Night and the Cities

Where Mikey and Nicky ends, with a family home being assailed by gunfire, Wayne Kramer’s legitimately insane Running Scared (2006) begins. A stray bullet from a domestic incident next door shatters the living-room window just as low-level hoodlum Joey Gazelle (Paul Walker) is settling down to dinner with his wife and kid. If After Hours is the apotheosis of the New-York-at-night movie, perhaps Kramer’s careening, wildly OTT, gratuitously violent film is aiming to be the nocturnal urban New Jersey version. But there are, to say the least, a few flaws in this plan, not least that Prague, where most of the film was actually shot, in no way resembles the Garden State, and Kramer, hailing from Johannesburg, is no Scorsese.

To be fair, he isn’t really trying to be Scorsese. With his crazed, jittery, oversaturated images and a heart-attack editing style he appears more to be emulating (and often outdoing) late-period Tony Scott at his most stylistically deranged. And who’s to say the film’s dislocation doesn’t add to its evocation of nighttime Never-Never-Newark as a place in which pimps and prostitutes and pedophiles become pretty literal fairy-tale characters? It doesn’t ever quite work, but it is never boring, and never less than intricately impressive in the baroque excesses of its craft, right up to the climactic orgy of gunplay that, soaked in garish ultraviolet neons, takes place in a black-light hockey rink. This is not New Jersey, it’s not even the States. Instead it’s a hyperactive hallucination of the nation after nightfall as a swirling vortex of guns, machismo, sexual exploitation, abusive fathers, guns, racial profanity, and guns.

If Kramer’s film is something of an outsider’s view of America,  Night on Earth (1991) sees consummately American indie director Jim Jarmusch looking outward from within. Not content with observing how the night acts on one city, he visits five, across Europe and the States, and views each through the window of a single cab ride. He is most at home in New York, and it yields the most endearing segment as Armin Mueller-Stahl’s delightful new-immigrant cabbie is schooled by his motormouth Brooklynite passenger (Giancarlo Esposito) in borough geography and the useful fact that the D on his dashboard stands for “Drive.” The other sections have less chemistry, but all contribute to the thesis that cities and their citizens exist in a kind of yin-yang. And though unevenness is a problem endemic to the anthology format, Night on Earth is held together by an all-timer of a score by Tom Waits, the poet laureate of the hard-knocks romance of the city at night. His compositions give the film its bluesy depth and its cool vintage-cinema vibe, as though, just out of frame, insolent hoodlums with fedoras pulled low over their eyes were snapping their fingers to its rhythms. Under his soundtrack, these lonely cities—LA, New York, Paris, Rome, Helsinki—and these lonely people are briefly, invisibly united by that tenuous cabbie/fare connection, the way a moment of harmony can make mere notes and noise into music.

No matter how hard night falls, dawn will always break. There’s a circularity to these concertina narratives that means their ends often rhyme with their beginnings, albeit imperfectly. As though the Nordic dawn were a pale, lidless eye and Anders, whom we first met rising from a bed, needs to be shielded from its gaze, Oslo, August 31st closes with him drawing the curtains against the new day and lying down to shoot up. Mikey and Nicky concludes with roles reversed and the polarity of the relationship upended: this time it’s Nicky hammering on a door, yelling for Mikey to let him in. Collateral elegantly embraces its own fatalism, when an earlier offhand comment of Vincent’s, about death and the LA subway, proves eerily prescient. The world turns, the sun rises, and for most of us the night’s terrors recede, looking a little ridiculous in the light of day. But for the protagonists of the one-night movie—whether they’re Philadelphia gangsters, Norwegian addicts, or New York cabbies venturing to Brooklyn for the first time—something momentous has happened, and they emerge subtly or savagely changed.

After Hours at first seems to be the exception. Paul is back where he began, relieved to have survived, yet fundamentally unchanged. But Scorsese unsettles the droll sight gag that is his hapless hero sitting at his desk with only the plaster dust that powders his face and suit to commemorate his ordeal. As the credits roll, the camera careens away and returns moments later to find Paul gone. The most optimistic interpretation is that, newly revivified by his brush with death, he has quit his dull job. Or perhaps he has simply gone to the washroom. But another possibility that we cannot discount (because Scorsese has a New Yorker’s sardonic sense of humor and a Catholic’s mordant sense of doom) is that even though it’s finally daytime, the New York night is not yet done with Paul. Perhaps he only escaped its clutches for a one tantalizing moment. Perhaps that was not the dream, and this is. Perhaps, when earlier he dropped to his knees and wailed at the heavens, “What do you want from me?,” the ravenous spirit of the city at night replied, “Everything,” and now it has come to claim him back.