Cinema
Nineteen of the Loneliest Films Ever Made
Some of them are stylish pop art or lowbrow trash—depending on how initiated you are with their appeal. But they will also make you cry or simply stare at the screen with a detached jaw as you begin to rethink their implications behind your sterilized walls.
By withdrawing ourselves into our bedrooms, we’ve become introspective and foggier. The weathering effect of a global pandemic has raised a pall over our dusty aesthetics. Deprived of sunlight and friends—even the aroma of a cup of Starbucks coffee becoming foreign—we’re all a bit more gothic and darkly imaginative, like Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice (1988). By engaging in a very necessary act of separatism, we’ve found ourselves bizarrely connected by a daisy-chain of emotions that seems wounded by an uncertain and cybernetic future. Our rate of media consumption has increased. What if we get sick and miss out on experiencing French new wave? What if a dear friend dies before we can drink coffee and talk about David Lynch’s G-rated Disney movie? So, we’ve been creating lists with the frequency of a sleep-deprived and sallow Kurt Cobain. By the summer, we’ll have ranked ourselves into a dizzying state of curated paralysis.
Ethan L. Clay
We collectively realize this might be our last chance to read Infinite Jest or delve deeply into Korean cinema or German Expressionism. Fueled by anxiety and our endless curiosity for the unseen, we are now, more than ever, connoisseurs on all matters of taste. But too often when we’re crippled with the strangling vines of fear, we seek to escape through the cushioned standards: Frank Capra’s clean-cut romanticism, the overconfident jingoism of the Reagan era, the satisfying but hollow blockbusters of the ‘90s, an overly relatable Pixar movie, and the formulaic Spielbergian pop that always leaves you feeling grossly sentimental. But there’s something far more pleasurable about using the cinema as a reflection of your psyche—rather than as a numbing agent. The following collection of films will inspire existential questions that many of us are currently incapable of answering, but in time, by bathing in their forgotten beauty and wrestling with their messages, you will begin to reflect upon your own mortality. You will begin to question your vanity and cracked reflection, obsession with youth, death, nostalgia, and unwillingness to face the cold hard facts. We are temporally friendless. We are alone. The TV is our only friend.
These are more literary, often black-and-white classics and forgotten masterpieces all filmed prior to the millennium, which require reevaluation in our post-millennium dystopia. Some of them are adaptations of novels, or the product of screenplays written with the panache and imaginative gaze of a novelist. They create more questions than answers. Some of them are stylish pop art or lowbrow trash—depending on how initiated you are with their appeal. But they will also make you cry or simply stare at the screen with a detached jaw as you begin to rethink their implications behind your sterilized walls. They are the sort of films that can be accompanied with hot coffee, pie, and a vintage paperback. Add them to your astronomically out-of-control collection of lists, or simply watch them before you catch the flu or have to go back to work.
Billy Wilder’s spooky exposé is what happens when you view a decaying headshot under a magnifier. It’s at once celluloid self-immolation—the cynical writer penning his own lurid gossip diary, covered in ash and sweat—and absurdist treatment of Hollywood’s infatuation with young flesh. The result is gothic horror trapped inside the mansion of a fading star who hasn’t been in orbit since Lindbergh flew over the Atlantic.
Picture a tragic clown (Charlie Chaplin) stumbling towards his curtain call with a bottle in one hand and his pride in the other. By the end, you end up weeping for both the clown and the actor who portrays him, as he begs for applause, while constantly giving his audience a reason to walk out on him. Limelight is the funeral procession of a lovesick clown.
It was black and white, when the studio wanted it to be color. It was shot in severe, urban locations, when most films of the era were shot inside air-conditioned studios that looked like illustrations in technicolor. Kazan’s minimalism is the background of a cold ethics course on the suffering that transforms Brando from a gangster’s stooge into a martyr for the working-class.
A crusading knight challenges Death to a game of chess. Beyond the medieval longline, Ingmar Bergman uses the knight’s chessboard to move us through a plague-infested landscape that’s idyllic, like a Millet painting, and morbid, with charcoal grays and glimmering whites that make it look like German expressionism.
Agnès Varda creates a stylish jaunt through cosmopolitan Paris, which seduces you with glamour and reflective surfaces, while its subject—a vapid, childlike French pop star—spends her day distracting herself from the quiet agony of believing she is terminally ill. She is a reflection of the melancholic child. Cléo is like a wildflower searching for sunlight between the billowing gray clouds of Paris. There are scenes when you simply feel like a voyeur trying to find some meaning out of her fleeting youth.
Sam Fuller’s psychodrama begins as a shocking indictment of journalistic malpractice. It concerns a preposterously ambitious reporter who has decided to commit himself to a psychiatric ward in order to win the Pulitzer. As he begins to crumble, the message evolves into a Nietzschean reminder that staring into the abyss can turn you into a reflection of its blank terror. Fuller uses the psych ward as a mirror of the abyss. The straitjacketed journalist becomes our eyes, as he witnesses race riots, white supremacy, the bigotry of the South, the KKK, and a period in American history when mental health patients were treated like convicts. The film begins and ends with a quote from Euripides: “Whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad.”
This is the first and most earnest adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I am Legend, which stylistically amounts to a film-length Twilight Zone episode starring Vincent Price. It was filmed in Rome, amongst its ancient cemeteries, churches, and fascist architecture, which enhances the alienation of Price’s American scientist—who plays a bebop record as zombied vampires descend upon his doorstep. Price’s air of sophistication produces the feeling of watching what’s left of the intelligentsia being devoured by the deadened horde.
It is one of the most unconventional looking films of its time: perspiring close-ups, psychedelic camera angles, cinéma vérité orgies, graphic footage of facial surgery, and a thick atmosphere of paranoia that begins with Saul Bass’s phantasmagoria credits and becomes positively nauseating by the final act. Frankenheimer manages to capture Rock Hudson’s most intense performance, who is the expensive new face of a pudgy middle-aged banker who’s hired an agency to reinvent him. He soon finds himself trapped in a kind of permanent acid trip where he’s caught between his new body and his old brain. It almost feels like an allegory for Rock Hudson’s life as a closeted gay man who was playing someone else for his entire life.
It’s a sexually frustrated tragedy that takes place in a version of Texas that looks like a Hank Williams song. The effect is a realistic and sunless portrayal of rural teen drama that has almost nothing in common with the malt shop romanticism of American Graffiti (1973). Set in 1951, and shot in black and white, the film explores the internalized frustration of horny teens in a stark and nihilistic small town, which would have practically been banned had it been released two decades earlier. Bogdanovich manages to use sexual desire to draw the eye towards a fading photograph of small-town America.
It was survival camp for chauvinistic drunks; a frigid horror covered in crunchy and moist special effects that were uncomfortably delicious, especially in the dog kennel scene, where a parasitic shapeshifter invades the body of a dog and transforms it into a gooey worm-like thing. Initially, for reasons that are unfashionably snobbish, John Carpenter was torched by his critics. Roger Ebert said it was, “the most nauseating thing I’ve ever seen on a movie screen.” Carpenter was described as a “pornographer of violence.” His career was in ashes. In the ‘90s, on VHS and cable, The Thingbegan to attract the geek obsession of a classic PC adventure game. For sci-fi horror fans of a particular age, The Thing is comfort viewing. For everyone else, it’s a “guy movie” that’s aged about as well as its VHS cover.
Imagine what you get when a German filmmaker tries to visualize a Sam Shepard script: isolated moments of tenderness, neon lamps, molten-orange sunsets, and Ry Cooder’s twangy guitar the landscape Harry Dean Stanton roams as a raggedy drifter searching for his soul. When he finally tracks down his transient wife, played by Nastassja Kinski in a hot pink mohair sweater, the film transforms into an evanescent romance. Amongst schmaltzy Reagan-era road movies, Paris, Texas is minimalist poetry.
Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas (1984)
Paul Verhoeven’s absurd attempt at a superhero film does one thing better than any other film in history: lambasting corporatism with the sadistic humor of a machine-gun toting clown. While it’s impossible to say something new about such a flawlessly cut piece of science fiction, it seems the Trump era is providing further justification for RoboCop’s mockery of America. Underneath its action movie packaging and killer one-liners, RoboCop is a comedy for the urban working-class. Film critics have studied it as allegory for Christ’s resurrection, or an example of liberal fascism in the cinema. Kids have accepted it as a steely superhero saga. The action figures are pieces of art. RoboCop is also a terrifying reminder that everyone is expendable in corporate America. It is thus the most important superhero film ever made.
It’s a twinkling fairytale that works as both a suburban satire and teenage Frankenstein film. In terms of its pastel-colored, goth aesthetic, Edward Scissorhands looks like a child’s illustration of a depressed California suburb. Flipping through its glossy pages, Tim Burton goes underneath the manicured, lush front lawns of suburbia to reveal a damp layer of prejudice that views any kind of change like an alien invasion. It is the blend of a Twilight Zone episode with an artistic teen movie.
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