Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/06/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, October 6, 2024

Someone's Watching Me! (John Carpenter, 1978)

Adrienne Barbeau and Lauren Hutton in Someone's Watching Me!

Cast: Lauren Hutton, David Birney, Adrienne Barbeau, Charles Cyphers, Grainger Hines, Len Lesser, John Mahon, James Murtaugh, George Skaff. Screenplay: John Carpenter. Cinematography: Robert B. Hauser. Art direction: Philip Barber. Film editing: Jerry Taylor. Music: Harry Sukman.

The hysterically titled Someone's Watching Me! (the working title was High Rise) was made for TV, and it's not up to John Carpenter's usual standards. But it's still a watchable thriller with a good performance by Lauren Hutton and some moments of genuine suspense. Hutton plays Leigh Michaels, a director of live television who comes to LA for a new job and takes an apartment in a newly built high rise that the leasing agent assures her has state-of-the-art computer-controlled amenities. She quickly makes a new friend in coworker Sophie (Adrienne Barbeau), who lets her know that she's a lesbian but that Leigh "isn't her type." She also lands a new boyfriend, Paul Winkless (David Birney), by hitting on him in a bar -- a spur-of-the-moment thing after she gets tired of being hit on herself. He's a philosophy professor at USC, of all things. But then creepy things start to happen to Leigh, and she realizes she's in some kind of danger. Sophie and Paul urge her to call the police, but when she does they say they can't help her until she's got better evidence that something truly criminal is going on. So everything is set up for a solid woman-in-jeopardy tale. The only thing that struck me as novel about the movie was that the introduction of a queer character in a strong second role was unusual for a major network like NBC as early as 1978. And then when we had a second scene in which Leigh shows her comfort with Sophie's sexual identity I realized what was going on: Sophie was being set up as the sacrificial character, the one who would fall victim to the harasser, thereby heightening Leigh's peril. The Kill-the-Queers trope loomed its tired old head again. Too bad, because otherwise Someone's Watching Me! smartly displays its debt to Rear Window (1954) and to Hitchcock in general, and Hutton is an attractive heroine (though she smokes too much).