Deconstructive Feedback: The Cinema of Larry Cohen

This piece originally appeared in Paracinema Magazine Issue #7, Sept. 2009.

In 2004, an album called “The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Uncovered” was released, a two-disc compilation of songs by the eponymous singer/songwriter. A number of prominent and popular musicians ranging from The Flaming Lips to The Eels were enlisted for disc one, an 18-track set of covers. The corresponding original recordings were on disc two. Now, Daniel Johnston himself is a bit of an anomaly — a true outsider artist, an awkwardly sweet and schizophrenic man who recorded songs at home in his parents’ basement until finding a more mainstream spotlight with the help of the Austin music community in the mid-80s. But his music often remained, to the public at large, inaccessible — poorly recorded and often-skeletal arrangements that showed if didn’t consistently deliver on great promise. “Discovered Uncovered,” with its assortment of reputable bands and artists, changed that perception. The genius of Johnston’s pop melodies, lyrics, and songwriting became clearer when put into the hands of already respected and established musicians recording in professional studios. Thanks to “Discovered Uncovered, as well as Jeff Feurezeig’s 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, many of Johnston’s early albums saw a vinyl re-release in 2007. It had taken two things for Johnston’s belated appreciation to come to fruition — re-interpretation and context. The film provided context, and the record a chance to view Johnston’s music not as it sounded, but as it was. Not necessarily fair requirements for a talent to be appreciated, but, in the eyes of a public increasingly dependent on the shiniest, slickest, most-produced product, perhaps necessary.

Director Larry Cohen faces a similar problem. His movies, produced on shoestring budgets and often shot in guerrilla style, usually bear many of the technical problems a modern audience doesn’t always have it in their heart to forgive. Slapdash editing and wildly-fluctuating sound quality break up the narratives in many Cohen films, distracting even as they add to the undeniable charm that any good do-it-yourself art carries. His stories — that of a resurrected Aztec dragon-god terrorizing New York (Q: The Winged Serpent, 1982) or of a delicious yet deadly dessert-treat taking over the world (The Stuff, 1985) have in them the sort of huge box office success that can only come from such original plots twisted onto familiar genres. Picture a big-budget rendition of Q helmed by Steven Spielberg in 1982 and you have in mind one of the most readily quoted blockbusters of the 80’s. Indeed, picture Black Caesar (1973) directed by Ridley Scott and you have American Gangster (2007). It is context then, not content, that keeps Cohen’s talents at bay. The fact that Phone Booth (dir. Joel Schumacher, 2002), a high-budget actioner with slick production quality, remains his most ubiquitous outing (he wrote the screenplay) is telling.

Sure, Cohen has an audience, but he is nonetheless relegated to “cult” status, something I would argue comes less from his outlandish stories and more from the production value which they are presented in. Being a cult director is certainly no great let-down, but the label also denies those graced with it the full analytical effort given to films of directors branded “art-house,” or even those labeled “big-budget.” The films of Michael Bay have probably engendered more critical analysis than those of Cohen, for example. While those who love fringe cinema may be the exception, for many casual moviegoers and even film scholars, “cult” takes on a pejorative meaning — the suggestion that it is a subcategory of films that are poorly made but find a small audience hunting either a general weirdness-factor or ironic “so-bad-it’s-good” humor. This point of view isn’t very helpful when it comes to a canon like Cohen’s, damning it with faint praise in the sense that all critical analysis about it becomes superficial. People observe the tacit fact that The Stuff is a metaphor for consumerism and don’t bother to delve any deeper. If we want to get to know any filmmaker, it’s always important to examine most, if not the entirety, of their body of work. Cult filmmakers are not always afforded this chance, but Larry Cohen is certainly one who deserves it.

“The Year is 1970. The most powerful nation on earth wages war against one of the poorest countries — which it finds impossible to defeat. And in this great and affluent nation exists its smallest richest city… And it is called Beverly Hills.” So begins Bone (1972), Cohen’s directorial debut, a scathing commentary on domestic race and class politics wherein Yaphet Kotto appears like a terrorizing ghost at a wealthy suburbanite household, boldly declaring “I’m just a big black buck doing what’s expected of him.” Bone opens with its protagonist, Bill (Andrew Duggan, a Cohen regular) recording a TV commercial for used cars. Bill struggles to keep his salesman’s face on as the cars he’s hawking begin filling with the bloodied dead who have presumably crashed driving his less-than-guaranteed vehicles. Thus Bone immediately establishes itself as a film predicated on the manifestations of guilt, albeit manifestations created from the minds of its characters. The plot is simple — Bone (Kotto) arrives at the mansion of Bill and Bernadette (Joyce Van Patten) and threatens to rape and kill Bernadette should Bill not bring him their savings from the bank. Bill leaves, and he and Bernadette both experience a sexual awakening — he with a young girl he meets in the city and she with Bone himself (of her own accord, as his initial threat proves to be more a front than anything). Eventually, Bill knowingly leaves Bernadette to die, while Bernadette and Bone conspire to kill Bill to collect his money. They do, and the film ends with Bernadette alone, pleading to the camera that she is innocent, but that she saw who did it — a black man. Minutes before this finale the trio rides on a bus full of old ladies. Refusing to disembark to his death, Bill proclaims that the two will have to “kill me right here, in front of witnesses,” only to turn and see the bus is now magically empty. Their disappearance echoes the sudden appearance of dead bodies in the film’s opening sequence, and more importantly, the sudden absence of Bone at the film’s conclusion. We are meant to understand that Bone has never really existed, that he is a manifestation of Bill and Bernadette’s decaying relationship, one critically divided over the fact that their son is being held prisoner in Vietnam; one more divided over the fact that Bill could’ve used his clout to help his son but didn’t. The fact that Bone is a black man “doing what’s expected of him” is only icing on the cake, a turn of the knife on complacent upper-class racism, but it is not the end all be all statement of the film.

Cohen is primarily a genre director, and great genre directors, as the “Cahiers du Cinema” writers pointed out in the 50’s, use the mold of a genre to imbue their own unique touch, whether it be social, political, or deeply personal. These auteurs, then, use the framework of a pre-established fantasy to inject themes that reflect reality. This is true for the majority of Cohen’s work, but Bone presents an inversion to the rule. In Bone the fantasy is not imposed by the author (Cohen), but by the characters themselves. Bill and Bernadette exist very much within reality, so much so that their collective conflict must make itself tangible in the form of the thing they both fear most. Bone has been labeled a blaxploitation film, but for all intents and purposes it is not. It is a straight-up drama crafted into a blaxploitation film by its characters’ wills. The sociopolitical message Cohen wishes to impart is not told through the lens of a preexistent genre mold, but rather the genre mold is self-imposed by the characters to deal with their sociopolitical problems. Fantasy is necessary to deal with reality in all genre films, as semantic elements of the genre become metonymic for real-world issues (the classic “knife is a phallus” argument for the slasher film is a good example), but Bone deconstructs this notion, placing its symbolism in the hands of its characters rather than its creator. Cohen sucks you into a blaxploitation drama, then abruptly breaks the fourth wall and removes genre from the equation with the ending. Quite a ballsy move for a first movie.

In his career, Cohen has worked through nearly every genre of film, embracing certain characteristics but rarely fully committing himself to its tenets. In Black Caesar (1973), for example, Cohen took on the blaxploitation film, one released in between two more stringently genre-defining works, Superfly (Gordon Parks, Jr., 1972) and Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973). With Black Caesar, Larry Cohen helped make Fred Williamson a blaxploitation star, but made an interesting choice with his style. Black Caesar is set in the 70’s, but it borrows far more heavily from the gangster films of the 30’s than it does from the then still-burgeoning blaxploitation movement. Cohen’s creation is blaxploitation in the sense that his characters are black, sure, but the story is straight depression-era. The title is a dead giveaway, a reference to the 1931 Edward G. Robinson classic Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy), which tells the iconic and often-repeated story of a gangster rising from the slums to become boss of his city, only to fall from grace at the hands of his own ambition. Black Caesar, if anything, takes this 30’s genre and encodes it with the sensibilities of the blaxploitation movement. That is to say, Cohen injects the rather predictable gangster tale with the racial politics inherent from the era. It is easy to feel sympathy for Tommy Gibbs when he’s chased down by racist cops in the film’s intro, called a slur, and beat up. Striking back at the white cops in charge, Cohen allows Gibbs not only to fuel the American wish-fulfillment fantasy of rags-to-riches, but indict a racist hierarchy which keeps young black men with no visible option but (punishable) crime, crime that helps maintain a cultural fear that reelects corrupt white officials who thieve on a much larger scale. The ending of Black Caesar is curt. When it comes time for Tommy’s fall, it is not at the hands of rival gangsters, but at the hands of a Los Olvidados (Luis Bunuel, 1950) style gang of children living in the worn-down projects Tommy Gibbs once escaped. The product of his lifestyle is a new generation of wannabe gangsters, who unknowingly aid the white police in killing him after he wanders there following a failed assassination. Thus Larry Cohen subverts both genres he has been using — by copying the framework of a 30’s gangster film he has deprived the blaxploitation film of its masculine hero, leaving behind its women as its only moral characters. Black Caesar’s place then, between the fantasy happy ending of Superfly and the feminist superhero Pam Grier plays in Coffy, leaves its legacy as a genre-changing, not genre-defining work.

The sequel to Black Caesar, Hell up in Harlem (1973) resurrects Tommy Gibbs, but does something far more drastic to the genre. We can think of genre in a sense borrowed from film theorist Rick Altman’s 1984 essay “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” — a collection of elements, some semantic (those contained in the mise-en-scene such as locations, characters, and music), some syntactic (the basic plot construction of the film as a whole). Making a full transmutation, Hell up in Harlem is a straightforward blaxploitation flick, carrying none of the syntactic trappings of the 30’s gangster picture but instead fully focused on the semantic elements of the black 70’s action film. What Hell up in Harlem does, however, is to break down that genre to its bare essentials. Much as Jean Luc-Godard broke down Hollywood genres into what he perceived made them work in the first place, such as in his gangster movie Breathless (1960), Cohen breaks the blaxploitation film down and as such, deconstructs it. Hell up in Harlem was shot simultaneously with It’s Alive (1973), filmed on weekends while the latter was shot Monday through Friday. It was also shot while Fred Williamson was working on That Man Bolt (Henry Levin & David Lowell Rich, 1973). The result is a disjointed and freewheeling film, devoid of much of a coherent syntactic structure but instead filled with an unending series of vignettes designed to evoke only the semantic elements of the genre — something akin to a 90 minute trailer. On the commentary track to Hell up in Harlem Cohen points out an editor who he remarks probably hasn’t kept the film on his resume, adding “but I’m never ashamed.” Nor should he be — despite Hell up in Harlem’s reputation as a bad film, it is nonetheless captivating. Due to a rushed production and Cohen’s guerilla technique, the film takes on the sort of kaleidoscopic view of blaxploitation so expertly conceived in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971) — it just does it by accident. Nonetheless, replace Cohen’s name in the director’s credit with that of Godard, and dub the movie in French, and the DVD release changes from MGM’s “Soul Cinema” collection to a Criterion. It is context, not content, that gives the film a bad reputation. The use of extreme close-ups that blur the image, animated special effects, and rapidly cutting music may have been done out of budget necessity, but that doesn’t change the impact they have on narrative. And just look at the marquis Tommy walks by while in New York — a theatre showing Hammer (Bruce D. Clark, 1972), Fred Williamson’s blaxploitation debut. Cohen knows and appreciates what genre he is working with, and has commented on it and broken it down from inside the narrative. This is in stark contrast to Bone’s character-imposed genre. What’s more, Hell up in Harlem grants us the happy ending of Tommy Gibbs and his son caught in freeze-frame, trapped happily in their slice of cinematic fantasy. When genre is imposed on the film, the characters survive and form an unlikely nuclear family. When genre is imposed from within, such as in Bone, it divides and conquers the family, leaving only broken people wondering what happened.

All throughout his career Cohen has performed this deconstruction of syntax, usually through the manipulation of semantic elements. Working with the monster film in It’s Alive, Cohen gleefully makes the creature a baby, carrying through on his ridiculous premise with remarkable seriousness. It’s Alive follows the Cohen mold, then — it manipulates a genre by pushing its semantic elements onto another genre’s syntax, causing its characters to undergo a severe, politically symbolic (here it’s pollution) transformation, and leaves them ready to continue existing, however changed from the norm they are. The fantasies of his genres have no closed-economy — they must, as real political events do, forever shape the players in the story. It’s Alive ends with a broken family, as Frank Davies (John P. Ryan) must shoot his baby dead, but It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987) ends with a happy family of father, mother, and mutant-baby on the run. The difference? The first film in the series operates as a drama grafted onto a monster movie, and thus allows no family to exist in the end. By the time the third film rolls around, however, the It’s Alive model has been set — the franchise has become its own subgenre, and thus its elements taken for granted. Much like Hell up in Harlem and Black Caesar, the first film in the series places the semantic elements of one genre onto the syntactic mold of another (blaxploitation onto 30’s gangster film), but the sequels have free reign to break out and throw all caution to the wind.

It’s important to note that this change takes place largely by the decade in which Cohen is shooting his movies — while the two Fred Williamson movies provide a good framework with which to analyze Cohen’s two approaches to genre, this example is anomalous in his body of work. It’s Alive III was shot in the late 80’s, and it was in this decade that Cohen was far readier to leave his characters in freakish, changed families rather than as disillusioned or dead individuals. His other two significant 70’s works, Gold Told Me To (1976) and The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), leave no family to carry on, and indeed portray their antagonists and enemies of the nuclear familial home. God Told Me To is a true mishmash of genre elements, all set within the syntax of a cop drama. When Detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) confronts the deity-like apparition/entity at the film’s climax, it gives him the opportunity to bear his child, but he denies it due to his religious affectations, and destroys what turns out to be a girl. Thus the symbolic villain of the movie (religious fanaticism) destroys what Cohen holds up to be the most important thing — the family. In J. Edgar Hoover, the title character himself is the villain, a man who can have no family of his own for his own aversion and hatred of intimacy, and thus destroys every potential couple which he can (this film is particularly interesting in the Cohen canon as it works very consistently as a political thriller, and even more interesting in that it grants Hoover one final exemption from his villainous status in crediting him for the downfall of Nixon). It makes sense that Cohen is more nihilistic in his 70’s ventures as they are heavily influenced by the war in Vietnam. The change in his work in the 80’s demonstrates more of a desire to poke fun at yuppie culture and consumerism under the Reagan era.

Cohen makes a decision with his genres — if they are set, as in the case of Hell up in Harlem and It’s Alive III, they are taken as pre-established and thus broken, leaving the family intact. If they are possibly the delusion of a character’s mind (Bone, God Told Me To), the family must be consumed and destroyed by the rules of the genre. Black Caesar and Q don’t allow a family to survive either, since their genres are experimental marriages of disparate types (Q grafts the semantic elements of the large monster movie onto the syntax of a crime thriller). Once genre is established in full, however, the characters continue existing in it after the credits run. Full Moon High (1981) can be seen as a sort of turning point in Larry Cohen’s approach to this. It grafts the werewolf movie onto the teen comedy (four years before Teen Wolf (Rod Daniel), I might add), but, as it also employs a Zucker-like spoof style, it has free reign to not adhere to the rules of previous Cohen outings. Radically jumping 20 years ahead in the narrative mid-movie, the film pays no attention to the rules of either genre — but then again, why should it? It’s a spoof movie. Full Moon High ends with two things very important to Cohen’s work — first, a character breaking the fourth wall to address the audience after the film is over. This happens subtly in God Told Me To, but is performed as a joke in Full Moon High and Wicked Stepmother, and demonstrates Cohen’s desire to break down the conventions of the film format and address his stories as fake. Second, Full Moon High concludes with its protagonist (Adam Arkin) turning a female teacher into a werewolf mate, finally freeze framing on a final family portrait of the two and their four werewolf children smiling happily. In Special Effects, Cohen’s deconstruction of the erotic thriller, the happy trio of a man, his child, and a lookalike to his dead wife who has chosen to “play” her forever depart on a plane. In Wicked Stepmother, a family is left intact after surviving a dual-pronged witch-attack in a way reminiscent of Poltergeist (Steven Spielberg, 1982).

If Cohen values the family then in his more genre-specific outings this does not mean he leaves said genres unattacked. Special Effects is maybe his most interesting movie in this regard, a film which seeks to continually detach itself from its own reality. Beginning as a Larry Cohen film, the film depicts Andrea Wilcox (Zoė Lund) as a young woman trying to make it as an actress in New York. When she becomes the unwilling star of a snuff film directed by Chris Neville (Eric Bogosian), an intertitle interrupts to read “Andrea: A Chris Neville Film.” Later in the film, to provide dramatic tension, another intertitle tells us the scene list for Chris’ film, which will change in the following minutes. After Chris dies and the film is taken over by an opportunistic cop, we are granted the final credit “A Phillip Delroy Film”. Special Effects is extremely adherent to the genre it is pre-rooted in, instead choosing to experiment with the concept of authorship and veracity in film. This is Cohen’s most telling cinematic deconstruction — a film that doesn’t necessarily encourage the viewer to interpret that anything has happened, and thus leaves everything to the viewer’s discretion. It is the true opposite of Bone — genre imposed by viewer instead of genre imposed by character. It comes as no surprise that when Cohen was approached to make a film for the Showtime series “Masters of Horror” that his Pick Me Up was a deconstruction of the slasher. Two serial killers both quest to kill Fairuza Balk, only to both end up prey of murderous ambulance drivers. Pick Me Up, furthermore, contains a reference to Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), one of three references to the genre-bending thriller I noticed in Cohen’s work. There is also one in Full Moon High and in Wicked Stepmother. Wicked Stepmother goes a step further in referencing past films — when Bette Davis first appears she is seen by the female protagonist as both Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger. Later, the image of Bette Davis alongside Marilyn Monroe, Fred Astaire, and Humphrey Bogart on the side of a building is used as an aside suggestion that our titular villain has been around for ages. This makes no sense within the scope of the film’s story, but is a perfectly reasonable gesture for Cohen, a man who is always willing to undercut his film’s genre tension with a tongue-in-cheek reference to his story’s nonexistence.

Larry Cohen is justly thought of as a guerrilla filmmaker who took genre films and imbued them with a political subtext. Sometimes that subtext is almost distractingly apparent (The Stuff), and sometimes the subtext is brilliantly subtle (a moment in Perfect Strangers (1984) wherein a white feminist is asked by a gay cop to finger a suspect, and picks a black man she knows is innocent). He, like Spielberg, holds up the American family to be the centerpiece of his narratives — although whereas Spielberg exposes his families to horrors of the outside world and emerges them stronger, Cohen makes the braver choice of making them more horrific too. His no-budget style has firmly assured him a place in the annals of fringe cinema history, but I would like to suggest that Cohen be seen as more than a cult director. His films, when put in their proper context and when held in appreciation to one another, suggest a director who not only tells original, fun stories, but imbeds them in a syntax of smart and wily genre-deconstruction; creating a sort of marriage between classic Hollywood genres and his own goofy sense of New Wave styling. It may not always be done on purpose (as in Hell up in Harlem), but his overall canon is testament enough to his goals, granting him the evidence enough to be appreciated not simply as a great genre filmmaker, but as one of the Great American Directors.