So my wife says: “Martin Scorsese made a comedy?” Yes, well, but it’s a dark comedy.
It’s called After Hours (1985), and Scorsese directed it after studio bosses canceled his long-dreamed-of project to film The Last Temptation of Christ. He received that devastating news just as he was setting up shop near Jerusalem, and, in the making-of feature that comes with the DVD of After Hours that we watched this week, he speaks of that period in his life as an ordeal on par with Christ’s descent into hell. The opportunity to churn out a low-budget movie about one man’s bad night in the Big Apple was, for Scorsese, a step toward spiritual as well as professional deliverance. (Later in the 1980s, of course, he found the backing that he needed to make and release Last Temptation.) After Hours isn’t “light,” by any means. But it is funny.
Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a mild-tempered computer geek, descends from his home base in the East 90s to the netherworld of SoHo. Drawing him there is Marcy Franklin (Patricia Arquette), a groovy chick who spots him in a coffee shop and chats him up about the book that he’s reading, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The promise of a good time with a women of apparently easy virtue compels him to take a long cab ride to the downtown loft where she is staying. What follows is an endless, dreadful night in which Paul gets lied to, stood up, messed with, jerked around, mistaken for a thief, and almost killed—yet he never gets laid, despite meeting a succession of enticing and alarmingly accessible women. Another title for his adventure could well be “Sexless in the City.”
Viewing the film now, I noted a streak of misogyny in it that I hadn’t spotted before. Paul meets five women on his nocturnal jaunt—along with the Arquette character, there are temptresses played by Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara, and Verna Bloom—and each one is a variation of the same psychobitch from hell. They turn him on, and then they turn weird. They come on to him, all desperate and clingy, and then they snap at him in hysterical, out-of-nowhere anger. One of them sets a lynch mob on him. Another encases him in a papier-maché prison that serves as a metaphor for his entire night of tribulation. The screenplay for the movie, I learned from the making-of feature, was a graduate thesis written by a Columbia University film student named Joseph Minion. Which explains things just a little. I was once a lonely, put-upon grad student, and that experience doesn’t promote largeness of spirit. Likewise, the muse of resentment hardly promotes a rounded view of the opposite sex.
That strain of bitterness—along with the one-note characterization that stems from it—rankled somewhat. But it didn’t keep me from enjoying those aspects of the film that captivated me when I viewed it on the big screen more than two decades ago. I saw After Hours on the first day of my first trip to New York, soon after the movie opened in September 1985. After studying the city’s anatomy through the close reading of maps and guidebooks, the chance to feel its pulse and to touch its flesh (so to speak) left me rapt and dizzy with enthusiasm, but also a trifle scared of the place. So I was receptive to Scorsese’s and Minion’s mythic rendering of New York as a region of Kafkan nightmare, as a dank grotto ruled by a spirit of fatal hipness. That myth still resonates for me, and the way it plays out here still makes me laugh. I particularly like the scene in which Paul pleads with a mammoth bouncer for permission to enter a goth lair called Club Berlin. The scene nods toward Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” the tale of a “man from the country” who dies while waiting for an inscrutable gatekeeper to allow him entrance to some obscure sanctum of power. Paul does get past the Club Berlin rope line, and he survives this trial and others that follow. But the notion that Manhattan is a field of mystery, by turns dark and opaque, carries real plausibility—and a real satiric edge.
Although some very grim things happen to Paul, his fate is finally a comic one. The city chews him up, but then it spits him out again.
