Wolf (1994)
After the utterly conventional dramatic narrative of Regarding Henry, Mike Nichols embarked on a series of genre exercises to close the decade and the second phase of his Hollywood career: Wolf (1994) may be the most surprising of all, a gothic werewolf melodrama that also seasons the story with romance and with capitalist satire; The Birdcage (1996) followed, a gay farce adapted from the French hit La Cage aux Folles; then Primary Colors (1998), adapting Joe Klein’s political campaign satire; and What Planet Are You From? (2000), an unlikely hybrid of sex-farce and science-fiction. In the early films of his second phase, from Silkwood through Regarding Henry, there were occasional commitments to Nichols’ generic roots in comedy, most notably in Working Girl and, to a lesser extent, in Heartburn and Biloxi Blues. But two of the four films that close this second career phase, The Birdcage and What Planet, feature unapologetically broad humor, and while Wolf and Primary Colors may be understood to have far more sober tonal intent, Wolf suffers when taken too seriously. Nichols would return to consistently serious dramatic intentions after the turn of the millennium, with his move to HBO, but his output in the second half of the 1990s saw a director very much at play, because he’d earned that right, or perhaps had lost his way. Of the four films with which he closed the decade, only The Birdcage was an unqualified box-office success. The other three were expensive, devastating financial failures, and What Planet is in the small minority of Nichols’ least accomplished films.
Wolf offers a demonstration of what happens when a director works too far outside his demonstrated generic vocabulary. Because it attempts more gravity than the silliness of What Planet, Wolf is actually the more alien film. Should Nichols, an acknowledged master of comedy and drama, have been experimenting with an exercise in supernatural horror? The film is probably most comfortable inside the satiric confines of the Bradbury Building, where Jack Nicholson (in his fourth and final appearance as a Nichols lead), Christopher Plummer, James Spader, David Hyde Pierce, and Eileen Atkins all enact the comedy of bad manners that passes for corporate culture in the hostile-takeover era. As the film moves closer to the natural world (on the leafy Alden estate and in Central Park), let alone in the supernatural mysticism of Om Puri’s scenes, Nichols reveals himself to be literally lost in the woods.
Nichols works from a script by Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick (with uncredited revisions by Elaine May1); Harrison, with his debts to men’s men like Ernest Hemingway and James Dickey in exploring codes of masculinity and gender roles, is at a glance an unlikely voice for Nichols to adopt in exploring his otherwise familiar preoccupations with commodified performance and reified anxiety, yet beyond Harrison’s distinctive musings on the twinned instincts of savagery and the noble savage within, the critique of late capitalism makes familiar points of contact with other Nichols’ films. Anthony Lane writes that Wolf “may be the first movie to merge lycanthropy and capitalism into a joint venture.”2 Where Harrison and Nichols most diverged was in drawing conclusions from their horror scenario: in the “return to the wild” depicted in the film’s ending, Harrison sees a sloughing of civilization’s bonds,3 while Nichols believes the idea of reversion to noble beasts is a “‘sentimental lie,’” because “‘This is a story about somebody who loses his humanity, and you can’t say that’s something to be desired.’”4 The culture introduced in Wolf is of “highly civilized” commercialized atavism: our species tears out the throats of its competitors not by physical assault but via the hostile takeover (whether in the boardroom or in a colleague’s bedroom). Property is territory, and anything from professional position to personal relationship is property. Not surprisingly, this is a world dominated by patriarchy, represented most aggressively by Raymond Alden, leading his way into every human scrum with the noble brow of Christopher Plummer (at his most effortlessly, smugly baronial). Alden is a billionaire takeover specialist who has no personal interest in what he takes over—he’s simply possessing property as its own reward. He possesses people, too—his daughter Laura (Michelle Pfeiffer) is among his key possessions, and he keeps her with more ardor and less success than his stock acquisitions. This becomes a sub-plot of Wolf’s inquiry into reified anxiety: can anyone refuse to be commodified?
Nichols’ previous film, Regarding Henry, ended with a glimpse inside the reification factory—an exclusive prep school, where students are asked to look around them at their future competitive antagonists, then ask, “Why do I push myself? Why do I strive to be a harder worker?” The question may masquerade as self-improvement, but its context applies with equal ease both to internal and external comparatives—these young people are, like Henry Turner himself, being groomed for competitive dominance. In the likes of Henry Turner (Harrison Ford) and Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl)—Nichols has presented the corporate American of either gender as a force of late capitalist surrender to relentless acquisition. Unlike Working Girl, whose narrative ends in the irony of a fairy tale in which the princess gets exactly what she wished for (a hard-driving prince and a window on the anonymous canyons of Manhattan power), Regarding Henry offers a sincere antidote to the commodified infection. The Turners opt out of the rat race; the film ends as they take a road less traveled. The narrative trajectory of Wolf, although worlds apart from Regarding Henry in terms of genre, ends at a similar point: with the rejection of imprisonment within the imperatives of wolf-eat-wolf late capitalism. Georgia Brown writes, “Will’s puncture wound is in the hand not the head, and whereas the venal, driven Henry required slowing down, the passive, defeated Will needs to be revved up.”5 Indeed, beginning with Meryl Streep as Suzanne Vale at the end of Postcards from the Edge, belting her declaration, “I’m Checkin’ Out,” Nichols introduced a string of feature films invested in a common commitment to principled exile from the majority culture. He wouldn’t return to people trying to maintain principles within the system until Primary Colors, when the ambiguities between principle and compromise spike again at the film’s climax and resolution, as in earlier Nichols films from The Graduate to Silkwood to Biloxi Blues. Suzanne’s song could as easily belong to the Turners in Regarding Henry, excusing themselves from the bloodthirsty social competition of New York’s elite. And Suzanne’s song could also belong to Will Randall (Jack Nicholson) and Laura Alden, who opt out of a life predicated solely on hegemonic possession. Each has known the ignominy of being commodified; both have also tasted the power of manipulating others and found it did not agree with them. When they “go wild,” there is something very different in their natures than when Stewart Swinton (James Spader, always game to play strange and unsympathetic roles) goes wild. Their wildness calls them out of the false civility of socio-economic structures. In his next film, The Birdcage, the last before the grand statement of Primary Colors returned to the question of whether individuals can change reified systems (rather than the other way around), Nichols tacks on a deliriously comic coda to this sequence of films within his oeuvre, a very broad comic finale on the topic of being “out” of the box of social conformity.
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Wolf’s potpourri of generic and tonal accents renders it a risky narrative experiment. Within the same narrative are the dead-earnest sentiments of the romance genre, uncomfortably close to the boisterously funny corporate satire within the gleaming walls of the historic Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles (where McLeish House publishing operates) and the supernatural horror elements of the werewolf formula. The parts don’t always cohere gracefully. David Foster Wallace, in his classic creative nonfiction essay about cruise-ship tourism, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” writes of feeling so trapped between ports that he takes to watching and re-watching the closed-circuit movie channel available at all hours in every stateroom. Wolf is one of the films in rotation during his cruise, and his one-word dismissal (“stupid”6) is, of course, unfair, though it does reflect the larger cultural indifference to the film. It’s a telling insight into Nichols’ self-knowledge as a filmmaker that his next film, The Birdcage, is not only an official, credited reunion of his first successful professional collaboration, with May, but also a reversion to one of his most familiar generic formulas: social comedy.
Despite all the intermittent hair and the talk of full moons and amulets, Wolf retains Nichols’ consistent critique of commodified social structures, this time returning to Manhattan’s corporate battlefield of Working Girl. The milieu is the executive class. Will Randall must first come to terms with his inner wolf and then reject its unnatural application within the bloodthirsty atavism of “civilized” human society. Betraying her own discomfort with the literalized genre conventions of horror, Janet Maslin writes, “So long as it stays confined to the level of metaphor, as it does in the first hour of ‘Wolf,’ [Will’s descent into the atavistic instincts all around him] is irresistible. And Mike Nichols’ own killer instincts as an urbane social satirist are ideally suited to this milieu. Just as he did in the opening, not-yet-sentimental sections of ‘Regarding Henry,’ Mr. Nichols knowingly captures the smooth viciousness behind his characters’ great shows of sophistication.”7
Will’s deferential gentility has anesthetized his marriage to Charlotte (Kate Nelligan) and left him an aging alpha-editor at McLeish House, unwittingly provoking the primal appetites for dominance of the young would-be usurper, Stewart Swinton. When we first see Will in Manhattan, he’s in close-up on the sidewalk, moving beside a chain-link fence. The camera’s zoom-out reveals that we have been watching Will from within the enclosure of a construction site, and as the camera pans to follow Will, it picks out another social species in its workday habitat: the hard hats in their tight pack, hungrily watching money (men) and sex (women) passing by just beyond the fence. Coming as it does between the wintry transgression of Will on the wolf’s territory in snowy Vermont, where he’s bitten, and the post-takeover whisperings and closed-door stratagems at McLeish House, the brief exterior shot reminds us that the commodified world sees all as territory to be negotiated—either to pass through unmolested or, if the call of one’s blood should command it, to assume the aggressor’s role and consume whatever one desires.
Certainly this is Stewart’s philosophy, having stolen from Will those two most palpable symbols of his self-possession: his senior executive position and his handsome wife. When Raymond Alden seeks the appropriate cutthroat to place at the helm of the new McLeish House, he does not even speak to Will about the job; rather, he hires Stewart—whom Alden confesses has irritated him with his constant, wheedling desires—and only reneges and hands the job back to Will after Will’s daemon-wolf blood demonstrates that he can be sufficiently “ruthless.” Alden doesn’t much care for either Stewart or Will; he makes his choice purely on the man he perceives to be the dominant hunter. When Will meets Alden’s daughter, Laura, her beauty does its usual stuff of attracting the male of the species, but she’s utterly unimpressed by him in a way we assume she has learned by default, combatting the waves of strutting Alden “wolves” sniffing around her iconic cheekbones and enormous eyes. At their hostile first lunch together, only undertaken to establish her autonomy from her father and Will’s defiance of her father’s clearly communicated desire that Will be gone, neither has an awareness of any need of companionship. Will delivers a long, alienating speech that begins with the deliberately antagonizing provocation, “You know, I think I understand what you’re like now.” What comes out of his mouth over the course of the next two minutes are the sort of anti-romantic bromides on which one-night stands are often negotiated. Jack Faulkner (Dennis Quaid) in Postcards from the Edge wouldn’t have felt entirely estranged from the canned sentiments Will delivers with deconstructive irony and, subtextually, a modicum of hope an old guy instinctively might find himself carrying into a conversation with a beautiful woman he wouldn’t mind possessing. Laura in bored irritation barely bothers to growl, “Sorry, wrong line. I am not taken aback by your keen insight and suddenly challenged by you.” She has deconstructed the deconstructionist; she wins because he doesn’t score. A few moments later, what gets through her defenses are questions Will, freed from the expectations of his male prerogative, asks about her family, especially her brother the suicide (whom we can safely presume, being the only son and heir to the Alden mantle, would have been expected to carry a particularly heavy burden of constructed behavior).
For both Aldens, father and daughter, Will is a comic lampoon of obsolete deference and gentle “civility.” As he is fired on the sweeping lawn of Alden’s estate, Will receives Alden’s assurance, “Nothing personal. C’mon. You know that you’re clearly a man of taste and individuality, which I prize. These days, not only in corporate America but all around the globe, taste and individuality are actually something of a handicap.” Will’s civil but pointed reply clarifies his perspective on people like Stewart Swinton and the men like Raymond Alden who encourage them: “Well, just out of curiosity, on what basis did you pick my successor—vulgarity and conformity?” Indeed, Alden’s hiring practices clearly reward smaller gestures made in the same key as Alden’s own hostile takeovers. Alden’s kiss-off indicates the satirized object of Wolf: “You’re a nice person, Will. Thank god I replaced you.” With Laura, moments later on this same lawn, Will assures her she’s “safe” with him, not in the sense of his providing protection but rather of his posing no threat. As a result, her early conversations with him mingle incredulity and faint disdain, until, at their peanut-butter-and-jelly luncheon only held to annoy Alden, he scolds her: “I don’t take anything for granted, Miss Alden, except some small measure of civility from my hostess.”
Charlotte and Laura take different perspectives on this old wolf. While Laura’s inner goodness (obscured beneath a bad-girl mask meant to goad her domineering father) innately begins to respond to a like nature in Will, Charlotte has entered into the affair with Stewart as a kind of recompense for Will’s lost fire. After the wolf bite, Will needs some time to adjust physically; the initial reaction is an even greater lethargy than he’d previously manifested. During the car ride home from Alden’s firing party, Charlotte needles Will, less about Alden than about the man with whom, unbeknownst to Will, she’s been sleeping: “Why did you let him walk away with your blessing, guilt-free?” She still wants to talk about it when they’re home in bed, but all Will wants to do is sleep—which is what he does for the next 18 hours, a kind of mini-hibernation. He awakes feeling “good” but ravenous, and his appetites for her stew and for Charlotte are exactly what she’s desired, for “a very long time.” Nonetheless, she keeps a previously arranged assignation with Stewart that requires her to lie to Will (the answering-machine message about the conference in New Haven). Will, with his newfound sensory talents, literally “sniffs” out the adulterous liaison. Kate Nelligan’s innate gravity offers Charlotte a humanity that would otherwise have been lost in the sexual front running she attempts with the two men vying for the restructured senior editor position under Alden. Later, when Charlotte returns to Will at his hotel and pleads to be taken back, he growls at her to “Keep away.” While this is part of the feral, aggressive new Will (and the only quality eyewitnesses remember and recount to the police), the moment retains a complicating ambiguity: this is Will’s embarrassingly public recoil from the woman who betrayed him, yet it is also potentially residual evidence of his goodness, the same impulse that will cause him to handcuff himself to a radiator in his hotel room and endure the searing of the amulet against his skin, all to remain civil against the temptation to ravage. He warns Charlotte for her own good, and out of his own good. Laura, watching the tense exchange, must become the beauty to his beast, though her effect does not so much tame as ennoble him.
In Wolf, the territorial objectification and atavism of corporate culture emerge in the battle between Will Randall (Jack Nicholson, left) and Stewart Swinton (James Spader) for a new senior editor position created by a conglomerate’s takeover of a publishing house. The rivalry spills over into possessiveness about Will’s wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan), who, tired of Will’s lethargy, has entered into an affair with Stewart. Their uneasy triangle is captured at the dinner where Raymond Alden, the man behind the takeover, hands the job to Stewart, citing the handicaps of Will’s “taste and individuality.”
In the days immediately after Stewart’s double double-cross, however, while he is still growing into his new powers of self-assertion, Will becomes a monster of conformity, not only vowing to “get” Stewart and making good on the vow, but even matching wits with the top-dog himself, maneuvering his way to a deal for more money and power. When Alden’s accountant reflexively balks at the proposal’s audacity, Alden stills him and approves the deal without negotiation. As if acknowledging a self-betrayal, Will accepts Alden’s praise (he’s even more bloodthirsty than Stewart at this moment): “Yes, but I still have those two big drawbacks: taste and individuality.” Alden is in on this sort of self-hating mockery: “Maybe I can overlook ‘em,” he says. The two suddenly seem made for each other in a way that does no credit to either. These are Will’s nights of liberation, a free id in Midtown. By day he figuratively tears the throats from his competitors; under the moon he tears the throats out of animals and the gun-hands off of would-be muggers.8
In Will’s brief absorption into the mainstream of corporate conformity, he and Stewart are momentarily on equal moral footing. After announcing to his longsuffering executive assistant, Mary, that “the worm’s turned and is now packing an uzi,” Will confronts Stewart, who assumes the same bootlicking servility with which he has previously cloaked his treachery (as at the Alden firing party, when he asks Will what he should do after Stewart has been named as his successor). Having learned that Will has double-crossed him, Stewart says to Will, “What do you want me to do? I’ll do it. Resign today? Promise never to see Charlotte again? Just tell me what to do.” Will’s civility has never previously permitted direct confrontation and bloodletting, so it startles Stewart into honesty when Will calls his bluff and demands his immediate resignation. “Well,” Stewart says, “I can’t do that,” and then, to himself, but loudly enough that Will (and we) can hear it, “So why did I say it?” It’s a striking meta-cognitive moment: no one could be less interested in a self-examining answer, and he knows Will would be the last man to counsel him now in self-knowledge. In asking the question, Stewart plays the role of a man questioning why he is a man who reflexively plays roles. In essence, he puts a mask on his mask, and he does so knowingly, with the knowledge that his one-man audience has always known this about Stewart. It’s as pure a moment of reified anxiety as Suzanne (Meryl Streep) watching her blown lines on the looping screen with Lowell (Gene Hackman) in Postcards from the Edge, but empty of any redemptive spirit of possibility to reverse or replace the damaging behaviors it deconstructs. Later, when Will is in trouble with the police and Alden is wavering about the deal he’s made, Stewart nags at Alden with the same persistence he’d initially displayed in double-crossing Will. He learns about the complicated clauses Will has negotiated into the contract concerning succession (Roy would be next in line for Will’s position), and he goes beyond even Alden’s generous boundaries between civility and incivility in asserting his will to power. Alden is visibly aghast at the mirror Stewart holds up to his own aesthetic of corporate conduct, and Stewart says, “I didn’t mean that,” again only tangentially to his audience, as if in theatrically reflective aside. Alden demands, “Well, what did you mean?” Stewart is the very image of reified ambition; it will devour him. Dr. Alezais has explained that the daemon-wolf is a kind of self-revelation, consuming the non-essential appearances of a being until all that remains is “his nature, his heart. […] The daemon-wolf is not evil, unless the man he has bitten is evil.”
The “rules” of this exercise of the horror genre have asserted themselves in these dialogues Will has with Dr. Alezais, as well as with Laura in his hotel room. We come to understand what Will the wolf will do and what he won’t allow himself to do. He will ruin Stewart’s suede leather shoes and his professional advancement, but he will not physically attack unless provoked. He will utterly reject but will not physically attack Charlotte (at least not knowingly). He will, however, attack the Central Park muggers, what the New York tabloids of the era would have called a teen “wolfpack.” Laura ascribes to him, with certainty hard won by years of bad experience with wolves, the status of “good man, and that’s very exotic to me,” she says. “I never thought I’d meet a good man who looked at me the way you do.” She recognizes in Will’s gaze something more than mere appetite.
As Will ultimately becomes more apparently himself under the spell of the daemon-wolf, so too does Stewart, who begins the narrative struggling to say what he truly feels after a life spent in unctuous diversion and manipulation, but who comes to find himself increasingly compelled under the spell of the daemon-wolf to say precisely what’s on his mind, often to his own bemused surprise and puzzlement. At the film’s climax, arriving at the Alden estate hotly pursuing both Will and Laura, he has only one thing on his mind: a demeaning objectification of Laura’s sexual attraction. The guards are stunned into hostility by his frankness, but before they can subdue him, he subdues them. Having tracked down Laura, disarming directness remains his only mode. Released from the role-playing of “polite society,” Stewart is frank in his reductive estimation of Laura as mere sex toy. By contrast, the ennobling power of the love Will feels for Laura reaches its apotheosis just before the film’s climactic showdown between old wolf and usurper, when Will delivers a speech that expresses the goodness Laura has seen within him: “I want you to know something: I’ve never loved anybody this way, never looked at a woman and thought, if civilization fails, the world ends, I’ll still understand what God meant, if I’m with her.”
Wolf argues that the great civilizing power of the world is not law but love. Alden uses the legal system and contracts to bind and possess, his takeovers no less savage for being bloodless. In the firing party scene at Alden’s mansion early in the film, Allison Janney has a brief walk-on part as a guest who gets to ask Alden a nakedly thematic rhetorical question: “I do not think of Time-Warner as another great, multinational conglomerate but as a bunch of decent, caring people, because I just don’t believe money always implies ruthless ambition, Mr. Alden. Am I insane?” Alden suavely replies, “I would say so, yes,” provoking approvingly sycophantic sniggering. With Stewart after Charlotte’s body has been discovered in the park and Will has gone missing, Alden discusses the future in terms of legal prophecy: Will has written Roy into the succession of McLeish House authority, and Alden yields only to this power of contract law, because it is the basis of his dominion. Yet Alden has no effective legal means of manipulating Laura, to whom he remains essentially powerless. Draw up a legal document disinheriting her? It could have little effect on someone so little desirous of the trappings of his largesse. Will has a kind of possessive power over Laura that comes, ironically, from truly loving rather than possessing her. Detectives Bridger (Richard Jenkins) and Wade (Brian Markinson)—the law—similarly have no effect in exerting influence over Laura. In the hotel room when they confront Will and Laura with the news of Charlotte’s death, Laura is aggressively defensive of Will’s legal well-being, despite her own exceedingly precarious standing as “Miss Smith.” Bridger immediately backs down, though he hungrily eyes her, also aware, as Stewart has been, that Will’s alpha-male status may legitimately be challenged. In the film’s coda, after Laura coyly refers to Will as “too tame” for her, using verbal irony to throw the literalist keepers of the law off the scent, Bridger confesses his attraction to her: “Yeah, that’s what I thought when I saw you together at the Mayflower.” As portrayed by Jenkins, Bridger is Will Randall without either a shot of daemon-wolf virility or Will’s innate civility. Bridger drinks on the job, lets suspects push him around, and hopes to use the opening created by his investigation to make a run at Laura, who ought to be considered very much a person of interest in the various crimes committed around her. His ineffectuality is most manifest in the legal muddle of the film’s ending: with what crimes will Stewart be posthumously charged, and with what crimes will Bridger fruitlessly pursue Will—or will he pursue Will at all? He seems interested only in pursuing Laura as the film ends, but in the closing montage, she has eyes—turning amber with the spirit of the daemon-wolf—for Will.
“There must be something wild within, an analog of the wolf,” Dr. Alezais has intoned to Will during their consultation—just before Will refuses to infect Dr. Alezais with the bite of immortality. “Certain moments in Nicholson’s performance (like the gentle, confused look he gives the dying Indian sage when asked to bite his hand) felt like strange, luminous celluloid flashpoints not quite like anything seen before. […] Wolf in its clumsy way exudes some of its hero’s torn earnestness, the beast’s desperation to find a humane way.”9 Will may be wild, but he remains civil. He can’t bring himself to even the most well-meaning of unprovoked attacks. The “analog of the wolf” is indeed the basis of the werewolf formula as well as the satire of late capitalism. “It feels good to be the wolf, doesn’t it?” he asks Will. “Power without guilt, love without doubt.” But of course the irony of Dr. Alezais’ characterization of the wolf is that he unintentionally describes two very different species of animal. The amoral (or “evil”) wolf wields power without reflection let alone guilt, and never doubts love because his love is terminal narcissism. This is the daemon-wolf that consumes Stewart, whose heightened senses doom him not only to registering sound and scent at extra-human levels, but also mendacity. Stewart’s untrustworthy nature accentuates his suspicion of others. He is destroyed not by Will’s bared teeth and claws, which always hold back their fatal force, but by Laura’s bullets, because she now feels as acutely the daemon-wolf as either of the men; despite the essential gentleness beneath the hardened exterior she projects to the world, she is able to kill because Stewart is in mid-leap and Will is thus endangered. Will’s “power,” as Dr. Alezais refers to it, has nothing to do with the systems of reified power within which Will has found himself so ill at ease throughout his career. His short venture into conformity with manipulative power-mongering soon disinterests him once he has come to “understand […] what God meant,” contemplating Laura in the grip of a daemon-spirit of loving commitment.
Protagonists have been riding away (The Graduate), paddling away (Catch-22), singing away (Postcards), and walking away (Regarding Henry) from the constricting forces of their objectification since Nichols’ earliest films. The social renunciations implicit in Wolf’s conclusion are consistent with such negative movement, but Wolf has more in common with Postcards and Regarding Henry than with earlier Nichols films of counter-cultural resistance, because there is a clearer sense of self-definition (“This is who I am”) rather than merely negative definition (“Whatever I am, I am not that”). There is something hapless about Benjamin and Elaine’s blank passivity at the end of The Graduate, and Yossarian’s tiny, quixotic strokes against oceanic currents may be noble but seem equally absurd, given the impracticality of his goal. There is in Wolf’s resolution, in which Will and Laura happily renounce their compromised humanity for the “wild within,” a familiar insight about human “evolution” that Nichols first posited in 1973, in The Day of the Dolphin. It is a dark vision of humanity’s atavism, a devolving (rather than evolving) into ever more bloody territorial possessiveness.
In Dolphin, all the intellectual brilliance of Dr. Jake Terrell (George C. Scott) has been focused upon lifting the dolphins up toward the presumed pinnacle of natural selection: homo sapiens. Yet Jake’s gradual epiphany is that, in fact, his attempting to shape in his own image the dolphin Alpha, born in captivity at the Terrell Center and the only “son” he and his wife have, instructing him in human language and logic, has only exposed Alpha (and his mate, Beta) to the venality of the “superior” human race and left Fa and Be complicit in the deaths of the conspirators on the boat. In the end, Jake is ironically reduced to using the system of logic with which he’d initially established meaningful engagement with another species in order to lie to them, sever ties, and thus preserve their lives from his own murdering species. It’s a noble but despairing gesture, one that underscores for Jake the futility of cross-purposes at the center of human experience, our reified codes of savagery wearing the mask of humanist civility. If Jake could grow gills, perhaps he would; indeed, his happiest moments in the film, scored to the romantic strains of Georges Delerue’s main theme, are when he has strapped on oxygen tank and mask and entered the dolphins’ world of water (albeit always within the artificial construction of the center’s aquarium, the boundaries he has imposed). What Jake realistically cannot do within the confines of the paranoid-thriller genre, Will and Laura fantastically can achieve within the werewolf formula. Thus the rhetoric of Dolphin banishes the Terrells East of Eden, while the conclusion of Wolf foresees what David Denby calls “the liberationist undertones”10 of Will and Laura’s reunion within the forest primeval, “what God meant.” The satire of commodified conformity thus meets its hybridized generic conclusion in Nichols’ beloved sense of “transformation,”11 here taken to its generic transmutative extreme. Lane writes, “From ‘The Graduate’ onward, [Nichols] has relished the spectacle of Americans at one another’s throats.”12 In Wolf, there is clearly more honor (among the highest human values for Nichols) to being a lone wolf of “taste and individuality” and the imperatives of love than to disappearing into the wolfpack of predatory conformity.