After Hours
A Brilliant Yarn
Martin Scorsese’s After Hours could at first seem like a double recapitulation. Trying to get money to fund The Last Temptation of Christ, he was willing to take on other projects after the failure of The King of Comedy, and show he could make less personal cinema. After The King of Comedy flopped, and he couldn’t find funds for his Christ project, he admitted: ‘I had nothing lined up next. And I knew I was going to have to start all over.” (BFI) Producer and star Griffin Dunne said: He had a stack of scripts next to him on his seat, and After Hours was the first one he read.” (BFI) Here was perhaps the US’s finest and most thematically preoccupied filmmaker, taking what was to hand.
The second reason was that Scorsese’s work was part of a 1970s cinema that took apart classic Hollywood, no matter the frequent homages his generation would offer to older work, most obviously in Scorsese’s case, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and New York, New York. But the former had plenty of Scorsese’s anxious energy, and New York, New York was more an anti-musical: like Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz rather than Grease. In both these Scorsese films, characters seemed to work against the generic components. There was the edgy intrusiveness of Harvey Keitel’s character in Alice…; the constant spats between the two leads in New York, New York. Nobody would say of Scorsese’s films that they functioned like clockwork; they were busted devices put together haphazardly to reflect the times. A fractured society needed a fractured form. The line in Taxi Driver comes to mind: ‘’all the king’s men couldn’t put it back together again.’’ They have been astonishingly well made, but they weren’t much interested in narrative logic.
Yet After Hours, written by Joseph Minion, is as carefully constructed and tightly elaborated a work as any screwball comedy from the 1930s or 1940s. Many of the characters have quirks, but they don’t quite have personalities, if we can differentiate the two by noting that the quirky contributes to narrative force, while a personality risks fracturing the form, or at least feels superfluous to the progression of the film’s story. Taxi Driver is full of characters who exist more strongly than narrative demands, who register on the screen as characters who might disappear from the diegesis but linger strongly in the mind. The most extreme is Scorsese himself in a cameo role where he offers a misogynistic rant from the back of Bickle’s cab, while they wait outside a woman’s apartment. Yet it’s there as well with the guy who hires him for the taxi driver job, the person who sells him guns, and even the drummer in the briefest of cameos as the camera stays on his presence longer than we would usually expect. A personality needn’t be consequential, even if they are vividly present, while quirky characters fit into the narrative pattern and often offer the work a recursive quality, no matter how dark.
After Hours is full of them: Marcy, Kiki, Julie, Gail, Neil and Peppe, all characters who remain lightly sketched as characters, yet rich in their contribution to the narrative tapestry. Just because Marcy( Rosanna Arquette) is needy, desperate and in turn suicidal, doesn’t make her any less quirky, which might sound insensitive, but is in keeping with the blackest aspect of Scorsese’s film. She is the film’s catalysing presence, the one who chats with central character Paul Hackett (Dunne) in a diner, gives him her number, which he then phones, as he finds himself in downtown Soho. Neil and Peppe are neighbourhood thieves, Kiki, Marcy’s flatmate, and Julie and Gail women who seem keen to help him in his predicament as he finds himself without money trying to get home. Yet these are women who will later turn against him out of resentment and suspicion. There is also a cab driver who thinks Paul has screwed him over, and a kind barman (John Heard) who has his own crisis to deal with that dovetails with Paul’s.
The gist of the story is this: Paul hopes for an assignation with Marcy premised on buying a plaster of paris paperweight, but she seems more messed up than he would like, and when she admits that she is getting over a break-up, has a yen for burns, and looks like she isn’t going to put out, he disappears from her apartment and tries to get back to uptown New York. The first problem is that during the cab ride to Marcy’s, the driver manically whips through the streets, and Paul loses the one twenty-dollar note he has on him. When he gets out and says he lost the bill, the driver glares and takes off. When he goes to get the tube back home, he only has a dollar or so on him, and the fare has just gone up that very night: it is now a dollar and a half.
One of the great films of the late 1970s that dealt with New Yorkers trying to get back home was The Warriors, based partly on Xenophon’s Anabasis. After a night where all the city’s gangs congregate in a Bronx park, the titular gang find themselves accused of killing the figure who brings the gangs together, and they spend the rest of the evening fighting various gangs along the way as they try to make it home to Coney Island. The Warriors covers the vastness of New York, and emphasises aggression. After Hours concentrates on Soho and relies chiefly on passive aggression. Much of the humour comes from the absurd difficulties Paul has in trying to get back to his comfort zone; The Warriors, on the ferocious physical abilities of the gang to do the same, even if, socially, the contrast is great. The Warriors are poor; Hackett is middle-class. Scorsese’s greatness as a director has often been in showing unequivocal aggression humorously, without quite falling into the cynical, post-modern humour of Tarantino, the Coens and occasionally Lynch. When in Raging Bull Jake La Motta asks his brother to hit him as hard as he can in the face, or when in Good Fellas the boys go for a slap-up meal cooked by a gang member’s mum after all the hard-work of beating someone to death, the humour rests on the gap between how most humans generally act and how Scorsese characters do so, aware that verbal inarticulacy is more than made up for by using guns, knives, boots and fists. In After Hours, Scorsese sublimates much of this aggression into subtext, with most of the characters containing within them a dislocated resentment that manifests itself in irritation, frustration, self-pity, and self-loathing, with Paul combining aspects of them all. ‘Why me?’ he says, falling to the ground at one point, and invoking the Lord.) When he believes that Marcy is too loopy and making out isn’t going to happen, he shows a mixture of frustration and irritation as he asks her to go and get that bagel and cream cheese paperweight, before scarpering out of the building. The self-loathing is perhaps a little less evident, but he certainly comes to realise that he completely lacks the resources to survive on his own when away from his uptown world.
We might be bending over backwards to justify After Hours as worthy of Scorsese’s authorial signature, and as a work that has incorporated modern Hollywood without the film merely being a throwback to screwball. However, if the film has the underlying menace of the director’s oeuvre, it also plays out in the context of a sub-genre popular at the time, one which often possessed a threatening atmosphere. This was the yuppie-in-peril film: Desperately Seeking Susan, Blue Velvet, Something Wild – films with an often timid or careful character finding themselves in a new environment. It played like a combination of two other sub-genres popular in the eighties: the woman-in-peril film manifest as a slasher (Friday the 13th, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine), and the fish-out-of-water movie (Trading Places, Witness, Crocodile Dundee). Judith Williamson saw that the yuppie-in-peril films were ‘’all concerned with a foray made by a middle-class person into an ‘otherness’ represented by the other side of town,’’ and sees that various ‘others’ (often blacks and women, gays or working class) were viewed as projections of the characters’ fears. For the politically concerned Williamson, this indicates, ‘‘if sexy women and laid-back blacks can be made to stand for repressed facets of the middle-class psyche – what of their own social reality?’ (Deadline at Dawn) As After Hours, like other yuppie-in-peril films, circles back to its original place, it might almost feel that the character has nightmarishly created the problem as a paranoiac reflection of their own anxieties.
Scorsese in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The King of Comedy was a great director of paranoia, taking a theme that ran through much seventies cinema (The Parallax View, Chinatown, Night Moves, All the President’s Men, and numerous others), and made it his own, a product of the very subjectivity that makes Williamson suspicious. After Hours can see like a taming of that paranoia for generic ends, but another way of looking at After Hours is to see that it muses over how to do screwball in the wake of that most paranoiac of decades, when trust in government was undermined by so many aspects of state, one that showed Watergate wasn’t an isolated incident, but merely the catch-all to capture the period’s sense of distrust. After Hours can be viewed as the softening of Scorsese or as the reenergising of what had become a moribund genre. Sure, in the late fifties, Billy Wilder gave it a spin in Some Like it Hot, but the 70s examples like What’s Up Doc? And For Pete’s Sake could hardly compete with those earlier classics, It Happened One Night, The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday. When the British Film Institute listed their ten favourite screwballs, they were all from the classic period of Hollywood. Williamson might understandably see a reactionary element in the yuppie-in-peril film, but from another perspective, it gives the screwball-style comedy a renewed generic energy. We have noted that Scorsese’s violence often had a comic dimension, and his paranoia also had a latent humorous element, with Bickle’s ‘You Talkin’ to Me’ speech in the mirror in Taxi Driver, and La Motta in Raging Bull yelling out the window, after neighbours are fed up with the arguments they are hearing from the apartment, that he will kill their dog and eat it. Here, he pushes the paranoiac into the fully comedic and arrives at the perfection of screwball in modern form.
If central features of screwball comedy are the battle of the sexes, farcical circularity and misunderstandings, After Hours possesses all of them, though reconfigured. The battle isn’t so much between a man and a woman, but between Paul and women generally, as if a variation of Bickle’s misogynistic claim in Taxi Driver: ‘’I realize now how much she's just like the others [Betsy is], cold and distant, and many people are like that, women for sure, they're like a union.’’ The women here aren’t cold and distant; more needy and desperate. But Scorsese turns the battle of the sexes into a paranoid reality.
Farcical circularity often comes in the typical screwball when characters wind-up with what they want long after the viewer understands what they need. We know in His Girl Friday that Walter and Hildy are made to stay together, and we know too that, for all the machinations in The Awful Truth, the Warriners won’t be getting divorced, and the emotional merry-go-round only reaffirms their love for each other. The film ends just before the divorce they have set in motion goes through, and where it is no longer valid. That would demand some explaining, but all that matters is that they arrive pretty much at the point they started at, as they catch up with the audience’s awareness. While screwball may have a lot in common with the romantic comedy, part of the difference may reside in circularity versus progress. When Stanley Cavell wrote a book on the genre, Pursuits of Happiness, he emphasised what he called the comedy of remarriage, and the recursive over the progressive. By the end of After Hours, it is as if Hackett needn’t have gone out at all, as he gets deposited, after a series of events, on the doorstep of his workplace. He will unlikely have further dealings with any of the characters he has met, and partly why Williamson may see the film as essentially about Paul’s psyche and not Soho society.
This leaves the misunderstandings. While in many classic screwballs, this rests on misplaced perceptions and hurts, petty acrimoniousness and lovers’ quarrels. Adams’ Rib, Mr and Mrs Smith and The Awful Truth could all be seen as comedies of misunderstanding, films that, by the conclusion, show the characters have seen the error of their perceptions, and can become reunited. The misunderstandings in After Hours aren’t about a central couple failing to comprehend each other’s actions and motives, but about numerous characters failing to understand the nature of events and the predicaments they find themselves in. When Paul persuades a gay man to take him home so he can hide out from a vigilante mob, the man says there are certain things he won’t do in advance, before slowly realising that Paul isn’t looking for an assignation, and there won’t be anything Paul will do. The mob who are after Paul predicate their pursuit also on a misunderstanding. Somebody’s been breaking into apartments in the area, and Paul’s image finds itself on a vigilante poster. The biggest misunderstanding also helps save his life. The actual thieves are a couple of stoners who end up stealing Paul after a kindly woman helps him out by hiding him in her basement, and turning him into one of her artworks: she covers him in layers and layers of paper. He now looks like a Papier-mache sculpture, and the stoners break in and take off with it in their van, unaware that inside this piece of work is a human being. As they careen around a corner with some of the haste we have seen earlier, when Paul hangs on for dear life, but not onto the twenty-dollar bill that leaves him for the rest of the evening defenceless, the back doors open, and Paul lands on the pavement. The encasement is shattered, he gets up and goes to work covered in white dust. While the twenty-dollar bill is the piece of paper that he loses, many other pieces of paper have covered his body and helped him escape his predicament. The robbers aren’t caught, but neither is Paul, as they obliviously return him to the part of town in which he can once again feel safe.
Scorsese’s film can perhaps be seen as a double affirmation rather than capitulation, as he manages to incorporate the paranoia and violence that have always interested him into a film that is as carefully interlocked as any from the classical era. While in earlier films he wanted the loosest of storytelling all the better to provide a picture of New York that is falling apart, or at least to show a character within it happening to be doing so, here he shows that the segment of the city he explores is unhinged in a new way, and finds in an older genre a manner of exploring it. Nobody would say that most classic screwballs are paranoid, but the director imbues the internal logic of the genre with the external preoccupation with a city that is capable of random violence and persecution. When he is running away from the mob (in this instance, a crowd rather than mobsters), Paul looks across the way and sees a wife fire a few bullets into her spouse. He says out loud to himself: ‘I’ll probably get blamed for that.’
In different ways, both Gilles Deleuze and Robert Philip Kolker saw that seventies American cinema transformed classic Hollywood. Deleuze made much of the restless, rootless figure: ‘‘Another type of actor will be born. The guy who literally has events landing on him that don’t really belong to him, even his death. And yet we can’t say he is completely indifferent. He will act, he will react. In this sense, he remains a good American. Sometimes he will react with extreme violence, and yet at the same time it’s as if it only half concerns him.’’ (The Deleuze Seminars) This fits Travis Bickle, but wouldn’t cover Paul Hackett. Kolker believes that while After Hours is good, it isn’t as great as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull happen to be. He reckons the form is more conventional, the camerawork ‘‘repetitive of movements Scorsese has done with more power in earlier films.’’ (The Cinema of Loneliness) Yet while Scorsese needed to find a camera correlative to the drift and chaos of Bickle, in After Hours, he requires a control consistent with the interlocked pieces of the story. Taxi Driver possesses a brilliantly fractured form that makes much of the narrative shattering. The characters in the earlier film are often in pieces; the characters here may be too, but only all the better to see them as pieces in the narrative labyrinth. This can be seen as a weakening of form, but it can also be viewed as a strengthening of it from a different perspective. Classical cinema was, of course, far from formless; the problem was more that the form had risked becoming a formula, and Deleuze and Kolker’s comments reflect how American cinema of the 70s had to collapse it and find new methods.
After Hours puts those pieces back together again while retaining the sense of a fractured reality as Scorsese insists on possessing numerous characters that could have shown up earlier in his work, but now instead of personalities that go nowhere (the sort of character acting that gives texture and density to a film, a sort of cinematic version perhaps of Roland Barthes’ reality effect), the individuals retain their quirks but serve narrative function. Whether it is the woman in the Mr Softy ice-cream truck who turns out to be a vigilante, the barman who helps him out and who we discover was Marcy’s boyfriend, or the burglars whose thieving ways lead to Paul’s hounding, yet are also responsible for his escape from Soho, everyone has their place in a very different type of weave. In Taxi Driver, it was the texture of New York reality meeting the paranoiac mindset of Bickle; in After Hours, it is the texture of New York narrative meeting the absurd disaster of one bad evening.
One may see in After Hours a directorial surrender and a retreat from the radical confrontation with the times. But it can also be viewed as an attempt to combine elements of the New Hollywood with aspects of the old, and all the better as it finds ways to bring form to a formula, without retreating into the stale. Scorsese has called the film an attempt “to show they hadn’t killed my spirit,” and this motivation is evident in every frame’’ (Criterion), Sheila O’Malley notes. ‘‘The screen bristles with visual flourishes, and the director’s capacious cinephilia is on display in an almost aggressive fashion.’’ It balances the reverential in its respect for the close-knit narrative style of classic Hollywood, with the referential need to acknowledge this is a film made long after that period, a work that combines Hitchcock (wrong man cinema), battle of the sexes screwball, and the cinema of suspicion of the 1970s. Yet it wears both its authorship and its use of homage lightly enough for an unassuming viewer to see just a brilliant yarn.
© Tony McKibbin