clue 1985, and the banality of films
the other day i watched the amazing 1985 film based off the eponymous board game: clue! and god let me just get it out of the way: this movie isn't very good. i think it is aware that it isn't very good. the humor lands and then it doesn't. the acting and slapstick choreography is filmed bizarrely and the film seems to forget about it every few minutes. the set design and costumes are… honestly pretty good. no complaints there. it's all very 'camp', as some might say.
the next few paragraphs are going to contain spoilers, if you particularly care about spoilers for clue, from the year 1985, for whatever reason. for the record, it doesn't really matter. if you don't already know this movie has 3 different endings. most online listings of the movie scaffold these endings into one long sequence.
so: i was not prepared for how theatrical this movie felt? which maybe is my own problem, we'll get to that, but the acting and script and situations are sooo profoundly hammy and over the top and it was a really pleasant surprise. as was finding out how much of the cast was composed of successful actors that i'd heard the names of before. unlike my mother i'm really bad at recognising famous people in movies. when i realised the butler was tim curry i literally sat up in my bed and went "no way."
the main reason this film was under my radar was due to having an art school assignment centered around film genre research. more specifically i had to look into “slapstick” as a genre and deconstruct it. it’s an interesting topic, but not enough to delve into here. at least not after wringing my hand writing about it for uni already. instead i want to talk about my personal critical thoughts on the movie!
ive been pitching this movie as “kind of shit” to anyone who’ll listen to me talk about it, and the main reason i do is honestly because it has some amazingly bad writing ‘quirks’ that entertain me a lot but are objectively… sloppy? sometimes offensive? for example the treatment of women in this film is kind of trashy and very of its time. most notably you have yvette, the sexy french maid who speaks in a fake accent the whole movie and is victimised for partaking in sex work by multiple characters, then ms scarlet who runs a prostitution ring and is characterised as a vile femme fatale mastermind in one ending, mrs peacock who’s kind of just a hysterical old lady, then mrs white who… is actually my favorite, being a five-time widow who murdered all her husbands. she feels like a nice inversion of the typical ‘dead wife manpain’ archetype. i get the same enjoyment from her that i get from the typical kurt vonnegut ‘morose wife’ kind of character.
the men? i barely remember them save for wadsworth who is extremely charming. they tried to give colonel mustard this bit of not understanding double negatives but it’s just not very funny… and though it may be ‘problematic’ (or more accurately, nonsense) i think the one twist with mr green going home to fuck his wife after lying about being gay is pretty fucking funny if only because of the way the actor delivers the reveal.
what else did i like? i thought the bit at the end with the cops swarming in like bees in while heroic music blares was really funny. did not expect to be so stressed out by all the times a stranger walked up to the mansion about to discover a dead body. just the base concept of a movie having multiple endings is really spectacular and dare i say made even better with the combined cut that pieces them together in a very stupid arbitrary way. HOWEVER that also causes a major narrative problem where characters don’t really get to have coherent backstories or development, since the film relies wholly on a twist ending. or three of them, i guess. and honestly i think this flatness is very well-executed and feels right as an anthropomorphisation of a board game that does… indeed… hand off flat character archetypes for players to embody. though of course this is also just the result of a capitalistic endeavour to transplant a franchise to the big screen. who knows how much of that philosophy was intentional! but i do like thinking about it.
END OF SPOILERS!
now let’s talk about broader implications.
anyone who knows me knows that there is little i hate more than having to sit down and watch a movie. it’s just not an engaging art form to me. it feels too subjective in a way that isn’t fun, and it’s so thoroughly visual which also feels like the easiest of five senses to work with. not to mention the permrnant feeling of wasting time whilst filmgoing, because these things require your full attention and engagement with the imaginary. and more broadly… you can’t occupy your hands with anything else. and yes, it’s because i have adhd, and yes, it is also because i am a strange snob.
a huge thing that scares me, somewhat, about filmmaking is the sacrifice of artistic vision to a collage of different specialists that may or may not be on the same page as you. it’s like the hypothetical discrepancies people suggest about color sight — do you see the same red that i do? and obviously the counter to this is ‘everyone who works on a movie brings their own vision to the project, that’s part of the appeal’ but it also means the majority of films are generic and mood-based and only interested in pathos, as the most universal human experience, alongside things like ‘making sense’. part of why i love mediums like writing (especially independent self-published works) is because it is quite literally the raw unfiltered hand of a creator being pressed against your brain, patting you like a dog. there’s always distortion between mind and body… but at least it’s connected by the same brain when it’s one auteur. the potential of loss in translation is lessened… and at least it’s not an error in interpersonal communication. which is just the worst!
to summarise, in the brave words of that one tumblr post: movies are amazing, a bunch of people gather to make something that ends up not very good.
so why do i like clue? because it feels like a shitty auteur film, in terms of direction and mood, but ALSO it has a very improv-esque spirit of the actors having fun and exaggerating their own directions to create something unique. a lot of clue’s failures that i mentioned before are things i actually find hilarious — and of course, memorable. and there is nothing worse than being forgettable. clue passes the check!
the last movie i watched prior to clue was rubber 2010. its an insane auteur film about a sentient tire that explodes people into meat and finds a naked woman sexy, with some twin peaks-y style humor and commentary on metanarratives. it’s ‘trashy’ in my mind the same way clue is, not necessarily due to specific elements as much as a general ‘vibe’ of earnest insanity. perhaps i’ll talk about rubber in depth some other time, but i think it’s landed us with a pretty good thesis…
that being: it’s great when movies embrace inconsistency, bewilderment and inhuman logic that can only come from the natural mismatch of abstract ideas. it’s amazing when multiple minds come together to contradict themselves and look insane.
this was going to be longer and more poetic but honestly this is kind of just it. i like it when movies are… um, bad. because it keeps my attention up far better than when a movie is actually serviceable.