The New Cult Canon: Reservoir Dogs

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The New Cult Canon: Reservoir Dogs
By Scott Tobias
December 18th, 2008

"I'm hungry. Let's get a taco." —Harvey Keitel, Reservoir Dogs

Earlier this year, I started The New Cult Canon with Donnie Darko, arguably this generation's only genuine midnight-movie phenomenon, so it seemed appropriate to end the year with Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, without question a major touchstone in today's cult cinema. Before Reservoir Dogs premièred at Sundance in 1992, the festival—and the arthouse scene in general—had seen very little of its kind. The independent world was supposed to be cordoned off from the violent, profane genre fare that littered the multiplex. While the great unwashed were off watching Steven Seagal shatter forearms like twigs, Joe Bordeaux-Sippers could flee for safety in tucked-away cinematic oases, where they found the comfort of earnest, socially progressive, values-affirming indie films, stuffy Merchant-Ivory costume dramas, or a host of middlebrow French imports. (Rumor has it that Reservoir Dogs' mysterious title comes from a mispronunciation of one of those middlebrow imports, Au Revoir Les Enfants, while Tarantino was working at a video store.)

Granted, that may be stating things a little broadly. It wouldn't be entirely accurate to call independent film pre-1992 toothless, or mainstream movies vulgar, or to claim that Tarantino was somehow the savior of an ineffectual, irrelevant arthouse scene. But Reservoir Dogs was nonetheless a defining moment, because it lent artistic legitimacy to what would have otherwise been dismissed as genre trash. It didn't make much money in its theatrical run—old viewing habits die hard—but along with Pulp Fiction two years later, it legitimately transformed the scene. Even now, low-budget genre films still have a tough time getting the support they need, but Reservoir Dogs did an awful lot to make them viable by finding a previously nonexistent audience that craved unvarnished visceral excitement without the attendant Hollywood stupidity.

Sixteen years and five films later (not counting Four Rooms, and counting Kill Bill as one), Tarantino has become a polarizing figure, swept along uneasily by the undulating waves of "cool" he helped create. Too often, he's looked upon less as a filmmaker than as a cultural phenomenon, subject to the "hot or not"/"in or out" fickleness of trend-spotters, who don't always consider the merits of his work. Detractors don't like his acting. (Okay, they have a point.) They don't like his obnoxious public persona. They don't like the drooling fanboys who congregate on Ain't It Cool News, or the legions of imitators who've clogged screens and video-store shelves in his wake. But all these things are just a distraction, because they're mostly in response to Tarantino the phenomenon, and not to what happens in the narrow hours when the lights are down and his formidable skills as a writer and director are on display.

Reservoir Dogs opens with what would become a Tarantino signature: The idea that bad guys, in the time between jobs, blab about the same banal shit the rest of us do, albeit in a much more colorful way. Sitting over breakfast with a table full of gangsters, there's Tarantino himself as Mr. Brown, theorizing (convincingly) that the Madonna hit "Like A Virgin" is not about "a sensitive girl who meets a nice fella" (that's "True Blue"), but about a John Holmes-type making a promiscuous girl feel the sweet pain of virginity all over again. That segues into an argument over tipping, prompted by the sniveling Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), who refuses to throw in a buck like everyone else, because he doesn't believe waitresses deserve extra money just for doing their jobs. Mr. Pink is obstinate in the face of reason until bossman Lawrence Tierney, with his gravelly voice and hulking frame, brings him in line: "C'mon, you. Cough up a buck, you cheap bastard."

Nothing said in the opening scene figures in later, not even in some obscure metaphorical way. Tarantino does make the most of an opportunity to introduce his characters, who have convened on a day leading up to a jewelry heist, and won't be seen together again until they meet at a warehouse rendezvous after the botched robbery. But the film would still make sense without the scene, which is just as much about Tarantino delivering a statement of intent that's carried him through to this day. Having these gangsters riff on Madonna and tipping establishes his characters and films as products of popular culture, reflections more of a movie-addled brain than of the far-less-exciting world outside of it. Some tag him as a rip-off artist, but he's really a collagist, cutting and pasting phrases, references, and styles from the past into something new, infused with his own distinct sensibility and unmistakable voice.

Made for just over $1 million, Reservoir Dogs is a classic example of turning budgetary liabilities into creative assets. A heist movie without the heist, the film takes place mostly in one location, the warehouse, and deals alternately with the lead-up and the aftermath. The limited space gives it the intensity of theater, and the interweaving of flashbacks and present-day confrontations make the robbery itself come together in the imagination better than it might have had Tarantino splurged on a Michael Mann setpiece. As with much of Tarantino's work, the heist-without-the-heist conceit isn't unprecedented, nor is the structure—Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, also a model of low-budget resourcefulness, was his acknowledged influence—but he always manages to stay on the right side of the line between homage and rip-off.

Here's what we know right away about the robbery: It didn't go well. Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) are the first back to the warehouse, with the older White desperately trying to keep the gutshot Orange from bleeding to death. Mr. Pink comes in next, declaring his certainty that they were set up; with their daytime smash-and-grab job, they knew they only had minutes after the alarms went off, but the cops seemed to be waiting for them, and a bloody mêlée ensued. The question then becomes, "Who's the rat?" Could be Mr. Brown, who died in the frantic escape, or Mr. Blue (Eddie Bunker), who never materializes, or maybe Michael Madsen's sadistic Mr. Blonde, who just started shooting bystanders at will once the job went sour. Tarantino takes his time with that and other revelations, and fills in the blanks by giving the key players—Mr. White, Mr. Orange, and Mr. Blonde, specifically—the introductions they deserve. And while everyone's in limbo, he also gives us Blonde torturing a uniformed cop in this career-making NSFW sequence, which forever repurposes the Stealers Wheel bubblegum-Dylan hit "Stuck In The Middle With You".

Tarantino tends to get singled out first for his stylized dialogue (with good reason), and second for his achronological, novelistic approach to storytelling (also with good reason). But he's always been underrated as a director, and the torture scene wouldn't be nearly as effective in more pedestrian hands. It's hard to believe the Madsen of Reservoir Dogs would balloon into the corpulent softie of the Free Willy movies, but in his black-suit-and-sunglasses getup, Tarantino frames him like the second coming of Robert Mitchum, a lean, charismatic figure with the black heart of Mitchum's preacher in The Night Of The Hunter. Having "K-Billy's super sounds of the '70s" in the background sets up the perfect ironic ambience (and gives Madsen the right beat for his famous shuffle), but what Tarantino does with the camera is key. The scene is considered hideously violent, but the most gruesome moments happen offscreen, whether the camera positions itself to miss the cuts of Mr. Blonde's razor, or pans away altogether as he severs the cop's right ear. (The latter shot is a nod to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, which also has the camera dolly out in the film's most painful moment, when Robert De Niro gets turned down while talking on a payphone.) There's plenty of blood in Reservoir Dogs, but little gratuitousness, and perhaps less violence than the average action thriller; it's a trick of a great director, one who knows how to play with viewers' imaginations, and realizes that less violence can have more impact. On Charlie Rose in 1994, Tarantino quoted Brian De Palma, who once talked about filmmakers getting "penalized" for doing violence well, and he goes on later to explain:

"Violence was like another character in the room [in Reservoir Dogs]. It hung over the proceedings. You kept waiting for every conversation to break out into it. So even if it was funny, the audience might have laughed, but when they get out of the theater, they don't remember laughing."

Thematically, Reservoir Dogs sticks to the tried-and-true "honor among thieves" premise common to most heist movies, and its strong masculine bonds put the film firmly in line with the two-fisted entertainments Tarantino has always championed. At the center of it all is this idea of "professionalism": These guys were hired to do a job, and as professionals, they have a code that dictates how it should be carried out. Mr. Blonde may be loyal, but cutting up a room when the robbery starts to fall apart is unprofessional, as is his extracurricular abduction and torture of a cop.

And though the dynamic between Mr. White and Mr. Orange is surprisingly tender, almost like a bear nursing a cub, all professionalism went out the window the moment Mr. White trusted Mr. Orange enough to tell him his first name, and reveal his incriminating love of the Brewers. Ironically, Buscemi's Mr. Pink comes away as the lone professional: In the chaos following the robbery, he could have (and given the circumstances, probably should have) driven away with the diamonds rather than come back to the rendezvous point, but he didn't. He also tries to break up the Mexican standoff between the other men ("We're supposed to be fucking professionals!"), but he fails and winds up the last man standing, fully entitled to the stash. There's no doubt Tarantino feels more affection for Mr. White, who reveals a kind of tragic decency in taking the younger Mr. Orange under his wing, but the job is the job, and his inability to live by a criminal code hastens his demise.

Above all, though, Reservoir Dogs is about the sheer pleasure of a good story told right, and few people can do it as well as Tarantino. There's a great meta-scene halfway into the movie in which Mr. Orange, an undercover cop preparing to infiltrate this criminal operation, goes over a five-page script called "The Commode Story." The script is a piece of fiction about Mr. Orange's run-in with four cops and a German shepherd while he was carrying a bag of hash, intended to ingratiate him with the other crooks. He's told he needs to be a good actor, "like Brando," but it's really about how stories come alive in the details, and how the storyteller's command of the little things spells the difference between a convincing and an unconvincing tale-or, in this case, between life and death. He may be a savant genius, a semi-literate with little but a pop-cultural education, but when he's really cooking-as in the following scene, when Tierney is handing out aliases-there's no one better.

The New Cult Canon: Fight Club

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The New Cult Canon: Fight Club
By Scott Tobias
September 18th, 2008

(Note: This entry is intended for readers who have seen Fight Club. Others are advised to see it first—and why haven't you already?—and come back later.)

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war, our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." —Tyler Durden

With that little monologue alone, Fight Club asserts itself—rightly, to my mind—as the quintessential Generation X film. (At least for men, anyway. Women may respond to it, too, much as an anthropologist might study a foreign species, but its raw appeal is strictly for the XY set.) Based on Chuck Palahniuk's short, staccato first novel about the withered state of modern masculinity, Fight Club offers the fantasy of neutered men finding an outlet for their muted frustrations, a way of feeling something, even if that feeling is sadness or pain. And since that outlet is an underground, bare-knuckles fight club—and later, a full-on anarchist movement—the film has been perceived as dangerous in much the same way as a Marilyn Manson record or the latest Grand Theft Auto game rouses the moral alarmists. If you stopped watching after the first hour or so, the film might fairly be dismissed as socially irresponsible, but its attitudes and conclusions are far more complex and ambivalent than its critics give it credit for being.

In fact, look past the ultra-violence and flashy punk aesthetic, and Fight Club would make a fine companion piece to Mike Judge's Office Space, another film that not-so-coincidentally opened to mixed reviews, tanked in theaters, and found an avid cult appreciation on DVD. (I'll cover it here someday, I promise.) Though the anonymous protagonist played by Edward Norton enjoys a slightly more upscale lifestyle than the Everyman played by Ron Livingston in Office Space, they're essentially the same character: a dead-eyed cubicle-dweller who experiences a life-changing revelation, snaps out of his numb funk, gleefully bucks the rules, and eventually ropes others into criminal conspiracy. One is a deadpan office comedy and the other a blood-spattered provocation, but both strike a chord in people fed up with the soul-crushing, 9-to-5 busywork of TPS reports and automobile-recall assessments. When Norton and Livingston suddenly decide to liberate themselves from the straight and narrow, it's a wage slave's dream, as exhilarating as any piece of Hollywood escapism could ever hope to be.

Granted, Fight Club goes to greater extremes than Office Space: A few guys defrauding a faceless company one fraction of penny at a time isn't the same as a terrorist operation laying waste to 10 city skyscrapers that represent the foundation of our credit system. But appropriately, Fight Club seriously questions the limits of anarchy with the same fervor with which it dismantles the trappings of consumer culture. The problem is, this tends to be the part that critics of the film (and some viewers, too) usually miss when they dismiss it as nihilist garbage, just like members of Tyler Durden's "Project Mayhem" choose to ignore their leader when he has a change of heart. It's easy to accept rebellion, because it's what we desire, but harder to examine the consequences, because we don't like the hangover. If Fight Club could be considered "dangerous," the responsibility for that lies more with the willful obliviousness of some viewers than the moral deficiencies of its creators.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let us first consider "The Narrator" (Norton), an average guy who wears a crisp white shirt and tie (but no jacket) to work every day, and comes home to a cookie-cutter condo furnished by IKEA. ("What kind of dining set defines me as a person?" he wonders.) He's seized by some indefinable anxiety and pain that's turned him into an insomniac, but his doctor refuses to prescribe more than valerian root, exercise, and—if he wants to see what real pain looks like—a visit to the support groups at his local church-based community center. Slapping on nametags for made-up personas like Cornelius and Rupert, the narrator slips into meetings for tuberculosis, testicular cancer, and various strains of organ- and brain-deteriorating parasites. The experience is a revelation, because the suffering he witnesses is authentic and personal, and he can pretend that other people's trials are his own. "Every evening I died," he says, "and every evening I was born again, resurrected."

Just when the narrator finally gets the nightly catharsis he needs for sleep, along comes Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a chain-smoking fellow support-group "faker" whose presence prevents him from letting go. The two agree to split up the classes, but Marla seems to have one up on him philosophically: She operates without limits, whether swiping clothes from a Laundromat to sell on the next block, or walking straight into traffic as if she could care less about getting struck down. The narrator can see the freedom in that, and it's no mistake that Tyler Durden appears to him shortly after he makes Marla's acquaintance.

Played by Brad Pitt with a movie star's brash confidence, Tyler is Mr. Hyde to the narrator's Dr. Jekyll, a raging id who detests the deadening effects of consumer culture and seeks to prank it out of existence. He explains that oxygen on planes is intended not as a safety measure, but as a way to make passengers high and euphoric, and thus more willing to accept their terrible fate. And in a great exchange, he also dismantles a favorite Gen-X defense mechanism, humor, when the narrator explains the concept of a "single-serving friend"—those strangers that exist between take-off and landing, then evaporate like a complimentary pat of butter:

Tyler: Oh I get it. It's very clever.

Narrator: Thank you.

Tyler: How's that working out for you?

Narrator: What?

Tyler: Being clever.

When Tyler and the narrator meet again, the latter's life has literally gone out the window, due to an explosion that's jettisoned the charred remains of his yin-yang coffee table and other carefully selected "Fürni" from an upper floor of his high-rise condo. Tyler gives him a room in a bombed-out rathole on the edges of an industrial neighborhood, but more importantly, he invites the narrator to hit him as hard as he can.

From there, the two give birth to "Fight Club," a group that starts as a once-a-week after-hours slugfest in a bar basement, a place for workaday types to unleash their pent-up aggression and feel like men again. In spite of the first two rules of Fight Club—both are "You do not talk about Fight Club"—membership multiples exponentially in cities across the country, and Tyler expands its scope via "Project Mayhem," a complex, militaristic operation that carries out his brand of anarchic mischief. Some early missions are playful, like demagnetizing tapes in a video store or planting alarming safety cards on airplanes. But the grand design is that of a terrorist organization, with independent cells concocting explosives out of household items and conspiring to attack the system at its core.

At this point, many people take leave of Fight Club, which admittedly never regains the excitement of the first third, when it taps so strongly into the purposeless, emasculating lives of Gen-X pencil-pushers. That yearning to feel anything, much less find meaning in the world, is what Palahniuk and director David Fincher are attempting to make palpable. For his part, Fincher captures the zeitgeist so effectively at the beginning that some might not accept the film's second-half shift into out-and-out anarchy. It's one thing to identify with an average guy who unleashes his repressed anger through once-a-week fisticuffs; it's another to make the cognitive leap into homegrown terrorism. I think Fincher handles the transition as well as he can, but much like the narrator, viewers are forced to confront the reality that the "fight club" concept is getting away from them. It was Tyler's plan all along to destroy the foundations of consumerism, not just find a forum for coping with it.

The word "nihilist" gets tossed around often in reference to Fight Club—and to describe Palahniuk's work in general—but it's really about its limitations. Sure, Palahniuk and Fincher have little but contempt for our gelded society, and they'd no doubt endorse bits of homespun Durdenisms like "the things you own end up owning you." But once Tyler creates "Project Mayhem" independently—in a manner of speaking—from the narrator, that's where he and the filmmakers part ways. Splicing single frames of pornography into family films, as Tyler does, is good for a subversive laugh, but once he becomes a messianic figure and trains men to contribute mindlessly to a terrorist cause, the cure starts to look worse than the disease. (Of course, it's impossible to imagine the film being made after 9/11, no matter Fincher's level of responsibility. It's also impossible to consider the film outside of that context, since the destruction of the World Trade Center—a symbol of American enterprise—so closely mirrors Durden's mission. The only difference is that Durden takes steps to ensure that nobody is in the buildings when they're detonated, which is more Weather Underground than al-Qaeda.)

Fight Club builds to the big revelation that Tyler and the narrator are, in fact, two sides of the same person, a metaphysical twist that Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls take great pains to execute. It's the kind of gimmicky conceit to which I usually object in movies, one so outrageous that it feels like a cheat. (See also: a certain extreme French horror film from 2003, which makes virtually the same revelation seem shockingly stupid.) But on repeat viewings, I've come to appreciate just how often the filmmakers hint at the twist, from the flash-frames of Tyler that are spliced in before his appearance to the many references in the voiceover narration ("everywhere I went, I felt I had already been there," et al.) to the fact that Tyler and Marla (who becomes lovers, to the narrator's horror) never actually appear together at the same time.

If the film has a flaw, it's that Marla amounts to little more than a deux ex machina, existing mostly as a pinball who ricochets between the dueling sides of the narrator's personality. In light of the twist, we can see why Marla acts so mystified by her boyfriend's ever-changing moods. ("You fuck me, you snub me. You love me, you have me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole.") I don't think we'd buy the metaphysical leap without Marla bridging the gap. But make no mistake: Fight Club is by men, for men, and about men, and Marla serves a purpose without becoming a force unto herself.

Still, is it wrong to feel a rush in the final sequence, as Marla and the narrator clasp hands while buildings collapse to the tune of the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?" It takes me back to the very first New Cult Canon entry, Donnie Darko, which also gave viewers a seductive invitation to the apocalypse, as a corrupt world yields to a new one while the songs of Echo & The Bunnymen, Tears For Fears, and Duran Duran ring in the background. Both films speak to the cult impulse to lay waste to conventional architecture and see the world from a fresh angle. To that end, at least, Tyler Durden would approve.

The New Cult Canon: Donnie Darko

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The New Cult Canon: Donnie Darko
by Scott Tobias
February 22nd, 2008

In embarking on the mammoth, open-ended project that is The New Cult Canon, I face the scary and exhilarating prospect of a journey with no set course and no planned destination, but there was never a question that I'd be leaving port with Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko. To my mind, Donnie Darko is the quintessential cult movie of the last 20 years: Here was a much-hyped washout at Sundance that fell to a second-tier distributor (Newmarket), which released the film to middling reviews and feeble arthouse box-office (barely half a million when all was said and done). The film was left for dead until, miraculously, word of mouth started to swell and an audience steadily grew and rallied around it. The Pioneer Theater in New York ran it as a midnight movie for two years—this at a time when the midnight movie itself had long been left for dead. And DVD sales were so robust that Newmarket attempted to re-release the "Director's Cut" theatrically. (It tanked a second time, too.) The movie has inspired a level of obsession that separates cult phenomena from the everyday hits that wither past opening weekend.

I saw Donnie Darko three times in the theater: Once at the press screening, where I was apoplectic to find many of my fellow critics shrugging their shoulders; a second time during its two-week run here in Chicago, where I saw it with maybe five or six other people in the theater; and a third time at the Gene Siskel Film Center, where it kept coming back month after month to packed houses, including the near-soldout showing I attended. (And on a weeknight, no less!)

Why did I and so many others keep shuffling, zombie-like, to see this movie again and again in the theater? It certainly isn't perfect—films this crazily ambitious, from a first-time director no less, are rarely flawless—but Donnie Darko accomplishes perhaps the one thing I value most in cinema: It creates a world to get lost in, so particular and full of life that other concerns (in this case, an overstuffed mind-bender of a plot that has never quite cohered for me) fall by the wayside. And though I'll probably be defining cult movies a million different ways in this column, that's likely the common denominator, because once you have the ins and outs of the story figured out, what's the point of seeing a movie a second or third or hundredth time? The world of the film is paramount. And sequences like this one help, too:

If Donnie Darko coasting through the suburb of Middlesex, Virginia on his bicycle as "The Killing Moon" plays on the soundtrack wasn't attention-getting enough already, the "Head Over Heels" sequence had me sitting bolt upright in my seat. In this mesmerizing five minutes, Kelly introduces many of the major characters (and wordlessly suggests the tension between them). More impressive still, he evokes the life of a late-'80s adolescent with a tone that hovers somewhere between nostalgia and dread. It's very hard, especially when the soundtrack is this irresistible, to revisit a period without making it seem like facile "I Love The '80s" nostalgia. (Just ask Richard Linklater, who intended Dazed And Confused—another New Cult Canon contender—to be suffused with melancholy, but doesn't always get that response from viewers who groove on the music and stoner comedy.) But Kelly maintains that ambivalent tone from start to finish, and for as much love as he displays for the popular music and movies of the period, the film is still sobering, hypnotic, and more than a little sad.

Back in 2001, when the film was first realized, a wise man (okay, me) summed up Donnie Darko thusly:

A dense and wonderfully stylized amalgam of genres and influences, Donnie Darko resists any clear definition, which is perhaps its most appealing quality. Is it the flip side of Blue Velvet, a blistering satire of Reagan-warped suburbia? Or is it an anarchic, Fight Club-style punk film about the impulse to tear down a corrupt world in order to build a new one? Is it mind-bending science fiction? An adolescent romance? Catcher In The Rye?

Of course, the film is all of these things and more. But it's also a case where the individual parts don't necessarily work that well until they're factored into the whole. As a satire especially, Donnie Darko takes a fairly broad, predictable indie-movie posture toward the Reagan '80s: Dad nearly spitting out his dinner when his daughter announces she's voting for Dukakis; liberal intellectuals (like the teachers played by Drew Barrymore and Noah Wyle) falling prey to narrow-minded conservatives looking to shake up the curriculum with guru Patrick Swayze's New Agey baloney; a cartoonish Supermom (and chief Sparkle Motion sponsor) who at one point dons a T-shirt that says "God Is Awesome." As for the Holden Caulfield angle, or the enormously sweet relationship between Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) and the new girl (Jena Malone, always terrific), the film can only strike a glancing blow, since Donnie's metaphysical journey overwhelms any deeper character-sketching.

And how about that journey anyway? One reason why people might rewatch Donnie Darko is to figure out all that mind-bending stuff about portals and wormholes and rabbit suits that twist up the story so intriguingly. For me, the science-fiction elements are mysterious and perhaps not altogether accountable, though I know I'm not alone in resenting Kelly's attempt to iron everything out on the DVD commentary for the film. (And on a related note: I have never seen the "Director's Cut" of the film, because I didn't care much for the deleted scenes I watched on the original DVD, and didn't want any more of the film spelled out for me.) For me, Kelly not tying up every loose thread and explaining away the film's mysteries is a major plus, though his fiasco of a follow-up, Southland Tales, proves just how easily a movie like this can devolve into a clutter of half-realized ideas and references masquerading as ambition and substance. Here, Kelly has the good sense to let the audience connect the dots and advance their own theories and meanings.

Perhaps we can hammer out the details in the comments section, but here's my general take on it: When Donnie and his girlfriend go to see Evil Dead at the town's single-screen theater, the other movie on the marquee is The Last Temptation Of Christ. To me, this is the skeleton key that puts the entire film in perspective: The whole of Donnie Darko is analogous to the infamous dream sequence in Last Temptation, where Christ is on the cross and fantasizes at length about the life he might have had if he rejected God's plan and embraced his human side. The temptation is appealing: marriage, a home, making love (gasp!) to his wife, having children, etc. Throughout the course of Kelly's film, Donnie comes to realize the tragic consequences of him not being in his room when the plane engine drops through the ceiling; as much as he endeavors to change the world and bend time in his favor, he eventually has to reconcile to his fate.

Or something to that effect, anyway. There are plenty of holes in that interpretation without question—for one, it would never have been revealed that Swayze is harboring a "kiddie-porn dungeon" in his house— but for me, figuring the film out on repeat viewings has always been secondary to simply returning to that world one more time, like a tourist. Kelly piles on the '80s signposts—the amazing soundtrack; the nods to Evil Dead, E.T., Blue Velvet, The Karate Kid, Back To The Future, and Stephen King's It; the reactionary tenor of suburbia in the Reagan era—yet they add up to a specific and deeply personal vision of what it was like to be a teenager in October 1988. And for a guy like me, who at that time was a 17-year-old living in Newt Gingrich's district (Cobb County, Georgia), that's pretty fucking resonant.