Starman (1984)

PG and God bless you, 1984, for thinking that this is something that would be considered PG.  I found out that my wife's family made this family-movie-night time and time again.  There's all kinds of sex and nudity in it, and the sex in it probably hasn't aged well.  There's violence and language and bigotry.  It's got all kinds of stuff.  Before finding out that this movie was PG, I was going to label this as the R-rated E.T.  Still PG.

DIRECTOR:  John Carpenter

Okay, yet another confession.  I often confuse Starman with The Last Starfighter.  Second confession:  I don't know if I've seen this movie before.  I also don't know if I've seen The Last Starfighter.  Yet another confession!  I watched it in Pan-and-Scan.  Since Netflix DVD has started shutting its doors, I've turned to local libraries to finish off my Netflix DVD queue.  I take what I can get.  I'll be honest.  My dreams of owning a professional CD repair kit like we had in my halcyon video store days is pretty palpable right now.  Just putting that out there if you want to hook me up with one.  Anyway, onto Starman.

I didn't know that John Carpenter made this movie.  I mean, watching it now, I can see Carpenter all over this movie.  It's weird when I watch his non-horror stuff, but all of the nuts and bolts that make Carpenter the director that he is sits right up there on the screen.  The weird acting style.  The slightly dark look to everything.  The cardboard computers.  I mean, I love it.  It automatically meant that Starman was going to be a good time.  But I want to kind of look at who we were as Americans in 1984.

There's something really sappy about Starman that I kind of love and loathe.  Starman wants you to open your brain to one message and asks you to not open your brain to anything else logical.  In terms of what it is exploring, it's very similar to Star Trek.  Star Trek, like that specific brand of sci-fi, asks you to understand that humanity is both beautiful and deeply flawed at the same time.  I know that Roddenberry probably would claim that humanity would someday overcome those flaws, but his conflicts in his stories only highlighted how bigoted and closed-minded we were.  Such is the case with Starman, a story that allows us to view humanity from the outside.  It's that whole philosophical argument that you can only view the objective truth of something as an outsider or an exile.  That's Starman.  The movie almost hits this level of philosophy experiment that doesn't pretend to hide behind entertainment.  If you were an alien visiting planet Earth, and you knew nothing about Earthlings beyond what you got in a message and conversations, how insane would it look?   And you know what?  It would look pretty paradoxical.

I'm going to just spell out what the movie is about in a second.  But I also want to talk about how silly Starman is as well.  Because the movie is a thought experiment, everyone kind of has to play an archetype.  I mean, we're hitting every major beat along the way.  There isn't a ton of complexity beyond Karen Allen's Jenny.  Jenny, obviously, is meant to be the avatar for the audience, who seems to be going through a lot throughout the course of the movie. I mean, if I'm going to make the Star Trek comparison, Star Trek did the same thing.  If you didn't guess what the people with the different colored faces meant, then who am I to explain that to you.  But Jenny is the character who is humanity's savior.  Her grief puts her in this place to be the voice of the sane.  But everyone else is something.  They're only one thing.  Heck, to some people, I'm an archetype for a certain kind of idea and that's the only role I honestly fill.  I'm going to use the guy from the diner / gas station as how quickly this movie has to get to its message. 

There's a scene where Starman, for lack of a better name, is eating dinner with Jenny.  He sees a deer strapped to the hood of a vehicle and he's taken aback.  It's a form of sadness, but he's more confused than anything else. Fine.  Very E.T..  So Jenny tries ditching him at first, but then she finds him staring at the deer on the car.  Now, Starman (I hate calling him "Starman") resurrects the deer, who scampers off into the woods.  Now, if the deer hunter witnessed that entire sequence, I could see a weird need to fight the Starman.  After all, there's something beyond his understanding and who am I to comment on something weird going on.  But he witnesses the Starman just staring at the hood of the car.  From his perspective, he has no idea what just went down.  But what is kind of clear is that the Starman isn't standing there with a dead deer.  There's no blood trail.  Starman and Jenny's car is still sitting there.  Instead of going right to violence, there would have to be a moment of confusion. But because the movie needs to show the worst part of us, which just so happens to read as an insane right-wing gun nut (my read, not necessarily the movie's).  It's this kind of stuff where your brain has to shut off.  Because the movie is telling us what to think (as well it should), sometimes it can't afford to be subtle. The deer hunter scene is one of many scenes.  It's just the cleanest to critique, so I'm going to use that as my foundational argument.

Let's talk about the ickiness of the movie.  There's an element that is going back and forth on the whole thing, so please be patient if I'm discovering things while I write.  With all '80s movies, the male protagonist has to sleep with the female protagonist.  As society has grown more oddly sex positive, this seems to have actually diminshed in films from my perspective.  But it's the '80s, so I'm going to remind you that family films must have people sleep with each other.  Now, there's so much to explain about Starman's specific circumstances that I don't quite know where to start.  Starman is an entity that scans a bunch of photos to mimic Karen Allen's dead husband.  She watches this creature horrifically instantly age to form Jeff Bridges, who slowly learns how to speak in disjointed syntax over the course of a minute.  Here are some assumptions about Starman pre-Jeff Bridges.  1) Starman is an adult because he traveled here by himself.  2) Starman is insanely intelligent because he picks up on a lot of cultural things in the course of three days.  Also, he says that their race is more advanced than humanity, so that is something we're told.  But, is Starman completely understanding of the sexual relationship that he has with Jenny?  I'm going to say no.

The only thing that makes me think that I may have seen Starman before is the fact that I wondered why Jenny Hayden didn't think that Jeff Bridges was her husband.  A young me didn't get that her husband wasn't resurrected; an alien just created a doppleganger using photos and videos.  But Jenny Hayden views Jeff Bridges as a monster baby, then a child, then a teenager, ultimately forming a Jeff Bridges golem in her living room.  She knows that this physical body is only hours to days old.  Also, Jeff Bridges lacks so much of understanding of what it means to be human that a kiss almost seems like a handshake to him. Now, I get that Jenny Hayden seems to genuinely care for the Starman creature.  She understands very quickly that he is not Jeff Bridges, but rather a separate entity.  (It's weird that she's not mad at Starman for taking her husband's likeness more, but maybe it was a beat too far for this movie.  Whatever.)  She loves that he's curious about humanity while displaying empathy.  She understands that Starman cares for her too in whatever way he can imagine.  But --and here's the real but! --he doesn't understand the act he just did.

The only cultural context he has for sex that he has is a quick scene from From Here to Eternity.  It's very quick and he doesn't have the context of the rest of the film to even explain the Hollywood version of romance.  No, he thinks that is something that everyone does to each other.  After the two share their moment, he very cooly explains that he has cured Jenny Hayden of her infertility and that she will bear a son that will grow up to be a teacher.  He will share her husband's DNA and offers to abort that child should she wish.  (There are all kinds of questions that she's going to have to answer and will the government let her have that child?)   He doesn't understand that this is a major life moment and that there needs to be a discussion about the intimacy that just took place.  To a certain extent, we want to let Jenny off the hook.  After all, Starman seems very cool with what happened.  And, from her perspective, she probably just lied to herself and let herself have one final moment with her husband, which can be sweet and romantic.  But Starman wasn't her husband.  He never claimed to be her husband.  Ultimately, the act is kind of selfish and borderline non-consensual.  Am I the only one who thinks that there's a very uncomfortable grey area that might be taking all of the romance out of this scene?  I am listening to the Starman soundtrack while I write this and that soundtrack definitely makes me want to think that this is romantic as heck.

But gosh darn it, I still like the movie.  I know. It's not the great movie that a lot of people make it out to be.  (Okay, not a lot of people talk about Starman, so I don't know what kind of fantasy alternate reality I'm living in.)  But it's good.  It's a better E.T..  I'll say that.  Yeah, they're both sappy movies.  But I also like the notion that humanity is a bunch of savages, but this creature chooses to see the best out of us, knowing that we could potentially be this amazing civilization.  And John Carpenter is Carpentering the heck out of this movie.  Sure, a lot of the moments aren't really explained and Jenny's life has to be insane after this moment. (I love how she can't join him in space and that this is probably going to involve a lot of therapy after.)  But it's a good movie. 

Actually, it's a good Star Trek episode, minus the crew of the Enterprise.​