UNDER THE MUSHROOM CLOUD:
AMERICAN FEAR IN JOE DANTE'S MATINEE
By Murray Leeder
David J. Skal's invaluable tome The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror contains an interview with Joe Dante about Famous Monsters of Filmland, the quintessential magazine of monster culture. Young Dante wrote repeatedly, trying to get into the pages of its "Fang Mail" section, ultimately succeeding with a piece on the fifty worst horror movies he'd seen-which was a lie-that ended up printed as The Fifty Worst Horror Movies Ever Made. We can sense some of that spirit in the protagonist of Dante's Matinee (1993), who loves monsters and considers Vincent Price an old friend. Gene Loomis (Simon Fenton) is a navy brat whose father is stationed in Key West just as the nuclear drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis is about to unfold. This historical moment gives Dante the opportunity to meditate on fear, war and a gamut of other subjects all entangled in the horror film.
The first image in Matinee is a mushroom cloud, followed by the voice of director Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman): "The atomic bomb is terrible. More terrible still are the effects of nuclear mutation." Importantly, these first words spoken by Woolsey are the truth, spoken strongly enough not to be undermined by the following dialogue promoting his new movie Mant, the story of a half-man half-ant who threatens the world. Gene tells Woosley near the film's close: "It's really kind of hard to believe you're a grown-up," which surely is high praise in a movie where the adults are either manic or incompetent or both.
Woolsey has come to Key West to premiere Mant, believing that the closest to the front lines is the ideal place to unleash his atomic monster-"The war stuff spooks him. And then we come, the main event." This is microcosmic encapsulation of the bulk of the horror genre in the 50's-while the threat of the bomb loomed, audiences lined up for radioactive beasts. It's fitting that the most famous of these, Godzilla, came from the only country in the world to fall victim to a nuclear attack, sold back to the attacker like a Trojan Horse of anxiety which few commentators of the time thought to notice. Yet the threat of war isn't entirely good for business. Woolsey, like the great showman director William Castle, employs theater gimmicks like Atomovision and Rumblerama, and justifies them by saying "It takes a lot more to scare people now," what with "bombs that'll kill two and a half million." Fictional horror has to work hard to keep up. As Woolsey says on another occasion: "Sure my movies show things that are shocking, But is that really more terrible than the world we live in every day?" Well, he's right, isn't he? Woolsey has a funny way of saying things that make sense even while being superficially ridiculous.
Gene, for a kid raised on a military base, is anything but gung-ho about militarism. He's mostly genuinely concerned about his father, in the line of fire on one of the blockade ships. But the other Navy brat we meet, Andy, who wears a sailor's cap at all time and shoots tree frogs for fun, proves the corruptive influence of the militaristic spirit. He advises blowing Cuba out of existence before they have the chance to do it to him. Gene's de facto best friend, Stan (Omri Katz), is more concerned about sex than war, having scored a date with pink-clad sexpot Sherry (Kellie Martin), who was tutored in the ways of love by biker beatnik poet Harvey Starkweather (who shares the last name of the infamous 50's spree killer who got a fictional treatment in Badlands). Dante satirizes the sexual mores of the conservative early 60's where plastic everymoms preside over the household, PTA members trying to ban Mant (actually Woolsey's shills, trying to drum up publicity) object to the message of horror movies, that "Atomic power is nothing but trouble and it's all right for monsters to tear the clothes off young women," and the boys muse on such deep issues as "Do you think if the bomb were falling she'd do it with me?" and what could you to do a girl who's hypnotized. Key West, after all, is "the make-out capital of America."
Gene is the least romantically experienced of the bunch, but he too is interested in adorable girl "communist" Sandra (Lisa Jakub), who earns a week of detention protesting the useless "duck and cover" method during an air raid drill ("They put Gandhi away for a year," she says). She rails against segregation, war and the dehumanization to Russia but is taken aback when he tells her about that his father is on one of the blockade ships. In an instant she turns from a protestor standing tall to a touchingly small little girl. Brown-eyed brunette Sandra, as counterculture, makes an ideal counterpart to blond and blue-eyed Gene, whose overt role as a representative of straight arrow America is undermined by his monster fixation (as one critic noted, he looks like a teenaged Bill Clinton). Dante treats the kids much more seriously than their well-intentioned but clueless parents, where Dante satirizes both political sides equally. Sandra's parents attend the screening of Mant precisely because it is their right to do so, and when her father launches into a tirade against censorship Sandra simply says "I know" with the perfect note of bemused petulance of a child who knows her parents better than they know her. Gene and Sandra make an ideal pair, who know just what to do when locked up in a fallout shelter together. Sandra's father's thought when they're found in each other's arms-"Is the boy military?"
The dominant motif of Matinee is fear. Early on Gene tries to convince his brother Denny that movie monsters are real (and later, that the Cuban Missile Crisis isn't), and Denny watches talk show where women have to put their hands into boxes that they're told contain rats. Later, he changes the radio from news about the brewing war to a music station playing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," a cheery song about fear. Dante cleverly arrays the characters so that almost everyone assembles at the climactic screening of Mant out of fear. Stan breaks his date with Sherry and goes to the movie instead after being threatened by her jealous ex-boyfriend, Harvey, who in turn gets the job working the switches backstage and stalking the hallways in a Mant suit after being threatened by some lone sharks. Sherry is convinced to go to the movie through her own little brother's blackmail efforts. The theater owner fears the bomb so much that he listens to army radio constantly and maintains a fallout shelter in the basement. Though their mother is concerned that Denny might have bad dreams, only Gene has a nightmare, where a mushroom cloud from the south devastates Key West. Dante slips in such apocalyptic jokes as Sherry listening to "It's the End of the World" and movie posters trailing end-of-the-world epics Panic in Year Zero and The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Only Woolsey is fearless. In fact, he relishes his role as "savior"-"They know we can't hurt them. But they're still going to be scared half to death . . . And then we save them."
In one of the most interesting scenes, Woolsey tells Gene an anecdote about a caveman who's survived an attack from a mammoth. He feels great, like he's outwitted death, and draws a cave drawing of the mammoth to show to everyone else. But then he thinks, why do it realistically? People are going to see it-why not turn it into a monster? Why not make the teeth long and give it tentacles? And that was the first monster movie. In this Cold War framework, the mammoth is the bomb, the real, genuine threat just outside the cave. The atomic bugs and their like are the exaggeration representation of a threat, that, while trashy low art, still encapsulates the real threat better than the high art of the period ever managed. More children probably learned to fear the bomb from Them! and Godzilla than from church or school.
Dante is at his humourous best in showing off Mant, the film within a film. Indeed, it comes off better than John Landis's Amazon Women on the Moon because it has context, where that film contented itself to parody a genre that was funnier when it was deadpan. Seemingly inspired by Them!, The Fly and The Incredible Shrinking Man, Mant tells the story of a man who's accidentally transformed into an insect-human hybrid while undergoing dental x-rays. Robert Cornwaite, Dr. Carrington in The Thing From Another World, turns up as a scientist from the "Office of Unforseen Atomic Events," who doesn't bat an eye at the insectoid monstrosity, has howler lines like "Insect-human mutation isn't an exact science," and feels the need to simplify his language when a woman is in the room. ("He'll begin to grow at a magnified-or faster-rate.") It reminds me of a scene in Hideous Sun Demon where the hero's girlfriend asks a scientist why her lover has changed into the title monstrosity, and he babbles on about evolutionary theory for about three minutes. But for all its klutziness, Mant manages to blur the line between reality and film in true postmodern fashion through its gimmicks, even at one point (like in Castle's The Tingler) having the monster attack a movie theater (a movie in a movie in a movie!) and its patrons screaming into the camera, even as Harvey Starkweather in a Mant suit accosts people in the real movie theater, but who is really benign-except when he sees his ex-girlfriend with another boy. When Harvey pumps up Rumblerama too high, shaking the entire theater and endangering an overloaded balcony, the nervous theater owner panics and thinks the Russians have attacked. And finally, everyone is chased from the dangerous theater by a mushroom cloud and fire, smoke and wind bursting from the screen-but it's not an atomic blast, it's Atomovision, Woolsey's gambit to clear the theater as quick as possible.
Standard heroes and authority figures consistently come up short in Matinee. The square-jawed heroes of Mant cannot effectively fight the monster. Gene and Stan find their teacher squabbling with another customer over "the last box of shredded wheat in Key West." Gene's brother wears a Davy Crockett cap, and as a character notes in Dante's The Second Civil War, Crockett only became a hero the minute Disney realized they could sell hats. Against the framework of the unheroic Cold War, Dante allows individual moments of plausible heroism from many of his characters. Woolsey's quick thinking frees Gene and Sandra from suffocation in the bomb shelter as the theater owner cowers impotently, Stan chases off Harvey with an unloaded rifle and Gene pulls his brother from the collapsing theater balcony, the biggest catastrophe to occur in Key West during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis is averted and life begins to return to normal. These heroics even make the paper-third page, but that's not bad considering "We're up against this Cuban thing."
Woolsey tells Ruth as they drive away that people are walking around that people are walking around dazed, amazed that they're still alive-just like the caveman in his story. How long does he give it? "A couple weeks, a couple years, then bang," interesting choice of words, "someone else comes up with a way to end the world." He could be talking about the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam and countless other events right up to September 11. Woolsey introduces Mant from "Ground zero, not a safe place to be"-a chilling portent (though nothing compared to the jaw-dropping destructions of American landmarks in The Second Civil War). But Woolsey also proposes marriage to Ruth, a positive act, showing that we should go on with our lives, that we shouldn't let these horrors change our lives. He advises Gene to "keep his eyes open" during the scary parts of a horror movie, and of life-shutting it out is not the way.
The last image we're left with is Gene and Sandra running on the Florida beach as military helicopters are returning from across the gulf, as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" plays again. It's an enigmatic image, anticipating a joyous homecoming for Gene's father but also invoking the coming storm of Vietnam, which took helicopters as a potent logo. Did Gene's father participate? Or did Gene, who would be draft age in a few years? How long will these two remarkable kids be able to enjoy each other and live in a peaceful world? The opening image of an atomic bomb and the closing image of a helicopter (with a giant bug attacking a building in the middle) anticipates a transfer in kinds of wars and kinds of fears.
Stefan Dziemianowicz, reviewing the aforementioned The Monster Show for the Washington Post, noted that "To understand a culture, you must know what it fears." This exactly what Matinee does. American society fears war, it fears sexuality and it fears nonconformity, even as it may celebrate any of those things. Matinee is a quiet gem of a movie, an examination of a place and time that becomes more profound on each viewing, providing a rare reminder that low art frequently encapsulates the Zeitgeist far better than high art.