Order in the Universe: The Films of John Carpenter (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature some great stories. The supplemental material provided, such as the filmography, the afterward by Barry Shipman, the concluding article by Peter Morris, the photographs and maps all make for a complete story. The only recommendation is for the editors to try footnotes instead ofendnotes to provide more flow to Nell Shipman's fascinating story. Jason Wojcik Cambria County Area Community College Jpwojcik@aol.com Robert C. Cumbow Order in the Universe: The Films ofJohn Carpenter. Scarecrow Press, 2000. $35.00 Worthy Addition The Second Edition of Robert C. Cumbow's Order in the Universe: The Films ofJohn Carpenter provides a valuable service not only to Carpenter admirers as well as horror and science -fiction aficionados, but also to readers in search of thoughtful, accessible film criticism. Cumbow approaches Carpenter's oeuvre (excepting 2001's Ghosts ofMars) from an intellectual, ifnotpurely scholarly, standpoint that attends to the themes, images, symbols, and narrative concerns that have fascinated Carpenter during his thirty years offilmmaking. Indeed, the simple act of taking this often undervalued writer-director seriously recommends Cumbow's study, while his stimulating analyses of many Carpenter motion pictures make it a worthy addition to the Scarecrow Press' Filmmakers Series. Cumbow frames these individual film readings (each offered in a separate chapter) within the overarching context of Carpenter's status as an auteur primarily concerned with an unexpected , often ominous realm obtruding into the confines of quotidian reality. "This is the far deeper, more devastating (and sometimes transfiguring) experience of finding that the order in accord with which one has lived one's life is not the right one; that some other order altogether controls—and perhaps has always controlled," Cumbow writes in his Introduction, setting the tone for the entire book. Through precise considerations of how Carpenter's plots, characters, and deceptively simple symbolism explore the fractured, spiritually decentered malaise of contemporary America, Cumbow recognizes that the man still most famous for creating Halloween 's Michael Myers is a visual artist of the first order. Cumbow's strengths are nowhere more apparent than in his fourth and longest chapter, a sometimes superb evaluation of Assault on Precinct 13, which the author exposes as central to the Carpenter corpus because it combines the director's respect for Howard Hawks (and his attendant belief in radical individualism ) with a mistrust of the progress promised by institutional bodies. Such concerns place Carpenter squarely in a tradition of postmodern skepticism about collective values. Cumbow notes these themes, as well as their complications, in all later Carpenter films, but his most significant accomplishment is elucidating how these ideas meld easily, even inevitably, with the fantasy, horror, and science-fiction genres with which Carpenter is most commonly associated. Cumbow has a healthy, refreshing respect for the possibilities afforded by horror and science fiction filmmaking , as well as how Carpenter manipulates these genres to inflect traditional themes of good and evil with a Hawksian anxiety about the utility of collectivism. As Cumbow points out, Carpenter consistently and skillfully refuses to endorse simplistic Manichean notions despite the fact that the director often returns to the concept of pure evil (whether the marauding street gangs ofAssault on Precinct 13, the extraterrestrial creature of The Thing, or the Satanic reverberations of Prince of Darkness). Cumbow understands that Carpenter often combines the good/evil duality with a sly depiction of urban alienation that results in evil characters and impulses becoming simultaneously mythic (and therefore unassailable to normal human experience) and horrific. In Carpenter's vision, evil must be resisted precisely because it threatens to dehumanize us by transforming the everyday world into one that we initially do not recognize as having changed at all. The invasion is surreptitious, so only by transforming his characters' vision can Carpenter demonstrate how evil resides both within and without. Cumbow is equally adept at highlighting Carpenter's cinematic reflexivity, commenting on how many of his films are, on one or more levels, about the process of filmmaking, visual storytelling, and editing. Cumbow's discussion of Prince of Darkness, one of the best American films of the eighties, regards this story as, in some measure, a palimpsest of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass films, Chris...