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Light of Day
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I’m
pretty sure it’s not just the vision, swimming in my tears, of Gena Rowlands on
her deathbed that has me declaring Light
of Day – originally slated to star Bruce Springsteen in the ‘70s, under the
title Born in the USA – to be among
the best and most important films of the late 1980s, and unquestionably one of
Paul Schrader’s finest.
What
a strange road writer-director Schrader had to take – through the five-finger,
mannerist exercises of Cat People (1982) and Mishima: A Life in Four
Chapters (1985) – to get back to what he did first and best: the naturalism
of Blue Collar (1978).
On
the baseline levels of structural elegance and observational authenticity, Light of Day is stunning. Certainly, as
a largely downbeat dramatic essay on the relation of music and its pleasures to
an everyday lifestyle – the dream of making it, and then making a hopeful
career of it – Light of Day shows up
David Byrne’s True Stories (1986) for the dreadful, patronising document it is.
Schrader’s
vocation is deeply naturalistic. As an artist, he has always been more of a
problem-solver than an expressionist; he takes to problems (such as how to
construct a narrative exposition, how to craft dialogue exchanges that pick up
both narrative and thematic threads simultaneously, and how to keep stylistic
procedures unobtrusive) like an old pro.
But,
given that naturalism (or classical narrative realism, as we tend to call it
these days) is usually, on both formal and ideological grounds, conversative,
then Schrader’s real investment is in bending this naturalism into an
expressive and symbolic form (as he did so well in Blue Collar).
The
typical realist movie is dedicated to a notion of the given, the universally
human, the ‘what just is’. Light of Day certainly rehearses a few realist verities of this sort: life is a matter of
constant change; after the dark night of the soul comes the light of day; the
necessity for compromise and compassion.
But
Schrader understands here – like John Cassavetes or James L. Brooks – that naturalism can both lay out the limits of the
familiar, and then also expand, subtly and powerfully, what can be thought,
imagined and represented within (and beyond) those limits.
This
is why Light of Day is, ultimately, the
story of a (fundamentalist) family, where the key moments involve a
breaking-down and going-beyond the set, cosy, familial situations – moments
such as Joe (Michael J. Fox) sharing a bath with his young nephew, or
confessing to his sister, Patty (an absolutely spellbinding Joan Jett) that he
compares all girlfriends to her – and where the tale’s generic identity is
finally revealed to be skeleton-in-the-closet melodrama. The massive
gear-change in the drama is not a flaw (as some took it to be), but the source
of a true profundity.
Light of Day struck
some reviewers, on its release, as an unwieldy hybrid of rock’n’roll teen movie
and family melodrama. But this view misses a lot. Throughout, Schrader plays a
quiet, cagey game with generic expectations – approaching and then
appropriating those conventions that a realist movie is meant not to be aware
of.
He
uses the heightened, affective possibilities of the kids-in-a-band teen movie
as deftly as he dampens down Fox’s star energy – thus creating at film’s centre
a brave, complex mediation between the two principal, semantic poles of the
fiction.
The
symbolic war at stake here is between two ways of living: “common sense”
(relying on traditional structures, morality, ethics) vs. “an idea” (living
passionately, for and in and the moment). The conflict and resolution of these
two life-styles is neither clean nor smarmy but, on the contrary, rough, messy
and heartbreaking – and still, somehow, finally optimistic.
Patty
looks at her mother on that deathbed and says: “I’m not sad”. She means it; but
she also cries. Both Patty and her brother sing at the end:
I’m a little
hotwired, but I’m feeling OK.
And I got a little
lost along the way.
But I’m just around
the corner in the light of day.
Light of Day earns its
tears and its joy.
tracking Schrader through better and worse: Affliction, Auto Focus, The Comfort of Strangers, Touch, Patty Hearst © Adrian Martin May 1987 / January 1993 |
