The very first time I ran across any mention of John Woo whatsoever, to be honest, was in Premiere magazine back in what must have been 1988. If I remember correctly (and like many strong memories for me, I can remember the moment itself quite clearly but have difficulty placing it within a specific context), it must have been fall of 1988 because it was my brother Chris's Premiere magazine and I was probably in his dorm room at San Francisco State. The article was a small one, the type Premiere used to have where it would write about movies that were making impressions on the Festival circuit. What caught me, apart from the description of the fight scenes which the writer said were balletic, poetic, exhilirating and insane (I believe that this is where I read the never-before repeated tidbit that Woo had become aware of the cinematic possibility of the gunfight on his earlier movie A Better Tomorrow and apparently would become so excited during the filming of the gunfights that he had to be restrained from jumping in front of the camera while the blood squibs were being set off), is that the writer kept referring to how the movie was frequently ludicrous and yet still moving.
It was an easy thing for an 80's writer on film to talk about something being ludicrous; irony appreciation was gearing up to a full head of steam. But it was, and is, much more difficult for a critic in the media today to talk about something being moving unless they're doing a puff piece (particularly those profiles of actors or directors that seem to go on interminably in order to spread out over five or ten pages and to and allow the editor show off four or five flashy pictures of the star and justify the cover of the popular figure) on something that hasn't been released yet.
In any event, I filed the name of the movie away in my head. I moved to Los Angeles and then, some time in late 1990 or early 1991, it played the Nuart theater (one of the few art houses in L.A.) and I went. It was a transformative experience, so much so that I didn't feel any different when I left the theater. To use a very 90's metaphor, it's a little like having an uneventful Sunday afternoon and then realizing three years later that during that day when you thought all you did was go on a picnic you had actually been kidnapped by aliens and implanted with strange shards of plastic debris in a loose semi-circle around your navel. I left the theater with an appreciation for the amazing technical accomplishments of the movie, and the amazing adrenal jolt of the gunfights, but I had little more conscious appreciation than I had when I left Die Hard. Externally, it looked like I had even less so, considering I went to see it alone and so had no one to talk effusively with afterwards. The only thing that I could think of was that it was the first time a movie poster's tag line ("One tough cop. One unstoppable killer. Ten thousand bullets.") was actually an understatement.
The plot of The Killer is this: Jeff, a professional hitman (played by Chow Yun-Fat), accidentally blinds a nightclub singer during one of his hits. He feels guilty about it and so becomes her protector and eventually falls in love with her without her finding out who he truly is. He decides to retire from the professional hitman business but agrees to one last job for a large amount of money so he can pay for the operation that will restore the singer's eyesight. However, after performing the hit, the mob boss tries to screw him out of the money, leaving Jeff to try to collect it while the mob boss's people are trying to kill him and a determined police detective closes in.
Film critics at the time compared parts of the plot to Magnificent Obsession, the Douglas Sirk movie I still haven't seen, that is a classic melodrama about a playboy who becomes a doctor so he can restore the eyesight of a woman he blinded. It wasn't until years later (i.e., after Woo started talking about it) that critics mentioned the influence of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai on The Killer. Le Samourai is a French movie from the late 60's that has Alain Deleon as a professional hitman who falls in love with the nightclub singer who sees him commit a hit and who has a mob boss try to screw him out of money and so is left trying to collect it while the mob boss's people are trying to kill him. The important subplot of Le Samourai is a cold professional police detective who is trying to catch Deleon and the important subplot of The Killer is the hot-headed, always-chastised-for-being-unprofessional police detective who is trying to catch Chow Yun-Fat.
It is the difference in the police inspectors in the two movies that really accentuate the differences in the two films. Melville's movie, disguising its sentimentality by having all of its characters be cold, was held up as coolly realistic. Woo's movie, by having everyone (except the mob boss and his thugs) be actually much warmer than one might expect (to the point of sentimentality), is considered melodrama.
In the creative writing and literature classes where I went to school, melodrama and sentimentality were not (and I assume still are not) positive buzz words. The best definition of sentimentality I ever heard, for example, was from a creative writing teacher who defined it as "unearned emotion." In literature, this usually means that the writer is trying to manipulate a heavily emotional response in the reader (teary reunions between mother and son, having a dog killed, etc.) without bothering to develop the characters fully enough. It's seen as a form of laziness on the part of the writer, either naively (the writer needs to be more imaginative and use more craft to create richer characters and imagine more unique scenarios) or cynically (the writer is letting the reader do all of the writer's work by giving the reader flimsily constructed universal situations and blatant cues as to how feel about those situations). Melodrama is a term that I never heard defined by anyone, just spoken with an air of disdain, that I guess I've always defined as a dramatic situation with thin characters designed for maximum emotional impact to the viewer/reader. Because these dramatic situations are pretty basic and because they work, they tend to get used over and over again so that melodrama carries with it the connotation of cliche as well. The type of plays that Plato complains about in his dialogues, the plays that produced wailing and rending of clothes on the part of the spectators, are melodramas. The term "tear-jerker" is strongly associated now with melodramas, although almost all Hollywood movies, with their lack of interest in developing character or doing anything to their audience other than letting them loll in their emotional juices, are melodramatic.
The Killer definitely is sentimental and melodramatic. After first seeing it, I wrote a letter to a friend suggesting that he see it saying, "The Killer is like watching an episode of Miami Vice directed by Sam Peckinpah with a script by Hallmark Cards." Like the rest of my generation, I recommended it because such a mish-mash was bizarre and bizarre things were worth seeing and experiencing for no other reason (it is exactly this idea that feeds the hipster ethic and why, when things become more accepted or done enough to no longer seem abnormal, they are deemed tired, discredited and discarded, despite whatever effectiveness they originally had or continues to have. It's easy to sneer at this ethic but it is part of our zeitgeist and just about everyone I know, myself included, does it to some extent or another. Part of the problem with this approach is its subjective evaluation built around the objects placement; our reaction to various creative endeavours these days is often little more than our reaction to our exposure to the creative endeavour both in its place as a piece of the media and as the media's coverage of the endeavour itself (whoever can figure out the mathematical figure for how many magazine covers a star can appear on before the public gets annoyed with the star and stops watching/enjoying the star, is going to get rich).). But what is important- - vitally important- - is that for many people, The Killer, which is sentimental and melodramatic, works whereas for many people, a very special episode of Webster, which is sentimental and melodramatic, does not. (By the way, dictionary.com defines melodrama as
Mel`o*dra"ma (?), n. [F. mélodrame, fr. Gr. song + drama.] Formerly, a kind of drama having a musical accompaniment to intensify the effect of certain scenes. Now, a drama abounding in romantic sentiment and agonizing situations, with a musical accompaniment only in parts which are especially thrilling or pathetic. In opera, a passage in which the orchestra plays a somewhat descriptive accompaniment, while the actor speaks; as, the melodrama in the gravedigging scene of Beethoven's Fidelio.so there you have it.)
So let's dovetail all of this back to me. What I realized that what I appreciated about The Killer, what ended up thrilling me just as much as all of the gunfights (which I realize now I underplayed my love for earlier on this page for fear of seeming unduly bloodthirsty or something) was the sentimentality and the melodrama. Rather than just kind of forgetting about The Killer and saying "oh, yeah, it's this crazy action movie" which, considering I've seen Road Warrior once means that I probably wouldn't go see it again, I thought back to those moments in the movie where I was moved, or where I realized that I wasn't moved but that the filmmaker thought I should be, or where things happened that I didn't know whether I felt like laughing or crying or both. The Killer, in doing everything I had been told was wrong, nonetheless ended up working, which obsessed me because at the time I was doing everything I was told was right in my creative work and it wasn't working at all.
Of course, there were plenty of early sentimental melodramatic stories that I wrote that pretty much did not work, but what I was finding was that my more "mature" work with a keen narrative voice couldn't quite bring itself to be about anything and that the work that was just telling stories or producing genre narrative was readable as all get out but not particularly well-written or memorable. If you're of sufficiently cyncial mind, you could say that I had mastered the two American writing styles, pointlessly literary and pointlessly commercial.
I went back to see The Killer every time it came to town at one theater or another, bringing friends with me, and watching their reaction, the audience's reaction, my reaction. I remember one time I brought my friend Pat G. to The Killer and he and the audience bellowed laughter all the way through it. He walked out pounding my back and saying, "That was a blast! I loved it!" Two months later, when it was playing again, I brought Maryea (an estimated spelling, alas. My memory is bad), his wife who was in the process of separating from him. The audience was a lot more subdued and she walked out saying, "That was beautiful. I loved how poetic it was."
Rather than having hyper-violent gunfights and then some empty pontificating, some strained weeping about some abstract topic (Danny Glover's character being broken-hearted about the death of young African American men in Lethal Weapon III) and then a return to even more hyper-violent buttkicking ("with a vengeance!") or having some love interest killed off, or tortured or else tortured and then killed off, leaving the protagonist crazy and ready to commit some even more hyper-violent buttkicking than in the first half of the movie (Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon II), characters in The Killer usually end up getting tortured or punished as a direct result of their beliefs (usually the primacy of friendship) which although the same result is had as in the above two movies (actors get to stretch their muscles and act a bit, the audience gets the feeling that the heroes are vulnerable), the results are much different precisely because they don't feel tacked on. In The Killer, much time is spent on people's beliefs and their friendships to each other so that when one character then ends up getting killed or tortured, the other character's reaction- - -generally weeping and then trying to figure out what to do next- - feels genuinely bathetic as opposed to second-hand, tacked on bathos.
Also striking to me was that everyone in The Killer, the killer, the detective, the detective's sidekick, the killer's sidekick, gets a moment to fight and redeem themselves. Hong Kong movies in general have more of an interest in having a large cast of characters and each character having more to do. It felt larger that way. The American action movie is little more than a big budget daydream which, as Freud pointed out about the nature of daydreams, are there to basically stroke and inflate the ego. As I learned from John Woo, Hong Kong movies, merely by expanding their scope to include all the other characters, turn that ego-stroking into something larger; a statement and belief about the good of all people, not just the protagonist (this belief in the idea that great good and its opposite horrid evil applies to everyone is why John Woo also consistently makes the hero and the villain mirror images of each other). This intermingling of pessimism and optimism invests the beautiful action scenes with an even greater grounding than they would have otherwise (the term for this sort of thing coined by the H.K. film geeks is "heroic bloodshed".)
These reasons are in fact superficial ones, initially propounded at the second viewing and the third and the fourth. With a little help from a disastrous date, I was able to get a bit closer to Woo's appeal.
About a year and a half ago, I had this huge crush on a friend of a friend. I was somehow able to parlay my general good standing into a date with this person who, as these things always happen, was in the process of breaking up with the Love of Her Life. Our first date consisted of me dressed up and bouncy and her wearing a torn red jacket , a slightly grimy shirt that read 'Kung Fu' in faded iron letters and a tired, beaten expression. I would try and be amusing and distracting and she would laugh, her eyes occasionally even looking alive, but then whenever things fell quiet, she would look down at her plate and instantly grow sad (to this day, I still wonder if the Love of Her Life made plates for a living or as a hobby or something). At one point, before the plate had a chance to again hold sway over her, she asked me "what is it that excites you and why?"
"Well," I said, and went on spontaneously to unlock the secret of The Killer which, five or six years after I first saw I now owned on video and had seen well over a dozen times, "I'm very excited by John Woo movies. He directs these heroic bloodshed movies? Which means that there's a gunfight in it every ten minutes and each gunfight is bigger and more insane than the first one which was very insane in the first place? And everyone dies for the most part in such extreme and amazing ways that you don't know whether to laugh or cry or do both at the same time. And, uh, I realized recently- - " which meant literally at that moment, "that that reaction is precisely the reaction Camp is supposed to evoke."
"See," I said, putting down my fork and knife, "Camp is thought of now as this thing that is so deliberately dumb that you're supposed to laugh at it. But that's modern camp which started back in the 80's as a way to interact with a media that was so large and impersonal it allowed very little interaction. People started laughing and deriding everything that was presented them and the more sincere the thing presented seemed to be, the easier it was to be derided. The sincerity was rendered hypocritical by the very large medium in which it presented. Nothing could be sincere, our media-savvy generation knew, because the media existed so obviously for one thing only; to make money. The commercials on T.V. proved it, the movie grosses on T.V and the advertisements in the paper proved it, the product placement everywhere proved it. To deride and to mock was an enjoyable activity for our generation because it allowed us to feel in control.
"That's not what Camp is about," I continued, my food cooling, "Susan Sontag in her essay Some Notes on Camp talked about the embracing nature of Camp. This was back in the 60's and Sontag was trying to figure out, for example, the way Gay men could simultaneously laugh at a Joan Crawford movie and still want to emulate it. The laughter of the audience, according to Sontag, is the laugh of love, the laughter of acceptance, and Camp is a complicated process that is nevertheless ultimately inclusive. The delight in 'the outrageous' is a celebration of the messy, awkward release of the repressed into the mannered and restrictive veneer of the sophisticated, a delight that seems pretty obviously necessary for Gay men who felt repressed and restricted at every turn (even within themselves at that time).
"See, part of the problem with 80's Camp is that it's not inclusive, it's exclusive by its nature," and I took a very quick drink of water somewhere around here because my throat was dry but I wouldn't have shut up even if she had looked down at her plate at that point (which she wasn't), "because the audience is trying to exclude the movie. Part of the problem with this I think is that it is essentially dishonest. 80s Camp is a way for our generation to secretly vicariously live through the process it's mocking. People watch an entire episode of Starsky and Hutch and mock it, but those images are still necessary to the ego, the daydreams are still needed to prevent the ego's collapse, and so the shows, the movies, the bad books and the comic books, are read and watched over and over, snickered at and derided and secretly embraced at the same time. And the problem with the secret embracement is that it does not allow the audience to know what it's really there for and so prevents them from going on to make choices about the types of art they want to experience. The attempt to take control back from the media ultimately just ended up ceding more control anyway.
"And of course there was that period of bad 80s movies, that still are prominent today now that I think of it, where the media, seeing the success of the crappy, went about making deliberately Campy movies, Campy in that 80s sense. So we were bombarded with movies that were suppoosed to be bad, that revelled in their own badness and made fun of the cheapness and crappiness of themselves and mocked the pretensions of those that tried to be more than crap. John Landis comedies, cheap teen comedies, Troma movies, later period slasher flicks with the emphasis of cheap jokes, puns and blood, John Hughes movies where people wink and nod at the camera, the National Lampoon flicks, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Dan Ackroyd, all those Saturday Night Live guys including later period Eddie Murphy. So Camp was something that I never thought that I would be able to respond to.
"When faced with the obvious ludicrousness of a John Woo movie, an audience laughs, and at the obvious moments of sincerity, the audience laughs even harder. But the laughter of a John Woo movie is not supposed to be the laughter of exclusion. It's supposed to be the laughter of inclusion. The camp of The Killer is classic Camp. And as such, it is serious, not ironic, in its bathos, sentimentality and melodrama.
"The distancing effect of the laughter actually allows the artist to go further with the emotional expressivity of the piece than they would be able to, ordinarily. And it allows the artist to put seemingly contradictory scenes and feelings of cruelty and kindness side by side. And more importantly, it allows the artist to address the deepest feelings of the audience directly, even as the audience thinks that it's not being addressed at all.
"I was finding myself in a cul-de-sac in my own writing," I said, oblivious to my decibel level, the cooling food or the sharp veers the waiters would take away from my table on the way back to the kitchen, "because my work couldn't really talk about anything serious when I was using a sophisticated voice, but it was too mawkish and self-conscious when I was trying to write anything as pedantic as a story. It takes an extraordinary amount of skill to say something well and actually talk about something and I was too aware that most of the best literary writers really weren't talking about much and that most of the genre authors wrote really terrible prose. I wanted to shoot for the pinnacle of writing, but I was finding it a littlle bit beyond my talent. And what I found in The Killer was a way out of that. The Killer presented an art where characters could be flimsy, plotting could be nonsensical and the highest pinnacle could still be attained. It was the art of Camp. Rather than derailing my narratives by overly abundant descriptions and characterizations, I realized that the flatter I made them, the more opaque they became and the more possible it was to move to the heart of what was important. Before The Killer, I was interested in literature. After The Killer, I was intrerested in film because film affects people deeper by simplicity whereas literature moves deeper through complexity (unless one only writes literature for children which isn't my bag). Film is closer to movement and movement, like music, is able to afffect in unspoken ways which are complex to understand but easy to create. Not everyone can make great Camp, but great Camp may be more attainable to my nature than great literature and can affect deeper. In fact, in this era, where most people reject the sophisticated out of hand the more sophisticated the venal, the base and the essentially materialistic most products of the media are, Camp, through its seeming lack of sophistication, may strike deeper and have greater influence on more people than great literature might. So my understanding of art and how it works has caused me to work on changing my own art. And a lot of that change and excitement is because of how I feel when I watch John Woo's The Killer."
At that, I finally took a mouthful of food, my head ringing with all of this that my conscious mind had not known until my own mouth spoke it. The food was very cold and its very coldness made me self-conscious. "And that's what's exciting to me," I concluded. The woman, the friend of the friend that I had a massive crush on, smiled at me. She looked down at her plate, clean for some time, and then looked back at me. She was still smiling. My sudden burst of effusiveness had actually made her forget the Love of Her Life. It managed to keep her in thrall for about two more dates and then she flaked on me a bunch, got back together with the Love of Her Life, and I never saw her again which bummed me out terribly. Now, of course, I am dating Julie, who rocks my world in a big way and makes me secretly very happy that every one of my previous relationships failed so that I can now be in this one, and maybe that allows me to say so cavalierly that it was all for the best and if I had hadn't had such a crush on someone with whom I so obviously never had a chance, I never would have been so driven to reveal so much deep shit to myself in the guise of trying to impress her.
Now if you've never seen the Killer or a Better Tomorrow I or II, but have generally only seen the John Woo stuff that he's done since moving to America, it might be harder to understand all of the above. No matter how John Woo throws in the occasional John Woo touch, there is very, very little in either the Van Damme movie Hard Target or the John Travolta movie Broken Arrow there is not much in them that is John Wooish. For one thing, everyone lives in John Woo's American movies (and by everyone I mean, of course, all the good guys). But there's an even greater, stranger reason which I'll get to in a minute.
Face/Off is John Woo's next American movie and his first summer release which is a new hurtle for him to clear here in America and a statement of confidence by the studio making the movie. In Face/Off, John Travolta plays a cop in the near-future who is obsessed with catching a master criminal played by Nicholas Cage. He, in fact, does catch Cage but then, to find the bomb or some other MacGuffin that Cage has planted, has Cage's face surgically transplanted to his so that he can infiltrate Cage's gang and find and defuse the bomb/whatever. After he does so, Cage ends up escaping, finding the doctor who performed the operation, and having Travolta's face grafted onto him. So now Cage/Travolta is hunting Travolta/Cage who had previously hunted Cage back when he was Cage.
Despite the fact that there is a blatant twist Woo standard of mirror-imagin the hero and the villain, I started to worry. All of the press that I had read until recently pointed out only the obvious; that it was ludicrous. And as these reports went on and on about how ludicrous everything was, got more and more depressed. The American studios kept handind Woo crappy scripts, I thought, and now they've finally given him one so ridiculous that he's sunk. His movie career is screwed, and he's going to end up directing episodes of Hercules and Xena for Sam Raimi and retiring early.
Suddenly, Thank God, I was enlightened. Face/Off was ludicrous. And it was the risk of being ludicrous, as opposed to merely hackneyed, that Woo's American films lacked and his Hong Kong films didn't. Although you may disagree with me and say that Van Damme as a Cajun merchant marine is ludicrous, or the idea of a bunch of people chasing each other around the desert with stolen nuclear weapons is ludicrous, the fact of the matter is that Hard Target and Broken Arrow were dopey but formulaic (one's in the Most Dangerous Game genre, the other is in the Speed genre) and anyone would have made them. But I don't think anyone would have gone for Face/Off but John Woo, just as I don't think anyone would have made a movie about a church-dwelling hitman falling in love with the nightclub singer he's blinded, or a tough cop movie where the centerpiece of the movie is the rescuing of babies from a besieged hospital.
So I'm actually very, very hopeful now about Face/Off. Other reports on the Net have been encouraging, none more so than the story about the much-in-demand cast cap for Face/Off which has on the front the Face/Off logo and on the back, the exclamation, "Everyone Dies!" Well, actually the story about the rough cut featuring a child watching a public slaughter while his Walkman plays "Over The Rainbow." Warms my heart.
In short (and I do say that, alas, ironically, as my three minute pop ditty has swelled up to fill one side of a 70's rock concept album), I actually have hope that, in a month or two, Face/Off will open and give America a chance, finally, to meet John Woo.
Had to throw in the special John Woo links for this one. For those getting acquainted, check out the great overview of John Woo weblinks at The Heroic Bloodshed Page. And for those of you who want to see more recent stuff about Face/Off and John Woo, check out the Woo-a-licious Bullet in the Web News Page.
Or why not check out:
Or email me at groder@red.org
All material on these pages (with the exception of the pagecounter)
is © 1997 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution,
all other rights are reserved.