Six Shots: 'Near Dark' (1987)
A half-dozen brilliantly subversive shots from Kathryn Bigelow's horror-western mash-up
Programming Note: A couple weeks back, I promised the conclusion of my two-parter on The Virgin Suicides. Unfortunately, life intervened and knocked me off schedule significantly. Part 2 is coming, but in the meantime, I wanted to share another piece I had in the hopper. The idea here, which may become a series, is to examine a single movie through an analysis of six individual shots. Thanks for your patience, and I hope you dig!
Oh, I almost forgot: SPOILER ALERT!
SHOTS 1-3:
In a span of only eight seconds, and in the very first two shots of the film no less, Kathryn Bigelow tells you exactly what she’s up to with Near Dark (1987).
Fading in from black, an extreme close-up of a mosquito, feeding. Seconds later—same shot—a hand slams down from out of frame, squashing the bug, spilling its blood.
Next we see the owner of the executing hand and the victim of the bite: Caleb (Adrian Pasdar), our protagonist, lying across the bed of a pickup, cigarette dangling from his lips, cowboy hat atop his head.
How better for Bigelow to announce her intent of hybridizing the vampire film and the western than by smashing together these two images—a blood-sucking insect, itself soon bloodied, and the iconic American cowboy—in the film’s opening seconds?
These are just a few examples of how Bigelow compiles, condenses, contorts, and subverts images and avatars of the genres she brings together in Near Dark, still underseen in spite of its blistering inventiveness.
The great Soviet director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein once described this sort of combination of shots as “not an idea composed of successive shots stuck together but an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another.1 In other words, a sum greater than the total of its parts. Consider it Near Dark’s mission statement.
If there was any question after the first cut as to what was in store, the third shot removes all doubt. For a movie that is ostensibly a vampire tale, the opening moments are preoccupied with the iconography of the old-fashioned western, as in here, where our protagonist lies in the truck, boots dangling over the side, against a Texas sunset vista.
These are just a few examples of how Bigelow compiles, condenses, contorts, and subverts images and avatars of the genres she brings together in Near Dark, still underseen in spite of its blistering inventiveness.2
SHOT 4:
Bigelow’s greatest flex, though, is towards the movie’s midpoint. Mae (Jenny Wright), a pixie-haired, doe-eyed vampire, seduces our young, cocksure cowboy—maybe to drink from him, or out of genuine sexual attraction, or perhaps both.
Mae inevitably bites Caleb, turning him, too, into a vampire. But he doesn’t cotton to the killing lifestyle, refusing to feast on other humans and growing sickly and on the verge of perishing by virtue of this refusal. Mae attempts to train him in the ways of vampirism, but her lover and pupil can’t summon the courage to do the deed.
So Mae, rather than see Caleb starve, dines on his behalf and opens her own wrist with her own teeth, offering her blood and that of her recent victim to him. And, oh, how Bigelow flips the gender dynamics in her rendering of this moment!
It is a commonplace of pornography to depict women on their knees subserviently performing fellatio on standing men—but Bigelow reverses this arrangement. Caleb is a needy supplicant, and Mae stands in the conventional position of power above him: a blowjob inverted.
Not only that, but the image of a woman feeding a man, otherwise incapable of acquiring nourishment himself, and by way of suckling, connotes an infant nursing at its mother’s breast. What’s more, Bigelow stages this moment against a pair of oil derricks busy extracting another type of precious fluid.
It’s stunning: against a backdrop of the industry and the machinery that civilized the Western frontier, a cowboy, that most iconic of American characters and emblem of rugged masculinity, is brought to his knees, withering and puny, by a woman, one who now tends to him as she would a child. Mae even has to jerk her arm away to prevent Caleb from greedily taking more than his share. Too much, she explains, and she’ll die.
SHOTS 5-6:
The above shots are but a few of many such inversions in the film. Look at how Bigelow takes aim at the nuclear family. Mae is no lone wolf; rather, she travels as part of a pack, at one point in a family RV with a bicycle mounted to the back. Among her companions is the assertive father-figure, Jesse (Lance Henriksen), and his steadfast wife, Diamondback (Jenette Goldstein); along with Severen (Bill Paxton, unrestrained and clearly having a ball), an unruly ne’er-do-well in spurs, cowboy boots, and a bolo tie; and the lispy, oh-so-creepy preteen little brother, Homer (Joshua John Miller).
Despite Homer’s manifest adolescence, he is in fact the oldest of the bunch. We learn that he is the one who “turned” Mae, luring her to her fate by requesting her help with his homework. Homer even predates Jesse, who in one scene claims to have fought in the American Civil War and who, along with Severen, quips about a fire they once started in Chicago—the Great Fire of 1871 one is led to believe. The youngest in appearance is thus revealed to be chronologically the eldest of the gang, and perhaps even its progenitor.
And this is what makes Homer’s modus operandi of preying so unsettling, and the film’s revelation of it is so diabolical. The rest of the family’s methods are disclosed more or less forthrightly: Severen and Mae rely on seduction, while Diamondback and Jesse opportunistically troll for vulnerable motorists and late-night loners. With neither the power or allure of an adult body, Homer adopts a much more sinister approach. In a key scene, Homer stages a hit-and-run accident by overturning a bike at an intersection while he plays dead, awaiting a Good Samaritan’s final noble impulse.
It’s only in retrospect that one realizes that the bike affixed to the Winnebago in the film’s first reel is not some marginal detail. Its early appearance instead lays the ground for its later deployment as a murderous prop. Who, apart from Bigelow, could have imagined such an ingenious reversal?
Sergei Eisenstein, “The Dramaturgy of Film Form.” In Critical Visions of Film Theory, eds. Corrigan, White, and Mazaj (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011): 264, emphasis in original.
As of this writing, Near Dark is only streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Fascinating and on target observations. Thanks for making an unsettling film even more unsettling- especially Homer.
This was an excellent read, thank you for sharing! As a writer I always focus more on story and structure than visual cues in my writing and I must get better!