Great Endings Series: In The Mouth Of Madness
This piece is another in a series for The Flickering Knight spotlighting noteworthy finales in movies.
With In The Mouth Of Madness (1994), director John Carpenter demonstrated new themes and techniques he’d added to his arsenal as a filmmaker. The film is not perfect but represents a transition in the career of an auteurist movie director positioning himself as a consummate genre craftsman (as if suggested by his name).
This step forward follows a wry humor evident in his debut, Dark Star (1974), which as a low budget student thesis project I would argue is still very much worth seeing. Then came Carpenter’s Hollywood come-out roll, Assault On Precinct 13 (1976), which seemed to strongly declare his dedication to the Howard Hawks model of adding personal touches to established narrative tropes. In essentially remaking Rio Bravo (1959) inside a police station house, he made a strong statement about the enduring power of classic Hollywood storytelling. Halloween (1978), which it’s important to remember ventured into relatively fresh territory at the time, was like the building of a new scaffolding for the horror thriller structure, stretching out the meager servings of its most basic elements into a full course meal that extrapolated what prototypical horror films like Jacques Tourner’s Cat People (1942) had begun and what imitators had been rehashing for decades.
Tourner’s Cat People, the first modern horror film. A masterpiece in the use of light and shadow.
With his twelfth feature, Carpenter begins to get self-referential, interrogating the relationship between the storyteller and the audience to a greater degree than what I’d argue was his last major step forward, They Live (1988). With In The Mouth Of Madness, Carpenter seemed willing to fuse each of his prior incarnations with a knowing self-consciousness, aiding material that I believe was a bit heavier than even he could articulate. The wry humor, the auteurist slant, the horror trappings, the prodigious integration of special effects, the use of a rugged individualist hero and the classical framing now seem to be subsumed within the process of a filmmaker looking back on the effect of his previous achievements.
Michael De Luca’s script suggests a heavy influence of H.P. Lovecraft but Carpenter’s imagining of this yarn that emphasizes the insanity and cult aspects but seems to keep Lovecraft’s fixation on demonology at some distance. That is, before an inspired final scene that totally forsakes Lovecraft’s obsessions for Carpenter’s and makes for the perfect ending for this story.
The first insane Sutter Cane zombie, who turns out to be Cane’s literary agent. Sequence demonstrates Carpenter’s typically masterful balance of tension between background and foreground
John Trent (Sam Neill) is an ace insurance claims investigator hired by a New York-based publishing firm to investigate the disappearance of its most successful author, Sutter Cane. Trent is presented as a big city pragmatist and cynic who we think would be the last person to believe the rumors that Cane’s novels make people murderously insane. But in venturing to the almost mythic location where Cane is presumed to be residing, he will become the truest of true believers.
Despite a prodigious career in Australian art-house movies, Sam Neill was more visible after Jurassic Park than at any time in his career. That this was the next script he chose is pretty neat of him.
The New England town of Hobb’s End, secluded to the point of obscurity, looks and resembles the setting of a Stephen King story. But Carpenter goes as far as to have a character mention King (whose name sounds not unlike Sutter Cane) just as he goes as far to jokingly play a Carpenters song in the gothic insane asylum where Trent is placed at the beginning of the film, setting up the series of flashbacks in which Trent relates how he came to be placed there. These flashbacks constitute the majority of the story.
We see that a series of wild and horrific intrusions of the world of Sutter Cane on Trent’s reality are the basis for his (and the world’s) descent into madness. Even Cane himself (Jurgen Prochnow), in his enthusiastic evocation of ancient gods and primitive rites becomes a force that pulls Trent (and us) from the postmodernist, self-referential, big city terrain of Carpenter to the small-town, premodernist universe of Lovecraft. This is a movie where you don’t exactly know how much of the story is playing out in reality and how much is the product of the fevered nightmares of its unreliable protagonist. The results are unsettling and fun, until the auteur director tips his hand in a brilliantly absurd finale that posits the cinema as the final piece of the puzzle.
With the world having plunged into an anarchy brought on by the mad paranoid fictions of Sutter Cane, Trent walks out of his cell, charcoal crosses scribbled all over his scrubs and his skin. He’s the insane new world’s originary Prophet of Doom. However, looking oddly composed, he may just be the last sane person left on the planet.
Nothing in this world ravaged by total anarchy appears to be operating and yet he wanders into a movie theater (who knows where he got the bucket of popcorn), plunks himself down in a chair and proceeds to howl with laughter at a mashup of images from the movie we’ve just watched. He is the star in a film adaptation of the latest Cane novel, titled “In The Mouth Of Madness.” Note the change in Neill’s laughter at the very end. It comes to sound incredulous and pain-addled, as if the humor has become almost too lacerating in its accuracy to serve as healing:
Up until now, the story has progressed like a perverse take on The Wizard of Oz or Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, but Carpenter reminds us that for all its cliches, cheap fiction has the ability to work on us in an immersive and subtle way and horror is best suited to that task. It’s important to remember that Sutter Cane is not a serious literary aspirant but a hack novelist, churning out open doorways to beast-filled, gothic netherworlds or mobs of the living dead like cheap bubble gum. And yet our sustained attention to these conceits has given them power to where we, the audience, are co-authors of our own media-induced nightmares.
Reality as laughter in the dark.
The razor-fingered guy who haunts our dreams, the hockey-masked bullying victim who resents the carefree flesh of the young, and the clorox-faced, man-child playing knife games with his suburban peers are all hack premises. As some of these franchises' entries have suggested, their power comes from the fear we endow them with every time we watch. We know they’re silly, but they’ve become the stuff of pop culture iconography, so they keep reappearing. We let their absurdity into our reality and in return, they allow us escape, diversion, pleasure and the vicarious thrill of calamity without the consequences.
We are participating in this agreement, which makes us characters in the movie. Carpenter is not goofing on horror, but on us, as we watch the story of our own disbelief break down and our emotional state become directed by some base and primal sensations for a few hours. A timely subject for a political discourse where certain right-wing media outlets egg on violent reprisals against imaginary phantoms, with the brainwashed assailants behaving like zombified cult members. A world gone bananas, in which we, the viewers, are wholly and willingly complicit.
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