Near Dark

(Kathryn Bigelow, USA, 1987)

There are some directors whose œuvre can be speculatively encapsulated in a single image-and-sound configuration. I don’t mean a literal screenshot, but an image more in the Jungian sense: a dynamic, variable constellation or configuration of elements. For Claire Denis, for example, a cinephile’s mind conjures a gestalt of vehicles (of all sorts) in motion – and bodies in vehicles, bodies becoming vehicles, vehicles becoming bodies. Racing, crashing, duelling, escaping, cruising …

For Kathryn Bigelow, the image-sound that occurs to me is explosion: explosion and flames. She renders gunshots as veritable explosion-events in Blue Steel (1989). Little wonder that she’d eventually gravitate to the premise of a bomb disposal team, in the midst of war, for her mainstream breakthrough The Hurt Locker (2008). The agony for the USA military machine in Zero Dark Thirty (2012) is that it can’t simply bomb that bin Laden guy to smithereens with a single drone drop; the mission is going to require an unusual degree of digital reconnaissance, stealth and quiet.

There are plenty of loud explosions and flames in Near Dark – the film that brought her to the attention of cinephiles and cultists everywhere. Cars explode and burn. A jolly vampire family burns every place (or vehicle) it leaves behind on its eternal trail of mayhem. Their bodies not only singe and smoulder in the sunlight: they eventually catch on fire, and then blow apart! When there’s no handy gasoline around, Bigelow turns to firearms to trigger similar spectacular effects. Burn, baby, burn! (Her mid ‘80s collaborator, Eric Red, was on a similar path of deflagration/detonation: see Robert Harmon’s fine realisation of his script for The Hitcher [1986].)

To lean on poetic license for a moment, we can validly ask of Near Dark 35 years later: what remains of its incredible explosion upon the world of cinema? Only ashes? Because an explosion-aesthetic, logically, is going to err on the side of the ephemeral: spectacular, galvanising, but fleeting in its impressive emotion (in a 1992 capsule review, I wrote: “Bigelow delivers her best, most gruesome scenes with a power and punch to rival Martin Scorsese”).

For some of us, the personal and cultural memory of it may be enough of a thrill: what joy it was, in the 1980s and ‘90s, to experience Near Dark and Blue Steel on the big screen and/or on VHS, and then to backtrack (through whatever viewing channel we could) to her experimental, Kenneth Anger-like debut feature The Loveless (1981, co-directed with Monty Montgomery – I saw it first on Spanish TV in ‘94, lovefully presented by Guillermo Cabrera Infante). “Florid, kinetic, violent”: these were the terms of my enraptured praise for Bigelow’s cinema in those years. A familiar song!

Point Break (1991) showed the first signs of wobble in Bigelow’s trajectory – although all us fans talked it up as best we could, until it weirdly became its own kind of good-bad, camp-cult movie (the 2000s generation of my film students loved it) – and Strange Days (1995) was, for me, the deal-breaker: I have never been able to bring myself to view it again. In the constitutive tension between avant-garde origins (the Art and Language collective, Sylvère Lotringer, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames [1983] … ) and Hollywood genre callings, something slackened or fell away.

In interviews from the early ‘90s onward, Bigelow increasingly talked of the need to centre on the excitement of central characters you could feel with, and the endurance of heroic actions in war (or war-like) situations; meanwhile, her career stumbled along from the ambitious, explicitly feminist, ‘art film’-structured but barely noticed The Weight of Water (2000) to the conventionally generic K-19: The Widowmaker (2002).

A new combo of forensic realism (chiming in with the fussy ‘recreative’ era of David Fincher’s work and Olivier Assayas’ Carlos [2010]), somewhat reactionary/compliant politics (a surprising turn from her), and super-tense, explosive situations put her (and writer Mark Boal) at the top of the industrial tree with the hits of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Her only film since then, Detroit (2017), continues in the ultra-realist vein, but at least has the anti-authoritarian courage to insult the cops once more. TV episodes and high-budget advertisements have punctuated her sporadic feature work. A collaboration with the gifted David Koepp (and Netflix) may be up next.

Near Dark looks a bit different to me now than how it did in the late ‘80s. What has been most touted about it for decades – its ‘genre hybridity’ (among the major themes of Stacey Abbott’s excellent 2020 BFI Classic volume on the film) – is no longer so startling or interesting. And not only because fancy genre-pretzels like horror-western-noir-delinquent-road-movie have become fairly standard fare in the flash ‘indie’ age of Tarantino, Rodriguez and their 10,000 would-be-cult imitators.

In 1992 I commented: “Bigelow’s films turn familiar action or exploitation formulae inside out”. Now I’m not so sure that they do – or what it would mean, exactly, to value the assertion that they do. And neither am I convinced that it’s what Bigelow ever really thought she was doing! Remember the central, alluring image of explosions and flames, a hallmark (after all) of commercial cinema of the Mission: Impossible type …

The Western element in Near Dark, for example, is certainly there – a few showdown-in-main-street clinches pop out – but that tends to be part and parcel of the fairly low-key adoption of Southern (and Southern Gothic) poses and settings (it takes more than a few cowboy hats and guys on horseback to make a genuine Western homage, or even Western subversion). As for the road movie itinerary, it, too, comes with the territory (and with the plot). More intriguing is the influence of Nicholas Ray-style doomed lovers romanticism – Bigelow, back in the ‘70s, participated in one of the final interviews that Ray gave – as embodied in the relationship of Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar) and Mae (Jenny Wright, who left acting in the late ‘90s), and – much more perversely – in the desperate yearning of the literal man-child Homer (Joshua John Miller) for little Sarah (Marcie Leeds).

Which opens a parenthesis: what an extraordinary figure Miller is in this and River’s Edge (1986)! (He was 12 when making the latter film, 13 in this one.) And what is so apparent today – but was almost invisible at the time – is the evident queerness (in the sex/gender sense) of his deeply unsettling presence in both films, powered in each case by resentment and envy (in one he kills a doll, in the other he craves to ‘transition’ a child!). Abbott goes only so far as to conclude that “Homer is disruptive” as a presence in the film. But the mis-fit between body and personality, action and type – queerness in this broader and more pervasive sense – has rarely been stronger or more affecting. (Miller’s queer sensibility now finds an outlet in writing and producing, for example in the enjoyable horror-high-concept-comedy The Final Girls [2015]. He also directed The Mao Game [1999], and has a new project slated.)

What lasts, what lingers from Near Dark? More than the explicitly iconographic shots (vampires on a hill silhouetted by backlight), it’s the unusual, inventive, singular gestures, postures and frames. Like three heads arranged weirdly (looking at Caleb just off-screen), Homer so short he has to bend his neck back and hold it there. Like the total-visibility of the flat landscapes – nowhere to hide, as if inspired by the cropduster fields in North by Northwest (1959).

Like the sudden, rare intrusion of slow motion, around 10 minutes in, for a shot of Mae in Caleb’s truck, pausing on a pivotal decision. Like the shots that soak in Hendrickson’s intensity, just giving a look and (as Michael Chekhov advised) radiating from the eyes. Like the incredibly consistent effort to make the vampires look as grimy, grotty and claustrophobically closed-in as possible (cinematographer Adam Greenberg, hitting 50 at the time of production, remains rightly proud of his work on this film).

There is structural script craft here that helps glue the sometimes Mad Max-montaged bits and pieces together (Severen/Bill Paxton rising up onto the truck bonnet, bloody but undefeated, is pure Max!). Almost every time the film starts to hit a repetitive groove (hard to avoid with this wandering-vampires set-up), Bigelow & Red change things up with a shift (rather than the large three-act principle, they would appear to rely more on the Hong Kong ten-minute-block method). For example, a mosaic-sequence – alternating between the night-prowls of Mae & Caleb, Jesse & Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein, porting over a smidgin more queerness into the film from her previous role in Aliens [1986]), and Severen – is an excellent way to extend the suspense surrounding Caleb’s reluctance to plunge in for the kill.

And the clinch moment when Sarah (along with her father) is revealed to be staying at the same motel as the vampire gang provides a terrifically unexpected loop/coincidence. All the way through, the stark collision of searingly sunny daylight and “deafeningly” silent night (as Mae explains) takes a basic principle of film structure (see Jean-Claude Carrière’s advice on this point in The Secret Language of Film) to its expressionistic apotheosis (Abbott discusses this aesthetic aspect well).

In its most successful plot moves, Near Dark displays the good side of the legacy of Dario Argento-type narrative illogic – when things just happen without a lot of careful set-up, or indeed, on occasion, any set-up at all. Bigelow has occasionally tripped up, in her career, on this merry anything-can-occur-at-any-moment mode of B movie irrationality, supposedly driven-through via pure, adrenal emotion. Another element in Near Dark’s plot crucial to its final section – the ability of Colton family members to re-infuse blood – is, for example, very weakly established by a single shot (of Dad injecting a farm animal) near the start.

Another undoubtedly unifying element (as Jean Fisher, who went on to write a book of criticism titled Vampire in the Text [2003], noted in an early Artforum pat-on-the-back in ’88) is the Tangerine Dream score. High on the memory of the 10-minute bar-devastation set-piece (as very many fans of this film remain to their undying day) and its use of “Fever” as covered by The Cramps, I hailed in ’94 Bigelow’s “heightened, parametric use of pop music”. But that’s not at all correct.

There are, in fact, very few songs sourced and featured on the soundtrack; the score takes prime, moody position at almost every juncture. It seems to me a simple score, often based (for example) on a very basic blues figure, quite unlike the emotive reading that Abbott and others give it – but its relentless synth groove fits the film nicely into a Michael Mann/William Friedkin ‘80s tradition (Tangerine Dream scored both The Keep [1983] and Sorcerer [1977]). It is often the percolation of a basic, ticking beat that helps build some of the best dramatic/spectacular effects and events in these movies.

Other details have not aged so well. What Philip Brophy has called the Read My Lips approach to pithy one-liner utterances is laid on heavily by Bigelow, Red and the actors (who undoubtedly improvised some of these quotable quotes of the “finger-lickin’ good” variety), and not always terribly wittily. Likewise, the obvious irony of graphically projected place names like ‘Hide-a-Way Hotel’. When people naively ask these days, ‘was the film meant to be funny/camp/ironic?’ – as if 1987 was a bit too early, historically, for such sophistication – I wonder where their attention was fixed during the projection.

Is Near Dark actually about anything, theme-wise, other than its own skilfully welded patchwork? The bloody revolt of the sub-proletarian classes, forever wandering through history? The pathos and pain of immortality (Bigelow’s own preferred interpretation)? Family ties, in the contrast between the vampires who can never part ways (and definitely rely on each other, and work together, for everything), and the less coherent, rather partial Colton clan?

Note Fisher’s stern critique back in ’88: “Near Dark, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, can only resolve the problem of identity through identification by returning desire to the insular values of the Oedipal nuclear family […] Caleb’s solution is 19th-century pastoral utopianism, which is no solution at all”. Or is there the frisson of ambiguity in that final freeze-frame of Caleb and the re-blooded Mae, an ending which I had totally forgotten over time?

Bigelow – and this is a constant in her work – tends to want to have it every which way (but not loose): affirmation and cool disengagement, identification and ironic distance, immersion and aesthetic glaze. That’s what’s kept her in the game, I guess, where so many pre-Miramax experimental-narrative filmmakers of the 1970s and ‘80s have been left (to this day) clambering by the wayside, trying to find a new footing.

MORE Bigelow: Wild Palms

© Adrian Martin December 1992 / 5 August 2023