0 Soft Cell, "Tainted Love" (1982)

May 22, 1982, #8
(listen)

"Tainted Love" started life as a swaggering, uptempo '60s post-Motown pop soul number, recorded by Gloria Jones, written by Ed Cobb (also involved in writing "Dirty Water" and "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White" for the Standells, among others for others), released on Champion, and going nowhere fast. Or slowly. In the early '80s the Soft Cell duo of Marc Almond and David Ball ran it through the Gary Numanizer for the biggest hit of their (and the song's) careers, spending most of a full year bouncing around the Billboard Hot 100. OK, maybe it's the mix I'm pointing to that has the Gary Numan qualities (or maybe not). Later Marilyn Manson had a turn with "Tainted Love" too, so the thing has been around the block, 50 years and counting. Its resilience has to be counted as a given at this point. I was more relieved than surprised to get the detail on its pedigree, because at some point in the years since it was a hit I had relocated it in my memory all the way back to the '60s. I made someone show it to me in a book that it came from the '80s. As such, perhaps, I think of it now as one of those infinitely malleable songs. I have almost entirely lost track of the "original" Soft Cell version in all the welter of mixes (extended and otherwise), covers, live (clonking) rave-ups, and whatnot. It's a very silly song in many ways, with robot beats and a whole swollen narrative embedded in use of the word "tainted"—very silly but too often a stone winner in the clutch to be written off. Close the loop. Look for the versions that work the Supremes song in, "Where Did Our Love Go," which start with the earliest.

Detail: Soft Cell, "Tainted Love" (1982)

0 Poltergeist (1982)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, Mark Victor
Photography: Matthew F. Leonetti
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Editor: Michael Kahn
Cast: JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robbins, Heather O'Rourke, Zelda Rubinstein

Let's stipulate right off that Poltergeist is silly and unscary, except (maybe) for a couple of scenes jammed in the middle. The funny thing ha ha about this movie is how wrong it gets everything, even basic stuff, with paranormal investigators who are easily spooked, anachronistic science fiction effects, a proto-Big Chill couple smokin' dope in the bedroom, and seeming endless out-of-context hokum about "the light." It tries very hard to appear to know what it is talking about but it is obviously empty: "Poltergeists are usually associated with individuals. Hauntings seem to be connected with an area," explains our head paranormal investigator at one point, who wraps herself in a motherly shawl (Beatrice Straight). She is only reading lines from a script by Steven Spielberg in which he is merrily making shit up to fortify the special effects. He is the only poltergeist anywhere around here.

Therein lies the rub, of course—there's an exciting credit in director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), but the script is by Spielberg, the first words we see at the end are "A STEVEN SPIELBERG PRODUCTION," and it is, by all indications, Spielberg in full flush of working on Raiders of the Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial wanting to take on a horror project. By all indications, Hooper was there for the cred to get the deal done. By all indications, it was dollar signs on eyeballs (not least Hooper's) that wrecked this. And by all indications, it worked, a sideshow in the big summer of Steven Spielberg, with E.T. released just a week after it. Cha-ching, baby. E.T. is still high on the list of all-time earners, currently #9 between Shrek 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. But Poltergeist is not doing so shabby itself—#800 all-time.



Tobe Hooper is a topic for another time and place. Suffice to say for now he's virtually invisible in Poltergeist, save for some shots and storyboards (he loves people looming on staircases from below, for example). Hooper is just drowned out by the busy Steven Spielberg (who has his own interesting way of shooting looming people by the way, using a crane). It's a familiar Spielberg circus: suburban middle-class family scenery, ubiquitous TV sets turned on and playing (ludicrously they become instruments of evil here, not convincing perhaps but ahead at least of Videodrome and The Ring), the constant impulse to retreat into safe sitcom blocking and setups, and especially the overindulgence of special effects and music.

It's arguable that Hooper ran out of ideas after Chain Saw, but the evidence in Poltergeist is more persuasive that an egomaniac full of then-current horror was running the show. Spielberg would get better at this, and get better at collaborations too (in Gremlins, with Joe Dante), but he appears to be an uncontrollable force of nature run amok here. Poltergeist is most often aping other things, but adding nothing to them. A tree comes alive and grabs a kid—kind of like The Evil Dead! The cause of everything is defiling a cemetery—kind of like The Amityville Horror! Stuff is inexplicably swirling around in a bedroom—kind of like The Exorcist! Et cetera. These are not the kinds of things Hooper has done in his career, but Spielberg.

This was obvious then and it's still obvious now. My feelings about Spielberg have changed many times, in many ways—he remains one of the most confounding figures in cinema. If I liked Poltergeist then out of some sense of loyalty to him (mostly for Close Encounters of the Third Kind), now I'm more willing to dismiss it as a lesser effort. The scenes in Poltergeist that scared me (disturbed me, annoyed me, got under my skin) are consecutive in the middle of the picture, though also very much incidental to the action. One involves a cut of meat on a kitchen counter, the other a man looking at his face in a mirror. It's still pretty good stuff, but again, overdone.

The whole movie goes on too long, packed with false endings, colorful characters, extra-dimensional vortices, skeletons bobbing up in the swimming pool that is conveniently under construction in the backyard, thunder and lightning every night like evening prayers. Aiyiyi. This goes so far over the top it's coming up under its own ass again. Here's some trivia for you. Those skeletons in the swimming pool are real skeletons, because plastic versions were more costly. In a way this is a microcosm of the whole problem, isn't it? The representation of past spirits defiled includes slathering mud on and spraying down the remains of actual human beings. It's not hard to imagine Spielberg rubbing his hands at such a fortuitous turn of events. Real skeletons. And cheaper! So awesome cool, man. Like it was meant to be.

Detail: Poltergeist (1982)

0 Modern English, "I Melt With You" (1982)

(listen)

Modern English came along early enough that Wikipedia labels it a New Wave rather than a New Romantic act, but it was at least harbinger of the "second British Invasion" and an adequate standard of the times too: not just in the lush, soft, breathless, keyboardy way it proceeds but in the nuclear anxiety it embraces, as "melting with you" turns out to be dying in the arms of a lover at the onset of the final conflagration. Dinner by candlelight and long walks on the beach. Holding hands and no need for words. Mushroom cloud and out. At the time, we knew that was on the way (the TV movie The Day After became something of a media saturation event early in 1983, which may have been the peak for that). More fitting, I think, that "I Melt With You" served as soaring montage music in the teen movie Valley Girl, with Deborah Foreman and an 18-year-old Nicolas Cage. The churchy stained-glass tones of the song filter the empty-headed cheese just enough to make the moment romantic and energized, although remember also this is a Nicolas Cage performance we are talking about. One worth seeing nonetheless. Modern English plays it feather-light and deadly serious, with no evidence of a real thought of consequence in its pretty head. We hear "I Melt With You" everywhere nowadays, don't we? Shopping malls, laundromats, elevators, waiting rooms. Or is that my imagination? I keep looking in my Billboard book for the chart information but it is never there. I keep thinking if Spandau Ballet and Simple Minds managed to score top 10 hits this should have at least cracked the 40. Am I crazy?

Detail: Modern English, "I Melt With You" (1982)

0 Elvis Costello & the Attractions, "Man Out of Time" (1982)

(listen)

"Man Out of Time" is one more gorgeous mess buried between the vaporizing screams in the middle of Imperial Bedroom, an album that I recall reviewed as Elvis Costello's "Cole Porter album" (or "George Gershwin," or "Tin Pan Alley"). It was also dissed contrarian-wise by Robert Christgau in a year when it stormed to the head of the annual Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll. Maybe Christgau was right—not sure who would be willing to go full-throated on it anymore. It always struck me if anything as more Costello's shot at Sgt. Pepper or Abbey Road (Parke Puterbaugh got that right in Rolling Stone)—because of the choice of producer Geoff Emerick, who engineered those Beatles albums, but also because of its ambition and how studio-focused and tricked-up it can be. It was the first Costello album that seemed to require study (and they all did for me after this). I remain suspicious of this self-training to like things—"you have to listen to it a few times, man"—but at any rate the judgment stuck. "Man Out of Time" still seems a terrific wounded cry of the soul, absolutely stunning at about the time of the title phrase, and definitely recommended for singing along. The words are typically fussy and cute: "'Cos the high heel he used to be has been ground down / And he listens for the footsteps that would follow him around," for example. It doesn't say that much and the attention to the foot-related activities is distracting and beside the point. But whatever, he gets a pass because his pop instincts remain so true. I really am not sure what this song is about, but it's obvious it comes from a profoundly felt place, one I naturally feel and respond to. That's good enough for me.

Detail: Elvis Costello & the Attractions, "Man Out of Time" (1982)

0 Lou Reed, "Heavenly Arms" (1982)

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It's none of my business, but I still miss Sylvia. In retrospect, maybe Lou Reed was more in love with something she helped him find in himself than with her—though who can say that isn't the reason most of us are in love in the first place anyway? Not my business, as I said, and beside the point anyway. I can go visit her any time I like in this song (or, if not her, then what I miss, because obviously I don't know her). It's the song Reed used to climax The Blue Mask, his first great album of yet another reascendant period, the early '80s. And that's no coincidence, because among other things the (carefully incidental) priority is on the lines of a heterosexual agenda. "I love women, I think they're great," he says in the song "Women." Everywhere you look on that album it is women, women, women. So if it's going to be a torch song at the end the ground is laid. But it's laid with other elements too: this amazing band he assembled, with Robert Quine on guitar, Fernando Saunders on an aching soulful bass, and rock-solid drummer Doane Perry. The birth of 2 guitars bass drum as self-conscious ethos buoys this. Not to mention something about emotional recovery, the details hazy but the feeling of assessing and owning up strong here. It all comes to a bracing head in "Heavenly Arms," one of Reed's most nakedly revealing songs. The heavenly arms of the title belong to Sylvia, of course, called out by name. Not just called out, but implored, beseeched, howled for, from as vulnerable a point as may ever have been recorded, more or less. A bellow of love. It's fair enough to call it calculating—it's Lou Reed, after all, and I've outlined the case above. But that doesn't mean it won't move you, over and over again.

Detail: Lou Reed, "Heavenly Arms" (1982)

0 Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Fanny och Alexander, Sweden/France/West Germany, 312 minutes
Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman
Photography: Sven Nykvist
Music: Daniel Bell
Editor: Sylvia Ingemarsson
Cast: Pernilla Allwin, Bertil Guve, Gunn Wallgren, Allan Edwall, Jarl Kulle, Borje Ahlstedt, Ewa Froling, Christina Schollin, Mona Malm, Jan Malmsjo, Erland Josephson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Kerstin Tidelius, Emelie Werko, Marianne Aminoff, Lena Olin, Pernilla August, Harriet Andersson

Ingmar Bergman's announced final film—he would actually make many more movies for Swedish television, including Saraband in 2003—is a colossal formal banquet of a movie, with many courses and a fine table. The long version (the one to see) rambles at its ease between the church, streets, theater, and homes of Uppsala, a small but growing Swedish city in 1907. Across winter and summer holidays, Bergman's deeply complex stories and film penetrate the tormented and banal lives it observes easily and naturally. Riffing on the profile of a bourgeois extended northern European family, much in the vein of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks for an earlier era, it is plainly the work of a master, a clinic in how to turn many sharply observed small elements into a fine movie.

Interestingly, it's not even the first time Bergman released a very good long picture theatrically, with a far superior and even longer version in the wings just behind it (in the U.S., at any rate). The first was Scenes From a Marriage, from 1973, which I think is even better than Fanny and Alexander. But Fanny and Alexander is the one that gets pride of place in surveys such as the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, where it presently sits at #57 (compared with #360 for Scenes). I suspect this is because Fanny and Alexander is more overtly and even self-consciously literary in its ambitions, applying itself equally to sumptuous Christmas celebrations, familiar rotting church-inflected corruptions of the soul, and plain old ghost stories, Henry James style. Potential spoilers ahead.


Over the years, it's the Christmas celebration that's tended to stick with me most indelibly about Fanny and Alexander, remembering set pieces such as when the extended family and servants clasp hands and snake in a line through the house as they sing—joy rendered perfectly, a scene I love. The first section, "The Ekdahl Family Celebrates Christmas" by name, runs longer than 90 minutes, the longest of the five by far (I'm not sure of the specific times for the shorter, 188-minute theatrical release, but my sense from recent viewings is that proportions are basically the same).

This first section introduces the principals, catching up with them on Christmas Eve and staying with them for their elaborate feast and rituals and celebration through the night all the way to Christmas morning (among other things, this is also one of the great foodie movies of all time, with multiple eating occasions). It overflows with comforting images of middle-class Christmas customs, obviously somewhat antiquated, but still familiar, resonant, and evocative: trimmed trees, wrapped packages piled under them, a church Christmas pageant, strange and hilarious food and dining traditions. It is effectively, and amazingly, charged with love.

The Ekdahl clan, with servants, is huge, consisting at its core of Helena Ekdahl (Gunn Wallgren), the doting matriarch, with her three sons—Oscar (Allan Edwall, a beautifully expressive face), Gustav Adolf (Jarl Kulle), and Carl (Borje Ahlstedt)—and their wives and various children, two of which, by Oscar and Emilie (Ewa Froling), are the 8-year-old Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) and 10-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve) of the title.

While Fanny and Alexander are central to everything that happens, and usually quietly right in the middle of it, they are more like the still center of a storm, behaving largely as I think most children would, in both the ordinary and extraordinary circumstances they encounter. This helps ground the story, setting the startling forays into fantasy in sharper relief. Part of the genius of the screenplay, also by Bergman, is that it effectively makes no one or two or three characters the focus but rather ingeniously contrives to make the larger family itself, in all its thrumming, writhing collisions of individual personalities and failings, the central character.

In fact, because there are so many, with such rich backgrounds and stories, it still feels almost just a little underdeveloped, which is a remarkable feat for a movie that runs more than five hours. One reason I prefer the long version, for example, is because the story of the brother Carl, a failing alcoholic academic, and his German wife Lydia (Christina Schollin) and their pitiful shambles of a marriage, opens up the dimensions of the family remarkably with the addition of a few more skillfully rendered scenes. In the theatrical version I think Carl's spectacular farting is all that's most memorable about him. But there is much more to him. I also noticed the last time I looked, as another example, that we learn very little about the children of Gustav Adolf and his wife Alma (Mona Malm), the latter yet one more brilliant performance and character in a picture studded with them.

This is all aided in no small part by two hugely important elements: a dazzling cast and cinematographer Sven Nykvist. If I were going to point to the star attractions in this smorgasbord I would start with Ewa Froling, Gunn Wallgren, and another character and performance I haven't mentioned yet, Bishop Edvard Vergerus (Jan Malmsjo). (There's also a typically excellent performance from Erland Josephson as Isak Jacobi, "the Jew," but I don't want to get sidetracked here.) The showdowns between and various turns by Froling and Malmsjo tend to be the points in this epic where the tension is most ratcheted and the narrative perfectly riveting. I'm one who tires quickly of Bergman's too-frequent resort to childhood and/or sexual abuse as plot device across the body of his work, but here it is handled very well indeed. Froling and Malmsjo utterly occupy their doomed roles.

Wallgren, on the other hand, as the soft-hearted matriarch Helena, brings a warm and human touch, a kind of emotional guide-star. She gets weepy and sentimental on Christmas Eve. "The happy, splendid life is over, and the horrible, dirty life engulfs us," she says through her sobs. Then a few minutes later she cheers up again, smiling at the thought of someone. At one point she says she loved her career as an actress, but secretly preferred being a mother. The expression on her face in a quick cut in the devastating funeral march tells us everything we need to know and feel about the death of Oscar. Wallgren's performance is one that just seems to get better and better.

The whole thing does. As with another big-movie favorite of mine, Nashville (though very different), I get the feeling that Fanny and Alexander could be twice its present size, 10 hours, or even twice that, and it would still be fascinating, every minute.

Top 10 of 1982
I reckon 1982 among the better single years in a decade that seems to me now a lot more lackluster than it did as I was living through it. No accounting for taste, maybe. At any rate, the top 10 is certainly solid, though it tends to taper off some after #8. Indeed, I feel so good about everything from the year otherwise that three of the movies in the "didn't like so much" list I actually do like (talking about Diner, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and The Year of Living Dangerously). It's just that everything else made a little better impression. They may well have underwhelmed me because others have been so outspokenly partisan about them. Go figger, as a friend is wont to put it. Another day in the life of the contrarian. Also, I really should see Eating Raoul again. That means there's only one stinker I'm sure about.
1. Fanny and Alexander
2. The King of Comedy
3. Blade Runner
4. Poltergeist
5. Burden of Dreams
6. Veronika Voss
7. Tootsie
8. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
9. Liquid Sky
10. Quest for Fire

Didn't like so much: Diner, Eating Raoul, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, The Year of Living Dangerously

Gaps: The Draughtsman's Contract, Missing, On Top of the Whales, The State of Things, The Verdict

Detail: Fanny and Alexander (1982)