Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 8-April-07
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Starman (1984)

In a way it makes sense that the man who brought us "Halloween," "Christine," and a remake of "Village of the Damned" also directed the sexed-up "E.T." rip-off known as "Starman." A friend recently told me that every female he knows loves this movie, as indeed my whole family did when it came out, but the fact is that John Carpenter's sci-fi romance is pretty creepy. Consider the plot: an alien comes to Earth, uses a dead man's DNA to generate a human body for a vessel, terrifies the man's widow into taking him on a road trip to Arizona, and seduces her along the way. Part of me wonders if Stockholm-syndrome nooky with a member of an unknown species is a sensible form of grief therapy, or even hygienic. Yet another part of me still finds "Starman" winning.

Much of the picture's peculiar charm comes down to its cast. With her Norman Rockwell looks, Karen Allen brings both emotional innocence and sex appeal to the part of a simple woman coping with the back-to-back shocks of losing her husband and then regaining him, but not really. (She knows the alien is an impostor from the start.) Jeff Bridges also blends physical attractiveness with childlike simplicity in the title role. The body he recreates looks solid in a lumberjack shirt (and without any shirt at all), but the mind within is reeling from an onslaught of unfamiliar experiences. It's hard to say who needs whom more, the widow who didn't get to say good-bye or the visitor who longs to return home. Hence the sentiment which overlies the creepiness. Despite a linguistic barrier on top of a cultural one, this unlikely pair manages to recognize and fulfill each other's needs.

A third major character bears more contemplation than the star-crossed lovers since his story is easier to swallow. The arrival of the spaceship attracts the attention of the feds, who enlist a nerdy extraterrestrial researcher (Charles Martin Smith) to track down whatever came out of it. In a nice bit of self-reflection, the movie contrasts our impulse towards scientific curiosity with our impulse towards defensive xenophobia. Whereas the astrogeek wants to find the alien to bask in its presence and knowledge, the commander of the expedition (Richard Jaeckel) only wants to dissect him. The clincher is that the visitor came to our planet by invitation of the United Nations, who sent up a friendly message in 1977 aboard the Voyager 2 space probe (which remains among the stars to this day). The more philosophical aspect of the tale engages the brain, just as Carpenter's propensity for suspense and explosions appeals to the gut. So even with the sappy stuff that aims for the heart but verges on heebie-jeebies, "Starman" lands in the Worthy-of-a-Rental universe.

Copyright © 2007 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.