After Hours
The movie After Hours is about pure cinema; it can be taken as a perfect example of itself. It does not have a moral or message, and depicts the protagonist’s struggle against a chain of converging threats to his life and sanity. It is “The Perils of Pauline” told straight.
Critics reflexively call it “Kafkaesque,” but that is an adjective not an explanation. Is it a warning about life in the city? For what reason? In New York there may be various odd people up after midnight; but they do not usually become involved in a series of coincidences so strange as these, all centered on one man.
You’re not paranoid if people really are plotting against you, but strangers don’t conspire to make you paranoid. The film has been called dream logic, but it might as well be screwball logic; except for the nightmarishness and weirdness of his adventures, what happens to Paul Hackett is like what happens to Buster Keaton one damn thing after another.
This was not Martin Scorsese’s personal project; he was then engaged in battles over “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Paramount’s sudden cancellation of the film four weeks before shooting (the sets had been built, the clothes made) filled Scorsese with rage: “My idea then was to pull back, and not become hysterical and try to kill people,” he told Mary Pat Kelly. “So the trick then was to try to do something.”
He read through stacks of scripts; this one came from producers Amy Robinson and Griffin Dunne, who thought it could be done for $4 million. It had been written by Joseph Minion, then a grad student at Columbia; later Scorsese would remember that Minion’s teacher, Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev, gave it an “A.” He decided to make it: “I thought it would be interesting to see if I could go back and do something in a very fast way. All style. An exercise completely in style. And to show they hadn’t killed my spirit.”
It was the first of his films with German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who had worked with Fassbinder and therefore knew all about low budgets, quick shooting schedules, and passionate directors. It was all shot at night, sometimes with on the spot improvisation of camera moves as in the famous shot where Paul Hackett (Dunne), the hero, rings the bell of Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino) and she throws down her keys, and Scorsese uses a POV shot of the keys dropping toward Paul.
In the days before digital, this really had to occur. They experimented with tying the camera to a board and lowering it down to Paul with ropes (it was a very dangerous thing for Dunne), but when that resulted in out of focus footage, Ballhaus came up with a crane move so fast it was terrifying. Some other shots, Scorsese said, were Hitchcock-inspired fetishistic closeups of objects like light switches, keys, locks and especially faces.
Because we know that a close-up signifies something significant to a character, Scorsese exploited that knowledge with unmotivated closeups; Paul thought something important must have happened, but usually it hadn’t. An audience raised on classic film grammar would share his expectation and disappointment without even knowing it.Pure filmmaking.
Another device is casually to suggest alarming possibilities about characters for example when Kiki talks about burns, or when Paul finds the graphic medical textbook about burn victims in Marcy’s bedroom (Rosanna Arquette), the woman he has come to meet at Kiki’s apartment: Are the burns accidental? Deliberate?
The possibility is there because Kiki is into sadomasochism. Looking for common conversational ground, Paul tells Marcy the story of how he was once a little boy in the hospital and left for a time in the burn unit there blindfolded; told not to remove the blindfold; did so anyway and saw things that horrified him. Strange: That he should enter into two women’s lives obsessed by burns and have his own burn story but coincidence and synchronicity drive the plot.
“After Hours” can be described as what might be called a “hypertext” film, where unrelated elements of the plot are associated in an occult way. In “After Hours,” such things as suicide, sculpture method, plaster of Paris bagel, $20 bill and string of burglaries all have connections that exist only because of Paul’s adventures.
This creates a sinister undertone to the film, as in a scene where he tries to explain all the things that have happened to him and fails maybe because they sound too absurd even to him. One thing many viewers of the film report is a high (some say almost unpleasant) level of suspense throughout “After Hours,” which is technically a comedy but plays like a satanic version of the classic Hitchcock plot formula, the Innocent Man Wrongly Accused.
With different filmmakers and other actors, it might have played more safely, like “Adventures in Babysitting.” But there is an intensity and drive in Scorsese’s direction here that gives it desperation; it really does seem to matter that this devastated hero struggle on and survive. Scorsese has suggested that Paul’s implacable run of bad luck reflected his own frustration during the “Last Temptation of Christ” experience.
Executives continued saying the film was on track, that backers had the money, Paramount had given the green light, agents said it was a “go,” everything was set and then one thing after another would go wrong. In “After Hours,” each new person Paul meets promises to take care of him, make him happy, lend him money, give him a place to stay, let him use the phone, trust him with their keys, drive him home and every offer of mercy turns into an unanticipated threat.
The movie could be seen as an emotional autobiography of that period in Scorsese’s life. The director has said he didn’t know how to end it; IMDb claims: “One idea that made it to the storyboard stage had Paul crawling into June’s womb to hide from the angry mob, with June (Verna Bloom) ‘giving birth’ to him on the West Side Highway.” An ending Scorsese actually filmed showed Paul still trapped inside the sculpture as the truck driven by the burglars (Cheech and Chong) drives away; Scorsese said he showed that version to his father, who was angry: “You can’t let him die!”
It was also Michael Powell’s message for weeks; Powell had come aboard as a consultant and would soon marry Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker. Powell kept saying that not only did Paul have to live at the end but he had to wind up back at his office – which he does, although after Paul returns close examination of the very final credit shots show that he has disappeared from his desk.
“After Hours” is not usually included in lists of masterpieces directed by Martin Scorsese. Its DVD release was long delayed. On IMDb’s ranking of Scorsese’s films by user vote (a notoriously unreliable but sometimes interesting reflection of popular opinion), it ranks 16th. But I remember how I felt the first time I saw it: wrung out. Yes, no matter that it was a satire, a black comedy, an exercise in style above all it worked as a story that flew in the face of common sense and yet hooked me.
I have seen it several times since; I know what happens at the end; and despite my suspicion of “happy endings,” Paul had to live. So now I no longer feel suspense, of course, because I know what will happen. But I feel the same admiration. “An exercise completely in style,” Scorsese said himself. But he couldn’t quite leave it there. He had to make a great film because, perhaps, at that time in his life, with the collapse of “The Last Temptation,” he was ready to, he needed to and he could.
From my reconsideration in “Scorsese by Ebert.”
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