Pinholes in the Curtain of Night: “Highlander” @ 30
Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander, the beloved nerd touchstone that turned 30 last week, is the kind of movie you’ll know your opinion on within the first minute of it starting. In that first minute, the following happens: the Cannon Films logo appears, stamping the film with a very specific seal of quality; Sean Connery, voice dripping with reverb, delivers some prime dungeon master opening narration; Queen starts levelling stadia left and right as “Princes of the Universe” plays over the credits; and the first proper scene of the movie opens with a six-man tag-team wrestling match featuring the Fabulous Freebirds, complete with Michael “P.S.” Hayes crotch gyration. Lest you think the movie is front-loaded with dorkiness, just know that we haven’t even gotten to the part where a motley crew of demigods try to behead each other with antique swords. But this dorkiness is not to be gawked at, but treasured as an example of earnest silliness, the kind that can’t be replicated in the era of irony.
The late, great Italian semiotician Umberto Eco theorized that in order for a film to reach cult status, it had to be both insular and disjointed; the universe presented had to be deep enough for a fan to immerse themselves in but rickety enough to exist as a series of “the part wheres” devoid of context. In that respect, Highlander might be the cult film par excellence. It works as a series of sequences that are ostensibly related, yet feel spackled together due to the scope its narrative tries to achieve. This is, after all, a tale that spans centuries and nations, propped up with little else but clever cutting and a protracted internal mythos: 16th century Scotsman Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) conquers death and over time discovers that he is one of the Immortals, a race of mystic warriors destined to decapitate each other and consume the life essence of their foes until there is, you guessed it, only one left. He gets exiled from his village for being a presumed minion of Lucifer himself, starts a new life on a farm, and meets his mentor and fellow Immortal Sean Connery. Fast forward 400 years or so, and MacLeod lives under an assumed name as antiques dealer in New York just as every remaining Immortal converges to the city in an event known as the Gathering. This feels like a lot, but the story here is the structural equivalent of empty calories. Highlander is dense rather than deep, stuffed with information instead of detail. It’s not so much a story as it is one screenwriter’s attempt at a mythological origins text set in two distinct eras.
Narrative fluidity is not the film’s strong suit. At best, its attempt at melding romance, high fantasy, and police procedurals is terminally interesting. But what it lacks in cohesion is made up for in sheer style. Mulcahy, an Australian director best known for his music video work with Duran Duran and Elton John, slathers the frame every chance he gets with generous helpings of smoke clouds, tons of mirrors and reflective surfaces, and giant shafts of light. It’s actually not wholly unlike his music video for Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”: a series of open sets, Dutch angles, moody lighting, florid cuts, and opulent textures. There are even the same kind of oddly surreal non-sequiturs; instead of having fencers and dancers show up unprompted, we get Lambert and Connery exuberantly running on a beach together. Or Lambert, decked out in Barry Lyndon finery, stumbling about piss drunk and getting stabbed over and over again during a duel. Or fellow Immortal Clancy Brown straight-up wrecking a castle wall with punches like Jonathan Winters in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World before he turns the fight he’s having with Connery into a Boris Vallejo painting.
And like in “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” there is no winking in the material. As ludicrous as the imagery can get, as much as Lambert’s accent slips and/or disintegrates, it is utterly devoid of irony. It’s a relic in this way; there is a purity of execution on display that embraces the cracks in the facade rather than trying to camouflage them. Mulcahy’s visual maximalism has the effect giving Highlander a unique tonal coherence rather than a narrative one. It is a pure phantasmagorical experience, bathed in deep blue lights and long shadows, culminating in a final sequence in giant vacated warehouse that might as well have been used for the video for “The Wild Boys.” There is a gleeful boisterousness on display that recalls other legitimately great faux-mythological 80s cartoon fare like Flash Gordon (also scored by Queen, natch) and fellow Cannon release Hercules (which stars Lou Ferrigno as the Champion of Men), jaw-dropping in both their lunacy and their commitment to the material. And like those movies, Highlander’s specific tone — campy but committed, rickety but gorgeous — can be approximated in the age of the faux-mage, but can never truly be replicated.
