I probably have a box of juvenilia that contains scraps of paper where I copied some down. "Hey handsome, would you get me another screwdriver?" "No, I believe you're too tight already." Well, OK, I'm cringing now. Good times.
“Nihilists? Fuck me. Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, but at least it’s an ethos.”
A sharp piece on what’s still one of the oddest and most unsettling Hollywood films, Matt. By ’55 even the subversions of noir were conventional, and it’s thrilling to see Aldrich so ruthlessly demolish them by, essentially, taking them at their word, removing even the faded honor and fatalistic wariness of betrayal that were staples of the noir anti-hero so that the typical twists and turns of the genre all lead to blind alleyways. The sordidness is all-pervasive; as Danny Peary points out in his excellent CULT FILMS, even KISS ME DEADLY’S promotional stills (seedy, unadorned black & whites of Meeker clutching the movie’s various dames on a couch) feel cheap and unwholesome.
I don’t think Aldrich could have pulled this off without his star. Meeker is so brave in his portrayal; this isn’t a tarnished knight or a morally compromised walker between two worlds, or even a cackling, outrageous villain. He’s a loutish, smug brute, as you say, small, nasty stuff. “[A] burly jackal who slams people’s fingers in drawers…” and does so flashing a smile at the victim’s squeals; that rat’s-grin pops up again when his knowledge of opera proves valuable in tormenting another chump in his way. The only contemporaneous performance I can think of that comes close to this unapologetic, solipsistic nihilism is Widmark in PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET, which always struck me as a likely influence on KISS ME DEADLY. (Robert Arden in CONFIDENTIAL REPORT/MR. ARKADIN is a kissing cousin as well—he even has the same grating bray of a voice, a deliberate booming announcement that king shit of fuck mountain has now entered the room—though frankly some of that seems Welles’s clever exploitation of a moderate talent.)
I would say, though, that however nihilistic Hammer is portrayed, the film itself has the same fervent, nearly frenzied allegiance to morality as much of Aldrich’s work. KISS ME DEADLY actually does articulate a moral code (again, using the same device as Fuller) when Meeker’s tough guy is put in his place by the police lieutenant. He even slows it down so the clod can get it through his thick skull: “Try to understand what they mean. Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity.” Meeker’s almost childish bafflement in this scene is one of the great moments in film for me. However vicious or sadistic, however clearly in it for his own gain, Hammer’s nonetheless the star of the picture, and certain to piece together what’s going on, save the day, and possibly even reveal a glimmer of conscience at the end. Instead, the white-haired cop has to put it all in his lap, in a voice so patient and calm it’s clear Hammer’s beneath his contempt. Hammer’s cynical nihilism seems all-pervasive at first, but even in this movie there are good men hard at work keeping us safe; KISS ME DEADLY, brilliantly, just hasn’t been about them.
Having watched almost all of Aldrich's movies, I always thought his signature shot has to have some kind of ceiling fan, shot from either below or above, but usually above. Especially in the later movies, it's nothing but men sweating with ceiling fans buzzing above them, futilely.
I was surprised by how much I liked "Hustle"---and "The Choirboys" is pretty tough stuff. But then there's something like "4 From Texas," which looks great, but...
Great piece, Matt; though I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of Phillip Marlowe, I see him as more of a softie -- a half step between Sam Spade and Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer, who Mike Hammer would probably regard as a woman in drag.
In a funny way, I think both you and Bruce Reid kind of hit the nail on the way about why "Kiss Me, Deadly" has never been a favorite of mine. The only fictional nihilist I've ever found compelling is the protagonist of "Fathers and Sons" -- perhaps because he's a slightly different sort of nihilist in that it's a mainly a philosophical pose. (Or not. I read the book over a decade ago.)
You guys probably know this already, but, but I heard A.I. Bezzerides talk about the film at a screening a few years and he said that his (and I think he also thought Aldrich's) intention was basically to undermine Mike Hammer in every possible way for the simple reason that they hated him and they weren't too fond of Spillane either.
Bob: That's an interesting tidbit that I wasn't aware of. It's not a huge surprise, given that the theme of so many of his movies comes down to some variation of, "All right, Mr. Tough Guy, you sure are tough-- now look where it gets you." Aldrich is an incredibly macho director who finds machismo funny. Even his darkest movies -- Ulzana's Raid comes to mind -- have an absurdist streak that pushes them toward comedy.
Spillane wasn't such a troglodyte that he didn't know what Aldrich and Bezzerides were up to (and Aldrich did indeed loathe Mike Hammer and was proud of saying so later); Spillane actively and vocally hated this movie (which I consider to be the best of the Aldrich pics I've seen, other perhaps than the grossly neglected EMPEROR Of THE NORTH, or ... NORTH POLE, if you prefer, I think that was the original title).
I, THE JURY was my first brush with the character too; I think I was too young to either appreciate or even vaguely care for what the Stacy Keach series was like. But now that I've read several Hammer novels over the years, I just can't see Armand Assante as being even vaguely appropriate, except for his brooding quality; he's frankly just too handsome for a role that Spillane repeatedly insists, via Hammer's own self-descriptions, is plug-ugly. (Keach is not precisely that, but his mug has an odd quality that fits the character well, yet by and large he seems too recessive an actor; the Hammer of the books wears his heart on his sleeve, in his own peculiar way, and Keach is not that kind of presence).
No, for my money the best filmic portrayal of Hammer to date was by ... Spillane himself, in the gorgeously bizarre early-60s British-made (!) THE GIRL HUNTERS. It hardly matters that Spillane isn't a trained actor, he just happens to be a natural ham, and someone you can't take your eyes off. He's actually at his best when he doesn't read lines, because his face can be remarkably expressive, whether flirting with a nurse while hospitalized (who but Spillane would know the character better, and Hammer comes off as both funny and even kind of charming), or while deriving obvious delight from nailing an unconscious crook's hands to a warehouse floor (it doesn't seem all that clear what he's doing in the movie, but I remember it from the book).
Hammer's character is not even completely consistent from book to book, which I think has to do with Spillane's own habit of churning the things out in a week or two; they apparently mirror how he feels about himself at any given time. In I, THE JURY, Hammer's sadism is positively jolly, and even sort of random; he feels damn good about himself and wants the reader to know it. Not long after comes ONE LONELY NIGHT, one of the darkest and most obsessive of the books, in which Hammer hates himself and everyone around him, finally by the end realizing his apotheosis as having meant to be nothing more than a permanent killing machine, whose mission is only to destroy those even worse than himself. (I don't even know what to make of THE TWISTED THING, wherein one of the main characters is some sort of genius trapped in the body of a crippled boy, or something; Spillane was known for his outlandish finales, and this may boast one of the most so.)
Actually, the most interesting Spillane novel to me was THE LONG WAIT, a non-Hammer story, not that that matters, since all of Spillane's novels are written in the identical voice, though as it winds up this particular tale could not have happened to Hammer without changing the whole lexicon of that series (indeed, I seem to remember it takes place in a small town, rather than the requisite Manhattan).
Curious thought about the anachronism of Hammer's character in the 80s Keach series ... at least one of the last books (not sure how many were published towards the end of Spillane's life) shows Hammer being pretty much the same person as ever, yet recognizably living in a Manhattan that wasn't the one he operated in during the 50s. The detail that really stuck out for me was when Hammer goes out to pick up lunch from a Korean deli buffet!
Six Degrees of Separation finale: I used to know a Chinese bartender who, in an earlier job, got to know Spillane pretty well. Said that at that point Spillane no longer drank anything but tea, yet still enjoyed bellying up to the bar for the mere sake of it. A friendly customer and an excellent tipper, I was assured.
Dan: Thanks for the info -- I haven't read nearly as much Spillane as you, so a lot of this was news to me.
Regarding the 1980s series, I interviewed Keach one time for the cable repeats of Mike Hammer, and -- I'm paraphrasing here, because it was so long ago -- he said the network originally intended to update Hammer to the present day, in every detail, with Keach in the lead, mainly because doing a period show was very expensive. Keach said he'd only do the part if he could play some version of the character as written by Spillane in the 40s; from there the show evolved into a bizarre hybrid that was clearly set in the present, but with most of the characters behaving according to 1940s and 1950s social attitudes. Hammer dressed like he just stepped out of a time warp -- complete with fedora -- and the women sported push-up bras and engaged in sub-Chandler "suggestive" repartee, but that and "Harlem Nocturne" as the theme song were the only obvious nods to the material's roots in the past.
It was one of those shows where the idea was fantastic but the execution was generally middling to poor -- basically not that different from Hunter or Matt Houston, except that the hero's anachronistically piggish behavior was purposeful rather than incidental. The highlight of the show's run didn't even occur onscreen -- it was Keach's 1984 bust for smuggling 1.3 grams of cocaine through Heathrow airport. He was held overnight and released the next day after paying a fine, but he ended up doing six months in prison, and his subsequent appeal was denied. Production resumed when he got out, but the show never amounted to much, really; Keach's imaginative performance deserved a better stage.
Caveat - I have no idea if Keach's account of the show's creative vision was accurate or not. It's just his version.
I believe Keach's jail time even interfered with post-production on some of the episodes yet unfinished; they had to bring in Rich Little to dub him. (Sounds like a joke, but isn't.)
forgot to mention how the show got started in the first place (I wish I remember where I read this) ... one of the producers yet-to-be was sitting near Spillane on a flight someplace, and, starstruck and not sure how to introduce himself, decided to whisper the lines from the novels he found most memorable. Spillane seemed irritated at first, but gradually warmed up to the guy (it was a long flight), and they had a handshake agreement by the end of it that said producer would be allowed to pitch a Hammer series. And thence we go.
I've been thinking more about whether or not Keach was right for this role, and even when I wrote before that I said he was too "recessive" I think I was underrating him; he was so fantastic in a not dissimilar role in THE NINTH CONfIGURATION that I should not have sold him so short.
Who could play Hammer today? I can't think of one of the A-list stars who's up to it. (It might be a perverse kick to see Tom Hanks take a hack at it.)
Dan: Russell Crowe has the Galahad complex and the requisite savage streak. Whoever got the role would probably need to be Australian, Irish or working class English. We breed waiters here, not tough guys.
Russell Crowe, naturally ... "we breed waiters here," that made me laugh, it's brutal but it's true. Though now that I think about it, Mickey Rourke played a very Hammer-like character in SIN CITY and was tremendous. (In recent years the Oscars have grown a tad less provincial about recognizing work like that, although they did in his case, and unsurprisingly probably never even noticed Lili Taylor's breathtaking work in THE ADDICTION, but we could all come up with dozens more similar examples.)
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