Dream
Double Features

The tagline of Hackers, the 1995 cult classic about connection and community among early dial-up freaks, reads, “Their only crime was curiosity.” Twenty-three years later, this should have been the tagline for Unfriended: Dark Web. (Instead they opted for “Death wants some face time.”) A sequel to the surprise Blumhouse success Unfriended, Dark Web is a nasty low-budget movie about video-chatting to death. It ditches the supernatural elements of its predecessor—the two are related in title only—for a conspiracy-heavy plot about horrible deeds committed for bitcoins by a faceless, all-powerful cabal of internet sadists. It’s DeLillo for Twitter eggs: men in small rooms + a plot racing deathward in 90 mins. You’re already on FaceTime, you’re already on Zoom, you’re showing your solo friend in Silver Lake the pale ciabatta loaf you baked alone in your dismal Crown Heights kitchen—why not watch the horror movie that exists only in Skype and Facebook windows, set during a virtual game-night between physically disconnected friends? Watch it on your laptop, stoned, for best results.

Chase it with Hackers, the optimistic and naively rebellious grandparent. There is no score and barely a soundtrack in Dark Web, but Hackers features some of the most beloved British dance music in history. Dark Web has no stars, but Hackers boasts a teenage Angelina Jolie in her first leading role as Acid Burn, to say nothing of Matthew Lillard, playing Cereal Killer, in braids and crop tops quoting Corinthians, or Marc Anthony as an FBI agent, undercover at a Manhattan houseparty and body moving to Stereo MC’s. It’s candy-colored fun, the excess of alt youth and the adorable speculation of an almost 40 year-old British filmmaker imagining what cool New York high school kids like to do. Listen to actor Renoly Santiago: “Before filming, we had two weeks of rehearsal….It wasn’t really rehearsal though, it was more learning how to rollerblade and learning about computers.” A film where the young cast hung out together, shiny in latex, mastering rollerblading and Pentium chips while listening to Orbital’s “Halcyon and On and On.” We had such a world once.

If it's the end of the world, it's time to stop depriving yourself of the finer things. I find myself drawn to spectacle and high style in the bleakest of times, like Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1981 French thriller Diva and The Great Muppet Caper, Jim Henson's directorial debut released that same year. It wasn't until recently that I discovered an uncanny synthesis between the two. Diva is revered as one of the films that ushered in the 80s wave of cinéma du look, and Muppet Caper possesses—by sheer coincidence—a similar romanticism of style. Diva tells the story of a postman who makes an illicit recording of a world-famous soprano who's never been caught on tape, and he inadvertently gets wrapped up in a more dangerous crime that sets him on the run of his life, from the Parisian police as well as the corrupt Commissaire's private henchmen. In Henson's film, Kermit, Fozzie, and Gonzo are news journalists pursuing the story of stolen jewels from the London atelier of the great fashion designer Lady Holiday, whom Piggy impersonates in order to seduce Kermit. Both films feature stunning motorcycle sequences: in Diva, the postman Jules is chased on a moped through the Paris Metro, and in Muppets, Piggy lands on a motorcycle that falls off a truck and crashes through the big glass window of the world renowned "Gallery Mallory" museum. It's intriguing that Henson and Beineix could have each uniquely arrived within the same ravishing aesthetic milieu with two radically divergent audiences in mind. Almost 40 years later, I think they can cater to the same viewer, craving a jolt of excess glamour in a moment of gloom.

The ultimate self-isolation/deadly-pandemic combo might be The Omega Man (1971) and Repulsion (1965), a strict binary yin-yang double-feature. The Omega Man is a macho sci-fi fantasy, in color, about the last man on Earth, barreling in a muscle car through a deserted Los Angeles by day, avoiding infected freaks by night, falling in love with a revolutionary and sacrificing himself for the future of humankind. In Repulsion, Roman Polanski’s arty black-and-white horror film, Catherine Deneuve shuts herself up in her apartment, scrubs at her teeth, vomits at the smell of meat, fantasizes about being raped, tries to avoid her lecherous landlord, and, as she slips further into mental illness, gives way to her homicidal impulses. Such cinematic extremes fulfill atavistic psychological needs during a time of crisis like the one we’re in. However, I’d like to offer a more humane double-feature that might provide an explanation about how we got here, where everything went wrong, and what we will need if we ever get out of this.

First, in Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Jim Jarmusch presents a black-and-white world of cell-like rooms and large empty voids. Ava (Eszter Balint) arrives in the Lower East Side from Hungary to stay with her cousin, Willie (John Lurie), a diffident hipster who plays cards and bets on horses for a living. He resides in a tiny studio apartment that is furnished only with a bed, a cot, a table and two chairs. When he goes out, he insists Ava stay there, watching TV, and not go out. Later, they end up in Cleveland and Florida. Despite the differences in climate, they find only post-everything landscapes wherever they go, and Ava ends up isolated in a drab motel room just like Willie’s apartment in New York. What’s the difference, when there is nothing?

A key scene finds Willie and his friend, Eddie (Richard Edson) driving past a bus stop. They slow down so Willie can sarcastically ask for directions to Cleveland. The man he calls to (Richard Boes), forlorn and clutching his coat at the neck, scoffs and replies, “Give me a break, man. I’m just goin’ to work.” “Where do you work?” Willie asks. “In a factory,” he answers. They drive off, chastened. Willie and Eddie may be small-timers, but at least they don’t work in a factory.

Stanley Donen’s all-color, all-singing-and-dancing 1957 musical, The Pajama Game, choreography by Bob Fosse, takes place in a garment factory about to go on strike for a seven-and-a-half-cent per-hour raise. Doris Day, head of her union’s grievance committee, falls in love with John Raitt, the factory’s new manager. Even so, he fires her for starting a work slowdown, and she dumps him when he doesn’t support the raise. The film presents a world in which labor is empowered to effect change, bosses are revealed as cheats, and the yearly company picnic is a riot of colorful skirts, sports uniforms, and shared food and beer (those last two things present in Stranger Than Paradise as cheap and pathetic). Of course The Pajama Game has a happy ending. Let’s look forward to a day when there will be a picnic like the one in this musical, a post-corona world where the people working in warehouses and grocery stores get their due, and there will be something to sing and dance about in a public park, outside the confines of smartphones and TikTok.

In some ways, now, all my time goes to wanting. Deep in the thick of what-ifs, false starts, and careening inertia, it’s all erotics of possibility, all the time. I want for me, for all of us: security; sanity; a new civility. The despondence inherent in wanting lamentably eclipses its eroticisms: I aspire to transcend and build, but most often I find myself plainly thirsty and miserable.

Here, where the denuding is too ugly to go it alone, enter two griots of yearning: Claire Denis and Apichatpong Weerasethakul regularly locate ecstasy in the articulation of wanting’s many vulgarities. Through their lenses, all our grievances are gilded, goading, imperative; contending with irreconcilability at the limits of the practical world, Denis’ cinema rests at the altar of human impulse detailing a plucky and seductive corporeality, while Apichatpong homes in on the human propensity for wonder with surrealistic, heady concoctions that stress-test the boundaries of social reality. To be human, both insist, is to be philosophical.

At opposite ends of their filmographies lie two such surveys of sentimental excess: Apichatpong’s Blissfully Yours (2002) and Denis’ High Life (2018) offer peculiarly twinned stories of confinement and longing, profiling the sedated and the medicated under existential duress. Apichatpong's protagonist Min ambles alongside survival, enduring a punishing skin ailment and the threat of deportation as an undocumented Burmese immigrant in neighbouring Thailand, whereas the death drive abounds for Denis’ motley space shuttle crew of convicts prone to life-destructive impulse on a likely-futile interstellar mission. Offering potent antithetical commentaries on the natural world—a balm and place of refuge in Apichatpong’s universe, but a hostile unknown in Denis’—and sexual gratification—shared, healing, and transformative for Apichatpong, while solitary, clinical, and commodified for Denis—both films intricately examine conundrums of desire and societal fit circumscribed by regulatory concerns, querying into the simultaneous splendour and hell of communal arrangement.

At the movies, all our ugly longing is punctuated by hallucinatory bliss. Or Juliette Binoche.

If you’ve exhausted your supply of escapist comfort movies and want to head in the extreme other direction, allow me to suggest two movies that may feel a little too close to reality right now but maybe in a cathartic way? It has become clear that we are now living in the Paul Verhoeven fictional universe, so why not dive on in? Starship Troopers (1997), based extremely loosely on the Robert A. Heinlen sci-fi book, satirizes the military, propaganda, nationalism and xenophobia. Verhoeven, who grew up in the Netherlands during Nazi occupation, creates a fascist fantasy world to demonstrate how hollow and ridiculous it is. There’s a whole scene copied shot for shot from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will, but played as farce. “War makes fascists of us all,” is how Verhoeven described the movie’s message, showing how the good will and fear of nations can be easily bent into xenophobia and racism. It’s so funny some people didn’t even get the joke, and thought it was an endorsement of right wing militarism rather than a takedown. Meanwhile Total Recall (1990), is based (also loosely) on Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” about a Martian human settlement where poor people are denied basic elemental rights like oxygen because the rich creeps in charge hate them. Total Recall is also super funny, in a dark dystopian kind of way with a great lead performance from Arnold Schwarzenegger as the construction worker who buys a virtual (?) vacation to Mars. At the very least, these movies will give you something to think about, and might have you wishing for Total Recall’s virtual reality mind-implant travel agency to be briefly real.