After Hours

(1985) dir. Martin Scorsese
viewed: 07/06/02

After Hours was made to be a cult film, one would think.

I certainly adopted it as such as a teenager when I first saw it. I remember going to watch it in the theater and, liking it so much, I coerced some friends to watch it again. Even back in my teenage years, repeat viewing in a theater was a pretty rare thing for a film.

For me, it was an oddly pivotal film, as it initiated my very first interests in contemporary directors and got me thinking about films from an auteurial perspective, I guess you could say.

It is perhaps a little ironic that this film, which got me interested in Scorsese, in many ways is somewhat a-typical of Scorsese’s main body of work. It’s not altogether a-typical, in that Scorsese has been continually interested in genre film and has tried his hand at a number of genres: musicals (New York, New York (1977)), biblical epics (Last Temptation of Christ, The (1988)), period literary adaptations (The Age of Innocence (1993)), and his bread and butter, the modern “gangster” films, (Goodfellas (1990)).

So, somehow, this contemporary (it was contemporary in its day) comedy seems another stab at playing the genre fields as many of the more “classic” American auteurs were known to do, like Howard Hawks or Frank Capra.

Another of Scorsese’s trademarks is his employment of 20th Century music as ambient commentary, and the film does contain some great use of music, including Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum” and Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”

After Hours is a film about anxiety, a particularly urban anxiety, a fear of the nighttime denizen of New York City — circa 1985 — (Please see Whodini’s 1984 track “The Freaks Come Out at Night” — a more obvious version of this film would have certainly included this song as a constant refrain), which nowadays looks like a very dated vision of underground life. Griffin Dunne is Paul Hackett, a lonely “word processor” who finds himself lost in SoHo with not enough money to make it home again (an interestingly pre-ATM era predicament), confronted with a bizarre assortment of New York’s “after hours” crowd. It’s a paranoid and hysterical universe full of obsessive characters who would be outsiders in Hackett’s daily world of the office, but among whom, in their element, Dunne is the outsider.

The fears and paranoias are often sexualized. Hackett embodies a very straight heterosexual male perspective, a fear of anything that is other. Sexual images are portrayed almost as archetypes, and though the film does find its sympathies in his character, Hackett also reads as very unhip and middle-class. In a world that he perceives as filled with as cartoonish sexual “deviance”, his deviance is his own dullness.

His trip throught the city’s “after hours” subculture an absurdist nightmare, with a distinct nod to Kafka. It’s still a very funny film, if now also an artifact of the 80′s, informed very much by its then-contemporary period.

I watched this on cable in a pan-and-scan format, which I think detracted from it somewhat. As a result, it lost some of its cinematic style, which maybe even letterboxing would have brought back somewhat. It actually made me yearn to see it on the big screen again, the way that I originally encountered it and was intrigued by it.