Jack Burton Trips Over the Gates Of Heaven
Like anyone in the film industry, director John
Carpenter has had his professional ups and downs. His
first feature, Dark Star (1974), progressed from a
USC student project to a drive-in attraction. His
breakthrough release, Halloween (1978), remains one
of the most ruthlessly efficient genre exercises ever
made, as well as one of the most financially lucrative
independent features of all time. However, on more
than one occasion, Carpenter has suffered from the
collision between his creative instincts and whims of
the movie-going audience. He either misread the public
consciousness or attempted to lead it into territories
it was unable or unwilling to explore.
This was most notably the case with Carpenter's
version of the science fiction classic, The Thing
(1982). It is one of the darkest and most disturbing
films in the genre. As horrific as a Hieronymous Bosch
canvas come to life, The Thing depicts an alien life
form committed to absorbing the identity and
annihilating the flesh of its victims. Unfortunately,
this film had the misfortune to be released the same
year as Steven Spielberg's E.T. If Spielberg offered
a character from outer space that was warm and cuddly,
Carpenter committed himself without reserve to one
that was vicious and voracious. The audience at the
time was repelled, although the film has gathered a
dedicated and growing body of fans through its
re-release on video and DVD.
The other occasion on which Carpenter was
inadvertently out of step with the public taste
involved the 1986 feature Big Trouble in Little
China. An elaborate, effects-laden studio release, it
was a commercial bomb. As was the case with The
Thing, it has over time developed a loyal following
as evidenced by several websites dedicated to the
material as well as the release of this enhanced
edition of the film. The enhanced DVD includes deleted
scenes and a commentary by Carpenter and his star and
frequent collaborator, Kurt Russell. (The actor
appeared in The Thing as well as the television
movie, Elvis [1979], and the Escape from New York
[1981] and Escape from L.A. [1996] sequence.)
The original script for Big Trouble in Little China
took the form of a period Western, yet with the aide
of screenwriter W .D. Richter (creator of another
sci-fi classic, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension [1984]), the events were
transposed to the present day. The storyline focuses
on the extraordinary interactions between a brash
buffoon, truck driver Jack Burton (Russell), and an
array of Asian wizards, warriors, and demons led by
the sorcerer Lo Pan (James Hong). Burton comes to the
aide of his good friend, Wang Chi (Dennis Dun), whose
fiancee, Miao Yin (Suzee Pai), has been kidnapped by
Lo Pan as part of an elaborate scheme to prolong his
3000-year streak of immortality. Accompanied by the
rival sorcerer, Egg Shen (Victor
Wong), and a crusading lawyer, Gracie Law (Kim
Cattrall of Sex and the City), Jack and Wang storm
Lo Pan's
fortress, rescue Wang's shanghaied fiancee, and
restore balance to the universe with the defeat of the
villain.
When Big Trouble in Little China first appeared, the
Western affection for Asian film was at a low point.
Bruce Lee had died a decade before, and kung fu
features were more the source of amusement than
adulation. The works that Carpenter admired and
imitated in making this picture -- the Samo Hung
feature Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1981)
and Tsui Hark's elaborate fantasy Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) -- were unknown to the
general public, as were successors to Bruce Lee, like
Jackie Chan. In the years since, both Chan and Hung
have appeared in either Western-produced movies or on
television. In addition, a substantial number of
pictures created in the Far East are now readily
available in a variety of formats. As a result,
audiences have become familiar with the visual
extravagance and narrative audacity that are
commonplace in these films, one of the factors that
might account for the success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). It is hard not to
succumb to the predilection for hyperkinetic action
and technical flourishes that reign supreme in this
sphere of world cinema. At a period when Hollywood
seems addicted to recycling cliches and retreating
from the pleasures of storytelling, even a
run-of-the-mill picture produced in the Far East
evidences a degree of craft and creativity that have
eroded almost altogether in our native commercial
cinema.
It was, if anything, the sheer giddiness of Hong Kong
films in particular that attracted Carpenter, the
devil-may-care manner in which these works attach
disparate genre conventions to one another and go over
the top, and to do so again and again before the final
credits roll. However, Carpenter's admiration for this
kind of overkill does come as a bit of a surprise, for
he is by and large an old-fashioned formalist, a
disciple of Howard Hawks and other renowned directors
of mainstream Hollywood cinema. His shooting style,
typically set in wide-screen Panavision, routinely
observes the classic verities of plot, character, and
setting. For all its firepower and mayhem, his second
feature, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), is Hawks's
classic John Wayne feature, Rio Bravo (1959),
transposed to an urban setting. Halloween explores
the in and outs of small town America with the
topographical precision that John Ford brought to
Monument Valley in his Westerns.
That is not to say that Carpenter is either humorless
or retrograde, for clearly his approach in Big Trouble in Little China is predicated upon respecting
narrative conventions but not necessarily taking them
seriously. As he remarks in the commentary, the film
executive Barry Diller took a strong dislike to this
film, for he felt Jack Burton was not heroic enough.
Truer words were never spoken, for, as Carpenter
continues, an energetic effort was made to flip-flop
the sidekick and the leading man. Jack is a bumbler, a
braggart, a figure of flashy words who typically
engages in misdirected or mistaken actions. He does
possess the exceptional ability to catch objects
moving swiftly through space, a skill that will be
crucial to the outcome of the narrative. Nonetheless,
Wang Chi is, in fact, the hero of the piece:
resourceful, committed, and loyal to his friends and
his fiancee. He may disdain the spells and potions
conjured up by Egg Shen, but he never dismisses them.
Jack thinks he saves the day and storms the gates of
heaven; in end, he is just a burly bystander who helps
out more often by accident than by intent.
More than likely, it was this implicit critique of
cinematic conventions of masculinity that turned off
much of the audience when the film was originally
released. The mid-1980s was the heyday of Rambo and
the Terminator, characters rooted in certitude and
absent even the slightest taint of irony. Carpenter's
films have often incorporated a political dimension,
obviously an implicit matter in this deliberately
adolescent free-for-all. Jack Burton is the anti hunk,
the inverse of the pectorally endowed fighting
machines typified by Stallone and Schwarzenegger. The
Occidental characters in Big Trouble in Little China
are typically two steps behind, while the Asian
Americans are three steps ahead. There are not many
films that engage in a debate over Orientalism while
incorporating a character who shoots lightning bolts
from his fingers. That said, the film is probably best
characterized by a comment from a review quoted in the
DVD commentary by Kurt Russell: "Absolutely fabulous
and terminally hip."
