Comments
This film, which is unrelentingly bleak from start to finish, is well named. It is populated by a whole series of 'dead zones' both physical and mental, with the frozen white and lifeless expanses of snow which form the film's constant backdrop and the various forms of grief and regret which underpin the lives of all the characters. This sense of tragedy and loss is underlined to great effect by the late Michael Kamen's superb and haunting score. As Kamen remarks in an interview quoting a 'French writer' about his approach to music: 'melancholy is the gateway to the sublime'.
The most disturbing images in King's original book are the images of the psychic space that Johnny inhabits while he is in a coma and the place he returns to when he dies. King writes:
He was in a dark, gloomy place - a hallway of some kind. The ceiling was too high to see. It was lost in the shadows. The walls were dark chromed steel. They opened out as they went upward. He was alone, but a voice floated up to where he stood, as if from a great distance. A voice he knew, words that had been spoken to him in another place, at another time. The voice frightened him. It was groaning and lost, echoing back and forth between that dark chromed steel like a trapped bird he remembered from his child. The bird had flown into his father's toolshed and hadn't the wit to get back out. It had panicked and had gone swooping back and forth, cheeping in desperate alarm, battering itself to death. This voice had the same doomed quality as that long ago bird's cheeping. It was never going to escape this place. (Stephen King (1979) The Dead Zone, London: Warner Books, p. 108.)
The few brief years of life he has after emerging from the coma are but a brief reprieve. He is a ghost, a zombie, the walking dead, an interloper and stranger in this world. Walken conveys this sense of tragic dissonance perfectly. Later in his career he would also play another, but very different, walking dead man in The King of New York.
To be continued.
DVD extras
The region 2 (UK) version, released in 2002, features an amusing and informative audio commentary from Stephen Jones (author of Creepshows: The Illustrated Guide to Stephen King on Film and Kim Newman (author of the BFI Companion to Horror, a number of genre novels and regular contributor to Empire). One of the things I liked about their commentary was the ongoing reference to Johnny's lost fiancée's husband as 'the twit'. It also includes quite a good booklet with the script of a short deleted scene to have taken place at the beginning of the film and with pictures of various movie posters released in association with the film. The booklet also contains information about the director, cast and crew and composer of the sound track. It's let down a bit by the fact that the information on Walken is not very up-to-date or well informed.
The TV series vs the film
I might begin with the proviso that the original Stephen King book, the film and the series are all rather different from each other and it makes better sense not to compare them directly, but simply to deal with each on its own terms.
The following comments are from Michael Piller, writer and producer of the new Dead Zone series. The article in which these are reported also appears in SFX. Piller comments in relation to the 1983 film:
"Now, I don't think it's a great movie,... but I do think Christopher Walken is great in it. I think the reason that it's so successful as a movie is because Chris Walken was perfect for the part and I thought the biggest challenge right off the bat for us was to fill his shoes. I just said, 'This will not work with a leading man type person in the role.' I really wanted to find somebody off-center who could provide a worthy successor to what Chris Walken did, and I think that with Anthony Michael Hall we did that."...
"He was my first choice," Piller emphasizes, "and the basis of that first choice was that I saw him play Bill Gates in The Pirates of Silicon Valley. Of course I was familiar with his work as a child and caught a couple of things in his more adult career, but when I saw the Bill Gates film, I said, 'Man, this guy is ready. He just lights up the screen and it's one of those qualities that is rare. He's interesting to look at, he's accessible, he's likable, he's off-center, he's just a very special talent.' He turned out to be exactly the right casting. All I can tell you is that of all the things I have done in my life, casting has not been one of my specialties. This time I was right. I think that The Dead Zone movie is dark for television, and one of the goals that everybody agreed on was that we needed an accessible Johnny Smith; someone a little easier to relate to who wasn't quite as dark as Christopher Walken was in the movie. I think that's what we get with Anthony Michael Hall. You really like the guy, and that's a quality that will carry the series a long way."
I have to say that I disagree with Piller about the movie. I think it is a good film for a whole range of reasons other than simply Christopher Walken (who is of course superb). The music is good, the expanses of cold white exteriors and interiors are striking, and the film creates a genuine and disturbing atmosphere of tragedy. As Piller points out, however, this atmosphere is not something one necessarily wants to reproduce in a weekly TV series (at least if one wants to attract large numbers of viewers - although it has been done in series like The X Files, Millenium and La Femme Nikita). It's also hard to compare Walken and Hall as they are two very different actors and personas. Walken couldn't be mainstream if he tried. As Walken himself remarks: 'The fact is ... I'm going to turn a role a certain color. As a person I have a quality that is eccentric. Whether the part is that way or not, if you get me to play it, it will be.'
(Scot Haller, 'I Am the Malevolent WASP', Esquire Jan. 1981, pp. 40-6).
But apart from a few bouts of intense staring, there isn't anything outstandingly 'off-centre' about Hall. Indeed, on the whole, his character comes across as a fairly standard product of mainstream America, which is fine. Hall's performance in the series is good and very watchable, without having to add anything else too unusual to the mix.
There are, however, some abrupt inconsistencies in character development towards the end of the first season of the series. Just as the series has started to settle down into a comfortable series of tales of American suburbia, it is brought back in line with some of the bigger ideas played out in the film to quite interesting effect. These ideas continue into the second season, but it remains to be seen whether things will continue to take this interesting turn. Other ambiguities are also added into the mix, with Johnny developing aggressively reclusive tendencies and indulging in some arguably less than ethical behaviour towards two of the women in his life in the last episodes of season one - the consequences of which continue to resonate into season 2. Four episodes into season 2, the series continues to intrigue with its impressive visual effects but with the story lines settling down once again into fairly non-threatening territory with Hall's Johnny remaining a sympathetic and likeable character. One might contrast this with David Greenwalt's series, Miracles, which deals with darker and more ambiguous aspects of the psychic realm.
to be continued
References in other films
Stir of Echoes with Kevin Bacon contains a scene which clearly owes much to Cronenberg's film. In a psychic vision as he grabs a corpse's hand, the hero sees a snowy scene and two young men luring a young woman to come over to them with the promise of a surprise - which ends in her sexual assault and murder.
Walken essentials
Salute to Broadway: None in evidence
Hair: Intially flattened down pre-coma, and then five years later post-coma, gelled 80s blow dried sticking up -very stylish.
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