Greatest Movie of All time of the Week: After Hours!

Martin Scorsese is now mostly famous for telling zoomoids marvelshit isn't cinema, but to olds like me, he was mostly famous for making gangster flicks where people talk like people talk, you know? With the you-knows and the whatnots. And this sort of gradually overlapped with and morphed into biopics and theological navelgazing and other things of that lofty nature.

Yeah, this ain't one of those.

But, like those few strips where Garfield became an existential horror comic, in 1985 Scorsese suddenly decided, just once, to make a David Lynch film, which was an audacious move, because Blue Velvet didn't drop until the following year, and Lynch's formula (one part Hitchcock, one part Kafka, one part The Wizard of Oz) was yet to be articulated*. Nothing Scorsese did before or since was anything like After Hours, which is a shame because it's his best movie, but is also kind of great because it implies any mainstream filmmaker or entertainer in general might just take a sudden detour into bizarre territory for no reason at all.

Horrifying sculpture of Gregor Samsa-mode abjection, or YouTuber reacting to the new slop to drop on Disney Plus? As always, you decide.

Griffin Dunne plays Paul Hackett (who, we will learn, can't), a hapless everyman whose efforts to live out the plot of a romantic comedy with Rosanna Arquette (Buffalo 66) go awry due to a storm of what begins to seem like targeted bad luck. Events contrive to strand him in the Soho district of New York, unable to get home. Like Dorothy, this becomes his singular focus, but things get worse and worse for him as his neurosis leads to poor decisions and his poor decisions lead to crippling fear and guilt, none of which is warranted because he's clearly in a situation so absurd that no decision he could make could save him from it.

"Can't we just get over the rainbow?" - Dorothy Gale, Paul Hackett, and everyone living in currentyear+9.

To say much more would be to give away a lot of the twists and turns of the piece, so I'll pontificate on Kafka instead. Kafka's main theme was abjection, which he understood so well that he completely covered everything there is to say on it, at least from the inside. Despite this, every other person I pass in the street wears a Nirvana T-shirt, indicating that abjection as a topic has never been more popular. Social media is mostly people whining about (and demonstrating) their collection of mental illnesses. Characters in TV and movies are made unlikable and dysfunctional so people can "relate" to them. What none of these posers realise is that Kafka was laughing at them (and himself) because unlike Burt Cobain and his shit Pixies knock-off band that blew up over their only good song (read: riff), Kafka had a sense of humour.

The longer you look at this still, the funnier it becomes.

*Ingmar Bergman also made a Lynch film, 1968's Hour of the Wolf, long before even Eraserhead dropped, but since it's Bergman it has only the dark Kafka stuff, because Bergman is Shadow the Hedgehog.