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Equinox
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That’s very superficial,
but true.
– Equinox
In
his engaging book A Cinema Without Walls (Rutgers University Press, 1991), Timothy Corrigan provides an evocative
account of the odd atmosphere that pervades so many contemporary movies.
According
to Corrigan, films are perpetually distracted these days, unable to concentrate on old-fashioned niceties like plot or character,
because they are too busy zapping between heightened moments of consciousness,
tabloid-style perceptions of social disintegration, and a storehouse of
media-fed memories.
In
a nutshell: postmodernism, defined
not just as a propensity for pop culture quotation or pastiche (that was
already part of modernism), but en entirely strange “mental set” that is
floating, curious about minutiae, uncertain about its ethical stance, in
permanent suspension. (1) Corrigan pegs the postmodern as “the state of having
it both ways, of participating without confinement, of active commitment
without a central presence, of narcissism without subjectivity, of appropriation
as relinquishment”. (2)
Whether
or not director Alan Rudolph (Choose Me [1984], Trouble in Mind [1985])
has read the chapter devoted to him (as a “cult movie” purveyor) in Corrigan’s
book, many of his films conform uncannily to this postmodern model. Equinox is an effortlessly stylish but
often deliberately unreadable mish-mash of elements: by turns an attempt at art
film mysticism, an ironic take on classic Hollywood genres, and a gesture of
anguished concern at the state of the world. It came and went quickly through
its small commercial window, yet again confirming the director’s firm belief: “My work seems to lack the success
gene and popularity chromosome”. (3)
Rudolph
has borrowed from his friend and mentor Robert Altman the device of a
mysterious, psychological osmosis between characters – in this case, identical twins (played by Matthew Modine)
separated at birth. They are the disconnected halves of a single personality:
Henry the timid nerd, Freddy the cultivated gangster. As in Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Veronique (1991),
the film tracks the complementary journeys of these lost souls.
Rudolph
drifts away from the central narrative structure as often as possible, as is
his wont. He populates the film with zany characters (incarnated by Lara Flynn
Boyle, Fred Ward, Lori Singer, Marisa Tomei … ) forever locked in their own
heads and talking at cross purposes. Scenes suddenly launch into excessive,
unmotivated parodies of The Honeymooners (already name-checked in his previous Mortal Thoughts [1991]), soap opera, or
classic crime films. The spectacle of senseless violence (mid-‘60s Godard touch), a grotesque yuppie materialism, homelessness, and acute social despair
punctuates proceedings as if it were, at times, an indifferent piece of Muzak –
or a cruel piece of slapstick.
There’s
a weird, fruity, camp depiction (as in Mortal
Thoughts) of America’s ethnic/multicultural proletarian class, not without
a hint of smug superiority or bourgeois panic on Rudolph’s part – although it
is must be admitted that his brand of satire tends generally to be
all-inclusive and almost Balzacian in its social scope (a point well made by
critic-filmmaker Dan Sallitt in a great 1985 study of the director). (4)
Corrigan’s
description of Choose Me goes double
for Equinox:
The spectator … remains oddly inscribed …
[in] a perspective that refuses to anchor itself in any secure sense of an authentic
or naturalised reality – whether that reality be fiction or fact. […] [The
spectator’s] work must take place across the spectacularly artificial sets and
carnivalesque narrative … which disolocate an audience especially from
Hollywood’s public fantasy and relocate it in the free play of a sort of
hyperrealism. Dramatised through its false depths and dense surfaces, which at
once attract and arrest vision, [the film] engages its audience through a
billboard perspective that aims to collapse the distinction between private and
public space, the illusory and the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. (5)
Rudoph
himself puts it this way: “It’s the same
as all the films I write and direct: people trying to connect in a crazy world.
But this film is also about an uncaring society, about people lying to
themselves, about people whose fantasy lives become as important as their real,
daily lives”.
(6)
Equinox is, ultimately, more
maddening than it is enlightening. Rudolph may not be entirely in control of
what he is doing here – and losing control, at least to some extent, would seem
part of his quasi-aleatory, shifting-pieces game-plan – but at least he is
devoted to finding a form for his own perplexity. He displays, as always, his
own brand of stylistic assurance amidst all the generated chaos: people
spinning about in shallow frames as the camera flits and flicks with a precise
pictorial intention; dapplings of an unconventional, atmospheric score by
Norwegian jazzman Terje Rypdal.
In
the process, Rudolph indelibly captures a certain feeling of ungroundedness, a
quiet hysteria, which is so much part of contemporary culture – whether or not
you choose to call that cultural moment postmodern.
MORE Rudolph: Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, Remember My Name
1.
My 1987 rumination (along a similar track to Corrigan’s) on postmodern culture,
“PM, Phone Home”, appears in Golden
Eighties, Volume 2: Pop, Postmodernism, The Body and Sexuality 1982-1987 (2019), which is the Level 7 PDF reward of my Patreon campaign.
back
2.
Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls, p.
93.
3.
Neil McGlone, “Alan Rudolph Interviews”, There’s
No Place Like Home blog, 11 December 2013.
back
4.
Dan Sallitt, “Alan Rudolph, 1985”, Thanks
for the Use of the Hall blog, 19 August 2016.
5.
Corrigan, pp. 93-94.
6.
Rosetta Brooks, “Soul City: An Interview with Alan Rudoplph”, Artforum (January 1993).
© Adrian Martin August 1994 (with updates) |
