Welcome to Day 19 of The Kasturi/Files at Speculative Chic! Gemma Files and Sandra Kasturi throw down about horror movies all October. And we give some cocktail and book recommendations and argue about existential angst and which movie to talk about next, and whether bonnets will be in season in the spring. You know, important matters.
Gemma: Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987), is a film noir with something very different lurking inside of it — a classic private investigation case that leads (SPOILERS) pretty much straight to hell. Much like Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) in Candyman, Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) makes a journey into endless night that begins with a lie and leads to horrifying self-discovery. And much like Candyman, Angel Heart is a burnished, glorious piece of filmmaking in which every detail counts, every cut and shot commenting on every other cut and shot, with Parker stretching the boundaries of the medium to simultaneously misdirect us and give us as much information as is humanly possible to absorb. It’s grotesque, sexy, fatalistic, funny, despairing. It persuades us of the soul’s possibility, then gut-punches us with damnation as fait accompli, caging us in an elevator headed down ad inferno. YouTube aside, in other words, it’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to an onscreen Barry Adamson/Nick Cave duet.
Sandra: I would buy that album! Kind of in the spirit of “Booth and the Bad Angel” which had Angelo Badalamenti teaming up with Tim Booth (of Brit alt-rock band James) for a collaborative record. But as always, I digress. Angel Heart was such a controversial movie when it came out. It created an absolute furor of discussion because of, gawd, so many things — it basically broke every taboo in existence and got everyone worked up. Much like Basic Instinct would do a few years, except of course Angel Heart is a much, much better and smarter film, and about real ideas, regardless of what your views on the depiction of violence (especially toward women) onscreen may be. As well as spoiler alerts, we might want to offer a few trigger warnings too, if you decide to watch this film; there is some pretty graphic stuff in there, and it’s not for the faint of, er, heart.
I can’t remember if I saw the movie in the theater when it first came out, or whether I rented it at God’s Little Video Store (not its real name), where you’d rent your film, but you’d also get a bit of scripture with every rental. If I did get Angel Heart there, I’m guessing the proprietor would have stuffed extra passages from the King James into the bag, for fear of the corruptive effect on my soul. That’s how nervous this movie made everyone. But if you put all the controversial elements aside, I have to wonder if the reason beneath all that surface upset is that the movie tells a bleak story about what destiny and free will really mean, and how you’re not going to get the better of the Devil, or your own devils in fact — your eventual damnation is a foregone conclusion. No matter how many clever stories about outwitting the cloven-hoofed one at the crossroads you might have heard.
But whatever else can be said, you can’t deny that Alan Parker is a genius, and he made something unique and upsetting with this movie. To think that later he’d go on to direct the hilariously glorious and charming adaptation of Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments beggars the imagination. I can’t think of two more different films!
Gemma: Angel Heart goes on the list of movies that inspired me and continue to inspire me, which is why I will hear nothing against it. I remember sitting in the theater watching something else, seeing a trailer for it and going: “Shit, is that . . . William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel? Somebody made a movie out of that?” But I love the film so much more than I ever did the book, which always seemed more pastiche than anything else, a fairly bloodless, knee-jerk stomach-punch affair, unmade by its own final twist. By translating many of the same points visually, however, Angel Heart adds a sensory, sensual element that makes me sympathize with almost everyone involved; it makes me feel the heat and the cold, the small pains, the hard knocks. It gets stuck in my head like an aimless, nameless tune, the wandering plinked-out notes of Johnny Favorite’s big hit, “Girl of My Dreams,” which forms the jazz-inflected score’s anchor-point.
Sandra: You know, I’ve read the novel, and I have to admit I’ve retained almost nothing from it, not even a sense of whether I liked it, or whether I liked the film better. It’s really only the film that’s stayed with me, and that’s saying something, given that I am so often one of those whiny purists who always rallies to the side of the book in the book vs movie debate.
Gemma: In Angel Heart, nothing is random, and free will is an illusion — the clues are there from frame one, with poor Harry/Johnny willfully misunderstanding them at every turn, and the tragedy is absolutely earned as a result. For a “small-time” guy, Johnny Favorite must surely be the most effective black magician ever, but it’s his very effectiveness that undoes him; he swaps his personality for Harry’s organically, then slides so far inside it he doesn’t know enough to feel guilty when Louis Cyphre (“Sifeeaire, is that a French name? The gentleman, is he French? From France?”) comes at him wearing his own victim’s face, bearded or no. (It took me multiple viewings to figure out that the sacrificial young soldier — the original Harry Angel — is portrayed by a clean-shaven Robert De Niro. He also appears as the veiled “woman” washing blood off the wall, but in both cases the cuts are subtle, almost subconscious.)
Sandra: What??? I can’t believe I didn’t notice that! Man, I am going to have to go back and watch it all over again. What else am I missing? Damn it!
Gemma: And yet. So, Johnny hid, then went through the war and lost the last bits of his old identity, and he’s been Harry Angel ever since. Which means that everything that happens to him in the movie and after, including burning in Hell, is happening to a completely new person: Harry, a chimera made out of Johnny’s now-empty(ish) body crossed with his sacrificial victim’s soul implant. Which means that in the end, Satan is punishing an entirely new person who doesn’t even know he’s currently committing murders, let alone what the guy he used to be did in order to incur Louis Cyphre’s wrath. Johnny Favorite still won, in a way — he doesn’t exist anymore to be punished, which is exactly what makes it a tragedy, from my POV.
This idea is well-encapsulated in the denouement scene where Margaret Krusemark’s father Ethan literally yells the whole crazily multi-twist backstory at Harry, even as Harry keeps screaming louder and louder and basically throwing a fit of disgusted rejection, the noir version of sticking his fingers in his ears and going “lalalalaICAN’THEARYOU!” Actually, I have to wonder on some level if Harry’s apparent blockheaded-ness and blackouts were something Johnny built into the whole infrastructure, to keep himself insulated and Harry forever “innocent.” But the Devil, unfortunately, is not mocked, and definitely operates like a lawyer; the letter of the law will do very nicely, thank you. Moral questions are for those winged dicks upstairs.
Sandra: The cruelty and cat-and-mouse aspect of the narrative really hit you where you live, once you finally realize what’s going on, and what’s in store for poor Harry Angel. Yet — should we say “poor Harry”? These are the choices he made, or rather, that his alter ego Johnny Favorite made for him. But if Harry is kept innocent, then serious questions about morality and justice arise: is it fair to punish someone who literally has no knowledge of any of this, especially if in fact he is literally a person (or persona) who has been created for the purpose of being kept “clean” of any of Favorite’s corruption. And also: where the hell (or Hell) is God in all this anyway?
Gemma: Now, you have to understand a couple of things, going in — at the time, Alan Parker was still “that guy who made Fame,” in most people’s eyes. And the movie itself was being sold explicitly as a noir (which it is) and a historical P.I. film (also true), without any real supernatural angle attached; I personally figured it out from the first trailer, but that’s only because I’d read William Hjortsburg’s Falling Angel, the book it was based on, the year before. Mike Mignola was just starting to break into the comics business, doing inking for Marvel and covers for D.C. — he wouldn’t jump-start Hellboy ’til 1994. And looking back, that’s what the tone Parker hit here most reminds me of . . . that same fatalistic, filthy-gorgeous palookaville vibe which pits man against fate knowing man will inevitably lose, and which sees magic and religion as equally cultish shell-games, with the Devil lurking dapper behind every funhouse door.
Sandra: De Niro and Rourke are both at their beautiful best in Angel Heart — though I confess that I have never thought of De Niro as an actor who was that good looking. He’s got an interesting face, a face of character, but pretty? Not exactly. But here he’s urbane, refined, has an oily glowing loveliness that is perfect for the role. And of course Rourke has his original face, before life caught up with him, before his stint as a boxer and eventual slide downhill, long before his eventual revival in The Wrestler. And Lisa Bonet in her vibrant youth (nudity or no nudity) is something to behold. Parker cast actors who could each hold the screen on their own easily — it’s fascinating watching them together: you don’t know whom you want to look at more. And Charlotte Rampling! Is she ever anything but compelling?
Maybe we should recap the movie a bit, because I feel like for those who haven’t seen it, it’s starting to sound like a big bag of “huh?” And by “we,” I mean “you,” Gemma, since you are much more thorough about these things than I am!
Gemma: Okay, here goes. Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is a low-rent New York private dick who surfs on the fact that people usually find his name first when they open the phone-book, then don’t bother shopping around. He mostly does divorce cases and surveillance, some fraud; he was in World War II but got “fucked up pretty quick,” cashiered out on a combo of wounds and PTSD, lives alone, has bad hygiene, a smart mouth, and “a thing about chickens.” One day, he’s hired by a high-class attorney to meet with Frenchman Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro), a rich weirdo who claims he’s owed collateral on a loan that he hasn’t thus far been able to repossess for helping out former crooner Johnny Favorite at the start of his career. Supposedly, Favorite was drafted into the service, caught a bomb-blast in North Africa and was committed to an asylum upstate with severe facial scarring and amnesia (rendering his contract with Cyphre null and void) . . . or was he?
Though initially unable to even properly pronounce Cyphre’s name, Harry ends up taking the case, and plunges neck-deep into a tangle of cons inside of cons, upper-class Satanism plus New Orleans voodoo-hoodoo horseshit, weird dreams, a particularly infectious earworm that turns out to be one of Favorite’s biggest hits (Girl of my dreams, I love you/Honest, I do/You are . . . so . . . sweet . . . ), and an ass-load of dead bodies. Almost everyone he talks to ends up getting murdered in mysterious and horrific ways, all of which tend to implicate him. And throughout, his own identity becomes increasingly both bound up in and challenged by this investigation: Has he simply stumbled on a nest of crazy people doing crazy things for crazy reasons, like Johnny Favorite trying to cheat his way out of Hell through black magic slaughter, or is the simplest answer — yet most disturbing, especially for its implications about what consequences our own actions may net us in the hereafter — actually the most accurate? And what does that say about this thin skin of normalcy Harry’s always thought was “real life,” if so?
Of course, anybody with an ear for homonyms can easily figure out where all this is going, so long as they’re not Harry Angel. Yet much like the Greek tragedies it references (“Alas, how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise,” Cyphre comments at one point, quoting Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex), Angel Heart spins out in ways that continue to entrance, if not surprise — and not least because you often get to see Lisa Bonet (as 17-year-old hereditary mambo Epiphany Proudfoot, Johnny Favorite’s illegitimate daughter) extremely naked throughout, way back in her only-just-post-Cosby Show phase. It’s the gravity of the whole thing that continues to resonate most, though, with me . . . that sense of personal monstrousness, of the desperation of hope without self-knowledge. The nigh-impossibility of any redemption at all, in general.
Sandra: I think that was one of the reasons for the controversy, not just because of the horrible death Epiphany is subjected to, but because it was Lisa Bonet who was playing her. At the time, The Cosby Show was America’s darling (which seems horribly ironic, given what we now know about Bill Cosby), and anyone on that show could do no wrong. When Bonet starred in Angel Heart, it was almost as if she’d spat on the basic moral values of the country, and had betrayed all her loyal watchers. She left Cosby for this? This violent, over-the-top descent into questionable morality and deals with the devil and an awful ignominious end, and to top it all off, full frontal nudity? Not Denise Huxtable! I think America recoiled at the idea of anyone from that nice Cosby family being soiled in this way (again: horrible, horrible irony). And I think America never quite forgave Bonet this transgression. But I guess it all worked out, because, among other things, she ended up married to the much-her-junior, extremely dishy Jason Momoa, so that sure seems like the angels were smiling down on her. (Despite the horrors of Aquaman.)
But that American prudery almost bit Alan Parker in the ass — the MPAA issued Angel Heart an X rating and he was asked to recut the movie, which he absolutely didn’t want to do. In the end, he did cut ten seconds of a sex scene and finally got that R rating, so the studio bigwigs could stop shitting themselves, but Parker was never happy about it. There are horrible, graphic things still there for all to see, but this is a movie that really begged the question about what constitutes art and how far should you go for it. Personally, I don’t know that I’d change anything — but your mileage on this one may really, really vary.
Cocktail: Devil’s Heart
Sandra: Only the Devil’s Heart here! No angels for you.
Ingredients:
- 1cl 1883 Spicy syrup
- 4cl White Tequila
- 1cl honey
- 3cl cranberry juice
- 2cl lime juice
Directions:
Plonk all ingredients in a shaker, add ice, and shake well for ten seconds or so. Strain into a chilled Martini glass. Decorate, if you are feeling fancy, with a pepper and a lime peel.
I am so amused by the fact that the measurements here are offered in centiliters! I mean, really! Who measures in centiliters?! It’s adorable. I also wonder how difficult it would be to get 1883 Spicy Syrup, so perhaps you can concoct your own by adding cayenne or jalapenos to some simple syrup? Do you want to work that hard? I’d maybe just throw a pepperoncini into my drink and call it a day.
Book Recommendations
Sandra: While they don’t have the visceral squickiness of Angel Heart, I have to recommend Mike Carey’s Felix Castor books, which I deeply, deeply love. The first one is The Devil You Know, and you won’t want to stop after that. There are only five of them, and there’s supposed to be a sixth. I live in hope. Mike said he always envisioned the series like a fugue — he just has to write that last movement. Castor is a sort of exorcist living in an England rife with the supernatural. But the books read like paranormal noir narratives. Clever, often funny, sometimes just heartbreaking, and with a core of real eeriness and things to make you shiver, Carey’s books won’t disappoint. (You might also recognize him as the M.R. Carey who wrote the absolutely astonishing The Girl with All the Gifts — simply one of the best books I’ve read in the last thirty years.)
One good Felix deserves another, so you might also want to check out Ian Rogers’s Felix Renn, another PI operating in a world where the “Black Lands” — a kind of supernatural otherworld peopled with nasty things — regularly encroach on our own world, requiring the intervention of various people and agencies to keep things under control. There are several Renn stories, and you can find out more about them here. You might also check out Supernoirtural Tales, which has a Felix Renn novella in it. More lighthearted perhaps than Carey’s Felix Castor, Felix Renn still has to deal with the weighty issues of the (semi) moral man in the (very) immoral (and sometimes immaterial) world. (Ian is of course also the author of Every House Is Haunted from ChiZine.)
For more shameless plugging, we have Michael Rowe’s October, out, appropriately enough, this very month. It’s about being queer in a small town, and about bullying and the high cost of selling your soul. Similarly, Stephen Michell’s Only the Devil Is Here reads like Cormac McCarthy wrote The Omen. Part road movie, part existential treatise on finding your true self amidst warring powers that might destroy you.
Gemma: Whenever I think about PIs and El Diablo . . . devils, at any rate . . . these days, my mind goes immediately to John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series: eighteen books about cracking cases and heads which just also happen to be about ghosts, dead or anti-gods, fallen angels occupying vile bodies, evil both human and inhuman. Parker himself is a man who violence seems to follow around, the vengeful hand of an equally vengeful god; his few friends are fellow liminal creatures who fall between the moral cracks — chief amongst them being Louis, a former hitman and Angel, his ex-thief boyfriend, joined on occasion by various FBI agents, thugs, gangsters, lawyers, antiquarians and experts, along with the occasional immortal occultist trying to reassemble a book that could change the world or other person who, like Parker himself, has had some sort of near-death experience which left them hunting monsters so hard they risk becoming one. The most recent title in the bunch is A Book of Bones, but I’d personally start back with Every Dead Thing and keep going, or just skip to either The Killing Kind or The Black Angel, because that’s where stuff really starts getting good.
Sandra Kasturi is the publisher of ChiZine Publications, winner of the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and HWA Specialty Press Awards. She is the co-founder of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the Executive Director of the Chiaroscuro Reading Series, and a frequent guest speaker, workshop leader, and panelist at genre conventions. Sandra is also an award-winning poet and writer, with work appearing in various venues, including Amazing Stories, Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Prairie Fire, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Chilling Tales, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, Abyss & Apex, Stamps, Vamps & Tramps, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin. She recently won the Sunburst Award for her short story, “The Beautiful Gears of Dying,” in the anthology The Sum of Us. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. Sandra is currently working on another poetry collection, Snake Handling for Beginners, a story collection, Mrs. Kong & Other Monsters, and a novel, Wrongness: A False Memoir. She is fond of red lipstick, gin & tonics, and Idris Elba.
Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work, two chap-books of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy, a story-cycle and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). Most are available from ChiZine Publications. She has two new story collections from Trepidatio (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), one upcoming from Cemetery Dance (Dark Is Better), and a new poetry collection from Aqueduct Press (Invocabulary).
I’ve not seen this particular movie, but I’m getting serious John Constantine vibes here between the images of Mickey Rourke and the Felix Castor recommendation!
I’m hung up on the fact that Lisa Bonet still looks exactly the same. Between that and Jason Momoa, I think she may have cut a deal with the devil. I’m super excited to learn that M.R. Carey and Mike Carey are the same author because now I have so many more books of his to read. Enough with the pen names, speculative fiction writers. I want to read all of your books, not the books in just one genre.
I totally agree, Kelly! Yeah, do check out Mike–he’s amazing. And a wonderfully lovely guy to boot. And you are absolutely right: Lisa Bonet has clearly made some sort of diabolical pact to look so good!! I mean, she barely looks older than her adult daughter (Zoe Kravitz)!!