The surprisingly effective elongation of Cape Fear

Martin Scorsese's 1991 movie Cape Fear -- and to a lesser extent, at least for me personally, J. Lee Thompson's 1962 film that inspired it -- established some really iconic cinematic elements.

Robert DeNiro's evil incarnate Max Cady was the sort of villain whose name you learn and remember, even when the names of hundreds of other villains, even the really effective ones, are lost to time. Robert Mitchum played that role the first time, and Lord knows he was very capable too, though I don't think his performance there holds a candle to his similar performance in Night of the Hunter. 

But then there was also Bernard Herrmann's score, which originated in Thompson's film and was carried down for usage in Scorsese's, albeit slightly reinterpreted. You can hear that score in your head right now as I'm typing this. It's super ominous, and for some reason it has a similar vibe for me as John Williams' score during the opening of the ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The reason I attribute this mostly to Scorsese's version is that I had carried that one with me for more than 30 years before I finally saw the 1962 version in 2022. Inevitably, I didn't get as much out of that version. It goes back to my theory that if you love something, you're always going to like best the first version you were exposed to, even if you ultimately see a different version, and even if that different version is, by most objective standards, the better version.

Making it all a bit more iconic? One of the most beloved Simpsons parodies of all time is based on Cape Fear. And yes, I can imagine you are seeing rakes in your head right now, possibly hearing a little Gilbert & Sullivan. 

In any case, the key to why any version of Cape Fear works so well is its intensity. Over the course of 128 minutes in the case of Scorsese's version and 106 minutes in the case of Thompson's, we get to know plenty well this sinister ex-con with the chilling laugh, and also become satisfactorily acquainted with the family he's torturing. 

Couldn't work as well over 509 minutes, could it?

Well you might be surprised at the sustained intensity of the Apple TV+ version of Cape Fear, a ten-episode elongation of the essential story and dynamics that had twice been previously depicted as adaptations of John D. MacDonald's 1957 novel The Executioners. While we're doling out credits, Nick Antosca is the showrunner.

I think the reason I started watching was the casting of Max Cady. He's played by none other than Javier Bardem, who has proven his knack for villainy in such places as Skyfall and especially No Country for Old Men. The guy who played the cruel and sadistic Anton Chigurh could definitely play Max Cady.

Of course, since I became acquainted with all the primary cast members within about three seconds of each other the first time I saw any promotional materials for Cape Fear, I shouldn't rule out the possibility that Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson played an equally significant role in my clicking play. I've always liked both actors, with Wilson being a special favorite of mine. CCH Pounder also has a role in this, as does a young actress who has really caught my attention in recent years, Lily Collias, who of course plays the role Juliette Lewis played in Scorsese's version. (Is Juliette Lewis in this also? Could be. No spoilers.)

I don't watch a lot of TV that I'm not also watching with my wife, but I like to have at least one series going for nights when it's just too late to start a movie. And because I've been really dragging my heels on finishing the series run of Mythic Quest, which has steadily lost interest for me over the course of its four seasons, I decided to give Cape Fear a whirl.

I won't say that it absolutely grabbed me from the first episode. I was positive on that episode, but not addicted. In fact it might have taken me two weeks before I watched episode 2. 

After that, I was watching one about every four nights, and there was one time I even watched episodes on consecutive nights.

Simply put, I could have never guessed how the combustible threat posed by Cady against the family of the lawyers who didn't properly defend him, leading to his 17-year prison term, could remain at such a high level of immediacy across so many episodes. And in case you need that threat to be goosed just a little bit, each episode begins with something sinister as a cold open, before Herrmann's score kicks in and the images on the screen are slowly superseded by the title. 

Needless to say, there's a lot more extra plot material here than in the previous movies. How much, if any, comes from the original novel, I'm not sure. But we learn a lot more about Cady's extended family, and burrow further into the lives of Anna and Tom Bowden and their children Zack and Natalie. I believe Zack is an addition to the family dynamic from the previous source material. Both children are in their late teens and they are both messed with by a woman who may or may not be Cady's daughter.

None of it feels like filler. All of it gives us a useful expansion on these characters, to care more about their ultimate fates and to learn more about what they may or may not be guilty of. The material is messy and complicated in the best possible ways. 

And you can get a lot of good stuff from the slow burn of a man who is trying to systematically destroy a family, both from without and from within. Cady lays traps that don't spring right away, and has plausible deniability on many of them. In fact, the show is clever enough to create times when we ask ourselves if Cady is actually the true source of the threat to this family, or whether some other combination of elements might be responsible. The show takes advantage of the fact that it comes out at a time when we no longer want to see monolithic evil depicted on screen, and every villain has a complicated backstory.

I was also fascinated by the casting choice of Bardem as Cady, because that changes him from a sort of southern redneck to a man with a Latin upbringing. As brilliant of an actor as he is, Bardem probably can't do an American accent, not without his Spanish accent creeping through. And so they just don't worry about it. What's more, they lean into it, as we see Max speaking Spanish in prison in flashback sequences. They just basically don't even worry about the fact that his other family members we meet -- who include a father played by Ron Perlman -- are not Latino in the slightest. I can't remember if there is an in-world explanation for why he has a different accent, but I'd say it is the equivalent of race blind casting. And I say "equivalent" rather than just "race blind casting" because race blind casting is usually ignoring someone's physical appearance, and the apparent anachronistic quality of it in a historical setting, while this is more about the actor's voice. So, race deaf casting?

I could probably go on more about the show. But all you really need to know is that I may not have been addicted at the start, but I was by the end. Any bumps along the way were small and soon forgotten. 

Obviously Cape Fear is not the first movie to be elongated into a TV show. It's not the 101st. It might not even be the 1,001st. But I don't usually watch these shows, so I thought it was worth spending a little time on this one. 

And that's especially because the thing that makes a film great, in comparison to a TV show of the same material, is its brevity. A great screenplay gives you an emotional connection to characters you've just met, even though it only has 100 pages of script to do so. Especially for someone with my proclivities, that economy should be prized over the lack of conciseness that's a luxury in a TV show, which might sprawl out over a dozen seasons. 

However, Cape Fear is proof that the extra time with the same material can also work, and work quite well. 

Game of Thrones gets cinematic

We're finally caught up on Game of Thrones.

(No significant spoilers to follow.)

We've navigated the seas of not being able to find a working pirated copy, as well as internet service that was causing constant buffering, and chewed threw about four episodes in two nights, catching us up to the present date. And yes indeed, this season has finally "gotten good."

Not only that, but it's put it all out there in terms of budget.

One thing you can't help but notice if you are a Thrones fan is that it only pretends to be cinematic quality entertainment. I don't mean this as a slight against the show; I merely mean to put my finger on a certainty reality. Namely, if you are producing 10 full hours of programming per season, you simply can't spend as much money as you would on a two-hour movie of the same subject matter. Or, you can, but it has to be stretched out over those 10 hours.

This is why Thrones has always skimped on showing us the battles. I tended to especially notice in the first few seasons, that we would come in right after a battle had ended. Although some might consider battle sequences as an indispensable aspect of a fantasy TV show, the more perceptive of us -- as well as those actually in charge of making the show -- know that battle scenes can be a dime a dozen. We've all seen two armies run at each other and engage in a large skirmish composed entirely of close-combat fighting with swords and axes. It's a bit of a yawn at this point, frankly. Game of Thrones smartly figured out that the character development was what would keep us coming back to this show.

Which makes the occasional battle scene the show does give us all the more enthralling.

At the start of Sunday's episode, "The Watchers on the Wall," I finally noticed the name of a director I was familiar with: Neil Marshall. And even though I didn't like this movie, I immediately recognized Marshall as the director of the 2010 film Centurion, a Michael Fassbender vehicle involving, well, lots of Game of Thrones-type fantasy sword fighting. Except, with the actual sword fighting included.

I knew at that point that we were in for a treat.

Okay, any mild spoilers there may be are in the next paragraph, but I assure you, they are not really all that spoilery.

The battle between the wildlings and the knight's watch at Castle Black was a simply enthralling spectacle. At times I even got a bit of a Helm's Deep vibe from the thing, which is high praise, considering that the Helm's Deep sequence in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is a big part of what makes that my favorite Jackson Tolkien movie. That sense of trying to stave off an impossible onslaught from an undefeatable army gave the scene massive stakes, especially when the wildlings are actually inside the castle (how could this happen??), engaging in that aforementioned close combat. How could it have come to this?

And here we see one of the clear advantages of television over the movies. If we had been watching one two-hour movie called Game of Thrones, we wouldn't have a sense of how catastrophic it is that Castle Black has actually been penetrated and is at the risk of falling. But having seen men walking through its seemingly impregnable halls for close to four seasons now, we do indeed think of it as a fortress that's above the fray. In Sunday's episode, "the fray" made its presence felt on Castle Black.

It wasn't just the typical "this guy fights that guy until one of them falls" stuff that made Sunday's episode both so impressive, and such a departure from the usual Thrones template. What really drove the episode home for me was this one audacious shot by Marshall that takes us through the whole battle. It was not without digital aids, of course, but this one shot sweeps through nearly 360 degrees of the battle inside that courtyard, upstairs and downstairs and capturing all the little nooks and crannies where men are clashing. A chill went down my spine as I thought:

"Finally, Game of Thrones really feels like ... a movie."

Interestingly, the other Thrones episode this one reminded me of was "Blackwater" from season 2, the other time I could remember the show pulling out the stops and actually giving us a battle. That episode happens to have been directed by ... Neil Marshall.

Game of Thrones already gives me what television does best, which is to build up our investment in characters over a number of seasons, so their fates feel all the more personal to us. The season finale this Sunday, in fact, figures to place one beloved character's fate in the kind of peril it may require a deus ex machina to get out of. And this is a show that fundamentally despises the deus ex machina ... so I'm a bit on the edge of my seat here.

When it can also feel like a movie ... well, then it's nearly impossible to beat.

TV's distinct advantage over the movies

Warning: The following post contains very minor spoilers about 50/50 that do not really spoil anything of significance. In other words, something late in the plot is discussed, but it doesn't give anything away. I'm essentially telling you to read on -- but don't be mad at me if you wish you hadn't.

Near the end of the overrated film 50/50, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's cancer-stricken character gives in to a moment of fear and emotion, and shares a cathartic hug with his mother, played by Anjelica Huston. Prior to this, he has clashed with her, considering her to be a bit of a smotherer. Their relationship has heretofore been played primarily for comic effect. This moment works as well as it does because those dynamics shift, becoming those of a son simply needing his mother in a moment when the future looks bleak.

It reminded me of a similar moment on the TV show Six Feet Under. Nate (Peter Krause) is going into surgery to relieve problems related to his potentially fatal brain condition called AVM, which puts him at increase risk of having a stroke. He breaks down and starts blubbering, and his mother -- the batty eccentric Ruth, played by Frances Conroy -- is there to comfort and soothe him, as she did when he was a child. Because their relationship has always involved friction, and she has always been portrayed as a bit of an insufferable loon, the scene has incredible emotional impact. In this moment, none of their prior baggage matters -- all that matters is the unique maternal gift she can give her frightened son.

The scenes are extremely similar -- I've avoided saying that JGL's character was going into surgery, in case you didn't heed my spoiler warning well enough -- yet the impact of the Six Feet Under scene is far, far greater.

Why? Because TV has a luxury the movies do not -- getting you invested in the characters over the course of dozens of episodes and a handful of seasons.

Since I value movies over TV in most cases -- I prefer to watch the former over the latter on almost any given occasion -- it's hard when I realize how much a film can be hampered by how much it has to do in such a short amount of time.

The good films pull it off. Films that aren't as good -- which is my take on 50/50 -- amply demonstrate the difficulties facing a short-form story.

I actually did think the scene between Huston and Gordon-Levitt was effective, but it didn't put a lump in my throat the way the Six Feet Under scene did.

However, the rest of the conditions in place are similar enough that the time spent with these characters becomes the most important variable. Like Conroy's Ruth, Huston's Diane is a very frustrating character. Both characters are the epitome of a certain archetype: the nagging, neurotic mother who tries your patience. In fact, if I'd been given only two hours with Ruth, I'd probably think that's all she was, so determined were they to make her character hysterical and unlikable. With longer exposure to her, I saw the positive aspects of her character. Given this little time with Diane, that's how I felt about her -- that she was one-dimensionally hysterical and unlikable. She asks her son the kind of annoying questions that makes him roll his eyes, and seems to be assessing things on the superficial level of gossip and unsolicited nit-picking. Like I said, the archetype of the nagging, neurotic mother.

Gordon-Levitt's Adam and Krause's Nate, on the other hand, are both relatable protagonists. Adam is a bit nicer and more generous than Nate, but that's only because we got to spend so much time with Nate that we saw him make questionable decisions and hurt people for reasons that revealed his weakness. But Nate was basically a flawed reflection of who we are: people who try to do the right thing but sometimes fail in that regard. Because we have so much less time with Adam, we see only his good side. (Or do we? I'd nitpick some of the ways he handles things. But let's keep it simple and just say Adam is basically a saint.)

And both characters are on a hospital gurney, about to go into a surgery from which they may not emerge alive.

The contrast between these two scenes made me realize how TV allows characters to be fleshed out into real human beings, in a way that movies often strive for but can't quite accomplish. In a movie version of Six Feet Under, Nate would have to be more saintly and Ruth would have to be more one-dimensionally shrewish. But because we had spent two seasons with the characters at this point -- I was surprised to be reminded, in researching it just now, that Nate's surgery comes as early as the end of season 2 -- the emotion of that moment is intensified by seeing the ordinarily strong Nate in a moment of crippling fear, and the ordinarily emotionally needy Ruth in a moment of pure giving. It's because we'd witnessed where these characters have been that we appreciate so much where they are now.

The moment should be equally effective in 50/50, but it's not. I say "should" because a movie certainly should be able to contain a moment of intense emotion like this, and many movies have. Director Jonathan Levine stacks the deck in his favor, using a contemplative pop song on the soundtrack and slowing down the ominous surgery prep scenes to less than their normal display speed in order to allow us to exist in the dread for longer. And both Gordon-Levitt and Huston play the scene in the best way possible to get that catharsis that comes so effortlessly to Nate and Ruth.

Maybe if we'd already had two seasons' worth of Diane's nattering and two seasons' worth of Adam's high points and low points, this scene would have punched me in the gut. Instead, it was more like a tap on the shoulder.

Then again, maybe I just didn't like the movie all that much.

Could TV be radio?

Over the time I've been writing my blog, I've thought of a number of posts that deal with the similarities and differences between movies and TV. I've touched on the issue now and then, but I've left most of my thoughts unexplored ... until now.

The event that spurred me to finally write down some of my thoughts was the realization, over the weekend, that my wife and I have different standards for when we give the TV screen 100% of our attention.

We both have scenarios where we like to be on our laptops at the same time we're watching TV. But the scenarios are different. These are not absolutes, but generally speaking, she doesn't mind being distracted when she's watching a movie, while I don't mind being distracted when I'm watching a TV show.

To some extent, this dovetails with what each of us would prefer to watch. My wife would prefer to watch TV. This is not because she likes TV better than movies, though her affection for the two is a lot closer than it is for me. No, it has to do with her paranoia that our DVR will fill up if we don't keep up with our shows, which is a legitimate concern. Me? I'd almost always rather be watching a movie. I love my TV, but if left to my own devices, I would watch a movie over a TV show any day. (And I am more comfortable than I should be when our DVR hovers around 90% full, which is also telling. Though paradoxically, I'm the one who refuses to give up on certain marginal TV shows, like The Event, when she's perfectly happy to cut the cord.)

Naturally, I think my perspective on which medium to give my full attention is more enlightened. And I'm here today to present my reasoning.

See, I think TV is primarily an audio medium, while movies are primarily a visual medium.

In other words, if you have to do one or the other, it's more important to hear TV, while it's more important to see a movie. In many cases, you'd be pretty lost in either medium if you were missing, respectively, the picture or the sound. But my contention is that you can ignore visual information on TV shows and still get pretty much everything that's going on -- this despite the fact that TV shows are becoming more like movies all the time. According to me, you're likely to lose a lot more by only half-watching a movie.

Of course, a lot of this stuff is genre dependent. An undemanding cinematic comedy is probably a lot closer to my definition of a TV show than some TV shows, whereas a dense TV show -- say, Lost -- would require your undivided attention a lot more than that undemanding comedy. But I think generally speaking, this idea holds true.

Why? It gets at another of my ideas about the differences between TV and movies: With TV shows, it's most important to know what happened. With movies, it's more important to know how it happened.

Case in point: We can watch a movie about Aron Rolston, who had to cut off his own arm to survive, without any problem. It doesn't matter that we already know the ending -- we want to know how the story is told. But if 127 Hours were a TV show, it wouldn't work, would it? You wouldn't sit through episode after episode after episode of 127 Hours: The TV Show -- you know, kind of like 24, only with a lot less nuclear terrorism -- if you knew Ralston was going to free himself in the end.

And there are numerous other examples of stories that work as movies but not TV shows. We repeatedly watch different filmed versions of Hamlet, even though we already know which characters will die at the end. But Hamlet has never been turned into a teen soap opera on the CW. (Fox actually came close once with a show called Skin, which starred Ron Silver as a porn magnate and a then-unknown Olivia Wilde as his daughter.) It's the same reason why movies, generally speaking, have more repeat watching value than TV shows. You can watch the how any number of times, but the what only needs to be watched once.

But circling back to my original point ... because TV shows are so heavy on plot, they rely heavily on the audio, requiring a lot of expository dialogue. Hearing the dialogue is usually more important to your experience of the program than seeing the expressions on the actors' faces as they speak their lines, or seeing other visual information presented at the same time. That's because there usually isn't any other visual information. In order to keep a viewer interested week after week, TV shows need to get straight into the plot and stay focused on it, at the expense of camera tricks, quick edits, or other aspects of the movies we are so accustomed to.

More than anything this might explain why David Lynch had to make Mulholland Drive into a movie. It was originally envisioned as a TV show, but its abstractions -- I imagine it was far more abstract than Lynch's relatively straightforward Twin Peaks -- required the medium of cinema. Only in film can you toy with the audience and stay unstructured. Only a film can "have no plot" and still be potentially worth watching.

Considering this, it's easy for me to understand why I get agitated when my wife is on her computer while we're watching a movie. Or why I get stressed out when she runs to the bathroom at the theater. It's not simply a matter of catching her up on the plot she may have missed. I have to remember if there was some subtle camera trick that told us something imperceptible about the motivations of a certain character. I have to remember if a date flashed across the screen. I have to remember if there was a quick montage of images that told you something about the character's past. A movie is dense with all this information. A TV show, generally speaking, is not.

So is TV basically like radio?

That could be taking it too far. But I'd be interested to "watch" a procedural cop show while wearing a blindfold, to see if my appreciation of it were significantly impacted. I'm guessing it would not be.

It's funny in this discussion how I'm privileging seeing over hearing. If one medium does one sense better, and the other medium does the other sense better, shouldn't that balance out?

Except not really, because we already privilege the visual by saying you are supposed to "show, don't tell." Could that be because if you asked someone which sense they'd rather lose -- sight or hearing -- almost all people would pick hearing? Sight is more essential to how we get around in the world. Hearing is useful too, but it ain't no sight. (Yeah, tell that to a music lover. I guess that's why I'm a bigger film fan than music fan, though I love both.)

In movies, we want as much information as possible to be communicated visually.

Otherwise, you might as well just be watching TV ... or listening to the radio.