Down the Rabbit Hole Project: After Hours (1985)

Office worker Paul Hackett faces the weirdest and worst night imaginable after a date goes wrong and he is stuck in late night downtown New York. He encounters an unstable woman with a bizarre fixation on burns,  a cynical artist who makes sculptures shaped like bagels, and a doorman who recites Franz Kafka. As the night goes from bad to worse, Paul begins to wonder if he'll ever make it back home, or even alive.

 

A black comedy nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions, After Hours is a fantastic exercise in paranoia. Despite all its recalling of Kafka's works several reviewers and essayists have drawn comparisons to Lewis Carroll's work, and it is these comparisons that this essay will focus on an explore. 

Whilst the film is devoid of any wonder it does play with some of the darkest aspects and tones of the Alice stories, as an extremely subtle down the rabbit hole film it conveys a sense of carrollian unease several ways.

 

Curiously comparisons with After Hours and other works have been made by reviewers but not generally with carroll. The comparisons include the film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Franz Kafka's novels and Greek Myth, but only Arnette Wernblad's 2014 essay Down the Rabbit Hole in her book The Passion of Scorsese makes a direct scholarly comparison with the works of Lewis Carroll.

 

Context

 

"An exercise completely in style," (Martin Scorsese on After Hours)

 

Made in 1985 on a tight budget of 4 million dollars, and a script written by Joseph Minion, director Martin Scorsese has characterized his film as a emotional "reaction against [Scorsese's] year... In Hollywood trying to get The Last Temptation of Christ made" (Wernblad, 2014, passion of Scorsese) This sense of frustration is embodied in the film itself, and multiple producers persuaded Scorsese away from a darker ending. British director Michael Powell "kept repeating that Paul not only had to live at the end, but to end up back at his office." (Ebert et al, After Hours review, 2019) and it is this ending that made it into the finished film.

 

Curiously about half an hour of Minion's script was plagiarized almost word for word from a radio play called lies which was written by Joe Frank.  According to Andrew Hurst, who has written an analysis of this affair: Frank was “paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film... that plagiarized his dialogue.” (Hurst, 2004, After hours... origins) And certainly listening to the radio monologue it is undoubtedly the same dialogue and set up as the first half of After Hours.

 

A taxi cab ride as a fall

"Down, down, down. Would the fall NEVER come to an end!" (Carroll, "Wonderland", 3)

 

Paul's hurtle into late night new York begins with a taxi cab ride which is filmed akin to a fall. And it is significant that Paul is leaving Manhattan and travelling downwards: towards SoHo. The fast editing and occasional lights conveying to the audience that the ride is framed like a tumble into the unknown. Paul also has no time to reflect on if going to see Marcy was a bad decision as his last dollar flies out of the window. In her video essay from 2016, Film Formula compared this scene to the tornado scene in the Wizard of Oz (1939) but in a way this scene is also reminiscent of Carroll's line about Alice jumping down the rabbit hole:

 

"never once considering how in the world she was to get out again." (Carroll, "Wonderland", 2)

 

and unfortunately the consequences for Paul are largely negative.

A Dreaming Protagonist?

The film opens with boredom. Paul's office colleagues are so dull they nearly put him to sleep (or do, depending on if you subscribe to the dream theory in regards to this film). Hearing a colleague boast about where he is going in life, Paul longs for something different. 

Much like Carroll's works this evocation of boredom by the protagonist gives way to a bizarre series of events contained in a dream state which entrap the protagonist in ever stranger situations.

 

There are several hints in After Hours that Paul's late night voyage may be at the very least unreal, and at most extreme an actual dream or rather a nightmare. We do not see Paul fall asleep or awaken but from the scene where he first meets Marcy the film begins to take on an increasingly surreal tone. 

Early on in the film at his flat "Paul is lying on the sofa... And it is possible to assume he falls asleep and that his journey...is a dream" (Wernblad, 2014, passion of Scorsese) Paul could also have fallen asleep at his office, as he ends up there at the film's close. "In a... surrealistic moment Paul enters the office... And his computer says good morning paul" (Filmformula, 2016, After Hours urban Oz)

 

Like Alice, Paul's reading from waking life returns to manifest in his dreams. In much the same way that in the trial scene, Alice in Alice's adventures in Wonderland:

 

"Had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them in books and newspapers, and was quite pleased to find she knew the name of nearly everything there" (Carroll, "Wonderland", 117)

 

Paul's desk at work contains a newspaper with a story about burns, and his apartment contains at least one alarm clock by his sofa. As a word processor, Paul's work allows him to interact with bizarre news stories daily. The newspaper story about burns manifests itself when Marcy is revealed to have connections to Paul's childhood traumas. Similarly a clock ticking, which could well be the clock on the table next to Paul's sofa is the film's near constant soundtrack, leading Paul deeper into the night.

Doors, mirrors,  Paul's personality and plays with time

 

 "at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then." (Carroll, "Wonderland", 43 - 44)

In keeping with mythic elements essayists such as Arnette Wernblad have seen in After Hours, the film focuses a lot in its first act on doorways and entrances. There are two significant entrances that Paul goes through in the first act, the entrance to Marcy's apartment, which is signaled by Marcy's artist friend Kiki throwing down a key to him, This door is "on the threshold of an unfamiliar world"(Wernblad, 2014, passion of Scorsese) Other entrances are the Taxi ride and the blocked entrance down in the Subway, which Paul cannot traverse due to the subway fare going up just a minute earlier.

 

Wernblad also points out that the earlier taxi ride could be considered "a symbolic crossing into hades" (Wernblad, 2014, passion of Scorsese) referencing the Greek myth or Orpheus and Eurydice, but this element of the story in regards to the subway also functions in a similar way to the garden door in Carroll's Wonderland, an unattainable entrance leaving the protagonist trapped in an unreal place.

There is also the visual motif of mirrors as at significant points in the film Paul walks into bathrooms to reflect figuratively and literally on what is happening to him. In later parts of the film he rushes into these spaces and splashes his face with water as if he is trying to wake himself out of a nightmare (a point I have established in this essay earlier)

 

The mirror is also a symbol of reflection and is a way on reflecting on Paul's personality. Like Carroll's Alice, Paul's personality adjusts to what other character he is with and the situation he is in. Through the film, Paul's personality changes from his actual self, who is fairly unassuming, mild mannered and occasionally annoyed, and metamorphizes into several sides of himself he didn't know existed. 

We see the character turn hostile, to grief, to disbelief, to cynicism and even to begging, asking the world itself what it wants with him. This is reminiscent of the character of Josef K in Franz Kafka's the Trial but also of Lewis Carroll's Alice who is forced to behave in ways she would normally consider impolite in order to deal with absurdities. 

One of the film's main visual motifs is a ticking clock or radio to show how late into the night Paul is. This is reflected in the score by Howard Shore which has pieces like "Midnight" and "6am". These musical pieces occur in the film as Paul transitions from one encounter to another, effectively leading the audience deeper down the rabbit hole and into the night. 

The ticking clock motif heightens the audience's reaction to the action onscreen, and also serves to illuminate the film's general preoccupation with time. Paul is aware at the beginning of the film that he is meeting Marcy despite the fact it is 11:30. Later, Tom the bartender notes that "its after hours" and muses how this late hour means different logic applies. Crucially in several scenes the clocks appear not to move, signifying to the audience the potential unreality of Paul's experiences and highlighting the film's surreal nature.

 

An entrance to a hostile place

 

The scene at the entrance to the club where a bouncer doesn't allow Paul to enter to see Kiki, and instead recites pieces from the Franz Kafka story Before the Law, is also reminiscent of the scenes between Alice a frog who guards the door of the Duchess in Wonderland. In Alice's adventures in Wonderland, Alice is presented with an illogical argument about the ethics of door knocking. In the same way the bouncer's dialogue in After Hours only serves to increase Paul's frustration. The joke in these parts of both stories is that both Alice and Paul quickly wish they were back outside as they both end up in hostile places.

 

The citizens of an unreal New York

 

`It’s really dreadful,’ she muttered to herself, `the way all the creatures argue. It’s enough to drive one crazy!’ (Carroll, "Wonderland", 58)

From the bizarre Marcy to the grief stricken Tom and the lonely June, the personalities Paul collides with in After Hours all have distinct, sometimes downright unsettling quirks. Most promise to help get Paul home somehow but end up using that as a pretence to talk about themselves or get what they want. It is notable that many of the people Paul encounters are women and this may be tied to his guilt about what happens to Marcy. However as Gregory Smalley points out in his essay for 366weird movies: "the women of After Hours can be... seen... as Furies come to pursue and punish Paul for his sins. Not that Paul’s sins are profound" (Smalley, 330: After Hours, 2018) If anything Paul's only sin is looking for lust/romance with Marcy, a feeling which is portrayed as mutual. Just as in Franz Kafka, the punishment does not fit the alleged "crime".

 

Not unlike Carroll's dream worlds, many of the characters in After Hours appear normal at first but reveal odd preoccupations. "Like Alice's Wonderland... [After Hours's fictional New York] it is inhabited by strange creatures...who may seem friendly, but turn hostile" (Wernblad, 2014, passion of Scorsese) 

This is most seen in the character of Julie, who pretends to want to help Paul get home but is in actuality just disappointed that he won't stay the night with her or listen to her talk about how she hates her job. Due to a spate of thefts around the neighbourhood and the fact Paul was in Tom's apartment earlier, Julie vengefully assumes the thief is Paul. She later becomes a tyrannical figure and organises a mob that Paul must flee from at the end of the film.

 

 It is not unreasonable to see these personalities as the people Paul could worry he will bump into in daytime hours, if anything these characters are over exaggerated aspects of New Yorkers and society as a whole.

 

By contrast towards the end of his journey into the night Paul comes across two normal characters without quirks. Young man Mark, and 50 something June. Mark is up late because he is looking for a gay encounter. Mark becomes increasingly bored as Paul rants at him for seemingly hours about the night he is trapped in. But even the accommodating Mark is not interested in "saving" Paul from the night and makes him leave because he is tired of Paul's talking. Similarly the lonely June only helps Paul because he offered her a dance at an empty party by using his last piece of money on the jukebox. It is this act of kindness by her that begins to release Paul from his nightmare. 

Conclusion

 

With After Hours, Martin Scorsese managed to create a masterful comic nightmare which feeds into its long literary heritage of stories about people trapped in strange places. Whilst the humour is pitch black dark and it may induce anxiety or remind the viewer of a nightmare, it is interesting to see something which leans into the darker side of the absurdist genre, and tangentially Carroll's work.

 

References:

 

Books:

 

Carroll, Lewis. Alice's adventures in Wonderland, London: Puffin Books, 1994.

 

Wernblad, Annette. “‘Down the Rabbit Hole.’” Essay. In The Passion of Martin Scorsese: A Critical Study of the Films, 58–67. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014.

 

Online articles:

 

Ebert, Roger, et al. “After Hours Movie Review & Film Summary (1985): Roger Ebert,” published February 14, 2019. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/after-hours-1985-1.

 

Hearst, Andrew et al. “The Scandalous Origins of Martin Scorsese's After Hours.” Andrew Hearst, published May 27, 2008. http://andrewhearst.com/blog/2008/05/the_scandalous_origins_of_martin_scorseses_after_hours.

 

Smalley, Gregory J. “330. AFTER HOURS (1985).” 366 Weird Movies, published May 3, 2018. https://366weirdmovies.com/330-after-hours-1985/.

 

Video Essays:

 

After Hours Analysis: Urban Wizard of Oz. Film Formula, Youtube, published in 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzT28uMfPdU.

 

Audio:

 

Frank, Joe. “Lies.” http://andrewhearst.com/audio/joefrank_lies.mp3

 

The original monologue by Joe Frank that the set up and some of the dialogue from "After Hours" is taken from. Joseph Minion was successfully sued for using this.