Spoilers throughout:
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| Mid population of a small town in the 90s (colourised). |
Different plots have different stakes. In Dennis Hopper's greatest film as a director, The Hot Spot, our hero (Don Johnson, Miami Vice) faces a troubling predicament: if he achieves his win condition, he gets to go to the Bahamas and live out his days banging prime Jennifer Connelly. If he loses, he has to live on a small fortune in a big house banging prime Virginia Madsen. This rarely happens to me.
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| Nooo not sex with Virginia Madsen nooo pleeease anything but that |
Johnson's Harry Madox drives into town like a man-with-no-name archetype out of the endless desert of the cinéma only to find himself consistently outwitted and outmatched by Madsen's superlative femme fatale, for he is in the wrong genre, and his efforts at antihero antics - robbing the bank, sweeping Connelly's naïve young hottie off her feet, and disappearing into the sunset - are thwarted by a run of "bad" luck reminiscent of the Kafkaesque determinism of 1945's fateful Detour, all capped off by the malign machinations of Madsen's scenery-chewing nympho villainess. Johnson is willing to go as far as rob a bank, but feels compelled to save a man trapped in a burning building, while Madsen tells him point-blank she's not above child murder to get her way. Like every man first entering into a relationship with a woman, he finds, to his dismay, he's brought a knife to a gunfight; a self-help pamphlet to a Machiavelli book club.
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| Born to lose: Madox's shirt is striped like an old-timey prison outfit. But will he end up trapped behind bars or in another type of prison? |
The early-90s cycle of "erotic thriller/neo-noir" films is a curious case of reviving a genre in an era permissive of more lurid and explicit exploration of a subject matter formerly rendered mysterious by the strictures of the Hayes code. While many like to simperingly praise the old noirs for their enforced restraint, most of them now just play as shy and awkward about sex, not really coy and knowing as their hipster fanbase would prefer you to believe.
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| These expressions alone would have incurred the banhammer in the 40s. |
Noir is largely the flipside of horror in that horror enables women to vicariously experience their fantasies of being pursued obsessively by aggressive men without shame or taboo, while noir allows men to indulge the side of them that wants to be tied down by a sexually uninhibited woman who never "has a headache". Sure, a man's first choice might be globetrotting adventure with wide-eyed Connelly on his arm, but if domestic purgatory comes attached to insatiable Madsen, we can think of worse ways to repay our sins.
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| (Extremely French existentialist voice) we must imagine ze guy banging Virginia Madsen...happy. |
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