In Memoriam
Truth be told, I was never a great admirer of the late
Sir Alan Parker. That he actively denied the existence of the British independent
film industry and campaigned for it to be dismantled and siphoned off to the big
American studios, bemoaned the rise of both the BFI and Channel 4 Films, and
spent much of the 1980s sneering at far more interesting and creative
filmmakers, like Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway and Sally Potter, forever puts a
black mark against his name for me. In many ways his championing of commercial
cinema, his toadying to a Hollywood that rejected him as soon as he proved
unfashionable, and his disdain for personal films from marginalized
communities, makes him an unwitting architect of the current cinema, in which
the corporations won.
More personally, I also find a lot of his work to be
quite boring, conservative, and politically shortsighted. As stuffy and
outdated as analogous works by Sir Richard Attenborough, such as Gandhi (1982),
Chaplin (1992) and In Love and War (1996).
Parker's breakthrough film, Midnight Express (1978),
is famous for its violent racism, its historical inaccuracies, and its
homophobia. His later films, Mississippi Burning (1988) and Come See the
Paradise (1990), respectively attempt to grapple with the violence of the civil
rights movement and the unlawful internment of Japanese-Americans during the
Second World War, but they do so as a means to provide purpose to their white savior
protagonists. As a result, stories that should give a voice to African American
and Japanese American experiences become a frame to examine stories of white
guilt and the journey of white characters in recognizing their own racism as
bad. His penultimate film, Angela's Ashes (1999), is a work of poverty porn
that casts English and Scottish actors and attempts to reinforce the myth of
the grey and dreary Ireland, with its drunks and destitution, at a time when
Dublin was becoming one of the most vibrant and exciting cities in Europe,
while the less said about The Road to Wellville (1994) and his final film, The
Life of David Gale (2003), the better.
In the middle of his career however, Parker directed
three films that I find hugely interesting and that still stand out as
incredibly creative and engaging pieces of cinema. Produced almost
back-to-back, Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982), Birdy (1984) and Angel Heart
(1987), demonstrate the great range that Parker's career had, even at its most
middling, moving as the three films do from a surreal musical fantasy, to a
coming-of-age psychological drama, to a supernatural horror tinged with the
influence of film-noir. All three films are steeped in atmosphere and the kind
of slick, graphic imagery that was born out of the director's background in
commercial advertising.
While Parker was an avowed disbeliever of the
"auteur" theory, as demonstrated numerous times in his smug documentary
film, A Turnip Head's Guide to The British Cinema (1986), the three films in
question have enough visual and thematic similarities that they nonetheless
prove the validity of the theory so despised by Parker and his contemporaries.
Each film in this vague triptych focuses on a psychologically damaged young man
who has been affected by war and its lingering influences. Through their
grappling with a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, the men each retreat
into a fantasy world of their own creation, where they invent and assume a new
identity that works to alleviate their pain and disillusionment.
The Wall, an adaptation of the titular 1979
double-album by Pink Floyd, deals with a rock star lost in an abyss of alcohol,
drugs, and creative burnout. Trapped in a hotel room between tours and becoming
increasingly disconnected from the world around him, he's haunted by memories
from the past: the death of his father during World War II, his overbearing
mother, the break-up of his marriage and the image of himself less as rock star
than a totalitarian dictator leading his fans into a culture war of violence
and extremism. It's a dark, terrifying work, that uses the mental illness of
the central character to create tortured, horrifying imagery, some created by
Parker and his collaborators, others using animations designed and directed by Gerald
Scarfe, the illustrator and designer of the original album cover.
Like the album, the film's depiction of women is
tinged with the abusive misogyny of the central character, while his later
slide towards dictatorship finds Parker and Scarfe playing with intentionally
fascistic iconography that they connect back to the cruelties of the UK
education system, as the character's self-hatred, on a subconscious level, is turned
outward, against marginalized communities.
Pink Floyd – The Wall [Alan Parker, 1982]:
The Wall is a visual tour-de-force and finds Parker
creating some of the most striking imagery ever seen in the British cinema.
However, more than merely providing a feature-length music video accompaniment to
the legendary rock album, the film also works as a self-contained narrative,
exploring themes of addiction, mental illness, and the still-lingering damage
of the Second World War on the post-war British psyche.
Themes of madness and war trauma continue on into
Birdy, an adaptation of a book by William Wharton. Here, a young man, coded
though never identified as autistic, takes his obsession with birds to a point
where he assumes the identity of one. His interest in flight speaks to the need
to escape or transcend his own limiting circumstances and later the devastating
experiences of war, and it is in the film's evocation of the character's
visions of imagined flight that Parker creates some truly arresting imagery.
With a soundtrack by Peter Gabriel and the use of a pioneering, pre-drone
"skycam", created by the inventor of the Steadicam, Garrett Brown,
the film creates a thrilling expression of the character's potentially
psychological flights of fancy.
Birdy [Alan Parker, 1984]:
Elevated by committed performances from Matthew Modine
and Nicolas Cage as the two friends trying to make sense of the world, both
before and after the War in Vietnam, it's unfortunately another film where
women barely get a look-in, used instead as props or sex-objects. Nonetheless,
Birdy remains a fascinating and creative film that explores wider themes of
friendship and survival.
Rounding off Parker's great run of films during the
decade is Angel Heart, possibly the director's best film for me, and one that
remains an absolute highlight of both the horror genre and the Southern Gothic.
Anchored by an excellent performance from Mickey Rourke as the laconic Private
Investigator Harry Angel, the bold imagery and narrative of twists and turns
mark the film out as both an engaging piece of storytelling and a hypnotic mood
piece. Hired to solve the mystery surrounding a music hall crooner from the 1940s
who vanished without a trace, Rourke's character moves from the cold,
blue-tinted streets of New York, to the ochre-hued and sweltering backwaters of
New Orleans, with Parker and his collaborators going to some incredibly dark
places in the presentation of violence and potential black magic.
Angel Heart [Alan Parker, 1987]:
Supported by spirited performances from Robert De
Niro, Lisa Bonet and Charlotte Rampling, Angel Heart remains a great work, and
is proof of the expert genre director Parker could've been had he not seem
himself as a filmmaker with pretentions to social and historical commentary. Of
the director's other works, I absolutely love The Commitments (1991), Parker's
adaptation of the book by Roddy Doyle, which is a much better film about
Ireland than Angela's Ashes, as well as remaining a genuinely authentic film
about the experience of being in a struggling band. I've also heard good things
about Parker's earlier 80s film, Shoot the Moon (1982), which is the only feature-length
film of the director's that I haven't currently seen.
I'd happily recommend each of these three films, as
well as the later The Commitments, to viewers looking to explore more of
Parker's work. Even if his perspective on the British film industry and his rejection
of lasting talents, such as the aforementioned Jarman and Greenaway, in favor
of championing forgotten failures, like Hugh Hudson or Roland Joffé, both of
whom crashed and burned in Hollywood alongside their mentor, the producer David
Puttnam, make it difficult for me to reconcile his legacy with anything
actually meaningful. Parker and his advertising cronies saw themselves as the
great white hope of the British film industry, emboldened by the success of
films like Parker's Midnight Express, Chariots of Fire (1981) and The Killing
Fields (1984), but outside of the Scott brothers, Ridley and Tony respectively,
the movement produced very little of actual artistic worth beyond the 1980s.
As an addendum to this, it's worth acknowledging that
it might seem disrespectful or in bad "form" to write negatively
about the work and legacy of an artist that has recently passed away, but I wonder
why this is a thing? For context, why is it acceptable to say the cruelest
things about a person's work and career when they're still alive and able to be
hurt by such criticisms (for example, see the critical discussions on George
Lucas, M. Night Shyamalan and the late Joel Schumacher, amongst others), but in
death, when such words can no longer hurt them, we're expected to play nice? It
makes no sense.
