I knew that Midnight Express was the movie for me right from the opening scenes, of young Billy Hayes making duct tape packages of hashish to smuggle out of the country. We hear his heart beating loudly on the soundtrack underlined by the Vangelis/Wendy Carlos-esque electronic synthesizer score. Popular film seemed to peak in the years coinciding with the classic punk rock era from 1978 to 1982. I don’t know what it is, but you see it strongly in stuff like Alien, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull and Blade Runner. Even in seemingly pedestrian films like Being There, Kramer vs. Kramer and Ordinary People, that certain I-don’t-know-what quality is there. It’s there in The Empire Strikes Back and E.T. as well, and you don’t see it in movies today. We may arguably have more good movies pound for pound, movie by movie, but there is something bubbly and airy about them. They’re still highly cinematic, but you can’t help but think that they have become easier to shrug off and have even become sort of homogenized. Cats and Dogs is indeed a better film than Flash Gordon, but I don’t know, something in me would rather have Flash Gordon playing in the theaters than Cats and Dogs. Those five years just seemed to be a better time to go to the movies.

Midnight Express is pretty good stuff. It falls quite short of being a masterpiece, however, thanks to a real uneven lumpiness. The film messes up badly early on. Following a genuinely intense first act where Hayes is arrested by the Turkish police, he is told to tell them where he bought his stuff and he will be allowed to return to the United States. He tells them that it was from a taxi driver. They go to interrogate the driver, and while they are busy with him, Billy makes a run for it. Why? They told him that he’d be able to go home if he cooperated. Where did he think that he would be able to escape to? The sequence doesn’t make any sense; it seems to have been included in the film just so they could have a traditional chase sequence. Many of the most famous scenes would probably get a very bad laugh today. They are overwrought and sort of ludicrous. One of the worst involves a homosexual relationship between Billy and a fellow hash-smuggling Swede. They are doing stretches in cold soft light, moving back and forth hypnotically in exaggerated simulations of anal sex. At the end of the montage we see them in the shower, where the Swede kisses Billy. Billy goes with it for a little bit, but then stops and shakes his head no to the Swede. Shortly afterwards the Swede leaves the prison and the movie. The whole sequence is a real howler. With the glossy dark corners and electric score, director Alan Parker seems to be working some sort of that icy coke-and-champagne Adrian Lyne eroticism. The film doesn’t suggest that Billy may be capable or willing to have a homosexual relationship; this scene is just there. It’s inexplicable and does little to help the film against charges of shallow sensationalism.

There is a lot of homosexual rape going on in the prison, among inmates and guards, but that is a whole different ball of wax. It seems to sound like an awful cliche, but prison rape has a lot more to do with violence, with the assertion of power, than metrosexuality. There is a scene in the film where Billy gets revenge on a fellow prisoner by going on a fearless rampage, smashing and beating him, culmulating with Billy ripping out the guy’s tongue with his teeth. The scene goes on for a while. However, I would certainly be lying if I were to say that it isn’t horrifying to watch. In her scathing capsule review of the picture, Pauline Kael called Midnight Express sadomasochistic: “The film is like a porno fantasy about the sacrifice of a virgin.” And indeed it is. The film was written by Oliver Stone, who, as in his script for Conan the Barbarian and in his masterpiece Platoon, views the rites of manhood as grueling, painful and frankly horrifying. Conan was prefaced with the Nietzsche dictum, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger." Stone seems to believe that not being killed is the only way one can grow stronger. It’s debatable as to whether or not Parker and Stone view the tongue-ripping as proof that Hayes has gone off the deep end, or if they are getting off on Hayes getting his revenge. As with the execution of Sgt. Barnes at the end of Platoon, I’d argue that it’s a little bit of both. The picture has an informed, awesome nihilism, seeing the metamorphosis of Hayes into a killer as simultaneously regrettable and impressive. In order to become a man he needs to both rape and be raped. He needs to understand and embrace this prison culture in order to become its master.

After five years in prison, it looks like Billy will be sentenced to another twenty-five. In despair he breaks down at his hearing and tells the court that they are a nation of pigs. And that he fucks their sons and daughters because they are pigs. And most interesting, that it’s really funny that they don’t eat pigs because that’s what they are. The whole thing is a farce; Islam only exists as an excuse to persecute. It doesn’t mean anything in the movie. The Midnight Express in the movie is defined as the catacombs of Christian crusaders. Tellingly enough, Billy doesn’t take this path. Christianity is not much better than the meaningless tenets of Turkish Islam. Christianity doesn’t save Billy; he doesn’t join the Christian crusaders against the Muslims. He is saved through a combination of fascist justice and pure dumb luck. He tries to bribe the head guard, but is taken into the sanitarium to be raped. Resisting, amusingly backlit by a stained glass pane, he kicks him back and the back of the guard’s head is impaled on a towel rack. He strips the guard of his uniform and walks out. You may try to argue to the contrary, but I would say that God had absolutely nothing to do with this. The death of the guard has the feeling of a pulpy revenge fantasy. You want to cheer Billy for killing him. And so through his death, Billy has finally learned how to rape. It feels much better and is much clearer than the tongue-ripping. And the opportunity and the actual murder is pure serendipty. The situation is so arbitrary that it plugs us into a universe of pure meaninglessness, where nobody is watching.

The film has been accused of being racist. Accused of being racist, what am I saying, the film has been attacked because it IS racist. It’s racist against Turks; it sees them as a backwards and barbaric culture. Islam gets a bad rap in this movie; the Turks are portrayed as hypocrites for forbidding homosexuality and then going and doing it. And none of the Turkish spoken in the film is given subtitles. Somebody told me that it’s Italian and most of the people playing Turks in the film are Italians. I’d expect that many Turks would feel about this movie the same way that blacks would feel about Birth of a Nation. Billy Hayes himself has said years later that his book (which the film was based on) was a wild exaggeration. The Turkish government didn’t worry too much about arresting Hayes should he re-enter the country after his escape or after he published his book. They didn’t really get upset until after the film was released. Hayes shows some regret about how he has single-handedly crippled the Turkish tourism industry, and more than anything else, THAT is why he can’t enter the country again. He also regrets that the film didn’t show a single positive portrayal of Turks (indeed proving that it is not an indictment of a few bad apples, but of the whole country). He reminds us that his message wasn’t to not go to Turkey. It was to not smuggle drugs out of Turkey.

After reading a longer-than-usual tirade of mine, a non-plussed high school economics teacher told me that I’m not his favorite critic but I am his favorite amateur sociologist. Good enough for me. I’m putting on my amateur sociologist hat right now. I’m bored, bored and bored with the position that all racism is bad. I figure that I have the racism problem pretty much figured out. We need to look at the conflict perspective and Durkheim’s theories of functionalism especially. It is necessary for those in power (or rather those in question) to assign a quality of otherness to those with a different skin color or culture to assure their own success as a culture. To take a relatively neutral example, the perpetuation of the idea that Vanilla Ice was a failed experiment is necessary to keep rap music from penetration into the mainstream and thus losing its status as a vehicle for social criticism. Similiarly, the joke about how to circumcise a redneck (you kick his sister in the chin) reinforces social taboos not only against incest, but in a funny way and in a certain sense, against the insularism that prevents social change. It tells us that we don’t want to be like the rednecks. Racism isn’t necessarily completely good, but it’s a complicated issue, because in some senses it is! In terms of Midnight Express, the portrayal of Turkish culture as being corrupt and fascist helps to show us that we don’t want to be like the Turks. It shows that being a Turk is highly undesirable, and so we will want to be as far away from what Midnight Express defines as a Turk as possible. The film is basically a defense of a legal system that lets the guilty go more than it convicts the innocent; this system is supported through its absence. The racism in the film, the exaggeration of a real culture, is more effective than something abstract like Orwell’s 1984 or, more to the point, the original Planet of the Apes because we don’t instictively view it as an abstraction. Consider it Machevillian libertarianism. If the Turkish tourism industry is thrown into turmoil, then so be it, as long as our values of freedom over safety are reaffirmed. It’s really sort of fascinating, and in a way satisfying to me, that the film is highly politically conscious but, in the traditional sense, completely spiritually vacant. The values of Midnight Express are less contradictory than complex. Kael is certainly onto something when she calls the film sadomasochistic and “porn about the sacrifice of a virgin," but it seems overly simplistic to call it a con.

It’s difficult to really come up with a lucid definition of what exactly great acting is. Visible acting is bad acting, but invisible acting is not necessarily great acting. Arguments could be made that that is simply adequate acting. Instead of defining great acting, maybe we should try and define what a great performance is, thus distributing some of the credit and blame on the filmmakers. A great performance incorporates and molds a persona. It deals with it. An actor, in film at least/especially is nothing more or less but a distinct body, voice and persona. (No actor is ever without a body, voice or persona.) Their body, voice and persona are inescapable facts. The greatness of a performance lies in nothing more than in the acknowledgment of these facts. As I am writing this within a week of the announcement of the 2003 Academy Award nominees, I hope that this can throw some light onto why I value the un-nominated Christina Ricci over Charlize Theron in Monster, and Bill Murray over Johnny Depp to win the Best Actor category. I’m basically saying that Ricci and Murray deserve to be recognized for giving the greatest Christina Ricci performance and the greatest Bill Murray performance that I have ever seen. Theron, and to a lesser extent Depp, are impressive in their performances, but there is something defensive and standoffish about them. They’re putting on a character. Ricci and Murray tap into something just plain richer. I suspect that it takes more courage to be an icon than an actor, and that is what Ricci and Murray do.

The main performances in Midnight Express, it needs to be said, are masterpieces of iconology. John Hurt turns in one of his best John Hurt performances as Max, the British intellectual who has allegedly been in the prison longer than any other inmate: seven years. Has John Hurt always been middle-aged? He’s like a vampire, bitten at age 50 and doomed to live his immortality in back pain and impotence. Hurt is so consistently depressed in his movies that it threatens to become a bad joke. Somehow it never does; his eyes show that he no longer fears the end, that he has learned to cope with it. He has an informed nihilism. In Midnight Express, he’s a decaying hippy, hanging onto his unkempt hair, mustache, loose clothes and sensually stoned mindset almost out of habit. When we first see him he’s shooting up with needles and aluminum foil. The image is more disturbing than anything else in the movie, and considering the movie that is saying quite a bit. Hurt’s voice reminds strongly of Strange Days and The Crow’s Michael Wincott, gravelly and just British enough to give it a surreal punk quality. We know that Max is dying and barely cares anymore. The prison has just beat him down. When he finds his pet cat murdered by hanging early in the movie, he doesn’t even seem to have the tears to properly mourn it. Hurt gives Max a history and a past. We don’t see it and the movie doesn’t mention it, but it’s there and it’s curiously missing from all of the other characters. Even Billy Hayes.

The painfully underutilized Randy Quaid does some excellent character work in the film. His character is not much in the film and is not fully developed, but Quaid works. He plays that one note extraordinarily well. As in The Last Detail, Quaid plays a dumb kid thrown into a long prison term for a petty but highly political crime. In The Last Detail, he tried to steal a donation box for the captain’s wife’s favorite charity. In Midnight Express, it’s a few candles from a mosque. The characters differ in that he’s a shy kid whose future hasn’t been written yet in The Last Detail, whereas in Midnight Express he’s adopted his thuggishness and hasn’t bothered to reflect on it. He’s the only other American we see in the movie, however, and we have to admire the fact that he doesn’t have the will to give up like everyone else. His presence helps to confirm Billy’s willfully naive hope that he’ll survive. He has a loud, slightly Texan voice and an arrogant physical presence that successfully counters the hypnotic European nihilism of Max.

Still very unknown character actor Paul Smith is excellent as the head guard. He’s a big guy too, hypermasculine; James Gandolfini, only much more so. Smith gets very few lines, but he sells the role; he doesn’t condescend to it or try and make it into anything more than it is: an abstract caricature. As Billy’s dominatrix, Smith is fairly straight-faced in the scenes where he is beating and raping him. He’s angry more than anything else during these scenes. We see him less as a sadist and as more of a professional. He’s breaking down Billy and initiating him into a world of pain, showing him who’s boss and furthering the film’s thesis of Turkey as a diseased culture as opposed to home of some diseased people. This is the right performance for this movie.

Billy Hayes himself is played by Brad Davis, an actor who arguably peaked with this film. He looks a bit like a synthesis between Kurt Russell and Josh Hartnett, probably manlier and handsomer than the real Billy Hayes. This is an interesting choice; if Billy was portrayed as more of a wimp, we wouldn’t hate him as much, we wouldn’t think that he would be able to survive, and his disentigration would not have as much power. On the third point, Davis probably fails; the film’s most major missteps come in the scene where, in a babbling “crazy” manner, he asks his girlfriend to show him her breasts. S'il vous plait. Davis’ manliness also lends itself to the macho revenge fantasy stuff, especially in the tongue-ripping scene. For the most part he’s excellent.

The one real weak link in the film is Irene Miracle as Billy’s girlfriend Susan. I’m sure her role is a thankless one. She doesn’t get anything to say aside from, “Oh Billy, oh Billy!!” and her exposing of her breasts for him lacks any real weight in the picture. It doesn’t seem to go on long enough; it’s not regarded as much of a moment in the film. Reading about it, it sounds disturbing. Since much of the film has been reported as being made up as it is, it would have worked better if Susan hooked up with somebody else during the five years that Billy was in jail. (Why hasn’t she, we wonder.) Or if we could see him cheating on her before he started smuggling the hashish. Their relationship should be deteriorated by the time she exposes her breasts to him. She would see it as a sort of penance for betraying him. For him, he should really find out that he was in love with her, it’s too late now, and now all that he can see her as is as a pair of breasts to masturbate too. In the film it plays on an emotional level like lovemaking, but Parker doesn’t lend it any sense of warmth or intimacy. He sees it as degradation. The breasts themselves seem appetizing at first; there’s something gentle and girly about Miracle. But then Parker gives us another angle and we are disturbed to see that they are cone-shaped. Then she presses them against the glass, so Billy can kiss them. It’s such a horribly grotesque moment. Why couldn’t Parker do more with it? And we come right back to where we started from: a subversive and interesting movie muddied by pure dopey sloppiness.