Mad About the Mouth
John Carpenter isn't afraid to scare people in a PC world
By Bob Strauss
Is John Carpenter going nuts? Sometimes he wonders. "I don't quite know what to make of it all," Carpenter says, referring to the creeping censoriousness, infantilization and general sense of tedium now infecting American culture. "Except that the country, it seems, is very fearful of what it's become."
Odd words from a filmmaker who, for much of his directing career, has made fear his business - with HALLOWEEN, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, THE FOG, THE THING, THEY LIVE and now, IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS. To Carpenter, what's distressing is the current notion that violent, frightening images in filmed fiction are, if not as bad as, at least a root cause of real blood spilled on real streets.
"What are they talking about?" he asks rhetorically. "It's a very fearful time. It's also the millennium. People are looking for an easy way out, something to blame their troubles on. Film and TV have always been controversial in that way. But this is absurd. I defy anyone to show me a cause and effect. It's not possible. These media don't work that way. I wish they did, but they don't."
Carpenter's concern doesn't necessarily stem from having a career stake in the outcome of the debate. Though he's filmed a lot of rough-action and retch-inducing horror, his resume also includes such comedies as the droll sci-fi satire DARK STAR and the Chevy Chase vehicle MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN; the gentle, out-of-this-world romance STARMAN and even a TV biopic of Elvis.
Carpenter talks a lot about alarming developments in audience tastes and social attitudes, perhaps because that's the subect of his latest movie. That, and trying to figure out whether it's you or the world that's going insane.
IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS explores what could happen when a pop culture phenomenon is taken way too seriously. In it, superselling horro novelist Sutter Cane, a spiritual descendant of H.P. Lovecraft with a kind of hyper-Stephen King popularity, is literally making people sick with his books. Readers get headaches, depressed, schizophrenic. Some are even driven into a demonic, alternative reality - which may be the future of our own.
When Cane disappears before delivering his latest manuscript, his publisher dispatches insurance investigator John Trent to a mystical New England town. There Trent discovers reality shifting and a major challenge to his own rationality. Sam Neill is the increasingly uncertain Trent. Jurgen Prochnow is the elusive author and Charlton Heston plays Cane's publisher.
"Our hero ends up in an insane asylum questioning his sanity," Carpenter says. "That's the whole point of the picture, although it can also be looked at in a number of other ways. It's a horror adventure, about discovering this evil force that's taking over the world. But it can also be seen as a classic 'Am I crazy or not?' story. You have to kind of decide for yourself, when you see the film, if he's crazy. I don't think he is. I think it's all real."
Hopefully Carpenter means real in a metaphorical sense. "This is about a horror writer whose books are starting to affect the fans. And infect the fans, turn them into something else, into killers. If you think about it, that kind of echoes this ridiculous debate about television, about how it's turning all of our children into murderers. This is kind of a horror way of looking at that."
Unlike many of the genre directors of his generation, Carpenter has repeatedly made oblique and sometimes overt socio-political commentary in between requisite shoot-outs and decapitations. There was a "we're all prisoners here" gag underlying the Manhattan-as-penal-colony action film ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. Besides its incomparably icky special effects, his remake of THE THING was a tragic meditation on man's warlike inability to trust his storytelling and thematic substance. Carpenter might even admit to having had a hand in a couple.
A cultural backlash to that witless but lucrative cycle was probably inevitable. But like most shifts in social taste, the new cry for softer, less explicit movies makes no allowance for the real elements of good taste - intellectual depth, artistic daring, honest insight - nor for just effective, visceral thrills, whether or not graphic viscera is involved. The new censorship doesn't want anything too distrubing, provocative or stimulating that might negatively influence a child or challenge an adult.
And that's not John Carpenter's idea of fun. "Even Stephen King is not quite as popular now as he used to be," says Carpenter, who made a film out of King's CHRISTINE. "What's popular now is THE FLINTSTONES. It's a whole different age. This is a G-rated world. I mean Las Vegas is turning into family entertainment. Disney wanted to turn Manassas into a theme park."
"How things change is very strange to me. I know that back in the 80's people my age rushed into parenthood," says Carpenter, who has a 10-year-old son with his wife and producer, Sandra. "Rushed into it, made up for lost time, I suppose. So we've got all of these spoiled kids running around now. And the market seems so skewed to that. I'm very happy about that movie that came out last summer, SPEED. It had a little juice to it, a little bit of kinetic excitement, which I find missing in most films nowadays. Times have changed. We've become more conservative, even more than we were, about our entertainment."
That juice Carpenter speaks of has been a visual hallmark of his work ever since the first South Central L.A. gang laid prescient siege to the isolated PRECINCT 13 in 1976. Whether it was the killer's point-of-view camera work in HALLOWEEN or the computer generated ripping open of reality that's a key scene in MADNESS, Carpenter has almost always found at least one galvanizing cinematic signiture for each of his features (uniquely among American directors, he usually composes his scores, too).
If he were starting out today, Carpenter frets, some of his most notable work might never have seen the light of a projector. "You wonder about it," he says. "I've made movies that don't have any violence at all in them, and then I've made some that are pretty violent. MADNESS has just a little, enough to get you goin'. But some of the early ones were real tough. I don't think I could make ASSAULT ON PRECNCT 13 now. It wouldn't pass. I'd have to cut THE THING down now, pretty heavy, in order to get an R rating for it. I can only say I'm glad I made it then. Making it now, it wouldn't have been the same movie. It would have been watered down."
To Carpenter, the trend toward repressing expression is more ominous than any fiction he's come up with. It echoes the all-time dystopian classics. "Do I know why this is happening? I don't think we want to deal with the problems that seem to be impossible to deal with. Y'know, they're all boring: poverty, crime and all that shit. They seem intractable; they seem beyond repair. Nobody can solve this, so let's hype ourselves out and worry about what's imaginary to begin with. Doesn't it sound like those books, 1984 and BRAVE NEW WORLD? All of the things in those books seem to be coming true."
For all his cautionary observations, Carpenter isn't letting the shift in cinematic acceptability make much impact on his work. His next film is another supernatural chiller, a remake of the paranoid, British classic VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED - "little kids with blond hair and glowing eyes making you do things you don't want to do," as he says. A not-so-subtle comment on the G rating of pop culture?
"We are updating it and setting it in America," he says. "it's not that subversive, but it'll be scary." Indeed. As long as he can contribute to the frightening of America, John Carpenter has a chance of remaining safe and sane, at least in his own mind.
"IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS was a difficult movie to make, but I've heard more screams from people watching it than I've heard from many of my movies for a long time," he says with unmistakable pride. "People yelling and screaming and jumping. That's what it's all about, man: Throw that popcorn in the air and let rip a scream!"
