L.A. Plays Itself in John Boorman's Point Blank

Point Blank (1967) is as much about the pathos and the existential malaise of the alienated gangster as it is about a whole city and its physical, as well as financial, infrastructure. The film starts out as a tale of revenge -a gang of three  consisting of Walker, his wife and his partner, intercepts a money-drop operation in an abandoned Alcatraz and Reese, the partner, runs off with Walker's wife and his share of the money, shooting him and leaving him near dead in  an abandoned cell. Having woken up from dead, Walker swims to escape. Some years later, we see him contemplating the view of Alcatraz and talking to a mysterious man who orders him to kill various people, to reach whom he would have to pass through Reese and his late wife's sister. 



Yet Lee Marvin's dead-pan, almost stoic Walker barely shows any feeling or reveal any motivation. Yes, there are moments of remembrance or repose, when a still melancholy comes over our lonely hero, but those are almost always accompanied by an intense restraint in Marvin's acting. And what's poignant is the sense that Walker doesn't really belong to this place and his immense, ghostly loneliness, like that moment when he's standing in front of his deceased wife's grave, unmoved, like a statue, his head framed almost ironically like a comic strip against the shiny green grass of the cemetery and the sunny cityscape of Los Angeles.


In this sense, Point Blank is a mixture of Jacques Tati's Playtime (released around the same time with this one) and Antonioni's L'Eclisse. It mixes the physical alienation of the former with the spiritual alienation of the latter, and, like both films, does this mainly through a skillful usage of architecture and space. Never as slapsticky and caricatured as Tati or as self-serious and gray as Antonioni, Boorman adopts to the unique feeling or texture of the city he's working in. So, Point Blank becomes a sun-drenched noir, set against the saturated world of comics and advertising and the tasteful products of high fashion and design. 


And like the physical world around him Walker is also unable to penetrate and understand the workings of a dubious corporate organization called, well, 'The Organization.' Adrian Danks, in his eloquent and insightful article on the film say that

Point Blank is by no means the first film to deal with the corporatisation of criminality – The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939) and such late 1940s noirs as I Walk Alone (Byron Haskin, 1948) already start to make this move – but it combines this thematic preoccupation with a revisionist abstraction of the codes, iconography and geography of the genre. In the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films narrativise this shift but Point Blank is more concerned with the abstraction of physical space and temporality that accompanies such a change. Late 1960s Los Angeles ultimately provides a kind of Purgatory that Walker needs to pick or bludgeon his way through. But although Walker is a very physical presence who metes out some form of violence to many of the characters he meets, as well as whole range of inanimate objects, he is actually not directly responsible for any of the multiple deaths that pepper the film. Although he is a key catalyst for these “events” to occur, the deaths are equally facilitated by the hard-edged modernity of the world that defines these characters. Like such later figures as Elliott Gould’s Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973), Walker is a man who is in the moment and explicitly out of time, a propulsively physical force and a “vaporous”, almost angelic vengeful essence. The streamlined minimalism of many of the film’s “environments” facilitates Walker’s seemingly straightforward quest, but this simplicity belies the considerably more complex structures (of power, finance, etc.) that are not mappable or readable onto these spaces.

Finally, if Point Blank's abstractions can be called cubist -and many scenes are constructed with a disregard to proper angles and rules of narrative filmmaking- it paves the road to another abstract gangster film, one that concerns itself with cubism and modernism, namely Jim Jarmusch's Limits of Control. And, although I can't articulate it, I would like to finish by saying that there is an interesting aspect of loss and elegy in the latter, which might be revealed through a comparison of the two films to be something quite significant.

The Ecstasy of Those Who Hump Trash

It would be inaccurate to call Trash Humpers a movie. It is more like a psychedelic Nuclear bomb dropped in the middle of suburban America, not doing any damage to the houses, garages, or the parking lots but destroying all sense of language and narrative, leaving behind only a detritus of words, ballads, stories, and actions. Yes, Trash Humpers is stupid if stupidity is a lack of intelligence, intelligence being in the end the mastery of language and narrative. Oh, and Trash Humpers is definitively insane if sanity is a fetish of language and narrative, a condition in which we perfectly repeat the sentences and the stories we are taught and be good boys.

However: I know I sound punk and anti-establishment and all, which is a period Harmony Korine might have gone through in his younger years, but Trash Humpers is the work of no angry teenager. Behind all the vandalism and the havoc and the regression is no simple protest-for-protest's sake. Rather, there is a Korine behind the camera who, as distressed as he might be, is free and secure, and who longs for a particular sensation of ecstasy, the revelation of a certain primordial truth.

What that truth is I can't say, but there is just a sheer, intense wonder at watching them masked people wearing beige khakis, polo shirts and snow white sneakers hump trash cans and destroy old, yellow sofas and tube-televisions in empty parking lots and light firecrackers on abandoned highways and drive around the neighborhood and lament the sadness of suburbia in mumbled falsettos with incomplete sentences. Every image feels viscerally true, without resorting to any idea, symbol or metaphor. It is made all the more immediate as Korine, shooting hand-held with a VHS camera, bypasses anything that might resemble a cinematic, aesthetic language. He just pushes REC and shoot what the hell happens in front of his camera at that given moment.

The result is a found tape that is at once familiar and otherworldly. It is familiar because we have seen this landscape in numerous anonymous home videos and otherworldly because, well, it is quite strange. And this is not unlike the films of another great American filmmaker, David Lynch. Although they are quite different at first sight, I think they follow a similar road in portraying America as a strange, uncanny landscape where a feeling of violence lies behind the most mundane things (for a much more eloquent description of Lynch's cinema see David Foster Wallace's piece on Lost Highway). And Trash Humpers is precisely the unleashing of this violence, which eventually turns into a pure spectacle filled with joy, anger, sadness, and, revenge. Pure not in a kind of restrained aesthetic sense, like pure cinema or something, but just a more immediate, direct access to the essence of the American experience.

Only Cinema Has Wings

Death looms over Howard Hawks' 1939 Only Angels Have Wings. Following a company of air mailmen led by Geoff (Cary Grant), the film is set in a distant and unidentified trading village in South America, surrounded by high mountains, the dark ocean and a thick fog. Although home to natives and visited by the passengers of a cruise ship every week for a few hours, the village is pretty much isolated. Reading these words one might imagine something exotic or idyllic, but no mistakes, Hawks paints it as a foggy and claustrophobic landscape, in which the pilots have to fly with outdated equipment in the harshest of conditions. We know there is an ocean in the village, we hear of ships arriving and going, but we never the see the ocean itself, save for one shot of a ship emerging from behind the fog at night, where the water is nothing but a shadow. And by the end of the film it is this shadow we remember with regards to the sea, much like the mailmen who have left their past lives behind as they did the ocean, for ever, like a self-imposed exile to purgatory.

Self-imposed it is, like rest of the famous men in Classic Hollywood. The men go after their ideals, obsessions, loves, or, they don't even have to go after anything. It is at its core a self-destructive, irrational move from the known, the habitual, the home to the unknown, to the dangerous. Yes, this is a part of Hollywood's masculine mythology or its mythology of masculinity. But there is always something poignant in this mythology and the best of these films underline just that. It is poignant, because what this leads to is ultimately man's confrontation with his own mortality, their always being on the brink of death, flirting with it, waiting for it.

And in the film where every flight is a stand-by ticket to the other side (Kid, a blinding veteran pilot says on his deathbed: Go outside, I don't want anyone to see me dying. I hadn't let anyone watch when I was flying solo for the first time neither), flying acquires such a beauty, as if, watching from the airplane, we are seeing the land for the last time. The special effects of the film look surprisingly seamless to the contemporary viewer, but there is more to it: In the way Hawks, an aviator himself, shoots and constructs the air scenes there seems to be a hesitation to move towards the merely spectacular. There is a kind of restrained choreography to these scenes that goes beyond the WOW!, to somewhere deeper where a flying airplane acquires a meaning, a profundity of it own. The more you watch the more elevated you are.

Finally, the film's beautiful and ever-meaningful title: Only Angels Have Wings. What a better way to phrase man's weakness at the face of the sky!