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Time and the Cities: |
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Introduction: This essay was first composed in 2016 for a book
project that would doubtless have constituted the last gasp of the short-lived
“vulgar auteurism” movement in film criticism, now (in 2020) entirely gone with
the winds, with scarcely an online trace. The idea of the book project was to
recognise, appreciate and celebrate certain overlooked film directors whose
career was intertwined with often maligned pop genres: action, romantic comedy,
teen movie, etc. My eager choice was Amy Heckerling. Alas, the (fully-written)
book fell apart due to a flakey publisher who vanished as surely as Vulgar
Auteurism did, and all subsequent attempts to get my own text published
elsewhere have met with rejection and the same response: “She hasn’t made a new
feature since 2012”! Whoever figured that film criticism (as published) was so
beholden to what is strictly current? I now present the essay exclusively here
on this website. (November 2020)
Nicholas Ray, in lectures he gave late in his life,
defined movie directing as the job of shaping “a whole piece of entertainment.”
(1) It is difficult to imagine many American filmmakers expressing themselves
in quite this way today. Perhaps Steven Spielberg, Penny Marshall or Ron Howard
might say something of the sort; but Abel Ferrara, Michael Mann or Amy Siemetz,
never. And even if any of these figures ever did gesture toward the totem of
entertainment, whether positively or negatively, they would probably intend the
term in its most restricted meaning: pleasing the mass audience, giving it what
it wants.
Of all directors working in the USA today, only Amy
Heckerling approaches her craft as a matter of shaping a whole piece of
entertainment, in the complete sense that Ray gave his expression: balancing
all the parts and levels; fulfilling generic expectations but leaving room for
a personal element; getting the most out of key collaborators in both cast and
crew; offering to the viewer a satisfying graph of mood changes and a economical
variety of things to see, hear and experience.
Like Monte Hellman or Bob Rafelson, Heckerling is
among those directors who constantly faces the career-threat of being reduced
to their two or three hits, whether that success is determined in commercial or
cult-reputation terms: her feature debut, the teen network-narrative Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982); Clueless (1995), an instant classic that has been
frequently relaunched and upholstered in the DVD/Blu-ray era; and possibly also Look Who’s Talking (1989), which has not endured in popular
memory as well as the other two.
Not every movie Heckerling has managed to so far make
in her chequered career is great. Despite their occasional mirthful moments, I
shall pass over, in this brief survey, Johnny
Dangerously (1984), National
Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985) and the sequel Look Who’s Talking Too (1990). Her scattered TV work (on Gossip Girl, Suburgatory, The Carrie
Diaries, Rake and Red Oaks among others) is, by her own
admission, more professionally solid than uniquely inspired. In 2020, she
directed all ten episodes (none over nine minutes) of the Royalties musical series designed for the short-lived Quibi
mobile-streaming platform. But once we expand the ledger of her achievement to
include, at the very least, Loser (2000), I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007) and,
most recently, Vamps (2012), we begin
to build a coherent picture of an important, inventive and neglected filmmaker.
The signature touches are evident. Situations recur,
or are turned around to be viewed from a different angle from film to film: the
plot premise of a woman’s masochistic tie to an uncaring man, while a nicer guy
lurks in the wings, helplessly looking on, structures both Look Who’s Talking and Loser.
Actors reappear from film to film, even down to the smallest roles (Alicia
Silverstone, Wallace Shawn, Stacey Dash, Paul Rudd, and many others). A vein of
autobiographical inspiration, back and forth over the times of her life, can be
tracked from one plot to the next: teen/school experience, college, difficult relationships,
childbirth, single motherhood, care of ailing, elderly parents, working in
television. A certain pop-cinephile canon is brandished whenever characters
turn on a TV set or hunker down to watch a movie: Vertigo (1958), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), James Cagney’s gangster
movies or musicals … with Billy Wilder (or better, Wilder teamed with
scriptwriter I.A.L. Diamond) looming – as for Fast Times at Ridgemont High writer-turned-director, Cameron Crowe –
as the ultimate model in aspiring to both artistry and commercial success
inside the American system.
It is tempting – principally became of the
predominance of romantic comedy, and the ubiquitous presence of families – to
group Heckerling with at least two other contemporary practitioners of the comedy
of manners, namely Crowe and James L. Brooks; plus, inescapably, the large
shadow of Woody Allen.
Yet none of these guys have ever stretched to embrace, in their generic
sampling, the references to The Exorcist (1973) in Look Who’s Talking or the weaving-in of a
gruesome vamp-buster killing spree, decapitations and dancing skeletons included,
in Vamps.
There are affinities, along this sometimes blackly
comic, mixed-genre line, with films by Robert Zemeckis (Death Becomes Her, 1992, the memory of which is evoked by the
cosmetic surgery opening credits of I
Could Never Be Your Woman), Susan Seidelman (She-Devil, 1989) and Danny DeVito (The War of the Roses, 1989) – but these directors have not (whether
by choice or by chance) negotiated quite the same consistency of tone and topic
as Heckerling, working over roughly the same period from the 1980s until now. A
closer match is Angela Robinson, across the daring teen-girls comedy D.E.B.S. (2004), the Disney vehicle Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005), the TV series The
L Word (2004-9), the web project Girltrash! (2007) and the more mainstream-friendly group-biopic Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017) – but Heckerling got
further inside the system, at least for a while, than Robinson.
Two themes or motifs assert themselves particularly in
Heckerling’s cinema. The first is the presence – once again, a staple of light
manners comedy in both film and TV in the Sex
and the City era, but given a special insistence and intensity by her – of
what we might call city celebration,
the eulogy of metropolitan place. This is a matter mainly of New York (Loser) and Los Angeles (Clueless), the two principal cities
where Heckerling has lived and worked … even when the former has to be shot in
Vancouver (Look Who’s Talking) and
the latter in London (I Could Never Be
Your Woman). Heckerling’s city symphonies come, within each film, in
isolated, compact montage forms (usually accompanied by an appropriate song),
and also in diffuse details of local customs, sites and rituals that are spread
throughout the piece. This aspect recurs, on a necessarily smaller scale, in
her TV work, especially in the Sex and
the City prequel series, The Carrie Diaries (2013-14); it is doubtless one of the reasons she is sought out for such work
today.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High is somewhat a case apart: its fictional high school was filmed in the
San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, but this locale is never named as such; of
all her films, it is the one most keyed to a non-specific, lower middle-class
suburbia. The interchangeable malls, diners, garage stations, school rooms and
corridors of these US suburbs – at least as depicted in much mainstream cinema
– rapidly became the iconography (or the semantics, in Rick Altman’s sense) of
the teen movie genre in the 1980s, enduring until today via relays such as the
internationally popular Canadian TV series Degrassi Junior High (1987-89). Not for the last time, Heckerling here
helped launch a trend, a global genre, and even a look conjoining setting, fashion, music, and plot situations. On
TV, Suburgatory (2011-14) – the most
stylistically adventurous of her opportunities, to date, in that medium – allows her to return to this richly generic suburban
setting (in this case, New York suburbs).
The second major theme in Heckerling’s work receives a
more complex and poignant treatment: time,
as in the passing time of years and decades, marked by the succession of cultural
fads and historic milestones of various kinds – and by the inevitability of
characters ageing. Age becomes an issue for Heckerling’s protagonists – mainly
women – beginning with Mollie (Kirstie Alley) confronting her “biological
clock” in Look Who’s Talking; the
autobiographical reference of this becomes clear when we watch Michelle
Pfeiffer in her 40s at the centre of I
Could Never Be Your Woman. Vamps,
as we shall see, proves to be particularly ingenious in this temporal regard:
Alicia Silverstone at once plays herself, her role as Cher in Clueless reprised (and revised) almost
two decades on, and a vampire named Goody, preserved in her youth since 1841.
Cultural time – which carbon-dates us all in our
prevailing tastes so precisely and so mercilessly – is used by Heckerling in a
very knowing, self-conscious way. She is very much a late ‘70s/early ‘80s
person in terms of formative cultural influences, and she remains publicly
proud of that fact. Although her earliest shorts (before and during film
school) are not accessible to view today, she speaks of them in terms of a shotgun
marriage of Hollywood glamour – nostalgically and ironically revisited – and
the punk ethos prevalent at the time. This is true, to varying degrees, of a
group of women who, in that period, entered the circuits of commercial cinema
through its B genre formats: Susan Seidelman, Penelope Spheeris, Martha
Coolidge, Joan Freeman, Marisa Silver, Joyce Chopra – most of whom, sadly, get
even fewer chances than Heckerling to make work for the big screen today.
It is literally on the song-stuffed soundtrack of Fast Times that we can hear the trace of
Heckerling’s particular, tenacious culture war: edgy Oingo Boingo (which she
fought to retain) and disco queen Donna Summer rub up against the more
comfortably smooth ‘70s sounds of Jackson Browne, Don Henley and Graham Nash.
Heckerling’s ear for an unusual mixtape effect that perfectly captures a
particular musical sensibility is less fettered in Look Who’s Talking: there, Talking Heads and Australian cult
favourite Paul Kelly interlace with The Beach Boys and (in an especially
delightful scene) Gene Pitney’s 1961 hit “Town Without Pity”.
Wisely, as Heckerling has proceeded through her
career, she has not tried (as so many other filmmaker, in vain, do) to
artificially update the taste-configuration that formed her, by replacing one
hip playlist with another, completely different one. When Kim Wilde’s 1981 song
“Kids in America” appears in Clueless in its mid ‘90s cover version by The Muffs, it signals as a gesture by
Heckerling declaring her hand: this is where I come from. Subsequently, keen
jokes about cultural taste in relation to ageing, the anxiety of no longer
being with-it in everyday conversation – especially for women in their intimate
relationships with younger men – fill I
Could Never Be Your Woman and Vamps.
Beyond the two major themes of time and cities, there
is a both a particular texture and a special form that structures Heckerling’s
films. The texture – of which the music selection is a large and crucial part –
relates to pop culture references. The flow of allusions to films, TV shows,
songs, performers, clothing, celebrities, dance moves, current events, and so
on, is relentless in virtually all her films. No individual viewer can be
expected to catch them all on a single viewing (this is why for instance, Clueless has become a repeat-viewing
cult classic) – and perhaps very few viewers understand or appreciate them all
in any particular film. There is a braveness and a risk element here that, once
again, testifies to Heckerling’s punk origin: I vividly remember a 1989 press
screening for Look Who’s Talking in
which pregnant Mollie’s line, as she studies her breasts in the mirror – “I
look like a Russ Meyer movie!” – prompted audible incomprehension and
irritation among the suited, senior, male film reviewers present, who noisily grumbled:
“Who’s Russ Meyer?”
There are quite a few moments in Heckerling’s work
where – exactly like her characters – we may feel we are not getting something, that we are not in on
the joke. (In Clueless, for instance,
Cher assumes that Kuwait is a suburb of Los Angeles.) This is a species of
daily humiliation that she presents with great understanding and affection,
rather than the cruel, superior tone of elitist, cultural condescension that we
occasionally find in Woody Allen or The L
Word. In her superb essay “Emma in Los Angeles”,
Lesley Stern asserts:
Clueless appeals to different audiences who bring to the movie
different knowledges and expectations, but what makes it particularly
fascinating is that it actually assumes, through the heterogeneity of its
references and allusions, that quotidian knowledge is informed by and woven out
of a diversity of cultural practices – not distinguishable according to “high”
and “low” markers. (2)
Just look at the wonderful vignette in Clueless concerning the rapt absorption
of Tai (Brittany Murphy) as she sings the Mentos commercial playing on TV –
right down to its spoken tag line – and the bemused but forgiving reactions of
other characters (Silverstone as Cher and Rudd as Josh) who notice this in
passing. Or the fact that smart Josh is a pretty awful dancer: nonetheless, Cher
will still include the goofy sight of his flailing limbs in her lovestruck,
mental montage of remembered moments. Every sympathetic figure in Heckerling’s
films is in the midst of a muddle that is cultural almost as much as it is
personal.
Cultural detailing dovetails into Heckerling’s favoured
narrative form, which I shall call description.
Like Stanley Kubrick, Víctor Erice and Chantal Akerman, Heckerling likes to stay on a flat, narrative
plateau for as long as possible, retarding the strong moves or intrigues that will complicate and transform the plot.
This allows her to explore and investigate a particular social milieu by
describing it in all its detail. This sense that Heckerling entertains an often
whimsical relation to narrative (and especially the mainstream’s hallowed
“narrative drive”) proves irritating to some blinkered reviewers. Clueless is the stand-out example here:
almost the first hour of the film (as in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, 1995) enjoys patiently laying out – with the help of an
unusually supple and inventive voice-over narration – the world of Cher and her
friends. A great deal happens within this first hour – Cher meets and makes
over Tai, she interacts at length with her garrulous single-parent layer
father, Mel (Dan Hedaya) – but the central motor of the tale in any
conventional sense, namely the unlikely possibility of a romantic match between
Cher and Josh, takes a remarkably long time to materialise.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High, at the start of Heckerling’s feature career, is once again something
of an exception: the sheer proliferation of characters and their story lines
demands greater pace and action in the narrative construction. Yet here, she
finds an alternative way to slyly undermine convention, and it was a soft
subversion she handed to many subsequent teen movies: taking advantage of her
material’s speed and breezy tone, she rides swiftly past the moralistic weight
that would normally be placed on the morally or ethically “bad” actions of
characters, and instead reintegrates them in a cloud of almost instant
forgiveness – or forgetfulness. It is thus that even the callow Mike (Robert
Romanus) who gets Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) pregnant can be welcomed back
into the communal fold by the time the final rousing montage (set to Oingo
Boingo’s “Goodbye”) arrives.
Frances Smith, co-editor with Timothy Shary of the
only academic book on Heckerling, suggests: “It is perhaps a consequence of Heckerling’s increasing sense of
precarity as an ageing woman in Hollywood that her most recent work has staged
a meditation on the politics of ageing and femininity”. (3) To get the full
measure of the professional and personal anxiety that such precarity can
prompt, let us perform a necessary reality-check. At the moment of publishing
this piece, Heckerling is 66; when she was shooting I Could Never Be Your Woman, she was in her early 50s. While a good
number of men (including Manoel de Oliveira, Clint Eastwood and Jean-Luc Godard) continue to be celebrated for directing films into their 80s and
sometimes well beyond, the examples of women directing big-screen movies (or
even TV) beyond even their early 60s are much rarer: there’s Agnès Varda (died
at 90 in 2019) and Kira Muratova (died at 83 in 2018) who worked right to the
end of their lives, and the somewhat freakish case of Leni Riefenstahl making a
personal deep-sea doco at age 100, but precious few others.
Heckerling’s films invent striking ways to
cinematically materialise these personal and social anxieties about gender and
age. As Smith notes, Paul Rudd at the biological age of 37 can be cast as 29 in I Could Never Be Your Woman – and
then, in the embedded, fictional You Go
Girl teen TV series, be cast as 17! – as distinct from Rosie, who is afraid
to admit she is 40, and is in fact played by an actor (Pfeiffer) closer to 50.
But it is Vamps that goes furthest,
and most imaginatively, in this direction. The film seizes on vampirism as its
central metaphor: to be a vampire means to never get old, to be frozen (at
least for some of the characters) in their eternal youth. Heckerling uses this
trope as a way to allegorically reflect, under the story’s surface, on both her
own life, and the nature of her difficult career, forever associated with the
teen movie successes of Fast Times and Clueless – just as the latter’s
star, Alicia Silverstone, also found her career stalled after being typed as
Cher.
In Vamps,
which is unusually politically progressive for a contemporary Hollywood movie –
the celebratory references to the New York City’s past are captured in moments
of social justice and injustice, civil rights and reform movements – the dream
of eternal youth is more a curse than a blessing, as it was for the lone,
disgruntled citizen in the fantasy-paradise of Vincente Minnelli’s Brigadoon (1954). Where Stacy (Krysten Ritter) manages to
escape from her vampiric state and be saved by love with a normal guy,
adjusting without too much pain to her real, 40 year old body, Goody must
accept that, at the end, she will simply crumble into dust, being (as she has
kept hidden throughout) so old – and this she does happily, gazing at the
phantom history-parade of Times Square as Heckerling’s own daughter, singer
Mollie Israel, performs “Give My Regards to Broadway” on the soundtrack. Few
endings in contemporary cinema are so beautiful and touching, especially for
those spectators on the wavelength of the filmmaker’s gesture.
In I Could Never
Be Your Woman, Heckerling manages to conjure what is surely one of her
dearest, nostalgic, Old Hollywood dreams: to have the other-worldly character
of wise Mother Nature (Tracey Ullman) figure prominently in the fiction, just
as a male Guardian Angel (Henry Travers) did for George Bailey (James Stewart)
in It’s a Wonderful Life. Yet
Heckerling has her cake and eats it, too: after all the supposedly timeless,
universal, humanist wisdom served up by this Mother about gender roles and
bodily functions, Rosie simply rejects – in a quick, screwball retort as the
camera rises and the final music plays out – the advice.
What better and more triumphant way for Heckerling to
affirm her spirit of independence, and sweep us up in what Stern called the “utterly
engaging impulse – an impulse at once utopian and comic – to remake or
refashion the world”? (4)
1. Nicholas Ray, I
Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), p. 78.
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2. Lesley Stern, “Emma in Los Angeles: Clueless as a Remake of the Book and the
City”, Australian Humanities Review,
issue 7 (August 1997), [http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-August-1997/stern.html];
Reprinted in James Naremore (ed.), Film
Adaptation (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 221-238.
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3. Frances Smith, “Femininity, Ageing and
Performativity in the Work of Amy Heckerling”, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media (special issue on “Women
and Media in the 21st Century”), number 10 (2016). The book referred to is Smith & Shary (eds), ReFocus: The Films of Amy Heckerling (Edinburgh University Press,
2017).
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4. Stern, “Emma in Los Angeles”. back
© Adrian Martin June 2016 / August 2017 / November 2020 |
