I have a longstanding dislike of flash-forward openings, but the odd functionality of the start of the 1978 made-for-CBS movie Are You in the House Alone? earns my respect. There’s no reason to open a stalker thriller right after the worst thing to happen to its protagonist: as soon as we meet the bloodied high school student Gail (Kathleen Beller), we know that she’s been raped and that her assailant has told her no one will believe her. Once the narrative restarts, jogging back to before the incident, the audience knows that nothing Gail does will change her fate. It leads to some effective atmosphere—disturbing and contemplative in a leisurely ’70s way—but it jettisons the traditional tension of this kind of domestic thriller. I’m not wondering what will happen next, I’m wondering, in a leap ahead, what will happen after that. How do you end a thriller that begins at a horrible ending?
Are You in the House Alone?—or, as its excited opening credits would have it, Are You in the House Alone?!—answers that question two ways:
Either of these answers could be a problem—again, (1) stomping on a near-perfect last line sticks in my craw—but (2), to my surprise, actually works. And it works because of that jarring cold open. The movie says what it’s about right from the start, and then it doesn’t become a thriller so much as use the conventions of one to open up a discussion. It’s a bit of a bait-and-switch, but in terms of smuggling a vital message into a 1978 TV movie, it’s pretty clever. There are audience members who would never have tuned in for The Accused (for example), and a network can nab them with a genre movie that then turns—purely by virtue of staying with the story a little longer—into a blunt but sensitive look at how society and the legal system handle rape victims. If you can root for Gail to survive, you can root for her to receive better, fairer treatment; if you can root for her, you can root for other survivors like her.
I think it’s interesting to see how message-driven fiction ticks and think about what makes certain pieces of it more effective than others (which is to say effective at all).1 But since it’s fair to point out, and bitterly so, that every single problem explored in this movie is still around, as pervasive as ever, it’s depressing to look only at how well this teaches lessons that too many still haven’t learned. It may have made a difference to someone, but I can’t prove it.
Luckily, I also like it. The free-floating suspicion generated by the prologue lets the movie make some subtler points about a “Schrödinger’s rapist” world: it breathes even more unease into otherwise typical, ubiquitous moments and tropes. Is Gail safe around the ex-boyfriend who is still openly pissed that she didn’t sleep with him? (And what will he do if he finds out she did sleep with new boyfriend Steve?) Can she accept a ride home from the photography teacher who assigns her to take “sexy” self-portraits and then emphasizes how much he likes them? Knowing there’s real danger emphasizes that these can all be danger signs.
The movie also has a deft, naturalistic touch for constructing some of its hangout scenes. A double-date discussion of Three Days of the Condor flows well, doing some load-bearing plot work without feeling stilted or unrealistic: it even picks up on the way most of the kids are all performing their opinions for each other, the way this kind of exchange, especially when it turns to romance or sex, lets people feel each other out. The story moves easily between its different “worlds”—both the adults and the teenagers have conversations that feel textured and authentic—and creates a separate sensation for Gail trying to navigate between those worlds. A scene where she has to look for her depressed, unemployed-and-hiding-it father in a restaurant’s bar has exactly the right awkwardness, for example. Beller’s body language highlights how unprepared Gail is to face this kind of adult despair. (Her parents are only marginally more prepared to handle her life.)
A lot of credit goes to the cast. Beller—her small face framed by a thick mane of hair—has the right vulnerability and determination; even before the plot happens, Gail has already had occasion to think over what she wants as opposed to what other people want of her, and that independence gives her both strangeness and steeliness. Blythe Danner and Tony Bill are both good as her parents, not so much loving-but-flawed as loving-but-real, with their own concerns and missteps. Alan Fudge strikes exactly the right ambiguous note as the photography teacher. And a young Dennis Quaid is striking in one of his earliest roles as Gail’s best friend’s rich-kid boyfriend, with all the confidence of privilege oozing out of his pores. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this role helped him get noticed.
I sat down to watch this because of the always enticing hook of creepy phone calls that may or may not be coming from inside the house. I’ll be going back to it again as an odd, unsettling drama, one that’s even more adept at uneasy slice-of-life than it is at big moments.
Are You Alone in the House? is streaming on Tubi and Amazon Prime.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Infinity Pool – not for me, the relentless bleakness and cruelty of it just wore me down. Some interesting ideas and Mia Goth is always a compellingly strange screen presence but I’m not sure this movie wants anything other than for me to feel bad and I struggle to celebrate the fact that it was 100% successful in that goal. I liked Possessor a LITTLE more than this but I get the feeling that Cronenberg Jr. isn’t really going to be a filmmaker I ever warm to.
Me and my friends couldn’t help comparing this to Videodrome which we saw in theaters before and how much better David is at getting across what he wants to say whereas Brandon flails a bit. I think the ending at least is interesting in that this whole pseudo-sadistic exercise is just that for the uber wealthy where James still doesn’t know what he wants, but it’s in essence a tormented nepo baby movie.
I don’t love all of David’s movies by any stretch but they feel more tonally interesting, Brandon seems to really hammer one particular note and I struggle with it. Plus I’m not sure the younger Cronenberg will ever come up with a character name as incredible as “Barry Convex”.
Who can?
Justified, Season Two, Episode Thirteen, “Bloody Harlan”
“You asking me or telling me?” / “Makes you feel better, you can tell people I asked.”
What a hell of a way to end the season – especially that last scene. This whole season has had me with that dramatic feeling – the pressure to know what happens next. It’s ballsy to end with Dickie’s fate being clear and Doyle’s death barely dwelled upon after it happens, but it’s so effective. And this ends up selling the basic idea of reason that drives the show; having goals is simultaneously a burden and freeing, as Raylan must put aside his rage and disgust to make sure a little girl stays out of jail as best he can. Like, obviously he cares about the psychological damage, but it definitely feels like he’s looking to preserve as many laws as possible – if nothing else, as a guideline for his actions.
Meanwhile, everyone else is acting on emotion in some way. Messer is really great in this, acting entirely on his conscience in multiple ways; both covering his ass with Dickie and genuinely trying to help her. Mags is eventually pushed to the ultimate emotional decision, when the pain of being alive is simply too much to bear. And of course, Loretta is looking for revenge. Revenge just isn’t a practical way to live life; there’s no positive consequences for her doing that and everybody knows it (Mags looks ready to take the bullet emotionally, but is more concerned about the girl).
“Okay Loretta. You got the answer you were comin’ for.”
That’s a sentence I find fascinating. The secret best part about being goal-oriented is that it lets you know when to stop acting – when you can say “I have gotten what I came here for” and stop chasing it. It sounds stupidly obvious, but I think a lot of people are chasing the vague feeling of satisfaction as opposed to measurable success or failure, and I know I’ve made this mistake myself – continuing to pursue that feeling as opposed to recognising I’ve gotten what I ostensibly wanted. Raylan gets Loretta to recognise she’s gotten what she came for (finding out what happened to her father) and to recognise she doesn’t want to go to jail, even to satisfy bloodlust (she seems downright confused when she clicks onto what she’s doing).
A rational actor is, paradoxically, constantly dissatisfied. We already saw last episode the sheer infuriating rage in Raylan when he had to put aside bloody satisfaction for the sake of a bigger picture; that plays out in a different way in Loretta here. You see the flip of this in Boyd, who is constantly chasing thrills – and indeed doing so with greater clarity of vision – in pursuit of self-expression, knowing one day a bullet is going to come for him. In some ways, Boyd is the most ancient of all the characters.
Biggest Laugh: “They’re always lookin’ for guys like me.” / “You mean guys that have shot people?” / “Exactly.”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “Go back to the part about you reading.” / “So funny.”
Top Ownage: Gotta give it up for Dickie hanging Raylan from a tree and going at him with a baseball bat.
Love when a review of a Justified episode can make me think about how I need to refine my way of looking at the world and my goals.
Phenomenal season finale, and what a send-off for Character Actress Margo Martindale: her “get to know the mystery” line has always stayed with me; it emphasizes the sense that we’re watching the passing of a kind of titan–great, if rarely good–and helps infuse the scene with awe by letting her experience it too.
Yeah, there’s always been a sense that Mags believes in an afterlife and that this even plays into her willingness to kill people; when she killed Loretta’s father, there was a sense of guiding him into the next life (even if it comes off as lot crueller than when, like, Dale Cooper did it). Revealing that she was never entirely sure about it makes her simultaneously vulnerable and awesome. Justified goes with The Shield, the works of Quentin Tarantino, and Cowboy Bebop in how all these works believe that everyone carries a little magic in them, even if some people twist that into something wretched, and something beautiful is lost when they die. Absolutely baller to end on that scene of her dying too, and letting the practical closure play out in your imagination (at least until next season).
“This bullet’s been on its way for twenty-five years” and the apricot shot finally paying off, wooooo boy.
Mags’ despair at the news her one non-idiot son is dead, which means the future she worked for will never come to pass.
Winona calling Art to bring in the cavalry to save Raylan.
Just tons of good stuff in this one, but I wanted to highlight a few favorite moments that weren’t already mentioned. An all-timer episode of TV to cap a fantastic season.
Bunny Lake Is Missing – Single mother Carol Lynley, newly arrived in 1965 London, cannot find her 4 year old after school, and when she calls the police has a hard time even proving the kid exists. Only brother Keir Dullea defends her. Or does he? The late-career work by Otto Preminger is moody and atmospheric in black and white, and for a good chunk of the run time it’s a solid thriller and mystery. And then we learn the truth about Dullea – sociopath with hints of incestuous intent – and neither Lynley or Dullea are up to the task of keeping things believable. Fortunately, Laurence Olivier as the chief investigator gives a perfectly calibrated performance (one of the most subtle ones I’ve seen from him), aided by Clive Revill’s own low key acting. Plus Preminger still looks to push boundaries by making the protagonist who chose to be a single mother over having a bad marriage and considerd gasp! – an abortion.
The Practice, “In Deep” – For all that I like this show and will defend it against its critics, episodes like this make things hard. The main story is the conclusion to Rebecca testifying as the only witness in a murder trial, and that’s reasonably well done but boy Bobby has no right to complain about how the DA handles things. And the start of a case where a pursesnatch just granted a state plea bargain now faces a federal law meant to punish people who target tourists (an actual law and one worth being angry about). But there is a plot about a man fighting a fine for refusing to use a water efficient toilet because he can’t flush away his feces effectively, and Eugene gets angry at a Chinese laundry about a shirt and makes fun of James Hong. These are, quite frankly, both rather silly and as much as Eugene protests he’s not racist, he clearly, plus how Hong’s character is written is pretty close to offensive. This is sort of the show in a nutshell. There is a lot of good stuff overall. There is also a lot on nonsense and some of it is not good.
The twist in Bunny Lake Is Missing does make it hard to believe Dullea’s character kept up the pretense of sanity for so long earlier, but I do like the dangerous childishness of his post-reveal performance.
I love how weird and grotesque the film gets with detours like the eerie, dilapidated “doll hospital,” all with that striking, sharp black-and-white cinematography; the effortless easing back and forth between the lucid and the surreal amplifies the nightmarish feel.
We’re in that time when directors (and I assume studios) are still making the conscious choice to do black and white instead of color, and we were better for it. You can of course do creepy in color, and creepy night in color, but this is such a strong use of a black and white world.
One of my movie maxims is, like Harry Dean Stanton in acting, every movie is worth seeing if shot in black and white in a 2:25 (or thereabouts) ratio.
I also like how the movie’s whip pan camera technique foreshadows the ambiguity of the child’s very existence, even during scenes that precede the alleged kidnapping.
“makes fun of James Hong” this is villain behavior, presumably he is sent to prison.
The villain is David E. Kelley, who uses such a good actor to play someone who only speaks broken English. And then for having Eugene act that way. Though to be accurate, Eugene’s overall behavior is not good and the audience knows it. Though then we get a person of color being racist to another person of color. Maybe they should have used one of the many white characters for this.
You know, maybe some of Blank Check’s brief criticism of the show wasn’t that far off after all.
Scrubs, “My Philosophy” and “My Brother, My Keeper”
Again, not writing up all of the Scrubs episodes I’ve been revisiting, but these are particularly worth mentioning, so I figured I’d give them a shout-out here.
“My Philosophy” is a stunner mostly for its transcendent ending, which is maybe the best non-comedic uses of a JD fantasy sequence: it’s beautiful how his imagination gives his patient the “death as a big Broadway musical” exit she’d spoken of earlier, infusing a sad, too-early death with a grandeur that encompasses and incorporates the rest of the cast’s emotions and experiences, too. Braff plays the aftermath of this very nicely too, like it’s more of vision than a fantasy, and he witnessed something that’s left him knocked back.
“My Brother, My Keeper,” on the other hand, has one of the best one-off plots, where Dick Van Dyke plays a beloved older doctor full of jokes, kindness, and homespun wisdom … but who isn’t keeping up with the latest medical developments. JD has to make a decision, and then (rarer, but always excellent) Kelso has to make a decision, and their actions have consequences that are dealt with briefly but honestly. And Dick Van Dyke is, to absolutely no one’s surprise, terrific in his guest role; he does instantly feel like someone everyone could like, and it’s kind of heartbreaking when he can tell his conversation with Kelso at the end is going in a direction he can’t recover from, and he tries, with barely concealed desperation, to steer it back to safer, joking grounds; it’s as if he’s saying, We’re friends, aren’t we? That’s what matters, isn’t it? Can’t we just rewind all this and forget about it?
Favorite laugh line: Kelso’s response to JD asking to hear a story about the old days. “Well, what the hell. Back in ’68 … I don’t like you. The end.” (I love the entire cast, but more and more I think that Ken Jenkins was maybe the best comedic performer.)
“And by Cleveland, I mean Hawaii. And by convention, I mean golf.” Jenkins was a treasure, also great in Cougar Town as Jules’ dad of course. And hell yes on Van Dyke, it’s great whenever he plays that need to be liked at a slightly darker pitch.
Reflecting on Scrubs, I think something that it did so well and was quite rare (but not unique, hello The Shield), was the diversity of perspectives among the authority figures. Cox and Kelso are the constant, primary teaching figures, but they were constantly bringing in those guests spots as senior doctors, with different approaches. And I think the show was very fair in showing the pros and cons of the different approaches, and allowing the characters to reflect on those. There’s that JD quote to Cox in one of the earliest seasons: “I want to be like you. But a more successful you.”
Yes, 100%. (And I love that line and how you can see it lands–Cox then making at least an attempt to play the game and allowing his patient to make a phone call on his behalf is a great story move; that he’s also sometimes influenced by JD is one of my favorite aspects of their relationship.) I appreciate everything we get with Dr. Wen, for example, and also the bit with the really short surgeon who emphasizes for Turk that the field doesn’t have to be all about outperforming colleagues in traditional badass masculinity.
Babylon 5 — an episode is outright Shieldian in “that escalated quickly,” a bunch of shit goes down and it rules. There is a bit of a Liv-4-Ever bit going on but it is used for a dark, painful purpose that works very well with the character. And then, time travel! This is also handled very well, stuff set up a while ago pays off big time. Officially on a roll after some duds.
Flow — cat content double feature! This is as good as advertised and interestingly uncanny — the polygonal animation is familiar from videogames but smoother and more evocative (lovely eye work for our lead), what is also familiar from videogames is the movement of the camera itself and this is a bit weirder to take in for a whole movie, the viewpoint moves with the head swivels and perspective of a player feeling out a world. Which, considering the world this is in, is not a bad conceit. Pure animal noises is the right call (hilariously, Captain Capybara is voiced by a camel because actual capybaras sound too annoying, the grunts are perfect) and the anthropomorphizing is scaled, with the lemurs being the most human (and not in a flattering way) while our bird buddy remains mysterious. Sometimes the Oscars get it right!
Kedi — cat content double feature! A rewatch of a documentary about Instanbul’s cat population, they are on the street but not exactly feral because the city’s culture is to feed and take care of them (one guy mentions how everyone on the street has a running tab with the vet) and crucially to appreciate their independence. There is some anthropomoprhizing here as well but this is come by honestly, folks describing what they see in the cats and what the cats bring out in them. There are surely editing tricks here and the film flawlessly integrates fake POV shots (e.g. a cat is darting below the tables at a marketplace, cut to the camera at cat level, moving from the spot we last saw the cat), but there are also scenes caught because of patience and skill, one bit of a cat jumping from roof to tree is pulled back from and focused as the cameraperson realizes what is happening and moves to meet it. A balm of a movie.
Anne Truitt, Working — short doc that is part of the Jem Cohen collection on Criterion, he impressionistically shoots around Truitt preparing paints and sanding wood for her sculptures as she talks about her work in her own language, not impressionistic per se but something she has developed for herself over decades. Cohen gives us a few glimpses of Truitt’s sculptures — tall thin blocks in apparent monochrome — but does not linger on them and this is a clear choice to avoid a false and incomplete capture of something the camera can’t truly see. What he can do a better job capturing is Truitt, working, and he does. More questions than answers, a good film about art.
You’d probably never guess this from my posts here, but I quite like a cat movie – and if we’re including documentaries in that, I’m not sure there’s a better one than Kedi. So beautifully shot and genuinely fascinating as a doc as well as being wall-to-wall cat content.
Flow is also pretty good. I guess I found it a bit TOO video-gamey to fully fall for its charms but I did enjoy it a lot.
I can recognize videogame aesthetics from watching others play but don’t really play games myself, so Flow didn’t have the familiarity-contempt continuum issue for me. If anything I liked it even more for the associations — you’re telling me I can watch Myst With Cats and not have to play the damn thing? Sold!
Andor S1E7 & 8 – Rushed through these two. Just fuck yeah, from the twin dramatic ironies of Andor getting arrested on vacation for a crime he for once didn’t commit to the Empire and Rebellion looking for a man who’s already in prison, to Mon Mothma getting to gleefully own for once. I love the Kafkaesque prison, Luthen and Saw Guerrera’s conversation – two very good manipulators going at it – and Major Partingaz being, in the context of a fascist regime with fetishistic interrogation rituals, a highly motivating and rewarding boss. When a subordinate challenges his own orthodoxy, he actually rewards instead of punishes her and seems to grasp the cutthroat hierarchy of it all.
Whenever Luthen and Saw are sharing a scene, I’m happy. Two of my favorite characters on the show (and two incredible actors, to boot), and they manage to generate dramatic tension despite having a lot in common/a mutual understanding: call it the difference between extreme devotion and actual extremism, or attribute it to how Luthen still believes in precision while Saw mostly believes in fire.
I love that we’re all agreed that Partagaz is truly the Best Boss.
In Bruges – A buddy of mine had been pushing me to see it for a while now, and it had been on my interest list anyway, so I decided to go ahead with it last night when I didn’t have much else to do. I rather enjoyed it and would be happy to discuss in further detail, although I dunno if I have anything new to say about a 17-year-old movie.
Also, this might be the worst trailer I’ve ever seen in terms of showing what the movie is actually about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96harmMOyiY
“It may have made a difference to someone, but I can’t prove it” — when art influences people in a bad way we hear about it, because what they did echoes the art. I suppose influence in a good way can echo the art, for certain outsized actions, but in general it just happens and unless someone talks about it it isn’t known. I don’t think this invalidates work like this at all, it just shows how influence is not a great metric to judge art by in some very crucial ways.
Agreed. It makes it easier for this kind of work to feel like it’s failed, because it does have an external goal, but since art works on hearts and minds in subtle and unknowable ways, I find it more interesting to look at whether or not it feels like the message art succeeds in framing itself in a way that means it’ll actually be watched/read/etc. by people who aren’t already on board with the message. I can’t gauge the reach, but I can gauge the approach. And of course the better examples, like this one, have actual artistic qualities that you can evaluate, too–which is a key part of the reach, actually. People have to want to care.
“I can’t gauge the reach, but I can gauge the approach” — really well said.