Trouble in Mind (1985)
May. 27th, 2007 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersIt's all ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
akirlu's fault, I suppose. She lent me DVDs of Alan Rudolph's Choose Me and The Moderns, and I liked them both, especially the smoky, jazzy Choose Me, so then she lent me a videotape of Trouble in Mind. I've now watched it four times since November, twice on the tape and twice, thanks to Craig Smith, on the Spanish DVD, which he found -- where else? -- at Scarecrow.
Yes, it's safe to say that I love this movie. In fact, it's the one that I'd always had in the back of my troubled mind as the Rudolph movie to check out some day, since it was shot in Seattle not long after I moved up here in 1984, and I read about the shoot at the time. Is the setting the reason I like it so much? (It's called Rain City in the movie, and while that's an obvious enough name for Seattle, it's still worth noting that Ulrika's column in Chunga ended up being called the Rain City Tangler, which is a tangled web of connections indeed.) I can't off the top of my head think of a better movie shot in Seattle, and the use of the cityscape is iconic in surprising ways, with only one shot of the Space Needle (coming at a pivotal moment in the story) although there's also a scene shot in the Space Needle restaurant. The King Dome -- long since demolished -- shows up in several shots as well, as does an angle on the Viaduct that completely inverts the city for anybody who knows it intimately. The familiar is made profoundly strange and new.
That it's Seattle in the mid-'80s is also personally significant, and it's true that the movie fills me with nostalgia. If I were a brash, arrogant, reckless (and sexy) prick, I could have been Coop (Keith Carradine -- yeah, in my dreams!), the hick from the sticks who is transformed by the big city into a debauched hoodlum with bad New Wave hair. That's part of the story, and then there's Hawk (Kris Kristofferson), the hard-bitten detective who's just getting out of prison for having murdered a gangster in the name of love. Hawk's looking for redemption, or at least for a woman and a job. He turns first to Wanda (Geneviève Bujold), his former love, who now runs a greasy spoon just a block above the Frontier Room and isn't interested in giving herself to anyone anymore. So he turns next to Georgia (Lori Singer), Coop's naive young wife with a baby on her breast. Meanwhile, Coop is being pulled away from her by the poetry-spouting, Mandarin-speaking criminal, Solo (Joe Morton), who's ready to take on the big gangster Hilly Blue (Divine, in his only film role in men's cloths, so they tell me) for the big score.
All of these characters are given room in the story to develop or to at least reveal mysterious aspects of themselves, and there are a number of minor characters who get business in the background, some of it surreal or symbolic. There always seems to be multiple things going on in the frame, particularly at Wanda's cafe. As in Canyon Passage, there are many pithy bits of personal philosophy thrown off in passing. "Everybody's got a little piece of hell in them," says Hawk to Wanda, and we cut to the apparently innocent Georgia with her baby. Did Georgia drive Coop to a life of crime with her demands that he provide for her and the baby? Not exactly, but her innocence is clearly shown to be a form of ignorance as well, which blinds her to Coop's limited choices and moral resources.
So it is very much a romantic movie, but cast in a film noir mode of gangsters and detectives, fatal choices, moral quandaries, and shades of grey. Yet the gangsters are largely played for parody and laughs, and in the background we are given a mixture of signifiers that make it uncertain when this is all happening, with WWII soldiers patrolling a 1962 World's Fair future of the monorail and the Space Needle, plus unexplained protests and riots that seem to come out of an Orwellian 1984, not to mention bad New Wave hair straight outta MTV. And why the hell is Solo speaking Mandarin? Or is it even Mandarin? There is an implication that he fought in a place like Vietnam, or did he fight the Japanese in WWII? And why does Wanda know the same language?
Even after four viewings, I still find the movie endlessly mysterious, and that's another reason why I love it. I love the world-weary mood, the noir atmospherics, the corny gangsters, the pithy maxims, the romantic melancholy, the hunger for redemption and change. I love the rumbling monorail ferrying lost souls to their fateful, unknown destination. Been there, done that. Now I've seen the movie.
akirlu's fault, I suppose. She lent me DVDs of Alan Rudolph's Choose Me and The Moderns, and I liked them both, especially the smoky, jazzy Choose Me, so then she lent me a videotape of Trouble in Mind. I've now watched it four times since November, twice on the tape and twice, thanks to Craig Smith, on the Spanish DVD, which he found -- where else? -- at Scarecrow.Yes, it's safe to say that I love this movie. In fact, it's the one that I'd always had in the back of my troubled mind as the Rudolph movie to check out some day, since it was shot in Seattle not long after I moved up here in 1984, and I read about the shoot at the time. Is the setting the reason I like it so much? (It's called Rain City in the movie, and while that's an obvious enough name for Seattle, it's still worth noting that Ulrika's column in Chunga ended up being called the Rain City Tangler, which is a tangled web of connections indeed.) I can't off the top of my head think of a better movie shot in Seattle, and the use of the cityscape is iconic in surprising ways, with only one shot of the Space Needle (coming at a pivotal moment in the story) although there's also a scene shot in the Space Needle restaurant. The King Dome -- long since demolished -- shows up in several shots as well, as does an angle on the Viaduct that completely inverts the city for anybody who knows it intimately. The familiar is made profoundly strange and new.
That it's Seattle in the mid-'80s is also personally significant, and it's true that the movie fills me with nostalgia. If I were a brash, arrogant, reckless (and sexy) prick, I could have been Coop (Keith Carradine -- yeah, in my dreams!), the hick from the sticks who is transformed by the big city into a debauched hoodlum with bad New Wave hair. That's part of the story, and then there's Hawk (Kris Kristofferson), the hard-bitten detective who's just getting out of prison for having murdered a gangster in the name of love. Hawk's looking for redemption, or at least for a woman and a job. He turns first to Wanda (Geneviève Bujold), his former love, who now runs a greasy spoon just a block above the Frontier Room and isn't interested in giving herself to anyone anymore. So he turns next to Georgia (Lori Singer), Coop's naive young wife with a baby on her breast. Meanwhile, Coop is being pulled away from her by the poetry-spouting, Mandarin-speaking criminal, Solo (Joe Morton), who's ready to take on the big gangster Hilly Blue (Divine, in his only film role in men's cloths, so they tell me) for the big score.
All of these characters are given room in the story to develop or to at least reveal mysterious aspects of themselves, and there are a number of minor characters who get business in the background, some of it surreal or symbolic. There always seems to be multiple things going on in the frame, particularly at Wanda's cafe. As in Canyon Passage, there are many pithy bits of personal philosophy thrown off in passing. "Everybody's got a little piece of hell in them," says Hawk to Wanda, and we cut to the apparently innocent Georgia with her baby. Did Georgia drive Coop to a life of crime with her demands that he provide for her and the baby? Not exactly, but her innocence is clearly shown to be a form of ignorance as well, which blinds her to Coop's limited choices and moral resources.
So it is very much a romantic movie, but cast in a film noir mode of gangsters and detectives, fatal choices, moral quandaries, and shades of grey. Yet the gangsters are largely played for parody and laughs, and in the background we are given a mixture of signifiers that make it uncertain when this is all happening, with WWII soldiers patrolling a 1962 World's Fair future of the monorail and the Space Needle, plus unexplained protests and riots that seem to come out of an Orwellian 1984, not to mention bad New Wave hair straight outta MTV. And why the hell is Solo speaking Mandarin? Or is it even Mandarin? There is an implication that he fought in a place like Vietnam, or did he fight the Japanese in WWII? And why does Wanda know the same language?
Even after four viewings, I still find the movie endlessly mysterious, and that's another reason why I love it. I love the world-weary mood, the noir atmospherics, the corny gangsters, the pithy maxims, the romantic melancholy, the hunger for redemption and change. I love the rumbling monorail ferrying lost souls to their fateful, unknown destination. Been there, done that. Now I've seen the movie.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-27 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-28 12:33 am (UTC)The science fictional aspect reminds me that I've seen a few people compare this movie to Blade Runner, which is weird but not wrong. I suppose the neo-noir elements contribute to whatever similarity there is.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-30 06:43 pm (UTC)I've seen it once or twice, but it could be 20 years now.
Hmmm, this could be our next movie to watch.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-30 06:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-31 06:30 am (UTC)