Tuesday, June 08, 2021

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

After Hours (1985)

Paul: Greg called.
Marcy: Oh, how'd that little faggot find out I was
staying here tonight? He probably wants to
whine to me about his latest boyfriend.
Paul: Friends like that are hard
to deal with sometimes.  
Marcy: Well, that's what friends are for!

First things first After Hours might be my favorite Scorsese movie, so I don't want you to mistake my complicated feelings here towards the movie's use of the F-slur as this being me throwing a Cancel Party or anything. (You know us Liberals, always throwing Cancel Parties!) I think the character of Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) calling her off-screen friend a "faggot" is definitely meant by the movie to make us not like her, for a second anyway -- Paul (Griffin Dunne, who's celebrating a birthday today, hence why we're here talking After Hours) winces at her use of the word and at this point the movie still wants us to be on Paul's side. 

That said I actually think the further we fall down the rabbit hole with Paul the less the movie is on Paul's side, or at least that's how I personally ride the movie's tidal waves of shifting sympathies -- I think by the end of After Hours Scorsese has fully deconstructed and tossed out the window like so much soggy plaster the myth of self-interested masculinity that Paul represents; he reveals himself to be a real shit, and even if nobody has a night like he gets coming to him... well, he kinda does, as well. Anyway it's complicated, and that's what I like about it -- that's what movies are for!

3 comments:

--->PAul said...

OMG, one of my favorite movies! Now I don't know whether to listen to The Monkees or Peggy Lee.

bdog said...

Saw this at The Paris when I was in high school I think, and loved it. BUT the subway fare scene was stupid, he should have just not had enough money for the actual fare. I miss Teri Garr.

bdog said...

By actual fare I meant the fare at the time, not the fake fare in the movie.