Ok, story time.
Part 1:
There's something about that movie for me. In my life, it's honestly become a good luck charm. It's accompanied me on so many different stops on my film journey over the last decade that I actually find it kind of spooky. I have so many stories to tell about it, but I'll wait until the voting's closed (I say "wait until the voting's closed" and not "wait until the discussion thread" because it seems pretty clear that it ain't winning this Battle Royale
). For now, I'll say that I'd be unable to bring it up if it weren't for
@aquamanpunch, an old frequenter of the
Serious Movie Discussion thread. In the SMD of old, members would often do movie bets (before an upcoming card, two members would pick two fighters and whoever's pick lost had to watch the movie of the other's choosing). I upped the ante once and offered a movie challenge. I made a list of Katharine Hepburn movies and told people that for every Hepburn movie they watched I'd watch two movies of their choosing.
Needless to say, the list of movies that I ended up having to go through was quite long. But
aqua was like a shark with a bucket of chum. He fucking
devoured that Hepburn list. I think he watched something like 8 of them which left me with 16 movies on the list just for him. One of them was
Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Anyone who knows what that is will understand the kind of person I was dealing with with
aqua as well as my level of commitment to the challenge. But another one of the movies on his list was
Miracle Mile. In a weird way, I owe him a lot and all he did was recommend a movie to me.
Part 1 of this story, about how I first saw
Miracle Mile via my "Hepburn Challenge" in the SMD, puts us at around 2009. The following year, I took a class as a film school undergrad on
film noir. I'd already taken a class on silent cinema with the same professor, a really cool dude who spent the '80s working on film and TV crews in LA. When we were coming up on picking what to write for our final papers, I asked him if it'd be okay if I wrote my paper on
Miracle Mile as a weird kind of neo-
noir film. He took a pause like I'd hit the reset button on his brain and then he tells me that he saw
Miracle Mile in its original theater run in LA. He was blown away by the reference and told me he'd love to read a paper on it.
That's not the end of the story, however. On the syllabus, the last day of class was blank. On the last day of his silent cinema class, we voted on what movie to watch (we ended up watching
The Passion of Joan of Arc). This time, he told us the second-to-last week that he was going to show us Paul Schrader's underrated film
Patty Hearst. On a whim, "just in case" something happened, I decided to pack my
Miracle Mile DVD and bring it with me that last day. Sure enough, the digital copy of
Patty Hearst that my professor had on his flash drive wouldn't play. I raised my hand and said, "You know, I have
Miracle Mile with me." He looks up from the lectern and just goes, "No you don't." I reached into my backpack and pulled it out and he goes, "Ok, change of plans: We're watching
Miracle Mile." I brought it up to him at the lectern, I put in the DVD, and as I'm doing that he just walks away. I stand-up and watch him walk through a row of seats, sit down, and then he goes, "So tell us about the movie we're going to watch." Now, coming up on the end of the second class I'd taken with this guy, he already knew that I knew my shit and that I wanted to go the academia route and teach film, blah blah blah. But when he said that, the look he had on his face, it's like what he was really saying was, "Go ahead, future professor: Profess."
So I got to take over and run the last day of class. I stood up at the lectern and introduced the film to my classmates, then we watched it, and then the professor stayed in the seats with us and facilitated a discussion throwing shit to me like I was his co-professor. It was the greatest day of my undergrad days, and it all happened because I decided to bring
Miracle Mile along with me "just in case." Harry's right: "Fate is a funny thing."
Fast-forward a few years and I'm finishing up my Master's at the University of Chicago. It's Spring 2014, I've already finished my MA dissertation, and I get a call for papers e-mail from the editor of a journal run through the Master's program at the university. I knew that I wouldn't have time to write an essay from scratch, but I'd recently bought and read Walter Chaw's book on
Miracle Mile and it occurred to me: Why not find that
Miracle Mile essay that I wrote for my undergrad
film noir class? I rummaged around in my computer, found that old essay, dusted it off, spruced it up a little bit, and submitted it. Sure enough, it was accepted. Not only that, I'd taken two classes at the University of Chicago with Tom Gunning, the author of the book on Fritz Lang in which he articulated the concept of the Destiny-machine that I rely on in the essay, so it was cool having him say that my essay using his shit was cool. Now I'm thinking - again to borrow from Harry - "There has to be a cosmic plan of some sort."
Still not crazy enough? Don't worry, I've got the icing for this crazy cake. I'm in Wales on my PhD scholarship. It's late 2016 and I'm sitting in my flat at like midnight, winding down for the night, and I decide to check my e-mails one last time. Once my Inbox loads up, I see that I've got a few new e-mails, including one from someone named Walter Chaw. The name seemed familiar to me but I couldn't place it. Then it hit me: The
Miracle Mile guy! I opened it and it's him telling me that he read my essay and thought it was great and was happy to learn new things about it from what I had to say in response to his book. I responded by thanking him for his kind words and complimenting him on his book and I'm thinking that was cool but now it's over. Uh-uh. A few days later, I see his name show up in my Inbox again. It's a short e-mail that just says that he forwarded my essay on to Steve De Jarnatt who loved it and wanted to thank me for writing it.
As a scholar, whenever I analyze a movie that I love, the only audience that I have in mind are the filmmakers. When I write about Bruce Lee, I write with him in mind, imagining him reading (and hopefully liking) it. Same thing with when I wrote about Hitchcock, about Mann's
Collateral. And same thing when I wrote about
Miracle Mile. If the person who made the movie that I'm analyzing can read my analysis and think, "Wow, this guy really loves my movie and he really gets it," then I did my job.
But obviously that'll never happen. It's just a device that I use to motivate me when I write. It's a fantasy, a projection. It's not reality. Then this craziness happens. There I was, writing a thesis with the concept of authorship at the center and trying to explain to my at-the-time poststructuralist colleague (and soon-to-be-girlfriend and now ex-girlfriend) why (paging
@Rimbaud82) Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" represents the most heinous and murderous aesthetic position that one can possibly take, and then I received the ultimate validation from the author of one of my favorite movies.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/9e9d0bd8-894e-46ad-8599-22ab58c4415c
So yeah, needless to say:
Miracle Mile is a very special movie to me. And, in addition to all of that, IT'S A DAMN GOOD MOVIE. Like sneaky good. Since I wrote a whole essay for you to read, I'm not going to recapitulate everything. But I will say something that I don't talk about in the essay itself, which is that this film is full of so many wonderful moments. By "wonderful," that can mean a bizarre moment (like the rats falling out of the tree onto Harry's car when he arrives at the diner), an ominous moment (that
glorious low-angle shot of Julie framed against the Wooly Mammoth [?] tusks), a beautiful moment (the combination of the slow-mo, the music, the colors, and Harry's voice-over makes that early bit of the Harry/Julie montage where they're on the Merry-Go-Round such a beautiful moment - oh, and BTW, I used that line of Harry's about how he thinks he's "always been a romantic kind of guy, [he] just never had someone to be romantic with before" with that colleague/future girlfriend/current ex and it worked like a charm
), a funny moment (I always crack up when the camera pans left on the outside of the diner when they're all exiting to get in the truck and you can see the Terminator shrink puking), a tragic moment (the visual of Bubba carrying his dying sister in his arms while trying to walk up the Down escalator is fucking devastating), what have you, the movie is filled with wonderful moments.
God, I fucking love this movie
Other than Mare Winningham, who seems off the whole movie, I think the acting is shockingly fantastic, particularly from the supporting players like Mykelti Williamson, Kurt Fuller, and Robert DoQui.
The plot contrivances I was less accepting of. Things like finding a helicopter pilot like that. The lady at the diner being some nuclear insider (or whatever). The girl of course not staying put. Things like that.
Read my essay and see if it brings shit together better for you. In particular, the idea of "
noir logic" and the way that Harry, who thinks that "there has to be a cosmic plan of some sort," never clues in to the fact that the only conceivable "cosmic plan" is annihilation should hopefully help you to come to terms with the way that the narrative
is essentially "rigged."
What I still thought was excellent was the mood it created. Lots of tension.
Oh, yeah. Watching it in that film class, with 20+ late-teens/twentysomethings in a room set-up like a mini movie theater, I could feel the way that everyone in the room was gripped. That term, "gripping," fits perfectly here.
And for a kid growing up living in nuclear fear, those are powerful emotions. The unhappy ending fit this film well.
In his book, Chaw invokes
Fermi's Paradox and argues that the idea that "civilizations, in their march toward technological sophistication, tend not to last very long. They destroy themselves" is relevant to the proceedings in
Miracle Mile, particularly in light of the fact - and yes, I'm going full
Muster here - that Landa is seen reading from
Gravity's Rainbow which promulgates the notion that "nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation," thus connecting the idea of annihilation on the one hand with immortality on the other and essentially posing the question: If the ending is indeed unhappy, in what sense or to what degree is it unhappy?
Things that struck me about this film was that it starts out so light-hearted in a museum with a guy just trying to meet a girl. Then the seriousness of the situation ratchets up but still seems ridiculous.
In 2008, BAFTA bestowed upon
Miracle Mile the award for "Biggest Lurch of Tone." Shit goes from the beginning of a relationship to the extinction of the human race: Now
that's a fucking movie
I honestly thought when Wilson crashed the stolen cop car and he and his sister were killed that it was going to be a situation where our protagonist Harry took a crank call from a phone booth and then started a chaotic event that had no bearing on reality. Wouldn't that be a kick in the teeth, find the girl of your dreams, go to prison for the biggest "nuclear war hoax" in history.
Same here, especially with Julie going at him ("What
is the truth, Harry?"), but then, on the other hand, there's a sinister undercurrent to the dialogue that's telling you: They're not going to be so lucky. As I put it in my essay:
"Julie does her best to be optimistic and convince Harry that everything had been a tragic misunderstanding and that everything was going to be okay, but discernible in both of their faces is the wish for this to be true despite the knowledge that it is not, a sentiment reinforced aurally by the sounds of the ticking clocks surrounding them and capped off visually by Harry, who only joins Julie to surrender themselves to the police after picking up an hourglass and placing it on the shelf with all of the sand on the bottom, another indicator that time has run out for this Don Quixote and his Dulcinea."
Sticking with this scene: My favorite part is how, even as you're hoping against hope that everything will work out, that the world isn't going to end, when you see those ropes swinging as the SWAT guys book it, it creates such a sinking feeling in your stomach because now it's all but impossible to believe that things are going to work out.
I found it interesting that the film starts with an explanation of evolution and then ends with Harry and Julie sinking into the La Brea Tar Pits.
Great minds think alike. From my essay:
"The aptness of the [film's] title extends to the miracle of humanity’s contingent existence as the result of millions of years of evolution, and the setting of the film—right in the middle of, on the one hand, the La Brea Tar Pits and the museums that provide the final resting place for a multitude of extinct species, and, on the other hand, the thriving contemporary American society representative of the vitality of life itself—contributes a tragic irony that will display its full effect in the film’s final sequence."
On top of which: It starts with a "big bang" and ends with another one
What is the moral of the story here? Survival of the fittest. That was the entire point of showing the evolution of organisms at the beginning of the film. Harry kept wasting time and wasting time and wasting time and getting side tracked and getting side tracked and he was not fit to survive and thus sank to the bottom of the tar pits just as the dinosaurs had. Its really a dual meaning because not only was Harry not fit enough to know he had to leave Julie behind and flee, hence his extinction, but also the extinction of mankind because of our own inability to survive our own technology.
I think I'm with you, but I'd hit that last point harder: Survival of the fittest is in there, but I think that the point of its being there is to indicate not just that Harry isn't fit to survive but that
we all, that
humans, aren't fit to - and won't - survive. It's a dark ass film in that respect - that's the
noir of it.
Bummer end to the film but it was the 1980's and I can tell you growing up in the 70's and 80's people actually worried about this exact scenario. This is why some people actually had "back-yard bunkers."
As I write in one of the footnotes in my essay (citing Vern from that blog post of his that I linked to):
"In his review of
Miracle Mile, Vern perspicaciously points out how, 'These days nuclear war seems like kind of an abstract threat. If anything we’re concerned about some fanatics stealing a bomb and setting it off somewhere. That’s a terrifying idea but back then ‘mutually assured destruction’ was pretty much assumed—if one went off then a whole bunch went off, fired back and forth between two sides until everybody’s dead.' While the narrative stays within the U.S. and limits itself to one particular city, the implications, as Harry well knows, are apocalyptic in the full sense of the word."
* One thing that I kind of turned up my nose towards was how gawkish and nerdy the two main-characters where. I mean, they're about to die in a crashed helicopter after nuclear annihilation hit and the guy makes a freaking Superman reference.
It's established right from the jump that Harry's a nerd. It'd be weird if he
didn't say something nerdy at the end.
* Got to love how the dawn's orange rays during the riots give everything a hellish tint, with masses of metal and human bodies scrambling around in chaos and fright. It's like the blazing orange of the dawn is foretelling the white-hot fire of the nuclear attack itself.
QFT.
* This is a movie that is so subtly strange
Two words from my essay:
Noir logic. In your head, this movie takes you to
The Warriors; for me, it takes me to
The Third Man, which is also strange, dark, sweet, and tragic all rolled up into one movie.
* There is a strangely atheistic bent to this film-apocalypse.
Two more (hyphenated) words from my essay: Destiny-machine. From my essay (quoting from Tom Gunning's articulation of the workings of the Destiny-machine in the films of Fritz Lang):
"Gunning is emphatic about distinguishing the Destiny-machine from any sort of God concept, but a crucial distinction to be made is that Lang’s early silent allegories did often posit some sort of controlling Agent, be it Death as God’s collector of souls in
Der müde Tod (1921) or the theistic God-Satan-Christ triad between Joh Fredersen/God (Alfred Abel), Rotwang/Satan (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), and Freder/Christ (Gustav Fröhlich) in
Metropolis (1927). It was not until his American
films noir (
The Woman in the Window [1944] and
Scarlet Street [1945]) that Lang banished Masters (of either the appointed variety, e.g. Death, or the self-appointed variety, e.g. Dr. Mabuse) from the Destiny-machine, now become a mercilessly mechanical 'crushing force' set in motion not by Promethean acts of human hubris, but by mere chance, and with no regard for the innocent and futile actions of those in its path, for 'there is no tyrant that reveals his hands on the puppet strings; simply an impersonal order of things' from which there is neither the possibility of escape nor the promise of salvation."
Most interesting to me (paging
Muster, aka Mr. Satan) is that, at one time, De Jarnatt thought of ending the film with Harry and Julie arriving in Hell. He even shot the scene and it's on the Blu-ray as a Deleted Scene. The alternate ending has Harry and Julie getting into the elevator which, in the film's ending, they ride up to the helipad, only in this version they realize that the elevator is going down. Suddenly, the doors open and they're on a parking level and a man and a woman get on the elevator with them (the man is played by Joe Turkel, who played Lloyd in
The Shining and Tyrell in
Blade Runner). They end up going down in the elevator literally to Hell. On the way, there are clearly supposed to be a bunch of "revealing" lines, but it's hard to make out what they're saying plus there are no subtitles since the scene is from an old VHS daily. It sounds like the first line that Turkel says upon entering the elevator is something like, "Well, the Ark left." The woman then says, with a creepy look on her face and in a lifeless tone, "Purgatory." Turkel then starts talking about the souls of suicides and adds something about "the flaming spirits of the evil counsels" before saying, with a weird kind of reverence, "Lucifer." The last thing he says as the doors open and the inside of the elevator reflects the bright orange from the fires outside the doors sounds like "The Kingdom of Hell." The two of them then exit the elevator while Harry and Julie stay inside.
I don't know where that scene was supposed to go from there, but the key is that, with reference to the Destiny-machine, to have introduced any religious elements into the film, to have revealed that the universe of the film was one with Heaven and Hell, God and Satan, etc., would've been an utter betrayal. The genius of the film, the source of its powerful force, is that there's no one pulling the strings, there's no one to appeal to, there's no "outside" force or entity "doing" anything to us. It just is what it is.
* Props to the camera-work during the dinner scene -- right after Harry got the call. The angles gave the impression of unreality setting him. Starting with a wide-shoot to highlight the thoughtless mundanity during an hour of doom. Moving into close-ups and sweeping-shoots and everything. It was well done
Plus, as a Hitchcock guy, I love the way that scene feels like it's from right out of
The Birds.
I think it's more about the love-angle, love conquering even death.
You sap. From my essay:
"The ending of
Miracle Mile, where Harry tries to convey the peace of death to Julie by invoking Superman’s ability to turn coal into diamonds, offering her the image of the two of them as beautiful artifacts to be preserved, discovered, studied, and admired by the intelligent life that will inherit the vacated Earth from the soon-to-be-extinct humans, shares the sentiment of the ending in
Der müde Tod. Comparing Lang’s tragic allegory to D.W. Griffith’s comparatively tepid
Intolerance (1916), Gunning argues that the 'sense of catastrophe' in Lang’s film surpasses that in Griffith’s, for whereas Griffith 'exempts his central modern story from the grim ending of death and destruction found in each of the tales of the past,' Lang makes his modern story 'the central allegory of death’s power.' Despite this similarity, however, to read the ending of
Miracle Mile as Gunning reads the ending of
Der müde Tod, as evidence that 'love
is as strong as death' and that it can act as a counterweight within the Destiny-machine, is to ignore the debt
Miracle Mile owes the science fiction genre and, by extension, to deny the film its larger allegorical function.
While the
film noir aspect of
Miracle Mile informs its oneiric atmosphere and fatalistic prerogative, it is the science fiction aspect that informs its depiction of Babylonian Los Angeles as an 'electronically infused enclave perched on the brink of the world, pushing at the boundaries of hope and torn between possibly inextricable drives to preserve and exploit the environment.' As outlined by Dan Dinello, 'at its most pessimistic, science fiction depicts humans as the victims of a ubiquitous, oppressive technological force,' and 'despair, cynicism, and fatalistic thought often rationalize capitulation to the apparent inevitability' of humanity’s return to the primordial ooze represented by the Tar Pits. But this is merely the thematic prelude, for science fiction can do more than simply reflect cultural despair (which was at once the
raison d’etre and the thematic cutoff point for classical
film noir). Unlike classical
film noir, science fiction carries with it a moral imperative, offering the potential to transcend fatalism and acquiescence; it calls for a 'progressive political agenda' that implores the audience to put their bodies upon the gears of the Destiny-machine and create a better future than that which has been depicted."
If you go the romantic route, you pass by the cautionary tale route. It's got to be tragic otherwise we won't feel compelled to avoid it.
Harry and Julia go beyond the call of duty for each other on The Day of Reckoning. The world's ending and all they can think of is each other. And then -- when they fail -- they rejoice in the fact that they will be buried together, decomposed with their matter conjoined as diamonds in 100 million years. Not even death or the end of the world can extinguish their love.
That very last bit with them in the helicopter seems to have an
amor fati ring to it.
Got to love the fact that the movie starts with them observing extinguished creatures in a museum -- and ends with themselves probably becoming museum pieces as extinguished creatures in a couple of million years time, since they crashed in that tar pit.
QFT.
I was a bit annoyed by that. I just couldn't stop thinking that in such a situation people would be more frantic. Going 110% all the time. They just seemed to collected, for my liking. But I think that's just for the benefits of telling a cohesive, toned story.
I'm sorry, you think the film should've been
more frantic
He'll always be Vile Emperor Shao Khan to me!
If you would've grown up around me, you'd know how amazing it is that I was beaten to this
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation reference
And then, for the laundry list of familiar faces:
Yes, the main character is Goose from
Top Gun.
Yes, the diner manager is Sergeant Reed from the Robocops.
Yes, the diner waitress is the diner waitress from "The Bubble Boy" episode of
Seinfeld.
Yes, the blond nuke expert is the mom from
Pet Sematary.
Yes, the guy eating with the tranny and puking outside the diner is the shrink from T1 and T2.
Yes, the helicopter procurer is Rob Lowe's sidekick from
Wayne's World (and yes, he got drugged out at the end of the movie and fucked a dead guy on the helipad before having his eyes melted by the nukes
)
Yes, the electronics entrepreneur is Bubba from
Forrest Gump.
Yes, the gas station attendant is Mr. Blue from
Reservoir Dogs.
This was such a disappointing movie. It got things right for a few minutes at a time, and had a bit of a James Cameron atmosphere...but not quite enough of it. The whole thing being centered on an ultra-goofy and not terribly well executed romance (which was bad from the opening scene) really hurt the story. If the whole meet-cute thing had been ditched and it had been grounded in pre-existing relationships more like the ones in Spielberg's War of the Worlds, this really could have been an 80s classic. That or execute the romance a lot better.
The cheese is so delicious. How could you want that movie without that key ingredient?
