Screen
Baumann, Paul
ROCKIN' & ROLLIN' 'CRY-BABY' & 'MYSTERY TRAIN' In Soul on Ice (McGraw-Hill, 1968) Eldridge Cleaver identified the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision as the pivotal event in...
...In fleeting and unknowing ways, each touches on the others...
...The film's last lingering shot pictures a train, a pickup truck, and a police car all breaking off in opposite directions, and presumably taking their occupants on to the next cosmic misunderstanding...
...We'll get married and live in suburbia," he woos Allison...
...He's a consumer...
...Obviously, Waters thinks such dichotomies are still relevant...
...The Vaselined leader of the high school's "squares" is a veritable incarnation of Cleaver's Hot Dog and Malted Milk set...
...PAUL BAUMANNds...
...Naturally, a certain suspense accrues...
...squirming through sewers...
...He's the leader of a troupe of teenage mutant rock 'n' rollers called the "Drapes," who also double as backup musicians in his band...
...This can be amusing, but the movie is more like an echo chamber than a natural landscape...
...a predictable insult that results in shocking violence...
...I must have gotten the wrong address," Elvis's ghost intones mellifluously before fading away...
...One thing is for certain: wherever they go, Time will hang heavy on their hands...
...And that might serve as an epigraph for this instruction in dissociation...
...Desegregation would "graft Mind back onto Body," Cleaver wrote...
...It offers some startling, well-marinated moments: a woman harrowingly stalked down an otherwise deserted street...
...ROCKIN' & ROLLIN' 'CRY-BABY' & 'MYSTERY TRAIN' In Soul on Ice (McGraw-Hill, 1968) Eldridge Cleaver identified the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision as the pivotal event in America's racial, spiritual, and sexual "convalescence...
...As a musical, Cry-Baby is a kind of pimply, hyper-thyroid version of Grease...
...Then, thanks to Elvis Presley and the Beatles, the soulful power of black rhythm and blues was transformed into rock 'n' roll...
...a bout of lovemaking in which the persistent camera angle exerts its own voyeuristic presence...
...Jarmusch also has luck with Ms...
...Mystery Train has great luck here...
...It's a match made in jukebox heaven...
...Depp is a physical clone of James Dean, and a musical shadow of Elvis Presley...
...First, and most incongruously, we meet a teenage Japanese couple (Masatoshi Nagasi and Youki Kudoh) on a pilgrimage to Graceland, Elvis Presley's house cum shrine...
...At the axis of these unconnecting stories are the hotel clerk and bellhop...
...threatening and forever heckling parents...
...The black blues singer Screamin' Jay Hawkins plays the desk clerk...
...Locane, although she plays the pure and inhibited maiden, has some of Grace Kelly's daunting sensuality...
...But much of its energetic dualism reverberates (literally) in director and writer John Waters's Cry-Baby...
...Next, an Italian widow (Nicholetta Braschi), improbably stuck in Memphis, ends up in an adjacent room at the same dilapidated Memphis hotel as the teenagers...
...Cry-Baby and his gang are untouchables who carry the virus of sexuality and rebellion...
...If Waters wields his cam-era like a can of spray paint, Jarmusch (Down by Law) is an ascetical Pointillist...
...He's pretty, and plausibly earnest...
...Black music was the subversive element...
...Laid out across the stern visual structure of this film, the skin of the story is thin...
...A new awareness and enjoyment of the flesh" was humanizing an increasingly technological and mechanical society...
...If black Americans were finally going to have access to libraries, "the deep frozen geeks of the Hot Dog and Malted Milk set" would be exposed to the genius of black America...
...PAUL BAUMANN...
...Hawkins studies every calamity with the same ageless disinterest, and his withering remarks are like unorthodox opinions at a modernist garden party...
...Rock 'n' roll aspirant Cry-Baby is a misunderstood juvenile delinquent from the wrong side of the tracks...
...When no revelation is forthcoming, however, tedium descends...
...And then there is the droll sense of absurdity pervading the movie...
...the eery appearance of Patty Hearst (as an actress...
...a backseat birth...
...But so little remains of the 1950s Malted Milk set that the movie seems to be using a sledgehammer on a gnat...
...Cry-Baby is done in the broadest satirical style imaginable, yet it invokes the icons of teen-age life with a kind of sincerity...
...Indeed, Jarmusch repeatedly returns to the same shot or sequence of shots...
...However, for those with a certain kind of patience, Mystery Train has quirky rewards...
...It has a spare, if not static, minimalist perspective...
...Braschi, whose Italian forbearance is put to the test by the presence of a voluble idiot for a roommate and the appearance of an ectoplasmic Elvis Presley...
...One doubts Cleaver still clings to this bold metaphysical theory now that he is an evangelical preacher...
...Like Cleaver, Waters (Hairspray) locates his rock 'n' roll fable in 1954, and he is equally explicit about the connection between race and class and music and sex...
...Jarmusch lethargically circles around a few iconic settings, giving his actors bits of funny business to hold our flagging interest...
...We get three parallel stories about the lives of nine characters...
...In bringing Cry-Baby and Allison together, Waters dramatizes the prurient fantasies of a buttoned-up age...
...First, Chubby Checker and his Twist taught whites "how to shake their asses again...
...Hawkins has the massive, implacable head of a Mayan god, and wears the most brilliant scarlet suit this side of Rome...
...Beauty, Brains, Breeding, Bounty" is the school's credo...
...Cry-Baby Walker (Johnny Depp), the swivel-hipped teenage hero of this mock musical, titillates his audience by promising "Something hillbilly...
...In turning away from black America, whites had repressed their own sensuality...
...Oh," she sighs, watching Cry-Baby and friends loiter in the high school parking lot, "I'm so tired of being good...
...something colored...
...Waters, the idiosyncratic creator of the scatological Pink Flamingos, has a readily recognizable, if not unique, sensibility...
...Last, a trio of sodden misfits on the run from the police also checks in...
...Whenever Mystery Train pauses at the hotel's desk, it gets very funny, and that includes the rat-sized plastic cockroach prominently on display...
...mock judicial proceedings...
...The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia," Cleaver claimed...
...Much of Cry-Baby plays like a lurid and absurd dream: leering, grotesque, and seemingly deformed bodies...
...In other words, you'll have no trouble locating the train in this movie but the mystery will prove a good deal more arcane...
...Cry-Baby represents forbidden pleasures for the delectably prim and bobby-soxed Allison Vernon-Williams (Amy Locane...
...The camera holds shots in provocative but ultimately didactic ways...
...The two attend the RSVP Charm School, run by a dithering Polly Bergen...
...Forbidden access to the full life of the mind, African-Americans had cultivated the wisdom and perceptions of the body...
...Waters skewers the sexual pieties and social conventions of the archetypal American TV family...
...D irector and writer Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train is a much more portentous exercise, but it too regards rock 'n' roll as a crucial expression of contemporary culture...
...His sly wit and evident sense of mischief break the confining frame of this picture...
...Waters is obsessed with the artificial,, often bloodless nature of modern life, and rightly so...
...Waters might be accused of being the last person in America who takes this stuff seriously enough to lampoon it...
...There's a painterly look to Mystery Train...
...But he offers little in its stead beyond a parallel indulgence in outra-geousness...
Vol. 117 • May 1990 • No. 10
