BOOGIE NIGHTS
WenQing
Written and Directed by : Paul Thomas Anderson
Produced by : New Line Cinemas
Main Cast : Mark Walhberg (Eddie Adams/ Dirk Diggler), Burt Reynolds (Jack Horner), Julianne Moore (Amber Waves), Don Cheadle (Buck), William H. Macy (Little Bill), and countless others
Duration : 170 min approx
Rating : ***1/2
This Review Filed: 21 August, 1998.FEAR THE FUTURE
BOOGIE NIGHTS is too much of an event to really describe everything in a single review. But I think if anything, BOOGIE NIGHTS is an excellently crafted movie with wonderful production sense and beautiful pacing. The only drawback is that it's a movie about as distasteful and as off-putting a subject matter as they get. BOOGIE NIGHTS is about the porno-film industry in the late 1970s and some of its members breaking into the 1980s. It's outrageous in its display of nudity and its incessant vulgarity, but at the same time, it's such a powerful movie of vision and themes that it's infinitely watchable for those who are not squeamish and ready to run at the sign of bared bodies, love-making and mouths so foul they have to be quarantined and disinfected... or maybe napalmed.BOOGIE NIGHTS revolves around numerous themes, one of its core ideas is the fear of the future. Eddie Adams is spotted by Jack Horner in a nightclub and is wooed into the porno-film industry by poolside parties and a blowjob from Rollergirl (she never takes off her rollerskates). And like Rollergirl, the film is always on the move. It's so
relentless that you feel the movie has so much a life of its own, and it's so vicious in dragging you along with its vision of the action that you know without being able to control it, that the film is going to take you where it wants, how it wants, and it's going to make you see its vision no matter what. I think what I saw, with the film spanning 7 years between 1977-1984, is that the future is something we think we're ready for, believe we can handle, but so different in such diverse ways that it turns on all our plans and leaves us wrecked.
The porno-film industry experiences a miraculous boom in the late 70s. Dirk Diggler wins awards for best actor in the Adult Film Awards ceremonies (it's hilarious, with Mark Wahlberg always posturing the jeet kun do poses of Bruce Lee, his great hero). But along comes the 1980s, and these characters don't know it yet, but change is upon them, and will not let them get by without transforming them. Don Cheadle's Buck is always trying a new look. He's backdated with the cowboy look in the disco 70s, and in the 80s, he's refused a loan to fulfill his dream of opening an audio store because his resume reveals he was a "pornographer."
Julianne Moore also delivers a poignant performance of the every-mother figure twisted into contortions by pornography and tons of snorted cocaine. Estranged from her family, she dumps her real name ("Maggie") for Amber Waves, and when her son finally calls her at Jack Horner's house during a party looking for Maggie... no one knows who he's looking for and the phone is hung up. Amber Waves is described by Jack Horner as the mother of all those who need to be loved, and its a double edged sword about the future. She needs to love someone to feel loved, and the future and change comes so hard and fast it leaves her bereft of both. She tries to mother Dirk Diggler who turns her away at first and then goes back to her, in a wistful foetal position, weeping and frightened of the future. Rollergirl and she snort truckloads of coke and end up calling each other mother and daughter. It's a delirious and perverted mismatching of loves and feelings, trying to grapple with the ensuing future that they can't even conceive is upon them.
Dirk Diggler is no different. He's shut out of the porno industry after an argument with Jack Horner. He's so high on cocaine that he can't get himself erect enough for shots, and needs to stimulate himself (in thoroughly explicit and distasteful scenes) before can he shoot the films. He goes from money-making scam to money-making scam and fails so horribly that the whole movement of the characters into the 1980s becomes a sad downward spiral into an age they cannot fathom.
Jack Horner is told that the future of porn is video-tape with amateurs not stars, and though he initially resists, he ends up on video-tape himself, trying to make (as he says) : "film history... on video".
Here are the days of their lives. People come full circle with their work and the meaning they invest in their existence. They're so much at the end of their lines that for the bleak part in the movie (with a pounding and sinister base and some of the most excellent editing I've seen in transposing scenes since THE GRADUATE : one group of gay bashers is beating up Dirk Diggler in one scene, and when they crowd over him and pull away, the scene reveals another young man being hammered by Jack Horner for insulting Horner's porno films). As all these characters meet with misfortune and sad events, the whole movie goes into a montage of scenes shot only at night, before a final surfacing into the daylight to conclude the film.
When Amber Waves shoots a documentary about Dirk Diggler, he says of the 1980s, that he doesn't fear the future. But whether he fears it or not doesn't matter. It will consume him and his euphoria all the same, and twist him into grotesque shapes he cannot even think of. From his wide-eyed dreamy look, Wahlberg goes to drugged-out and finally to deluded but mature expression. He does what's necessary to get the point across... even though BOOGIE NIGHTS doesn't end unhappily, with nearly all its characters returning to the porno industry where they first felt safe... somehow we see them trying to draw another circle that resembles the one they made in the 1970s. The inevitability of the future and how it consigns people to seek comfort in familiarity is masked so effectively by the buoyant ending (with a Prodigal Son allusion thrown in for good measure when Dirk returns to Horner for help), that it impresses how much we're defined by our times and our choices. It also impresses how we delude ourselves with our own visions of grandeur, as Dirk tries to rock and roll by declaring porno movies will become real films with meaning and stature, and visualises his name in neon lights "so sharp and powerful the sign has to explode!".
Sometimes blindness to the fear of the future is all people have, and it's as good as they can get. "When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of the neon light/ Split the Night..." -Simon and Garfunkel "The Sound of Silence"
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