Robert Bierman insists New York City's congested skyline contributes as much an atmosphere of corrupted Gothic in the 1989 Vampire's Kiss, given his opening pan of the Big Apple's skyline, the dome of the Empire State building glistening with golden portents, as does Transylvania in Stoker's original horror story of subservience to evil's insatiable appetite. In the most reducible terms, this is vampirism, its enslaved withering before an all consuming gluttony which can only be triumphed over by the life force of sunlight and the power of faith to flare against it, recycling old atavistic animism like a forest fire, upon which we've layer innumerable interpretations Despite the fact that in some ways it is a better extended metaphor than its younger cousin, Wolf, the dowager never particularly liked the film, not necessarily due to what Cage has to shoulder. He does well enough, after his more ebullient gambit with Cher, evoking the melodramatic gestures of Max Schreck for ironic gratification, but what Bierman seems to aim for in suggesting that humanity's most efficient ecological environment, the metropolis, creates its own graphic malevolence, just as the vast space of the west does in expertly paced thrillers like Breakdown, with Kurt Russell, is belied by the fact that his ensemble cast function like fashion accessories, against which Loew slowly loses his smooth, wearied of being rolled in aesthetic refinement, as if it was analogous to a lifelong coating of garlic powder. There are a few really interesting scenes, capture shots, which, with a little more verve and daring, Bierman might have done a homage to The Day of the Locust, with New Yorker's actually turning against our celebrity thoroughbreds, intrepid matinee idols like Cage, when he's running out of the nightclub, taunted. Staying with that might have given the narrative juxtaposition greater impact. What drew me into a third viewing, however, wasn't Elizabeth Ashley's prima donna superficiality, more exaggerated as the delusion and irritability grow more insulating, or the made for television appearance, so much as the city's nearly sinister innocence twenty years before Osama's operatives created their indelible image of civilization and its discontents.
Is it a no life factor? Possibly, but it may also be that I live in Pennsylvania, and knew people who witnessed the downing of flight 93, and also lived in Manhattan before Giuliani, a correspondence to what Nicholas and Bierman are conveying in my citation. I was irrevocably altered by the great blow of 9/11, without, however, deriving any sacrament from the great piss hole of NGO's, Kabul, and GW's stupid war of misdirection in Iraq. Saddam had nothing to do with Saudi Arabia's disreputable passing the buck of Hadi extremism, while the EU just sits and takes it. If we do go to war, eventually, we need a really defined objective, even if the Middle East and parts of Africa get redrawn. Bill Maher too was impacted in the aftermath. As a challenging observer to manners of reserve, he once stated, on air, that nothing had changed in the aftermath of this country's greatest shock. He is right in the sense we're still a shallow, material world, too glib in some ways, like Bierman's gilded script, with how many other dead alives waiting around to provoke their own ludicrous cessation. It would be overreach to assert Vampire's Kiss is a predicate illustrative of why the agrarian mindset recoils from meta-cities, but simply reading what Bierman does with exteriors, you can see with the Taliban's eyes why Semitic bedouins hate our hedonism. We answered with the ultimate embodiment of "this is New York," as Trump's election attests.
Searching for a link, Google suggested flight to avoid apprehension. If they wanted to amuse me, rare as that is, they succeeded.
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