Last Exit to Brooklyn

When Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn was published in 1964, the novel’s unflinching portrayal of the squalor and viciousness of New York circa 1952 proved so controversial that it stood trial for obscenity in Britain and was banned in Italy. But if it was the documentary exactitude and believability of Selby’s fiction that was the secret of the novel’s success, then Uli Edel’s cinematic adaptation works because it both addresses and occupies the gap between fiction and reality. A portrayal of 1950s America from the postmodern perspective of 1989, Edel’s ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’ both incorporates aspects of American life that popular media of the time tended to ignore – among them political ferment, domestic violence, social deprivation and homosexual experience – and acknowledges that, partial and sanitised as they may be, period media are one of the only ways we have of understanding the era; for better or worse life in the 20th century was thoroughly pervaded by manufactured representations and generic codes, and denying as much is pointless.

The film accepts culture’s insufficiencies, the incommensurability of cultural representation and lived experience – a disjunction especially apparent when it comes to the mass media of the 1950s. Rather than aim for pathos and wind up bathetic, Edel plays on this disjunction, portraying fathers who clown around like sitcom patriarchs, representing queer boys forced to shape an identity out of pornography and Hollywood melodrama and - perhaps most horribly - juxtaposing the trite but heartfelt prose of an honest man’s love letter with a scene of gang rape. Edel does not wallow in tragedy or attempt to wring emotion from the viewer. While the score – traditional, emotive, period-sounding orchestral music provided by Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler – swells and trills in sympathy with the characters’ subjective states as it would in a 1950s movie, the camera remains dispassionately aloof, treating joy, violence, and sorrow alike with the same crushing indifference.

As I have already suggested, 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' is, in one sense, a very post-modern film. It’s full of allusions and references to mid-century culture, with the spectres of 'West Side Story' (1961) and Tennessee Williams’ oeuvre looming especially large. George (Alexis Arquette), dancing over the flung switchblades of the gang, suggests Bernstein’s balletic Jets and Sharks. Tra La La (Jennifer Jason Leigh) passes the marquee of a theatre where 'South Pacific' is showing while having her own romance with a soldier. But where some post-modern cinema is gleefully irreverent, revelling in incongruous and ironic splicing for its own sake, Edel’s film retains a moral compass. A conservative reading might, in fact, locate a pretty unforgiving ethical backbone to the movie seen from a certain perspective, the plot (which remains fairly faithful to Selby’s novel) seems to punish George, Harry (Stephen Lang) and Tra La La for wanting too much – too much love or money or acknowledgement. It seems closer to the truth, however, to say that the film is a critique of a culture and a media which promise more than they can supply, creating a dangerous surplus of desire, a surplus that has proven pernicious and even fatal consequences for certain characters.

Supply, in fact, is one of the film’s primary concerns. As its title hints, 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' is a movie concerned with flows and blockages. When the film opens the longshoremen’s, union are weeks into a strike; the union must supply food to men with no income, the strikers must form barricades and obstruct the flow of produce and capital. The water cannons turned by the police on the rioting strikers reflect actual police procedure, but they also provide an image of the fact that control over the direction and intensity of flow is the preserve and instrument of those in power. It is against the backdrop of the strike that the film’s personal and domestic dramas play out, and these likewise hinge on questions of circulation and supply. Donna’s (Ricki Lake) water breaks as her mother is trying to contain her pregnant belly in a wedding dress, while Donna’s father (Burt Young) is furious at having failed to block access to her, to maintain control of his bloodline. While Harry is riding high in the union, he enjoys making gestures of lordly beneficence, overseeing the free flow of beer from the union’s tap, funding cab trips all around the city. Tra La La, by contrast, prides herself on her ability to draw a steam of men toward her, to induce motion and solicit outpourings of money without even lifting a finger.

Control over the flow of images is especially important. As I have already said, the film shows how the newly omnipresent technology of television – ‘the tube,’ to give it its colloquial name – emits a monodirectional torrent of images into the homes and bars, the lives, and minds of the characters, dosing them with radiant images of violence and glamour. Tra La La, with her platinum hair, pale skin, and lozenge-shaped coiffure, does not just look like the sort of woman you’d see on a TV or cinema screen, she looks like the screen itself. The film’s gay and trans men are similarly meticulous in their emulation of celluloid glamour, as the fateful drag party demonstrates. Alienated and under-represented, they collect and arrange images and objects that seem to offer an ideal of beauty, a refuge from the real world’s hostility and banality. George loses control of the circulation of images in the scene in which his homophobic brother ransacks his closet, revealing and forcing their mother to acknowledge George’s collections of lingerie and pornography (“look at these disgusting pictures!”).

It is only one of film's many scenes of violation. The gang rape may be the most obvious and egregious, but other subtler and more malicious violations occur – such as when the boys who would normally jump the servicemen Tra La La lures to the waste ground hang back and watch as she is forced her to go through with it with a sailor – a form of remote rape. Voyeurs, trained by a media-saturated culture, they treat Tra La La’s exploitation as if it were a spectacle. When, earlier in the film, they are shown jeering and whooping through the windscreen of a car at three headlight lit soldiers they’re chasing, they look as if they’re watching a movie, as if the car’s headlights are projectors. The asymmetry of this viewer/viewed relationship - the ability to look at others and feel no compunction or connection – is something the film questions and challenges. Judith Butler has recently argued, following Levinas, that our obligations toward others ends at the point when we can definitively differentiate ourselves from them – her point being that it is impossible to establish any such divisions and that, as such, we are all inter-implicated, as convenient as it is to deny that fact (Frames of War p.14). Edel’s film mounts a similar argument, perhaps most clearly via the story of Harry. Harry is repeatedly shown just looking, the camera lingering on his rapt face as he tries to calculate the relation of equivalence between himself and the objects of his gaze. Any distinctions he might try to establish, any self/other binaries, are shown, however, to be fragile and provisional: at the start of the film he looks into the eyes of a beaten soldier being lead, bloodied, from the scene of a brawl, while at the end of the film he himself is beaten; at the start of the film he meets the desiring gaze of the extravagantly camp George, at the end he has been brought low by his unreciprocated desire for the dandyish Regina (Bernard Zette). Harry’s riches to rags trajectory constitutes a reminder of reversibility, of the connectedness that too many characters are wont to deny.

Speaking of connectedness, one of the film’s central themes is the inextricably interwoven status of sex and violence. The sexual assaults the film depicts are the most obvious expression of this interweaving – though even there the film suggests that sex and rape are perhaps not as neatly dissociable as we would prefer to think - but 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' also abounds in instances of unexpected or ironic substitution of sex for violence or vice versa. Bodies enter into all manner of unexpected and extreme assemblages: George gets a knife in his leg when he’d sought a different kind of penetration; Tra La La has to have sex with a sailor when normally the sailor would be mugged, and Harry is beaten after trying to seduce a boy. The sexual violence culminates, of course, with Tra La La’s rape. It’s unfortunate – if predictable – that Jennifer Jason Leigh’s portrayal of Tra La La came to dominate discussions and perceptions of the film; as brilliant and magnetic as she is (and her Oscar was well-deserved), it’s hard not to read fore groundings of her character’s story as attempts to – whether consciously or not - de-politicise and de-queer 'Last Exit to Brooklyn', placing the emphasis on the timeworn Hollywood staples of heterosexual romance and beautiful, childlike but morally suspect women. Given that this is a film all about the complexity of the political, socioeconomic, and affective ties that bind the members of societies, this sort of selective reading does 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' a grave disservice. Insisting on the equivalence and interconnectedness of apparently distinct identity categories and positions, Edel’s film achieves a truly novelistic scope, striking a deft balance between the political and the personal, the poignantly anachronistic and the enduringly relevant. Twenty years on, it remains a queer, complex, remarkably powerful film, one that still has much to say.

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Country: USA, UK, West Germany
Budget: £
Length: 102mins

Bibliography
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable, 2009, Verso

Filmography

West Side Story, 1961, Jerome Robins, Robert Wise, Mirisch Pictures

Pub/2009

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'The Hudsucker Proxy', 1994, directed by Joel Coen
'What? (Che?)', 1972, directed by Roman Polanski