Great Scenes and Sequences in Cinema - Twilight Zone: The Movie (Dante, Landis, Miller, and Spielberg 1983)

Hello everyone, and welcome to a new segment here at The Experience Cinematic, Great Scenes and Sequences in Cinema. Here, I will take selected scenes from overall films that I find are worthy of discussion and do just that. And to kick things off, the scene being discussed today is the opening of Twilight Zone: The Movie.

When I was a kid, about the age of five, one of the things I tended to do when I couldn’t sleep was to get up and try and convince my parents to let me watch what they were watching. Usually, I failed. However, one Saturday (I think it was a Saturday), I pushed my luck and won; I was going to be allowed to stay up and watch what my parents were going to watch. In this case, it was to be a late night airing of a film, one which was preceded by an interesting, if slightly creepy, advertisement. I wasn’t going to leave though, as I was curled up beside my mother and ready for anything this film called Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) could toss at me.

Four minutes later Dan Aykroyd turned into a monster, killed Albert Brooks, and I tore down the hallway to my bed as fast as possible. If it needs to be said, I didn’t sleep well that night.

However, that opening scene always stuck with me, and when the opportunity to tape the film off of “Space: The Imagination Station” came in the late 1990s, I took it and watched the film with glee several times. The film was one I eagerly anticipated on disc, and when it finally hit DVD, it was a day of release purchase, no questions asked. Sure, the film is flawed, and the production of the film is one of the most notorious in cinema history due to the horrific deaths of Vic Morrow and two children in a helicopter stunt gone wrong, but I love the film just the same.

The best element of the film though is that opening scene with Aykroyd and Brooks, a scene so strong that it almost sabotages the rest of the film. The scene is a perfectly executed jump scare, one of best ever put to film, but the scene has a much greater function than merely scaring the hell out of the audience. While Twilight Zone: The Movie is update or remake of the original show, the film is also a love letter to what Rod Serling created, examining the show’s place in American popular culture. It is a reminder about how the series examined the society it was part of, highlighting said society’s best and most negative attributes through Serling and crew’s imaginations. The opening scene of the film is a tightly constructed piece of meta fiction that directly comments on the series intent and power, while acting out itself a moral/political drama that would not have been out of place in the original series.

The scene (and the film overall) begins with the folk song “Midnight Special” performed here by Creedence Clearwater Revival, playing over shots of a highway at night in the middle of nowhere. Already the themes of the film are being set, with the song recalling America’s cultural past while the images remind us of the increasingly interconnected nature of America in the late 1970s/1980s. Said images finally give way to the image of a car wheel barrelling down the road to…somewhere, and finally to the two nameless occupants, singing along to CCR, engaged in their culture. Presumably, from the images we see, these two are friends. After all, why else would two men be driving in the middle of nowhere together, just singing along?

Soon, an all too familiar event for those who had cassette players happens: the tape is eaten, and the duo are left to talk to one another. Or not, as the case turns out to be, as the driver (Brooks) states that they already have talked to one another. The writing at this point is clever and subtle, as the nature of the relationship of the two is complicated when the passenger (Aykroyd) notes that he knows where the driver is from, but not the other way around, a point ignored by the driver. The driver instead begins to joke about by turning the lights on his vehicle off as he races down the road, much to the discomfort of the passenger who calls the practice unsafe, another point ignored by the driver as he kids about running over pedestrians.

As simple as the scene thus far is, some rather complex material is happening just below the surface. What we have is a tale of two men of seemingly similar backgrounds (a point only to be enhanced in the events to follow) but with two vastly different world views. The nameless driver is seemingly empowered in all ways - it is his car, he is driving, he decides how the conversation is going to go - and he treats this power as a joke. He could very well kill someone, but his self confidence is unshakeable as he heads into the darkness without direction. The passenger, quite possibly a hitchhiker, lives up to his position as being passive, out of control of what is going on. He is also more thoughtful and concerned about the driver’s behaviour.

The moment of dangerous driving gives way to the pair bantering back and forth about TV theme music, a topic suggested by the driver, until the conversation reaches its ultimate point, The Twilight Zone. The conversation from this point on turns into a complete geek fest, with the driver mixing up a Zone episode for an Outer Limits episode and claiming that he bought an additional pair of glasses after viewing the classic episode “Time Enough at Last.” While a seemingly innocent conversation, the driver’s unfounded conviction about which series a specific episode belongs to and the misunderstanding of “Time Enough At Last” points to a superficiality of the character, his own self-absorption. He “knows” the culture, but he does not understand it beyond how it may or may not apply directly to him. Just as his driving is solely for his own benefit. Just as he controls the conversation and games to his own benefit, not caring about the man in the seat beside him.

At this point, the passenger asks the same question of the driver that the driver asked him earlier: do you want to see something scary? The driver does, and the passenger illustrates the difference between himself and the driver by asking him to pull over before he will show him, an act of social responsibility and awareness. Once the car has stopped, the passenger indeed show the driver, and the audience, something scary, as he punishes the driver for his self absorption and lack of social consciousness, out in the middle of America.

Cue the iconic music; kick in Burgess Meredith’s narration.

As noted earlier, the scene serves a dual function. First, it is a reminder and commentary about the intent and importance of the original Twilight Zone series, with regards to its political, cultural and moral concerns, as brought to the show by creator Rod Serling. Second, while explicitly explaining the series, the scene itself plays out a type of morality play that would not have been out of place in the original series, were it to be expanded to fill a proper television spot. It is a complex scene, written and directed by John Landis, a scene which makes one wish that Landis had managed to come up with something half as clever in his full segment, which becomes lost in its grandiose attempts at political relevance.

The casting is also a vital reason that the scene works as well as it does. It is not merely that the casting of two stars primarily known at the time as comedians that adds to the creepy and unsettling tone of the scene, but just how average the pair are. Aykroyd and Brooks may have been major stars at the time, but at no point do they come across as such: they are just a couple of geeks cruising about and having the same nerdy conversations as anyone else. It is a tough quality to find in modern cinema, and one that makes me miss the style of American studio cinema of the 1980s all the more.

To be perfectly honest, I am willing to admit a nostalgic bias when it comes to Twilight Zone: The Movie, but that doesn’t change the brilliance of the film’s opening. If nothing else, I highly recommend the film for that sequence alone. And who knows? Maybe you’ll stick around for the return trip into the Twilight Zone…

Neighbours Follow Up

Found this on you tube recently, and it is an interview that was done around the time of the release of Neighbors, which was reviewed here last month.

The video is errie given the events that would happen not too long afterwards, and Gene Shalit is as terrible an interviewer as ever, but it is highly worth watching to see how Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were in the early 1980s. Enjoy!

Neighbors (Avildsen 1981)

I like to believe that in some alternate dimension, another version of the film Neighbors exists, written and directed by David Lynch with the same cast as the version of Neighbors that actually exists. In that mythic universe, we would likely have a film with a stronger understanding of the material its playing with, from the suburban middle class values and iconography that are sent up, to the fact that the film is finding its humour out of situations of sheer horror. This film would have also been the final work of John Belushi, and likely would have given him a high note to go out on with a performance that acknowledged his great talent and showed the range that most people never really took notice of during his life.

Unfortunately, in our reality, Neighbors is a film directed by John G. Avildsen, a competent filmmaker whose cinematic grasp never really extended pass the underdog sports film, which he made twice to great success (Rocky in 1976; The Karate Kid in 1984), and several other times to middling results (including The Karate Kid Part III in 1989; Rocky V in 1990). This real version of Neighbors, despite boasting some excellent performances and a script by Larry Gelbart (best known for running the television series version of M*A*S*H*), is a mess of a film, with a unbalanced tone, awkward direction and one of the most inappropriate scores I have heard for a film.

I don’t mean to pick on Avildsen, but it would be dishonest for me to say that I consider him anything more than a lesser talent. He is a competent director when he has the right script, and in the case of both Rocky and The Karate Kid, he was the right man, at the right place at the right time. However, with Neighbors, Avildsen is completely out of his depth, trying to force the material to be funny rather than trying to play it straight and allow the humour to develop naturally out of the horror.

In fact, that is the key thing which Avildsen misses with the film, that the film is first and foremost a horror story which happens to be funny. The film's narrative concerns Earl (John Belushi), a middle aged man who lives a dull life that is seemingly being systematically destroyed by the newly arrived neighbours (Dan Aykroyd and Cathy Moriarty) over the course of one night. The film is something of an early precursor to the late 1990s classic Fight Club (Fincher 1999), as Earl finds himself caught in a seemingly endless nightmare of trying to maintain his dignity, sanity and values in the face of the chaos his new neighbours bring, while still oddly being attracted to their anarchic behaviour and lifestyle. In order for the comedy to work, the repulsion and attraction that Earl feels towards his neighbours and their behaviour must be established. Unfortunately, in trying to emphasis the comedic aspects of the film, Avildsen ultimately sabotages his attempts to make the film funny.

Consider the score from frequent Avildsen collaborator Bill Conti, who manages to craft a selection of music that is memorable while being completely inappropriate for the film. Rather than working with the film as a whole, the Conti’s music overpowers the film, attempt to force the audience to find a scene funny or surreal with its mock Father Knows Best meets Twilight Zone sound. The music attracts attention to itself and never manages to feel like it belongs the film, instead coming across as some bad internet attempt at a joke dub that goes on throughout the entire film.

Luckily for Avildsen, not everything is a disaster, as Belushi actually manages to hold the film together almost single-handedly, giving a perfectly restrained performance that is far better than most film surrounding it. Belushi manages to make his Earl into a sympathetic figure, whose life is built on repressed feelings of disappointment and anger. Even more impressive however is Aykroyd, who manages to overcome the failure in direction to transform his character of Vic into a truly bizarre and sinister creature. Aykroyd’s work here is something of a watershed for him as an actor, pushing him farther than the amazing sketch comedian and straight man he had played thus far, and setting up the more dramatic performances he would later give. Unlike Belushi’s Earl, Aykroyd’s Vic is a character lacking in background and a cohesive sense of purpose, and Aykroyd’s patented mater-of-fact attitude which he brings to the role manages to give Vic a disturbing sense of purpose that another, lesser actor might have missed.

I am not sure however that I can recommend Neighbors based on the performances alone. At the end of the day, the film is little more than missed potential, and as a dark comedy is outdone by Joe Dante’s classic slice of suburban hell The ‘burbs (1989). Sadly, the best reason I can recommend it is to see Belushi giving his last ever role his all, effort that was ultimately in the service of a film that wasn’t worth it.