The films of Larry Cohen have long been an interesting anomaly in American cinema. Cohen has made pictures on budgets which would be entirely impossible in today’s mega-million buck industrial climate. He has also operated in a manner very akin to the techniques of underground cinema by the ways he finances and shoots his films. As an independent commercial director, he describes his role as that of a ‘guerrilla’ filmmaker.1 Cohen and several of his collaborators use this term to describe the director’s particular method of making films, one often involving minuscule budgets and a type of risk-taking not found in mainstream cinema today. Although Cohen’s style differs from most examples of Hollywood mainstream and independent cinema, his very modus operandi and synthetic inflections of motifs taken from diverse sources parallel certain practices associated with American underground filmmaking.
Any case for defining Cohen’s work in relation to the cinematic underground must consider the nature of the dominant discourses surrounding the usual definitions of independent cinema. Generally, as in the work of Wheeler Winston Dixon,2 these involve concepts that historically define American experimental cinema as arising from the development of an avant-garde tradition emerging from New York and/or California in the 1960s. More often than not, this movement is associated with key names such as Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Ron Rice, and several others. Also, the theatrical venue often forms an influential role in conceptions of underground cinema by defining relevant examples as those having had premieres at the New York Underground Film Festival or various independent campus locations. Most popular definitions of underground film usually encompass those works which eschew narrative in order to operate in a totally avant-garde manner which will preserve both formal purity and radical intentions from contamination by the dominant ideology.
However, these definitions tend to be too rigid in terms of understanding how cinematic movements operate in particular fluid ways. Although narrative and independent films tend to be regarded as mutually exclusive, this is not often the case in certain realms of cinematic practice. For example, Soviet independent films such as Lev Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) engaged in a satire of both Hollywood cinema and Western ideological misconceptions of a new society by merging comedy techniques, circus acrobatics, avant-garde acting styles and documentary shots within a highly heterogeneous formula.
Also, the Andy Warhol Factory films often engaged in interrogating the nature of Hollywood formulas, using them for their own mode of satire. This was particularly the case with those films directed by Paul Morrissey. Although Morrissey altered Warhol’s avant-garde practices into more structured directions, thereby incurring the wrath of purists (similar to those who criticised Bob Dylan’s use of electric instruments in the late 1960s, as well as Miles Davis’ jazz explorations in the same decade), Warhol-produced films such as Heat (1972), Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (1974) and Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1974) did not entirely depart from their subversively satirical, underground use of Hollywood formulas. For example, Heat was a reworking of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1951) starring Factory alumni Joe D’Allesandro in the William Holden role and Sylvia Miles as Gloria Swanson. (Both Miles and Morrissey had appeared separately in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), which also featured aspects of New York underground life.) Not only did the film transform Wilder’s original into another ‘Day in the life of Joe the Hustler’, as in Flesh (1968) and Trash (1970), but it ended with the hero escaping his predecessor’s fate by not falling into a Hollywood swimming pool after a rejected lover fires a gun at him. We must also remember that Wilder had attempted his own version of an ‘underground’, non-Hollywood mode of discourse in the original cut of Sunset Boulevard, where Joe Gillis’ dead body engaged in voiceover conversation with other occupants of the morgue. Preview reactions led to the elimination of this scene.
An underground film may operate in an essentially fluid manner and does not necessarily involve the jettisoning of either narrative or influential mainstream films for referential purposes. Certain examples may, however, update and interrogate the premises of the original mastertext in a manner which, although not abandoning narrative, can resemble certain practices of underground cinema by adding new inflections both stylistically and thematically.
HITCHCOCK AND COHEN: A COUPLE OF RADICALS
My point concerning the films above is not to argue for demolishing the usual convenient classifications concerning the nature of underground cinema. It is rather to argue for a more flexible interpretation which recognises occurrences of this phenomena in areas where it would not otherwise be considered. This is specifically so with respect to two films Cohen shot in New York during 1984: Perfect Strangers and Special Effects. Although formally narratives, they rework cinematic conventions in very much the same manner as the best examples of underground cinema. Furthermore, not only did Cohen shoot these films on the kinds of low budgets common to this type of cinema, he also understood their specific kinship. Speaking of shooting both films back-to-back with the same crew, he remarked on the former’s use of ‘all kinds of New York people who’d worked in underground movies,’ people who were not ‘even in the Screen Actors Guild.’ Cohen enjoyed working with Eric Bogosian, Zoë Tamerlis and others on Special Effects, describing them as ‘all highly offbeat people who lived in strange basements, had no money, but were highly talented.’3 On Perfect Strangers, Cohen worked with Anne Carlisle, whose only previous role involved playing both male and female characters in Liquid Sky (1983), directed by Eastern European alternative filmmaker Slava Tuskerman. Although Perfect Strangers is an accomplished work in its own right, Special Effects is really the more ‘underground’ of the two.
Special Effects is particularly significant in terms of its use of self-reflexive techniques usually associated exclusively with underground cinema. It continues Cohen’s interrogation and extension of motifs contained within the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but they are here mediated within the mode of the former’s cherished ‘guerrilla cinema’. Despite its narrative structure, Special Effects contains several self-reflexive elements characteristic not only of Hitchcock’s cinema, but also Hitch’s fascination with those earlier avant-garde moments in European cinema such as German expressionism and Soviet montage which he often incorporated into his own films. Although Hitchcock later became identified with the Hollywood studio system, he was also influenced by the ‘underground’ films of his day which were first screened at the London Film Society from 1925 onwards. Although many of these films later became classified as ‘Art Cinema’, at the time of their original exhibition they were considered dangerously subversive works, especially those belonging to Soviet Cinema that received their only public screenings at Workers’ Film Societies both in Britain and America. Furthermore, both Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk subtly attempted to inflect their Hollywood narratives with non-mainstream cinematic expressionistic flourishes in their later careers within the studio system.
Since underground cinema is often associated with radical movements interrogating the status quo, Special Effects offers an interesting example of how a narrative film may provide the viewer with oppositional strategies often exclusively associated with independent cinema. For example, during the heyday of Screen theory in the 1970s, the avant-garde was thought to be the only salvation for viewers seeking to escape from a supposedly oppressive form of gendered visual pleasure associated with a particular rigid definition of narrative cinema. However, this strategy soon became redundant with the emergence of a diverse number of theories associated with the fluid nature of visual spectatorship, as well as the later translations of then-unknown Russian narrative theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.
Although, to her credit, Laura Mulvey noticed an ‘uneasy gaze’ and ‘disorientating voyeurism’ in the Hitchcock films she singled out for criticism, her influential 1975 essay led to a rallying call for an oppositional avant-garde non-narrative cinema (which, supposedly, would lead viewers in radical directions) that went unanswered.4 Furthermore, as critics such as D. N. Rodowick have since revealed, this original essay is highly rigid and reductive in nature.5 Special Effects, however, is particularly instructive in showing how a low-budget underground film using a narrative structure can interrogate the negative effects of the male gaze and, at the same time, deliver a form of visual pleasure that is not compromised by the dominant ideology.
It is also possible to argue that Special Effects provides a specific reply to the third formulation of Mulvey’s theory in terms of its radical use of narrative interrogation. Whereas in ‘Visual Pleasure’ Mulvey championed the avant-garde, her second follow-up essay (entitled ‘Changes’) saw possibilities within a Bakhtinian carnivalesque narrative strategy.6 May not an independent cinematic use of narrative space contain a potentially transgressive Bakhtinian conflict involving visual technique, self-conscious practices and humour, one that leads to a particular cinematic pleasure as challenging to the audience as the pointing figure of the jester in the climax of Blackmail (1929)? One might question whether a particular inflection of the Hitchcock text belongs in any definition of underground cinema. But if Warhol’s Factory could appropriate and rework Sunset Boulevard in Heat, then Cohen has every right to do the same thing in Special Effects. Furthermore, both counter-cinema and the underground are at their best operating against a dominant narrative and providing alternative counterpoints. This may not necessarily be formal; it can also be both narratively thematic and oppositional. As Sally Potter’s Thriller (1979) demonstrated, a Hitchcock text may be used in many counter-cinematic ways. The same is true for productions belonging to that now-lost era of creative British television, as seen in the later works of Dennis Potter and Artemis 81 (1981). Directed by Alastair Reid from a teleplay by David Rudkin, the latter merged allusive references to Hitchcock films within a generic framework indebted to British television productions such as the Quatermass series (1953–57) and A For Andromeda (1961), while challenging viewers to respond actively in a manner resembling practices associated with avant-garde techniques by the very nature of its allusive narrative structure.
SELF-REFLEXIVITY IN ‘SPECIAL EFFECTS’
Special Effects is based upon a screenplay written at the same time Cohen attempted to interest Hitchcock in directing Daddy’s Gone A Hunting (1969), based on another Cohen script. Universal Studio politics succeeded in thwarting this ambition, and the project ended up in the less creative hands of Mark Robson. Already disillusioned by the way his West Coast television projects usually ended up on the small screen, Cohen then decided to control his work by directing it whenever possible. This led to his first film, Bone (1972), which he shot in a manner resembling an independent, underground film. The original title of Special Effects was ‘The Cutting Room’, self-reflexively specifying certain parallels between film editing and violence. Cohen’s later involvement in the world of New York independent cinema finally led to the filming of this project.
Special Effects engages in a self-reflexive cinematic examination of the murderous gaze within a narrative plot partly indebted to Vertigo (1958). But it also evinces Cohen’s fascination with the oppressive nature of patriarchal, family-defined identity. These were themes already present in his early teleplays, such as the 1963 Arrest at Trial episode ‘My Name is Martin Burnham’, and the January 1965 opening episode of Branded (entitled ‘Survival’), as well as his later scripts for both film and television. Special Effects also contains several humorous moments, not just Hitchcock-influenced, but part of Cohen’s strategy whereby comedic moments often disrupt coherent operations of traditional narrative cinema. This strategy can be observed in many Cohen films, including such successful and not-so successful instances as It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1986) and Wicked Stepmother (1989).
Special Effects opens with a scene which uncannily foreshadows Bill and Monica’s escapades in the White House. A scantily clad woman poses half-naked in the Oval Office, providing a particular form of visual pleasure before leering male photographers. It takes a moment to realise that the scene is not ‘realistic’, but a studio recreation of the now-infamous Clinton ‘Oral Office’ set up for voyeuristic purposes. Abandoned Okie husband Keefe Waterman (Brad Rijn) arrives to find his erring blonde wife Mary Jean (Zoë Tamerlis) positioned upon a revolving dias. As this opening sequence shows, appearances can be both deceptive and devastating. Mary Jean has not only abandoned her traditional subordinate role as Oklahoma housewife, but (to Keene’s disgust) has taken on a new identity as ‘Andrea Wilcox’ in order to begin realising her dreams of fame and fortune in New York. Furthermore, the opening shot tracks Andrea by performing a 360-degree camera movement. This not only calls to mind the dominating cinematic mechanisms used to depict the complex romantic agonies of Vertigo and Brian De Palma’s Obsession (1976), but also the patriarchal system’s exploitative use of the female body as seen in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) and North by Northwest (1959). Here it is worth remembering that although Hitchcock’s techniques have over time become appropriated as Hollywood ‘cultural capital’, they were originally regarded as the equivalent of today’s underground filmmaking techniques in the conservative world of British cinema, which reacted adversely against the infiltration of European techniques such as German expressionism and Soviet montage into their productions. The same problems affected the work of Powell and Pressburger.
Returning to her sleazy apartment, Keefe forces Andrea to watch a 16mm film of their 31-month-old son. While Andrea objects that the child will no longer recognise her, Keefe callously replies that as an actress she can easily play the mother’s role (a line that will foreshadow the film’s climactic airport scene). A blurring of identities occurs early on, as Keefe acts like a dominating director making his lead actress watch a cinematic example of the part he wishes her to perform. Andrea also engages in her own form of fantasy role-playing by lying to Keefe that twice-busted Hollywood director Chris Neville (Eric Bogosian) wants her for his new film. She manages to escape from her husband and arrive at Neville’s apartment. After auditioning for a different type of role, she becomes outraged when she discovers him filming their lovemaking. By verbally humiliating Neville’s sexual and creative powers, she provokes her own death at his hands under the eye of a camera concealed behind a mirror. Falsely accused of her murder, Keefe finds himself bailed out of jail by Neville, who wishes to use him in a 16mm re-creation of Andrea’s life and death. This will obviously be a picture made under underground filmmaking conditions, to be blown up into 35mm for general release.
Neville’s circumstances not only echo the plight of directors who have experienced flops within the mainstream film industry and who wish to keep working in the low-budget independent field, but also anticipates the contemporary predicament facing once major talents today. During 2001, some British newspapers reported the plight of television and film director Ken Russell; now exiled from both industries, he continues making films on video in his garage with the aim of distributing the finished product on the Internet. Under these circumstances, boundaries between mainstream and underground talents as well as divisions between narrative and avant-garde techniques become very blurred – a contemporary phenomenon Cohen’s Special Effects superbly foreshadows.
Supposedly firm boundaries between the ‘law’ and exploitation also become blurred in a manner evoking Hitchcock motifs in works as diverse as Easy Virtue (1927), Champagne (1928), Notorious (1946), and Vertigo. Detective-Lieutenant Philip Delroy (Kevin O’Connor), the officer who arrested Keefe, becomes so fascinated by cinematic techniques that Neville appoints him as technical advisor on his film. Such a blurring of boundaries also echoes the high degree of contemporary involvement of New York police on television productions such as Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, N.Y.P.D. Blue, Third Watch and 100 Centre Street. As one critic remarked in a recent New York Times article, ‘So many New York badges glisten in the lights of the cameras these days, it might behoove the police brass to think about recruiting from the drama schools.’7
Failing to find a suitable actress, Keefe accidentally discovers lookalike Elaine Bernstein (also played by Tamerlis) whom Neville transforms into the dead Mary Jean/Andrea in a manner resembling the techniques Scotty (James Stewart) uses on Judy (Kim Novak) in Vertigo. After losing footage of Andrea’s death, Neville decides to recreate the original murder according to the improvisation techniques of underground cinema. But he rewrites the screenplay so that Keefe supposedly kills Elaine, with Neville killing him in turn. After realising that Neville intends to make him ‘The Wrong Man’, Keefe escapes from the police and removes all the fuses from Neville’s apartment to frustrate his plans. Engaging in a struggle with Neville, Keefe throws him into his indoor pool along with a studio light which electrocutes him – a punishment he would have received before the days of lethal injection. Elaine unknowingly becomes Keefe’s accomplice by plugging the fuses back in, an act which leads to Neville’s electrocution. She thus becomes the underground equivalent of Hitchcock’s ‘guilty woman’. Special Effects concludes in an ironic manner, with Delroy before the media announcing his intention to complete Neville’s unfinished film while Keefe flies home to Oklahoma with Elaine, whom he now renames Mary Jean.
Special Effects might appear to be a mere derivation of Vertigo were it not for the fact that the source is incidental to a plot centered upon identification and the cinematic machine. These elements not only occur within Hitchcock’s British and American periods, but also within various works of underground cinema. Special Effects also emphasises the self-reflexive components contained within the low-budget world of independent cinema much more radically than any of Cohen’s previous or subsequent films. In addition, the dislocation of Hollywood cohesive narrative structures echoes the challenging nature of his screenplay for Bone, which was written at the same time as Special Effects.8 The latter film uses the Vertigo references more radically than does De Palma’s Obsession; although both utilise Hitchcock’s recognition of the oppressive nature of gender roles, Cohen’s treatment brings this issue to the forefront by formally employing underground cinematic techniques. Ultimately, the Vertigo narrative becomes as marginal to the construction of Special Effects as the scene showing Mary Jean/Andrea’s dead body in a car parked in the abandoned Coney Island winter landscape. Like Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) during her drive to California in Psycho (1960), Andrea’s eyes are wide and staring, the only movement being the swish of the windscreen wipers turning back and forth. Mary Jean’s journey to New York ends in brutal violence. She is the victim of a power relationship in which two impotent males attempt to dominate her.
(DIS)HONEST ABE ZAPRUDER
If the themes of Special Effects were not extraordinary enough, Cohen’s particular manner of cinematic treatment is also exemplary insofar as it blurs numerous boundaries. This blurring involves sound as well as vision. The opening of Special Effects resembles that of Hitchcock’s second sound film, Juno and the Paycock (1929), in that it contains voices against a black background before the visuals actually begin. Although such practice became commonplace in the later sound era, Cohen restores this ‘disruptive’ opening to the very radical avant-garde intentions employed by Hitchcock in his early sound productions. While Hitchcock emphasises the monologue of Barry Fitzgerald’s Orator at the beginning of Juno, Cohen employs a dialogue between the unseen figures of Neville and reporters after his firing from a multi-million dollar production. Dismissing accusations of wasting money, Neville responds that his movies make millions of dollars in video rentals – a common situation for many directors who never gain theatrical release today – in a distribution system which functions as an alternative means of seeing different types of films (depending of course on the location).
As a special effects director, Neville acclaims ‘honest Abe Zapruder’ as his mentor in a manner acknowledging transgressions of real-life boundaries between fantasy and reality. Although Zapruder shot the only footage of the Kennedy assassination on an 8mm camera, questions of documentary reality often clash with issues of interpretation, as films such as Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) reveal. Despite being a ‘real-life’ documentary shot like a family home movie, the Zapruder footage is open to as many interpretations as the best examples of avant-garde and underground cinema. Neville actually dismisses Andrea’s belief in the reality of the news footage documentation of Lee Harvey Oswald’s death, viewing it instead as make-believe.
The original title of Special Effects – ‘The Cutting Room’ – emphasises editing, a process which denotes not only the manipulation of reality, but also murder, as demonstrated in such classic examples as Battleship Potemkin’s (1925) Odessa Steps Massacre and the shower scene in Psycho. In Special Effects, Neville embodies William Rothman’s definition of Hitchcock’s ‘murderous gaze’ by committing murder wearing editing gloves and attempting another with editing scissors.9 (Significantly, Jeff Costello [Alain Delon] in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 Le Samouraï wears editing gloves as part of his murderous profession.) Neville’s fascination with the Kennedy and Oswald assassinations also reinforces the connection between the real-life world of documentary and violent fantasies revealed by Hitchcock in the opening scenes of The Lodger (1927) and Blackmail (1929). The subversive blurring of boundaries between reality and imagination is thus present not only in the more familiar examples of underground cinema, but also in the work of Hitchcock and Cohen.
Neville inhabits an apartment decorated with rose imagery, the rose fascinating him because it combines opposing emblems of beauty and violence. Roses also have thorns that can injure. During his assault on Andrea, Neville scratches her back with thorns. Also, at various points in the film, rose thorns prick the fingers of both Neville and Keefe. These oppositional realms of beauty and death complement intertwining associations of sexuality and violence occurring throughout Special Effects. After Neville’s interview segment in which he acclaims the death-conveying 8mm Zapruder home movie footage, Special Effects opens (as discussed above) with a low-angle shot of Andrea posing before male viewers in the sleazy Oval Office set. When Keefe brutally assaults the organiser who attempts to stop him from pursuing Andrea, an exhilarated voyeur immediately gets over his disappointment in losing ‘girly shots’ by avidly photographing Keefe’s victim. Later, when Neville films a bedroom scene between Keefe and Elaine (the latter now cast in Andrea’s fictional role), he coaxes the prudish husband into coupling as he remembers his earlier violent bedroom assault upon Andrea.
In one striking scene, Cohen films Neville from a high angle as he casually walks over the photos of hundreds of willing actresses eager to audition for the role of a murdered woman. Oblivious to (or uncaring about) her death, even Andrea’s own agent sends Neville a still! The imagery here superbly illustrates certain deadly psychoanalytic mechanisms contained within the cinematic medium, mechanisms which parallel the sadistic nature of the director’s murderous gaze with the masochistic submissiveness of willing victims eager to lend their bodies to passive reproduction on the screen. Significantly, this scene also depicts the world of cinema as an art of dangerous ideological illusion trapping males and females within deadly, power-dominated roles. It is a revelation usually defined as belonging to the anti-mainstream movement of non-narrative underground cinema. But here we find this device employed within a narrative film.
The unequal nature of power relationships between males and females occurs at different points throughout Special Effects. When Keefe chases Andrea out of the ‘Oval Office’, he first encounters a lookalike who plays upon his fantasy. Keefe’s former reality of his Oklahoma wife and mother of his child is an illusion, since Mary Jean has now become Andrea. The lookalike propositions Keefe: ‘My name is Mary Jean. I can be whatever you want me to be.’ Keefe angrily replies, ‘You’re not Mary Jean. You’re not my wife!’, to which the woman significantly responds, ‘Are you sure?’ Later, while Keefe compulsively gazes at the 16mm image of their young son, Andrea expresses alienation. Frustrated by his puritanical nature, she rejects the role of wife and mother. Unlike Margaret (Peggy Ashcroft) in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935), Andrea has managed to escape to the city but only finds disillusionment, sexual exploitation and death there. Keefe’s aggressive attitude parallels that of crofter John (John Laurie) in the earlier film. But Keefe finds his true shadow self in director Chris Neville, who will carry the violent implications within his possessive gaze to their logical conclusions.
Like other oppressive Hitchcock figures, such as Millie (Margaret Leighton) and the pre-repentant Charles Adare (Michael Wilding) in Under Capricorn (1948), Ben McKenna (James Stewart) in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955), Scotty in Vertigo and Lil (Diane Baker) in Marnie (1964), Keefe’s possessiveness and denial of Andrea’s real personality drives her into the bed of a man she actually dislikes. She complains to Neville about her husband, ‘He wanted me to be Mary Jean, not Andrea.’ The climax of Special Effects has Elaine exhibiting reluctance about playing her next role as long-lost mother when she travels to Oklahoma with Keefe. While she speaks of Keefe’s son – ‘I wonder if he’ll recognise me. It’s been so long’ – the camera zooms in to Keefe’s dominating gaze as he replies: ‘Don’t worry about it. You look just like your picture.’ The scene ends with Elaine realising her new entrapment under another director who will groom and direct his contracted actress for another dangerously oppressive role, one that exists within the same patriarchal system her predecessor attempted to flee from in vain.
Neville and Keefe appear as dominating males in Special Effects. But they are both role-players whose everyday performances conceal deep insecurities. Keefe has lost Mary Jean while Neville has lost two major films. Both characters resort to violence to compensate for their loss of power. Keefe also becomes insecure when Neville casts him as himself in the movie Andrea, directed by Neville. In one humorous scene in a nightclub, Neville kisses Keefe briefly and undermines the Oklahoma husband’s gendered security. This scene also reinforces the line a taxi driver utters while driving Keefe to Neville’s apartment. Perhaps recognising the hidden sexual ambivalence within his violent passenger, he twice unsuccessfully attempts to interest him in visiting a transvestite bar: ‘You can’t tell them from the genuine article.’ This line also echoes those spoken by Andrea’s lookalike several scenes earlier.
Andrea too engages in several masquerades. Discarding the role of Oklahoma wife and mother Mary Jean, she poses in the recreated Oval Office as a Presidential Playmate, passes herself off to Keefe as a successful actress, pretends to be a New York University student trying to write a paper on Neville’s films and plays her last role as unwilling corpse. Additionally, Keefe’s flight to Neville’s apartment duplicates that of Andrea’s on the previous day. Neville also shoots both partners on film, his camera recording Andrea’s death as well as Keefe’s arrest. As for Elaine, she confesses to having several personalities, none of which she actually likes. She engages in Salvation Army work, feminist activities and teaching new maths in Harlem in very much the superficial manner of Melanie Daniels (Tippie Hedren) in The Birds (1963), finally becoming a voyeuristic object for both Neville and Keefe. Like Hedren’s eponymous Marnie, Elaine is a victim of ‘feigning and falsehood’,10 seeing in masquerade an escape from her personal dilemma.
Like Sir John (Herbert Marshall) in Murder (1930), Neville intends to direct his own project and nearly succeeds in accomplishing this aim. As with Hitchcock’s theatrical performers, he plays directly to the camera. Before killing blackmailing laboratory technician Gruskin (Richard Greene), Neville decides against using a knife. He speaks to the camera: ‘No, it’s been done.’ Finding a pair of editing gloves, he puts them on and strangles Grushkin with celluloid. Neville concludes by praising his own performance to the audience, ‘Now that’s fresh!’ At one point Elaine remarks to Neville: ‘You don’t do things. You rehearse them,’ complementing an earlier line – ‘You don’t talk to people. You do routines’ – when they are in a restaurant overlooking a theater advertising A Chorus Line. After murdering Andrea, Neville exclaims ‘That’s a take,’ before the screen displays Neville’s imagined credit, ‘Andrea. A Film by Chris Neville’.
Cohen’s technique here and elsewhere breaks up established techniques of narrative diegesis. After Keefe accidentally destroys Neville’s footage of Andrea’s murder, mistakenly believing it to be his family home movie, Neville envisages another scenario. This one is mediated on the cinema screen in script captions that describe Elaine’s murder and Neville’s accidental killing of Keefe as the supposed murderer. Throughout Cohen’s film, everyone becomes hooked within a cinematic scenario they are powerless to prevent. Ignoring Keefe’s moral objections during a sex scene, Elaine responds, ‘I don’t care. I’m hooked and so are you.’
Special Effects concludes ironically, with the unhappy couple flying away to Oklahoma after the airline attendant informs them that the flight has ‘a complimentary luncheon and a movie’. This line not only satirically reflects Hitchcock’s frequent associations between food and violence, but also compliments the shot revealing Andrea’s dead body, one which shows a sign prominently displaying ‘Golden Fried Chicken’. Another parallel can be found in the ‘Cold Meat’ advertisement Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) sees in the newspaper announcing Annabella’s (Lucie Mannheim) murder in the crofter’s cottage in The 39 Steps, as well as the many visual associations between food and violence occurring in Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972). As the plane flies away, the credits ‘A Philip Delroy Film’ appear, before the ‘real’ film credits roll.
As a director Neville may be a master manipulator, but he never lacks for willing victims. Top criminal lawyer Wiesenthal (Steven Pudenz), whom Neville hires to represent Keefe, is often mistaken for infamous media-conscious McCarthy attorney Roy Cohn. He helps Neville because he wishes a movie to be made of his life one day. Neville seduces not only Andrea and Elaine, but also Keefe and Lt. Delroy. Delroy in fact becomes fascinated by the movie business, ignoring his partner’s pleas to return to their normal work, and eventually becoming Neville’s associate producer (with his own car and free advertising). In the penultimate scene of Special Effects, Delroy informs news reporters – among whom is Cohen in an uncharacteristic Hitchcock-like cameo appearance – that he intends to complete Neville’s picture himself. Unlike Detective Frank Webber (John Londgen) in Blackmail, who avidly views Scotland Yard movies such as ‘Fingerprints’ to see if the director gets the facts wrong, Delroy believes that his ‘skill and insight and knowledge of police procedures’ will make for ‘one hell of a picture’.
CONCLUSION
Special Effects uses many of the self-reflexive techniques associated with underground cinema to engage in a dialogical re-working of the Hitchcock mastertext in the manner suggested by Mulvey in her 1985 ‘Changes’ essay. Although her original ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ manifesto championed the supposed radical claims of independent cinema, her subsequent revisions revealed a number of blind spots in her premises. For example, a narrative film may employ techniques associated with the supposedly alternative world of underground cinema. Furthermore, Mulvey’s original argument lost sight of the fact that directors such as Hitchcock also employed certain techniques within their films which were once associated with the contemporary version of the underground. Special Effects is a low-budget film interrogating narrative mechanisms in very much the spirit of underground cinema. Neville explains his methodology (and the film’s title) to Delroy in the following manner, also defining Cohen’s principle of underground filmmaking: ‘People assume that special effects means taking models, miniatures, tricking them up, making them look real. I’m taking reality and making it look like make-believe. That’s a special effect too.’
In very much the same spirit as Hitchcock’s explorations, Cohen’s film interrogates the mechanisms of narrative cinema, breaking down supposedly rigid boundaries between the mainstream and underground worlds. It examines the supposedly distinct realms of fiction, fact, fantasy, documentary, news reporting, sex and politics, revealing them all as belonging to a system needing interrogation and eventual rejection. As Keefe and Elaine fly away towards an undisclosed marital future as bleak as that facing Frank and Alice (Anny Ondra) in the climax of Blackmail, two director’s credits appear, ‘A Larry Cohen Production’ following ‘A Philip Delroy Film’. These credits contrast a reality and fiction both of which have been revealed as deadly illusions.
Special Effects is a challenging film. Consciously employing different styles and techniques, it suggests one possible avenue for achieving Mulvey’s idea of a ‘transformative potential’11 within areas of popular culture, one that combines a self-aware textual pleasure within a narrative format that remains uncompromised by the very nature of the exploration achieved by its its director. It is an interesting and maverick experiment in underground filmmaking that deserves more acclaim.
This is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the ‘After Hitchcock’ Panel at the March 1995 Society for Cinema Studies Conference in New York.