| |
|
Spoilers:
I love the novella and the comics adaptation; there's a lot to like about the film, but it's deeply flawed, both as an intrepretation of its source material and just on its own terms.
First of all, Don Johnson and Susanne Benton both appear to be about thirty years old. I don't recall if Vic's age is ever mentioned in the film, but the novella makes it clear he's in his late teens; Quilla June is supposed to be about the same age. This is pretty damn important to the story -- it's the difference between reading these people as naive/adolescent and reading them (Vic, especially) as just flat-out fucking stupid. I'm relatively certain that the latter was not Ellison's intent. Anyway, in casting actors who at least look much too old for their roles, Jones (intentionally or otherwise) paints his human protagonists as violent, immature morons, possibly somewhat retarded as a result of long-term exposure to radiation, which kinda sucks.
The film's depiction of the downunder departs significantly from the one seen in the novella (and in the comic), and it's a choice that also hurts the film. Jones has Topeka's residents all in proto-Lynchian clown makeup, I guess to illustrate they're literally painting on a smile, etc., in the face of global destruction. This idea probably sounded a lot better on paper. In practice, it's just distractingly weird, and gets old fast (more or less instantly). Ellison conveyed the same point more effectively, and with considerably more subtlety, simply by showing Topeka as an anachronistic Winesburg, Ohio-type small town, deep in denial. Jones and subtlety don't seem to talk much, though.
Jones further misses the point by reworking the story so that Vic -- who thinks he's been given the key to the city (i.e., license to fuck every fertile woman in Topeka) -- learns to his horror that he's actually going to be milked for sperm by...you know...some kind of milking machine. His reaction and the mechanics of the milker (including a device that sends current into the part of Vic's brain that triggers an orgasm) provide some throwaway humor, but this doesn't make up for the fact that Jones has just kicked a leg out from under the story. In the novella, Vic realizes that his own personal vision of utopia (a 24/7 orgy) comes at the cost of his freedom, and finds that his freedom is more important to him; in the film, he's the prisoner of weirdos in clown makeup who make no bones about treating him like a labrat, and acts accordingly. Escape presents the same perils in both works, but -- in the film -- has been stripped of meaning.
And the ending...well. I guess the last line could be funny if you've never encountered the source material. In the novella, Vic has just made the most horrific, enormous sacrifice he's capable of, and it's, like, just not that funny a scene. In order for this ending to have any emotional impact, however, you have to have invested a great deal more in the characters than Jones does in the film.
Is the film sexist? Maybe. It certainly doesn't portray real positive attitudes about women. I wouldn't exactly be surprised to learn that L.Q. Jones was the kind of guy, in 1975, who regularly slapped waitresses on the ass and called female shopkeepers "honey." But saying that A Boy and His Dog endorses misogyny is a little like saying Natural Born Killers endorses mass murder. The flaw of both films is that they're not up to the task of adequately addressing the questions and concerns they raise. Instead, we wind up with these cartoonish films that don't take sides at all, only address their own themes in broad strokes, and leave their morally flawed "heroes" more or less the same at the end as they were in the beginning. The sad part about A Boy and His Dog is that the film had the potential to be more.
In Jones's defense, A Boy and His Dog is a terrific exploitation movie on a visceral level (or at least its first half is). It's hard to hate on a post-apocalyptic spaghetti western that features a telepathic dog. I love the look and feel of the above-ground scenes (but I also have a great fondness for windswept, radioactive desert landscapes). And Blood's great. Overall, though, I think the Corben comic is much, MUCH closer to an ideal adaptation -- if the film is ever remade (which doesn't seem too implausible), they could do worse for a model. |
|
|
