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And Rusty James reflection in the car.
If someone would be willing to write the times I could put it together.
I'll have it added, @Birdleson. You may be doing Tamahori a great service here because I know many (including myself) were skeptical of his other work after seeing DAD and have avoided it with a ten foot pole. Hopefully your selection redeems him a bit as a creative talent. ;)
I've always wanted to see that one and now I have a reason to stop making excuses.
Really? I hate depressing movies.
Not many, I don t own it. Have never found it for sale anywhere.
He just writes what he feels like writing, like we all do. ;)
When do you mean?
As for the tense score, it is by Stewart Copeland, drummer in The Police.
What is he famous for? How come everyone is scared of him? He's like a mythical figure.
What did you make of the ending? It can be interpreted in more than one way. The very ending, the last minute or so.
The ending I took to be a happy one. The Motorcycle Boy never made it to the coast, because "California got in the way," but Rusty James does make it, which means he is going places where his brother couldn't, and is going to free himself from his influence, which is what he couldn't do while he was still alive. That works with the metaphor of the fish being freed from the pet store and going to the river, "where they belong" (significantly, the fish provide the only hint of color in the film). Also, recall that at one point Rusty James says he seems to be spending his life "waiting for something." Waiting for the full-time return of the gangs and their rumbles, probably, and wishing to rule them alongside his brother, to finally give a direction to his life. But that's a pipe dream for several reasons, one being that his brother no longer wants to rule, and another being that as Smokey says, Rusty James doesn't have the intelligence to rule. Before his brother's death, Rusty James is trapped in his brother's shadow and isn't prepared to fully embrace his own life. He is just wasting time. After he dies, he is forced to become his own man.
In the film, the concept of time is a relevant one. It's explicitly mentioned in one scene in the diner, but apart from that, it's hinted at visually on several occasions: In Rusty James' dreams, the clock in the classroom is ticking quickly. Also, when Rusty James is talking with Smokey outside the diner, the clouds reflected on the window are moving too fast, as if time was sped up. Before Rusty James and Steve are mugged in the alley, there is a shot of the shadow of a fire escape covering the brick wall of a building, and its movement is accelerated. In some street scenes, I also got the impression some of those clouds of mist, fog, smoke, whatever, were moving way too quickly. It's all got to do with the idea that when one is young, one has the impression there is plenty of time to do things, but in fact life is moving, and quickly.
I really liked the moment when, for me, the purpose of black and white becomes clear: when The Motorcycle Boy explains he is color blind and can't hear too good. In that sense, he is detached from the world, but in another, he seems to have --as his father says-- an acute perception of things, the kind that can drive one crazy. That's probably what prevents him from finding a purpose to his life (shades of L'Avventura here, as well.) It's as if he could "see through walls," so to speak. Surely, most of us have felt like that at some point in our lives. In one scene, Steve says unlike his brother, The Motorcycle Boy is someone whose thoughts you can't read and understand; indeed, he always has a cryptic expression on his face, not only due to his sensory deprivation, but also because of the fact his trip taught him something about life everyone else ignores.
I greatly enjoyed the noirish cinematography of the film, of course, with those striking blacks set against the urban landscape. Every location, no matter how briefly it was seen, felt utterly vivid, whether it was empty (the alley with the muggers; the high school hallway) or full of people (the garage where they fight; the crowded street at night). The score had a quirky feel to it that worked with the strange, ethereal atmosphere of the movie, and it faded in and out from scenes in such a way that it gave the film an improvisational, in-the-moment style. The movie seemed to be aiming for a timeless feel. The actors were solid, especially the two leads. Mickey Rourke as The Motorcycle Boy is a magnetic presence; you definitely buy him as the "ruler" of the gangs, and he is great at transmitting the character's sense of mystery. You can see why Rourke became a star so quickly. Matt Dillon manages to effectively convey Rusty James' humanity, his worries and his doubts by presenting them in contrast to the character's tough exterior. Diane Lane, Dennis Hopper, Nicolas Cage... they are all compelling to watch. William Smith as the cop comes across as more than human: mythical... archetypal even. I like the fact that, defying our expectations, he displays humanity at the very end when he lets Rusty James go.
I liked the movie.
Imagine if Connery had been cast in the role instead of Matt Dillon.
"I'm Rushty Jamesh"
By the time that 1983 had rolled around, Francis Ford Coppola had been one of the main talents to help make the 1970s a strong contender for the greatest decade of filmmaking in the history of the medium. He shook up convention and challenged what movies could be in such efforts as the two Godfather films, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, showing the world that he could depict war in foreign conflict, inside families or inside his own characters’ minds. Part of what makes Rumble Fish an interesting to film to study is the fact that, even after Coppola had made a massive name for himself at that point in his career and crafted some surefire cinematic classics in the medium, his 1983 effort resembles more of an independent film than anything else. The starting point for many filmmakers, a stripped back, black and white think piece on humanity, was made by Coppola after he’d already reached his greatest heights. That on it’s own is a fascinating thing.
And yet, despite the different feeling to Rumble Fish than any other Coppola film I’ve ever seen, the same touches he added to all his work is contained inside it. He seemed to have a theme that carried throughout many of his films, of his leading characters fighting against their own nature while being faced with revelations through their experiences in those roles. Michael Corleone discovers the erosion of trust and family that can come with the powerful role placed upon him in the Godfather films, just as Apocalypse Now’s Captain Willard grows disillusioned with his role as a soldier when Colonel Kurtz’s madness reveals itself as profound wisdom and The Conversation’s Harry Caul feels the effects of the paranoia that comes from discovering the powerful danger of surveillance. Continuing the trend of Coppola’s films, the gang characters of Rumble Fish led by Rusty James and Motorcycle Boy face the same war against their identities as the director’s other characters, caught in the middle of a lifestyle that is suffocating and depowering.
As a compiled feature, Rumble Fish is certainly a feat, and perhaps most refreshing because something so simple in approach and content could come after some heavy and logistically nightmarish features in its director’s career. That Coppola was able to shift from battling deadlines and his own sanity as he teetered on the edge during the infamous and stranger than fiction filming of Apocalypse Now just years earlier to a much more restrained and practical film with simple logistics is a testament to his versatility as a talent.
And there is certainly a lot to admire in Rumble Fish, most readily in the form of the amazing black and white photography of Stephen H. Burum that gives the film such atmosphere, life and grit. The heavy use of smoke and steam, water on the wet streets and limited light fixtures paint some striking frames that are dominated by the shadows playing off the actors’ faces and how the light strikes the cobbles of the pavement on the shooting locations. A divisive and rough part of town is rendered before us quite hauntingly while still attaining some beauty. And in a very conscious decision that ties directly to one of the film’s main characters, the black and white photography could be meant to simulate for the audience how Motorcycle Boy sees the world in his color blindness. Additionally, a common tool used by many filmmakers is utilized in Rumble Fish’s photography where small dashes of color dot the film to contrast against the monochrome visuals. In this movie those colors are represented by the “rumble fish” in the downtown aquarium that gives the picture its symbolic name.
In other areas of its production, Rumble Fish has a very punchy and rough style that works quite well with its makeshift indie feeling and the focus it has on youths in distress. Like many films of this particular style, adults are seldom seen in favor of really honing in on the experiences of young boys and girls facing their world as they adapt to it and each other. The dialogue these kids swap is similarly punchy to meet the style of the film around them, with fast and loose colloquial discourse dominating the feature. The kids are often made to sound themselves like adults, something that I’m sure was a stylistic choice on Coppola’s part to give the movie a different sort of feeling than what is expected. I’m reminded quite fondly of Rian Johnson’s 2005 indie neo-noir film Brick, where the high school kids depicted speak like the adults out of the 40s and 50s noir classics and where actual adults are almost non-existent.
This stylistic choice really makes the story about youths and being young, but also blurs the line amusingly between the young and old when the youngsters are facing the kinds of moral issues and questions of life you’d expect of those beyond their years. It’s also interesting that of the adults we do see, they are always a nagging or authoritative figure, like Patty’s controlling and dismissive mother, the misunderstanding principal of Rusty James’ school who suspends him and the biggest example of all, the cop who dreams of bringing Motorcycle Boy down. I don’t know if these choices were made intentionally to create an “us vs. them” dynamic in the movie between the kids and the adults, but how the adults are presented certainly amplifies how misunderstood the kids feel by them.
The smart script and snappy dialogues of Rumble Fish are accompanied by very awkward ADR work that makes the dialogue echo above the film scenes. While this could be the mark of sloppy filmmaking in other cases, I think the choice to make the ADR so overt in the film was another stylistic decision to really deliver the dialogue of the actors in a style that made it an experience for the audience to hear. The audio of the ADR is crisp and direct without being watered down by the other sounds in the film when the spoken lines are played over the actors’ original performances, which can often lead to some great texture to the deliveries. I particularly enjoyed the performance and line delivery of Tom Waits, who was chomping on some gum while doing his ADR in a manner that gave his Benny character some real personality.
In other areas, the enhanced and overt ADR in Rumble Fish allows us to hear every sigh and breath of the remaining cast, which almost makes them feel in the room with us. In this way, the film manages to recreate what I would imagine to be the closest approximation of a 3D effect through auditory means, where sound design and presentation is utilized to bring the characters closer to you as you view the film despite the movie playing on a 2D plane. Much like the black and white photography of Rumble Fish could be simulating Motorcycle Boy’s colorless vision, perhaps the punched up sound could be meant to simulate the loud sounds that wash over him after he comes out of one of his deaf spells, the noise heightened as a result? The audio in this style is often accompanied with performances that are larger than life and very pronounced, which only gives the movie even more texture and personality without slipping into a cartoonish mode.
To finish out the discussion about sound design in Rumble Fish, I noticed that there is often a particular set of sounds playing in the background of scenes that are repetitious in nature and that remain present for the duration of each particular moment. The scenes where this was most apparent was in the beginning of the film when there is a chiming sort of sound as we are introduced to Rusty James and the other characters, the ticking of what could be a clock when a stabbed Rusty is holding on to life after his fight with Biff, and at the end of the film where the sounds of the animal life in the pet shop are amplified as the Motorcycle Boy strives to free them from their cages.
I don’t really know what effect Coppola had in mind by having sound layered and presented in this way, but it certainly adds another mask of character to the film. In many cases these background sounds also bolster or add a sense of awareness to the scenes they play underneath as well, like the ticking clock/s in the aftermath of Rusty’s fight with Biff conveying that he’s running out of time to be saved. In the same way, the loud cacophony of the pet shop as Motorcycle Boy frees its occupants gives a sound to the liberty he’s returning to the animals, like a victory call created by the miniature animal kingdom in the city.
All these particular stylistic elements give Rumble Fish a very distinct and original identity, and its use of sound and visuals often result in a surreal or slightly bizarre final product that feels almost like a fantasy pretending to be reality. I am thinking most prominently of how the clouds race past the sky in reflection when Rusty James and Smokey speak for the last time, like time is being fast forwarded, or the very surreal and dream-like nature of Rusty James being carried weightlessly through the sky after he gets him on the head with a crowbar. Other little elements, like the fantastical nature of The Motorcycle Boy’s name and his legend give what would otherwise be a crime film about street urchins a far richer core dotted with mythical touches and stylistic flourishes.
Rusty James: Not Word Smart, But Heart Smart
In Rumble Fish, Matt Dillon’s Rusty James is at first built up as the archetypal street vagrant-he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed and is quick to fighting to compensate for his lack of practical intelligence. As the film goes on, however, his character is peeled back to reveal more to the stereotype, with the greatest discovery being his deeply felt and understood sense of loyalty when it comes to his family and gang. This brawn over brain kind of tough guy character is one we’ve seen in just about every conceivable storytelling medium at this point, but the movie is wise to give the character more layers than that almost immediately. Rusty James’ intelligence is a common theme of the film and is often brought up not only to underscore why he may not be able to graduate to a higher station in life (leading to him dropping out of school as a result) but also to paint a conflict between he and his gang. As Smokey confesses at the end of the film, Rusty James lacks the wisdom and mind of his brother to lead a gang and can only get hot-headed for fights that kill his “brothers” in arms.
You can feel Rusty James struggling to come up to the expectations that he thinks others hold for him, and he hates it when he perceives that he’s disappointed his father or brother because he tries so hard to impress them with his every word and action. In reality, both of the men in his life strive to combat his attempts to be like them and warn him against trying to be anyone than who he is. But just as his lack of “word smarts” halt Rusty James from entering into the conversation between his two idols, that lack of intelligence also makes him unable to see the bad path he’s treading down. He’s a blunt instrument that can bang his fists in the name of gang conflict, a street soldier, but he has little utility as a man of his own making. Like a pawn of war, he’s sent off to risk life and limb on the battleground of the streets while smarter men hang behind a desk and order him around, knowing he can be manipulated through his gullibility.
Even in light of Rusty James’ battles to understand and his lapses in intelligence, Rumble Fish does an admirable job of painting a lack of education as something that isn’t a definite negative, and refreshingly escapes the danger of making Rusty James out to be a lost cause. The narrative instead makes him a very sympathetic character because we can see him trying to understand what he’s being told if only he could grasp the meaning behind the words being spoken at his ear and the truth behind the metaphors thrown at him. He’s not left out of the discussion because he’s too lazy to join in our apply himself: we can see him straining to catch up with everyone else in a fashion that makes him quite admirable and endearing. He puts in the effort.
An early dialogue in the film that Rusty James shares with his then girlfriend Patty played by the utterly heart-stopping Diane Lane underscores how the movie is making note of the young man’s lack of intelligence while also redeeming him with other qualities that are valuable and beautiful in their own right:
Rusty James is a kid with a big heart who will go to hell and back for those that mean something to him, and it’s that kind of emotional intelligence that allows him to empathetically connect to those he wants to help. His love for his father and his mother make him invested in keeping their family together and when he finds out that Motorcycle Boy actually managed to track down their runaway mother, Rusty James has a hard time dealing with it because his heart is so big and he wants to reach out too. Beyond that, the love he holds for his brother that goes beyond simple idolatry is what motivates him to understand what Motorcycle Boy is going through in his life, to help in what ways he can.
Ultimately, it’s that same love for his brother and his simple dream of freeing the pet store fish into the water that pushes Rusty James to risk getting shot himself just so that he could honor his hero’s memory after his death. Rusty James may not have even picked up on what Motorcycle Boy was saying about the rumble fish and the symbolism they served to his mind as creatures as trapped and suffocated as he was, but that doesn’t diminish the very selfless actions Rusty James takes to free the animals to meet his brother’s wishes. His emotional strength becomes his greatest asset above all others, his ability to care and defend who he loves.
I don’t know where Rusty James could’ve ended up following the events of Rumble Fish, but the character painted by the film did well to give more layers to a common stereotype. We saw the heart behind the gang soldier and the film gave support to show that sometimes heart is more vital than brain in being a good man. Additionally, Rusty is refreshingly anti-drug in the film and holds drugs as the cause for the gangs not being as prevalent as he once knew, which makes him an interesting moral character on top of everything else. He’s against shooting up but has no issues pummeling people in the streets in the name of brotherhood, a strange sort of moral hypocrisy that I think the film addresses in Motorcycle Boy’s attempts to get Rusty James out of gang life for good. He’s also a tragic character in a way, as the kid who has a phobia of being alone ends the film as a solitary bike rider, effectively taking on his dead brother’s mantle in a way he’d never succeeded to before. You wonder where a kid like that could go from there, on his own and without the support of his idol brother behind him to steer him on the good path.
Hopefully Rusty James learned the importance of moving past gang life after he went out to the sea, to live a more productive and safer existence. In the final discussion he has with his father, Rusty James tellingly avoids saying that he’ll be like Motorcycle Boy when he “grows up” and instead settles for saying he will when he’s “older,” avoiding the concept of growing up entirely. I think he ultimately realizes that he needs to grow up and apply himself to be something more than a street urchin with no future. Rusty James is aware that he’s waiting around and wasting time in the place he’s at, stuck in that same position, and I think the path his brother gives him to leave it all behind was the turning point for him, the moment of clarity that gave him only one choice: to flee. Maybe he’ll hook up with his mother in his new location, find a good job and apply himself and his talents of the heart to something more useful. Like Motorcycle Boy said, “If you’re going to lead people, you have to have somewhere to go.” All we can do is cross our fingers and hope that Rusty James has a destination in mind and a goal to reach for himself.
Rumble Fish: A Metaphor for Society & Humanity?
The real meat of Rumble Fish comes down to its final ten minutes where a lot of the symbolism of the film is paid off and Motorcycle Boy attempts to free some animal life that he feels tied to through their mutually oppressed spirits. There’s a lot of metaphor in this section of the film, and a lot to take in. The idea of rumble fish fighting their own reflection, a trick Motorcycle Boy and Rusty James recreate in one scene, could very much be a metaphor for the struggle of these two young boys. Rusty James risks his own life constantly trying to be a reflection of his brother, never able to achieve the real thing, and far more tellingly Motorcycle Boy goes to his death fighting his own nature in his attempt to give the pet shop fish the freedom from suffocation that he can’t seem to capture for himself.
It’s easy to see that Motorcycle Boy feels a kindred spirit in the fish of the pet shop as well as the other animals beyond them, because he seems to feel that same caged oppression. He was suffocated in his gang life and grew sick of that existence and role, and for a moment he was able to be free like the fish Rusty James lets into the river while in California. But quite tellingly, California got in the way of him getting to the water just as he fails to get the fish to the river in his final moments. Once back from out west, the tragic Motorcycle Boy finds the gang life calling back to him as he inadvertently falls into the same habits, warring with Biff to protect Rusty James and reigniting a rivalry with the cop that wants to see him done in.
Perhaps his time at the top of the gang pile taught Motorcycle Boy some wisdom that only someone in his position could see, of how that life suffocates you and sends you warring with those in another gang like the rumble fish. He seems to wish for the society at large, or at least the part of it that wars senselessly against itself, to be free like the fish in the river. Maybe then the violence and aggression would die out. The real sadness to his character is that, like the Siamese fighting fish, he can’t escape his own nature or his gang life. He tries to get out, but is always pulled back in much like another Coppola character, Michael Corleone.
Motorcycle Boy’s death will certainly reach everyone in the area and perhaps serve as a cautionary tale for those thinking of getting into gangs, but what exactly does that teach those who are already in that life? I think the bad relationship between the gangs and law enforcement would only worsen after Motorcycle Boy’s death, as the young boys would war against the system that silenced one of their greatest figures. The rival gangs could even find themselves joining together in opposition to the long gun of the law that sought to tear them down, a senseless murder that ironically united those the death was meant to deter. Through the cop’s final solution there can only be more crime and escalation, whereas Motorcycle Boy offered a far more peaceful message and had even tried to form a treaty amongst the gangs to end the violence. In his death he tragically looks like a martyr to the gang cause that his demise may only spur on, instead of representing the reformative message he strived to convey in his attempt to free the fish to the river.
It’s left a mystery what Motorcycle Boys’ death will cause amongst those in his town, a unity of gangs or an end to them. While one would prefer to be hopeful, it’s in the nature of rumble fish to rumble, in the river or in the tank.
Concluding Thoughts:
There’s certainly a lot to decipher and ponder over in Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish, and I think it’s a film I’ll come back to in the future to experience again. From the perspective of cinematic history there’s a lot of fun that can be had in watching this film simply to spot all the young actors who would go on to be icons or at the very least successful practitioners in their fields later on. We’ve got a young Matt Dillon, Nicolas Cage, Diane Lane and even Coppola’s daughter Sofia (credited as “Domino”) here as their careers were just beginning. It’s entertaining to look back over thirty years to see where each came from and the promise they showed at the time in some of their earliest work.
Overall, I appreciated the message of Rumble Fish, of how the characters were crafted and what it makes you consider about the world we live in. The film concludes with Coppola himself dedicating the picture to his oldest brother who he refers to as his greatest teacher, and that sense of respectful brotherhood can be felt all throughout his creation. The relationship that Rusty James and Motorcycle Boy have, a sort of student/mentor dynamic, is a beautifully drawn one that must’ve struck Coppola as being familiar to his own experience with his brother when he stumbled upon S. E. Hinton’s original novel on which the film is based.
The relationship between the two gang brothers will probably be the movie’s lasting impact, or at least it will for this particular viewer. It’s quite a powerful image to see Rusty James racing over his brother’s corpse to let loose the fish his eldest died to free, just as it’s powerful to see the young lad taking his brother’s bike to seek a life outside the suffocating confines of the gang wars the near-mythical Motorcycle Boy tried and failed to escape. To the tune of the Stan Ridgway song “Don’t Box Me In” that plays over the closing credits of Rumble Fish, I hope Rusty James found that sense of liberty and happiness that alludes so many of us.