Parents – Nightmares of Childhood from John Keefer on Vimeo.
[Editor's note: Press Play is pleased to welcome filmmaker John Keefer to our roster of contibutors.]
Parents is a film with an intimate and acute knowledge of what it feels like to be a frightened child, citing the source of those fears as a growing awareness of the carnality of adults.
The film was not a success critically or commercially on its first release in 1989. Reviews complained of a mixed tone — that it didn't know if it wanted to be a horror or a comedy. But the film works best if taken from the point of view of a child. A tipoff comes from the opening image; it suggests a boy's point of view, or perhaps a Missing Child photo from the side of a carton of milk. What the boy sees is what we all see at one point or another: the strange behaviors and bizarre rituals of adults glimpsed through banisters from upstairs.
I blame the accusations of a mixed tone on the fact that there were two listed Directors of Photography. Taken from the p.o.v. of the boy, the tone is perfectly consistent: bright, perfect days dissolving into nightmares and monsters under the bed. In this sense, the film's '50s setting isn't so much indicting the hypocrisy of the time as much as using the period to suggest the archetypes of the father, the mother, and the confusion we all share as the child.
I haven't mentioned the plot: Michael realizes his parents are cannibals and the leftovers they keep trying to get him to eat are actually people. He doesn't spend the film trying to convince police or school officials that his Parents are dangerous and need to be stopped. We just see him being affected by it. Which is just right.
I can't say if this is a great film, but it's one I saw at the perfect time. I was around ten or eleven when it played on cable, and it was just a little over my head, which is probably why it's stuck with me for the past eighteen years. It's a film about the moment before the last moment of childhood, a time when nightmares were very real.
John Keefer is a writer/director of short films working out of Phoenixville, PA. You can view his work here. You can follow him on twitter here.
Sharon, played by Mimi Rogers, is someone whose life is adrift. She lives an existence numb to human emotions, trying to get whatever cheap thrills she can find. Only when Sharon begins to notice how others are at peace with themselves does she begin to find her purpose. Sharon completely embraces the beliefs of Christianity, finding a way out of her past life.
Sharon marries and has a daughter with one of her early sex partners (David Duchovny), saving him from his own aimless existence. This is where the film starts to challenge the beliefs of Christians and non-Christians alike. After Sharon loses her husband in a mass shooting, both she and her daughter are not deterred. They are both fully convinced that the rapture is soon approaching. Sharon believes she receives a message from God to take her daughter to a remote park until the rapture happens.
The thesis of The Rapture is that God is a narcissist, giving us life for the sole purpose of demanding unconditional love in return, no matter how much damage his demands have inflicted on human lives. The film posits the theory that God is undeserving of our love even if he does exist, that he is in no way any less fallible to pettiness and power trips than the human beings he created. Like many humans, God lives by a set of rules and laws that he applies arbitrarily at his own moral convenience. Tolkin illustrates this by showing the non-believing cop immediately being accepted into heaven by declaring his love for God in a last ditch effort to be saved. He's merely saying what God wants to hear to save his own skin.
Our guide through this story is Sharon (Mimi Rogers), a telephone information operator who escapes the overpowering dullness of her life through group sex with strangers. Her cruising partner is a slick Brit named Vic (Patrick Bauchau). They’re disaffected intellectual drifters. When Sharon gets visited by a couple of door-to-door Bible thumpers and one of them tries to establish a bond with her by saying, “I was like you once,” Sharon smiles wearily, as if her own transgressions were so colossal that admitting them might make her a kind of celebrity of sin. Sharon and Vic have no pursuits besides hedonism; their rejection of all beliefs is their belief system. Their pleasure is an end unto itself, and to hell with tomorrow. 
In exchanges like these, Tolkin captures the essence of what makes fundamentalists, or any other kind of completely absorbed believers, so intimidating to anyone who rejects the spiritual life. They’re often polite, even pleasant. That’s because they know that their embrace of faith is a positive value, and what nonbelievers have is negative: nonbelievers simply don’t believe. And here’s the trick: In order to formally reject the concept of God, you first have to admit there is something to reject — a being, an energy field, a mythological concept, something. That’s a troubling thing. It can gnaw at you. It gnaws at Sharon. When she presses her coworkers about the dream, their replies are infuriatingly either/or: either you believe or you don’t, they tell her. If you don’t believe, you’ll never be able to understand why we’re so happy and complete; deciding to believe makes everything else in life take care of itself. This “leap of faith” notion makes Sharon’s sudden decision to purge her life of Vic and all other evidence of sin believable. She has built her life the rejection of societal mores. She feels hollow. The dream of the pearl fills her up. 
I won’t divulge the rest of the plot because it takes some startling turns. Suffice it to say that no, Sharon doesn’t get deprogrammed; in fact, she rarely expresses doubts about the healthiness of what she’s gotten herself into. Tolkin doesn’t stage Sharon’s predicament as a nightmare voyage into cultdom, but he doesn’t make it a slam against fundamentalism, either. He sends Sharon on what can only be characterized as a spiritual journey. Along the way, she is tested, argued with, even pleaded with by friends, but Tolkin doesn’t skewer nonbelievers, in the way that secular filmmakers often turn street-corner preachers and hellfire prophets into bellowing, pink-faced ogres. He lends believers and doubters nearly equal weight, which leaves you uncertain as to where he stands — even at the climax, even when the film climbs to heights of horror that seem to verify everything the pearl cult’s child prophet has been warning us about. 
William Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A. includes several closeups of men getting shot point-blank in the face. Friedkin has been painting actors’ faces crimson since his breakthrough hit, the notoriously ruthless policier The French Connection, which included a just-for-the-hell of it close-up of a cou- ple of disfigured accident victims who had no apparent connection to the film’s main plot. In most cases, these images are a visual definition of the word “gratuitous.” But in L.A., Friedkin’s horrific close-ups are integral aspects of the picture’s down-and-dirty aesthetic and a rebuke to an especially irritating cliché: the movie character who sustains what would surely be a mortal wound in real life, only to show up a couple of scenes later with a cast on his arm. In Friedkin’s Los Angeles, when characters die, they’re dead, and Friedkin puts the camera right up in their freshly pulped faces so you know it’s adios muchacho.
Friedkin’s viciously blunt direction of the film—which he cowrote with cops-and- robbers novelist Gerald Petievich, from Petievich’s best seller—mirrors the obsessive quest of its protagonist, U.S. Treasury agent Richard Chance (William Petersen), a surly jerk hell-bent on punishing his partner’s killer, the suave counterfeiter and would-be painter Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe). Chance flouts rules and procedures in the name of justice and ego; Friedkin startles the audience by flagrantly disregarding conventions that encrusted so many Hollywood movies in the 1980s. That decade saw the rebel antiheroes of the Johnson-through-Ford eras supplanted by macho narcissists played by the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Douglas, and later, Bruce Willis; alpha males who walked all over everybody, yet still earned a slow clap at the end of the story. In the scenes of Chance drawing his more straitlaced new partner, John Vuckovich (John Pankow), deeper into his payback fantasy, the film puts an ironic 
spin on the arguments that other ’80s action heroes used to justify their quasi-fascist hijinks. “I’m gonna bag Masters, and I don’t give a shit how I do it,” Chance declares. He sounds like Mickey Rourke’s Stanley White in the Oliver Stone-scripted, Michael Cimino-directed Year of the Dragon, which came out the same year as Friedkin’s movie (White’s signature line: “How can anybody care too much?”). But there’s a crucial difference: not for a moment does Friedkin’s film encourage us to believe that Chance represents anyone’s interests but his own.
The movie is attuned to the decade’s Me First culture; it’s borderline nihilistic in a way that’s true to its gutter milieu and the self-interested, often loathsome humanoids that scamper through it. At its heart, L.A. is a cautionary tale about a man who is denied instant gratification and then seeks it in his own way, destroying careers, property, and lives in the process. In a DVD supplement, Friedkin describes L.A. as a story of “counterfeit lives” in which every major character is pretending to be something he’s not. On a superficial level, that’s accurate. (Chance and Vukovich go undercover as criminals, and Masters is a frustrated, mediocre painter who lives an art-world hero’s life, financed with money from his counterfeiting operation.) But the description implies a sense of delusion that doesn’t really jibe with the characters’ single-mindedness. They know what they are, they have primal drives, and they do what they need to do to satisfy them.
The film’s final stretch is a turbocharged black comedy—a Keystone Cops chase going the wrong way on an LA freeway while Wang Chung’s synthesized score chug-chugs like a cokehead’s dance-floor heartbeat. The chase doesn’t just build on Popeye Doyle’s deranged pursuit of the El train in The French Connection; it improves on it by serving up a spectacular metaphor for the characters’ progress through—and effect upon—their world. Tear-assing across Southern California while drug goons strafe them with rifle fire and oncoming cars and trucks swerve to avoid hitting them head-on, the treasury agents threaten the very society that their improvisations are meant to protect.
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