Hi everybody! This isn’t my usual spot, but Mr. Sweeney’s out this week for very forgivable reasons. It’s not my story to tell, but let’s just say there’s about to be a slight uptick in the world’s population, and leave it at that. Since he didn’t want all y’all Morlockians to have to endure the indignities of a missing post, or a rerun, I’m filling in for the day.
And with the recent release of The Nice Guys, I’m in a bit of a Shane Black reverie. It cast my mind back to the 1997 action thriller The Long Kiss Goodnight and a certain scene that, to my mind, encapsulates everything you need to know about contemporary commercial Hollywood cinema. If you had a space alien, or some Rip Van Winkle type, who wondered “what’s the deal with movies these days?,” you could just fire up the DVD player, scan forward to this scene, and let ‘er rip:
We have Geena Davis as amnesiac spy Charlie Baltimore, an elite assassin who lost her memory following a botched attempt on her life, and who woke up believing her cover story of mild-mannered schoolteacher Samantha Cain. She’s hired low-rent private detective Mitch Hennessy (Samuel L. Jackson) to help her reconstruct her missing past, and now the two of them are trapped in a New Jersey train station under fire from anonymous bad guys. The adrenaline of the crisis helps awaken the Charlie part of Samantha’s psyche, and she quickly takes charge of the situation—until a grenade lands in front of her and Mitch. There are only seconds left, they are trapped in an upper floor hallway between a dead end on one side and a horde of machine-gun-toting killers on the other. Game over?
Charlie starts running towards the window with Mitch, furiously firing her hand gun to shatter the glass. The grenade explodes, and now they’re racing the shock wave of the explosion. As the fireball expands behind them, they leap through the window and start to plummet to the ground below—at which point Charlie starts firing her machine gun at the ice (previously established to be thin ice) so they land safely, if unhappily, in the icy lake. Singed and cold but otherwise unharmed, they emerge from the frozen water—but the receding crisis has taken Charlie’s memories with it, and Samantha is at a loss to what just happened. “I saved you,” Mitch deadpans, “It was great.”
This scene bears no discernible relationship to anything approaching the lived reality of its audience. Its ignorance of physics, ballistics, gravity, and basic human psychology is absolute. But, who cares? This is delirious fun—if you don’t enjoy watching this kind of absurd nonsense then you don’t enjoy life. It is a superbly well-crafted piece of crowd-pleasing entertainment in a film packed with such fist-pumping “hell yeah!” set pieces. In other words, deeply stupid and very smart at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Hollywood filmmaking courtesy Shane Black.
Several years ago some acquaintances of mine tried to launch the theory of ecrire, as a counterpoint to auteur theory. Ecrire posited that the most important creative voice in the making of any given film was the screenwriter, not the director. Their theory and their chosen pretentious term for it failed to catch on (and it isn’t hard to see why—just watch a selection of movies and their remakes to see how wildly different levels of quality can be teased by different directors from virtually identical scripts) but I do have a soft spot for the idea.
Shane Black is a great example of ecrire theory. This is a man who has left his fingerprints in one form or another on an astounding list of blockbuster hits: Predator, Lethal Weapon 1 and 2, The Last Boy Scout, The Last Action Hero, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Iron Man 3. His latest film, Nice Guys, is out now. Some of these films were very profitable, some were exceedingly popular, and some were both (see especially the Lethal Weapon films). The distinction between successful and popular is important—there are some movies that make a lot of money without ever being liked very much by anyone, and there are films that burrow into the memories of their fans and remain beloved cultural touchstones for generations but which never quite made their economics work. To do both means you leave a deep and lasting influence on the film industry—studios will bankroll more of what you’ve done, and will bankroll copycats, while the kids who see your films will someday grow up to make films inspired by your work.
Shane Black cracked that secret code, and made films that were both—but let’s be clear I am talking here broadly about his contributions as a screenwriter. Some of these films he also directed, but not all of them.
As a writer Black has several recognizable characteristics. The guy loves buddy cop films—and even if sometimes the characters aren’t cops per se, they function in that same narrative space. He also has a strong sense of humor—albeit a very vulgar humor at that. His works have a swaggering masculinity to them, bordering on misogyny, with female characters often treated as dehumanized sex objects, and the brunt of crude sexual jokes.
Which means that as fun and as funny as his scripts are, they also have an unavoidable ugliness to them. And this ugliness tends to be casual, incidental, peripheral–it’s not that he’s chosen to write about ugliness to make some kind of point, he’s just thoughtlessly including that ugliness in his depiction of the world.
I don’t mean this as a criticism of Shane Black—I mean, obviously it is, I can’t expect to say Black writes casual misogyny in a thoughtless way and not have it be taken as a criticism of the man. But it isn’t meant as a criticism of Shane Black individually—this is an endemic problem to modern Hollywood, and he is neither the first nor the most significant example of it. It’s like deciding you won’t watch any films by John Landis because you don’t like movies made in color. Yes, John Landis makes films in color, but gee, a lot of people do, why you pickin’ on him?
With Shane Black, the thing is he is a terrific screenwriter. He writes with wit and color and a masterful understanding of pacing and tone. I noted above that by virtue of being both commercially successful and popular, he has left a deep influence across the industry, and that means there a lot of Shane Black-wanna-bes whose half-baked also-ran scripts serve as points of comparison by which to appreciate what Black does so well.
So, case in point number one: the action scene I described above. It is full of action movie cliches—outrunning an explosion, for one. Somehow having time to react and perform some insanely precise set of actions in a fraction of a second (like shooting out the ice while you fall a couple of stories towards it). The off-the-cuff quip spoken right after the action subsides (“I saved you. It was awesome.”). These tricks are now the bread and butter of big action movies—but they generally lack the same charm that Black brought to them.
It’s a fine line between absurd implausibility and ridiculous impossibility—and since CGI has made it easy to put ridiculous impossibility on the screen, too many films these days opt for that route. But something like that machine-gun-addled plunge towards the ice as the fireball licks their heels is the right balance of memorable visuals, visceral thrills, and creative invention without totally sacrificing the audience’s investment in suspension of disbelief.
If you’re still not persuaded, let’s look at another scene from later in the film. Charlie/Samantha has been captured by the bad guy (David Morse) and is being tortured. She is tied to a water wheel, and is being periodically submerged in freezing water (again!) to coerce her to reveal what she knows. At the start of the scene, David Morse’s character says that a woman is most beautiful when she’s in pain—a creepy remark that implicates the audience in the sexualized violence to come. We’re on notice that if we find anything aesthetically pleasing in the following scene, we’re sadists like Morse.
Except then Black undercuts that—if Morse is hoping to see Charlie/Samantha in pain, he’s going to be denied. As we’ve learned by now, moments of stress help bring the suppressed Charlie Baltimore persona back from Samantha’s unconscious mind, and there’s little more stressful than being tortured by a man who has promised to kill you.
It’s here that Shane Black’s trademark vulgar humor comes into play. Just a few minutes earlier there had been a scene where Charlie’s mentor (Brian Cox) mentioned that he keeps a gun holstered in his crotch, because he knows other men are uncomfortable touching another man’s groin so enemy agents often miss this weapon during pat downs. In just a single line of dialogue, Black handed over some important exposition in a memorable way that established how Cox’s character might still have a gun on his person even after being killed by the baddies, and how Charlie would know exactly where to find that gun.
So, all Charlie needs to do is reach into her mentor’s pants and grab that gun, and exact her revenge on the super villain. Problem is, the process of reawakening her Charlie-ness used up most of her time underwater, so she needs to get dunked again. The scene has shifted its weight to where we know the hero wants the villain to keep torturing her—she actually needs to goad him into torturing her some more so she can have the chance to defeat him. Instead of watching her in pain, we watch her control the situation and win.
I’ve gotten pretty deep into this blog now talking about a movie with a female action hero without really commenting on that fact. There are very few female action heroes—Sigourney Weaver in the Alien films, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, Michelle Yeoh playing second fiddle to Jackie Chan and Pierce Brosnan respectively in Supercop and Tomorrow Never Dies… It’s a rarefied enough field that having Geena Davis play a proto-Jason Bourne in 1997 is real novelty.
And her presence helps temper the inherent misogyny of Black’s writing. Because, honestly, even though he has written a crackerjack female action hero script, it’s still a typically sexist Shane Black production. But Geena Davis changes that calculus.
I’ve always had a thing for Geena Davis. She has a charming off-kilter sense of humor that is of a piece with the kookiness of Jeff Goldblum or Michael Keaton, both of whom she co-starred alongside before. I found this distinctive, since so many other actresses were forced to equate “goofiness” with “airhead.” It was refreshing to have a comic actress who seemed smart and capable. On top of that, she has been a feminist activist—and an advocate for increasing female representation in movies and TV.
As it happened, however, Davis’ then-husband Renny Harlin was just as keen to establish her as a viable action star, and he cast her in two action movies produced in 1997. The Long Kiss Goodnight was a modest commercial success (it didn’t lose money, at least), fairly popular with audiences, and generally well received by critics. By itself it made a credible case for Davis as the next Bruce Willis, the next Arnold Swarzenegger. But, Harlin also cast her in Cutthroat Island. Unlike Long Kiss Goodnight, Cutthroat Island was a commercial flop, disliked by audiences, and savaged by critics (I haven’t seen it and am not commenting on its merits directly, merely how it was received at large). Its failure interrupted Davis’ ascendancy as an action movie heroine, and the mooted sequel to Long Kiss Goodnight remains unmade.
Too bad Harlin didn’t hire Shane Black to write Cutthroat Island.