Uploaded 1 December 2001

In the jargon of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, Joe Dante is a low-norm satirist. (High-norm satire, of which Horace would be a good example, is not practiced today.) This can be puzzling for critics who analyse films for political messages, because the low-norm satirist, without necessarily being a conservative in his politics, tends to appeal to old ways and simple standards of conduct to justify his mocking depictions of modern society.

The satirist’s stated aim of correcting and instructing also needs to be understood as part of an aesthetic, one whose foremost practitioner in European cinema is Federico Fellini and, in American cinema, Frank Tashlin, both of whom, like Dante, began their careers as cartoonists. One aspect of Dante’s work, which finds its fullest expression in The Second Civil War (US 1997), is rooted in the graphic style of Mad Magazine, which introduced his generation to the art of satire without having any perceptible impact on the targets of that satire – something high-norm satirists, who have the intact memory of cultural ideals to appeal to (cf. Dante’s aborted TV series Osiris Chronicles), tend to be better at.

We are, according to Frye, in a period when satire, in the sense he defines, is the dominant genre, but having a temperament for satire did not keep Lord Byron from being a Romantic poet. Because it is, as Godard has said, a nineteenth century invention, cinema is condemned to be a late Romantic artform, and satire has been an essential element in the work of late Romantics as diverse as Ophüls and Kubrick, Welles and Renoir, Hitchcock and Sirk. In other words, although we live at the end of a long period of cultural decline, even Dante’s Inferno contained an escape hatch.

Dante Jr.’s name for the escape hatch in his films is “apocalypse”: the Saturday matinee apocalypses that are averted, temporarily, in Piranha (US 1978) and The Howling (US 1981); the void the omnipotent child in “It’s A Good Life” (his episode of Twilight Zone – The Movie [US 1983]) contemplates after eliminating his grotesque family and the world that contained them; the comic apocalypses visited on Kingston Falls and New York City by the title creatures of Gremlins (US 1984) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (US 1990); the all-too-believable apocalypse visited on an America which has turned into a high-tech version of the Tower of Babel in The Second Civil War, or its fiery suburban equivalent in The ‘Burbs (US 1989); and the purely aesthetic, but highly beneficial apocalypse engineered by Lawrence Woolsey, the impresario in Matinee (US 1993), whose schlock horror movies can replace the outworn rituals of religion because they offer a degraded but still viable form of the vision the English Romantics experienced when confronted with mountains or memento mori and called the Sublime.

The root meaning of “apocalypse”, a Hebrew concept which comes to us in Greek clothing, is “revelation” or “uncovering” – the root image being the lifting off of the lid of a pot, or of the sky, which is, in that tradition, another kind of lid. In Explorers (US 1985), three youngsters go questing after a revelation in outer space, only to meet a Looney Toon version of the Bug Eyed Monsters prevalent in pulp science-fiction. Worse, this monster is a kid like them, a cosmic couch potato whose brain has been fried by watching American television. Switching voices as if he had swallowed a remote, he delivers the only revelation they’re going to get: a cacophony of one-liners, ad-lines and pop clichés backed by a shimmering, discontinuous cascade of visual dreck.

Scholars call this very American Sublime “post-modernism,” a term that only its failures deserve. In Dante’s work its name is “montage,” a word that comes easily to the filmmaker because he also started as an editor, putting bits of found footage together to create a 7-hour compilation film, The Movie Orgy, that was screened on college campuses during the early 70s: montage of signs (the collision of two pieces of celluloid, two clichés, two styles of narrative, character, image, musical accompaniment) and montage of meanings (two contradictory ideas, emotions or attitudes colliding in the spectator’s head while listening to Phoebe Cates’ Santa Claus speech in Gremlins or watching one of the Commando Elite get his lower parts ground up in a garbage disposal in Small Soldiers [US 1998]). Invaluable as a tool for satire, montage is also Dante’s preferred formal procedure for producing what most modern filmmakers try to produce through its opposite, duration: the experience of the Sublime, which is consciousness of self raised to an apocalyptic pitch.

At the end of Explorers the questers return to Earth, disappointed by their revelation but already nostalgic for it. The dream that followed, in the film Dante was never given time to find in the editing room because Paramount wanted it in theatres before Ron Howard’s Cocoon (US 1985), would have linked all the characters through their dream life as part of a whole analogous to Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” or World Mind. (The theological reference is Dante’s.) That movement – from innocence to experience and finally to a higher form of innocence – was paradigmatic for the Romantic Imagination, a faculty for shaping the real into something new embodying a truth superior to fact, which S. T. Coleridge distinguished from “Fancy”: the arbitrary assembling of images into patterns pleasing to the senses, not unlike most movies coming out of Hollywood today. (When challenged, Dante makes the same distinction to differentiate between The Howling and Armageddon [US 1998], even though his work arguably prepared the way for directors like Michael Bay.)

Like the “Gentleman from Porlock” who knocked on Coleridge’s door before he had finished writing down his visionary poem “Xanadu,” which the poet had unfortunately forgotten by the time he returned to his writing table, Paramount Pictures kept Dante from realising his version of the Romantic quest in Explorers, but he has continued to show us glimpses of it in films like Matinee, with its tribute to the Imagination’s power to reconcile us to the real world it is always sending us back to, or The ‘Burbs, which proposes a comic variation on John Keats’ definition of the Imagination as being like Adam’s dream in Paradise Lost: “He awoke and found it true.” Even the manic overabundance of humanity which is the main impression communicated by The Second Civil War may be crowding toward some revelation, as the technician played by Robert Picardo reminds us when he quotes those famous lines from Yeats’ “The Second Coming.”

This fidelity to a vision that the directors of the American New Wave who peaked in the Seventies seem to have stopped looking for in the Eighties and the Nineties is what has enabled Joe Dante to keep making good films, with gaps in between during which he must have said “no” to lots of bad ones – that and a steely sense of self without which any artist working in Hollywood, now or even in the long-vanished Golden Age, would be doomed to extinction.