Owned version: The 2004 DVD released by Warner Brothers as part of the Martin Scorsese Collection box set.
Acquired: March 5th, 2015 from Amazon.
Seen before?: Twice, to my recollection - once on VHS probably around 1997 or 1998 and once on HBO around 2000 or 2001. Never from this disc.
"I'll probably get blamed for that."
The thing about being at the center of a narrative is it makes everything about you, even if it really isn't. Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is hiding on a fire escape from an angry mob when he peeps in a window and sees a man shot to death by an angry woman. His reaction is not one of shock but of rueful self-pity, which given the circumstances is semi-understandable - he's already been accused of at least one thing he assuredly did not do, a string of apartment burglaries, which is why there's a mob on his tail. He's having an impossibly bad evening... but the murdered man in the apartment is having a worse one.
That's a fascinating aspect of Paul's trials throughout After Hours, Martin Scorsese's hilarious and unnerving black-comic exercise in ratcheted urban paranoia: the insinuation that much of what he goes through is due to his self-absorption. His skills in reading other people and choosing who to trust are poor and only made worse by stress/exhaustion, as is his unerring ability to choose the wrong response in any situation; by the later stages of the film, he's compounding his troubles by throwing blind panicked trust at an obvious lunatic like Gail, Catherine O'Hara's bizarre and giggly ice-cream-van driver, then whining his way out of a temporary haven provided by a gay man who furtively picks him up as he's seeking refuge in a park. Before that, he'd scotched his evening with flighty raw-nerve Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) by trying to make sexual overtures on her rather than just be the conversationalist she repeatedly says she's looking for that night; further exacerbated the situation by getting snippy and cold towards her even as her emotional state visibly deteriorates; misunderstood a circular conversation with a bouncer and in doing so accidentally agreed to having his head shaved; and allowed his frustrations to boil over at Julie, a lonely, if slightly odd, waitress (Teri Garr, finding all the pathos she can in her short screen time) who was nice enough to take him in out of the rain. Paul may indeed be stuck in SoHo as a sort of purgatorial punishment, but he's had the keys to the gate within his grasp several times and not been able to see it.
Then again, maybe the universe really does just have it out for him. Both these things can be true - Paul is kind of an asshole, yet the misfortunes piled upon him seem out of proportion unless he's been fingered as karma's dumping ground for the night. Despite the connotations of my initial argument, it can only be argued that Paul is the object around which everything in After Hours orbits - especially the camera. As it zooms, drifts, roves and circles with a malevolent energy, the camera never detaches from Paul's proximity, even when he's immobile and encased in plaster. Furthermore, Scorsese throws in a number of sharp little details to signify that this isn't just stacked assholery, many of which I'd never before noticed. When Paul goes to visit Marcy, she's staying with Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), a conceptual artist who drafts him into helping with her latest sculpture while he waits for Marcy to return from the pharmacy. The act of doing so gets plaster on his white shirt, so Kiki lends him a black shirt with pinstripes; the swap from white to black, combined with the suggestion of prison stripes, is a clever indication of how the night will proceed. (A similar white/black contrast exists between the phone in Paul's apartment, which he uses to phone Marcy in hopes of a nice evening, and the phone in Kiki's apartment, which he uses to phone the police and report a death.) Later, in Julie's apartment, she attempts to cheer him up by dancing to the Monkees's "Last Train to Clarksville"; Paul breaks down crying just as Mickie Dolenz gets to, "...and I don't know if I'm ever coming home." Even later, he returns to Kiki's apartment in search of a $20 bill he noticed on the surface of her plaster sculpture, and right after he removes it, the flashlights of the nascent anti-burglary posse shine through onto him. The God Paul finds himself bellowing at in a moment of high dudgeon has a sick sense of humor, it seems.
Not as sick as it could have been, though - the original ending was for Paul to be trapped in limbo inside another sculpture, this one built for him by barfly/basement-dwelling resident artist June (Vera Bloom) as a disguise against the angry mob. This haven soon becomes another trap, another cosmic joke on Paul perpetuated on him by a mysterious figure who knows his name without him ever mentioning it to her. His deliverance comes at the hands of the real thieves (played by Cheech and Chong), puckish figures of anarchy who slip through a manhole and into his basement prison - literally descending into the underworld to spirit him away - and in the light of this proposed ending, Cheech's line, "A stereo is a stereo, but art is forever," sounds damned ominous. But instead, he ends up falling out of their van right in front of his office. After Hours opens with Paul training a new hire (Bronson Pinchot!), who responds that the job is, "...temporary anyway. I don't wanna be stuck here doing this for the rest of my life." Paul's response to this unintentional slight is to gaze around at everyone in the office who IS here for good, reflect on his own station and recess into himself for the evening. It closes with Paul back at his desk, having traded one nerve-jangling personal Hell for another, far more anonymous and manageable one; as though to drive that home, the camera at last breaks free of Paul and slides around taking another look at his coworkers. Is that all there is to a bad evening?
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