Something Wild: Pandora's Jukebox

by Steve Dollar

When it was first released 25 years ago, Something Wild seemed very much a part of the zeitgeist. As "morning in America" drifted into the senile platitudes of Ronald Reagan's second term, and Top Gun and Back to the Future cleaned up at the box office, some filmmakers were reconsidering the national identity, in particular, the apple-pie verities of small towns in what might now be called Red States - aka, the Heartland.

It was 1986, the Year of “Americanarama” (as Village Voice critic J. Hoberman named the trend). There were gas masks and severed ears in Blue Velvet. There was David Byrne's remake of Our Town as an eccentric Texas musical in True Stories - which felt like a self-conscious, theatrical riff on early Errol Morris documentaries, like Vernon, Florida. Two years earlier, Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise had sketched out an escape from New York's Lower East Side into a depopulated landscape as a minimalist road movie. He was glancing in the rear view mirror at Herzog and Wenders, as well as Swiss photographer Robert Frank, whose 1955 book The Americans, Jack Kerouac observed, "sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film."

It's all swell to consider. But watching director Jonathan Demme talk about the movie in the interview supplement to the new Criterion edition of Something Wild, it's clear that the cultural moment wasn't nearly as significant to the director as simply reigniting his career, which he'd tabled in disgust after the “debacle” of Swing Shift - the abortive period comedy starring Goldie Hawn that was to be Demme's break into Hollywood but instead was snatched back and chopped up by the studio. As such, this screwballsy comedy-turned-thriller, conceived as an NYU Film School thesis by 30-year-old screenwriter E. Max Frye, offered Demme a chance to reinvent himself.

Ironically, that's one of the film's pivotal themes. If the story begins as an East Village romp akin to the yuppie-takes-a-walk-on-the-wild-side scheme of After Hours or Desperately Seeking Susan, it quickly ditches that milieu in much the way nice-guy coffee achiever Charles (nee Charlie) Driggs (Jeff Daniels) blows off an afternoon at the corporate office where he's the new VP. He's just been picked up by Lulu (Melanie Griffith) at a funky downtown diner. Soon they're speeding through the Holland Tunnel and into deepest Jersey in a crazy sedan decked out like Graceland's Jungle Room, a thick reggae bassline rumbling in harmony with the motor.

Lulu is a piece of work: a mystery gal in a black dress and sheer stockings, garlanded with Afrocentric jewelry and sporting Louise Brooks bangs under which she bats her lashes at Charlie, a seemingly upright young American whom she just watched pocket his lunch check. “You're a rebel, Charlie,” she tells him, in a babydoll coo, “You just don't know it.”

What happens next is always a surprise, but the key throughout is the dynamic between the seemingly straitlaced Daniels and the free-spirited Griffith, the soul of good-natured human decency and the post-punk Pandora, luring an allegedly married man out of the air-conditioned nightmare into a sweat-drenched misadventure full of kinky sex, stolen booze, abandoned cars and various other crimes and misdemeanors at which point, Charlie learns Lulu's real name is Audrey, and she's hijacked him for the express purpose of having him pose as her husband at her 10 Year high school reunion.

We're learning that neither Charlie nor Lulu/Audrey are really who they appear to be - they can't even fool her mom Peaches (Dana Preu), who nudges Charlie over the kitchen sink after they drop by for an unexpected visit somewhere in the movie's Pennsylvania, “You've got a real wife somewhere, haven't you?” It's a loaded question. But in the film's centerpiece - the reunion scene - Demme suspends the narrative arc and just lets the camera hang out on the dance floor, with a party of extras busting a move to New Jersey post-punk heroes The Feelies, playing mostly covers (“I'm a Believer”) in front of a giant American flag. It's one of the most perfect moments in the last 30 years of movies, two characters who appear to have emerged from a thrift-shop chrysalis: Charlie in his new wave dress suit, Audrey now a blonde gamine with a pixie cut, cutting a rug as the soundtrack spills with song.

And then. As the band plays the jittery chords to “Loveless Love” (an original Feelies song I like to call “Love Theme from Carlos,” since Olivier Assayas used much of the same music in his film), we meet Ray (Ray Liotta, oozing rattlesnake charisma in his big-screen debut, if you don't count the bomb The Lonely Lady). Audrey's convience-store robbing ex-husband has just got out of jail, and any unease Charlie's felt at bumping into a co-worker at the dance is about to be ramped way, way up as Liotta snatches the narrative steering wheel and floors the movie headlong into thrillerville.

Back in the day, the sudden hairpin turn seemed to throw some critics, yet it fits right in with the movie's consistent strategy of unboxing surprises, going noir just as the femme fatale becomes the damsel in distress, yet never losing touch with the larger, humanistic sensibility that guides Demme's vision.

This is a film that begins, after a sweeping aerial panorama of Manhattan seen from the Hudson River, with a close-up of a boombox shouldered by a black teenager, and that rarely lets its lead actors linger in a frame unaccompanied by a random stranger with some kind of folk wisdom or shoot-from-the-hip inspiration. (In a similar way, Demme crams the soundtrack with non-stop source music, emanating from car radios, cassettes, storefront gospel churches, street musicians - combining new wave hits with a deeper curatorial sensibility that, like so many friends' record collections at the time, split the difference between streetwise and dubwise).

Adapting Frye's script to his own cultural interests, Demme illuminates a multicultural, magic realist America that thrives in all the overlooked margins - the 7-11s, the No-Tell Motels, the tacky gift shops and theme diners. It's not a little bit of an answer to The Americans, proposing not a nation of short-order melancholy but of vibrant congeniality.

If all that makes Something Wild a movie-within-a-movie, for me it's got a third reality. Demme, who got his start in the movie business writing reviews for a South Florida shopper, shot most of the film in and around Tallahassee, Florida. It's where I grew up, and live at least part of the time, and while many of the locations that stand in for New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Long Island aren't the same anymore, it's impossible to watch them flash by and suspend belief that it's somewhere else. The Pandhandle, then as now, remains substantially rural and small-town - indeed, it is so “Americanarama” that Morris's Vernon, Florida, is only about an hour's drive away.

Demme made terrific use of local resouces, casting professionals and non-professionals for cameos, right alongside the more obvious appearances by John Waters (as a sleazy used-car salesman) and John Sayles (as a motorcycle cop). The movie's mix-tape grooviness is surely redemptive, as is its near-perfect trio of central performances, yet the real genius was the director's openness to the moment.

Jim Roche, an art professor at Florida State University and to this day one of the most throughly original characters around town, caught Demme's eye when the director drove past his studio, glimpsing an array of crosses in its windows. He thought he had stumbled across a folk artist (and in a way, he had), but after meeting up he cast Roche as the scraggly motel handyman who greets a badly hungover Daniel after he's survived that long first night with Lulu. Roche, tapping a literally divine inspiration, offered his own line of dialogue for the encounter and Demme agreed. So there he is, wearing a T-shirt that laments, “I Don't Love You Since You Ate My Dog,” handing Charlie some Alka-Seltzer, and some advice that, to this day, is the movie's most instantly memorable phrase: “Remember, no matter what, it's better to be a live dog than a dead lion.”

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