NEAR DARK: The Children of the Night

March is Women's History Month, so let's continue last year's tradition of highlighting a weekly movie by female filmmakers. With the recent global resurgence of toxic masculinity and fascist norms, it's all the more important to seek gender parity in the director's chair. For the director is as much an embodiment of the soul of a movie as any one person can be, and the souls of men are clearly not good enough.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Writers: Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Red
Cast: Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, Tim Thomserson, Joshua John Miller, Marcie Leeds
Runtime: 94 mins.
1987

Kathryn Bigelow holds an interesting place in film culture. She is arguably the most prominent female director, certainly the most mainstream. Although I am not especially familiar with her career, one obvious throughline presents itself: her films traffic in hypermasculinity. In an artistic climate that is actively hostile towards women--especially female directors--it makes sense that a woman's only path to prominence requires wading through the swamp of masculinity. This is wholly anecdotal evidence, but looking at the four movies I reviewed last March, Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker was a highly masculine production, Mary Harron's American Psycho was all about toxic masculinity, and even Speed Racer trafficked in a bunch of masculine themes. The exception is A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which aggressively positioned itself as indie and alienating (and still doled out plenty of gender commentary).

It's far from surprising that women looking to make movies in the public eye are severely limited in their prospects, but we can't argue that Bigelow hasn't been making exactly the movies she's wanted to. Her films have too much verve to be obligatory. They indicate a deep fascination with hypermasculinity, one that oscillates between the straightfaced and the parodic from movie to movie.

Though in this specific instance, it is the case that Bigelow didn't actually get to make quite the movie she wanted to. As the story goes, Bigelow was seeking backing for a neo-Western, but this was the late eighties and Westerns were not en vogue. Vampire movies, on the other hand, were en vogue. Bigelow thus opted to make her project more bankable by scripting a vampire Western. Near Dark was born.


Bigelow folds a classically queer genre into one that lives and breathes het-masculinity. The result is fascinating. The film begins with Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar) meeting up with a couple guys outside a bar. They immediately spot a young woman to objectify, Mae (Jenny Wright). Caleb takes the opportunity to pursue her somewhat aggressively. She coyly plays along with his advances. At some point during their evening together, the creeping strangeness of what ought to be a familiar dynamic becomes clear: Mae is the one who has power over the situation, not Caleb. Mae, you see, is a vampire.

She gives him a bit of a nip before night's end. Not enough to kill him, but enough to transform him into a body that burns in the sun and craves fresh blood. Before Caleb figures out what he has become, he is kidnapped by Mae's surrogate family, a roaming band of vampires led by the cowboy confederate Jesse Hooker (Lance Henriksen). Over the years he has built a tight-knit group around himself, including his lover Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein), the sociopathic Severen (Bill Paxton), the old beyond his body Homer (Joshua John Miller), and Mae. The group is fierce, overprotective, insular, a dark mirror to the typical sitcom family unit. They consider Caleb dangerous, but Mae pleads for his life. They relent and agree that he can be one of them--so long as he makes a kill of his own to prove himself. For his part, Caleb is willing to be complicit in their atrocities for the sake of his connection to Mae, but he cannot make the definitive choice of taking life himself.

It's unclear why Mae chooses to take Caleb under her wing. Maybe she thinks of him as a plaything, maybe she develops genuine affection for him, maybe it is pure and simple lust. Certainly all are true to some extent, and some are likely more true than others at different points in the movie. This central ambiguity exists in its most starkly literal form the first time Mae lets Caleb feed of her own blood. She stands, wrist bleeding, and allows Caleb to suck her life force in a moment that is sexually charged, thematically resonant, and politically complicated.

Near Dark thrives on its seedy imagery. It is something of a twisted road movie, with its caravan of nomadic creatures sowing violence and discord all across the midwest. Their makeup is effective, not excessive; the vampires' embodiment is wan, yearning, slightly desiccated. Their faces evoke the dusty burnt-out landscape through which they travel. There's something apocalyptic about Near Dark. Or rather, Bigelow, cinematographer Adam Greenberg, and production designer Stephen Altman are fully committed to teasing out what is apocalyptic in the nature of the contemporary American midwest. It is a brilliant wedding of form and content, topped off with some truly disturbing special effects; when these vampires are exposed to the relentless midwestern sun, their skin boils and chars like forgotten meat left on the burner.

Near Dark is at its best when suffused with Bigelow's desolate imagery. Near Dark is at its worst when the characters are talking. The dialogue is punchy, corny, and utterly in keeping with B-movie schlock in a way that clashes with the visual sophistication on display. It could be that Bigelow and writing partner Eric Red stilted the dialogue on purpose, and in its better moments it fits, but the dissonance is too pronounced. Likewise the plot ranges from immaterial to shaggy. Near Dark being a road movie of sorts, this doesn't matter too much. But some of the contrivances and conveniences, such as the ridiculous final solution to the protagonist's problems, are occasionally too much to bear. Contrived is also an appropriate descriptor for the score by Tangerine Dream, a German electronic music collective whose funky tunes may have felt apropos at the time, but have aged horribly.

None of that matters when the film is delivering one of its sizable stable of iconic moments. Like the classic Western shootout at a motel, with the brilliant wrinkle that bullet holes are letting toxic beams of light into the vampires' lair. Or even better, the scene in which the entire vampire family terrorizes a hole in the wall bar. Bigelow is at her best here, slowly ratcheting up the pressure cooker of tension until it explodes in an orgy of blood and excess. Every character has at least one incredible moment in this sequence, with Bill Paxton's Severen stealing the show and making good on the unhinged potential of his characterization. It's one of the finer scenes of its kind this side of Tarantino.

In a lot of ways Near Dark is simpleminded, but Bigelow compensates for all of them with her assured directorial hand. She elevates the material above its sloppy script to create a howling vampire parable with a distinctly American swagger.

3.5 / 5  BLOBS