Wednesday, November 20, 2019

THAS: 'Invaders from Mars': The Rough Cut




I officially present this rough cut of Invaders from Mars, which includes most notably an entire first act cut out for reasons we can only presume were motivated by a desire for expediency and fleetness in the film's part as a product/commodity: In other words, a run time under 100 minutes.

I present to accompany this unprecedented and momentous history of Invaders from Mars a dialogue between myself and my colleague-in-thought (also poet/writer/performer) Josiah Morgan, unpretentiously gathered as the at-first-blush impressions I had upon sharing it and Morgan had in immediate viewing, and which goes to some length in distilling the value of this expansion of a film that already spoke to a jaded filmmaker's sense of grandeur, but not to their personal labor, their unfiltered work and ethic.[X]

Alienated consumption and alienated production.

"I haven't had final cut on a movie since the original Chainsaw.  It disturbs me that, for the most part, my movies have not been shown the way they were intended because of someone's 'fantastic wisdom.'" - Tobe Hooper, Fangoria Magazine, 1988

"With the Industrial Revolution's manufactural division of labor and mass production for a global market, the commodity finally became fully visible as a power that was colonizing all social life.  It was at that point that political economy established itself as the dominant science, and as the science of domination."

"Consciousness of desire and desire for consciousness are the same project, the project that in its negative form seeks the abolition of classes and thus the workers' direct possession of every aspect of their activity.  The opposite of this project is the society of spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making."

Thank you to Josiah Morgan 
for putting me in the direction
of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle
from which these excerpts derive.


A Dialogue Between JR and Josiah Morgan On the 'Invaders from Mars' Rough Cut


JR: But let's talk about how Hooper never had final cut and he could barely exhibit his wily, raggedy analyses of the human condition without it being fitted into a box.  I was going to say this "Invaders" cut reveals the Mike Leigh of genre, but that's totally wrong, he's Rivettian and I'm not even a big Rivette fan.†

JM (whose brilliant write-up on the first 9 minutes of the rough cut you can read here): I have always found Hooper's lack of final cut fascinating; it is one mark of his artistry that he managed to always shine through. One can see all of the impositions placed on him by studios, other writers, producers, television stations, etcetera, in all of his work, and frequently can reconcile these impositions with what we know of his early films: Eggshells, Down Friday Street, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

His early films reveal an obsession with architecture (away from a cosmology focused on theological hierarchies, away from a cosmology focused on top-down governance, away from a democratic cosmology, toward a cosmology of autocracy; in which emotions are autocratic, in which emotions are made physical, in which emotions govern decisions and critique structural societal problems).

His early films reveal an obsession with discontinuous editing and lying about what one's own senses perceive -- this seems intrinsically linked to the gap between both cuts of Invaders; this one is far more discontinuous. Perhaps it is naive to comment on this -- a rough cut, after all, is almost predetermined to involve significantly less consistency! But the actual language and ordering of language, the general sequencing here is slightly different and more fragmented - closer, perhaps, to the upstairs-downstairs-basement fragmentation of Eggshells than to the continuous architectural clarity of Poltergeist.


 Excerpts from Chapters 5 and 6 of The Spectacle of Society, "Time and History" and "Spectacular Time"

... History, which until then had seemed to be only the movement of individuals of the ruling class, and thus was written as the history of events, is now understood as the general movement, and in this relentless movement individuals are sacrificed...

... In this social domination by commodity-time, “time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the carcass of time” (Poverty of Philosophy)...

... Pseudo-cyclical time is actually no more than the consumable disguise of the commodity-time of production. It contains the essential properties of commodity-time, namely exchangeable homogeneous units and the suppression of the qualitative dimension...


Illegible: the jar of pennies beside David's bed, in an excised shot from the theatrical cut, the coveted item of the Martians' "science of domination," their invasion a mere reassertion of Earth's commodity-time.

... While cyclical time was the time of immobile illusion, really lived, spectacular time is the time of self-changing reality, lived in illusion...

... Time, as Hegel showed, is the necessary alienation, the environment where the subject realizes himself by losing himself, where he becomes other in order to become truly himself. Precisely the opposite is true in the dominant alienation, which is undergone by the producer of an alien present. In this spatial alienation, the society that radically separates the subject from the activity it takes from him, separates him first of all from his own time. It is this surmountable social alienation that has prohibited and petrified the possibilities and risks of the living alienation of time.

... The natural basis of time, the actual experience of the flow of time, becomes human and social by existing for man. The restricted condition of human practice, labor at various stages, is what has humanized and also dehumanized time as cyclical and as separate irreversible time of economic production. The revolutionary project of realizing a classless society, a generalized historical life, is the project of a withering away of the social measure of time, to the benefit of a playful model of irreversible time of individuals and groups, a model in which independent federated times are simultaneously present. It is the program of a total realization, within the context of time, of communism which suppresses “all that exists independently of individuals.”

The world already possesses the dream of a time whose consciousness it must now possess in order to actually live it.

JM (cont): In relation to the Letterboxd Hooper-core, the identification of early Hooper with later Hooper also marks the eyes of a set of talented viewers.  [Christofer] Pallu's writing, especially, has often seen straight through the structural conditions Hooper worked inside and the surrounding critical noise in order to get to the heart of the matter: the design, the form, the story, the genre.

What do you make of Hooper's 80s forays into examining the industrial world? Of course the threads were planted in the 1970s but he moved away from the micro view of small towns and localised regions into the geography of America as a whole, for a while (this stopped, I think, after The Mangler), before shifting back to a microcosmic view that focused on individualism and the creation of a collective identity through solitary, wandering, wanting individuals.

JR: Not sure yet (the 80s certainly made "mono-society" the forefront), but it's a crime the final cut removed the one glimpse of real technology in the film.  Plus, the rocket destruction scene is shockingly reconstructed into a slack, Cannon spectacle whereas here it's a fragmantary confusion of splintered worldviews. 

JM: You remind me that I need to read "Society of the Spectacle," actually -- Hooper is impossible to diminish into iconography which is why I suspect the TCSM franchise never took off the way Elm Street did with the Krueger colours and silly arms, the way Halloween did with its mask.  This is largely because Hooper only creates icons in order to critique them, to pull them apart, to suggest that they're only refractions of something else.  In large part that is what he is doing here.  His icons bend to moods, and not the other way around, yes.

JR: It's odd to think of Hooper condoning the reedit that hurries the pace into something of a total dream (rather than an anti-Spielbergian confrontation with time), but we can almost rationalize it (outside of Cannon demanding it not exceed 100 mins).

JM: It's remarkable, really, how similar the finished reedit is to what we see here, at least in a material sense. Curiously, the reedit contextualizes much of this in relation to a different tone and this is what affects the symbols.

JR: What's unmistakable is how acute of a documenter Hooper is of human emotions. Hunter Carson's performance is incredible here, and that's what producers can't really see when they are trying to create a finished cut. Hooper doesn't think in "finished cut" when he's on a set, it's why human mutability accelerates and time stands still, as he lives in the moment. This probably has to do partly with the "roughness" of it, but as you say, the performances stand out and the camera moves stand out, and given that he edited this cut, we see his thought process before it's ever changed.  The "Texas Chain Saw" sequence in the back of the van is astonishing and baffling at once, because it's clear what it's doing, but why it's doing? I dunno, but it does so well and so clearly in its intent.



JM: Hooper is a realartist, in this sense - to risk laughability, to risk being superficial - perhaps, even, a savant: it is so so difficult to pinpoint why, but it is easy to pinpoint what, and it is easy to pinpoint what else, and it is easy to discuss the gaps.  He lives in the gaps.[X]



This cut also includes more eliminated scenes, shots, and alternate takes, as well as some more subtle alterations in scene structure and rhythmic construction (a lot of beginning and endings of scenes snipped).  It also has no score (outside of one scene given an eerie temp track), which emphasizes how much musical scoring can affect a scene - such as a scene of a father repeatedly expressing a love and affection for his son through a series of gestures and utterances, coming off sincere and natural in the unscored version, but suddenly made threatening and unnatural when underscored by the artificially saccharine "domestic theme" used in the final film.

Some of these differences were hopefully pressingly touched upon in the correspondence above, such as the clearer intentions found in the more fragmented editing and the recut of the rocket explosion scene, which eliminates dialogue and re-chronologizes the sequence in the final cut, thoroughly doing away with the sense of the events occurring through the subjectivity of David, the rhythm of experienced, lived time, and the aforementioned fractured, devastated worldviews.

On the "Invaders from Mars" Rough Cut

If there is one thing all sectors of "Hooper studies" have come seemingly to a conclusion to in total rank and file cohesion, it is that his films work at a remove from all perceptible expectations surrounding them.  It is the "Not safe" zone that, I think, it is John Landis who enjoins, rather aggressively, as he's interviewed in the American Nightmare documentary about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  There being no less auspicious an authority on the theoretical valences of a work than one's contemporaries, so determined as Landis would be to sell a reactionary zeitgeist of which he was a part of (maker of his own brand of exploitation films and horror products), we can look at these "expectations" that Hooper evades in other, less sensational ways.  If his films, in their original form, are to be compared to things, they would be the abandoned objects on the side of the street, the home movie someone was not supposed to see (like the "snuff film" characterization that overly-persuadable Texas Chain Saw adherents like to - somewhat artificially - apply), the junkyard appliance that symbolizes some late-stage capitalist neglect.  These are things that have served their purpose once but now exist as things outside their time, in forms that encapsulate the necessity that derived them but now only serve as haunting reminders of that necessity.  It is possible for these things to be reclaimed, in their original form, as a dereliction of the society that afforded it.


"By discovering its basis in political economy, history becomes aware of what had previously been unconscious; but this basis remains unconscious because it cannot be brought to light.  This blind prehistory, this new fate that no one controls, is the only thing that the commodity economy has democratized."

In their abbreviated, at times completely renovated, forms, subject to and the aesthetic byproduct of their use-value of that time, they are the product of a form of domination, a colonization of forms.  Hooper's films are themselves constantly a comment on a society of domination, but, as the tossed-out item, or the home video on consumer camcorder, they are a document made valuable by the hands of the documenter and not the spectacle that produces it and "contemplates itself" in an endless spectacle.  Hooper's films are made to exist outside of time, outside of production models, outside of consumer use.

Hooper's work's "functional remove" is the presentation of time and crystallization of a proletariat/commonplace history.

But rather than its funders honoring a documentarist's integrity, his works have been constantly recycled into trends that are meant to simply reflect a market that is unduly imposed on it.

"Critical theory must communicate itself in its own language -- the language of contradiction, which must be dialectical in both form and content.  It must be an all-inclusive critique and it must be grounded in history.  It is not a "zero degree of writing," but its reversal.  It is not a negation of style, but the style of negation."

In its clearer demonstration of David as our proletariat hero seeing through the nightmare of recycled time and an endless production-cycle that dispossesses us of our autonomous time, in its bolder assertion of time in the face of illusionary, dreamed spectacle, we see what Hooper truly intended.  The rough cut is undeniably superior.


"The wealth that can be concentrated in the realm of power and materially used up in sumptuous feasts is also used up as a squandering of historical time at the surface of society. The owners of historical surplus value possess the knowledge and the enjoyment of lived events. Separated from the collective organization of time which predominates with the repetitive production at the base of social life, this time flows above its own static community. This is the time of adventure and war, when the masters of the cyclical society travel through their personal histories, and it is also the time which appears in confrontations with foreign communities, in the derangement of the unchangeable order of the society. History then passes before men as an alien factor, as that which they never wanted and against which they thought themselves protected. But by way of this detour returns the human negative anxiety which had been at the very origin of the entire development that had fallen asleep."

† [Ed. "On "Rivettian": It's not only the primacy of human behavior taking over from the typical plot mechanics, but the ability to give over a film totally to the inhabitance of a performer into a character such that they become one.  If all life is a performance, then only so thin a line can be drawn before our play-acting begins to bleed over into the circumstances our superstructures enmesh ourselves into.  Refraining from the rudimentary sensationalism of a reaction to his debut horror film, such as Landis's, the sense of instability that derives from his films is more generally, and genuinely, seen as the way his films act as responses to both natural and structural systems that entangle his characters and function at a remove from them.  The desire to see his films as commodities is what allows a convoluted editing phase to so often dilute this "functional remove" in favor of efficiency and expediency, but at the sacrifice of a non-spectacularized history, the labor of an artist who sees no line between film and life, between his performers and their characters, save the Rivettian efforts that what we see is a performance of negation, a negation of performance.  What Hooper's performances lose is the sense they are in a film, despite the prominance of cameras, multiple set-ups, and takes.]