II a progressive rise of the tension.
1-une simple and recurring structure which dominates it
spectator.
1.1- seminal works with work synthesis: towards
a definition of Carpenter receipt.
Carpenter forms part this category of realizers film enthusiasts
who express a visceral love for art that they try out as much like realizer
that like spectator : Carpenter is thus prompt to convene the long list of
films or scenario writers who influenced as well his work as the construction
of his personality. He answers thus for example (28) a journalist asking for
the list of his favorite films to him : « Only the angels
have Wings of Hawks, thanks to its stylized romanticism, and to its
fatalistic side which [him] likes much. The Quatermass Experiment
(the Monster) and Quatermass 2 (the Mark) of Valley Guest.
Both Quatermass terrifying, are turned with a ridiculous budget in black
and white, environment is really atrocious there... Rio Cheer of
course, the Big sleep for its cynicism... The Red River,
Hundred dollars for a Sheriff of Henri Hathaway... Chinatown de
Polanski... The Injury of Friday of Hawks because it is amusing... The
list would be too long. » The list would be too long... Can one
however try to define a restricted number of seminal works, which carry in them
the germs of work carpentérien to come ? One obviously notes at
Carpenter the influence of scenario writers as Jacques Tourneur (Go with the
fear) for his capacity to be played on the out-field and the suggestion ;
Sam Peckinpah (Dogs of Straw) for the capacity to build a progressive
tension bursting in a fireworks of final violence, and also for this capacity
to be freed from the system (« I am a rebel as Sam Peckinpah was it
in the past. I assert this title. » (29)) ; Hitchcock, to which
it pays homage in Fog : « in the two films [Fog
and the Birds], a population is found subjected to a strange plague.
Moreover we turned some plans in Bodega Bay, the city that Hitchcock used to
turn the Birds. It is a small strange seaside resort, located in the
north of California. » (30). It will even go (chance or voluntary
choice) until employing Janet Leigh, mother of Jamie Lee Curtis but especially
victim of the very famous scene of shower of Psychosis...
However, more still than the above mentioned list of scenario
writers, if I were to retain only two names having posed the bases of the work
of Carpenter, I will choose Howard Hawks and George A. Romero. De Howard Hawks,
Carpenter already retained of course Rio Bravo, which was for him an
experiment founder of its desire to make cinema : « Then, in
1959, at eleven years, I discovered Rio Bravo. All the city fought to go
to see this film, I wondered what that could mean. I was not any aware of the
system set up behind all that, but I said myself that something
D `enormous was woven down there, and I wanted to form part of it. At that
time, my father offered a small camera to me and I put into practice, or at
least I tried into practice to put the ideas which passed to me by the head.
The result was null. Nobody will never see my first attempts.
Never ! » (31). It is quite naturally that after Dark
Star, pastiche of 2001, the Odyssey of Space and film of end of
study inflated for an exit in room, Carpenter will decide to be directed, with
unconsciousness characteristic of the beginnings, to carry out its own version
of Rio Bravo. Learning that it will not have the budget necessary to
treat to horses, it writes in eight days a scenario transposing the diagram
hawksien within a contemporary framework while taking as a starting point a
quite real news item. It makes Attack a contemporary version of Rio
Bravo, but also entirely will structure its work around the fundamental
lessons which it draws from its film-reference. Thus, which it retains mainly
of Hawks, it is the patient construction of a situation of threatened waiting
(in Rio Bravo, John Wayne and Dean Martin, representatives of the law,
prepare during the essence of film to the attack of gangsters wishing to
release one as of their retained captive) which will serve as revealing for its
characters : John Wayne learning how to open in the world and the love,
Dean Martin finding his dignity by exceeding its original fault with knowing
its dependence with alcohol. However, Carpenter would almost seem to be able to
re-use this system ad infinitum (Attack, The Thing, Prince of
darkness, Ghosts off Mars...) while reinventing it constantly in
detail and sets of themes : for example, in Assaut, Carpenter exceeds the
model hawksien, because if Rio Bravo exposed from the start the identity and
the objective of the killers, the suspense being built at the time of the
attack, Assaut voluntarily leaves in waste land ambitions and identity of the
gangsters, Carpenter conferring a fantastic and metaphorical dimension in this
connection that there was not at Hawks. It will also retain its intellectual
guide an essential data of its catalog of films, work on the ambiguity of the
situations and of the characters, underlining at which point the border between
the Good and the Evil can appear thin, two extremes meeting sometimes even.
Thus, at Carpenter, cop and gangster, heroes and threat, Well and Badly are
never held well far one from the other : for more precision on this
concept, one can refer to the part III 2.2 of this study, entitled
« inversion which dissimulates a resemblance with human
monstrosity , a reflection on what makes Humanity. »
Lastly, last fundamental characteristic of the cinema of Hawks that Carpenter
employs on his account, the idea that it is in the action that the Man proves
his value, independently of its social or economic origins, each one among us
having in oneself the potential to transcend itself to achieve miracles :
the best example is John Nada, worker itinerant that a priori nothing
distinguishes from the remainder
mass of excluded that produced the system American
ultra-capitalist and who however, by his capacity to agree to upset its
reference marks and its way of thinking, then by its will to defend what makes
Humanity (capacity of initiative, freedom of thought and action) at the price
of its own life, will endorse the statute of Saver to the noblest direction of
the term. One could still raise of many quotations of less importance of work
hawksienne at Carpenter (for example, Bertrand Rougier (32) notices that in
Assaut Carpenter shows « until the cinematographic tics of the
realizer of the Big sleep and Port of the Anguish, as the
dominant position of the cigarette in any spiritual dialog attests
some » ; with in particular the famous gimmick of
Napoleon Wilson : « C you cuts has
smoke ? »). Lastly, it will be noted that like Hawks,
Carpenter tested itself, directly or indirectly (the western), to explore the
kinds for better renewing them.
Carpenter, in his work of scenario writer and realizer, borrows
also much from Romero. There is already of course in its films of many more or
less direct references to the zombie so expensive with Romero, this fantastic
figure obsessing particularly Carpenter: broken up leprous phantoms of
Fog and their ahead inescapable walk which points out that of Michael Myers
in Halloween, démoniaque character with the human appearance but
which neither alive nor died ; the pack cannibal which quickly crosses
Plissken in New York 1997 (to be noted besides that the musical
composition which accompanies this sequence was entitled by Carpenter...
« He' S still alive Romero » !!) ; had and
mutilated bodies of Ghosts off Mars or even extraterrestrial broken
up Los-Angeles Invasion ; moreover Carpenter voluntarily brought
the look closer to the invaders of that death-alive his model : «We
wanted that the aliens resemble the creatures of Zombie of George
Romero. Those represented already rotted characters, whom corrupted... But I
have fears that people think that the film put in scene thealive ones. This is
why I chose to accentuate the extraterrestrial side with metal eyes, in order
to robotize them. » (33) It will go even in this film until placing a
wink directly addressed to Romero when a TV diffuses the images of a disguised
invader discussing of the danger which represents the violent cinema of the
realizer of the Night of theAlive ones. But it is especially the social
speech of Romero who interests Carpenter ; indeed under fantastic cover of
entertainment and cinema of exploitation, Romero draws up an extremely
subversive metaphor, the decomposition of the corpses life income returning
directly to the deliquescence of an American company in end of race : it
should not be forgotten that the Night of Death-alive leaves on the
American screens for the first time in 1968, date symbolic system if it is.
Thereafter, Romero will not cease working and developing his matter through a
permanent rewriting of his work (Zombie, the Day of Death-Alive
and latest to date, Land off The Dead, whose speech on the social
fracture in the United States, machine to be created excluded, recalls, by a
curious reference of elevator, the speech held fifteen years more early by
Carpenter in Invasion Los-Angeles.). In same optics, Carpenter always
worked to create entertainments with a true bottom, developing in each one of
his films a reflection pushed on Humanity or the American company, perhaps at
the price of a commercial success which it too little met (with share perhaps,
to a certain extent Assaut and Halloween) taking into account the
quality of its cinema. He expresses a quite comprehensible bitterness of it
(34) : « I do not make sure films. Rather wild tricks. People
need some they ? Perhaps that in this moment they do not want to intend
some to speak. One pushed back many dates of exits. Still for inappropriate
contents. It is the American manner : you fold up, are
afraid ! »
Lastly, it will be noted that if Rio Bravo and the Night of
Death-Alive constitute seminal works, Ghosts off Mars, the last film in
date of John Carpenter, seems well to constitute a work synthesis in the
direction where it summarizes and synthesizes purely and simply with him only
almost the whole of his catalog of films. One thus finds there all his
leitmotivs and all his obsessions : work on the westernien kind (abandoned
mining, true phantom city of the kind ; spirits of Mars whose tribal
aspect directly refers to the Indians of America ; Martian topography
strongly pointing out that of rock...) ; bringing together enters the two
facets of the human nature (the collaboration of the cop, Melanie
Ballard and of the gangster, Williams desolation) ; changes of
tone (the brother which cuts the fingers in full preparation of the
battle) ; concept of viruses (spirits of Mars which are spread from one
body to another) ; closed space (they are besieged) ; concept of
confrontation and survival to ensure its domination (the spirits of Mars want
to recover their ground) ; the ambivalent position of the women (as well
carrying hope as the matriarchy adopted like political standard in the future
underlines it, that corrupted : Melanie Ballard takes drugs, WFP Grier
badgers it sexually) ; the political speech (a criticism of the
colonialist attitude and scorning of the United States)... Carpenter himself
regards this film (35) as « a mixture of what [it has] which been
able to make before (...) » : that to make after thus perfectly
having analyzed and having synthesized its own work ? Carpenter, having
the feeling to have made it tower of the question, considered one moment to
withdraw circuit definitively. Against any waiting, it however announced there
is little time to have started the preparation of a new enigmatic project,
temporarily entitled the 13th apostle.
1.2 - entomological glance and time in advance of
spectator.
One of the first and more obvious observation than one can make
in connection with the setting in scene of John Carpenter, it is that so to
speak it is not seen: indeed, with the vision isolated from a film of
Carpenter, without carrying out bringing together with the remainder of its
catalog of films, the spectator perhaps tempted to define the pure technical
cutting of transparency. It is a fact that at Carpenter cutting refuses to be
conclusive and is erased with the profit of the narration; moreover one can
indeed notice at his place a clear propensity with the use of broad or average
plans allowing to deliver a maximum of information (scenaristic or space) and
guaranteeing the narrative fluidity of the unit. Of course Carpenter does not
exclude the use of the tight plan (even if it would be interesting to take time
to count the average number of large plans per film in its catalog of films) or
of the effect (see for example the ultra-effective use of the camera-sight
in Assaut when the attackers seek a target): but it is important to note
the extreme importance which it attaches to the use of the each large plans.
Thus the insert is used only to give capital information, that it is of order
narration (a hand seizes a weapon that it will use thereafter) or other (the
insert on the package of cigarette crushed with ground whose is seized Snake
Plissken- Kurt Russell, symbol of respectful America of the personal freedoms -
that to smoke in fact, this activity being prohibited in film and being
disappeared in the fiction from anticipation New York 1997). This
parsimonious use gives only more smell to each use of the large plan, which
created there a true visual shock at the brought spectator, even unconsciously,
to wonder about the reason of its presence: for example, it is often used to
translate a form of violence. Two examples will be noted: first of all in
Los-Angeles Invasion, when the character of John Nada attacks the
television broadcast station charged to retransmit the waves being used to
control the population. Nada takes by storm the station by eliminating the
extraterrestrial ones on its passage. A regular assembly connects sizes plans
and broad plans of Nada which advances and drawing and the very large recurring
plans from the gun of its weapon spitting of the balls: these large plans
underlines the violence of the company of Nada, and in particular for the
witnesses of the scene because it should not be forgotten that in film the
extraterrestrial ones are dissimulated under a human appearance that only the
resistant human ones (whose Nada) can bore using special lenses. Also for the
employees of the station in ignorance, Nada is quite simply insane-furious
drawing on the innocent ones. It is this violence received by the witnesses who
is development here. Violence which is also that received by the spectator:
indeed, Nada is equipped with special lenses which enable him to detect the
enemy, but the spectator him, is not it. Of course, it is informed of this
reality by the means of the scenario and the setting in scene (use of
subjective plans of Nada seeing the extraterrestrial ones), but in this
sequence, in the absence (voluntary) of the use of subjective plans, the
spectator really sees... only one man who shoots at other men. And like already
magnificiently showed it Brian De Palma, with the cinema what the spectator
sees it is what is. There is for the spectator a truth of the image, and in
this sequence it cannot differently receive the action of Nada than like
violent, adopting in spite of him the point of view of the dormant mass judging
the resistant ones as criminals whereas they represent their only chance of
freedom.
One will be able to also note another example of this type of
meaning use of the large plan at Carpenter in the Fog film: at the time
of the attack of the leprous phantoms on the boat with the accesses of Antonio
Bay, the sailors see to approach a strange fog which decimates them one by one.
The last sailor does not see the fog behind him, from which is extracted
phantoms which attacks it with a hook. follow a series of very large plans
successively on the weapon then on the part of the connected bodies struck cut,
this cutting expressing the suddenness and the brutality of the attack. There
one finds in fact a direct reference to the cutting of the scene of shower
of Psychosis with his succession of very large plans connected, the
visual shock of cutting being the exact one during visual of the violence of
the act. It is known that Carpenter regards as major the influence of Hitchcock
on his work, even if Hawks and Romero remain his two greater sources of visual
and scenaristic inspiration: moreover, this scene of attack is not the only
reference to the Master of the suspense in Fog, Carpenter having chosen
to turn some plans in Bodega Bay, the city used by Hitchcock as tallies for his
film the Birds.
This quasi-systematic recourse to broad or intermediate values
of plan makes certainly it possible Carpenter to register his characters in a
space (and one can the importance of space at his place- see part I-) but also
makes it possible to the realizer to be posed as an omniscient narrator, and
even more as a demiurge observing his characters struggle in the situations
which it A creates. However, these situations will appear genuine catalysts
suitable to expose all the faults of the characters then to enable them to
exceed them, and it is in that that the glance of Carpenter appears perfectly
scientist and entomological: the broad plan is to locate the characters
compared to space but also the ones compared to the others, it is to pose
physically (distance/proximity, gestural...) the reports/ratios of force and
the bonds which link (or precisely divide) the characters. Thus, one will be
able to take the example by Storm, where the characters are brought
physically, by their placement with, like very precisely the expression says
it, «to choose their camp»: when dissensions are felt on the strategy
to adopt, the operator of the police station comes to put herself at the sides
of the policeman in order to mean that it chooses to grant her confidence to
him, and of course Carpenter chooses to film them in average plan, the
policeman leaving at his sides within the framework a space which the operator
will come to fill who makes his entry in the field. As Rafik Djoumi concerning
and the Village Prince of darkness notices it of Damnés,
the use of the broad plan, and in particular of the cinemascope, «allows
constant reports/ratios of force between the groups and the individuals the
screen» (36). The cinema of Carpenter it is thus also that: to place
characters in a restricted space (Attack, The Thing, Ghosts
off Mars...), a restricted temporality on which weighs a kind of countdown
(Vampires and contamination of Baldwin which progresses, the character
of the Trent in the Cave of the Madness which must carry out its survey
quickly...) and even both at the same time (as in New York 1997, where
Plissken is locked up in New York and is contaminated by a virus); then to
observe their reactions and to finally draw an analysis from it from the human
nature, nature which appears in the crises. Thus, as we will see it again
later, the subject of the cinema carpentérien, behind the fantastic
cover, it is the Man, and perhaps even more precisely the American man and his
place in the paradoxical American company.
However, as we said, to observe the human nature, it is
necessary to place the characters in crisis. It is with a certain jubilation
that Carpenter builds these crises patiently, taking time to realize its
characters while posing the stakes of confrontation to come. In the beginning
of Attack, an alternate assembly shows us on a side the various
protagonists (the policeman, the father and its daughter...) to evolve/move
within a daily framework (the agent in patrol, the father and the girl in the
car) while on another side we see the threat being specified (the gang meets,
is armed, ballade is conveyed some in the search of a target...): that makes it
possible Carpenter to build a psychological base for its characters (the agent
of return in the district of its childhood, from now on in prey with violence,
the attachment of the father for its daughter and the concept of responsibility
whom it develops in his connection...) while preparing in an inescapable way
their meeting with the threatening force (the gang), the father of family being
used as hyphen between these two universes, since, continued by the gang it
will come to take refuge in the police station entrusted to the policeman. But
Carpenter is even further involving the spectator in the jubilation of this
installation via the use of the suspense and the dramatic irony: while always
leaving a time in advance to the spectator lasting this preparation, this
installation of the events, it makes it quite simply accessory to its
entomological step. Thus the spectator knows some more than the characters...
That is to say. But how that does it appear?
Firstly, there is additional information that Carpenter delivers
to the spectator, in particular by the means of the assembly. In
Halloween, one finds many demonstrations of this phenomenon: when Jamie Lee
Curtis finds in car with its friend, assembly makes us to pass successively
from interior of car where girls laugh and discuss, outside car, which enables
us to note that the car is followed by another car, conveys that we saw being
stolen by the killer little time before. During this time, the girls they do
not suspect nothing... Moreover all the construction of film rests over these
times in advance of the spectator: during nearly one hour we see the killer
observing Jamie Lee Curtis, then when it is turned over, he is not there any
more. But if it does not know, the spectator knows to him... What sometimes
makes it possible to involve it in false tracks: thus when the baby-sitter goes
in the wash-house, the spectator, knowing that the killer grinds, expects that
it is made attack (what is also announced by the rhythmic musical one
associated to the killer). However it will not occur anything: Carpenter poses
his rules of the game, but does not hesitate to redefine them when that sings
to him, thus preserving its capacity to surprise the spectator. Always from
this point of view of time in advance of the spectator, one will note that
Halloween is a very good illustration of the use the depth of field at
Carpenter, which is often used to dissimulate a threat with the character all
while delivering it to the spectator: one will quote the plan very famous,
having often served as visual for film, where one sees Jamie Lee Curtis Net in
the 1st plan, face camera, army of a knife, and in the depth, blur, the threat
Michael Myers to approach in his back.
Secondly, there are the indices that Carpenter enjoys to deliver
to the spectator: they are not strictly speaking information, but they direct
the vision that is made the spectator of measuring, founding an unquestionable
tension. In The Thing, Carpenter makes a very particular use of the
figure of the dog recovered by the team of scientist. In the masterly opening
of film, we see Norwegian scientists in the helicopter continuing a dog in
order to cut down it: this surrealist situation takes all its direction in a
plan which will intervene later with the court of measuring. Once the dog
recovered by the American scientists, this one walks freely in the station.
However, when Mac-Ready- Kurt Russell returns from the Norwegian camping, a
plan of a terrifying simplicity shows us the dog looking at the return of
Mac-Ready in an almost human way, as if it included/understood what it does
without and the stakes this return. The whole accompanied by rhythmic musical a
repetitive door of threat. In a plan, Carpenter makes sensitive the higher
intelligence who lives this animal, and the danger which it represents,
illustrating the matter even film: appearances are misleading... Later, when
the scientists understand that this dog is not really what it seems to be and
which they will wonder about the people exposed to the contamination, the
spectator him will remember that it entered the room of the one of the members
of the team, Carpenter choosing to cut the sequence into molten to the black at
the time when the shade of the latter turns to the dog. While thus exploiting
the out-field and the suggestion, the realizer lets function the imaginary one
of the spectator with full mode, the manner simplest and most effective to
cause the anguish... Lastly, in the list of the subtle indices delivered by
Carpenter, always in The Thing, one will be able to note the following
example, raised by Rafik Djoumi (37): at the time of each monolog of Mac Ready,
«the camera panote on the faces of the protagonists and the words
«the thing» are marked when the camera passes on the actually
contaminated character». This effect rather anecdotic bus very difficult
to notice is in any case a good illustration of the twisted spirit and
calculator of Carpenter, who in his filmic construction randomly does not leave
apparently anything!
2 - Threaten suggested and principles of avoidance.
2.1- characters built on the mode of the observation:
to include/understand before facing.
One of the first principles of avoidance which one can note at
Carpenter, it is its quite particular manner to delay the confrontation between
the hero and the threat which weighs on him. And this quite simply because the
character carpentérien must initially carry out a work of study and
observation in order to seize (with the intellectual direction of the term) his
enemy ; it is indeed at the price of this study that the confrontation
will be able to turn to its advantage. The first stage consists in agreeing to
see the threat as such, Carpenter exploiting the very cinematographic
importance of the glance : in Halloween, if Laurie Strode feels the
Myers threat without never it to see during more half of film, it is also
because it refuses to accept the possibility that the Evil can exist. It is not
astonishing to note that only the children see initially the killer, because
what characterizes them is the absence of prejudices on reality and the
capacity to believe in the impossible one : in fact here the
croquemitaine. On the contrary, Laurie repeats inlassablement that
« the croquemitaine does not exist », to reassure
the children as much that to be convinced itself. It will be necessary that it
makes the experiment of a direct attack of Michael Myers for finally hustling
his certainty of adult and agreeing to call in question its perception of
reality, so that it goes, basically, of seeking in it its fears of child. One
finds the same thing in Fog : if small Andy Wayne (Ty Mitchell)
finds the piece of the cursed boat failed on the beach, it is because as a
child it agrees to believe in the manifestations of the irrational one.
Carpenter notices besides (38) that « it is not so innocent if in
these two films (Halloween and Fog), the children play a great
part. In a certain manner, the history is told through them. »
Even question of the glance in Los-Angeles Invasion : by
fitting this pair of special glasses that it finds in a paperboard, John Nada
discovers the back of the decoration, or how the whole company is handled by
invaders. But Nada, if it does not show the choice (the fact that it finds this
pair of glasses is a mere chance scenaristic) done at least that to believe. It
almost immediately accepts this upheaval of its certainty and its reference
marks and immediately chooses its camp, that of resistance, while awkwardly
trying to only eliminate with him all the invaders. It thus accepts a double
danger ; the first, according to Helene Frappat (39), is that to be seen
(by the extraterrestrial ones understands itself), since John Nada will
discover « that to learn how to see, it is to become aware to be
seen. The glance is always reversible : I see in so far as I am seen. And
being considering, it is to be likely to be killed (...) ». The
second, it is that to be « badly considering » :
indeed, the human ones not having the means of including/understanding the step
of Nada, this one cannot be perceived differently than as insane furious (in
particular when it enters the bank and kills the invaders with human appearance
coldly), which cannot that to still contribute to reinforce its statute of bet
and of excluded social. Franck, on the contrary, initially will refuse to him
to see : one will need a Homeric combat with Nada so that, equipped in its
turn with the famous pair of glasses, it agrees to see the world such as he is.
Helene Frappat (40) stresses that it acts « of a crucial inversion in
the middle of Los-Angeles Invasion, but also of all the work of John Carpenter
in what it has of subversive : inversion of the blind man who
acquires a glance, of the passive individual which decides to make a choice, of
the slave which becomes free- short, of the controlled individual who manages
to change the rules of the game. With the resulting one from this interminable
combat, John Nada can conclude : « my brother, a new life
starts for us ». » This first stage of the glance is
thus an essential stage according to John Carpenter. Let us let conclude it on
this subject : « the sight is without any doubt one of the most
important directions. But the directions, whatever they are, can produce a
strange feeling of reality. The hallucinations or the sight trouble are as many
phenomena which can lead the man to see something of different. With the
cinema, the glance is, obviously, something of fundamental. » (41)
Lastly, it will be a question for the hero carpentérien
of clearly identifying the threat, to include/understand
« scientifically » its operating mode for better fighting
it. It is because it understood that the mirror is the point of crossing
between the world of Anti-God and ours that the Loomis father, by breaking it,
can stop temporarily his advent (the Prince of darkness). It is because
it identified its biological characteristics that Mac-Ready and Blair (Wilford
Brimley) can develop a capable blood test to detect the presence of the thing
(The Thing). It is because Nada and the resistant ones understood that
the invaders use radio waves in order to control the human ones that they can,
while attacking their transmitting antenna, to reveal their true face with the
population (Los-Angeles Invasion). It is because it dealt with Myers
during fifteen long years that Dr. Loomis knows what this figure of the Evil is
able and how to face it (Halloween). It is finally because Dr. Al
Chaffee observed the child-invaders of Midwich patiently that it will be able
to resist to them by drawing up a true mental wall against their telepathic
capacities (the Village of Damnés). That which tries to face the
threat without to have taken time to study it cannot whereas to meet the
failure, and so death : thus, always in the Village of
Damnés, when the police force tries of éradiquer the children
cut off in the barn, they are put quickly at entretuer, handled by the
telepathic capacities of the invaders.
2.2- a delayed threat bus suggested and incarnated.
Let us note that if the threat can be observed and studied by
the character carpentérien, it is that before appearing frontally, it is
incarnated initially initially physically by effects on our world
scientifically observable. Helene Frappat (42) stresses that « the
work of Carpenter [always] attempted to prove the existence of the evil by the
effects which it produces ». Thus, in Fog, before the phantoms
do not go on the city, a doctor practices an autopsy on the corpse of one of
the sailors, this one carrying a physical mark (its body is broken up as if it
had remained extremely a long time in water) supernatural but scientifically
observable which was bequeathed to him by the fog malefic. In The Thing,
Mac-Ready brings back Norwegian camp a proof of the existence of the thing with
this body awfully deformed fruit of a fallen through change. This body, studied
by Blair, in addition to incarnating the existence of the thing, will deliver
invaluable information on its operating mode, which will make it possible to
fight it. In Halloween, Dr. Loomis proves the presence of Michael Myers
in the city thanks to the corpse of dog found in the given up house, corpse
which will allow him in same time to prove to the police officer the extreme
and free violence of the character, who as it will take care well to specify
it, « is not human » (« It is not a
human being. It is the evil in person. What lives behind this glance is only
the evil in a pure state. » « With man wouldn' T C that.
This is not has man »). Lastly, in Prince of darkness,
Arnaud Bordas (43) precise that the threat finds its incarnation physical
« in a corruption of the flesh which invades film literally. A
character is completely devoured by a multitude of carnivorous cockroaches,
while Calder cuts the throat of itself by means of a splinter out of wooden and
that a strange blue grows bigger on the arm of Kelly. This viral progression of
the evil, this contamination, is a trademark of Carpenter, and it gets busy,
in Prince of darkness, to develop all the richness set of themes of it.
The Evil, in its films in general, and Prince of darkness in particular,
is not an abstracted concept, it is a tangible reality which is printed in the
flesh and oozes of the walls. ». Concurrently to this physical and
concrete incarnation of the Evil by the effects which it produces, Carpenter
works with his suggestion via its setting in scene : one will not
reconsider the way in which Carpenter manages his representation of space to
impregnate the very whole city of the presence of Michael Myers, suggesting his
oppressive presence permanently. One can on the other hand quote the use which
it makes of wrongfully subjective plans in The Thing : when
Mac-Ready approaches the Norwegian camp, the camera, placed inside the camp
given up, behind the window, with breast height, carries out a light movement
of dolly accompanying the movement by the visitor, giving the feeling that
somebody (or something) is there and observes Mac-Ready. In fact, it of it is
nothing ; it is just about a false track employed to make feel with the
spectator the weight of the threat which weighs on the characters without
needing to materialize it physically. Lastly, one cannot quote particular
employment only made Carpenter of the music which it primarily composes by
itself (in the list of films that we retained, only the music of The
Thing was not composed by Carpenter ; it is the work of Ennio
Morricone), used to suggest the presence of the Evil which grinds close to the
characters : that it is the rhythmic musical one of Fog which
accompanies the projections by the fog or even famous melody 5/4 (five times in
a measurement) accompanying the boogey man by Halloween (and
which Carpenter holds of his father), the music at Carpenter becomes a
sufficient palliative with the physical representation of the threat : in
other words, even if they are not present at the image, the simple fact of
hearing the music which is dependant for them is enough for the spectator to
physically feel the presence of the phantoms of Fog or that of Michael
Myers.
This ambivalent use of the suggestion (which désincarne
and métaphorise the threat) and of the physical incarnation (which on
the contrary does not make it abstract but quite physical) brings closer much
the setting in scene Carpenter of the writing of Lovecraft : this writer
born in Providence (Rhodos Island) in 1890 and died in 1937, division indeed
this same ambivalence in its representation of the evil, representation which
is the heart even of its writing. On a side, it treats inexpressible
Evil and unnamable which can irremediably only be suggested
for the simple one and good reason that it exceeds the capacities of
intellectual apprehension of the Man. Of another, it constantly seeks to
express of them the physical, scientific effects on our world. As summarizes it
Michel Houellebecq in his study of Howard Philips Lovecraft (44) :
« More the events and the described entities will be monstrous
and inconceivable, more description will be precise and
clinical ». Carpenter, conscious of this formal filiation and
set of themes, will have several times semi-officially adapted the universe of
Lovecraft, in particular in Prince of darkness and especially in the
Cave of the Madness : besides on this subject, it admits (45) being
« replongé in the universe of Lovecraft before making film.
The cave of the Madness is indeed a history of Lovecraft without Lovecraft. It
is thus clearly about a homage to this novelist. I was not yet ten years old
that I read already The Dunwich Horror in my bed. And I was frozen of
terror to the bone. I quoted Lovecraft texto straightforwardly besides. When
Lynda Styles reads passages of the new book of Sutter Cane, passages that the
Trent will see materializing under its eyes, it reads in fact of the almost
exact quotations of texts of Lovecraft, of the Rats in the Walls in
particular.
3 - flow and backward flow, a sinusoidal structure.
3.1- the swing of the stakes.
There are at Carpenter an unquestionable talent to cumulate the
stakes and an obvious facility to be passed from the one to the other. As we
saw previously, there is a stake principal and essential in work
carpentérienne, it is that of survival. While analyzing of close his
catalog of films, one however realizes that it is far from being an exclusive
stake. Which are thus these other stakes?
Narrative stakes first of all. For the hero carpentérien,
there is always a bound principal search, as one said, with its survival: to
bring back the president or limp it black for Snake Plissken in New York
1997 then Los-Angeles 2013, to prevent the gang from coming to take
the father of family taken refuge in her police station for the Bishop agent
in Assaut, to escape the death masked for Laurie Strode in
Halloween, to discover which is «the thing» and how to eliminate
it for Mac Ready in The Thing, to find Valek the vampire for Jack
Crow-James Wood in Vampires or even to include/understand the operation
of the invaders in order to better push back them for Dr. Alan Chaffee-
Christopher Reeve in the Village of Damnés... But this principal
search will have for effect to make emerge a multitude of small secondary
stakes like as many obligatory stages to the realization of the principal
stake. Let us take the example by Storm: lieutenant Bishop decides to
save the father who found refuge in his police station, as from this moment, it
thus binds his own fate to that of this man. The principal stake of Bishop
becomes that of survival, stake which we will name stake A. to survive, Bishop
must resist the attacks of the gang during an unspecified time while waiting
for the reinforcements, and thus organize the defense of the police station
(stake B). However the defense of the police station can be made, but in the
single condition that Bishop manages to convince his/her companions of the
founded good of his step (to save this man that he does not know) and of its
strategy: it is the stake C Thereafter., realizing that it is likely not to be
able to resist sufficiently a long time, Bishop seeks a solution with Napoleon
Wilson in order to escape from their refuge which is not any more one (stake
D). One thus sees how principal stake and secondary stakes cross, answers
oneself and builds the ones compared to the others (in particular in the fact
that at Carpenter, very often the resolution of a secondary stake involves the
appearance of a new secondary stake, and that the dramatic resolution of the
whole of filmic work can be done only at the price of the successive resolution
of all the secondary stakes) contributing to maintain a level of dramatic
tension constant, without idle period. One will be able to also quote the
dramatic construction of The Thing, where Mac Ready in order to survive
must also solve a multitude of secondary stakes (to include/understand the
operation of the thing, how to eliminate it, to discover which is infected, to
convince that it is him even a «healthy body», to find a means of
preventing that the threat is propagated...), just like Dr. Chaffee in the
Village of Damnés (to approach the invaders for better destroying
them, finding how to resist their mental attacks...). To note besides that, as
we saw, to include/understand the threat is a stake secondary but necessary
that one finds within all the work of Carpenter.
Concurrently to this stratification of the narrative stakes,
other types of stakes appear, less waited but which find their place as much.
One will be delayed thus on a major stake at John Carpenter, the metaphysical
stake: indeed, to cross measuring carpentérien is also very often to put
to the test the concept of reality. Finally what does this word indicate? For
Carpenter it is an old question which «gives its definition to the
fantastic kind: how to know that what one sees or tests is quite real?»
(mad p.22) It is all the direction of this sentence of Edgar Al Poe placed
forward at the beginning of Fog: «is is Al that we see gold
seem goal has dream within has dream» («all that we see or
believe to see only one dream in a dream?»). Indeed, to exceed appearances
and to discover the true nature of the «reality» or of be-saying
reality in which it evolves/moves can prove to be a fundamental stage in the
step of the hero carpentérien: John Nada must thus fit by chance a pair
of glasses to discover that the world in which it evolved/moved and in which it
believed («I believe in America!» exclaim it naively at the
beginning of film) does not exist, or rather does not exist any more. The
ground is nothing any more but one mass of individuals apathetic and subjected
régentée by a race of extraterrestrial hideous and dissimulated
among the population. Consequently Nada must make close-cropped table of its
old reference marks and be rebuilt a reality: charge with him with carrying out
choices in order to determine how to place itself compared to this reality.
Some, such homeless people between outline at the beginning of film, will
choose to collaborate. Nada, will choose to him to die as a combatant,
determined to be excluded from this world of which it discovered that it was
only one lure. Even phenomenon at Laurie Strode who will discover that death
is dissimulated behind the apparent peace of small «a suburb»
American (Halloween), and especially at John the Trent, the private
cynical one and income of all, which will see its design of reality exhausting
itself as it will progress in his investigation. Indeed, John the Trent will
end up discovering that he is anything else only one character of fiction
invented by a démoniaque writer; the film is concluded besides on a John
the Trent out of nightshirt, in a cinema, looking at ravelling since the
beginning film of what it lived, realized by some... John Carpenter! The whole
in a loop probably without end, the absolute setting in abyme perpetual
undoubtedly absurdest and that it was given to see with the cinema... One will
note with which control Carpenter exploits the various levels of reality,
putting at evil the certainty of the Trent like those of the spectator: to see
for example the splendid oneiric scene of the car where the Trent seems to
unceasingly cross the same cyclist then where the car leaves the ground to find
on the other side of the tunnel, i.e., and the metaphor in is obvious, on the
other side of the mirror, where the border between fiction and reality does not
exist any more. This work of déconstruction of reality also passes by
the figure of the nightmare, appears ultra-traditional here revisited by
Carpenter thanks to subtle an artifice: The Trent makes a nightmare, then alarm
clock... in a new nightmare! Illustration with the word close to the remarks of
Poe referred to above, and manner of saying that it would be illusory to seek
to precisely define the limits of the reality in which we let us live, because
that escapes the capacities from reasoning from the human nature. Carpenter
does not tell to another thing to the beginning of his film the Prince of
darkness, when professor of physics exposes to his pupils the limits of
their perception of reality («drop what you believe being
reality!» exclaim it): he shows, through the example of
inexpressibly small (particles), which there are elements of which we are not
aware but whose science proves the existence. To be a scientist is to seek with
all to explain, but is as to learn how to accept as certain things can escape
to us. Because to want to apprehend the limits of reality at all costs can
prove to be dangerous, as will learn it with its depend John the Trent: the
film starts with its imprisonment in a psychiatric asylum, where it is regarded
as insane. However its apparently absurd speech will appear much more coherent
than envisaged, since the events will give him reason: the final one,
continuing the scene of introduction, quite simply will see to prove to be the
destruction of humanity. But the Trent, which knows the truth (if as well is as
there is a truth. as in an absolutely relative way one will specify it of the
characters, «the truth it is that we say true being». And
still, after all, all this is not it only another «dream inside a
dream», one moreover...), can it be regarded differently than as insane by
its pars? To accept its speech would amount calling into question the same
principles of reality, of our reality... Like precisely Stephan Moïssakis
says it, «which stage of Trent madness must it reach to prove in the whole
world its logic imparable?» Here is that John Carpenter starts again a
vast debate, and old man like the world: the insane ones, or regarded as such,
are the marginal ones, excluded from reality, or in a paradoxical way let us be
us, us them «healthy» people, with the margin of a reality which we
wrongly believe to apprehend, the insane ones becoming elected officials then,
a minority of beings which them «know»...
Lastly, behind these narrative stakes and metaphysics, are
played at Carpenter of the human stakes: reports/ratios of force, confidence or
distrust which are tied and are untied throughout film. This subject was
already tackled in the sections entitled «an agglomerate of individuals
which is built in the difference» and «to exceed the logic of
elimination to choose human being», also we will not be delayed above...
To note all the same how these human stakes can be found in the middle same of
the construction filmic (writing and put in scene) of Carpenter: it is the case
of The Thing, where the reports/ratios within the group are the
condition even of its survival, and more still the subject of film. We attend
permanent reversals of hierarchy, being able and confidence, Mac-Ready passing
for example of the statute of leader to that of potential suspect which one
seeks to get rid, each crack within the group precipitating a little more this
one towards an inescapable death. To support the ones the others is to survive,
to tear is to give capacity to the thing, and thus to die. But how to know
which lies? Even the discovery of the blood test does not solve the problem,
because to carry out the test one needs somebody of confidence! The human stake
is well the central subject of film, beyond the fantastic argument, testifies
the final one, of a total effectiveness: the confrontation of two men, lost in
the icy vastness, condemned to await hypothetical reinforcements while
suspecting themselves mutually, awaiting only one false step on behalf of the
other to attack it... Carpenter is even even further leaving ambiguity: neither
one nor the other are known which is «the thing», but the spectator
either! In an irony all carpentérienne, one could even imagine that
neither one nor the other is infected and that, doubting one of the other, they
finish by entretuer... A quite contemporary illustration of the morals of
«Door-Closed» of Sartre, «the hell they is the
different ones».
3.2 - management of the rate/rhythm and art of the opposite
course.
Whereas the scenaristic structure carpentérienne seems a
priori relatively simple and easily dominated by the spectator, it however does
not cease surprising it. Why ? Because Carpenter controls to perfection
the changes of direction or tone and multiplies the secondary stakes which all
rise from the central stake, that of survival (see the preceding part).
Therefore borrowing a mathematical image one could qualify the structure
carpentérienne of sinusoidal, the realizer choosing to dilate certain
moments or of in ellipser others (thus, in Fog, one can notice that it
takes time, in a very long prolog of almost 10 minutes, carefully to
retranscribe the effects of the approach of the malefic force in a succession
of plans to the four corners of abused- the cars city, cut electricity,
ransacked supermarket- preparing even the incursion of these supernatural
effects come to upset daily space in a long scene in the supermarket a priori
banal, since we follow an employee in full cleaning, but where we however smell
intuitively by play over cutting, the musky one and the length of the plans,
that something will arrive. On the contrary, it chooses not to show certain
moments, like the passage to the act of the relation between Jamie Lee Curtis
and Tom Atkins), printing a variable rate/rhythm with its sequences, connecting
moments of pause (in The Thing, it is for example the medical study of
the deformed body, before the thing does not appear in the kennels) and abrupt
renewals of tension (the scene of the blood test). On the management of the
rate/rhythm, one will be able to quote the effects of assembly of The
Thing, since « for traditional melted with the black, [Carpenter]
substitutes for halves of strange molten for the white which ensure
intraséquentielle breathing while wrapping the characters, with the
choice, in No man' S immaculate Land or with deepest of the
darkness. ». Even strange management of the rate/rhythm which hustles
the reference marks of the spectator in the Village of
Damnés : the many temporal ellipses put to us in difficulty to
locate us compared to the time which passes, giving the feeling which the time
can as well pass incredibly quickly (children which grows) that incredibly
slowly (the sequence of mental resistance of Dr. Chaffee in the ultimate
sequences which appears then in extremely long comparison). Let us see finally
how Bertrand Rougier (46) analyzes construction, or rather the rhythmic
déconstruction which Carpenter in Vampires adopts :
« By the means of [its brutal introduction], Carpenter aims at
captivating [the spectator] by a rate/rhythm which will not be slackened, the
attack of the first sequence causing a shock wave which is propagated on all
film, inflecting even his intrigue. The movement, the tension, instead of
accompanying the account which generates them manage here to conceal it, to
make itself some main, tending to soften cutting with the profit of the
continuity of the rate/rhythm. The traditional filmic composition, founded on
the principles of balance, variety and harmony, is upset by it so much so that
Carpenter comes from there to dispute the directing role of the scenario. If
the account progresses well towards a climax, each scene develops in an
autonomous way by exploiting all its resources until exhaustion. In
Vampires, Carpenter decides to develop the vitality of the movement to the
detriment of the strict coherence of the account. But the permanent miracle of
the chain reactions makes it possible Carpenter to preserve intact energy
produced at the beginning. The scenario writer (...) play with the nerves of a
public already quite surprised by accelerations and the decelerations
impromptus of the account. [the opening] communicates upon the departure with
the spectators all information which they will need to correctly apprehend film
and his protagonists. Carpenter can thus allow himself to let fall down the
pressure, the feature film adopting a throbbing rate/rhythm, not rocked by the
crackling the weapons, but by the alternation of the cycle day/night, the sunny
plains of Far-West being opposed to the reference marks narrow, lugubrious, in
which the monsters are confined until the twilight, moment when great spaces
open in their turn with the threat. » Thus, Carpenter, through subtle
but precise work of management of the rate/rhythm of the sequences, of their
sequence, their breathings (internal breathings with the sequences and
breathings between the sequences), as thanks to a tangle of stakes which join
answer and are developed mutually, Carpenter complexes and densified the
structure of his scenario.
That is supported by the will of Carpenter to delay to the
maximum the final confrontation (Laurie/Myers, Nada/invaders, Loomis/Anti-God,
the Trent/Sutter Cane, Mac-Ready/the thing) promised by its scenario, because
curiously, more than the climax, which seems to interest it it is what occurs
front, all the scenaristic preparation which will lead the spectator to
approach this final in a particular state of tension, conscious of the stakes
of all kinds which were posed throughout film. For Carpenter, the preparation
of the climax seems almost jouissive besides than the climax itself :
perhaps because it is this preparation, as it places the spectator in a state
at the same time of waiting and permanent anticipation, which is interesting
émotionnellement. Besides Carpenter defines thus the feeling of fear
(47) : « it should be held account owing to the fact that the
fear emanates from the anticipation of an atrocious event. Once the event
passed, one falls into the tragedy. Imagine in Hiroshima in 1945. The
terrifying part of the events takes place before the dropping of the bomb,
after it is other thing. » To continue to surprise the spectator and
to reactivate his anticipation of the atrocious event unceasingly,
Carpenter will play on two elements : work on the transitive state and the
capacity to take the opposite course to waitings of the spectator. He thus
works initially on the transitive state : transitive state of the hero
carpentérien, who, as we saw builds ourselves in the physical and
metaphysical confrontation, and especially transitive state of what threatens
it. Contours of the threat are specified (One sees initially only the arm of
Myers, then its back, then its mask and finally its face) where change (the
creature of The Thing which changes with each appearance, signs of its
protean nature), obliging the spectator, by upsetting his reference marks
continuously and the visual representation that it can have of the threat, to
be held constantly on its guards. Carpenter can also perfectly exploit the
changes of tone or the effects of surprised which will come
désarçonner the spectator in his waitings ; one will be able
to quote two examples of features of black humor which come to defuse tended
situations : in the Village of Damnés, in the sequence of opening,
the arrival of extraterrestrial causes the unexplainable fainding of the
inhabitants : when those awake without any memory what could well do
without, the spectator notes, mid- frightened mid- amused, whom one of them
disappeared... on its barbecue ! Even black humor and violent one in
Ghosts off Mars, when the brother of Williams Desolation accidentally cuts
all the fingers while wanting to show his force. But if Carpenter can defuse
situations, it also knows, by thwarting waitings of the spectator, to start
news of them : we delay on the management of the case Mac-Ready in The
Thing. Rafik Djoumi (48) raises that in this film Carpenter goes so much
far in his will to thwart waitings of the spectator whom it straightforwardly
«will kill a narrative interdict. Indeed Mac-Ready, referent of the
spectator, are in his turn suspecté to be the thing. However, instead of
us to make share his feeling of exclusion, Carpenter puts all works about it so
that us it suspections in our turn ! Its hand tries to open a handle of
door slowly, in reference to a plan impossible to circumvent of film of
phantoms. Then it appears to us in the handing-over of explosives, enlightened
on an icy bluish bottom, the eyes brilliant, metal, and a beard of white frost
which confers an appearance of death-alive to him. Impossible consequently, to
push paranoiac confusion further from the spectator, who has just suspected his
referent, the projection of oneself with the screen. » While posing
as postulate which he is the only Master on board his filmic space and which it
can constantly reverse the prospects for the spectator, Carpenter then involves
the spectator in the meshs of his net, causing the disorder and the anguish of
the next inversion : in a word, Carpenter, with brilliance created the
anguish, this feeling to be able to rest on any certainty which is the
characteristic even of its cinema. The spectator, literally, is subjected to
the will of Carpenter !
III a mythology of threatened America.
1- a purification carrying direction.
1.1 - suggestion and means of production.
One often introduced Carpenter like an enthusiastic partisan of
the suggestion and use of the out-field, which is true, but to a certain extent
only. Let us note first of all that Carpenter knows perfectly suggested the
threat which weighs on characters without showing it with the image :
thus, in Halloween, the first time that we see Michael Myers at the
adulthood, Carpenter takes care well to dissimulate its appearance. While
playing with maximum on half-light, and especially on subjectivity of point of
view of (in particular the point of view of the nurse in the car which sees
only the Myers arm crossing the pane), the realizer gives us to see the element
that it considers essential at this time film for the apprehension of the
character by the spectator (its extreme violence) without for all this we know
him anything else. Of course that answers a preoccupation with an effectiveness
(to pose the violence of Myers while letting work the imaginary one of the
spectator), but also a will of Carpenter to purify to the maximum his
character : he does not have, in a strict sense, identity (an inexpressive
mask, and under this mask a face quite as inexpressive as we will discover it
at the end of film) because the identity for Carpenter it is humanity and Myers
does not have anything human in spite of appearances. He is anything else
only one pure representation of the Evil, just like are to it the attackers
of Attack. Moreover in this film in the same way, Carpenter will play to
initially suggest the presence of the mass of attackers thanks to the effects
of their violence, in particular the multiple inserts showing the balls to
strike the interior of the police station : preoccupation of effectiveness
and an economy of course (it thus does not need to use hundreds of observers to
make feel with the spectator the danger which they represent), but also real
will to exploit the any power of the out-field ; Bertrand Rougier (49)
notes thus that « the framework being restricted, the essence of film
is played apart from this one, the camera being only used mechanically to
record the devastator effect of the out-field ». When Carpenter thus
chooses not to show, it is never free and that falls under a true reflection
compared to its setting in scene : in Fog for example, Carpenter
initially chose anything to show, taking as a starting point a Jacques Tourneur
to work on « a setting in scene all the more distressing that it does
not seek to represent the face of the evil, but which it suggests its
solid drop shadow on our world. » (Helene Frappat (50)), even if it
realizes to the assembly which the film just as it is does not function
perfectly, then deciding to turn over certain scenes in optics to clarify them
and make film more alarming. But the film rests still much on this concept to
give to believe in the spectator whom it saw whereas it often did nothing but
guess or distinguish, his imaginary filling the missing images : it will
be enough to re-examine the scenes or the phantoms attack the sailors close to
Antonio Bay. By a very precise play on the sound and the assembly, the scene
seems much more violent than it is it actually (inserts on the face of the
victim at the precise time where the weapon strikes, its flesh and bone which
cracks while the blade transpierces the bodies out-field). To put in scene the
fear, it is thus mainly to take up the challenge to find a balance between what
I suggest and what I show.
Sometimes, on the contrary, Carpenter decides to
show sometimes much more than one could not expect it: in The
Thing, its film most representative of this established fact, the SFX
particularly gores of Rob Bottin (probably the best make-up man of special
effects with Tom Savini) traumatisent the characters very as much as the
spectator, helped well in that by all the psychological preparation on which
the scenario writer works. Let us notice with Rafik Djoumi (51)
« that it is henceforth a question for Carpenter systematically of
diverting the attention of its public, before the nightmarish visions lovingly
prepared by the make-up man Rob Bottin do not burst. At the time of the
reanimation of Norris, not only Mac-Ready occupies the main part of the plans,
but scientists framings highlight the operations of Clark to seize the scalpel.
During the blood test, an argument bursts a few seconds before the fateful
moment. If the infernal and grotesque visions of Bottin have indeed a
nightmarish impact, temptation to however laugh, quite real, is from the start
defused by the long psychological preparation to which Carpenter subjected to
us. » Thus not only Carpenter decides to show and incarnate
physically the threat, but this conscious choice is accompanied by a whole work
of setting in scene aiming at coming to support this incarnation. In the same
order of idea, Carpenter makes the choice expensive show with the screen the
inexpressible one in Lovecraft ;risked bet when one knows that to
represent with the screen what one initially worked to suggest is highly likely
to come to disappoint the imaginary Almighty of the spectator. In the Cave
of the madness, Carpenter chose to represent the diabolic creatures which
enter our world whereas it could have decided not to do it (this passage being
in my opinion undoubtedly less successful of film) ; Carpenter confirms
besides that it could have done without this representation (52):
« It is true, the special effects are not essential for this kind of
history. But I adore the special effects ! They make film more alarming,
give him a strange aspect. If you want to suggest a creature of beyond or a
metamorphosis, it is necessary to set a limit on what you want to show. Me, I
decided to go thoroughly there on the effects. Then certainly they are not
essential to film, but I am quite glad to have some. » Further,
Carpenter raises an essential point concerning his manner of tackling the
question of the limit between representation and suggestion (53) :
« And then, it is a decision which I made at the time. You know, I do
not have any reasoning stopped on my choices when I make a film. I always tell
my stories like I feel it. I always sticks to my instinct. »
Here is a new interesting facet of Carpenter : a realizer
of instinct whose work translates a very great coherence set of themes and
visual. In any case, that it is a question of representing or of suggesting
the threat, a constant emerges from the work of Carpenter : its skill to
make the synthesis of its subject, the angle according to which it wishes to
approach it and of the means of production which are granted to him. Carpenter
is a true craftsman with the noble direction of the term, formed at the
difficult school of the series B and « clear up » able to
work with ridiculous budgets taking into account the its ambitions without
however practically never exceeding them. Thus, the use of the out-field is
sometimes quite simply an effective and economic solution pragmatically adopted
by a scenario writer anxious to optimize his means of production. The Prince
of darkness is surely the most obvious example : after the cooking
failure Of the Adventures of Burton Jack in the Claws of the Mandarin,
large-guignolesque homage vibrating to a whole side of the Asian cinema which
it fascine (production come from Honk Kong from Shaw Brothers, Tsui Hark, Bruce
Lee of course...), Carpenter decides to remake a health far from the pressure
of the studios and to turn to what Arnaud Bordas (54) indicates like
« an independent cinema, mown but clever, where the poverty of the
budget has of equal only the rigor of the design. In short, of the authentic
series B, to summarize quickly. » .Carpenter thus multiplies the
economic images but fulgurating : proliferation of insect which it
describes (55) like « a direct homage to the universe of Bunuel which
adored to include images of insects », horde marginal as alarming the
as inexpressive ones, premonitory dreams of the characters materialized by a
dirty and granulous video image all the more worrying, Catherine captive on
other side of the mirror... The representation of the Anti-god finally :
how to retranscribe with the image an image reversed of God supposed to create
greatest physical and metaphysical fright ? Most simply of the world while
choosing not to retranscribe it, or if little : a green liquid in a
container, a massive and indistinct form behind a mirror... And it is all. Not.
The realizer lets simply the spectator be frightened itself by convening his
own most intimate fears, which confirms Carpenter himself (56) :
« At the beginning, we wanted that Anti-God has the aspect of a
creature of Lovecraft but did not reach that point us. This is why I finally
removed them final version. But perhaps that the Prince of
darkness resembles in this way more one film lovecraftien that if we had
included these plans. You know, one can manage to describe a monster of
Lovecraft easily, but when it is a question of giving him a visual form, the
problem takes another dimension. ». Let us leave the word of the end
with Arnaud Bordas (57) summarizing work of Carpenter on Prince of
darkness : « How Carpenter is able it to stick to us a
similar funk with only one million and half of dollars out of pockets ?
Having retained the lessons of a Robert Wise (the House of the Devil-
1963) or of a Jacques Turner (Go with the fear- 1957), it has a perfect
command of the art of the suggestion and uses it better than anybody to
generate the fear. Better still, just as at Lovecraft, in Prince of darkness
what is in the black is not horrible but unnamable (in the literal sense). And
imagination to harness with full output... »
1.2- open and ridiculous end, or rather ridiculous bus
opened.
It is clear that John Carpenter is far from being a follower of
the Manicheism: in its universe, the «white whole or any black» does
not find its place. It work constantly the question of ambiguity, and in
particular in the way in which he chooses to finish his films, or rather in the
way in which he chooses not to finish them. The cinema of Carpenter raises
questions, but does not answer it inevitably, opening tracks and leaving the
spectator and with his imagination the care to invest itself in order to find
its own answers...
There are first of all the ends which carry in oneself the germs
of a probable prolongation: last evocative image, final «In Media
LMBO» i.e. right in the middle of an action... One will be able to thus
quote final Village of Damnés, where we see the small David saved
by his mother, its empty glance walking on the horizon while the car runs
towards an unknown destination. However, if its behavior appeared different
from the other invaders (much «humanized more), we know that David is not,
and will be never, a human being. The nightmare of Midwich (of the identically
perfect and perfectly identical children invading a community of the interior)
is thus dedicated to repeat itself, the more so as like specified it the
character of Kirstie Al, other communities saw themselves infiltrated in their
turn... In the same way at the end of Ghosts off Mars, we see the
character of Williams Desolation helping Melanie Ballard, then both to set out
again with the attack of the «spirits of Mars», which escaped of
their phantom city, come to attack civilization. We more about the destiny of
our two characters, but of it is it necessary will not know any really? Just
let us need to know that the evil is never overcome, that it is there, tapi in
the shade loan to be struck again. It is in that that one could qualify the
cinema carpentérien the ridiculous one, and even of absurdity: during
1h30, we follow the desperate combat characters to ensure their survival,
before the last plans of film reveals us that the threat was only pushed back,
and that it is intended to return, still and still, ineluctably, condemning the
human ones to an eternal fights. Thus, at the end of Halloween, Dr.
Loomis (Donald Pleasence) kills Michael Myers who fall by the window. However,
when the doctor leans by the window it does not have there more body. Quite to
the contrary, last plans, of the increasingly broad executives of the city (the
house of Laurie, the street, the city.) accompanied by breathing throbbing and
characteristic of the killer put to us on the track: Myers cannot die because
he already died 15 years earlier when he coldly stabbed his sister. Any
humanity died in him, and from now on, like specifies it Dr. Loomis,
«he' S the evil», a figure of the evil dedicated to haunt the
town of Haddonfield eternally (it is the direction of these last plans), with
the research of the prey which has escaped him. One reproached Carpenter for
having made a commercial calculation by choosing this end: to think thus is to
pass completely beside the major direction of this final, i.e. to make of
Laurie Strode a kind of contemporary Sisyphus condemned to eternally carry out
the same combat to ensure its survival. Moreover, Carpenter will not hesitate
to give up the frankness lately created to go to carry out Fog. This
open end also contributes to make of Halloween a nightmarish tale: Myers it is
the croquemitaine, and as Stephen King summarizes it, «he was once
three baby-sitters who decided to leave during the night Halloween, and only
one of them was still alive when came the day from All Saints' day.»
It is the same phenomenon that one finds at the end of the Prince of darkness:
Kelly sacrificed himself while plunging on the other side of the mirror which
is then broken in order to avoid the advent of Anti-God. However, with final
the character of Brian Marsh (interpreted by Jameson Parker), awaked by a
recurring nightmare (in fact a message addressed by the future through time),
approaches the mirror located in its room, tightens the hand... and the film
finishes. Carpenter implies as well as the characters made a mistake in
interpretation: the mirror of the church was not the only vector of entry for
the malefic force; any mirror perhaps a sufficient condition allowing Anti-God
to incarnate itself in our world, this data changing the situation, while
making ridiculous the resistance carried out in the church, and especially
while making ridiculous even any form of resistance. This is why Brian Marsh
continuous to make his nightmares while at the same time they should cease:
they express the unquestionable victory of the evil (the black form on the step
of the church) some are the conditions. In Fog finally, in before last
scene of film, the character of Adrienne Barbel, guardian of the headlight and
voice of Antonio Bay, urge the inhabitants to supervise the fog: its
«look for the fog» referring directly to the «watch the
ski» enclosing film of Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby, the Thing
of another World, film of bedside of Carpenter. Here, like Helene Frappat
(58) specifies it, the voice of Adrienne Barbeau «then delivers the
«morals» of the fable carpentérienne. The evil can return. In
other words, the threat of Fog is all the more terrifying that it is
dubious, unspecified, since it resides in the zones of shade and fog present of
each one of us.»
Thus at Carpenter, paradoxically, any perhaps final end: of Crow
Jack dedicated to eternally pursue his enemies vampires and in particular
Katrina and Montoya, contaminated (Vampires, although the final fine met
with the tracking of Valek and in revival a news, that of Montoya, stake not
being more then the survival of humanity, but the report/ratio of competition
between Crow and Montoya) with John the Trent in the Cave of the Madness
condemned to revive with the screen a perpetual setting in abyme of its
existence created of any part by Sutter Duck (final buckles some, at the same
time open and closed), there is in its work an unquestionable taste for
ambiguity and ambivalence. From where that does it come? Like specifies it John
Carpenter himself (59), it «likes much the ambiguous ends. [It has] always
have problems with the films which have a «true end». It is not as
that which that occurs in the true life, all is much more stable and dubious
there. This is why [it] often uses open ends. In fact, [it] resembles to them
much. [it him] is very often able not to find a solution with a problem.»
It is in this same optics that it carries out a comparison between John Ford
and Hawks (60): «I appreciate John Ford, but I do not like his
sentimentalism, his romanticism, nor his respect for the values morals. The
films of Hawks are more ambiguous.»
Lastly, the choice of final open perhaps also occasion for
Carpenter to hold a specific speech to with it, as it is the case in The
Thing: at the end, Mac Ready seems to have eliminated the thing, but it
discovers whereas another character survived. Consequently, the final plan
shows the two armed men, lost in the icy vastness, supervising one the other in
the search of a sign which can betray the presence of extraterrestrial protean.
In only one plan very «sartrien», Carpenter summarizes the subject
even film, i.e. the fear of the other: two men unable to trust each other,
ready between-to commit suicide constantly, symbols of a paradoxical humanity
which can only live groups some but without to be able to trust its next.
Carpenter is quite conscious that its taste for the open ends
does not serve its commercial interests inevitably: «One of my major
problems, it is that the majority of my ends are ambiguous and are not always
very merry. They put badly at ease, whereas Spielberg, for example, is
conscious of the feelings which animate us and knows how to flatter them. (...)
Thing of which I am completely unable, because I make initially this trade for
me.» (61)
1.3 - towards a pure evil.
Carpenter refuses to waste his time in explanation and
justification: in its cinematographic space, the things arrive, a point it is
all. Free to the spectator to refuse to enter the universe set up by the
scenario writer, but if it agrees to enter there is to accept this starting
postulate: the things arrive a point it is all. In the universe
carpentérien, there is always a disturbing starting event which starts a
crisis and which pushes the characters to be organized to exceed it, and it is
important little to know why or how this event arrives: the children invaders
who colonize the Village of Damnés, the thing which infiltrates
in the American base in The Thing or the avengers spirits which awake
over Mars in Ghosts off Mars...
One can easily establish a parallel with a film which belongs to
the cinematographic references of Carpenter: Birds of Alfred Hitchcock.
In its measuring, Hitchcock made fall down on an island (and its characters) a
quite particular plague, since all the birds link themselves to attack the
human ones without apparent reason. There is no explanation, and it is well
there more terrifying. That of course makes it possible Hitchcock to make his
film ultra-effective, since by not wasting time in explanations (which would
have been in all ways probably not very credible), it has a maximum of time to
set up his characters, in particular its heroin which incarnated by Tippi
Hendren, a woman with the margin too modern bus, too «released» for
its time, then to film the attack itself. But that also makes it possible
Hitchcock to release from the realistic yoke for métaphoriser its speech
and to deliver, through its birds, an incarnation of the Evil. However, that
makes on its Carpenter side, if is not to explore in each one of its films a
facet different from the Evil?
Thus in Attack, for Bertrand Rougier (62), Carpenter
«never reveals frankly the ambitions nor the face of the gangsters, the
film precisely nourishing these interrogations to feed the fantastic content of
the account» .D'autre part, as Helene Frappat underlines it, «one
will never know exactly which are the phantoms of Fog» (63). Of
course, they have a history, a history of revenge more precisely since they
return to eliminate the descendants from those which ruined their boat for
gold, melting the community of Antonio Bay on an original crime. But this
motivation, this explanation which Carpenter chooses is there before very
conveying a metaphorical speech on the United States, country founded him also
on an original crime, that of the massacre of the Indians. For the remainder,
John Carpenter chooses, like precisely says it still Helene Frappat, to be
interested in «confrontation with the pure evil (all the more
«pure» that it is as vague as a bench of fog) and in the terror which
it generates», seeking «a form of stylization very pure and
abstracted from the horror». That is even more prégnant in the
Halloween film, where Carpenter starts from a realistic figure, or all
at least credible (the killer sociopathe) to make the figure of it even evil:
slow and inescapable step pointing out the zombies of Romero, total absence of
expression thus of emotion and thus of humanity as one of the last sequences of
film shows it where one sees Laurie Strode tearing off the mask of its attacker
and revealing a face quite as transparent and inexpressive (the same
inexpressiveness that one discovered on the face of small Michael Myers after
the murder of his sister: it there does not have any more trace of humanity in
him), employs of a very precise lexical field on behalf of Dr. Loomis who
designates Myers by the terms «devil» (= devil) or
«evil» (= evil), feeling of invincibility: Myers is made draw
above, fall by the window but does not die, surely because in a certain manner
he already died...
Especially, an element in particular contributes to make of
Michael Myers either simple a serial-killer of series B, but much more one
mythological figure of the Evil, it is its capacity «to haunt space»:
that was already approached in the part «put out of order and contaminated
space» but specify the matter here. All the device of setting in scene of
Carpenter, in particular in the space management, is intended to give the
capacity to Myers «to be based» truly in the decorations urban of
Haddonfield (streets, house...). Thus, there is a regular recourse to the
system of following assembly: plan of Myers who observes Laurie Strode, then
plane of Laurie who, smelling the threat intuitively, is turned over towards
Myers, then return to the preceding plan (even value and even tallies) but this
Myers time disappeared; this system confers on Myers the possibility of
appearing and of disappearing as good seems to him within this urban space, or
all at least gives to believe in the spectator whom it has this possibility. In
the same way, Myers seems to completely control the space in which it
evolves/moves: when Laurie Strode is dissimulated in the closet to escape the
killer, this one immediately locates it like if it to be able to see through
solid surfaces of this space which it endorsed; when it continues Laurie, in
particular in the final confrontation in the house, Myers finds itself
systematically behind it in a quasi-supernatural way... Moreover, as we noticed
previously, the ultimate plans of film, these increasingly broad plans of the
city with in background music the breathing of the killer, completely confuse
Myers and his environment in a perfect and perfectly indissociable symbiosis.
Lastly, last element which makes of Myers a character of tale terrifying like A
defines Stephen King, it is the fact that during more half of film only the
children whom keep Laurie seem to have the capacity to really see the killer:
as known as the young boy of which Laurie occupies itself, «he' S the
boogey man», «it is the croquemitaine». And indeed it is
well that in question: Michael Myers it is the croquemitaine, the monster
hidden under the bed or in the wall cupboard ready to return to terrify us at
any moment. Consequently, the counting rhyme sung by the children when they
leave the school concerning the «Boogey man» becomes, more than one
stylistic effect, a true declaration of intent.
Moreover one will be able to note to conclude that the will of
Carpenter to make of Myers a mythical figure was present right from the start
project like it specifies it itself: «we sought to give our interpretation
of an icon like Frankenstein de Boris Karloff. We liked these monsters.
Godzilla for example, in its first film, was a horrible monster... And he
became a hero! (64)» Just like Myers, entered to the Pantheon of the
malefic figures of the cinema on the same basis precisely as Frankenstein,
Dracula or Freddy Krueger...
2- an alarming normality: the paradox
carpentérien.
2.1- the work of diversion of the daily newspaper and of
institutions.
One of the talents which one can certainly recognize in
Carpenter, it is its capacity to be worked on elements of the daily newspaper,
therefore to return elements a priori reassuring, them terrifying a posteriori.
Streets of small «a suburb» American means, police a station, a
village, a dog which runs in snow... As many elements, of images which in any
traditional film would seem alleviating and which take very an other direction
for the spectators of Carpenter. That can appear surprising, but like specifies
it Carpenter (65) «some of the things more terrifying for me and for step
badly of people, in fact the tricks have the air seemingly completely normal. A
person, a district... But under varnish they are not like you and me.». In
connection with district, one spoke already much about Halloween and the
capacity of Michael Myers to be based in the urban space of Haddonfield, small
city of Illinois: it is also a means for Carpenter of scrambling all the
traditional reference marks of Laurie Strode, to choke it in this space which
is it his since always and which should reassure it. Thus all the setting in
scene of Carpenter will work is «to lose it» in space (use of the
scope, and overall plans accompanied by an extremely short focal distance,
almost deforming which isolates Jamie Lee Curtis and seems to put it at the
thank you of its predator) that is to say there to lock up it with very made up
executives where trees, cars, houses, washing line (all components of a city
all in all) come to create lines and executives within the framework which
imprison the character by limiting his possibilities of displacement, giving
the feeling to prohibit any attempt at escape. Daily urban space, far from
being reassuring, becomes by the work of cutting a threat for the character of
Laurie. From this same point of view of diversion, one will be able to quote
the plan of the dog already evoked in The Thing, when this one, looks by
the window the return of Mac-Ready bringing back with him a proof of the
existence of the thing: a dog looking by the window, here is an image which
seems a priori well not very alarming. However, something comes to cause it
Malayan of the spectator: is this this way of looking by the window as if it
included/understood really the stakes of what is occurring? Perhaps, but not
only. It is also the very precise work of setting in scene of the realizer who
comes to give a force particular to the plan. There is already, as we have just
said it, and as surprising as that can appear, a work of «direction of
actor» if not raising: this fixity of the dog, the tended body, in stop
constitutes already a disturbance for the spectator who cannot then prevent
himself from carrying out a bringing together with the sequence of opening of
film where one saw the dog being made continue by a helicopter. It occurs
something with this dog definitively: but what? Lastly, Carpenter, chooses to
film this dog in two plans which intersect with the assembly the action with
Mac-Ready, Carpenter binding the two proposals (the dog/the return of
Mac-Ready) as if the dog had a direct report/ratio indeed with what is being
played, i.e. the discovery of the extraterrestrial threat : however, as we
will discover it thereafter, it is indeed the case. Moreover, the choice of
framework of the 1st plan of the choice is significant : Carpenter decides
to place the camera behind the dog, with this one out of starter, placing the
spectator from the point of view of the animal, type of framing which one in
general employs for a human character since it underlines a conscious and
reasoned observation, the whole contributing to confer on the plan a under-text
which will become obvious when the dog placed in the kennels proves to be the
body-vehicle of «the thing». Last example of this work of diversion,
invaders of the Village of Damnés: Carpenter attacks an essential
taboo here since it chooses children to incarnate a new figure of the Evil!
Like Carpenter (66) specifies it, «the metaphor of the Village of
Damnés is indeed rather complex and touches one of the most significant
points of the current urban companies: what arrives when the children become
cold killers and without remorse?» How does it begin there then to make
his/her children alarming? And well it will carry out a whole work of setting
in scene resting on the standardization: physical standardization obviously
with all these children as perfectly identical as identically perfect, all fair
to the blue eyes in a reminiscence of fantasmatic Nazi; standardization of
reaction then as for example when one of the doctor accidentally wounds one of
the children with ocular product and that we see all the other children waiting
in the corridor to rise of a blow and to turn to the room (the children seem to
react physically to the pain of the one as of their, like as many components of
same and single body); standardization of displacements finally, with these
many sequences where one sees the children crossing the village at exactly
synchronized intervals, in a species of parody of military step (and the
comparison is not alleviating: under are their appearance, these children
finally other thing that «soldiers» sent to invade us? Besides
Carpenter develops readily in his setting in scene a military lexical field
when the children are represented with the screen, in particular the fact that
the invaders come gradually to truly «occupying» the city...). But
they is perhaps front even as the children do not make their appearance that
Carpenter shows the most talent to divert the daily images; let us examine thus
how the realizer gives us to see all the stages of the pregnancy of the women
of the village of Midwich: Carpenter shows us the traditional images of a
preparation of birth, but shift completely our prospect via a very simple
principle, the principle of repetition. We see women thus first of all
following one another at Dr. Chaffee, learning their pregnancy the ones after
the others, Dr. implying thereafter that strictly all the women of the village
having the capacity to procreate await «happy» an event. The first
faintness: by generalizing in a surrealist way this wave of pregnancy,
Carpenter removes any personal aspect to him creating a first fracture with the
traditional image of the happy, awaited and prepared pregnancy. He will not
cease thereafter, always according to this same principle of repetition, to use
images seen thousand times but which this time take a fundamentally unhealthy
turning: one will quote the wave of dreams striking at the same time all the
women without exception lasting their pregnancy (and the same dream, repeated
strictly with the identical one: there traditional antenatal anguish taking a
turning much more threatening) or even preparatory gestures with the childbirth
repeated by a multitude of couples of all ages gathered in a small space, this
negation of individuality surrealist, almost absurd, completing to reverse our
prospect for spectator like that of the characters: to see the face of the
«fathers», completely exceeded by the nonsense of the situation being
observed the ones others. This work even finds its apotheosis at the time of
the scene of the childbirth, where in a hospital of fortune drawn up by the
army, a long dolly passes in front of this multitude of women in full work
(exactly at the same moment!), transforming the hospital into gigantic baby
factory: the limits of the absurdity are reached here, but whereas the scene
could lend to laughing it is absolutely not the case, because with this perfect
negation of individuality, and humanity thus, in fact also the limits of the
horror are reached... One will note also quickly that in the center of this
standardization of the invaders Carpenter works to isolate a child in
particular, David, this identity which emerges from the group not taking
whereas more importance: for Rafik Djoumi, (67) «the small David becomes,
by the force of the things the principal element which returns to the
brittleness of this group of invaders, offering to the scenario writer the
occasion to exploit the desynchronization on several occasions (while
preserving the rate/rhythm of walk of the group, the small David is diverted
some to penetrate in the cemetery)». However, if David is a disturbing
element, it is because it is «orphan, with horse between two worlds».
Character of an extraordinary ambiguity all in all, Achilles' heel of the
invaders from his humanity surely, grave-digger of humanity perhaps because it
remains despite everything a invader (cf the final one where the car moves away
with the small David on his board, music implying that this history is far from
being finished).
This direct attack with the taboo of maternity shows well that
Carpenter thus does not hesitate to scratch the institutions: by institutions
we understand the instituted things (rules, uses, organizations...) to which,
by definition, one does not touch, fundamental laws governing the political and
social life of a country. First institution put at evil in the work of
Carpenter, the police force, and the concept of police force in particular. An
image could summarize the feeling of Carpenter with regard to the police force,
that of the nightmare of the Trent in the Cave of the Madness, where it
sees, in a narrow lane a police officer to strike with dead homeless people.
When the police officer is turned over towards the Trent to threaten it, it
exposes a face bouffi and torn, this physical corruption referring directly to
another form of corruption, mental this time. Carpenter lives in Los-Angeles:
how not to see in this image a reference (hardly) dissimulated to police
violences and in particular to the business Rodney King gone back to 1992,
where agents of Los-Angeles are transfered filmed whereas they were caught some
with an innocent Afro-American, racial riots bursting thereafter in all the
city? The image of the police force is not more reluisante in New York
1997 and Los Angeles 2013 or even in Invasion Los-Angeles,
the principal problem being that this police force is a police force, in other
words an arm armed with the service with the established order, without
possibility of judgment nor of reflection, including if this one appears
morally debatable as can be to it the modes fascisants quoted films, where
capacities of initiatives and personal freedoms of the citizens are gradually
gummed (see thus the band announces of Los-Angeles 2013, where a voice
enumerates the rules to be followed in the cinemas, the orders becoming
gradually those which it will be necessary to follow in 2013:
«prohibition to speak, smoke, eat red meat, to choose its religion, to
marry without the assent of the department of health...»). Carpenter
boulverse thus once again reference marks of the spectator by making police
force (in the broad sense term, like guarantee of an established order) either
a reassuring presence but a threat, one moreover, for the hero
carpentérien: Snake Plissken is stopped by the police force, which will
contribute to send it behind the walls of the penitentiary of New York (in a
scene of introduction finally cut to the assembly of New York 1997, one
saw Plissken being made stop and its accomplice to be made cut down), John Nada
is continued by the police force while «Justiceville», the refuge of
left for account, is put at bag in a sad reflection of the current police
exactions in the United States. At Carpenter, the police force is thus, in the
worst case, a threat, at best ineffective, as in Assaut where Bishop
will hopelessly await reinforcements which will never come or in
Halloween, with this figure of police officer of the completely transparent
and useless suburbs...
The Church, and especially the ecclesiastical hierarchy, are
also a target of choice for Carpenter, in his permanent will to dissimulate in
particular for better controlling: in Prince of darkness, it is the
existence of Anti-God who is dissimulated in order to avoid a counterweight
which could harm the domination of the traditional religion on the men. But
Carpenter goes even further in Vampires, since Jack Crow, engaged by the
Church to eliminate the creatures from the night, will discover that it is its
employer even who is responsible (by a disproportionate ambition) for the
existence of Valek, which it always sought to hide! Thus the two extremes (the
Church/vampires) end up meeting in a species of loop upsetting the traditional
reference marks of the good and the evil: indeed, pushing the vampiric metaphor
until in his last cuttings off, Carpenter links the two opposite ones by same
and inextinguishable thirst, thirst for blood for Valek, thirst for being able
for the men of God... But Valek, it, cannot fight against this dark share of
itself, because its greed is physical and condition of its survival: if it does
not have physically the choice, can one still judge his thirst for blood in
term of good or evil? Does it make another thing that to consume to survive,
that is to say the equivalent of what we make each day with the raw materials
of our planet to the risk exhaust the resources? The more so as as Bertrand
Rougier (68) explains it, «the existence of Valek is literally infernal.
Hardly it is on foot that it is necessary for him to run after its subsistence,
to watch for its victims, to allure them, absorb them. Valek is perpetually
threatened by drying of these volatile bloods, these bad bloods making of him
an eternal conscript provisionally exempted of death. Is its thirst, blind and
irrepressible, that of living» (69) Pourquoi this eagerness against the
religious institution, more precisely the catholic institution? Perhaps
Carpenter delivers of it to us a key in one of his talks: with the question
«are you a religious person?», it answers «not, I do not
believe in the supernatural one. The only place where there is it is on a
screen. The true life is such as it is: we sat in this coffee, there are cars
outside, it does not have there phantoms around us, it does not have there an
UFO above our heads, I will not transform myself into werewolf and you are not
a vampire. If we were in a film, all this could arrive.» (70) .Voici thus
perhaps the explanation of this conflict report/ratio: Carpenter would reproach
the catholic religion, not to lie since the lie is a basically cinematographic
data, but to lie with an aim of exerting a control on the Man. Thus he still in
same maintenance (71) says, whereas the journalist notices that it is not very
tender with the catholic authorities in Vampires: «I was high in
Protestantism, at the methodists to be more precise. The methodists make a very
particular branch of the Protestant religion: they do not recognize the
culpability like a crowned value. All opposite of the Catholicism which,
precisely, rests on the concept of culpability, of sin. Catholicism is very
strange in my eyes. More especially as it grants an important place to the
pageantry, the costumes, with the ornaments, with all these symbols ritual. I
do not include/understand this manner of equipping a religion. All this decorum
makes Catholicism very suspect. I am wary about it.»
Pageantry, culpability, as many weapons of the Church to sit
its position of superiority and to control crowd...
Lastly, the last target, and not least, of Carpenter: political
institution. That those which directs us are manipulators (extraterrestrial of
Los-Angeles Invasion which controls the human mass via subliminal messages)
the, ineffective ones (in Ghosts off Mars, in spite of the interrogation
of Melanie Ballard which announces the threat, the matriarchy is unable to
organize a defense and is overflowed as the end of film suggests it: spirits
gain civilization), made thirsty for to be able (the soldiers of the Village
of Damnés who make of Midwich a laboratory of observation while
hoping to draw some from information before being made, once again, to
overflow) or heirs to culpability original (Janet Leigh which plays the part of
a mayor in Fog, commemorating the birthday of a city - Antonio Bay-
founded in the crime and blood), it is clear that Carpenter does not grant a
blind confidence to the leading authorities. Probably because it made the
experiment, as a man, of the injustices of the system in which it
evolves/moves: thus he says, «I saw how the Man is treated by the large
capitalist machine and how those which control it do not have absolutely
anything to do others. I have evil to include/understand that. I was born in
1948, and I grew in this time of great hope. It was believed whereas the system
was friendly and that it took account of each one. While growing, I realized
that it was not the case, and that plunged me in a terrible anger.» (72)
Thus, with his manner, Carpenter is what one could call a true (and large)
political scenario writer, unfortunately underestimated. But a political
scenario writer with the direction first of the term: étymologiquement,
the «political» term comes from the Greek «polished» (= the
city). Policy it is thus what concerns life of city, and that Carpenter makes
if is not to observe the «city» in which it evolves/moves, i.e. the
American company? But this observation, Carpenter does it with a certain
passing, almost in a remote way, without never really delivering themselves,
and good luck with that which will try to encircle the character! Stephan
Moïssakis and Rafik Djoumi (73) were risked with this difficult exercise,
drawing up a portrait in the shape of kalédioscope starting from its
catalog of films: Carpenter is «a narrator (Cartesian), a perfectionist
cameraman (mathematician), a naive pessimist and anarchist (individualistic but
socio-capitalist), assembler-type-setter-interprets with rhythmic infallible
(and its rock' roll attitude) and a faithful conservative of the great
traditions, in love reserved for the entity cinema, short Carpenter the
scenario writer!». But, they recognize both, «all those which are
interested in its case recognize a certain constancy to him, assimilate without
sorrow the character to his films, make him carry multiple more or less
militant caps, without however agreeing on a satisfactory definition of what is
«John Carpenter». Anarchist or gauchist for some, reactionary for
others and even both at the same time (for Jan Kounen, «one finds in its
films of the at the same time provocative and social ideas (Los-Angeles
Invasion) but also on the sides plus reactionaries, sedentary
(Attack, who is for [him] a masterpiece)» (74)), Carpenter is the
scenario writer of all the parties and as no at the same time (speaking
about Los-Angeles Invasion, it describes the film of «revolt
against the left, the line, the censure and the politically correct one»
(75) and for him Los-Angeles 2013, «does not tackle a party in
particular, it types on everyone. More than quite simply to be used soup to the
republicans or for the democrats, [this film] known as that the country
currently gives up freedom with the profit of the order. A step moreover
towards Fascism. Our company is mistaken, is deluded with illusion.»
(76)), to finish often badly liked «because people do not know how [it] to
consider, [it] to approach.» And it is all the more difficult «to
consider» that it does not hesitate to be contradicted, contributing to
make its image even more imperceptible! It thus criticizes «the large
capitalist machine», before recognizing: «I would lie if I said to
you that I never worried about the money. It is important, I am a capitalist, I
am American! If somebody unloaded with much money I would be easily at its
mercy.» (77)... For my part, if I were to engage me on this slipping
ground of the definition, inevitably reducing, I would say that John Carpenter
is a libertarian realizer, and deeply independent, in its work as in its
opinions, very near finally to its character of Snake Plissken, as it
recognizes it readily itself (78): «there is indeed of the John Carpenter
in him. In Hollywood one perceives me like an outlaw. I am a rebel as Sam
Peckinpah was it in the past. I assert this title. And it is true that it is
what attracted me in the character of Snake Plissken». Then,
Plissken-Carpenter, even combat?
2.2- Inversion which dissimulates a resemblance with
human monstrosity, a reflection on what
fact Humanity.
At Carpenter, the threat is never law, dissimulated in the
shade, lends to
to emerge to seize the hero carpentérien thus (, in
Assaut, when Bishop carries out its turn of recognition in the city at the
beginning of film, it does not intend its radio to state worrying information,
as an index of the explosion of violence to which we will assist thereafter. )
But while further going, T there it does not have not a border of thinnest
which separates the hero carpentérien from what threatens it ?
Thus, while looking at well, heroes and threats, once
subjected to the analysis, dangerously seem to approach, almost to merge
sometimes. One has already to speak about the strange resemblance of Plissken
and Myers, both between two worlds, neither completely alive nor completely
dead. Even case of figure between Jack Crow and Valek who end up meeting in
their manner of existing only through their respective searches. Carpenter
admits it itself (79) : « finally Jack Crow and Valek form only
one and even nobody. They are so strongly implied in the same search ! The
similarities between the goods and malicious give a little pepper to the
scenario of Vampires. Following the example Wild Horde besides.
In this western the gangsters are the heroes and vice versa. I have of it
enough the Manicheism driveller of old films of vampires. » In the
same order of idea, Bertrand Rougier (80) notes that « no character
in Vampires can assert the role of good Guy. It is against the
heroic figure generally incarnating the values of the American community that
the attack of Carpenter carries most ardently. Laconically being able to be
defined like a phratry of assassins stripped of heart, all the characters of
film offer the image of an integral negativity. (...) Valek is not a haughty
dandy but a mad animal, plugged by its hatred and its ambition. Tony Montoya is
not the inébranlable right arm of Crow Jack, but a vulgar
désarticulant himself puppet as soon as its Master gives up it. The
pontiffs of the clergy are obviously not the representatives of an altruistic
faith, but of cheap hypocrites animated by a vanity sacrilege : to become
immortal. As for Crow Jack, it is rough stripped of spirituality, a being
viscéralement, even exclusively, violent one. » Thus, the two
sides of the barrier meet, the extremes are linked and come from there to
merge, in a pulp of value where the traditional reference marks of
Good and Evil do not have any more a value.
For Carpenter the line which separates the goods and the
malicious ones in its films is « as in the quite thin life. The cops
and the robbers are the same ones » (81). Not astonishing thus that
they join (Bishop/Wilson in Assaut ; Melanie Ballard/Williams
Desolation in Ghosts off Mars). To make sensitive this attenuation, even
this disappearance of the border between the two worlds, Carpenter convenes the
image of the mirror : the mirror, very present in the it, Prince of
darkness is who reverses my image all while returning it almost to the
identical one. Exactly as can be to it Crow and Valek, reversed (different
camps, opposite searches...) but identical in the same violence, the same
brutality and especially the same deficit of existence apart from their
reciprocal tracking. In a sense, they do not exist that as they are
fought...
Carpenter still underlines the thinness from what separates its
heroes from the malefic forces while employing precisely and voluntarily of the
anti-heroes. John Nada for example is the prototype even. John Carpenter
notices on this subject (82) : « John Nada is an individual
without much motivation, somebody of banal completion. (...) From the point of
view of the company it is nothing (Spanish nada means anything
literally. You know for the rich person the poor are invisible. They do
not exist. » Carpenter goes even further in his will to scramble the
tracks (and the values) by creating figures of the evil able to adopt the shape
even of Humanity : Michael Myers posts a human face behind which any
humanity died while the thing is able to reproduce all human being in its least
details : voice, displacements, physics... In an opposite movement, as we
saw Carpenter made of the referent even of the spectator (Mac-Ready in The
Thing) a potential threat. In this confusion of the places and statutes
where `one cannot know with which proud, which remains it to defend for
Humanity ? Perhaps not its appearance which can be copied and imitated,
but surely its values and its principles, and in particular the ethical combat
which it can carry out against itself in order to contain the Evil which is of
each one of us.
3- the human one with fantastic dimension, the fantastic one
with political dimension.
3.1- a new off-centering: the logic of
successive domination.
The combat, resistance, survival is the principal stake of the
cinema carpentérien. But survival against which, counters what? Gang of
Los-Angeles in Attack, extraterrestrial in The Thing or
Los-Angeles Invasion, Anti-God in Prince of darkness, vampires in...
Vampires, phantom revanchists in Fog or Ghosts off Mars,
writer demiurge and démoniaque in the Cave of the Madness. What
plain all its threats? Quite simply will to impose its domination by subjecting
the character carpentérien, thus opening the way with the introduction
of a new astounding order, sometimes with exact opposed that established.
In Vampires, Valek seeks to recover an artefact which
would allow him, with him and his, «to go during the day», making of
him a complete predator. Indeed, in the state, Valek is a Master the night and
tracked the day as an animal as the scene of opening shows it where Jack Crow
and its comparses tear off the vampires with their reference mark and wildly
expose them in the light of the day. At the beginning of film, in a surprising
way, it is thus more Jack Crow (the man) which represents a threat for Valek
(the vampire) that the reverse. But with this artefact, Valek would make ground
a gigantic hunting ground, the man being reduced to the game row and loser of
this fact his statute of being higher creation. After the first off-centering
which the meeting with «the alter-ego constitutes», it is a new
off-centering quite as fundamental, bus from now on the human being is put at
bottom of its pedestal, is deposed of its statute of central and dominant
figure of the creation, put in competition (and of course at its disadvantage)
with other forms of existence. In Ghosts off Mars for example, the human
ones are confronted with the spirits of Mars, and the final one, to be opened,
lets well hear that the report/ratio of force is likely to be unbalanced, just
like in The Thing: if the thing is beaten for this time (and within
sight of final chosen by Carpenter one can doubt it), it only did not leave
given, because how to fight against a force which is spread and which one
cannot identify?
Same manner, in Prince of darkness, the advent of
Anti-God would mean the advent of new perfectly opposed order, testifies to
them the homeless people who surround the church: put at the service of
Anti-God they would be the first to benefit from this total upheaval. Why
homeless people? There perhaps precisely because they are the marginal ones,
Carpenter founding an off-centering of a new type, and politically very
subversive: paraphrasing a very famous biblical sentence, with the victory of
Anti-God the last will be the first and conversely. In this off-centering, it
is the majority, that of integration and the social success, which is
threatened by the minority, that of excluded and left for account, in a total
upheaval of the values and reference marks... One can easily imagine resonance
that such a matter can have in an American company champion all categories of
the social fracture!
If in a film as Prince of darkness the total inversion of
the values is only suggested (even strongly: in any case, evoked off-centering,
if it is made, will be done apart from filmic space, in extrapolation that will
just like be made the spectator of «after-film» in Ghosts off
Mars), in other films it is truly put in image: thus the final one of the
Cave of the Madness which sees the humanity decimated with the profit of an
obscure force, and which sees especially, in an inversion compared to the
beginning of film, the character of the Trent initially considered as insane,
to be right in the prophetic words which it had launched. From now on, they are
the insane ones, or regarded as such, which holds the truth. Sometimes even
this inversion of the values is posed like normalizes at the beginning of film
and not only crosses all film but the structure even: in New York 1997,
the town of New York, floret and pride of America, became a populated
penitentiary of the worst criminals, and in Los-Angeles 2013, the town
of Los-Angeles, become a ground of exclusion for all the misfits of the
American company, is paradoxically the last space of freedom. In Los-Angeles
Invasion, the off-centering which threatens traditionally the hero
carpentérien is this time realized before even the beginning of film: if
it relies on the world in which it lives, John Nada does not know yet that the
extraterrestrial ones (temporarily) gained and that they seized the power.
Beautiful (and subtle) mirror tended by the scenario writer to the American
company besides: the human rich scorning exclude them without suspecting that
they are themselves exclude them from a higher and dominant race...
Consequently the mission of the hero carpentérien is not any more to
avoid off-centering, but to reverse the inversion already operated by thus
restoring the original order... Without, and it is that also the irony
carpentérienne, which that changes something with the social
inequalities as characteristic of the human society as of that installation by
the extraterrestrial one... Once driven out invaders, basically that that will
change? perhaps all. Surely nothing. Lastly, while being delayed on Ghosts
off Mars, one will notice that it is this time the off-centering which
threatens the hero carpentérien (spirits of Mars dominating the human
one) who however comes to restore an original order: indeed this ground of Mars
belongs to the spirits since they were there before the men, it make finally
only take again their rights. As if the spirits of the Indians of America awoke
and came «botter the buttocks» from the cow-boy all in all...
Thus Carpenter dares to threaten the statute even of the Man by
posing the possibility, if not the certainty, that the human being is dedicated
to being replaced by «something of other» that they are phantom,
extraterrestrial or anything of other... Like the Man succeeded the dinosaurs,
something of other, superior will succeed to him. And this for the simple one
and good reason which the Man carries in oneself the germs of his own
destruction...
3.2- codes westerniens with the internal threat :
revisited America.
Carpenter forever carried out western, although it does not know
very well itself why (82) : « I failed to do one of them but I
do not know why I never passed to the act. I could not formulate a correct
answer. Perhaps that I did not have courage. It should not be forgotten that
the young people do not have of it anything any more to make westerns. They
made their time. » However the kind crosses all its work, of the
deserted city of Attack to the phantoms desperados of Fog, of the hat of
cow-boy of Mac-Ready to the duels in the corridors of the station of
TV in Invasion Los-Angeles, of the arrival of the Trent with Hobb' S End (only
the name of this city is in oneself a proclamation !) a such cow-boy
avenger in the Cave of the Madness to the primitive spirits of Mars come to
recover their ground conquered by the land ones... in connection with Vampires,
Bertrand Rougier (83) announces that « Carpenter signs as much a
night western inspired by Rio Bravo (music), the Night of
Word-Alive (the environment and progression of the account) and the Wild
Horde (general sets of themes and the space management) that a remake of
Prince of darkness. » But the films in which this influence of
the western is felt more, it is perhaps the couple New York
1997/Los-Angeles 2013 ; Carpenter himself defines them thus
(84) : « Los-Angeles 2013 is like New York 1997, a
black western, a film with Indians and cow-boys ».
Why this attraction for the western ? by taste of course,
since it is the popular cinema which rocked its childhood and caused its first
agitations of spectator... But also because to evoke the western, it is to
evoke the history of the United States, and not any history... It is to evoke
the original culpability of a country which was built in violence and blood,
and this culpability, Carpenter did not cease working to represent it with its
way: in Fog with the phantoms come to make pay its crime at a community
which takes pleasure in the lie, in Ghosts off Mars with the colonists
who learn with their depends that one does not adapt a ground also easily
(spirits being defined clearly as a reflection avengers of the Indians of
America driven out of their ground), and finally through all its work. Indeed
concept of culpability and cursed genealogy structure completely work
carpentérienne. This is why Cédric Delelée does not
hesitate to establish a comparison full with by the way between Carpenter and
Clint Eastwood, both falling under the same logic of storytellers of the
history of America (84) : « Carpenter approaches another large
scenario writer fascinated by America and his mythology. It is indeed
impossible not to think in Fog of the Man of the High Plains of
Clint Eastwood, the only realizer with Carpenter to be fitted in a traditional
vein inherited John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann and John Sturges. Passion
that Carpenter and Eastwood divide is there to prove it, just like their desire
to transmit typically American legends (i.e. registered in the unconscious
collective of a still young nation) and who can be forged only in these heroic
spaces which are Far-West and the Ocean. In Fog, the spectra which
emerge from the sea evoke more once band of desperados. And it is not a chance
if Carpenter benefits from it to stress the fact that America was built on the
corpses of innocent to which one stole their grounds, just like had done it
Eastwood in Josey Wales Hors-la-loi. ».
Lastly, let us note that if Carpenter trotts us from one end to
another of America (New York, Los-Angeles, suburb, province, coastal city, far
North...), it is indeed, under cover of entertainment, to draw up a catalog of
the threats which weigh on it... Which are they ? Threaten of
standardization with the invaders of the Village of Damnés or the
extraterrestrial ones of Los-Angeles Invasion which standardize the
human behaviors (obey ! You marry !), this standardization
being also that which specifically threatens the world of the cinema (Carpenter
says thus (85) « that at the time its rage was not directed against a
studio in particular or a producer. What made it insane, it was rather the
state in which was the American cinema. It was revolted by what one proposed to
the spectators, but also by the apathy of the public in general. A public which
does not accept any more the originality and is reassured by consuming stupidly
done everything formulas. »). In same optics, threatens of the loss
of individual identity in The Thing, and threatens of the loss of
collective identity, i.e. our culture, in Invasion Los-Angeles (what
Helene Frappat describes as threat of the ugliness, a levelling down of our
company which is locked up in the mediocrity : « the largest
danger that the exploiteurs make run in our world is less its destruction that
its disfigurement. » ), threat of the social fracture
and the violence of the large capitalist machine (machine to produce exclusion)
in Los-Angeles Invasion, threat of blind violence like only rule
(Attack, New York 97 : it is virtually the law of the
strongest which reigns), threat of the puritanism and the loss of personal
freedoms (Los-Angeles 2013, Los-Angeles paradoxically appearing the last space
of freedom.), threat of the censure against the difference (the Trent in the
Cave of the madness is censured because its vision of reality is not in
conformity... It is thus insane.) and finally threat of the alienating
technology which reduces to us with the state dependant sheep... (it is the
direction of the last arm of honor of unverifiable Plissken which decides to
extinguish the world).
However these threats that Carpenter decides to make weigh in a
fictional way on the United States (extraterrestrial, monsters...) under cover
of entertainment are finally only the reflection of obsessions and the
obsessions which corrode America of the interior. Finally here is all the
metaphorical movement of the cinema of John Carpenter : to take the quite
real threats which mine our company of the interior and to disguise them in
less dérangeantes fictitious external threats. However, well in spite of
we let us not be easily deceived. Here well all the lesson of the cinema
carpentérien ; if it frightens us also, it is because it does
nothing but tighten us the disgracieux reflection of our most intimate
neuroses...
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