Network Newsroom

Starting a series premiere of a political news drama with a monologue on the ills of America is brilliant – courageously, recklessly brilliant. It's politically incorrect. The kind of screed that would grind most shows to an entertainment halt. If this same monologue had occurred at the height of West Wing's popularity and had come from anyone other than a stock, political hack, the backlash would have been swift. Bill Maher's exit from network television following his crude comments about September 11 proved that certain corporations lack the conviction of their rights and prefer profit to scandal. The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers exposed the fragile core of the American media. In the immediacy of the post-9/11 world, they abandoned nuance for jingoism and drawing reductive lines in the sand, civility pitted against nature, red in tooth in claw, us vs. them – a duality where Maher's dynamism was not welcome. Months later, Maher resurfaced with a new show on a new home, HBO, a network known for its progressive programming and at-times biting social commentary.

Therefore, it's fitting that Aaron Sorkin's new drama would also find a home on HBO. Newsroom is Sorkin's first foray into the sanctuary of cable television. The premiere espouses much of the trademark Sorkin charm – accidental hirings, awkward badinage, and savant-like idiots – but there's an aggressiveness that's downright un-Sorkin-like. Even at his worst, Jed Bartlet is an idealist reformer, but Jeff Daniels's Will McAvoy is a realist who needs reforming. The show hints that years ago, he and renegade producer Mackenzie MacHale were the Woodward and Bernstein of broadcast news, but much like the actual media, McAvoy's jounalistic zeal has deadened. He's now the Jay Leno or more aptly the Larry King of anchors who offends everyone by offending no one.

However, from the show's first scene, his patience with mediocrity has worn thin and McAvoy's ennui boils over into a rant for the ages declaring that America is no longer the greatest country in the world. Like Maher, we fear that McAvoy may be fired (even if temporarily, after all the show is called Newsroom). Smartly, however, the show avoids the easy melodrama of termination or rivals without having first earned it and instead positions the season's arc around a more imposing fate for a figure of McAvoy's stature: irrelevancy. Will his speech be his downfall or his first step on a path to redemption?


At his best, Sorkin's conflicts are internal rather than external, rooted in ignorance, apathy, and self-doubt. Governor Ritchie from West Wing is the purest example that Sorkin's antagonists are typically thin and underwritten. A stand-in for George W. Bush, Ritchie spouts half-chewed cliches about the virtues of small government and even smaller minds. But the greatest battle of that election season is not Bartlet against Ritchie but Bartlet against himself, Uncle Fluffy against the Nobel Laureate. “Will Bartlet let the pitch go by?” as Toby projects. The query is merely a symbolic continuation of season two and three's prime conflicts: Bartlet's struggle with living up to his expectations for himself.

Similarly, Sorkin's other protagonists at their lowest doubt everything – God, government, technology, the future, themselves – everything except their fellow man. Rather than themselves, their enduring optimism is rooted in each other. They are surrounded by lost passengers on the path of righteousness, but not lost causes. The masses are not the enemy; they are the downtrodden victims of misinformation that need to be persuaded more than defeated. Like a Greek chorus, Sorkin's proudest refrain has remained that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens, a few good men, can change the world. That is why the easy battle lines of the post-9/11 media are so disheartening to Sorkin's worldview: they forgo a faith in men and institutions for fear.

Newsroom is trying to restore that faith in the fourth estate. Sorkin attempts to do this by setting the show two years in the past on the day of the BP Gulf Coast oil spill. At first, because of its in media res opening, we're unsure of when we are. For a newsroom, the background is shockingly devoid of televisions turned to competing networks except for one solitary monitor tuned in to John McCain. A surprising image considering McCain's considerable lack of television presence since his defeat in 2008 that is typical of electoral losers. Later, a typed narration reveals the date, April 20, 2010.

A newsroom with no flatscreens though is hardly the only conscious choice to deprive the show of verisimilitude. The episode's resolution is propelled forward by an unemployed assistant's sources and a blogger's geological hunches. In typical Sorkin fashion, the producer in charge (the villain of this scene) is an obstructive, micromanaging dimwit who cuts off his nose to spite his face. He'd rather have the boring safety of no news than the risk of news that might piss people off, the kind of gutless paper-pusher that plagues the mainstream media. As the newsroom comes alive with investigative fervor, he smugly sneers, “I'm the only one not dramatically doing anything,” and sadly, he's right because he's the most realistic character in the scene and that's the biggest disappointment.

When the revelations about the Gulf Coast oil spill and BP's culpability come fast and furious within minutes of the report hitting the wire within the show, Sorkin discards reality for the cinematic power of reclaiming legitimacy. We are not seeing the way actual newsrooms reported in the immediate aftermath; we are seeing the way we and Sorkin wished actual newsrooms reported and reacted to the tragedy. The poignancy trumps the fiction. While it's a gamble to set a critique of the media, an industry obsessed with daily business, two years in the past, it allows Sorkin the freedom to rewrite history to improve the present without having to predict the future.

A History of Drivers

A ghost-like, hypnotic unreality permeates much of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive. The film's LA is not in California but in a dream world where people are not individuals but archetypes, 5 minutes is not 5 minutes, and driving is not driving. The characters are quieter, often only speaking out of necessity for themselves and not the audience, as if words were an endangered species and not to be wasted. Time is slower but perception is more immediate. The world unfolds as a slower pace (often in slow motion) but with brighter hues and deeper shades to accentuate the frame. Several minutes pass by without significant passages of dialogue or even ambient noise. The pervasive solitude creates a sense of both patience and unease – the pace is methodical but guarantees periodic, sudden sometimes violent interruption. The existential appeal of such factors is often a highlight of European films moreso than American cinema. When Albert Brooks as a shadowy loan shark admits that he use to make action movies that “one critic called 'European'” but he thought they were “shit,” the filmmakers are acknowledging the uneasy (to some) marriage they have formed of muscle car heroics and French New Wave psychology.

From the film's first scene, one detects precise craftsmanship and visual storytelling. Opening on an intricately devised map with numerous routes and shortcuts sketched through streets and down alleys, we sense an attempt to bring order out of chaos. Gosling's first line (“There are 100,000 streets in this city”) echoes what the map and Michael Mann films have shown for over a decade – that LA is a journey rather than a destination. The city attracts outsiders and hardened criminals only because its sprawling, rootless condition allows the predators of the world to hide in plain sight. Because Gosling is driving a Chevy Impala, the most popular car in California, his boss Shannon tells him, “no one will be looking at you.” Even as the camera pans from the map to Gosling, we face his back and only see his face in the window's reflection. As if even that is too intimate, the camera quickly looks away and instead shows us his dimly lit, Spartan accommodations that he calls home.

Among many touches borrowed from Taxi Driver, the camera often moves and avoids direct emotional confrontation with the protagonist at his barest, most vulnerable moments. We see him mostly in reflections because, like a wraith, we're never sure if we're seeing the real him or just another shade. When out of the car, Refn uses long and wide shots to fill the frame and de-emphasize Driver's importance. However, when in the car, he is cast as a titan in low angle grandeur but half shrouded in the darkness of the night. Similar to Travis Bickle, he is a creature of the night that when shown in profile with alternating red and blue fields of light appears even less human and more threatening. He is simultaneously larger than life and less than life-like.

Like Jef Costello, Le Samourai, Gosling's Driver is a process more than a man. Trivialities such as entertainment, enjoyment, friends and decent lighting do not factor into his existence. As a stunt man, he casually signs his life away on a liability insurance form for the studio in a way that is not human. While others enjoy a party, he sits in the dark and pieces together a machine – another symbolic attempt to bring order to chaos. He seems most keen on adopting the persona of Hollywood star. He wears a jacket with a Scorpion on it and is never without a toothpick hanging from his lips like Sylvester Stallone in Cobra. Whether it's donning bare knuckle, leather gloves or the prosthetic face of a leading man, Driver loves pretending. He pretends to be a mechanic to his boss, he pretends to be a disinterested neighbor to the newly paroled ex-con, he pretends to be an LA Clippers fan, he pretends to be a stunt driver (“only part-time”) and he pretends to be normal to everyone. He is all of these things and he is none of them. There is a brilliant cut to a tracking shot that follows Gosling moments after the initial successful robbery where he is revealed to be a police officer, but only for a few seconds until we realize he is a thief pretending to be stunt man pretending to be a cop.

Early in the film, there is a scene with Benecio that indirectly highlights his character's ambiguity. They are both sitting on the couch with the same parallel look of child-like wonder while watching a cartoon. Gosling, continuing to emulate adolescent behavior in this scene, asks Benecio questions about good guys and bad guys in the show. He wonder if the shark in the cartoon can be trusted (“He's a shark.” “There's no good sharks?” “No.”) and Benecio answers, “I mean just look at him, does he look like a good guy to you?”

The same question could and should be asked of Driver by all of the other characters. Until this point in the film, we've only seen him as a criminal with fleeting dreams of domesticity. He does not smile nor engage in small talk. He only acts with purpose toward a designed end usually for profit. Down to the minute, he is a perfectionist that never appears out of his element or off plan. His every action is performed with the habitual rigidity of a mechanic – and a mechanic. While driving with finely-tuned mechanics, he never displays a hint of hesitation, an ounce of fear, or a glimpse of humanity. Like the shark in the cartoon, he is a predator.

But like the criminal antagonists of other notable LA crime dramas, Heat and Collateral, he is an honorable, if immoral, predator. He has principles and a code that he lives by even if we are never privy to it. Driver is like the cars that he works on (the Impala and the race car): he's just a ordinary, blank shell but one that has been modified internally to make it more powerful, more valuable and more unpredictable. He welds a balled up fist and a menacing, accusatory finger to Christina Hendricks more dangerously than his counterparts do shotguns and knives. Unlike even Tom Stall in A History of Violence, though his past was likely bloody and crime-filled, it never ventures into his present and the film's narrative (probably because he has killed everyone that would know).

After enjoying a few days and sharing a goodbye kiss with Irene amidst all the carnage, the film tries to project that he is a new man with a new lease on humanity. The final song announces over and over again that he's seemingly transformed from a monster into a “real human being” and a “real hero.” He has finally made order out of the chaos of his life. But at film's end, he's back on the road, behind the wheel, and under the glare of red and blue light, presumably on the way to another city to continue his journey as the man with no name and the man with no past. It's only fitting that when you're in the business of “driving,” “for the rest of your life, you're going to be looking over your shoulder.”

Slices of Cake: David Fincher, Auteurs and Genre Pictures

Is “genre picture” an insulting label? Is Hoop Dreams a lesser film if it's a “sports movie” or “basketball picture”? What about Casablanca as a “romance” or Die Hard as “action” or even worse The Exorcist as “horror”? Genres are useful categories for cataloging but can obscure the meaning and quality of individual examples. From science fiction to holiday, each collection comes prepackaged with a set of determinative values that prejudice audiences toward certain expectations.

While this seems natural even innocuous for purposes of clarity, it can hamper a filmmaker from experimenting or a film from finding an audience. Though both were “alien” movies and both were released in 1982, ET set box office records and John Carpenter's The Thing slipped through the cracks. Lost Boys (1987) from Joel Schumacher continues to enjoy “monster” movie cult classic status as a staple of late night cable programming but Kathryn Bigelow's more philosophical, less fantastic Near Dark from the same year has yet to truly experience a revival. After numerous failures at the “pirate caper,” a spin-off of the sword and sandal epics, such as Cuttthroat Island, Steven Spielberg's Hook, most studios were reluctant to greenlight a $100 million adventure film with no backstory other than a theme park ride. However, after the cultural smash that was Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, another wayfaring tale of the high seas hit theaters that same year, Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. Yet despite being nominated for 10 Academy Awards, starring Russell Crowe, and being based on a popular series of books by Patrick O'Brien, the film lost money because it wasn't POTC. Near Dark didn't star Kiefer Sutherland and the Coreys, Haim and Feldman. The Thing wasn't a family film about cute aliens akin to George Lucas's ewoks. The earlier success of the other films in the same genre cornered the market and shifted the audience's appetite away from other “genre pictures.”

In their television review of Primal Fear (1997), starring Ed Norton and Richard Gere, Siskel and Ebert touch on the slippery slope of genre pictures:

Ebert: This is the John Grisham genre and it's better than the John Grisham films. We know they are going to hype up the sensationalism, that they're going to have a red herring to throw us off track, that there's going to be a surprise at the end...
Siskel: Roger, this is standard stuff: “the lawyer who takes on the tough cases”
Ebert: There is a such thing as good genre stuff and bad genre stuff, and if you're a movie lover, you love genre stuff that's done well. This is done well.

I include the exchange not for a discussion of the film's merits, but for it's reasoned approach to how to assess a genre picture: if it's good, it's good regardless of the embedded cliches. Still, it's hard to avoid the Hollywood establishment's aversion to various genres especially at award time. No true science fiction, horror, or animated film has ever won the Best Picture. Silence of the Lambs is the closest example for “horror” but that label is just the kind of misleading, disingenuous gloss that is the problem.

Perhaps the assumption is that talented filmmakers, real auteurs don't traffic in genre fare. John Ford (Westerns), Alfred Hitchcock (Thrillers), and even Stanley Kubrick (war, science fiction, horror, caper) made careers exploring the limits of the genre picture. In fact, the auteur theory pioneered by Andre Bazin was crafted in response to the idea that genius could not exist or persist in formulaic films. Even, a modern master like David Fincher has tried his hand at expanding the possibilities of genres with science fiction (Alien3), procedural (Zodiac), serial killer (Seven), and B-horror (Panic Room).

Another reasonable critique could be that genre films are light – lacking of depth and substance. Fincher, on his commentary for Panic Room, addresses this very issue in what he calls “footnotes movies”:

"I don't know if this movie is specifically a footnote movie. I feel like all movies you kinda have to go in and understand this isn't the movie that will define you. People get too caught up in the legacy they are leaving. I sort of like thrillers. I like this movie because it's not really about crime or any kind of sociology. It's just a lurid thriller. It's a Friday night movie. It's not supposed to be that important. And I think a lot of people get questions when you release a movie like, 'What were you trying to say?' It's like, 'I don't know. I was trying to say two chicks got caught in a closet and three guys try to get in and they burn the place down.' I guess the footnote movie aspect is that it's not supposed to be taken that seriously. Hitchcock once said, 'I'm not making slices of life; I'm making slices of cake' and I think that it's important that-- ya know, we're not curing cancer. We're just making a movie with actors pretending to be burglars.”

Fincher simultaneously embraces the genre of thrillers but rejects putting that label or its implications under interpretive scrutiny, essentially negating the first half of his statement with the dismissal of the second half. If we are fans of thrillers or any genre and we continually find ourselves drawn to that formula, that should tell us something about either ourselves or the films, but Fincher understandably was reluctant to take on the onus of genre explication. After all, he effectively birthed and destroyed the serial killer genre in one fell swoop with 1995's Seven. While Silence of the Lambs was a noteworthy and exemplary entry, Seven was the popularizer that meta-spawned numerous copycats including Kiss the Girls, The Bone Collector, Along Came a Spider and many others. He must have become so bored with the paltry imitators that he decided to reinvigorate and redefine the genre again with 2007's Zodiac. By mixing the serial killer picture with the procedural style of Law and Order and CSI, Fincher was able to give the genre a new lease on life.

In 2011, Fincher has dipped into tried territory for himself again by making another serial killer movie with Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Is it fair to call this film a “serial killer” movie though? Or even a thriller? Anytime Fincher knowingly takes on the confines of formula, there is a chance that he, as a clever and active filmmaker, will search for empty parts of the film to play. Typically, Fincher's sandbox is the credits. In Panic Room, he pioneered the pop-up characters framed against the city's real geography that has since been used in many commercials and other films. In Seven, there is a cryptic, askew montage of John Doe's hands cutting off his fingertips and plunging into the depths of thousands of journals with off-center, stained text. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is another inspired choice – more closely resembling a Nine Inch Nails music video than a credit sequence, Fincher opts for an interpretative, ouroboros-esque animation story that brings to life the titled dragon tattoo.

Is it only in the “genre pictures” where Fincher's imagination runs wild with the credits? Fight Club is too hard to pin down under a single category and contains perhaps the most inventive opening with three minutes of Dust Brothers chaos as the camera winds, circles, and finally backs away to reveal the miniscule details of a handgun. Zodiac, on the other hand, is unusual. Other than the muted inclusion of the collapsed Oakland Bay Bridge and the Hyatt-Regency construction on the initial push in, Fincher's visual flair is mostly absent from the credits, but the title credit is telling in it's simplicity.

The text is all lowercase in a conventional font. It's an off-center double shot but it's the two people that speak to it's signifcance. Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is dropping off his son at school with a basic set of instructions that could serve as a survival guide in case he never sees him again: “Learn a lot.” The statement plays half humorously because we have already seen father and son wearing similar clothing and brushing their teeth in the same way at the same time that they could pass for dwarfed twins rather than pater familias and eldest son.

In another way though, the image resonates because of it's insight into the film and Fincher's entire ouevre. As much as anything else, Zodiac is a film about obsession and how it destroys lives and families. Graysmith's drive to find the Zodiac perpetuates his divorce from his wife and separation from the son he instructs in the image. The irony is that in his own quest to “learn a lot” Graysmith sabotages his own closest relationships. Paul Avery's addiction to finding out the killer's true identity is only matched and indeed overrun by his addictions to drugs and alcohol that claim his career, health, and eventually life. Dave Toschi manages to escape just in time to save his marriage though we see Graysmith able to pull him back in through his blind commitment to the chase.

Zodiac is hardly the only Fincher film to display these themes. In Seven, both Somerset and eventually Mills ruin their own lives in pursuit of John Doe. Even Girl with the Dragon Tattoo teaches the virtue of love and family and the perils of forgetting it. Blomkvist lost his family through a divorce caused by adultery, but the implicit acknowledgment is that the cheating is due to his ties to the newspaper and his relentless conviction to outting Wennerstrom. Similarly, Henrik Vanger proudly lists off the accomplishments of his business that include “building” Sweden through its railroads and lumber, but he neglects to make the associations between his own family's collapse and their tireless bickering over the “family business.” Lisbeth is an intriguing character, because while she has own own obsessions and addictions to battle, her current predicament is clearly not of her own choosing or doing. Rather, while the film provides no explanation as to how she became the ward of the state, one can easily parallel her with Harriet and Pernilla as gifted, but neglected daughters and due to their parent's obsessions find their own releases in religion, escape, and (psychological, financial, and geographic) freedom.

Lisbeth and Harriet also bring to bear another Fincher staple: ordinary, possibly child geniuses. Almost every character that speaks of Harriet immediately adds that she was “very bright” and soon to take over the business from Henrik himself. Lisbeth, despite the chaos of her live and depravity of some of her benefactors, is the film's best detective and manages to solve a case that stumped the local police for 40 years. To a lesser extent, Mikael is also indicative of Fincher's interest in common brilliance. Like Graysmith of Zodiac, Mikael is a journalist who engages in investigations for fun and for hire and he's adept at both. Like Toschi though, Mikael is a decent man who wants to reclaim his family or at least his relationship with his daughter. Unlike Graysmith and unlike Henrik, he has learned the most important lesson of the case and this is primarily why Lisbeth trusts him while she trusts no one else. She has done the background on him and realizes “he's clean” meaning “he is who he says he is.” It is his integrity that draws Lisbeth to him, not his genius, though she admires that as well. When she asks him to borrow $50,000, he says yes almost without hesitation. Still, though, for a woman that seems perpetually bored by her latest acquisitions whether they be partners, tattoos, piercings, or electronics, she stays interested in Mikael because of his complexity, even if his forthrightness attracted her initially. She, like him, is a savant, but while he wants a return to homeostasis, she yearns for the next challenging distraction to depress the pain.

Still though, for Fincher, there is an undeniable attraction toward these sorts of tortured artists and their method to madness. Some of the more unique scenes in his filmography involve a process of discovery, a teasing out of order amidst the chaos of uncertainty. Roger Ebert recalls a similar sensation in perhaps the most famous example of such a scene in Antonioni's Blow Up:

“Whether there was a murder isn't the point. The film is about a character mired in ennui and distaste, who is roused by his photographs into something approaching passion. As Thomas moves between his darkroom and the blowups, we recognize the bliss of an artist lost in what behaviorists call the Process; he is not thinking now about money, ambition or his own nasty personality defects, but is lost in his craft. His mind, hands and imagination work in rhythmic sync. He is happy.”

Working from the same cloth, Fincher includes variations of this trope throughout his career. To the tune of Bach's “Air on a G String,” Somerset in Seven pieces together the breadcrumbs left by John Doe in the downtown library. Through one drunken night of vegging and technological alchemy, Zuckerberg in The Social Network creates the monster that would go on to become Facebook. Mikael methodically reanimates a 1960s parade with the help of a computer program and some classical music. Graysmith and Toschi pour over the painstaking details of the Zodiac case in a diner using silverware and saltshakers as stand-ins for landmarks and corpses. He has an entire film dedicated to puzzles and mind games with 1997's The Game and one ups himself again with the psychological, nihilistic morality tale, Fight Club.

In a sense then, Girl with a Dragon Tattoo confirms Bazin's argument about auteurs, namely that even their “footnote” films in lesser “genres” display tenets of their underlying philosophy toward life and filmmaking. There are undoubtedly “serial killer” elements to Fincher's latest offering but he makes effort to minimize their deadening impact. He splits the first half of the film between the murder mystery akin to Gosford Park and Lisbeth's dark, twisted journey toward the case. As soon the film begins to drag on either account, Fincher cuts to the more interesting narrative thread for some needed vitality in the form of detective scenes mentioned above or a particularly gruesome rape scene. It is as if Fincher is somewhat bored with the source material and entertains himself by playing with convention. He turns the credits into an avant garde animation short, he teases a horror movie jump scare at the climax only to have Martin already outside in his car pulling away, and just as Lisbeth seems intent to blow him away Dirty Harry-style, the car explodes to mock such a trivial confrontation in the same way that Toschi leaves the theater in Zodiac to express his impatience with Hollywood's formula, genre conventions. While Fincher invokes Hitchcock to praise genre pictures and dismiss the necessity of making each film “high art” important to a filmmaker's legacy, Fincher himself would probably agree that even in making slices of cake it's hard to hide who we are.

The Demon-Haunted World

“How could she know whether I could see them or not? I wondered. Squinting, I had thought I'd made out a thin strip of land at the horizon on which tiny figures were pushing and shoving and duelling with swords as they did in my comic books. But maybe she was right. Maybe it had just been my imagination, a little like the midnight monsters that still, on occasion, awakened me from a deep sleep, my pyjamas drenched in sweat, my heart pounding. How can you tell when someone is only imagining? I gazed out across the grey waters until night fell and I was called to wash my hands for dinner. When he came home, my father swooped me up in his arms. I could feel the cold of the outside world against his one-day growth of beard.”

In the introduction to his 1995 best seller The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan ponders the above when as a child he told his mom that he could see people across the ocean from his bedroom window. His mother quiets his youthful exuberance with facts, but it springs Sagan into contemplating if imagination can ever fully be ruled by the realities of the world.

Taking stock of the mid 90s hoopla surrounding spurious tabloid claims of life of Mars or the Moon or elsewhere, Sagan wonders if the world, particularly the United States, had become overwhelmed by pseudoscience – if the world of rationality have bent to the whims of the fantastical. Sagan was and is perhaps right that the marketplace of ideas has become marred by inadequacies, but what of the public consciousness? Rarely are people given more license, encouraged even to imagine “midnight monsters,” ghouls and goblins galore than on Halloween and with horror films.

In a world ruled by laws, rules, and science, horror films are the chaotic melting pot for our basest carnal desires. We, like Sagan, like to downplay our violent, senseless roots best typified in Kubrick's “Origin of Man” sequence from 2001, but as Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscience blogger, recently wrote, “Although we’d always seen ourselves as rational creatures—this was our Promethean gift—it turns out that human reason is rather feeble, easily overwhelmed by ancient instincts and lazy biases. The mind is a deeply flawed machine” (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/10/is-self-knowledge-overrated/). And while we hopefully eliminated the worst of our biological origins through the our throws of civility, our collective id is always lumbering and craving sustenance.

For many, one of the only places to release with unbridled enthusiasm our primordial schadenfreude is at the movies on Halloween. Stephen King in his well known essay, “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” says as much: “It is true that the mythic 'fairy-tale' horror film intends to take away the shades of grey . . . . It urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity, irrationality and even outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we may allow our emotions a free rein . . . or no rein at all.” Like Sagan, King connects irrational imaginings with childlike wonder. It is children who are the most vulnerable to regression back to violence as a means of conflict resolution, whether as perpetrators or victims. Indeed, parents must civilize and protect the younger generation from the “cold of the outside world” that Sagan feared.

John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) is a fairy-tale – more a cautionary tale – of its own kind but at its heart it poses an intriguing question: What if the Boogey-Man were real? In a place already ripe with superstition and mythos and pseudoscience, what if the world was actually haunted by demons?

Sam Loomis is the film's hero. He is a doctor, a profession at its root that is driven by the scientific search for truth. As Sagan himself notes, “Hippocrates introduced elements of the scientific method. He urged careful and meticulous observation: 'Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. . .'' (8). But Loomis is not an ordinary doctor or an ordinary hero. He is not the strapping model, romantic interest leads that would later come to dominate the slasher genre opposite strong female survivors. He is a different archetype: the lone nut. Typically, the crazed old timer who knows the apocrypha of the killer or the killing fields is around just long enough to warn the headliners and simultaneously serve as a red herring for first time viewers before getting offed in rather gory fashion in the second or third reel.

But Loomis persists through the whole film as an apparent voice of reason. He is the only one who knows the truth about Michael Myers, and like the lone nut, he continually reminds everyone of the dire fate that awaits if they do not heed his Cassandran rants. Yet, the irony is that Loomis abandons his scientific grounding for fantastical theories. In his first scene, he nervously rides with a psychiatric nurse to the hospital where Michael has been held for the past 15 years. The nurse is apprehensive because of Loomis's ramblings about Michael's capacity for evil but Loomis is the one that succumbs to paranoia. He intentionally refers to Michael as “it,” not “he” as if characterizing a supernatural force. In a later monologue, he cautions the local sheriff to take Michael and the threat seriously because of his eyes – “the Devil's eyes” – and the darkness, the evil lurking behind them.

Loomis's embrace of folklore and superstition would ordinarily be at odds with his role are a man guided by science and rationality, but instead, it is evidence that he has been converted into this anti-faith (“atheism”) by witnessing first hand the purity of Michael's evil. If he were to be discarded as the lone nut, he would die prematurely or alternative authority figures would replace him. However, all of the other possibilities are underdeveloped or easily discarded. In fact, part of the cause (as opposed to the solution) for Michael's insane spree is the film's adults.

Continually, we see that parents are absent and babysitters or siblings are unattentive. In the film's opening scene, Judith Myers says to her boyfriend that her little brother Michael is “around here somewhere” and then she proceeds to make out and have sex with her boyfriend. Of course, we see and hear all of this through Michael's six year old perspective from outside voyeuristically looking through a window. Michael's parents only arrive after he has fatally stabbed his sister several times with a butcher's knife. Later, we see Tommy Doyle bullied at school and then walking home alone with no teachers or parents around; Michael Myers is the only adult to witness the neglect. Similarly, Annie's plan for her night of babysitting is to stick Lindsay in front of the television for hours while she has sex with her boyfriend like Michael's sister Judith. Lindsay's and Tommy's parents are both gone for the night on Halloween, unusually remiss considering Halloween is a holiday most commonly for kids to celebrate under the supervision of adults. Like Sagan and King both indicate, adults are the ones culturally and socially that are supposed to rein in the kids' delusions, but in Haddonfield, they are nowhere to be found. Even the film's other authority and adult figure, Sheriff Bracken, who casts reasonable doubt on Loomis's nightmarish tales, is no better, because as he mounts his sternest defense against the doctor midway through the film, he is unaware that his own daughter Annie has already been strangled by the very killer he can't find and doesn't believe exists.

While Loomis is Carpenter's sage, Laurie Strode is his moral compass and his scientist in waiting. She doesn't date; she's smarter than other girls and boys; she babysits responsibly; she does well in school; and she doesn't believe in superstition. She repeatedly sees Michael Myers throughout the day lurking in the shadows and at times in broad daylight, but she never subscribes to their validity. Again and again, she disregards these close encounters. Obviously, children are the ones most apt to jump to fantastic, sublime conclusions. The boys that harrass Tommy at school tease him with ghost stories of the Boogey Man coming out on Halloween. Smartly, we later see how the victims of such teasing become the instigators as Tommy does the same to Lindsay by hiding behind the curtain in the living room and whispering her name during the horror movie playing on TV.

However, while kids are obvious targets and purveyors, it is the adults that seem to thrive on perpetuating myths and tricks on each other and children and Laurie is the prime target. Twice, Annie calls Laurie only to ominously pause or pretend to be someone else hoping to elicit a scare or scream. Sheriff Bracken sneaks up on Laurie and later does the same to Loomis while he is decamped at the Myers' house. While not directed at Laurie, we even see Dr. Loomis, the supposed voice of reason, taking perverse pleasure in torturing the schoolyard bullies by whispering ominous menaces from the bushes. Moreover, because the adults are comfortable and practiced enough in the realm of youthful pranks, they do not hesitate to repeatedly express that it was “probably kids” that did a number of criminal acts around the town including robbing the hardware store, killing a dog, breaking into the Myer's house, and stealing a graveyard headstone when in actuality all of these were committed by Michael Myers. Their unreason has crippled their discerning ability to their own detriment.

In this sea of irrationality and hazing, Laurie is the objective observer. She is interested in the real and the physical, not the imaginary and the mystical. While others are quick to heighten fears and prolong agony, she shows maturity by quelling Tommy's fears about the Boogey Man. She discourages him from reading the comic books, (“Laser Man, Neutron Man, Tarantula Man”) a medium fraught with modern myth, and is the only adult telling him that the movies he's watching, the comics he's reading, and the ghost stories he's reading are make believe.

There's an obvious qualification to make though: When Tommy sees Michael Myers, who he believes to be the Boogey Man, Laurie is quick to dismiss that as make believe as well. Despite seeing the same looming “Shape” many times herself earlier in the day and during the night, she refuses to acknowledge that Tommy might actually be seeing a flesh and blood killer, which is what Michael Myers is, regardless of Loomis's disbeliefs. Even though the film flirts with the idea of the occult and the later sequels embrace this whole-heartedly, in the original film, Michael Myers is human, a possessed, depraved, inhuman, subhuman (but not superhuman), unstable, unstoppable force of nature, but a concrete individual that exists in the here and now.

By film's end though, Laurie's role has inverted. Whereas previously she is the children's sole protector, she now ventures forth into the night to confront the Boogey-Man. Tellingly, when attacked, she seeks refuge at the next door neighbor's house shouting, “Please! Help me!” only to be turned away. We see them turn on the lights and look out the window only to ignore her and mind their own business. You can imagine them suspicious and ignoring the interruption as “probably kids” playing a prank. Loomis arrives at just the right moment to empty his revolver into Michael Myers sending him careening from the second story to the ground below. Because Michael survives and escapes, Laurie, the actual voice of reason, is in shock. She cries out, “Was that the Boogey Man?” Loomis answers in the only way he knows how, “I believe it was." In the face of death and the unexplainable, she abandons her rationality, like her earlier forgotten chemistry book at school. The transformation is complete. The nonbeliever has become a believer of a world haunted by demons.

In one of the more famous reviews of Halloween by Richard T. Jameson, he argues that Carpenter is a mythological sadist by creating a world where his victims like Laurie and Loomis are unable to escape the fantastical world of superstition created by the trauma they have experienced: “Halloween toys with the possibility that 'His' mania might be catching, if only in that the experiences of this night may so traumatize the survivors that they could rehearse the mayhem forever, weird without end. This is less a serious threat or serious point than simply another angle from which to terrorize and tantalize us. John Carpenter doesn’t want this kind of cinematically invigorating evil to end; it’s intrinsic to a classical order he believes in” (http://parallax-view.org/2009/10/30/review-halloween/). Given, the self-conscious lecture in the classroom about whether or not fate is a spiritual or natural element in the world, Jameson's reading is certainly plausible. Perhaps though, Carpenter intended the film not as the first in a modern folk franchise, but as a singular trauma akin to the Boogey-Man campfire stories forced on Tommy by the bullies. After all, “it's Halloween; I guess everyone is entitled to one good scare.”

Deception: A Journey into Film Trailers and Music

A friend once told me that film was the pinnacle of art because it could combine the best of all other media: visual art, textual art, and musical art. But film scoring and composing is one of the least appreciated aspects of the medium. Despite the wealth of wonderful music created over the decades, only a handful of songs have penetrated beyond the confines of film circles into the cultural zeitgeist. Most of these examples are by the legendary John Williams with his well-known themes from Star Wars, Raiders of the Last Ark, Superman, Jaws, Harry Potter, ET and many others.

However, other music-makers like Philip Glass, Danny Elfman and the vast majority of composers are lucky if a single cue of their's registers with the audience. Even then, if it does strike a chord of memory with the viewers, they can't place it. Identification eludes them as does praise and reward for the composers. The hows and whys of this phenomenon are many, but what are the implications? Can great music be labeled as such if it is not remembered? Is memory a sign of validation or inconsequential?

Another composer often slighted for accolades is Clint Eastwood. Like John Carpenter, Eastwood in recent years has chosen to score most of his own films to minimize costs and maximize the aesthetic consistency. Much of Eastwood's music including that for Gran Torino, Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby is sparse. Echoing his visual style, Eastwood creates an aural palette that is both contemplative in mood and minimalist in dynamic. There are no sweeping melodies or whirlwind crescendos to test the audience's resolve for majesty.

Therefore, it was a bit jarring to hear the background music for the trailer to Clint Eastwood's latest film, J. Edgar. Visually, the film certainly looks like an Eastwood picture. All of the footage in the preview is washed out to avoid even a shade of bright colors as previously seen in his twin Iwo Jima films, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, and even more starkly in The Changeling and Hereafter. Yet, the music overwhelms.



The pounding base dominates to give the trailer a seedy feeling of forced importance. If the music sounds familiar, it should.



While not identical in entirety, the blaring base notes are common to both. However, Eastwood did not direct or score Inception – that was Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer respectively. The plot thickens when another teaser is added for Immortals.



Neither Eastwood nor Nolan or Zimmer had a hand in the making of Immortals. This raises an obvious question: Why is Zimmer's music in the trailers for J. Edgar and Immortals?

Studios, producers, editors and directors have been borrowing, reusing, and recycling music from other films since the advent of sound with The Jazz Singer. If one link in the final cut chain is dissatisfied, scores are abandoned and replaced by late additions. While the most famous studio excisions are footage related as with RKO burning Orton Welles's final reel of The Magnificent Ambersons or Tony Kaye dressing like Jesus Christ to object to the editing of American History X, the same pitfalls have happened with music. One of the more notorious falling outs was over Jerry Goldsmith's score for Ridley Scott's Legend being bumped for a synth, electronic rendition by Tangerine Dream. A similar complication arose over the composing of Scott's Blade Runner as well.

My first exposure to this trend was watching Halloween: 20 Years Later as a teenager. While not well-versed in the minutia of filmmaking or criticism, I was diligent and obsessive enough about the films that I enjoyed to know their inner workings. Over the course of 1996 and 1997, I had many nights of repeated viewing pleasure of Scream. The meta-, reflexive dialogue and self-conscious heroines was a much needed shot of adrenaline to a dormant genre, but I also enjoyed Marco Beltrami's score. It nicely complimented the on-screen thrills with effective, if formulaic tension in the strings and percussion. When the news trickled out that Kevin Williamson, writer of Scream, was working on a sequel/reboot of the Halloween franchise, I was ecstatic. Fast-forward to the release and I was happy with the picture, but I couldn't shake the nagging sensation that I had heard all of this before. Like the people struck by selections from Glass's “Pruit Igoe” or Clint Mansell's “Lux Aterna,” I knew I had heard the music previously but it took a while for the realization to sink in. As pointed out at Filmtracks: Modern Soundtrack Reviews, H20's original composer John Ottman, most well known for his scoring and editing of The Usual Suspects, had his score replaced in post-production by Miramax (http://www.filmtracks.com/titles/portrait_terror.html).

Another recent example of this trend was in the heralded documentary/docudrama, Man on Wire. MOW is a rendering of Philippe Petit's successful, high wire act between the both towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. As noted by film critic Godfrey Cheshire, director James Marsh's choice for the score is mostly reused sections from Michael Nyman's scores of Peter Greenaway's films and a few from Jane Campion's The Piano (http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2008/07/man-on-borrowed-piano-wire/). Though the criticism was later retracted after additional information from the director in a follow up post (http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2008/08/man-on-borrowed-piano-wire-follow-up/), I am particularly interested in Cheshire's questioning of the intellectual honesty of recycling film scores:

“Unquestionably, purloining one's score from other, more artistically serious movies is taking the easy (and sleazy) way out. Most filmmakers use pre-existing music during the editing process, then set about the task of having a composer fit the film's themes and images with their own score... And contempt for the audience's intelligence is implicit in the assumption that viewers either have no memory of past cinematic achievements or don't care when they are traduced.”

There is a degree of shamelessness to the repatriation of music and themes for other films. It smacks of a disconcerting carelessness on the film's part and an expectation of audience ignorance to such aspects. Won't many home viewers regard the use of Zimmer's Inception theme in J. Edgar along with the appearance of DiCaprio in both as an implicit sign of correlation? If they did, who could blame them? Or are these examples somehow unrelated because they are regarding music in film rather than music in film trailers?

Deception in advertising, even film advertising is old hat as well, but generally it is visual editing that carries the tinge of dishonesty. One need look no further than Moneyball to see how the film marketing shifted from week to week depending on box office receipts. Initially, it was marketed as an Apatow comedy mixed with screwball sports film like Major League only to be repackaged as a heartfelt, true story, feel good sports movie of the year akin to Remember The Titans (http://www.awfulannouncing.com/2011-articles/october/moneyball-the-feel-good-movie-of-the-year-the-oddities-of-movie-marketing.html). Who is to blame for the advertising schizophrenia? Directors? Producers? Editors? Studios? It seems the usual critical punching bags are off the hook for trailer integrity.

Most film trailers are utterly disconnected from the filmmaking process. Instead, they are assembled by independent companies and freelancers like Mark Woollen and his company, Mark Woollen and Associates. His latest notable successes for trailers include Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, The Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, and David Fincher's The Social Network (http://blogs.indiewire.com/mattdentler/archives/mark_woollen_qa/) . However, much like the trailer for J. Edgar, the initial teaser for The Social Network contains “non-diegetic” music. While the online community was abuzz at the brilliance of the Radiohead “Creep” cover by Scala and Kolacny Brothers, the film's later audience did not have the pleasure of hearing the music or even experiencing the narrative of the film's trailer. In a way, it was almost disappointing that the trailer was so layered and complexly dovetailed with “Creep” while the film itself had no such apparent connection. Can a great trailer with a fantastic mixture of interpretative yet inconclusive cuts and a wonderfully symbolic score somehow unfairly prejudice an audience's expectations for a film? Can a trailer overshadow a film when the music and stories of each don't match?

Ferris Bueller: Perceived Adulthood and the Class of 2015

This week, the Beloit College annual “Mindset List” for incoming freshmen was released. As usual, the list contains a myriad of references to pop cultural trends and icons from bygone eras and how they fit (or don't fit) into the class of 2015. The most striking to me was a passing reference or two to Ferris Bueller as a potential parent to a recent high school graduate. There's something so sacrilegious, so wrong, so culturally shocking to consider Ferris Bueller as a father figure to anyone. But what could it be?

The math and dates make sense. Ferris Bueller's Day Off was released in the summer of 1986 meaning Ferris would walk the isle to Pomp and Circumstance in the spring of 1987 and today Ferris would be 42 years old, certainly capable of having multiple children of age. Matthew Broderick who brought Ferris to life, himself, born in 1962, was 24 when the film was released and today is 50. But seeing Broderick get older was never a cause of concern or a moment to reflect. The actor aging is not the same as the character aging.

The offense arises not from chronological gripes but from thematic ones. We feel that Ferris Bueller cannot age because he represents youth, or at the least the zeitgeist conception of youth from the 1980s. Most people don't remember the details of their high school experience, but they remember what films (and music and television shows and...) best tapped into its social relevance and energy. It would feel just as violating to suggest that John Bender is now a high school principal or janitor or that Samantha Baker is a day over 16. The actors come and go freely, but the characters are ours, forever frozen in celluloid for our enjoyment and dissection.

However, what if those wounds are felt in error from romanticism, not just of our own memories of our lives but memories of memories – memories of films? Does Ferris Bueller stand for youth and fighting for your right to party? At first glance, it certainly seems to. Ferris lives a high schooler's dream life: he breaks all the rules but never gets caught; he does next to nothing but gets all the credit; and most importantly, he's popular with everyone including the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads. They all think he's a righteous dude.

But all of this notoriety with teenagers buys him no currency with adults. Every obstacle that comes Ferris's way comes for two reasons: because he lies and because he's a teenager. Moreover, all of Ferris's lies are because he's a teenager without a car, a job, independent income, a house or a degree – all the hallmarks of being “adult.” That being said, Ferris's problems can be merged into one collective issue: Ferris lies about being an adult because he's a teenager. The eighteen year old's fantasy is to become a grown up or at least be treated like one.

If this seems self-evident, it stands in direct contrast to the nostalgia of Ferris as a paragon of youth. In the film, he is able to accomplish nothing as himself and nothing alone other than to fool his well-meaning yuppie parents. He needs Cameron's help to get Sloan out of school, but even then, they must pretend to be Sloan's parents on the phone and dress up as her father to pick her up. They can only get a seat at the finest restaurant in Chicago by again placing prank phone calls posing as police officers and sausage barons. When they get to the big city, they oddly spend time at the NYSE, an adult business institution, where Ferris suggests to Sloan that they embark on another adult institution, marriage. In the film's universe, fake adults can get more accomplished than teenagers.

Yet, even as Ferris, Sloan and Cameron struggle to apparently escape their teen years through reaching for perceived maturity, they collide back with their real parents because their lives are inextricably governed by their parents. They have to “borrow” Cameron's dad's car for their adventure. Ferris runs into his dad at the restaurant and again in traffic. When trying to hurriedly get home before they arrive, he is almost hit by his mother and sister driving. As they ascend the Sears Tower, Cameron first thought at reaching the then-highest man-made point in the world was, “I think I see my dad down there.”

The lone naysayers to this trend in the film are Ferris's sister, Jeanie, and his principal, Ed Rooney. Jeanie and Mr. Rooney despise Ferris and his attempts to circumvent the normal teenage rigors of going to high school and taking classes. Jeanie's attempts to play by the rules though are not rewarded by the film. After calling the police about a crime, she is the one arrested for prank calling and taken to another, darker adult institution: jail. Rightful Teenage actions have placed her in adult entrapment. She meets Charlie Sheen, the Shakespearean fool shouting wisdom that is often not followed due to the lowly source. Sheen tells her to lighten up and live her own life. When next confronted with the intruder Rooney, she has the opportunity to turn Ferris in to either her parents or to her principal. But she interprets Sheen's advice as to stop playing it straight and instead fake adulthood. Jeanie converts to Ferris's mantra of perceived adulthood and pretends to be Ferris's mother and kicks Rooney out of the house. At the film's close, Rooney the sole person not persuaded by Ferris's antics has lost almost all markers of true adulthood: his car has been towed, his wallet now belongs to a fierce canine, his clothes are shredded, he has to ride the school bus like a child, and he may lose his job after this very visible incident of student harassment.

Much earlier in the film, though Ferris knows he has his mark in his parents, he's not satisfied at escaping school and pissing off his sister. He ups the ante by openly mocking traditional paths toward success and maturity. He sarcastically quips, “I want to go to a good college and lead a fruitful life.” Similarly after Ferris has foiled the “snooty” restaurant host, the maitre d is left to aggressively shout, “I weep for the future.” He's not the only one.

Fast Times at Mel's Diner: American Graffiti and Lost Innocence

American Graffiti opens on a still of Mel's Drive-In, the popular hangout spot for the locals. Like a framed novelty picture that would be sitting on the wall of a modern diner, the photograph is a simultaneously celebration of the era but a reminder of how unapproachable it is. Though set in 1962, the first song played with the drive-in still is an anachronism, Bill Haley's “Rock Around the Clock,” a hit from the late 1950s. The song and the image signal that though the film plays like a documentary, it more closely resembles a class reunion where distance and time away have distorted perception to where everything feels just a few years off and everyone reminisces about the good ole days that may not have been so good.

But George Lucas's ode to his high school years seems less a fond remembrance and more of an ironic commentary. The film is permeated by a sense of nostalgia tinged with melancholy. The characters mourn their lives even as they live them, as if they know that in just a few short years Vietnam will start and all of this will be gone. John Milner is the fatalistic, outlaw philosopher akin to James Dean's Jim Stark from Rebel Without A Cause. He has the fastest hot rod in town but spends all of his time visiting the junkyard and wondering if each new race could be his last until his number is up.

The town is experiencing economic, social, and moral decay. Milner complains that the strip use to be so much longer and bigger just a few short years ago. Though Modesto, California had apparently escaped the economic and social contraction that plagued Anarene, Texas in The Last Picture Show a decade earlier, it has now come to pass. The local arcade owners and the Moose Lodge are giving away their first ever scholarship to encourage kids to leave the town because they can better prepare themselves for the future elsewhere. In this town, the film insinuates that one night stands and meaningless sex are common and schoolwork is done by parents for their children. While intimidating, The Pharoahs gang is much older than the rest of the teenagers and spend their time committing petty thievery for quarters from pinball machines and bullying people that sit on their cars. And they show their small-time status further by getting caught up in the awe of Milner's drag racing narrative wondering when and if he'll ever lose. The grown ups are no different. A popular teacher in his late 20s tried to go to college but wasn't the “competitive type” and came back home, the film implies, to violate ethical codes by sleeping with his students.

Even the iconic Wolfman Jack is demystified. Through the use of diegetic radio for ambiance, the film builds Wolfman into a folk hero, a mythical figure that escaped the town to evade the law and travels the world and comes back only to deliver the occasional pirate broadcast. Everyone has a Wolfman Jack story to share that is half collaboration from other urban legends and half confabulation to inflate the storyteller's sense of self-importance. When we meet him on the outskirts of town, Lucas cleverly shrouds him in darkness as a gatekeeper guarding the secrets of music and life. He is The Wizard of Oz, Marshak from A Serious Man, The Oracle from The Matrix – he is film's semblance of inspiration and answers. We can only enter through a backdoor maze, but when we see him the illusion is dropped for reality. Like the malt shop commemorative picture of Mel's Drive In, Wolfman Jack's legend does not match his appearance. He is a middle-aged disc jockey eating popsicles too fast so they don't melt first. Seemingly unable to crush our dreams, he perpetuates the mythos of Wolfman Jack even after we've seen behind the curtain. He is another in a long line of locals who was unable to flee the small town's grasp.

The younger, recent graduates also feel a sense of pessimism about their plight. Though they try to escape, they are unable to avoid reliving the same experiences. Steve, the exiting class president, plans to fly out of town the next morning for college and break up with his girlfriend. After unsuccessfully ending the relationship, he spends his remaining hours at a freshman dance back at school getting back together with his girlfriend and delaying the trip back East. Terry the Toad, the loser of the group, itches to be cooler than he is. He borrows Steve's car for the night driving the strip and tries to adopt a new persona. He changes his nickname, puts on airs to pick up a girl, drinks more than he normally does and gets into a fight he is sure to lose. However, by night's end, he has lost the car twice, had the fight broken up by Milner, and gotten sick from alcohol poisoning. At night's end, though Debbie gives him hope that they can hang out again, Terry is left to beg Milner to let him ride with him during the race against loud-mouthed comic relief Bob Falfa played by Harrison Ford. Even Milner, despite his posturing and existential angst, reprises his role as drag strip king in another race at film's end to reinforce his inability to alter his course.

Curt, the brain, is the film's one exception. Like the others, he “wants to remember all of the good times” as well by going to the dance. He even wanders the halls of the old school and gets back together with his ex-girlfriend for about an hour. However, symbolically, he is unable to reopen his old locker by using the same combination because he has been locked out of his old life and forced to branch outward. He is given multiple avenues of change. He pursues a blonde siren in a white chevy all night. He is forced to hang out with the Pharoahs but wins them over and gets invited to join the gang. He receives the scholarship from the Moose Lodge and also plans to leave town in the morning. But he's also the one that talks to the hedonistic teacher and meets Wolfman Jack. He hears all the tales of misspent youth and wasted opportunities. He has been granted knowledge that Terry lacks, Milner appreciates, and Steve fakes, but none are able to act on other than Curt. He is the only one able to break the destructive cycle of small town life and escape the picturesque Mel's Drive-in.

American Graffiti possesses one of the saddest codas in film history but perhaps the most honest. As Curt boards the plan and flies back East for college, a title scrawl brings us up to date with the characters. Milner, in spite of his prescient wisdom and familiarity with all the fatal car wrecks, is killed by a drunk driver only two years later presumably in a drag race. Steve still lives in Modesto, California as an insurance agent repeating the path of the teacher and Wolfman Jack. Although given a glimmer of hope with Debbie, Terry does not get the comic epilogue that Bluto does in a similar situation in Animal House by marrying the blonde and getting elected to congress. Terry goes to Vietnam and is reported MIA near An Loc just three years later. Curt, like George Lucas himself, becomes a writer and moves to Canada, perhaps to avoid being drafted into Vietnam like his friends.

The film like the nostalgic still of Mel's Drive-In is an artifact of a by-gone time before Kennedy's assassination, before Vietnam, and before Watergate that can never be recreated.