There’s
a moment in 'Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan' where
the captain of the ship gives his son a sextant and laments the fact that such
old skills of navigation are entirely disappearing due to reliance on modern
techniques. It’s a theme that isn’t really developed in any way, nor does is
get much emphasis, besides this one moment but still did it make quite an
impression on me. Because I was quite struck by the seeming coincidence that
this reference to navigation would pop up in precisely this type of film, since
as I mentioned briefly here, I have been planning a
piece on exploitation cinema in general for quite some time now, in which I was
to take up the exact same navigation metaphor to illustrate one of my main
concerns and which had to do with the liberation watching exploitation cinema
can lead to, a certain freedom that centers on breaking through the barriers of
prejudice and expectation. I had the intention of developing this argument by
comparing two modes of navigation: one that relies mostly on instinct and inner
feeling with certain instruments merely assisting – against the modern
dependence on computers which more or less makes any gut feeling obsolete. Which
of course, is just another way of describing the difference between relying on
Ego or Soul. Now some of you who have been reading some of my earlier entries
on this blog may at this point throw their hands into the air out of
desperation at yet another mention of these concepts, which leaves them with
the distinct feeling I’m trying to read them into everything I discuss here. Be
that as it may, the fact this whole navigation metaphor was more or less thrown
into my lap in such a movie is simply too good an opportunity to pass up and is
yet another example of the interconnectedness of all things that would be clear
to anyone if they only would want to see it. Which brings us to the difference
between looking and seeing.
See, the
thing is, I can't shake the feeling most people can't truly see the movies they
are looking at, because they can't look behind the expectation created by the
reputation of the movie they're seeing. Take 'Citizen Kane' for instance: it
would be almost impossible to look at that movie now without being aware of its
cemented reputation as being one of the most celebrated pictures ever made and
my central idea is that people should really try to ignore this kind of
information when viewing it because failing to do so would influence their
experience too much. Generally speaking, those who like it often seem to like
it only because it is expected from them, which would mean they more or less
already made up their mind before seeing even a single frame of the movie
itself. On the other hand, there will be a large group of people who will
criticize the movie much too harshly because they feel it doesn't live up to
its reputation and feel the need to rebel against its status – in which case
the expectations influence the experience too. In psychological terms, these
two opposite positions could be described as Conformists vs. Rebels, which are
opposites on one level, but also quite similar in that both groups relate
themselves directly to the accepted norm. So what they both share, is that it
isn't really the movie itself they are judging, but its reputation. What I am
proposing here is trying to get beyond that somehow, to truly perceive the film
itself instead of its comforting surface and/or reputation. I want us to be
guided not by generally accepted notions like 'a good script', 'great
cinematography', or 'originality', as all these concepts tend to enslave people
and actually prevent them from truly experiencing these movies in every sense
of the word. Let our gut feeling be again much more important than that which
you can understand intellectually. This may be impossible to accomplish
completely, as cultural conditioning can't be obliterated totally (nor should it), but what is
definitely possible is trying to see the world with fresh eyes, as if you see
everything for the first time. In other words, to reclaim our innate innocence
as much as possible, which most have lost contact with since childhood. This is
of course quite similar to what Stan Brakhage mostly wanted to accomplish with
his movies:
“Imagine
an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by
compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything
but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of
perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby
unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye?
How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive
with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of
movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the
'beginning was the word.”
One of
the many ways by which something like this return to innocence can be achieved
is by watching (ironically, since most of them are anything but innocent)
exploitation or trash films, which also returns us to the old dichotomy between
Ego and Soul and to my navigation metaphor. This may sound downright weird to
some, as exploitation films are usually thought to bring out a certain
jadedness in the people who watch too much of it, as they’ve been assaulted
with so much strong material their extreme nature in itself becomes ‘normal’. While
a certain tolerance will inevitably arise, this can already somewhat be remedied
by seeing a wide variety of films. Keeping an innocent attitude to the world
around us is anything but simple, it may in fact be the hardest thing to
achieve, and I’m really not suggesting it can be accomplished just by watching
a couple of cheaply-made porn or horror movies; I am sure though it can be of invaluable
assistance in trying to make such a shift in perception possible. Because what
these exploitation films represent in a larger context is an amazing
opportunity to move beyond established conventions and ideas to sail into a
perhaps terrifying but also highly exciting uncharted waters. When watching
mostly mainstream films (whether of the Hollywood variety or art cinema), it is
virtually impossible to ignore all the reputations and prejudice because so
much has already been written about them they are mostly set in stone. They
come with so much baggage that people tend to crumble under its very weight.
This is where exploitation differs: as the majority of these films has mostly
been ignored, it is possible to see them with fresh eyes and to train your
capacity of seeing the world as unprejudiced and intellectually innocent as
possible. They throw you into the pit, forcing you to fence for yourself
without the safety net the well-known films provide, a net that will almost
automatically prohibit any true innocence. Or in others words, watching
exploitation films is not unlike navigating through uncharted waters with the
help of nothing but your own build-in instruments, forcing the captain to train
and trust in his instinct, intuition and gut feeling. This may be much more
work than just relying on computers that do all the work for you, but that's
also the point. Because when you're only used to navigate with the help of
computers, you don't really know how to navigate at all and problems will
inevitably arise the moment you are cut off from their help.
Say there's
an electrical defect because of a storm and you are forced to sail without any
computer help at all; if you're not experienced in this, you are liable to
panic and run into trouble. Which is more or less what mostly happens now with
people who watch exploitation movies and are untrained in truly trusting their
instinct, always relying too much on Ego and that which is generally accepted:
the film they are watching doesn’t conform to generally accepted notions and as
the computers or instruments they have become so dependent on go blank, it
leaves them utterly helpless. All the assumptions and ideas they have always
trusted in so blindly and never really put to the test, are suddenly
unavailable to them, which means they have to start thinking on their feet, but
since they have never really trained themselves in this, they are unable to
meet the challenges exploitation provide. So, yanked out of the comfortable
aesthetic categories they are so used to, they get scared at the prospect of
all that true freedom suddenly looming up before them, and they invent new
categories to get some grip on the situation. As a result, a ridiculous
category like 'this is so bad it's good' is invented which is really just
another prison wall people build around them to keep all that annoying freedom
out. If people could only recognize the incredible opportunities for
self-development and inner growth that are hidden in these exploitation movies
and how they can be used to learn to navigate using only your own strength. We
should embrace these films not only for their obvious wild subject matter,
which already would do much to liberate ourselves from the unnecessary taming
of Western society. But exploitation can also help us to learn how to find our
own way in the jungle again without the comfort of a guide or map that shows us
the way. It's a rough and rocky road to be sure, with lots of surprises and
failures along the way, but one that can truly transform the way you experience
the world. To use the words of anthropologist Bradford Keeney:
“The
problem began when someone said that words and meanings must explain,
domesticate, and cover up wild experience. Within this hegemony of words, we
demystified whatever was mysterious and walked away from the wild in order to
become semantically tamed. We sacrificed our link-to-the-universe-heart for a
delusional body-less-head-trip that has imprisoned us far too long. Consider a
re-entry into the wild.
To see
how difficult it is to feel ourselves through the wild instead of just think
our way through it based on surface concepts, let's look at the 'Nightmare
on Elm Street' series, as it illustrates my point. Freddy Krueger became more
grotesque and invincible with each entry, which seems to have been a huge
source of irritation for most viewers, as most apparently see his increasing
cartoon-like nature as the weakest aspect of the later parts. Without opening
that particular can of worms, what should be clear is that by the time we get
to 'Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare' (1991), the original Freddy had changed
considerably from his original incarnation. The beauty of this particular film
however, is that it recognizes this and amplifies it even more: treating every
murder as a performance art piece, it sends Freddy's performative nature
through the roof. People may not like the fact he more or less ceased to be
scary and had become something of a stand-up comedian, but this was the legacy
'The Final Nightmare' had to grapple with somehow and its fascinating logic is
not to try to conceal this but emphasize it even more. Yet at the same time,
even as it makes him even more unreal and mythic, it also proceeds to cut
Freddy down to size at the ending of the film. It does this by way of
psycho-analysis, and the fact this was the very first time it entered into the
franchise is almost unfathomable, as the whole series was based on a
psychological principle. Because what was Freddy but the dreams and unconscious
fear of the people he killed? He was the manifestation of all that was hidden
in the unconscious, which is to say he was very little more than a neurosis and
every neurosis can be cured by bringing it over to the conscious mind. So
there's a poetic logic when at the end of 'The Final Nightmare' the girl kills
Freddy not by burning or exploding him, as usually happened, but simply by the
virtues of psycho-analysis and transforming him from mythic murderer to just an
ordinary man with a questionable past. There had been references to this past
in several of the earlier films of course, but none of them used the methodical
approach of 'The Final Nightmare', which makes it probably the first film since
the original that started it all to proceed along the lines dictated by the
franchise itself; it first openly embraces the legacy it got handed over, only
to take it out of dreamland by returning Freddy to his roots as a human being.
Yet
despite this undeniable logic that makes total sense when viewed through the
lens of the series, it is generally considered a terrible film. This would not
be the fate of the next entry, 'New Nightmare' (1994), a film that’s often
hailed as a return to form for the franchise since it was the first since the
original that creator Wes Craven was involved in. Echoing the concerns of so
many fans that Freddy had veered too much away from his scariness, Craven set
out to make him more dark again, which must have resonated with all those that agreed
with this assessment. Yet, when looking at the film, one wonders how this has actually
been accomplished, as the concept of making Freddy scary again seems to have
stranded in the wardrobe and make-up department: besides some new clothes and a
facelift there's little to distinguish this new Freddy from the old one. As if
to hide this deceit somewhat, the film has been injected with the highly
‘original’ idea (something that must also speak to many) that Freddy has
somehow crossed over into the 'real' world with all the actors playing
themselves. How this is possible is explained by Craven himself in a sequence
that I still don't understand a single word of, even though I've seen the film
twice now – I must lack the requisite intelligence to understand this complex
idea. But besides this, one wonders how all this make-over has changed the
dynamics of the film itself, because to my eyes it hasn't changed even a little
bit: 'New Nightmare' is just another stale entry into a long franchise, only
this time infused with a highly undeveloped 'Exorcist'-type of family melodrama
and some desperate meta-concept put on top of it in a desperate attempt to make
it look original. It's really just
old wine in new bottles, which wouldn't be a problem if it were still good wine
(or nice new bottles) and if it didn't try to conceal this fact by masquerading
as something else entirely. Yet this film has constantly been praised over its
arguable much better predecessor for reasons that seems to point directly to
nothing but the surface: 'The Final Nightmare' is nothing more than it proposes
to be, just another entry in the series, but with a highly intelligent script
that’s sensitive to the tone of the others films, while 'New Nightmare' likes
us to think it has an intelligent script which is in truth nothing more than a
smokescreen that tries to disguise the fact it's just another entry in the
series. Is it all just coincidence then that one has a much higher profile and
surface 'originality' while the other is routinely thought of as nothing but
the 6th entry of an already too long series? I think not. But as I
have been trying to explain, scratching away the surface to really see what's
underneath it is exactly what's so difficult for most people as the prejudice
of expectations has already decided for them – hell, most people probably had
already decided upon their verdict the moment Craven agreed with their
complaints about the loss of scariness of its main character!
The
first thing to do now, I suppose, is come clean and confess I disliked 'Friday
the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan’ very much when I saw it
first almost four years ago. It's hard to determine what exactly has made the
difference, as there would be many contributing factors anyway, although I was
likely to be still a victim of prejudice myself back then. One of the things
that certainly made a crucial difference was the beautiful looking new blu-ray
this time, as I now had an aesthetic reaction to the film which had been
entirely absent the first time; things like that can really make all the
difference, especially if you are walking that thin line of direct experience
and intuition instead of mere reliance on accepted notions and ideas. When you
are learning to make this leap, it's vitally important to determine whether a
certain film 'speaks' to you or not and I knew ‘Jason Takes Manhattan’ was
speaking to me this time when I saw the scene right before they take off with
the boat. It's hard to put into words really, as we are talking feelings here
instead of notions like 'quality' or 'originality' which can be described more
easily, but I felt something happening within me at that moment. There was
something about the cinematography that swept me off my feet, which may surprise
some as beautiful cinematography is usually reserved for Terrence Malick
pictures and not something that's called 'Friday the 13th, Part
VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan'. But the combination of the sad and rainy
surroundings – all gray, with here and there an isolated spot of color was
breathtaking to me at that moment and made me instinctively realize this movie
knew what it was doing. Something inside was instantly awakened, and a feeling
of aliveness and excitement overpowered me, adrenaline perhaps even. I truly
feel moments like these have been too much ignored in our society and we should
try and learn how to honor them, because they can teach us so much more than
those homogenized notions we’ve been taught in school. All too often I come
across people who seem to regard movies as something of a checklist: good
script – check; great soundtrack – check; impressive acting – check; result: a
great film. But like human beings, every film is much more than just the sum of
its parts as the individual parts really don’t tell you all that much – it’s all
about how they interact. Clinging to these generally accepted ideas is of
course much safer than truly jumping inside a experience and let yourself be
guided by those inexplicable little moments that perhaps don’t even mean all
that much in the greater scheme of things, but do speak forcefully to you. And because this particular moment spoke
to me, I realized instantly it was much more than just another entry in a long
and predictable franchise and I had been horribly wrong those four years ago by
falling into the familiar trap of prejudice.
As is to
be expected, the 'Friday' franchise progressed along similar paths as the
'Nightmare' films, as it wrestled with the conundrum of how to keep things
fresh – with varying degrees of success: the first four entries more or less
settled comfortably into the same pattern and are all the better for it – while
I can't place any of them at the very top of their game, they are definitely
right behind that and are all lovable slasher movies. The fifth one is the
first to break with the pattern, with obvious disastrous results only to be
invigorated by the incredibly energetic sixth part, with its reflexivity and
pop-culture references. Intriguingly, the original plans for the 7th
part was supposed have Freddy and Jason in the same film, an idea that only
materialized years later, and in its place they desperately tried to take the
franchise into new territory to mix it with 'Carrie', which on paper perhaps
could've worked but which probably should have stayed on paper. As this rather
hapless seventh part made painfully clear, there's only so many ways to have a
masked killer named Jason stalk teenagers through a forest and as a result the
formula had gone stale. Something much more was needed to breathe new life into
the series than just a new gimmick: it needed somehow to both keep the familiar
elements but also reconfigure them at the same time, which is what 'Jason Takes
Manhattan' does so admirably. For his contribution writer/director Rob Hedden
had the incredible foresight to take Jason out of his true surroundings for the
first time, ostensibly creating yet another variation on the same theme. But
its change of scenery really brought a new dimension to the franchise, making
this arguably the best part of the entire series along with the sixth part.
It's interesting to see that 'Jason Takes Manhattan' came to a similar solution
as 'Final Nightmare', by opening up the familiar ingredients.
The
Jason that Takes Manhattan is explicitly presented as the stuff of film legend,
as if the by now well-known film character somehow has become alive and has
managed to break through the screen into the 'real world'. It's more or less
the same as Lamberto Bava's 'Demons', where the demons literally tear through
the screen to invade the movie theater of the film itself. As a result, Jason
is made both more AND less real: he is even more superhuman than normal, while
also becoming more human. As Jason has gotten progressively more mythical and
stronger with each film, the film manages to acknowledge it and undermine it at
the same time by reminding us he is in fact little more than a drowned little
boy that has come to life to revenge his death and that of his mother, which is
accomplished by the scattered references to the little boy that Jason started
out as, by having the female protagonist having nightmares about him. But even
as it constantly reminds us of the little boy in Jason, the use of his hockey
mask is crucial to his role as killer, as it has become his most defining aspect
(even if it only appeared in the third part for the first time). There are
three major references to the mask: in the beginning of the film he takes the
mask away from the guy he just killed and who scared his girlfriend with the
Jason myth, thus becoming 'Jason' again, the man of myth. When he arrives in
New York, the film has Jason looking confused at an advertisement for a hockey
game, clearly demystifying him by reminding us of the pedestrian origins of his
famous 'face'. And at the end, when Jason is 'destroyed', we see the mask
limply floating in the water, which completes the process of inflating the legend.
Which is to say, the film treats Jason as both the mythical film legend as it
ties him again to his human roots, something that most of the previous films
had lost contact with entirely.
This
combination of reality and illusion make strange bedfellows indeed, as one may
very well wonder how on earth a yacht could reach a place called Camp Crystal Lake!
Some of the other parts already briefly flirted with outside influences, like
in the sixth when the colored girls says she knows so much about something
'because she's seen it on TV', but generally all these films more or less took
place in their own vacuum – even though the clothes were generally a good
indication of the times they were set in, they did manage to keep most of it
out of the door, probably because they are all set in the woods which eighties
civilization hadn't entirely seeped into. But now, at the very end of the
decade, it came back with a vengeance and in some way the entire film is not so
much a battle between Jason and his victims, but more a clash between his
timeless woods environment and the extremely loud and brash city life of the
late eighties. Ironically, this shift into the real world makes 'Jason Takes
Manhattan’ less realistic than most of its predecessors as it is a highly
stylized film which also reinforces the notion all of it could be seen as a
clash between the horrors of real city life and the film horror of Jason. Take
the scenes in the beginning at the dock for instance, those that touched me so
deeply: there's some subtle but definitely unreal quality about them, as the
careful manipulation of color within a colorless landscape recalls Antonioni's
'Red Desert' more than anything in the 'Friday' series. There's also a
remarkable scene in the fog which is so overtly a studio set as to become so
highly jarring, that, to me, it very much felt like something straight out of
Hitchcock around 'Marnie'. It's like the movie is scratching at its own edges,
with reality trying to get in or fantasy trying to get out – take your pick.
This idea is strengthened when we get to New York itself and Jason keeps
stalking his two victims with most people doing nothing and Jason doing nothing
to them. While this could easily be read as a comment on general apathy of city
life (which it is on some level), it also raises the interesting idea these two
main characters are almost escaped from a nearby movie set, with some extras
filling out the space. Or perhaps one could see the film as one of those
'Godzilla vs...' films, with two creatures from different franchises battling
only each other and relegating the rest of humanity to mere spectators. Because
how could we otherwise make sense of the fact Jason doesn't take anyone on
besides those that he has been following the rest of the film? He should have a
field day in the city, feeling like a kid in a candy story with possible
victims wherever he chooses to look. But of course, this is to be expected as
even the title 'Jason Takes Manhattan' points to this. It's not 'Jason Goes to
Manhattan', like 'Ernest Goes to Camp', no – he actually 'takes' it on,
obviously setting Jason and Manhattan next to each other as two similar evils.
By
taking it out of the dark forest into the bright lights of the city, Jason
Voorhees is no longer just a nightmare in some local forest, but it has the
nightmare spread out through the world. Only as the film makes clear in the
beginning, modernized city life has become so spiritually dead, that being
hacked to pieces under a tree would be almost preferable. Usually the
alternative to the dreary and dangerous city life is to move to nature
again, but here's the trick of course:
that's not safe either as there's some insane masked guy roaming the. As Richard
Louv, author of 'Last Child in the Woods' puts it:
“Our
kids are actually doing what we tell them to do when they sit in front of the
TV all day or in front of that computer game all day. Society is telling kids
unconsciously that nature's in the past – it really doesn't count anymore –
that the future's in electronics, and besides, the boogeyman is in the woods.”
The
general atmosphere the film implies at the beginning then, is one of total
despair; some hell on earth with all the horrible dangers of the big city but
also no recourse to the usually regenerating wilds of our earth. That this
makes the film a direct confrontation between two huge evils gets a comic if
poignant expression when Jason, in pursuit of his victims, trashes the radio of
some street punks, who immediately proceed by drawing their knives. Here are
two evils eye in eye: a celluloid monster and the realities of daily life. The
monsters comes from out of the dark of the woods (with darkness usually
connoting danger) into the bright lights of the city (with light traditionally
associated with safety), but this metaphorical trajectory from the darkness to
light is thrown out of whack by making the light just as dangerous as the dark.
The effect that's created by this is not unlike that of Andrzej Wajda's 'Kanal'
(1957), in which people are crawling in a dark tunnel the whole movie, trying
to get to the supposedly comforting light, only to find at its very end the
light doesn't hold any more promise than the darkness they came from. A similar
tone of despair infuses 'Jason Takes Manhattan', a film that begins in the
oppressive darkness of the familiar Camp Crystal forests, gets literally more
colorful along the way, starting on the ship and almost explodes with colors
and sensations when they arrive in New York – only to find really nothing has
changed and people are still stalked at every corner. This is also why the gray
colors of the dock before boarding the ship spoke to me so forcefully probably,
as the lack of color pervades the whole movie: as darkness and color ultimately
cancel each other out they leave nothing but gray dullness. These people have
nowhere to turn, finding despair wherever they look and are hopelessly drifting
between darkness and light – just as the ship that figures so prominently in
the middle half of the film.
It is a
movie filled with nasty characters, a world where people are only using – drugs
or each other. It immediately begins inside the car, where Rennie is presented
with a pen which supposedly belonged to Stephen King. It could have been a nice
gesture, were it not for the fact there's the unmistakable subtext of lesbian
lust and the feeling of pushing and manipulation from the side of the teacher.
And she's probably her best choice, as her guardian McColloch (played by
Dynasty's Andrew Laird no less!) is even nastier and self-serving, trying to
impose his will on everybody every chance he gets. The boy Sean too, is plagued
by a father trying to make his choices for him. McColloch is at one point
seduced by one of his students who secretly films all of it in order to
blackmail him later on. The protagonists have barely arrived in New York, only
to have our heroine be kidnapped, injected with heroin and raped. The whole
atmosphere is one of oppressiveness and fraught with dangers, like 'Adventures
in Babysitting' without the sugarcoating, and also a masked maniac thrown in
for good measure. It creates a world of predator and prey amongst which our
pure hero and heroine are almost hopelessly lost. There's a lovely moment of
peace and quiet, when they have found each other again in New York and they
have a tender moment in which they kiss, only to have Jason barging in on them
by crashing through the garbage. Speaking of garbage, it's really quite fitting
to have Jason killed by it, as for the first time he isn't hanged, gauged,
burned or chained to the bottom of a lake, but drowns – in toxic waste. It's by
drowning of course he became Jason the killer in the first place, so the film
comes full circle now as indeed we briefly see Jason as a little boy again. But
with the strong cleansing connotations of water, the ending also strongly
implies Jason is not only saved from his eternal thirst for vengeance, but in
this way is also saved from society as a whole. Which is to say he should have
stayed drowned all those years ago, because living in a nasty world like this
is probably even more horrible than what he did to all those unsuspecting
youth. In the end our hero and heroine may have been freed from the dangers of
Jason, but the even bigger dangers of Manhattan city life will not go away so
easily. The light isn't as comforting as it used to be, so they may even prefer
the darkness of the woods after all.
Friday the 13th: The Complete Collection [Blu-ray]
Friday the 13th: The Complete Collection [Blu-ray]
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