A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night or Un Chat Andalou

What is Iranian noir? Like The Blair Witch Project it’s shot in black and white and maybe recalls 60’s B movies like Succubus with a little bit of Rebel Without a Cause, thrown in.  Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night stars a vampire in a chador (Sheila Vand) who rides a skateboard. She sucks the blood out of Saeed, a drug dealer and pimp with “sex" tattooed on his Adam’s apple. Saeed has a stuffed antelope over his bar and modern art on the walls of his pad. She tells Atti, a prostitute  (Mozhan Marno), “You’re sad. You don’t remember what you want. You don’t remember wanting.” And she falls for a James Dean look alike, Arash (Arash Marandi) who drives a Thunderbird and pierces her ears with a safety pin at night in the front of the bilging smoke- stacks of the local power plant. As you may be able to tell A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is totally over the top. Like its heroine, it sucks blood-- this time out of a number of genres rather than people--including that of the morality tale. But it’s the settings of the movie, the oil fields, the domiciles of Arash, who lives with his father Hossein (Marshall Manesh), a heroin addict, of the vampire herself, of the prostitute and of a wealthy prima donna, Shaydah (Rome Shandaloo), who is recovering from a nose job, that tell the story. Though this vampire is an avenging angel, you may have to search in vain for political allegory, despite the fact that the movie takes place in, yes, Bad City, Iran. Amirpour, is obviously in love with film style and particularly the haunting postmodern surrealism found in filmmakers like David Lynch and David Fincher. Looking for a message in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night would be like trying to analyze the politics of Un Chien Andalou and with the film’s resident cat perched enigmatically between the vampire and her lover in the film’s final scene, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night might also have been called Un Chat Andalou.

Leader of the Pack

photo: Ralph M.  Newman

Margalit Fox’s recent Times obit describes Shadow Morton as being “almost singlehandedly responsible for the wild success of the Shangri-Las, the Queens girl group he introduced and propelled to international stardom”(“Shadow Morton, Songwriter and Producer , Dies at 71,” NYT, 2/15/13).  Morton was responsible for such iconic songs as “Leader of the Pack” and later produced Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child.” There was a haunting quality to Morton’s music. It was a mixture of doo-wop and The Sufferings of Young Werther. The dissonant riffs communicated an infatuation with a world pregnant with impossibility, one in which fantasy is prized over reality, with that which doesn’t exist trumping knowable things. Just like today you have East and West Coast rap. Back in the sixties, The Beach Boys presented the West Coast version of a similar sound in songs like “Don’t Worry Baby.”  The defiant James Dean character in Rebel Without a Cause prefigured Morton’s “Jimmy”in “Leader of the Pack." Fox’s obit pointed out that Morton possessed a “brazen, naive genius” epitomized by the fact that “he played no instrument, could not read music and wrote his songs in his head.”  According to Fox, “The nickname Shadow was bestowed on him by a Brill Building colleague to describe his habitually evanescent presence.” Morton’s bio makes him sound like a creature out of one his own songs, which is not implausible for an artist. Some writers and songwriters describe the life they’ve lived and others prophesy their own epitaphs. Morton didn’t turn out to die as young as the ill-fated James Dean, but he burned out quick, as far as music is concerned, crashing like the  “Leader of the Pack.” “Mr Morton,” Fox went on to say, “who underwent treatment for alcoholism in the mid-l980’s…remained sober to the end of his life” and “had a second career as a designer of golf clubs.”