“This book is going to drive people absolutely mad!”
“Well, let's hope so. The movie comes out next month”
John Carpenter is one of my favourite directors.
When I was starting to get into movies, I went on a tear through his work. There are few Carpenters left.
In the Mouth of Madness was one of them.
His filmography as a whole has seen a critical revival but I was always leery of checking out his work after the eighties. I had watched a couple of films from around this era - Memoirs, Escape from LA and Village of the Damned - but none of them made me want to do more of a deep dive.
Mouth was the one of his nineties films that sounded the most intriguing.
My local Arthouse screened it for its 30th anniversary so I decided to finally give it a go.
A follow up to 1992’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man, the film marks a return to Carpenter’s preoccupations: An unstoppable evil, a character learning that the world he believed in does not exist.
It was hard to watch this movie and not be reminded of Robert Cumbow’s book Order in the Universe. The film is about order - we open on books being produced and end in a movie theatre at the end of the world. Even as the world we know falls, the so-called chaos is even more controlling.
John keeps trying to leave Hobbs End and finds himself driving back into town. Even when he leaves, that escape is an illusion. He is a character trapped in a story that has already been printed.
In a manner that feels like a more successful version of Halloween 3’s cliffhanger, our hero is too late to stop the apocalypse - it has already been consumed and adapted into other media. He is reduced to experiencing the whole of the Sutter Kane cross-promotional campaign, from the posters to - in the film’s crescendo - the movie adaptation.
This is a movie not so much about the power of creation as its commodification. It also feels infused with the rage of a filmmaker tired of having to deal with the Hollywood machine.
Considering the remainder of Carpenter’s career, it is hard not to view the ending as the last embers of the director’s enthusiasm for the career he had spent decades building.
John Trent ends the film cackling at himself onscreen, losing whatever delusions of control. The wheels of industry cannot be stopped. One man cannot bring down the system. Like They Live, the power of the dollar is more compelling than any threat - whether it be a hidden alien menace, Lovecraftian horrors or Chevy Chase...
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