17. Wolfen (Michael Wadleigh, 1981)

“In his remarkable novel ‘Ishmael’, Daniel Quinn makes the distinction between ‘Leavers’ and ‘Takers’. The Takers are the people often referred to as ‘civilized’, who formed a culture out of an agricultural revolution that began about ten-thousand years ago in the Near East. The Leavers are the people of all other cultures, referred to by the Takers as ‘primitive’. The Leavers and Takers have very different stories. Each of these stories contains a core worldview that forms the basis of their respective cultures. As Quinn’s character Ishmael puts it: “The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man. The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world.” These premises make all the difference, defining whether people live in balance or imbalance with nature.

Currently, here on Earth, it is the era of the Takers, and their habitat is the entire planet. The Leavers still exist here and there, but their humble voices have been nearly silenced by the onset of the industrial age. The Takers – and now almost everyone is one – have taken almost everything. They have steadily increased their dominance, not because their story is better or more adaptive than that of the Leavers, but because it has been backed up by superior firepower. That’s the stick behind the Taker’s success. The carrot, now sustained by a dizzying amount of technological innovation, is the seductive illusion that industrial civilization can keep growing forever, and that population and consumption on Earth have no limits.”

This passage, taken from Bill Pfeiffer’s book ‘Wild Earth, Wild Soul’ makes clear just about everything that’s underlying the remarkable ‘Wolfen’, a reimagining of the old Takers vs. Leavers story, cleverly disguised as a werewolf picture. Or is ‘Wolfen’ really about lycanthropy? There has been some discussion about that, and although it definitely shares several traits with the werewolf genre, strictly speaking it isn’t one at all. The transformation scene so crucial to most pictures of its kind is conspicuously absent and is replaced instead with a sequence that seems consciously designed to poke fun at the very concept of a man transforming into a werewolf. But if not werewolves, what are we dealing with then as it should be clear the Wolfen referred to in the title are more than ordinary wolves? I suppose it all boils down to how one defines the werewolf and if it is restricted to the transformation proper, it wouldn’t qualify. However, if we take a broader view of the ideas underlying the werewolf myth, things change somewhat (forgive the pun): because what all werewolves point to is what film critic Robin Wood has termed ‘The Return of the Repressed’. Wood saw that as central to all horror pictures, but it most certainly directly applies to werewolves, as the myth clearly points to the irrational fear modern Western society has of the wild and animalistic emotions that lay buried in every human being. Most of us seem to want to forget it, but every man or woman is still an animal, even though a highly developed one. We’ve done everything we can to tame these wild emotions, because for some inexplicable reason these wild feelings remind us of the animal within each of us, which drives us wild with fear (again, forgive the pun). Consequently, we have come to believe that wild and civilized cannot coexist. Or to say it differently: we have lost contact not only with the wild nature within each of us, but also with Nature all around us.

Which brings us to the story of Takers vs. the Leavers: Takers believe the world belongs to man and Leavers believe man belongs to the world. Takers are the technology-driven industrial societies which believe Earth and its vast resources are there to be taken and used by man, because man is somehow outside of Earth. We live on it and have to rely on its oxygen, but are still somehow superior to it. In other words, there is a fundamental imbalance in the Takers story, as it views mankind as somehow separate from nature. It is exactly this illusionary separation that makes the systematic rape of the Earth, as it continues to this very day, possible, because if we would truly feel connected with everything around us, we wouldn’t be able to treat it the way we do. Which is where the Leavers cultures kick in, as they don’t experience such curious disconnectedness and see all of life as one vast web of relations. When rainforest activist John Seed says he doesn’t feel he’s saving the trees but really just saving himself, it’s much more than just a clever play of words, pointing as it does to the harmony with Earth that the vast majority of modern society lacks. We human beings are just as much a part of Earth and all its ecosystems as all the rocks, trees, animals, oceans and insects, and to disrupt them in such horrible ways in the end will only hurt ourselves too. All this, of course, forms the basis for the whole deep ecology movement which will hopefully lead to the changes necessary to create a life-sustaining way of life. As valuable as the protests of some environmental agencies can be, deep ecology feels they are in themselves not enough as they often lack the vision that’s the basis of this thinking. What’s needed is not really more protests and actions against nature’s destruction, but a profound change in thinking and being – one that supplants the fragmented lifestyles so common to most Takers cultures to the harmonious way of life of Leavers. So if we could just get people to start feeling connected first with themselves and then with everything around them and bring their lives in harmony, Earth will take care of the rest. If we just wouldn’t Take so much and Leave the Earth be, we would be much better off, because not a single man-made system can be better than the perfect systems Nature herself has designed. Only in recent years have scientific discoveries begun to point to the same conclusions so many religious or mystic beliefs have always spoken about and has science started to view nature not as a machine, but as something that’s alive.

Although it has a default mode that’s so subtle as to become obtuse to many viewers, everything I’ve just described is already there in the opening of ‘Wolfen’: after some shots of the skyline of New York, we see two Native Americans perform some odd rituals; a host of wasted old buildings are taken down by explosives and we see some guy opening a new construction site. After this, we see strange, distorted points of view from inside one of those decrepit buildings, instantly insinuating some sort of alien presence, perhaps a threat even. Then some people, safely snug in their comfortable limousine and a clear focus on technology and surveillance. Or in other words, the distinction between Takers and Leavers is already being set up: the Takers live in huge cities and are capable of mass destruction because they are aided (and captured) by their precious technology. The Leavers (the Indians and the ‘alien’ presence of the Wolfen) are much more modest in this respect, as they don’t have the power to kill or destroy in such great numbers (nor do they want to as they understand that such mass destruction also hurts themselves). Yet they are characterized by a certain kind of efficiency and mystery that the Takers entirely lack. The close-up on the monitor in the car which says ‘executive surveillance systems’ is the first of many to set up an implicit contrast between two systems, between the system of man-made technology (Takers) and the organic one of nature (Leavers). The success of any system is, of course, entirely determined by its own balance, which is why Nature wins out: it may lack all the gadgets man has accumulated, but human technology can never measure up to the perfect construction and harmony of nature’s systems of organization. It is really no coincidence the POV shots from the Wolfen are taken with the Steadicam camera, new at the time, which with its precision mirrors nature’s efficiency most closely, even though its slightly mechanical quality lacks the organic spontaneity nature always has.

This strange conflation of Nature being represented by technology is not inconsistent with the rest of the film, but rather its point, as it leads us toward some kind of sensible combination of the two. We shouldn’t just go back to living like cavemen, but find some way of adapting technology to nature instead of just subjugating it. Nature can be cruel, that’s for sure and it’s something that ‘Wolfen’ emphasizes even. But not only is a healthy awareness and acceptance of the inevitability of death crucial to any kind of sanity, it’s also helps to see nature’s inherent cruelty in the larger scheme of things. ‘Wolfen’ also directly questions our basic assumptions of what constitutes cruelty, as it clearly invites us to see man as more savage than the Wolfen and thus criticizes our much too easy distinction between savage and civilized. Bill Plotkin tells a beautiful story in ‘Nature and the Human Soul’ about a tribe in Africa that sends their children into the wilderness at the tender age of twelve. They know beforehand some of them will not return, but they also know that those that do return, will have done so because they have truly found themselves and their place in life, and they see the whole process as little more than natural selection that weeds out the weak. When seen through Western eyes, this may very well be perceived as horribly cruel, but if you think about it, our own ways are perhaps even more cruel: we don’t send some off to die in the wilderness, yet are apparently entirely comfortable with the idea very few of our young people ever find themselves in the way those in Africa do. Besides which we also lose quite a large percentage of our adolescents to suicides and murders that are a direct result of the fact we don’t feel the need for the kind of guidance that’s so normal for the African tribe. So in the end, the same percentage (or probably even more) of our children die anyway, while the African tribe at least makes those that survive better people by consciously embracing death as an inevitable part of life. So which is more cruel then? 

While the film’s poster doesn’t even hint at this, the film ultimately doesn’t present the presence of the Wolfen as a threat at all, which may well be the most subversive and radical aspect of ‘Wolfen’. Even though the killings by the Wolfen is initially seen as a threat to humanity, it is also made clear at the end they kill only for survival. They are described by the Native Americans at the end as highly intelligent wolves, who were forced underground by the humans (whether we should take them as real wolves or only metaphorically in our minds as the wild nature that we’ve forced underground, is left open to interpretation) and, thus taken out of their natural habitat, have to prey on the homeless that nobody really misses. It is insinuated they have been doing this for years in cities all across the continent and only have begun to expand their attacks to the rich businessmen who directly threaten (again) their habitat by tearing down the old deserted buildings in order to resurrect new apartments, that used to form the dwelling places of the Wolfen. As such, they only kill to eat and when their immediate survival is threatened and it’s interesting to see the clear parallels ‘Wolfen’ implies between the Wolfen/Nature and the Native Americans, the only Leavers culture still existing in America. Despite the negative portrayal of so many Western pictures, the various Native American cultures could (and should) serve as a model example for the future of the world. They lived in close harmony with the American continent for thousands of years, giving back as much as they took from it and thus insuring balance and harmony. Within a matter of just a few hundred years, white colonialists managed to undo all that, and completely destroyed the harmony by turning the American landscape into a wasteland, almost annihilating all the native tribes in the process. What is probably even more impressive is that through all this the Native Americans not only kept their basic dignity intact, but also their ways of life – something that stands as one of the greatest achievements of mankind. They may have killed too, but, like the Wolfen, only for defense and survival, not for the more dubious reasons that Takers culture still present as necessary for Industrial growth. As the Wolfen in this movie virtually equal the role of the Native Americans in the history of the United States, there’s the rather intriguing notion that ‘Wolfen’ can be more properly understood not as a werewolf horror picture, but as a Western instead. The time and setting may have changed, but little else: it’s still Garden vs. Wilderness and white man dominating and expanding at all cost. The Garden has turned into high-luxury condominiums, and Wilderness is represented by the old buildings that are being torn down; the gunfighters and settlers of old are now businessmen with ascots, trying to impose civilization on the wilderness – all in the name of Progress. ‘Progress’ is such a lovely word, but also extremely frightening, as it is always blindly accepted and never scrutinized, which is thankfully what ‘Wolfen’ so brilliantly does. Because by making something of an updated Western, it basically implies the domestication of the Wilderness has been a total disaster. Most Westerns were firmly rooted in the white, dominant point of view that was seldom undermined and this is where ‘Wolfen’ differs – as it suggests that an alternative way to dominant culture is possible or even necessary. And this is the genius of the film’s opening, when one wonders how all these disparate elements could possibly be related. It uses the fragmented, disconnected world view that pervades our society and is often thought of as the only way to view the world, only to supplant it, through its detective plot with Albert Finney as the viewer’s surrogate, with the harmonious and interconnected way of looking at things that’s so common amongst indigenous tribes.

By fusing the Western with elements from the werewolf picture, it challenges the often unspoken assumption that being civilized is somehow inherently ‘good’ and wild ‘bad’ and strongly suggests that by taming the wilderness around and the wildness inside of us, we have lost something that’s extremely valuable. This is already admirably mirrored by the casting of Albert Finney, who became famous for his animalistic vitality of his roles in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and ‘Tom Jones’, with the latter picture entirely focusing on his refusal to be tamed. When Finney got to 1981 he seems to have lost most of his energy, however, as he seems almost somnambulistic in both ‘Looker’ and ‘Wolfen’, which is especially effective in our picture as it so forcefully suggests a taming of the beast (apparently Dustin Hoffman lobbied quite aggressively to land the role, but it’s hard to imagine how his nervous energy could have worked in this part). Just about the only thing that still suggests Finney’s untamed nature buried deep beneath his expressionless face, is his awful hairdo as he quite literally looks he just got of bed during the entire film. Besides that, he dulls his senses by over-eating and drinking alcohol all the time, which leave him senseless in the most strict sense of the word – in sharp contrast with the Wolfen who live through their senses. So if not really werewolves, the creatures in this film do function in a somewhat similar way, as they have to rekindle the extinguished fire within Finney, to make him reconnect with his wild self once more. With this, ‘Wolfen’ turns the basic concept of werewolves upside down, as the (metaphorical) transformation from civilized man into a wild animal is here presented not as something to be feared, but as something that’s to be cherished. Finney’s character will always be fragmented and distorted until he accepts and embraces his own wild self, something that’s beautifully portrayed in the climax of the film. In a moment that recalls nothing so much as John Boorman, Finney is seen through the distorted glass, which through its funhouse effect metaphorically points to the fragmented nature of his being. The glass windows of the apartment also symbolize the separation from Nature at large, something that’s undone when the Wolfen magically break through them, seemingly threatening Finney. But the threat is only imaginary, as Finney comes to realize by not resisting the wildness they represent, but by embracing it instead. It is at this point they disappear as mysteriously as they came, because they have served their purpose: to reconnect Finney with his wild self and the Earth around him. 

Although Finney’s trajectory from separation to inclusion (which neatly mirrors deep ecology, by the way) is presented as a way out of our malaise, his lack of present-centeredness are not the cause of the problem, but merely a symptom. Because as I’ve said earlier, the lack of harmony doesn’t limit itself to only our individual wellbeing, but also contaminates every system we develop. ‘Wolfen’ is quite explicitly modeled as a battle between systems, between the ecological systems of Nature and those that are based on human effort, with the latter constantly being revealed as inferior. Throughout the movie for instance, the detectives are constantly expressing their admiration for how effective and precise these murders are, even though they can’t figure out what is causing them. So when Gregory Hines wonders aloud how the killers could have known so quickly some of the organs were deceased, as it took him an hour to figure out even with all his equipment, he implicitly says all man-made technology can’t even hold a candle to the efficiency of Nature’s ways. It is also why the highly protected businessman who gets killed at the beginning, with even phones and surveillance inside his limousine, doesn’t stand a chance against his Wolfen attackers, because ultimately man’s technology is far inferior to Nature’s organic systems of organization. The Wolfen are in complete balance and accord: they move like one, think like one and attack like one. As the Native American’s say “Hunter and prey. Nature in balance. In their world, there can be no lies... no crimes, no need for detectives”.

Man can be no match for them, because mankind lacks this kind of balance, both in themselves and in man-made structures, as all of modern society is fragmented. The Takers have forgotten the harmony of the Leavers, as this story related by Chellis Glendinning in her book ‘My Name is Chellis & I’m in Recovery From Western Civilization’ attests to: when a woman was visiting an indigenous tribe, she began drinking from a glass she had brought with her. The tribe people were much confused by this strange looking thing they had never seen, and were curious as to how glass could be made. When the woman was at a loss for words and had to admit she didn’t have a clue how to make glass, the people started laughing, as it confirmed what they had already thought: this woman was banished from her culture because she was totally unfit for it, as she lacked even the basic knowledge of how to produce an item she used on a daily basis. This little story should serve to illustrate how far modern people have drifted away from such basic logic, as few of us ever learn the basic skills of our life. As most of us have internalized this, we have come to believe it normal, while in fact it does nothing but point to the general lack of harmony of our entire lives. We don’t know better than society is made up of specialists, with everybody having learned a certain skill or bit of knowledge, but with no-one being able to transcend all this and see the big picture. That is not to say indigenous tribes don’t have specialists; they do, since some people are either by learning or natural talent more suited for certain areas of life than others. But all members of every tribe are skilled in and have knowledge of all the basics that make up their everyday life, so they could survive entirely on their own, if necessary. Unfortunately this doesn’t apply at all to our own lives. I use my bicycle every day, yet I don’t know how to repair it when it breaks down, something that scares me deeply on a certain level. Of course, since I have the money and there are specialists around who will do the work for me, I can get by, but it does make my life as a rule more fragmented than that of indigenous people.

References to this division of work and tasks are scattered throughout ‘Wolfen’: the mayor is seen with two shady fellows whose exact role there remains rather unclear. All the work on the police force is of course divided amongst specialists, who can only by working together reach the same kind of harmony every Wolfen has in itself. The most sour example may be the remark Finney makes at one point to his female colleague Diane Venora, when he sarcastically says “you’re here for the motivation”. It’s one of those many off-hand remarks in a remarkably subtle movie, but it exemplifies the troubles pervading our society, like the physical detective work of Finney is somehow different from the psychological motivation aspect of Venora. They all know their own specialist side of the puzzle, but not one of them is able to see the puzzle as a whole, which is of course why they don’t come any closer to unraveling the mysteries of Nature. In order to overcome this problem, mankind should learn to think like nature again, because only then can our fragmentary view reach anything approaching wholeness. We should undo our civilized taming and learn to ‘become animal’ again, to use a phrase of David Abram’s. So, when the police officer remarks to Finney that the death cases on Park Avenue and the Bronx couldn’t possibly be related as they don’t fit the regular police M.O., this only makes sense when seen through the deficit logic of isolated humans who see everything as fragmented. Because as the combining of Park Avenue and the Bronx so evocatively suggests, the animalistic worldview even builds bridges between the very rich and the very poor, two worlds that couldn’t be more apart from conventional human points of view. Many horror and science fiction films use outside threats to form some kind of sudden allegiance between human beings that were fighting each other just minutes before, but what makes ‘Wolfen’ virtually unique is that it recasts what the threat really is. The people are not united because they have to fight an outside agent, even though the Wolfen are initially presented as such. But at the end, their threat was unmasked as an illusory one and it’s made abundantly clear that but by fighting nature, mankind is really fighting itself. The battle is already over, it’s just that most people don’t realize it.

“In arrogance, man knows nothing of what exists. There exists on earth, such as we dare not imagine. Life as certain as our death. Life that will prey on us, as we prey on this earth”.

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