Dancing a Two Step: "Midnight Run"

If you have been reading this journal for any length of time, you may have noticed that I place a lot of importance in metaphors.

A great deal of our thinking, particularly but not exclusively about art, involves analogies, substitutions, imagining one thing as another, making comparisons between processes and images, images and feelings, feelings and physical structures. Metaphors, in other words, as long as we take the idea of metaphor to be broader than simply the definition that some of us learned in high school, which, as I remember, was something along the lines of "a comparison that doesn't use 'like' or 'as,' because then it's a simile." 

Once one becomes aware of this tendency, one spots it everywhere. Plots, it is said, have "movement." But do they really? How exactly do they move? Aren't they just a series of events? And in some ways, they don't move at all – they are, as Michael Roemer has pointed out, entirely complete, and static in that completion, before we encounter them. A movie is finished, the story told in its entirety, before we watch it.

Characters have "arcs." But an arc is a specific shape, and do characters really have that? Sometimes a character seems to change more than once in the case of a story – does that still count as an arc, or has it transformed into a Z? And what about when a character changes (as people sometimes do in real life) suddenly and drastically? Why not describe characters as having "leaps" or "strides"? What difference in our understanding might that make?

In the same way, films are sometimes described as "thrill rides," but how similar are they, really, to amusement park rides? (Ask Martin Scorsese, notes someone drily from the peanut gallery.) Or they're described as having "politics" or "messages" or even making "arguments" – but what is it, exactly, in a film that "has" these things? I understand how a person can have beliefs, and thus politics, and I understand how arguments work when they are made by a person using whatever tools are available to them, but can a film be said to have beliefs? Can a film, which is composed of images and sound strung together into a story, be said to make an argument?

The wrong move here would be to get pedantic and say that none of these things are possible and that everyone who says something along the lines of "I loved the way the plot of Titanic moved and how Leo's character went through this amazing arc, and I feel like the movie was kind of a thrill ride at times, but its deeper message kind of got to this argument about how there is nothing in the world – not even a super-big ship – that has the power of love!" is somehow wrong because that person who said it doesn't know how language works. Because they do know (they are using it) and what they've said does make sense, regardless of how much of it we agree with.

Instead, the right move seems to me to be noting that all of these phrases and ideas have meaning because we can understand them. I know what someone means when they talk about a film's politics or about the way it puts the viewer onto a rollercoaster of emotion. We use metaphors because they work. They allow us to communicate things we might not otherwise be able to.

We cannot think only in the language of "movie," because movies are not entities of the mind, but of sound and image on a screen; thus, to talk about and understand them we have to find analogies, comparisons, language that brings to mind other non-movie things in the world, to help us work through what's actually happening on the screen and inside of us as we watch that screen.

Having said that, it's also worth noting that a great deal of this metaphorical thinking goes on below the surface (metaphor) of our conscious mind, or behind the curtain (metaphor, again) of the arguments we roll out (again) onto the stages (once again, for the peanut gallery) on which our discussions occur.

Our metaphors often go unexamined, is what I’m trying to say.

Why am I going on about this? Because I've recently been making a short film with some banter-y dialogue in it, which has put me in mind of buddy-films like Midnight Run. And as I've worked, I've been trying to figure out some of the things that make characters fit together (if that's the right analogy) in pleasing ways on the screen.

Released in the summer of 1998, Midnight Run is a fascinating film. It represents the first real turn towards the lighter, more comedic fare that has come to constitute such a large part of the second half of Robert De Niro's career; it showcases Charles Grodin in a feature role, rather than the supporting parts he was too frequently relegated to; and it epitomizes the short, sweet peak of director Martin Brest, who had burst into moviegoing consciousness with 1984's Beverly Hills Cop, would go on to make respectably-profitable movies in Scent of a Woman (1992) and Meet Joe Black (1998), and would then be essentially drummed out of Hollywood after the disastrous Gigli (2003), which failed, by most accounts, because of studio interference rather than any real failings on Brest's part. Such is life out here under the gold-tinted palms.

The film tells the story of burned-out bounty hunter Jack Walsh (De Niro), who is given the task of tracking down a milquetoast accountant named Jonathan Mardukas (Grodin) who has jumped bail in Los Angeles. Mardukas is on the run because when he discovered that he was keeping records for a Chicago mob boss instead of a legitimate corporation, he embezzled $15 million from the mob's operation and gave most of it to charity; now, he's afraid that if he turns himself in to the authorities the mob will figure out a way to kill him.

Walsh apprehends Mardukas in New York City and starts trying to get him back to L.A., which is when the hijinks begin. Not only is the mob boss (Dennis Farina) intent on killing Mardukas to keep him from testifying about his operation, the FBI is also after him – but if they get Mardukas, then Walsh doesn't get paid for returning him to L.A. There's also another bounty hunter, named Marvin Dorfler (John Ashton), who's trying to take Mardukas away from Walsh so he can collect the bounty. And finally, Mardukas is going to try to do everything he can to escape

Walsh drags Mardukas across the country. They get kicked off a commercial flight when Mardukas (who later turns out to be a small-plane pilot) claims he's scared of flying; they leap onto freight trains and fall in rivers and steal cars and borrow a car from Walsh's ex-wife and engage in high-speed chases, all while staving off mob hitmen, the FBI, and Dorfler.

The climax of the film takes place in the Las Vegas airport, when Walsh makes a deal to set up the mob boss for the FBI if they'll let him take Mardukas and collect his bounty. This plan works. The mob boss gets arrested, and Walsh gets Mardukas to L.A. just before the deadline. But over the course of the film Walsh and Mardukas have gone from being unremittingly annoyed by each other to being something like friends, and in the end Walsh lets him go rather than turning him in for the reward. After he does, Mardukas reveals that he's been carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars with him during their entire escapade. He gives this to Walsh so he can get out of the bounty-hunting business for good.

The immense charm of the film has any number of sources. The comedic acting shines, from the stars on down to the supporting cast, the direction and pacing are virtually flawless, and the script is both nicely constructed and filled with memorable lines.

But at the heart of it is the relationship between Walsh and Mardukas. This is a relationship that evolves over the course of the film, as I've noted, and one that also benefits from the on-screen chemistry between De Niro and Grodin. But you will notice that as soon as one starts to talk about these kinds of relationships, one falls into stock language about relationships "evolving" and "on-screen chemistry."

What does all this actually mean? And how can we describe and understand it? This is where the unavoidability of metaphorical language comes in.

One sometimes hears of relationships in movies being described as something along the lines of pieces of a puzzle being fit into place. "You complete me," is the romantic tagline from Jerry Maguire, which puts a nice button on this way of envisioning how this works. The idea is that two characters get along because in their interaction they each supply elements that might be missing from the other's life or personality. Like puzzle pieces, they are shaped such that a protuberance in the one fits perfectly into a declivity of the other; at the end of the film something that has been missing or unresolved in the characters (the "picture" that the pieces of the puzzle eventually add up to in the metaphor) is no longer missing or has been resolved.

So, in Midnight Run, Walsh is, at the start, an ill-tempered fellow who only really cares about getting paid for the job. He is continually irascible, and refuses to open up to other people – and by implication, to himself – about what has made him this way. Mardukas's personality fits perfectly into this personality quirk, solving it, or unlocking something in Walsh that was not present at the start (one also hears a lot of "key and lock" language in trying to describe this, particularly from the folks who write manuals about screenwriting.)

Mardukas is almost petulantly genial, and yet when he gets his mind set on something, he refuses to give in. One of the film's best examples of this is when he keeps asking "Why aren't you popular with the Chicago police department?" again and again, to the point of annoyance, until Walsh finally gives in and tells him. His geniality is exactly what allows him to befriend Walsh, because it prevents Walsh from ever completely shutting down, and his persistence slowly breaks down Walsh's barriers, until their friendship begins to take hold.

The opposite is also true: Walsh is, at heart, a good, humane person, which provides Mardukas with exactly what he needs. We are told in dialogue that Mardukas gave most of the money he embezzled to charity, but in terms of on-screen action, his character is still an accountant who worked for the mob and then jumped bail rather than testify against them. What he needs, what's missing from his character in dramatic terms, is a chance to do a good deed; and Walsh, by setting him free at the end with no hope of recompense, provides Mardukas exactly that. Mardukas is alone, and on the run, he has committed crimes, but by giving some money to Walsh he can atone at least a little bit (again, in terms of the dramatic structure of the script) for what he's done.

In other words, the buddy-comedy works because each character offers the other something he needs. They provide the missing elements that allow the other to complete that human development, that moving from point A to B, that maturation or realization, that is so key to Hollywood storytelling.

And yet, this doesn't quite tell the whole story. Because in addition to having complimentary personality traits, Walsh and Mardukas also drive each other crazy. There are ways that their characters don't fit together like puzzle pieces at all, but are, instead, irreconcilable. The oft-used analogy of cats and dogs comes to mind here, or the invocation of fire and ice, or, closer in physical terms to the notion of the puzzle piece, the round peg in the square hole.

Walsh is, by nature, imprecise, a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants (wonderful metaphor) guy. He's not detail-oriented, does not plan for contingencies so much as he just makes everything up as he goes along. When he gets pulled into a car and interrogated by the head FBI agent (Yaphet Kotto), he responds by stealing the agent's badge, not because he has any plan but because he's irritated and an FBI badge might be a handy thing to have. When he and Mardukas are out of money and don't have any means of transportation, he makes Mardukas jump onto a moving freight train. He's not a man of foresight, he's a man of action.

Mardukas is the opposite. He's an accountant, a thinker, a man of odds and calculation. He has planned so well that at the beginning, assuming he's sooner or later going to be grabbed by someone, he has donned a money belt with hundreds of thousands of dollars in it, a fact which he keeps secret until the end of the film. This planning also lets him be duplicitous. He pretends to be scared of flying when he's a pilot, and when Walsh forces him to jump onto the train, he tries to escape by shutting the door in Walsh's face.

This incompatibility creates comedic tension between them. One of the running gags in the film is that Walsh wants to retire from being a bounty hunter to open a coffee shop, but instead of seeing this as a kind of romantic dream of the future, all Mardukas can think about is the financial risk involved. "A restaurant is a very tricky investment," he responds to Walsh's voicing of this ambition. "More than half of them go under in the first six months. If I were your accountant, I'd have to strongly advise against it."

At the end of the film as they're saying their goodbyes, Mardukas says, "You're OK, Jack. I think, under different circumstances…you and I probably still would have hated each other." They both laugh. The joke is that they've become friends but still drive each other crazy, although perhaps it is exactly their opposing qualities that have endeared them to each other. So they both do and don't fit together, in character terms; it's exactly this combination of antagonism and complementariness that makes them fun to watch. They are somehow both puzzle pieces and cats and dogs.

And beneath all of this (to once again fall into a metaphor that sees these things as working in a series of layers, with depth to them) is a final metaphor. The two mirror each other. They are remarkably similar, although not quite identical, for one of the fascinating things about mirrors is that when we look into them, we see our right hand as our opposite's left hand. The image is reversed, to our eyes, not exact.

The best example of this is the wonderful scene when Walsh lets Mardukas use the FBI badge to fool a bar owner into giving them some twenty dollar bills that are supposedly counterfeit. Here, Mardukas is acting exactly like Walsh: gently unscrupulous and willing to improvise in whatever manner it takes to get the job done.

This mirroring plays out across the course of the movie. There's a great argument between the two of them about which one lied to the other first, and they both enjoy catching the other out in their self-deceptions. The script also gives both characters a nearly identical backstory. When Mardukas, as an accountant, found out that he was working for the mob, he felt compelled to take action; we also find out that Walsh used to be a cop in Chicago, and when he found out that all the other cops around him were taking payments from the mob, he refused to go along and had to quit the force.

So the men reflect each other – they're more similar that either wants to admit. And yet they are also different, each offering the other something he needs, in a relationship that matches compatibility with antagonism. The complexity here is precisely what drives us into metaphor in trying to arrive at comprehension and description.

They're engaged in, to use the metaphor I might like the best out of all of them, a dance. They move through the film together, partnered, sometimes reacting, sometimes initiating, sometimes imitating, but always responsive, always communicating. And always entertaining to watch.

In the end, is it necessary that we find exactly the right metaphor to describe what's going on here? Of course not. But for those of us interested in either writing and making films or in thinking critically about them, working through what's captured by the metaphors we use, and what's perhaps left out by them, can be invaluable.

Like films themselves, it's a complicated process. And when I find a perfect way to describe it, a perfect metaphor for it, I'll let you know.

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