Tag Archives: 1986

REIGN IN BLOOD

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REIGN IN BLOOD
Slayer
1986

Any amount of distraction or sonic interference is enough to frankly destroy Reign in Blood. Slayer’s breakthrough album does not function as background music. Rick Rubin’s mix works when you’re locked in, but any amount of distraction drowns out every 220 bpm riff with Lombardo’s blast beat drums and Araya’s shouted vocal. It becomes noise. All the texture will drop away. When I started relistening to write this, I thought, “Oh, this isn’t very good anymore.” Then I put the laptop away for a minute and could hear it again.

I don’t actually like Rubin’s mix, but I’ve lived my whole life in its aftermath. Reign in Blood is credited as being the crossover moment between thrash and death metal, signaling the point at which metalheads could retreat into a deeper subculture while Metallica gravitated away toward more melodic hard rock. I’m not a person who cares too much about subgenres, to be honest – I follow them only to the extent the artists themselves discuss them, and music is usually more interesting at the borders anyway. What I can recognize is that this album was still deeply influential on the death metal and screamo I could never get into in high school, where drums and vocals drowned out the melodic instruments.

Every time I return to the source and give it my full attention, I can understand why. In a decade where the average metal song was between five and ten minutes long, Slayer doubled the tempo and still put twice as many musical ideas into two and a half minutes. The drum part is so forward in the mix because it creates continuity between all the very dramatic changes in riff and melody. Stop paying attention and it creates the effect of a twenty six minute song – keep your eye on the ball and the nine tracks become twenty.

The fact that some members of Slayer and Rick Rubin have turned out to be reactionary chuds over the years is only surprising to those in denial. While reading “Angel of Death’s” lyrics and controversy section on Wikipedia should be enough to convince you that they’re earnest about just depicting an evil man and not endorsing Joseph Mengele, it’s also revealing that they don’t really have anything to say about him. Throughout the album and its (excellent) cover art, the satanic imagery, the descriptions of brutal ways to die, the absolutely braindead “Criminally Insane” lyrics – this is trolling, meant to create a cumulative effect. It’s theater, grand guignol building toward an epic finale.

Everything builds to that tenth song, “Raining Blood,” which overwhelms the rest of the album in terms of groove, brilliant riff songwriting, portentous storytelling. The opening rain effect and tom drum with the siren guitar – I mean, this is just the coolest shit in the world. The solos are the album’s most discordant and insane, and they fly over the album’s chunkiest straight-ahead speed. The two ways to listen to the album, for me, are in its entirety, front to back, or just to listen to that last song.

KEY TRACKS: “Piece by Piece,” “Jesus Saves,” “Criminally Insane” “Raining Blood”
NEXT STOP: Arise, Sepultura
AFTER THAT: Dead Rituals, Swamp Witch

FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF

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Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Dir. John Hughes
1986

It’s hard to overstate the dominance Ferris Bueller’s Day Off had over the entire rest of the 80s catalog growing up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Sick days, substitute teachers, pizza parties, Von Steuben Day Parade, school field trips to the Art Institute, this was as constant a companion as The Indian in the Cupboard or Newsies. I went to a talent show at Glenbrook North with a friend back in high school, and they were still constantly referencing Ferris in 2010. One of my mom’s OTs claimed he was “the guy who did the flip” during the “Twist & Shout” sequence. 

Until Mean Girls and Fall Out Boy, Ferris was our pop culture representation. And, frankly, he probably still overshadows either one when it comes to relating to one another. We love the Art Institute – we love Wrigley – we love our sausage and want it to overshadow any fine dining establishments we might have in the city. We don’t have an entire city of women as hot as Jennifer Grey and Mia Sara, but we celebrate those women where they exist.

Scolds have given this film something of a beating, insisting Ferris is a bad person. This line of criticism is noxious to begin with (Ferris is my friend!,) but it also misunderstands Ferris’s dramatic function. Ferris isn’t an audience cipher or a real person – he’s Bugs Bunny, set loose in a Looney Toon with Alan Ruck’s sad sack Cameron and the Fuddian Dean Rooney. If he’s aspirational, he’s aspirational the way a cryptid is aspirational. God forbid we have a little fun in this world.

The Ferrari, a crazy composite of replicas and models.

I actually do think this is misunderstood partly because of other John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club or Planes, Trains & Automobiles, which are more humanistic approaches with deeply flawed characters. Hughes set out to make a hypercapable character who can handle anything who comes his way. He comes across as a funny sociopath, but he also really loves Sloane and Cameron. I love the guy. I wish I had that spark. The film teaches you how to watch it, too – it makes space for people who can’t stand Ferris from the start and then asks you what harm he’s really doing.

This film also employs one of Hollywood’s greatest cinematographers of all time, Tak Fujimoto. Fujimoto’s first credits include Terence Malick’s Badlands, exploitation greats like Switchblade Sisters and Death Race 2000, and the original Star Wars – he became famous for his collaborations with Jonathan Demme on films like The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia and his later work with M. Night Shyamalan on The Sixth Sense and Signs. There is an incredible tactility to Fujimoto’s choice of lighting and lensing in every shot of this film, and the framing he chooses to match Hughes’ blocking makes the Art Institute sequence one of the most beautiful in film history. A moment like Cameron looking at Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jette is, for my money, an instant admission to the all time hall of fame. 

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a home for me. I have so many memories both of watching the film itself and of being in the places it depicts. I remember old friends and their families. Revisiting it always brings me a lot of joy, and I get the stupid “Oh Yeah” Yello song stuck in my head every time. If someone asked me if I wanted to get some Portillo’s and throw it on this minute, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Sounds like a great afternoon.

BLUE VELVET

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BLUE VELVET
Dir. David Lynch
1986

The short films David Lynch made in art school, as well as Eraserhead, contain his intense visual horror flair and his otherworldly treatment of sound and light, but they’re deeply angry films, a young man railing against societal failures and expectations. The Elephant Man and Dune are adaptations, Lynch putting his distinct style onto other people’s work. But they also soften his edges quite a lot – Dune marks what I think his first real mature work showcasing empathy and friendship, the relationships between Paul Atreides and his friends full of liveliness. It’s the first time watching a David Lynch project I feel like you can really fall in love with some of the characters.

It’s also the last time Lynch would ever work on something that massive in scale, even accounting for Twin Peaks: The Return. The degree to which Lynch poured his heart into the film, the time he spent with Frank Herbert (who largely liked the film) undermined in post-production by the De Laurentiis family, ended Lynch’s desire to work on big-budget films going forward. Creative control came with a lower asking price – according to producer and Lynch collaborator Sabrina Sutherland, that approach is still getting pitches into board rooms as long as they aren’t about mythical Snoots.

The lessons he learned making Dune are visible in Blue Velvet, not least of which through the return of Kyle MacLachlan as Jeffrey Beaumont, another precocious golden lion-boy quickly corrupted by exposure to a world where naivete can become egomania. While Blue Velvet was conceived in 1973 alongside Eraserhead, it lacks that film’s sour edge and general misanthropy. The film is still on the knife’s edge of thriller and horror, depending on how unsettling you find its darkness, but it comes to that darkness through a deep love of its characters. Jeffrey is presented from the start as a character more like one of the Hardy Boys than Jack Nance’s Eraserhead Henry Spencer, and while he does find some unseemly, voyeuristic desires and a penchant for manipulation in himself, his conscience also always seems aware that these things are wrong.

Lynch (center) and the boys (from left to right, Kyle MacLachlan, Brad Dourif, J. Michael Hunter, Lynch, Jack Nance, Dennis Hopper)

That melodramatic empathy with these characters is, to me, the real heart of the Lynchian ideal, as it combines tropes or familiar, mundane elements with intense tragedy or darkness. Some people take this to mean something as simple as “the radiator is menacing” – while I think that’s certainly true of Lynch, it’s also true of iconic images like the telephone on the stairs in Maya Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon or the basement in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. I think what really makes the Lynchian whole is the juxtaposition of menace and love, and just about every Lynch work from Dune onward is embodied by that ideal.

It’s certainly the primary iconic juxtaposition of Blue Velvet, Bobby Vinton playing over a suburban lawn until the grass leads us back to a severed ear. Isabella Rosselini’s Dorothy Vallens is tragic but also erotic, and her trauma response cycles between despair and desire in the flash of a moment. Frank Booth is a terrifying villain, and that villainy never comes forward more uncannily than watching Dennis Hopper sob over the performance of the woman he brutalizes. Even Dean Stockwell’s terrifying pimp Ben is given the Roy Orbison “In Dreams” solo, creating a dynamic of traditional American beauty and violent blood running under the surface. The only person spared this conflict is Laura Dern’s Sandy, whose only exposure to the darkness is to see it crashing down upon her lawn in the film’s crushing climax of melodrama.

David Lynch’s work has meant a lot to me for the past ten years or so, since I first met Twin Peaks and Eraserhead. Annie and I originally bonded over talking about Twin Peaks, and his films have been a source of many beloved memories of mine. Last summer, when we moved back to Madison, the first film we saw at the UW Cinematheque was Blue Velvet, and there I reunited for the first time with friends I met maybe six months after my first time watching Twin Peaks. It’ll remain a special experience to me for a long time.