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Powder
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I
occasionally see movies that, objectively, are not very good, but which grip me
utterly; I can’t seem to shake them from my mind. Often, such films are an odd
mixture of amateurishness (even naïveté) and incredible intensity; it is as if
the filmmaker is madly fixated on putting over his or her grand message to the
world. Just how that message ends up on screen is often quite another matter.
One mid 1990s movie of this sort that is worth close attention is the very
strange fantasy, Powder.
The
first thing that impressed me about this film is its incredible patchwork of
influences. It concerns a boy nicknamed Powder (Sean Patrick Flanery) who has
been kept hidden in a basement most of his life by his grandparents. He has an
extreme albino condition that gives him unearthly white skin, like powder.
After both grandparents die, Powder is discovered by local officials and hurled
into a savage, small-town world of fear and prejudice.
You
do not have to be a master cinephile to spot the traces of previous movies in
this set-up alone. Down in that basement, Powder is like Jodie Foster’s Nell (1994), or Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby (1993), or the kid in Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995) who has never seen the
daylight. A teacher, Jessie (Mary Steenburgen), discovers that Powder knows
about the world only from the books he has memorised – and that is reminiscent
of the young desert-island castaways with their books in The Blue Lagoon (1980). Once Powder gets to school – the sensitive,
shy, lonely, gifted kid picked on by bullies – he becomes the soul brother of Edward Scissorhands (1990). And the pea-brained, phobic, small-town
community recalls the one in Samuel Fuller’s immortal The Naked Kiss (1964).
But
hang on: this is no ordinary albino we are dealing with here. Powder came out
of his mother’s womb after she was zapped clean dead by lightning! This X-Files-type transmutation has made
Powder one amazing kid. He is – we are told by Dr Stripler (Ray Wise, aka Leland
Palmer in Twin Peaks) – the most intelligent person in the whole world, with an IQ
rating right off the charts. Like John Sayles’ The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Powder can also, with the
mere touch of his hand, read the thoughts of people and animals, seeing into
the depths of their very souls. And – here’s another X-Files touch – Powder is also, as Jeff Goldblum handily pops up as
Ripley (believe it or not!) to explain, “electrolysis itself”! That means his
body conducts enormous amounts of electrical energy … and that he has to be
really careful whenever there’s a thunderstorm around. At that point I swam in
a dim, confused memory of a dozen TV specials about UFOs and unexplained/paranormal
phenomena – such as the sensational story of a poor woman struck by lightning
three times in her life (so far).
If
that composite identikit picture of the teenage hero has not yet boggled your
mind, you may be beyond the reach of a certain kind of popular cinema. Powder is written and directed by Victor
Salva; it is, in fact, his third feature, after Clownhouse (1989) and The
Nature of the Beast (1995). Like many preachy, naïve filmmakers, Salva is
clearly very impressed by Steven Spielberg. Like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Powder is a Christian allegory: Powder is the Saviour who offers
himself up for our mortal sins and failings. At a key moment, he even spreads
out his arms in a gesture of crucifixion, like Kevin Costner did on the back of
a horse at the climax of Dances with
Wolves (1990). You get the idea.
But
even more influential here is someone more Spielbergian than Spielberg: Bruce
Joel Rubin, who wrote the very popular Ghost (1990) with Demi Moore, and directed My Life (1993) with Michael Keaton. Rubin also
scripted the intriguing supernatural fantasy Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and, lo and behold, there is an elementary
electrical device called a Jacob’s Ladder in Powder. The distinguishing feature of Rubin’s work is its earnest
pop mysticism-spirituality. The religious feeling in his scripts and movies is
a little Christian, a little Eastern, very Hippie, extremely New Age. Rubin,
like Powder, shies away from actually
mentioning God or any other deity. In place of any such explicit reference,
there is a constant eulogy to the material energy of the universe, and
especially to dazzling white light – a very Spielbergian trait.
In Powder, energy is the thing. We are all
particles of energy (so we are informed), all interconnected, never truly
dying, just dispersing. There is a whole spiel about evolution – how Powder
represents the next peak in our developing cycle. Ripley works quotations from Albert
Einstein into this discourse concerning how, one day, humanity may finally get
the evolutionary upper hand over deadly technology.
Needless
to say, Powder is an astonishing
wish-fulfillment fantasy, straining so hard to touch the heavens – with its
overwrought orchestral music (by Jerry Goldsmith, no less!) and blinding beams
of light – that it completely falls to bits. It is one weird movie, truly akin
to a piece of naïve art. The story lurches all over the place: skipping or
condensing certain key plot areas, concentrating obsessively on others. Not the
least of its oddities is Goldblum himself, a sublimely daffy duck. With his
out-of-body hand gestures, postures and vocal intonations, Jeff is something of
an alien or evolutionary freak himself. Only he could have embroidered and
delivered the deathless line of dialogue to which I’ve already alluded: “He is ... [pause] … electrolysis. Drink
that in!”
But
what really, finally, motivates all the wish-fulfillment fantasy in Powder? I do not think it is the ozone
layer, or the Bosnian war, or urban crime, or any of the usual macro news
topics that get us worried and desperately dreaming of a Better World Tomorrow.
What drives this movie is, I believe, something altogether more intimate and
personal. So let me cast my line out here: Powder is a crypto-gay film. I do not mean by this that the director has secretly
worked some gay message or allegory into his movie; nor am I saying that the
film inadvertently reveals the sexual orientation of its maker – that’s not
important here. What I am saying is that, for whatever reason, there is an
intense, subterranean, truly cryptic gay fantasy at work in Powder.
Let
us look at the evidence. There are key female characters in the film – Jessie, plus
the teenage girlfriend, Lindsey (Missy Crider), that Powder very briefly has –
but they are so pale and vapid in dramatic terms that they count for almost
nothing. The scenes with them are few, brief, too condensed. In short, there is
no conviction invested in them, as characters or as women. They (and the
situations in which they are prominent) play like obligatory movie clichés,
handled perfunctorily – a stolen teenage kiss, or the vague ministrations of a
nurturing mother-figure.
What
the film does get very intense about, however, are the emotional exchanges
between men. There is a very charged scene where Ripley touches Powder on his
hands and face, and the young man cries in a great release. And let us not too
quickly forget – although I am sure a lot of viewers will blot it out as soon
as they see it – the entirely unmotivated scene where Powder finds himself
captivated by the sight of a sports jock at a wash basin, taking his top off.
That seems like an explicitly gay moment – but the film seems to erase it, and
its implications, as soon as it appears.
Why
does this cryptic gay fantasy matter? What is its charge? The explanation for
this lies in the film’s veritable obsession with the fraught relation between fathers
and sons – a topic that seems extremely close to the director’s heart. There
are no less than three father-son pairs, and they are based on exactly the same
relationship model. In all cases, the father rejects the son – in one case with
extreme emotional violence, in another case with extreme physical violence.
We
see Powder’s own father, Greg (Phil Hayes), present at his birth. Seeing this
little monstrosity with his albino skin, the father repeats angrily, “He’s not my
son!” – and that’s the last we ever see or hear of this Bad Dad. Another
teenage character, John Box (Bradford Tatum), is an aggro, homophobic jock.
Powder sees into his soul and knows that the violent taunts he uses are exactly
the same as those his father used on him as a prelude to violent beatings (a
touch of William Friedkin’s Cruising [1980] here). In both these cases, Powder gets so worked up, so
expressionistic, that death, thunderstorms and fatal bolts of lightning simply must be present.
The
third instance of the father-son theme is only slightly more on-the-ground. It
concerns a cop, Doug Barnum (Lance Henriksen, who appeared in Salva’s previous
film), and the son from whom he’s estranged. When Powder is able to be the
medium, or perhaps the angel, for Barnum’s dying wife, she is able to tell her
husband that she cannot leave this world without him and their son making up.
Then we get – virtually out of the blue – an intense father-son reunion
embrace, a gesture that, supposedly, instantly wipes out a lifetime of pain and
rejection.
Taking
all this in, I am led to think that the identity of the young men in this movie
– sexual identity included – is in a state of wild flux, and that their
damnation or redemption as individuals is totally dependent on the approval or
disapproval shown by their fathers. And it is that kind of primal oscillation
in the male psyche between being something and being nothing that creates, as a
heady spin-off, the gay fantasy – an intense, desiring identification with
other men.
That’s
the type of only half-conscious projection going on in Powder, and it’s pretty fascinating for what it is. Drink that in!
MORE Salva: Jeepers Creepers © Adrian Martin February 1996 |
