FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD (1988)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


After three films which focused on Tommy Jarvis as a "Final Boy" protagonist, the FRIDAY series finally circles back to the "Final Girl" syndrome with which the series began.  Further, it features one of the few times Jason would encounter a power comparable to his own, making NEW BLOOD one of the few "combative dramas" in the series.  BLOOD has often been dismissed by the summation: "Jason Meets Carrie."

There's considerable potential, both realized and unrealized, in BLOOD's scenario.  Whereas Stephen King's CARRIE is primarily about the conflict of a young girl with other females, both her mother and her high-school peers, telekinetic Final Girl Tina is a "daddy's girl" brought into conflict with one of horror-cinema's foremost "momma's boys."  A flashback, which takes place at Jason's Crystal Lake stomping-grounds, reveals how young Tina's powers burst forth one day when she sees her father strike her mother during a quarrel, and not for the first time.  Young Tina steers a boat out into Crystal Lake while her father harangues her to come back to the dock.  Tina's frustrated aggression lashes forth in a burst of telekinetic power that causes the dock to collapse, drowning her father.  We later learn that his body was never recovered from the lake, which seems more than a little improbable but proves necessary for the climax.

Seven years later, Tina is taken back to the cottage at Crystal Lake by her mother and her psychologist Doctor Crews.  Like Tommy Jarvis, Tina has been in and out of psychiatric institutions that have been unable to cure her trauma.  Crews, a believer in shock therapy, convinces Tina's mother to take Tina back to the scene of her trauma.  Ostensibly this is to give Tina some healing closure, but it later comes out that Crews wants to bring forth her telekinetic powers in full force.  He doesn't seem too worried that he might suffer the fate of Tina's father; apparently he's consumed with the desire to demonstrate her psychic powers to academia, though it's never very clear why he believes that this will lead him to fame and/or fortune.

Tina, whose unresolved feelings for her father are in play, senses a presence within the lake, and thinks that it's her father.  Her psychic powers awaken Jason, chained to the bottom of the lake at the end of Part Six, and he breaks forth, immediately going on a rampage.  Following a pattern cemented in Part Four, Jason menaces two houses: one full of disposable, party-happy teens, and one containing a loose approximation of a typical nuclear family, in which Doctor Crews' authority has taken the form of the Heavy Father.  Eventually both Tina and her mother break free from this authority, but for roughly half the picture Crews convincingly maintains that all of Tina's sightings of a hockey-masked killer are just hallucinations brought on by her guilt-complex. 

Since "Carrie" takes up so much of the narrative, Jason's mythology isn't given much development here, beyond the motif of certain Jason-victims having a trauma that mirrors Jason's own.  I haven't attempted to chronicle the variety of murder-methods used in the FRIDAY films, but BLOOD has one of the weakest selections thus far, apparently in line with a producer's dictum to lessen the bloodiness of the franchise.  This can be seen in the executive decision to adumbrate the best murder-scene in the original film.  In the original release, Jason grabs hold of a sleeping-bag with a helpless victim inside, and bashes it against a tree six times.  In home-video versions, the bash-count is reduced to one smash, which seems a rather silly limitation for a series predicated on extreme violence.  In addition, I'll note that in this film and the next one, Jason has been given more ghoulish makeup during his brief unmasking-scenes. Perhaps this was a natural response to the fact that he'd been under the water for several years, but I suspect that the real reason was to keep selling new forms of ghoulish makeup to the FANGORIA enthusiasts.  That's not entirely a bad thing, since those fans supported the Jason franchise, but I personally just didn't like them.

I suppose one could make a very loose case for viewing BLOOD as an "anti-patriarchy" film.  Tina's father tries to maintain his authority through violence, and is punished for it when Tina unleashes her witchy abilities.  Jason, who is archetypally more of a "son" than a "father," also uses violence, though it's not to establish any sort of authority: merely to satisfy his unquenchable anger against everyone who had a more normal life than he did.  Yet though Jason is repeatedly battered by all the objects Tina hurls against him-- including a fire that destroys the cottage where the original father-violence took place-- he isn't defeated by her psychic powers in a direct sense.  Instead, when during the climax Jason faces off against Tina at the Crystal Lake dock, Tina somehow senses the dead body of her father beneath the lake and calls him forth as a sort of zombie who drags Jason back into the water.  There's no elaboration as to why this stops Jason, though one must assume it works in the same manner as it does in the last film: it forces Jason to re-experience something like his original near-death-by-drowning, so that he again falls into an undead immobility.  One may view this as the "good father" of Tina's memories triumphing over the "bad father" inherent in Jason's masculine violence-- though Jason's violence lasts long enough to kill both Tina's mother and her other "bad father," Crews.

On a minor note Tina also vies with a nasty socialite for the favors of a hunky guy, which plot-thread has a loose resemblance to certain events in CARRIE.  But all of the teen-victims are thoroughly tedious cannon-fodder, so the film gets no mileage out of their psychological and sociological makeup.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VI; JASON LIVES (1986)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

Some fans and critics don't like the development of Jason Voorhees into a near-invulnerable psycho-killer.  Since Jason the Uncanny Psycho became more and more unlikely to survive with each new film in the series, I don't mind at all.  JASON LIVES, written and directed by Tom McLoughlin, is easily one of the best Jason films.  Since it succeeds far more than previous entries in using the slasher-subgenre for purposes of grotesque humor, LIVES can be seen as one of the forerunners of the "metahumor" motifs later employed by SCREAM and its ilk.

Tommy Jarvis is once again the viewpoint character, but he's somewhat more complex this time out.  The last few seconds of the previous film, which suggested Tommy had finally donned the Hockey Mask of Hate, have been annulled in this continuity, and he's responsible for no deaths save those of the original Jason and Jason's impostor.  However, though he's released from the asylum, Tommy's still consumed with the desire to end his history with the mad killer.  Not satisfied with knowing that Jason is still dead, Tommy and a friend journey to the renamed town of Crystal Lake, seeking out Jason's grave, where Tommy intends to burn the killer's corpse to ashes.  In a development clearly borrowed from the Universal FRANKENSTEIN series (there's even a "Karloff Hotel" referenced later on), Jason's corpse is revivified by a chance lightning-strike.  Undead Jason rises from the grave and begins a new killing spree. 

Tommy, riddled with guilt at having created a near unstoppable menace, tries without much success to enlist the help of the local constabulary.  In one of McLoughlin's strongest contributions, the young man promptly gets on the bad side of a bunch of dumbass cops, particularly the sheriff, whose pretty teen daughter Megan takes a shine to Tommy.  Megan is a member of a new group of camp counselors assigned to reopen the camp, which is scheduled to receive its first new campers in years: all gradeschool kids this time.  She also becomes Tommy's only ally against her own father, who plays such a butthead that it's a disappointment that he doesn't buy the farm.

As repetitive as it may seem to return Jason to the lake once more, McLaughlin makes it work, particularly when Tommy has the unexplained intuition that the only way to kill Jason is to make him drown again.  Once Jason has been made invulnerable, there's no longer a need to continue the "transference of evil" motif, but in a sense the new motif becomes that of finding some chink in the Hockey Horror's armor, even though in most entries he's fated to live through whatever climactic end the puny humans can devise for Jason.

The climax, which like Part Four owes more to action-suspense visuals than those of the pure horror film, is perhaps the strongest such set-piece in the series.  There's not a lot of psychological depth here compared to the original film, but to some extent the focus on "metahumor"-- in particular having the stoic murderer encounter such human absurdities as paintball games-- functions to compensate.

FRIDAY THE 13TH: A NEW BEGINNING (1985)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Because FINAL CHAPTER made a lot of money, the franchise's producers naturally okayed a new entry in the saga of Jason, slice-happy stalker.  As noted in the previous review, the script left a loophole open, so that the signature hockey-mask might be worn by a new psycho-killer.  However, though the script does bring back the character of Tommy Jarvis, it does allow for a certain amount of mystery as to whether Tommy has taken up the Jason role.

The scenario advances four years after the events of Part Four.  Tommy Jarvis is now a young teen, but his trauma has caused him to be transferred to various institutions over the years.  The fate of his sister and mother is not explained in either film, though an alternate ending reveals that the mother was one of Jason's (unseen) victims.  As he checks in with his new place of residence, a halfway house for the mentally disturbed near a woodsy area, Tommy has hallucinations that Jason has come back to life and is stalking him.  This seems to be the first Jason film to gravitate away from the Crystal Lake area, though it keeps the woodland setting that works so well for Jason's "hunter" persona.

A brutal murder takes place when one of the disturbed patients takes an axe to another.  There's no mystery about this slaying, but it opens the genie's bottle, and soon more patients are being murdered by a ruthless, hockey-masked killer.  Is it Jason, returned from the dead?  Or has traumatized Tommy assumed the role, as the end of Part Four suggested he would?

Without going into detail, it's neither.  The killings are serviceable and the mental patients-- some of whom are as randy as the standard "teen-kill" victims-- make an interesting change of pace. However, the director claims that his bosses told him to constantly goose the screenplay with either actual murders or "false starts."  This has the effect of making BEGINNING seem like a hyperactive child, and so gives the audience less time than ever before to empathize with any of the characters.  I suspect that since FINAL CHAPTER had made money, someone in the head office was leery of making money with the red-herring-killer approach, and misread the appeal of the FRIDAY series as being about nothing but constant shocks and scares.

The script does work in a "final girl" of sorts-- a minor "keeper" at the halfway house-- but she doesn't emerge as a distinct character.  Even more than in FINAL, Tommy is the central protagonist (once the audience learns that he's not the new Jason), and he's almost entirely responsible for the defeat of Phony Jason.  However, he's further traumatized once again, and the film once more puts teen Tommy in the position of being the new Hockey-Mask Murderer, though he's not seen to definitively kill anyone, except in a dream-sequence.  Slight though the ambivalence was, it proved foresighted, for the relative failure of BEGINNING proved that Jason was a character whose mythic origins had become important to fans, and not just an empty mask into which one could stick any old psycho.

FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS


Some critics regard FINAL CHAPTER as the real conclusion of the FRIDAY series, even though it was later continued by other means.  On the DVD commentary the director, writer, and editor all agree that they were instructed to kill Jason Voorhees for real.  At the same time, the writer attests that some of his more extreme ideas for the death of Jason-- having the fiend's head blown up or split open-- were shot down by producers.   That ambivalence may have cued the filmmakers to leave open a potential new avenue for the return of Jason, or at least his moneymaking icon.  

While I wasn't overly taken with this psycho-slasher by director Joe Zito, it's a huge improvement over his 1981 slasher THE PROWLER.  The characters aren't any more complex than in any of the earlier films, but the script allows for a few touches of humanity, as when little-kid protagonist Tommy finds himself "sandwiched" by his mom and his sis.  It's also interesting that despite the tendency of FRIDAY-filmmakers to assert that they followed the slasher-craze in a slavish fashion, they break from the "final girl" pattern that dominates the first three films, simply through the addition of grade-schooler Tommy Jarvis. 

It's true that the general pattern stays the same.  Directly following the events of Part III, which concluded with Jason getting an axe in his neck, his body is transported to a hospital near the killer's usual Crystal Lake stomping-grounds.  This is the first time Jason recovers from a wound that ought to kill a non-supernatural man.  The supernatural is not yet evoked, though, so so one must presume that everyone's favorite hockey-masked hobgoblin was simply not as severely wounded as it appeared.  Jason kills a couple of hospital employees and slogs back to the general area of Crystal Lake.  However, since Jason has just finished off a new group of victims at the camp proper, Jason proceeds to seek fresh game in a couple of nearby suburban houses: one of which harbored the three family members mentioned above, while the other contains a gaggle of party-hearty teens. 

The variety of victims-- both horny teens and a stable family-- makes Part Four much livelier than Part Three, and Zito and Co. develop some outstanding set-pieces, not only for Jason's bloody murders but also during the attempts of "final girl" Trish (Tommy's sister) to escape and/or kill the psycho.  However, the film's viewpoint character is young Tommy.  At a point when Jason is about to kill Trish, Tommy apparently "channels" the strategy used by heroine Ginny from Part II, and shaves his head so that Jason will think of Tommy as some sort of kindred freak.  This made more sense in Part II, where the script foregrounded Jason's absolute devotion to his mother, and was therefore half-deceived by Ginny's imposture.  Still, it's a viscerally appealing scene if it doesn't make much sense, and gives Tommy the honor of being the first protagonist who definitively kills the original FRIDAY menace.  Corey Feldman, not yet a "name" at the time, contributes a vivid performance as Tommy, and stuntman Ted White makes one of the more formidable Jasons.

The final scene suggests that Tommy has been so traumatized by the night's events that he may well become the new Jason.  In Part Five, the script does follow up on Tommy's trauma in a roundabout fashion.  This device is the only reason I rate the film's mythicity as "fair," because it follows up on the "transference of evil" motif established at the end of the 1980 original.

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART II (1981), FRIDAY THE 13TH PART III (1982)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

Following the surprise box-office success of FRIDAY THE 13TH, the film's producers had to come up with some way to make a sequel. Their problem was in essence solved by the end sequence of the original film. I noted in my review that the "final girl's" dream-sequence, wherein she was attacked by the corpse of the drowned boy Jason, was almost certainly just the filmmakers' imitation of CARRIE; a last jolt on the thrill-ride. 

Since Mrs. Voorhees was definitively decapitated while the audience never actually saw Jason die, a recrudescent Jason was the logical choice.  The idea that Jason somehow survived his drowning and became a "wild man" surviving in the woods around Crystal Lake doesn't line up well with Mrs. Voorhees' rock-solid certainty that her son is dead.  Further, for Part 2 to work, one must presume that not only is Jason alive, he also happens to be watching when his mom gets wacked in Part 1, since he picks up her head, carries it to his isolated shack and makes a shrine of it. 

A similar inconsistency appears early in the film, when two counselors in the forest come across the body of a dog that's been torn apart, implicitly because Jason fed on it.  A sheriff shows up right behind them-- and somehow doesn't see the dog's remains.  Later the two counselors conceal the truth from their peers, while the sheriff continues to act as if he never saw the dead dog.

Those points made, consistency is far less important to me than mythopoesis, so I quite enjoy the sight of Jason worshipping at this shrine to maternity while killing off the new arrivals at Camp Crystal Lake.  Part 2 flirts, as did the first film, with the Oedipal currents best articulated in PSYCHO.  Similarly, Part 2's teenage victims--  a new group of camp counselors sent in by some over-optimisitc owner not too concerned by the massacre's bad publicity-- are still relatively realistic despite their simplicity.  However, in order to build up the audience's anticipation of the new menace, the new camp counselors suddenly start talking up the legend of Jason's survival, how he still lives in the forest-- a legend never heard anywhere in FRIDAY PART 1.

To respond to the usual imputations of a "sex vs. death" theme in the FRIDAY series, it's still not as clear here as some critics have insisted.  Indeed, Jason's first two victims are not teens at all.  One is the creepy looking old bike-rider from the first film, and the other is the aforementioned sheriff, who's brought in to establish a suggestion of authority overthrown by Jason's savagery.  Since Jason has no ability to speak-- though he may or may not be a mongoloid idiot as in the first script-- one can't tell if he's entertaining some "repetition-compulsion" involving his failure to save his mother, or if he's just killing randomly, along the line of Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN.

There's definitely a greater attention here than in the first film to supplying set-pieces of slaughter.  It's long been suspected that some or all of the filmmakers had some exposure to translated Italian giallo films, and FRIDAY 2 seems to confirm that, since Jason's most famous kill here-- impaling two lovers with a long spear-- resembles a murder-scene in Mario Bava's 1971 BAY OF BLOOD.  The most interesting psychological angle is that heroine Ginny ruminates over what Jason would be like had he survived his drowning and witnessed his mother's death. Later, when she invades Jason's maternal shrine and Jason overtakes her, Ginny speaks to the killer by speaking as if she were Jason's mother, confusing him long enough that she and one of her friends can retaliate.  This identification between Ginny and Mrs. Voorhees resonates well with the first film's end scene, where heroine Alice imagines Jason as still alive, just as Mrs. Voorhees had.

So Part 2 is relatively coherent in terms of launching a new psycho-franchise.  What about Part 3?

FRIDAY III (available in 3D, though I only watched the 2D version) is the start  of the franchise's long descent into mediocrity.

True, it's in this film that the filmmakers lucked onto the perfect iconic rendition of Jason.  In the previous film he hid his deformed features beneath a cloth bag, but here he hits upon the much more memorable hockey mask, which became his signature image from then on.  At the same time, Part 3 also loses whatever formal interest the other films showed in the  psychology of the psychos involved.  Jason becomes a killing machine, and the teens start getting dumber and hornier.  One of the "teen types" who makes his first appearance in this franchise is that of the "prankster," a character who allows filmmakers to indulge in all manner of "false scares" as a counterpoint to the real perils.  There is also much more talk about sex, and it's tempting to believe that after the filmmakers listened to the distortions of the film's critics, they decided to ratchet up the horniness to greater levels in order to fulfill audience expectations.

Only Chris Higgins, the "final girl" here, has much in the way of backstory.  Since she doesn't have any connection with the bloody camp where both Jason and Mrs. Voorhees conducted their reigns of terror, and since the events of Part 3 take place just a few days after Part 2, the scripters posit that Chris encountered "wild man Jason" in a forest two years previous to the timeline of Part 3.  During that encounter, Jason attacked Chris and tried to carry her away.  But here too the spectre of inconsistency looms, for earlier-Chris loses consciousness and then simply wakes up at home, with no idea how she survived the ordeal.  Presumably the scripters didn't worry too much about that little detail.

Though the victims and their killings become more routinized, the growing conflict between Chris and her monstrous antagonist-- some might say "alter ego"-- remains viscerally strong.  A couple of times Jason comes very close to emulating the feats of his later superhuman persona, particularly when he squeezes a man's skull so hard that the guy's eyes pop out!  Yet, in a conclusion designed to suggest that he really dies this time, Chris finally plants an axe in his skull.  In the movie's final shot he's seen well and truly dead on the ground, suggesting that the filmmakers were ready to call it quits with the franchise at that point. To be sure, Chris hallucinates that he's still alive, and dreams that she's in a boat being attacked by Mrs. Voorhees, but this time these dream-devices seem forced, as if the writers were already running out of ideas.

IRON MAN 3 (2013), THE WOLVERINE (2013)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *poor,* (2) *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*




SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS




I didn't have much to write about IRON MAN 3 when it first came out, since it was easily the least impressive of the Armored Avenger's three outings.  But this weekend's viewing of THE WOLVERINE gives me a new take on the "wrong way" and "right way" of current Hollywood's rendering of franchise superheroes.

From the POV of a longtime comics-reader, Hollywood has improved mightily since the days of such dubious gems as the 1977 SPIDER-MAN teleseries.  In earlier decades most live-action film and television adaptations of comics properties showed a cheery indifference to the original stories.


The success of the 1989 BATMAN, freewheeling as it was, validated the eclectic approach of its scriptwriters, borrowing what worked in the original stories and crossbreeding those elements with the standard Hollywood format of the "big loud action picture." 

That said, it's not hard to find examples where Hollywood scripters made only token efforts toward adapting original comics-stories.  For instance, both FANTASTIC FOUR films reduce the stories they adapt into a dumb-show of meaningless plot-points.  The 2008 IRON MAN pumped new life into the genre, finding a clever way to update the themes implicit in Iron Man's origin-story for the internet generation.  The second film was considerably less insightful, but some of its best moments stemmed from the script's take on the "Tony Stark, alcoholic" storyline.

Though some of the early publicity for IRON MAN 3 touted the presence of the Mandarin as the film's villain, the scripters of IRON MAN 3 probably congratulated themselves on producing a witty "deconstruction" of Iron Man's Asiatic antagonist.  To justify the SPOILERS above: there is no real Mandarin; he's an actor hired to project a phony, Osama-like presence as a superterrorist.  I have not read the 2005-06 IRON MAN "Extrenus" story-arc, so I can't say how closely the film hews to that original, but in this film the villain behind the phony Mandarin proves to be little more than "Wolverine crossed with the Human Torch."  It might be impossible to render a "yellow peril" menace like the original Mandarin for modern audiences, but the poor excuse for a major villain here shows contempt not just for the original stories, but for the superhero genre as well.

Similarly, IRON MAN 3 is the first film in which the hero perfects a new and showy ability to have parts of his armor automatically fit themselves upon his body from afar.  Call me old-fashioned, but I like a hero who presents a somewhat stable appearance and set of powers when he takes arm against a sea of troubles.  As if to mirror this disintegration of the iconic status of Iron Man, Tony Stark has yet another twitchy mental breakdown.  He also whips up a small army of robotic Iron Men and in a pinch causes his flying armor-sections to engirdle fiancee Pepper for purposes of protection, rather than following the tried-and-true "heroic rescue."

I might approve these assaults on iconicity if IRON MAN 3 was a satire on superheroes. But in a film that's selling the excitements of superhero action, they add up to nothing more than Hollywood hackwork.

WOLVERINE, however, is more like the original IRON MAN than either of the armored sequels, in that it chooses eclectically from assorted "Wolverine" and "X-Men" stories, but rearranges their elements to produce a vivid new story.  Characters like Viper, the Silver Samurai, Yukio and Mariko Yashida are all altered radically from their comic-book versions, but thanks to the script's sensitive treatment they acquire as much or more symbolic resonance as they had in the comic books.

One major alteration is that whereas the comics-Wolverine was, in the course of his evolution, given an extensive acquaintance with the culture of Japan, Hugh Jackman's Wolverine's first (and superficial) encounter takes place in World War II, where he saves Japanese soldier Yashida from the atomic blast of Nagasaki.  Many years later, Wolverine is summoned to Japan by the same man, now old and dying of cancer.  Though the hero is still suffering bouts of survivor guilt due to being forced to kill the berserk Jean Grey/Phoenix, he agrees to follow the gamine-like Japanese psychic Yukio to Japan.

I won't give away further elements of the plot, but suffice to say that Wolverine is drawn into the expected conflict involving both a plot to kidnap (or kill) Mariko Yashida, heir to the Yashida fortune, and a plot to drain Wolverine of his "healing factor" and the concomitant-but-unwanted immortality it confers upon the hero.

While I'm not of the critical persuasion that believes that stories must be essentially "realistic" to be good, it's something of a plus that one can imagine some elements of the story transpiring without the fantastic devices, much as if someone had tried to make a modern version of Samuel Fuller's 1955 Japanese noir HOUSE OF BAMBOO.  And that's not to say that there aren't a few dubious plot-points in WOLVERINE.  However, whereas IRON MAN 3 simply lets its plot-holes flap in the wind with lofty indifference, director James Mangold and his scripters paper over the (minor) cracks with a studious attention to character interactions-- particularly those between Wolverine and his destined paramour Mariko.  The contrast between the raffishness of Wolverine (Mariko calls the shaggy-looking hero a "caveman" when she first sees him) and the elaborate customs of Japan is one that Mangold plays to good effect.  In addition, the action set-pieces-- at least one of which is clearly borrowed from the Claremont/Miller WOLVERINE graphic novel series-- are fluidly realized.  WOLVERINE is one of the few films I've seen that manages to use "shakicam" techniques to convey thrills rather than to call attention to the "artiness" of the diegesis.

In contrast to the overblown X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, this movie deserves to be regarded as the definitive Logan film to which any further entries in the franchise should aspire.  That said, the closing "teaser" suggests a future project that will allow for a more X-tensive X-pansion of mutant heroics.

  

PAYCHECK (2003)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, sociological*

Continuing my attempts to suss out the multifarous ways in which the works of Philip K. Dick have been adapted to film, I arrive next at PAYCHECK, scripted by Dean Georgaris and directed by John Woo.  Woo and Georgaris choose to channel Dick through Alfred Hitchcock, albeit a Hitchcock beefed with a lot more car-chases and physical fights.  The results are not totally unpleasing, since both Dick and Hitchcock were masters of anxiety, but the script unfortunately fails to deliver on its potential.

Without dwelling too long on the 1953 Dick short story of the same name, it's actually one of Philip Dick's least anxiety-filled short stories.  Central character "Jennings" is an engineer who takes an assignment to work on a secret project: in return for a fabulous paycheck, he agrees to have his memory wiped clean of everything that happened during his employment by the project.  To his surprise, Jennings' paycheck is an envelope full of various value-less items.  However, over time Jennings finds that these items all place a vital role in his survival.  He eventually deduces that he has had recourse to a time-piercing device, allowing him to send his to his past self the very items he would need to survive.  The conclusion is more upbeat than a majority of Dick stories, in that Jennings's reward for his investigations takes him from being a simple employee, a cog in a corporate machine, to partnership in the secret project and marriage to the boss's daughter.

Whereas the Dick story deals in part with a time-device that can literally "scoop" objects from one period to another, in the movie the device only allows individuals to see their futures.  But it isn't just one company that pays the protagonist-- given the full name "Michael Jennings" here-- to have his memory erased after his work for them. Rather, in Jennings's era it's standard practice for many companies when dealing with outside talents.  The viewer sees Jennings go through the mind-wiping procedure once on a minor job before he even signs up for the assignment vital to the main plot. 

While the character of the short story is largely a cipher, Georgaris makes a partial attempt to give this Jennings (Ben Affleck) a consistent character.  This Jennings is something of a "player."  He wants a big paycheck to pay for his expensive tastes, and is willing to sacrifice his memories because he believes that only life's "highlights" are important.  When he meets female lead Rachel Porter (Uma Thurman) at a party, and feels a genuine erotic spark between them, he invites her, in all sincerity, simply to have quickie sex with him, since he considers the game of courtship a waste of time.  Rachel demurs, and shortly later, Jennings agrees to an engineering assignment lasting three years.  However, thanks to the mind-wipe he loses those years, and on top of that, is rewarded not with the sizeable paycheck he expected, but an envelope full of seemingly useless items.

As in the short story, Jennings is then pursued by the law, who want more information about the secret project, and who are none too gentle in trying to probe his wiped memory.  Since this  film portrays the future cops shows them as having no restraints on their inquiries, one may wonder if the writer had the 2001 Patriot Act in mind when he wrote this scene-- though, in contrast to the Dick story, the cops are shown as redeemable at the end of the Woo film.  After Jennings escapes from the cops through the use of some of his "value-less" items, he begins to seek answers.  And one of the people who ends up helping him is Rachel, who just happens to be a biologist working for the same company.

The strongest gimmick in the film is its borrowing from Dick: though Georgaris changes the particular items in the protagonist's "paycheck" in order with a very different route to the truth, the film is most challenging in providing the context for all of these foreordained items. However, the addition of the action-heavy "set-pieces" detracts from the mystery this time.  I won't say, like the more elitist critics, that the addition of heavy action is automatically a minus.  Frankly, I like the 1990 TOTAL RECALL better than the rather dull Dick story on which it's based.  But this time, the set-pieces seem de rigeur, as if John Woo felt that he had to serve up a certain number of them to please "the John Woo audience."

Georgaris' early script is set up to show early Jennings the error of his ways: to reveal to him the importance of love.  He experiences with Rachel during his employment at the project, but though he loses that memory, he recovers the emotion through his re-alliance with her.  He also comes to realize that the time-device which he reverse-engineered into working status is morally wrong; that it leeches away humankind's ability to regard the future with fresh eyes.  These are interesting themes not present in the Dick short story.  Unfortunately, Georgaris doesn't manage to sell Jennings's transformation.  In contrast to the example of Hitchcock's films, whose writers could suggest a multifaceted background through a few well-chosen sentences, Jennings is too flat in the beginning to create any conviction in a personality capable of such transformation, and Rachel is no better.

The action-elements also create another disharmony.  It's just barely believable that this version of Jennings, despite his engineer background, can prove competent running around doing action-stunts, since an early scene depicts him practicing martial arts with a bo-staff.  But the film also shows biologist Rachel doing stunts almost as outrageous, and makes no attempt to provide an explanation, unless one should think it's "the power of love" at work.

Since the film does have a strong protagonist and a strong villain, I considered that it might be deemed an adventure.  But on consideration, I found that the conflict between these two characters was of less significance than the dramatic love-affair between Jennings and Rachel; ergo, I rate PAYCHECK as a combative drama.