Bigger Than Life as Twin Peaks Cinema #17 - Ray's Haunted Fifties (podcast)

The conclusion to my three-month "Ray's Haunted Fifties" season, Bigger Than Life may have encouraged more Twin Peaks comparisons than any other Nicholas Ray film (except perhaps last month's entry, Rebel Without a Cause - whose direct influences are more on the surfaces and whose indirect connections are more subtle). Like the title that kicked off this season, On Dangerous Ground, Bigger Than Life centers an angry, violent father, but in this case the father's wrath is directed at his family rather than on its behalf; or rather, he convinces himself that his patriarchal rage is meant for the benefit of his wife and son...even it costs them their lives. As a mild-mannered schoolteacher turned by addiction to Cortisone into a psychopathic abuser, James Mason's Ed Avery runs a similar gamut to Leland Palmer in Fire Walk With Me (or, for that matter, to Walter White in Breaking Bad, which also comes up in this discussion). Tackling one of the most common fifties motifs, familial domesticity in suburbia, Bigger Than Life offers an early subversion of its tropes in ways both obvious - Avery's controlling mania undercutting the idea that "father knows best" - and more subtle (there's even a cameo from the star of Leave It to Beaver himself in a bit of black comedy). The film's portrayal of the family's financial precarity and spiritual ennui, even before Avery goes mad, evokes a broader societal malaise behind his own personal drama.

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LINKS FOR EPISODE 17

Melodrama, Crime, Fantasy, and War: 17 Classic Capsules (LOST IN THE MOVIES podcast #45) - brief reflections on Ah, Wilderness!, A Letter to Three Wives, Invitation, Morning Glory, Parnell, Little Caesar, Dick Tracy, Nightmare Alley, Gilda, The Woman in White, It Came From Outer Space, Pinocchio, The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Enchanted Cottage, The White Cliffs of Dover, The Fallen Sparrow & The Angel Wore Red

This podcast season of "Hollywood Classics" reaches a crescendo as I pack over a dozen "capsules" from my Patreon into one episode. Some of these reflections run close to half the length of a normal review while others are just over a minute. As such, they range from tight but comprehensive overviews of a film to very quick riffs on a single element of an otherwise undiscussed movie. Topics include The Angel Wore Red's and The Fallen Sparrow's interpretations of the Spanish Civil War, Little Caesar's spot on the very cusp of the gangster genre, colorful side characters in The Woman in White, the way that everyday forties life is depicted in productions ranging from A Letter to Three Wives to an early version of Dick Tracy, the ability of Hollywood to capture current events alongside more escapist elements in films like The Enchanted Cottage, The White Cliffs of Dover's sympathies with British aristocracy from a down-to-earth American perspective, The Devil and Daniel Webster as a rare cinematic look at New Hampshire, and Pinocchio's proto-Disneyland quality (an idea I've also explored as a visual tribute). Stars like Katharine Hepburn (Morning Glory), Clark Gable (Parnell), and Rita Hayworth (Gilda, of course) appear throughout, and connections casual and arresting alike are made between several of these titles and Twin Peaks itself; for example, It Came From Outer Space anticipates the woodsmen of The Return in a similar location and situation. These topics are organized roughly along a snaking line of occasionally interconnected genres, including poignant melodramas like Invitation (in which a woman realizes her husband may not really love her) to noirish crime pictures like Nightmare Alley (in which a carnival mentalist rises to high society charlatan but risks falling to sideshow geek). Eventually a wide range of fantastical topics - sci-fi, fairy tales, supernatural allegories - bleed into meditations on the legacies of mid-twentieth century wars.

One of the longer discussions, which kicks off the episode, focuses on the many charms of Ah, Wilderness!, a 1935 adaptation of Eugene O'Neil's play set in a 1906 New England town. In addition to leading off from the last couple months of Lost in the Movies subjects - the similarly comic Swing Time and Monkey Business - this bemused but still sincere portrait allows for an obvious comparison to (and contrast with) Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Since I covered that less comedic, more ethereal tribute to small town Americana at the turn of the century in my Twin Peaks Cinema podcast (alongside other underbelly-of-the-pastoral tales Peyton Place and Kings Row), I was eager to tease out those connections as well as exploring how later decades remembered this earlier, ostensibly more innocent zeitgeist.

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tfw you glimpse where your son’s vaguely uplifting graduation speech is about to go pic.twitter.com/hHrLaflDW8

— Joel Bocko (@LostInTheMovies) August 20, 2019

THE LINE-UP

(added in the afternoon)

August 2022 Patreon round-up • LOST IN THE MOVIES patron podcast #94: The 80s in August... Desperately Seeking Susan & Top Gun (capsules on Stranger Things, Poltergeist, Beverly Hills Cop, Witness, The Breakfast Club, Wall Street, Twins, The Hunger, archive readings on Fast Times at Ridgemont High, E.T., Muppet Babies, An American Tail, Brave Little Toaster, The Secret of NIMH, The Last Unicorn + feedback/media/work updates including Captain America: Civil War & more) + 3 TWIN PEAKS Character Series advances

Listen to Episode 94: The 80s in August... Desperately Seeking Susan & Top Gun (capsules on Stranger Things, Poltergeist, Beverly Hills Cop, Witness, The Breakfast Club, Wall Street, Twins, The Hunger, archive reading of Fast Times at Ridgemont High + feedback/media/work updates including Captain America: Civil War & more)

& PUBLIC Episode 94 bonus - Opening the Archive: The 80s Imagination

I stumbled across a theme for this podcast, and by extension the next several months, only when I watched Top Gun about halfway through August. Then the idea kept getting reinforced by the outside world: what was playing in theaters, showing on TV, trending on social media, and even being given as gifts at a cousin's birthday party (a vinyl record player accompanied by an LP of the Top Gun soundtrack provided the score for that evening). Having bought a Top Gun blu-ray on a whim this past spring, I only found time to watch it after catching up with various other projects and was inspired to keep exploring eighties films as the month went along. I pulled some DVDs from my own collection and ordered others from Netflix; Top Gun itself was initially only meant to be a brief capsule discussion, so for my longer film in focus section I found (free on YouTube), watched, researched, and reviewed the wry, whimsical Desperately Seeking Susan. That choice may have been inspired by the Madonna-scored montage from the third season of Stranger Things which I also talk about on this podcast, finally catching up years after I watched the first episode. And as it turned out, there was so much to dig into with not just Top Gun but its production and tangential themes (the USSR as an implicit enemy, the totalizing eighties aesthetic) that the Tom Cruise action flick became my second film in focus for the month, the first time I've doubled up in years.

I didn't make it to 2022's Top Gun sequel on the big screen, as initially planned, nor was I able to finish watching the newer fourth season of Stranger Things by month's end - those capsules will have to wait till September. However, I did get to reflect - often for longer-than-usual capsules - on a couple first-time viewings (The Hunger and Witness) and return to some classics I'd already seen (Wall Street, Poltergeist, The Breakfast Club, Beverly Hills Cop, and Twins). Twins, I'm pretty sure, was the first live-action film I ever saw in a theater, as a five-year-old in 1988. It's kind of amazing to consider that my college rewatch in 2005 (when the seventeen-year-old movie and my childhood viewing of it seemed like ancient history) is in fact exactly halfway between the present and '88, a generation's length in either direction.

Speaking of generations, that favorite subject comes up not only in some of these capsules (particularly The Breakfast Club) but also the archive reading of my 2012 Fast Times at Ridgemont High review, and the 2022 reflection which follows now that another ten years has passed since I wrote that retrospective. (There were so many potential Opening the Archive picks this month that, in addition to an excerpt on the '84 Olympics in my main episode, I also published an entire bonus episode of readings: reviews of E.T., Brave Little Toaster, An American Tail, The Last Unicorn, and The Secrets of NIMH, plus an essay on meta cultural references in Muppet Babies and other cartoons.) The topic of generations appears first in my behind-the-scenes work update in the non-eighties part of the podcast, which also includes another Marvel capsule for Civil War.

Next month there will probably be more non-decade-themed capsules but also probably even more hailing from that particular decade. But which decade will that be? Should I move backward to the seventies, or forward to the nineties (and onto the zeroes and teens, catching up with many recent acclaimed and popular movies I missed in my lost decade of cinephilia)? I'm leaning toward the latter, but perhaps I'll make some room for at least a sample of the former as well.

As for other Patreon rewards, after falling behind in the mid-summer I was able to publish all three character advances for August well before the end of the month. These entries provided a particular challenge since a couple of them actually covered more than one character, entailing research into multiple actors...

EXCLUSIVE advance: TWIN PEAKS Character Series #77 - 75

(become a patron to discover their identities)

I already cross-posted the full conversation a week ago, but specifically on Patreon I published almost an hour of extra discussion with author Lindsay Hallam for the $5/month tier. The occasion that night was the thirtieth anniversary of Fire Walk With Me...

PATREON EXCLUSIVE: Part 2 of Twin Peaks Conversations w/ Lindsay Hallam

Podcast Line-Ups for...