On this year’s first blue moon – an occasion that probably no one cares about or will faintly acknowledge with some disappointment when they find out that the moon did not, in fact, turn blue – I find it fitting to explore the equally conflicting, ironic and confused picture that is John Landis’s 1981 An American Werewolf in London.
With films as heavy handed as Landis’s cult classic, the viewer is given two options: take it as a full-blown self-aware spoof of its own plot, themes and style, or take all of these at face value and assess the film as an ironic dramatisation of a premise with some latent intellectual substance. This film’s lurid freakiness and shock-factor gore can be appreciated for their campiness alone, but I would like to pick at the ideas that lie behind the gross-out comedy and recognise them as worthy of analysis.
An American Werewolf in London is an ambivalent mix between a satire on American entitlement and an exploration of American vulnerability, specifically Jewish-American foreignness in Britain. The opening scene introduces us to David and Jack, a pair of freshly graduated (and clueless) backpackers traversing the gloomy North York moors. The song choice – Bobby Vinton’s whimsical ‘Blue Moon’ – is too obvious to disconcert and so tinges the scene with the film’s characteristic irony – irony already palpable from its kitschy title and pop gothic poster. Looking like they have walked not out of a rainstorm but the 1981 Spring/Summer Patagonia catalogue, David and Jack take refuge in the aptly-forebodingly-named pub ‘The Slaughtered Lamb’ in the fictional town of East Proctor, cowering at the sight of the tough middle-aged English locals. The intercultural subtext is as conspicuous as the pair’s neon presence in the pub.
But does it want to say anything at all?
Jack’s gruesome death-by-werewolf is rapid, clunky, gory and quite ridiculous. But the whole aesthetic setup – squeaky-clean American boys in an inhospitable, wild, even primaeval landscape – tempts hypotheses about potential metaphors that undergird the film. The use of a figure from European folkloric tradition (however detached the modern portrayal of the werewolf is from his beginnings) physically destroying the American body ties some kind of spiritual knot – albeit a tenuous and aesthetic one – between the picture of civilian modernity and his pagan European beginnings. If it were a local boy devoured by the wolf, this would be a story of the human fight for survival against nature’s mysterious forces, or an incoming threat. But the death of an outsider, someone previously untouchable, allows the movie to rid itself of the burden of the local community’s story and instead use it as a springboard from which to launch its supernatural myth into an urban audience’s landscape. That metropolis is London, and the modern vessel of a pagan past, David.
The middle section of the film is a contrived and at times tedious romantic interlude between a bedbound David recovering from his wolf bite and his nurse, Alex Price (Jenny Agutter). The pair’s young and toned bodies are exploited for a gratuitously lengthy sex scene. Dialogue drags. David is presented as the clownish American boy toy providing light-hearted fun for the naturally stern and less characterful English nurse.
But this plot plateau is soon eclipsed by the first full moon since the attack. In a hair-raising scene with special effects that were revolutionary for the time, which would have dazzled even Ovid could he have seen it, David transforms from man to werewolf. But beyond the cosmetic innovation, David’s curse invites various conceptual interpretations. Much of the film is preoccupied with young bodies either in ecstasy or subject to terrifying mutilations. Jack’s undead body is green and decaying while David and Alex take pleasure in each other’s. I wonder if David’s transformation is one of several appeals this film makes to the fears of a 1980s Western audience enthralled by the cult of youth.
even irony must be executed well and make itself clear, or a piece risks exposing itself to critique
David’s metamorphosis has also been given a more political inflection: a Jewish man in a foreign country, David is ostracised and, like a nightmare come true, turns into a symbol of xenophobic/antisemitic paranoia. One wonders why Landis chose London as the place in which to explore David’s insecurity as a Jewish American. Perhaps Thatcher’s Britain was an interesting in-between place, foreign but not bearing the scars of the Holocaust; a setting in Central or Eastern Europe may have obliged more explicit, consistent and serious analogising. An ironic film can interact with ugly realities without signing itself away to any political or moral message. However, at points it feels as if An American Werewolf in London wants to acknowledge serious themes but is afraid of committing to them, unwilling to reckon with the political implications they might burden it with. The film reads as neither a dark comedy nor a light-hearted parody. A dream sequence of David’s family being shot in their home by men in military uniforms is fleeting. He runs naked in a forest and feasts on a doe. He eats some wealthy Londoners and returns to the absurd farcical act of feigning normalcy in Alex’s home. The film’s wooden acting and tension-building elements surely must belie some knowing concept. But does it want to say anything at all?
The last scene brings a predictably messy and action-packed finale. A tortured David, lured into a porno cinema by his now decaying ghost friend Jack, is confronted with all the people he killed during his first full moon transformation. David’s deliberation on how to commit suicide to escape the curse is cut short by his next and final lupine episode, and as the wolf devours the entire audience and then bursts out onto Piccadilly Circus, causing a pile-up just as pointlessly lengthy and graphic as the earlier sex scene, the porno plays on. The atmospheric dissonance is plainly funny. The preoccupation with bodies throughout the film climaxes: David transforms not on his own but taunted with the ultimate picture of youthful bodily indulgence – pornography. David’s slain body, reverted back to human form in Sebastian-esque martyrdom, is the movie’s final image. Alex’s declaration of love to the growling wolf before he is pummelled with bullets by the police is so unconvincing one would rather see it as an ironic employment of the classic ill-fated love story – a foil to the real meaty themes of indigeneity versus foreignness, ruralism versus urban life, exoticism and threat, desirable, untouchable youth and visceral animosity. Perhaps irony is the film’s very self-justification. However, even irony must be executed well and make itself clear, or a piece risks exposing itself to critique of its shallowness, ridicule of its style and acting, and worse, to pretentious hobby critics claiming it deals with themes like ‘indigeneity’, ‘exoticism’, ‘visceral animosity’… In any case, An American Werewolf in London begs the question: to what extent must a film be aware of its own critical ability to merit serious analysis? Couldn’t this weekend’s blue moon really be blue if only you believed in it?
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