KLAATU YOU (8)

By: Madeline Ashby
February 19, 2020

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite pre-Star Wars science fiction movies.

KISS ME DEADLY | d. ROBERT ALDRICH | 1955

Kiss Me Deadly is, as far as I can tell, the first instance of sci-fi noir or hardboiled sci-fi that exists on film. (It precedes the other big contender for the title, La Jetée, by about seven years.) It’s one of those genre films that secretly takes place in another genre, and doesn’t inform the audience of this until a key moment in the plot. There are other films like this: From Dusk ’Til Dawn is a hardboiled crime movie that takes place in a horror film universe; Only Lovers Left Alive is a humbling meditation on marriage that also happens to be about vampires; John Wick is secretly an urban fantasy that owes as much to China Miéville as it does John Woo. Of course, these genre mashups are only of interest to the viewer. The characters in the film have no idea that they’re in a film, much less what genre it is. Mike Hammer has no idea what his target demo is, or what quadrant his story fits in, or how the international market might boost his gross.

But I would argue that without Kiss Me Deadly, the larger trend in genre mashups — particularly sci-fi noir and technoir — would not exist. That means no Blade Runner, no Neuromancer, no Altered Carbon, no Dark City, no Minority Report. (Hell, even one of my own novels wouldn’t exist without that precedent.) The grim and gritty sci-fi films of the ’70s and ’80s, like Soylent Green, A Boy and His Dog, and The Terminator all owe a little something to Mike Hammer and his relentless rampage in search of the truth behind one terrified girl’s heinous murder. Sure, they were adapted from other novels and stories, but those novels and stories were published in a landscape that Mickey Spillane (and other noir and hardboiled writers) made possible. His brutality made theirs publishable and marketable. And make no mistake: the brutality is the point.

There are other noir films that deal with how American men behaved after the war — In a Lonely Place twists the premise of its source material to become a story about the personal tragedy of untreated PTSD, and Shutter Island takes a long look at what that treatment might have looked like. But Kiss Me Deadly dares to join up the man hardened by the horrors of war and the people who create those horrors, the scientists and engineers of the war machine itself. As Matt Zoller Seitz said in essay on the film “In his typically backwards-ass and thus strikingly original way, Aldrich confirms the function and necessity of morality by showing us a Hobbesean universe without it.” Mike Hammer spends the entire film fighting and fucking his way through foe after foe, ruthless and undaunted, until he encounters the MacGuffin that started it all: the glowing suitcase that is really Pandora’s box, the “Great Whatsit” that unleashes destruction on a scale that even Hammer can scarcely contemplate. Depending on which ending you see (or believe), the suitcase is the only thing terrible enough to encompass and defeat Hammer’s violence.

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KLAATU YOU (8)

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