'Slow dancing' may very well be may favourite term. It is almost certainly my favourite way to go about most things that I do. Even, and perhaps especially, when my mind is moving fast. It conjures up an image, a sensation, an ethos that is at once both deeply balletic and classical, and yet simultaneously lustful and anticipatory of anything going under the broad and oft-salacious heading of 'ACTION'. It implies grace and, with it, a longing to be yet more graceful still. It indicates a full and yet forever inconsecratable desire to turn to volume down on everything in life that doesn't move you, to dim the colours of the things in life that cause something deep inside of you to pulse and rage with bitter, aimless anger - to turn that volume down and dim those colours forever. It is a warmly isolated, tender state, un-intruded upon by shameful/shameless political machinations, by money-grabbing, money-hoarding, money-loving, by the (mostly metaphorical) whoring out of souls that are not yet well-rounded enough to be enjoyed by anyone, to be appreciated as having a worth that is above all that whoring, and so are instead mocked endlessly, jeered on and cheered on into their messy, celebrated end - hounded into that hallowed place that is the Z-list. It elicits in participants a utopian glee, seducing them with the notion that there is a calm situation, a completely chilled-out space, in which they may exist (alongside company of their own inscrutable choosing). That human nature has a zenith, a peak, and that 'slow dancing', in whatever form, may very well be it. The nadirs of that same nature just peel away like last-year's snakeskin, to crinkle in the dust.
But those nadirs do remain. They have to. There has to be a bleakness out there for the art of 'slow dancing' to become and remain what it is. It is only, some may very convincingly argue, possible to truly enjoy a moment of pure peace if you accept that peace with the knowledge that, at some point or another, it is going to slide down again into some kind of pit. You have to take the rough with the smooth, as they say, in order for either notion to have meaning.
And so I find myself thinking of slow motion tonight, late as it is and sober as I am, and, in particular, of the way that some directors use it as a means of coming to terms with that duality, with that price that must be paid for beauty. And by 'in particular' I mostly mean Sam Peckinpah.
Now, it cinematic terms, I mostly grew up avoiding anything that looked old - either in a black and white sense, or a 60's/70's faded-denim-type film colouring sense (bizarre to those who know, as those are the very things I love most often in films now). Peckinpah was unheard of and unsought after. I wanted action (though a different kind, in many senses, to that alluded to above), and plenty of it. Of course I did. I was a boy growing up into my teenage years at the arse-end of the 90's and action films were where it was at. Well, that or watching copies of 18-rated 'gross-out comedies' that some schoolfriend or other had acquired. But that wasn't really my bag. Not enough shit getting blown up. Not enough heavily-muscled Austrians looking for invisible aliens amongst the rainforest mist (I do not mean to suggest, however, at this point that my tastes in action were always so refined as Predator. No, sir. I would watch any old shit if the TV guide listed it as an 'action thriller' or, less frequently, and 'action comedy'. Even Steven Seagal films that weren't Under Siege or the somehow terribly entertaining one with Michael Caine in it (I watched Hard to Kill once, and could not believe how little actually happened in the first 45 mins, or how deftly and impressively the director managed to keep me watching the remainder of that steaming heap unfold (Still, that itself was a more impressive effort than the two Dolph Lundgren efforts I actually properly had a go at watching (Masters of the Universe doesn't count, because that was a He-Man film, and therefore not an original Lundgren property.) Silent Trigger, which, aside from including Gina Bellman who would later go out to be both hot and hilarious in Coupling, had little to recommend it; and Red Scorpion, which, to the best of my recollection, included a couple of gun battles lasting a sum total of 5 mins (in a film of about 2 hours), and lots of shots of Dolph running around in the desert pretending to be a Russian commando gone AWOL (or some such shit).). As well as many a film containing the vast repository of charisma that is Marc Dacascos (in fairness, Sanctuary was not half bad). So, please, feel free to assume the worst about my tastes at that time. Or now, for that matter, if you count Dolph and Seagal amongst your action-movie idols.). (I honestly have no idea if I have the correct number of brackets or full-stops in there, but I'm tired, so I'll skip the edit.)
I wanted action, and so the discovery of John Woo was a revelation. I distinctly recall that Hard Target, with none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme, was the first of his films that I saw, and I recall equally well being blown away by it. Sure, I know now that it's not as original as it seems, but that's one of the joys/drawbacks of growing up - the constant evolution of your knowledge as regards the limits of the known universe. When I was 14 (or so), Hard Target was the dog's bollocks (as they say, and I haven't said myself for years). Partly because I was still riding high on the buzz of seeing JCVD kick down a tree in Kickboxer, and I was willing to watch him in anything at the time, but also because John Woo just made everything look so cool! Everything that wasn't nailed down had a chance of being blown the fuck up, or crashed through by a speeding car or motorbike or motorboat or Belgian. And if something extra cool happened, you could be sure that some part of it was going to happen in slow-motion. Including, and particularly, a bad guy getting roundhouse-kicked in the face by the 'Muscles from Brussels'.
Action. Movie. Gold.
But both Kickboxer and Hard Target were showing on TV tonight, and I watched neither. I made no effort to watch either.
Perhaps that has to do with Face/Off. Probably the second John Woo film I watched. Oh, I loved it at the time, impractical science and glorious scenery-chewing and all. But the last time I watched it, I dunno... the bottom had kind of fallen out, and I couldn't quite say why. Maybe I was just too grown-up and cultured for that kind of thing (stop sniggering at the back!). Perhaps I'd simply seen it too many times to be surprised by it any more. Don't get me wrong, it still did what it was supposed to do, more or less, but that was no longer enough. Not even the slow-motion shoot-outs could save it.
Because I was starting to suspect that sometimes Woo was throwing them in just because he felt he had to. To appease the people in his audience like the teenaged me who'd demanded and expected that sort of thing from him. I can't say for sure this is how he felt, but that's not important. It's how I felt on recent reflection. I'd seen, a few years prior, The Killer, one of his early masterpieces, with Chow-Yun Fat, and the slow-motion seemed honest in that, and there was a sense that he was using it for a reason. The gulf between sensations emitted by the post-midnight watching of that film, and the whatever-time re-watching of Face-Off was nearly immeasurable. And it wasn't until I became more acquainted with Peckinpah, and with what slow-motion meant to him, that I was able to put my finger on what exactly was at the root of that gulf, was at the base of that chasm, chiselling it further apart.
The problem is, to me, that, whilst misery is the starting point for the action, it gets lost too often beneath an enjoyment of that action for action's sake. As a viewer, you are drawn to the madness of Travolta's performance in particular, and to the batshit sight of Cage trying to play straight opposite him but all the time waiting for his opportunity to get in on the fun. Slow-motion is there just because it can be. It looks cool, so it might as well be.
There just isn't a real reason for it, is all.
It was Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia that what made me understand just what was missing. What lesser directors than both Peckinpah and Woo cannibalised from both of their works and whirled through the machine until even Woo couldn't give it much meaning any more. In that film, Peckinpah winds everything up brilliantly for the first half. Real alarm clock tension stuff. And then in the second half, after a rather pivotal event which I will not divulge here, he lets that tension slide. And the slow-motion comes out, and he makes sure it captures not the zenith of human nature, but the nadir. He uses slow motion to invert the timeless idyll, and to show the horror of what happens when the seclusion of that slowed-down peace is invaded. To suggest a world that is so envious of such peace that it seeks to crush it out before it can be fully enjoyed for any proper length of time at all.
One scene in particular, which has been copied, consciously or not, in a great many films since (and is, to some degree a copy of a shot from an earlier Peckinpah film, The Wild Bunch), conveys this inversion, and indeed perversion, of an ideal better than most others in the film. It involves a shoot-out between two parties, one on either side of a dusty Mexican road, and the kernel of that sequence is simply a long-held slow-motion shot (interrupted a couple of times by cuts to what's happening across that road) of a man firing a sub-machine gun. In now-clichéd fashion, cartridge cases tumble down into the dirt, clinking, bouncing, scattering asunder; muzzle flare sits at the end of the gun like a kind of tropical flower, twirling, blowing in the wind. And then that man is killed, his trigger-finger remaining squeezed upon the trigger and he keeps firing. All in slow-motion, as hideous as it is mesmeric. The peaceful moment ruined and pockmarked with holes. (It would also be useful to make reference at this point to the late Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde here as well, which uses slow-motion for a similar effect.)
In what I was going to try and make my first book (but am saving for a later date, when I can make it slightly more better and whatnot), I have the main character making this observation:
Slow things are what people secretly want to be. What I want to be. When they found slow motion and put it in films it was like watching a second stretched out to a minute’s length. Some people say that movie stars will live forever once they’ve been up on the screen, that once their name has been in lights then they’ll be in lights forever, but if someone is on the big screen in slow motion then surely they’ll live even longer. Death scenes happen in slow motion because it is postponement, and if the rest of the time were like that, death would just be pushed further away. Love scenes happen in slow motion because love should be outside of time, because love should be made a new eternity with each breath, because sometimes slow motion makes the people look good.
And I thought that was appropriate to this discussion/ramble, and so went right ahead and jammed it in. Whilst the part about 'death scenes' in this passage seems to be making a slightly different point about their usage, it isn't really. It isn't as full of a consideration of all facets of the deployment of slow-motion in such cases, of course, but it does touch on the fact that directors such as Peckinpah used the form to suggest the trauma of violence and its ruinous effects on mankind, as well as reflecting on the strange and worrying (though perhaps not always unexpected) similarities between the experience of joy (in the above passage given as 'love') and pain, and the way that such similarity allows for the potential of one to corrupt the other.
As with all these things, however, the original intention becomes mislaid and diluted through overuse, to the point where it is perfectly acceptable for one of the most haunting and effective uses of slow-motion (in Oliver Stone's Platoon) to be parodied quite mercilessly in Tropic Thunder. Now, whilst I am far from against the spoofing of such things (as long as it is done, as it largely is in Tropic Thunder, with some measure of intelligence and wit), it can easily be seen that such parodies can, retroactively, render the initial scenes devoid of their original intention, so as modern viewers can watch older films and assume, quite reasonably, that slow-motion is being used simply because it's cool, and for no other reason. It renders whatever serious comment the directors may have been aiming to make largely ineffective, turning the volume down on the wrong things. Draining away the colours with which they were trying to communicate. Leaving only the snakeskin up on the screen.
Yet, a lot of people keep watching, and they don't seem to mind. They'll happily shell out the money to see things explode in slow-motion and high-definition and 3(unsatisfactory)Dimensions. And so I sometimes feel, when it comes to cinema at least, that I am not so much 'slow dancing' with those always of my choosing, but simply with those who are left behind when the rush to see 'new' things has started, still searching for a beating heart and a working mind, and finely-honed technique being used for a definite reason. For works of art that aren't just made to make money, but to make a point too.
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