We are all familiar with the image of the '80s yuppie as young, complacent, materialistic, khaki wearing urban professionals. Classic movies of that decade, like Bright Lights, Big City, Less Than Zero and the post-college drama St. Elmo's Fire have cemented this image into popular culture. But in After Hours , Scorsese's 1985 eerie black comedy, this yuppie character is sent to hell, and we spend the whole time watching him suffer.
After Hours is roughly based on Homer's Odyssey , updated into '80s New York: a lonely word processor named Paul Hackett leaves the safety of his uptown apartment to visit a new found female acqaintance at her sculptor-friend's loft downtown. His trip can be seen as a metaphorical descent into hell.
Once in SoHo, he systematically loses all the comforts of his life: his money, the keys to his apartment, his clothes, and almost his life. The night takes on an intensely surreal edge as he encounters more and more freaky characters: kooky, irrational women, S&M enthusiasts, punks with mohawks, gay bikers in black leather... the list goes on and on. All Paul Hackett wants to do is go home, but he cannot. Only when he finally gives up trying to control what is going on around him does he somehow end up back at work the next morning.
More than anything else, After Hours is a subtle and finely crafted black comedy. Scorsese is known for his dark explorations of machismo and the New York street life, as exemplified in his popular films Mean Streets, Raging Bull and Taxi Driver . But Scorsese proves that he can pull off a surreal comedy and incorporate the same themes about the darkness of the human soul as materialized in the background of the quintessential mysterious city, New York.
The key to understanding the movie is in its geographical locations, which have very strong metaphorical representations. Hackett lives in uptown Manhattan, an affluent and posh neighborhood. He works in midtown Manhattan, which is comparable to Wall Street as the bustling business center in the city. But SoHo, the downtown neighborhood he ends up in is, at least up until the late '80s, a relatively inexpensive warehouse district with a lively art scene. It was segregated from the rest of Manhattan as the liberal, Bohemian area where all the "others" - the artists, the homosexuals, the hippies and Beatniks lived.
For Paul Hackett, SoHo represents the ultimate difference. Coming from his safe, ordered and inevitably lonely environment, Hackett finds all the people in it - the aggressive and kooky women, the homosexuals and artists, all completely different from his own world. Yet he seeks it out, as an escape from the deadening boredom of his high-paying but dull wordprocessing job and from the pretentiousness and complacency of fellow yuppies. The very first scene of the movie demonstrates this by following his distracted gaze longingly out the window as fellow worker, masterfully played by '80s icon Balki from the sitcom Perfect Strangers , drones on and on about the magazine for intellectuals that he hopes to start up one some day.
But Hackett gets way more than he plans for by going downtown. Each one of his needs for survival are slowly stripped away. The first, and most important, is his money, which he loses in a speeding cab as he heads downtown. His twenty dollar bill blows out of the window and he is left penniless. It is interesting to note how dated this idea is: today anyone could just go to an ATM machine and get out more money, or use a credit card. But Paul is left with nothing.
Next goes his white shirt, through a series of plaster mishaps at the sculptor's loft. While it is in the washing machine, the sculptor, in an interestingly metaphorical moment, gives him a black shirt to wear instead. He never gets his white one back.
Stripped of the money that he relies in all situations for escape, he is stuck in Soho. After escaping from the loft, in a series of intricate events that convince him that the blond acquaintance he is lusting after is crazy, he finds he cannot go back home. The subway fare, afterhours, is mysteriously raised. Wandering through the dark and barren streets of Soho, Hackett stumbles into a bar. Here he makes a frantic deal with the bartender, giving him his keys as collateral while he goes to the guy's apartment to borrow some money. But in the crazy events that ensue, Hackett never gets his keys back.
And after that, all physical comforts lost, Hackett begins to fear for the one thing that is most important to him: his life. Falsely identified as the burglar robbing everyone in the neighborhood, he is pursued by an angry mob in the streets. Only in the final climactic scene does Hackett finally escape, ending up by accident right back in front of his office in the morning.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of the movie is the tight self-referentiality of all the surrealism - all characters inevitably are intertwined, all end meeting with each other, whether they knew each other before or not. And the same themes, phrases, images, and objects pop up again and again, emphasizing the sealed nature of this nightmarish world that Hackett has fallen into. (Keep a close look out for the bagel and cream cheese paperweights.)
The acting is excellent as well. Griffin Dunne is perfect as the handsome, slightly geeky Hackett; and we cannot help but notice that his large innocent brown eyes and neat curly brown hair greatly resemble the Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who in 1985 was the icon of geeky hipness on the downtown New York punk scene. Rosanna Arquette breaks out of her ditzy blond role (as portrayed in the earlier movie Desperately Seeking Susan ) to play the crazy blond role to perfection, and Teri Garr reprises her perennial kooky role as the cheesy sixties loving waitress who tries to seduce Hackett and when rejected, wreaks havoc by deliberately misidentifying him as the local burglar. And, perhaps best of all, Cheech and Chong keep popping out of nowhere throughout the movie.
Scorsese has skillfully created the classic, paranoid white yuppie male fantasy, where everything that he fears - aggressive women, homosexuals, punks and artists (although interestingly enough all the characters are white), all that depart from the `norm' - converge on him in one night.
At the same time, as nightmarish as it sounds, After Hours is immensely entertaining - each incident becoming more and more surreal and hysterical. While we're left squirming in our seats wishing Paul could get home, we can't help but enjoy the insanity of his predicament. And, ultimately, that is the greatest pleasure that we can get out of this dark, witty and tortuous comedy.
After Hours is playing on Saturday May 3 at Kettering 11, at 7:30 p.m. 9:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m.
Copyright © 1997, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 125, Number 23; May 2, 1997
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