body and soul
by Douglas Messerli
James Foley and Robert Redlin (screenplay,
based on the book by Jim Thompson), James Foley (director) After Dark, My
Love / 1990
The other day I accidentally stumbled upon a
1990 film that I’d never before encountered, James Foley’s sun-drenched
noir—the contradiction is essential for comprehending the film—After Dark,
My Sweet which absolutely astounded me in its cinematography, acting, and
thematic significance as if it were a lost classic.
Clearly, some critics had noticed its qualities upon release, most
notably Roger Ebert who after watching the film four times, claimed “it only
deepens with the retelling.”
To
date, I have watched it only once, although I am certain I will want to revisit
it again in a few more weeks or months, but just thinking about it over the
past couple of days I realize how it keeps opening its narrative up to deeper
and deeper meanings.
Given the context in which I was reading it, as a work of possible
interest to the LGBTQ community and those who follow it, it certainly didn’t
seem to offer much: the possible queer figure, a doctor, Doc Goldman (George
Dickerson) who not only immediately diagnoses the problem with our hero, Kevin
“Kid” Collins, better known as “Collie,” (Jason Patric) and offers to take him “under his wing,” so to speak, is
quite apparently far more interested in getting into his handsome patient’s pants than into his
head. Although the Doc does manage to provide the “kid” with a comfortable bed and an
invitation to stay on for a year or so, he doesn’t get very far, and even
before he might actually betray his desires for “Collie’s” body, he is killed
off just for bollixing up our hero’s relationship with the woman who has
captured Collins’ attention and heart, Fay Anderson (Rachel Ward). We don’t
even get to know the queer character well enough to discern what’s behind his
attraction to Collie accept for the obvious pulls of loneliness and lust.
Everyone in this desert world into which Collie has literally stumbled
seems to be lonely, while seemingly doing everything possible to make sure they
stay that way. A less hospitable town outside of Black Rock—the hostile
community of John Sturges’ 1955 film Bad Day at Black Rock—is hard to
imagine. Not that the ex-boxer who has just escaped from an insane asylum makes
it easy to immediately start up a breezy conversation. As Ebert correctly
observed:
“There is something wrong with Collie, but
it's hard to put your finger on it. He tells the bartender he pours a good
glass of beer, and the bartender feels like throwing him out of the bar. He
looks like a bum, clutching that parcel wrapped in brown paper, but he's young
and handsome and will tell you that he's an ex-serviceman with a year and a
half of community college. He walks unsteadily out of the blinding sunlight of
the desert and into a run-down suburb of Palm Springs, where his destiny is
sitting in the same bar, smoking a cigarette.”
But we also know that if a similar figure such as Collie, Mickey—played
by Keith Carradine in a film to which Foley’s movie owes a great deal, Alan
Rudolph’s 1984 Choose Me—might have chosen this spot to end up his
insane asylum-escape, he would probably have not survived. It may be a
necessary thing that Collie slugs nearly every male who crosses his path into a
concussion or immediate death. Surely the surly bartender deserved it. This is
not an easy place to visit.
But then no one in such noir films is ever very friendly. And
certainly one never quite knows what motivates their eccentric and often
inexplicable behaviors in this genre. Why does the alcoholic sexy ex-housewife
whose husband has—one senses her relief in the fact—just died, demean the boy
the moment she meets him, taunting him for his lack of mental abilities, and a
few moments later encourage him to get into her car and spend a few weeks at
her house in a backyard trailer hidden among her dried-up date palm field.
Evidently her actions also stem from loneliness and lust, and since Collie is
obviously heterosexual, the situation immediately intrigues him far more than
his later amiable relationship with the Doc.
In
fact, although the entire narrative of this film is told from Collie’s
perspective, we don’t truly know that much about him either. What we do know is
that while almost losing a boxing match, Collins suddenly became so enraged
that he beat the other fighter to death, the act which caused him to be sent
off to the asylum from which, as a model prisoner, he easily released himself.
Given that almost all his bodily contact has
evidently been only with men, both before and during the film’s narrative, provides
us with an insight about Faye’s deadly allure. Like everyone in this
film—except perhaps for its true villain “Uncle Bud” (Bruce Dern)—he also is
consumed by lust and loneliness. But far important, she has taunted him about
having no brain, or, to look at it in another way, no soul. And as one of the
most soulful characters ever put to screen—when was the last time you saw a man
cry himself to sleep in a US movie?—Collie is out to prove her wrong. If
everyone, including the film’s passive voyeuristic audience, sees Collie as a
body, he is out to demonstrate that he is also a being with a soul who cares
about the others around him, and through his intellect might even be able to
save them from their various manifestations of self-destruction.
To
be fair, both Faye and Doc attempt as long as they can to keep away from
Collie’s body and keep him away from their own, even sending him away with the
hope that the act might more easily drawn him in and back. Yet both of his
would-be lovers also ultimately foil their relationship to the “Kid,” which
frustrates and angers the man as much as each other. As long as he remains
primarily a “body” to be desired he is himself
trapped in a queer world, with only true bodily contact, strangely enough,
taking the form of the hand to male flesh, fist to head, chest, or belly. And
when the story finally boils up, releasing him to make gentle contact with
female flesh, the director presents it as an almost violent affair centering on
Collie’s rather than Faye’s nude physique. In short, the Kid becomes a body, in
the end, even for us.
For Faye’s friend “Uncle Bud” the ex-boxer also serves as a much needed
body, but in this case not one to fulfill his sexual desires but rather his
lust for money. For a long while, evidently, this seedy and shady ex-cop has
been plotting to get rich quick by kidnapping the child of a wealthy family
living near this Palm Springs suburb. And Collie is the perfect somebody to
carry off the deed—a man unknown to the community, of great physical strength,
and with good enough looks that he can get away by acting as the family
chauffeur to pick up the physically ill boy from his childhood golf lessons.
But even in this rather pedestrian act, another child gets in the way, a
doubling match to Doc and Faye’s description, who instead of being sickly as is
the assigned child, Jack (Corey Carrier), is a fast-talking young bully who
escapes his golf playground escapades by jumping into Collie’s car and asking
him to take him around the block in order to temporary escape the immediate
repercussions of his acts. There is something about Collie that attracts
seeming opposites, males, both young and old, who desire his company as equally
as the weaker, confused more feminine figures of this film.
The seeming mistake has a devastating effect on the kidnapping plot, and
Collie must now return the other boy and pick up Jack, whose real chauffeur
arrives a few moments after, forcing Collie to knock out yet another contender,
one who can now identify him and lead the police to “Uncle Bud” and Faye.
Another problem arises because of Collie’s stereotyped presumptions
about both women and children, figures which he simply presumes his must save
and protect. If his careful attentions to a frail boy who, previously unknown
to them is suffering from diabetes indeed reveals Collie’s depth of caring and
through his recognition that the boy immediately needs insulin, proof of his
having a perceptive mind, he has nonetheless, highly misjudged Faye. So used to
the male queer world he has previously inhabited, he has not fully been able to
imagine what might lie behind a woman’s exterior. Not only is she not “weak,”
but, so he discerns, possibly cold-hearted enough to perhaps leave the boy in
the wilds to die or be discovered by others. He washes up the boy and returns
him to bed.
Moreover, we must ask what is her
relationship to the despicable “Uncle Bud” who most certainly is nobody’s uncle
or “buddy”? How has Faye come to know him, and what is her part in his plot,
which, as Collie cleverly perceives, involves his being sacrificed not only to
dissociate Faye and Bud from his actions, but to increase their own percentages
of the ransom paid? And finally, we wonder what is Bud’s connection to the
bartender of the first scene, Bert, who we later observe killing Bud at the
airport pickup of the cash, a secondary player obviously aware the kidnapping
plot?
As
in so many noirs, connecting all the various dots of plot and human
relationships is never an easy or even plausible goal. Things happen that
cannot be explained simply because things in life, without any logic to them,
often make no sense. When it comes to evil acts, there are seldom simple
explanations, not even loneliness or lust.
At
least we might imagine that since “Uncle Bud” has been cooking up this plot for
a long a while, he might have purposed his schemes to Bert at an earlier point.
She reacts just as he hoped, shooting him dead to protect the boy while
allowing herself the alibi that she was kidnapped by Collie and led unknowingly
into their plot by Bud. She has become the savior instead of the villain she
certainly has thought herself to be and Collie has been forced to imagine she
might have been.
But for him the sacrifice was his proof that he not just a man possessed
of a body but a being who harbored a powerful soul and an ability to think. As
he tells her, in his last words, “You did the right thing.” So, in a strange
way, this is a sunny noir, a noir with a sort of happy ending.
But
then, we now discover we have yet another unexplained dilemma. If Collie is now
dead, who has been telling us his story; perhaps the same man drowned in the
swimming pool at the end of Sunset Boulevard.
Los Angeles, June 6, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (June 2021).
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