The Night Clerk

 The Night Clerk is a 2022 psychological thriller.  The movie is handsomely made, fluent, and contains some startling performances.  However, the film is so elliptical and intentionally understated, that it has almost no narrative pulse, and generates no suspense.  In fact, the conventions of the crime thriller are invoked only to be casually disregarded.  For instance, a cop played by John Leguizamo investigates the murder that is central to the movie's story.  He interrogates suspects and gathers evidence and, even, tries to intimidate the protagonist into a confession -- but it's all very low-key, tentative, and goes nowhere.  The cop doesn't solve the crime; instead it's solved for him.

The titular night clerk is a handsome young man named Bart Bromley.  He suffers from Asperger's Syndrome and, although very intelligent (possibly a genius), he is socially inept and presents to others with an uncanny, robotic indifference.  At his job, he has rigged the hotel rooms with cameras so that he can spy on customers.  In the course of this surveillance, he witnesses a man killing a woman in one of the hotel rooms, watching the footage at home in his basement room.  It turns out that he lives nearby and, when he sees the feed showing the homicide, he rushes to the hotel, encounters the dead woman, and dips his fingers in her blood. Although he's an obvious suspect, and, of course, can't reveal how he observed the murder, the cops rule him out and continue searching for the suspect.  After the killing, Bart is assigned to another smaller hotel.  At that place, a young woman checks-in. She's fantastically beautiful (played by Ana de Armes) and tells Bart that she had a brother, now deceased, who was on the autism spectrum, but more severely impaired than Bart.  She begins to flirt with Bart.  As it turns out, the woman has an ulterior motive -- she's the girlfriend of the murderer and has been charged with stealing from Bart his video evidence of the killing.  Bart, who is confused by the young woman's flirtatious behavior, falls in love with her.  This leads to the film's climax which occurs after the young woman has slept with Bart to take from him the thumbdrive (or something on that order) containing the recording of the homicide.  

From a logical and narrative perspective, the film makes no sense.  We don't understand the technology that Bart uses to somehow be privy to the remote feed from the motel in his basement room where he views footage on about nine large monitors.  Bart's mother, played by a gaunt Helen Hunt, is intensely protective of her son, but, somehow, seems unaware that he is spying on the customers in the motel where he works -- notwithstanding the huge array of screens in the basement of her house.  Furthermore, she seems somehow indifferent (or unaware) of the sexual encounter between her son and the beautiful young woman (who apparently spends the night in her house).  Helen Hunt's role is underwritten to the point of vanishing -- she doesn't get to do much of anything and, remarkably, doesn't call a lawyer when the cops interrogate Bart.  The beautiful young woman is appealing but plays the part of the film noir femme fatale, also a role that is underwritten.  Tye Sheridan is so convincing as the kid with Asperger's syndrome that I wondered whether the actor was someone who, in fact, suffers from this condition.  (Sheridan has played lots of superhero roles, apparently is a well-known movie star, and, of course, is merely acting.)  The movie is pretty much completely implausible -- I worked as a night clerk and its a job that requires almost constant interaction with a wide variety of people, many of them peculiar and, even, half-criminal.  I'm not able to suspend my disbelief as to the premise that a person with this sort of condition could work in this job.  And the technological aspects of the movie make no sense.  The film is an odd vehicle starring some prestigious actors; it feels to me like it was made as a tax-dodge or something on that order.  It's strangely indifferent, inhuman, and remote, as if directed by its autistic hero.  

Laid (Australian series)

 Australia is one version of the future.  Laid, an Australian TV comedy that ran for two seasons around 2012 (twelve half-hour episodes), illustrates this proposition.  A raunchy sex-comedy, the show's casual amorality and explicit content are features that American TV producers have come to only belatedly, more than 10 years after the Australian show was canceled.  I haven't seen the American version of Laid, a brand-new program that apparently adopts the previous show's premise and so can't comment as to how that series differs from its predecessor.  But my point is that the Australians and their media are culturally more progressive than television in this country.  Laid is blithely nonchalant about its heroines promiscuity -- in her early thirties, the heroine has had 22 lovers, all of them dropping dead in the sequence in which she had sex with them.  She has no regrets except the fatal consequences of her sexual encounters.  And, in fact, the demise of her former lovers seems more of an inconvenience to her than a matter of actual tragedy.  Everyone is wholly non-judgmental.  The older generation of Aussies, men and women in their fifties seem to accept casual sex with equanimity, even enthusiasm.  The show is full of new age gurus and frauds.  This sophisticated urban world is completely secular.  When one of the characters dies briefly and is, then, revived, he imagines himself to be Jesus.  But his problem is that neither he nor any of his comrades know enough about the Bible to provide him with a convincing account of how he should act or think as the Savior of the World. The terrain in Laid is resolutely sunny, mild, and hedonistic -- even when it is raining, the skies are bright and the world is luminous.  Laid imagines a world without real consequence to sex -- at least, this is how everyone views the situation until the heroine's former lovers start dying in bloody and grotesque ways.  The noncommittal non-judgmental ambience to the dire events in the show, all played for comedy, is necessary to keep the tone of Laid from becoming unbearably grim and unpleasant.  The program is bawdy in the manner of old Elizabethan comedies -- it abounds in dirty puns and unseemly double entendres -- but the show is weirdly family friendly; everyone's in on the joke and its amusing to all concerned.  

Roo McVie, the show's protagonist, works in marketing research.  She lives with a female roommate E. J.  She's close to her parents.  (In this show, there's no generation gap. Parents and children understand one another perfectly, have the same tastes, and are happy to spend time together -- if anything, the parents, who are all aging hippies, are more progressive than their children.)  Roo discovers that the men with whom she has had sex are all dying, in fact, in the order of her encounters with them.  This is established in the first three shows which involve accidental deaths, funerals, and Roo's discovery that she (or her vagina) seems to be the cause of the young men's deaths.  The situation becomes complicated when Roo meets a young man whom she genuinely loves -- her dilemma (and his) is that if she consummates the relationship, her lover will die.  People in the show drink a lot and Roo ends up in bed with her roommate E.J.'s boyfriend, a feckless fellow who is dim-witted but charming.  Of course, Roo's sex with the E.J.'s boyfriend leads to a rift with her roommate.  But this is Australia and everyone is laid-back and forgiving and Roo reconciles with E.J. after some initial unpleasantness.  Roo consults her gynecologist, a flaky new-age physician and endures some rituals involving bathing in epsom salts conducted by a self-proclaimed shaman (no one knows how to pronounce the word).  Her love-interest's mother conducts a sort of cheery seance in which Roo apologizes to the young men (all 22 of them) that she has killed.  This seems to free her from the curse and she sleeps with the young man with whom she has fallen in love.  All goes well, except in the morning, the poor kid is in a coma.  This sets up the second season's six episodes.  

In the 2012 season, Roo encounters a nasty, cynical, and unattractive man whose penis cures all illnesses.  Roo decides to sleep with this man to rid herself of the curse.  The show's premise has run out of steam by this point and, although the first three shows are funny, the program deteriorates, becoming increasingly vulgar and coarse.  The unseemly guy with the healing penis is a funny character -- he's hideous with greasy hair, blemishes on face and lips, and has a deeply furrowed, comically large forehead.  His personality neatly matches his physical shortcomings -- he's openly exploiting his clients, all needy women of various ages and descriptions who are cured by his embraces:  he heals psoriasis, hemorrhoids, diabetes, and several other ailments (including some said to be terminal) in the course of the series.  Marcus, the sex-healer, falls in love with Roo creating more problems.  Roo and E.J. have concluded that ejaculation is the source of both the poison and the balm -- if the "deal isn't sealed", then, Roo's vagina doesn't kill and Marcus' penis is without efficacy.  Roo and E.J. drug Marcus and try to rape him, but he's flaccid and they can't get the healing semen out of him.  This leads to them rigging a splint for his penis so they can extract the ejaculate which Roo injects into herself with a turkey baster.  To simply detail these plot elements, which on paper sound fantastically unpleasant and lurid, is to misrepresent the show.  Despite the program's obscene subject matter, somehow, the program remains amusing and cheerful, even, somehow wholesome.  (This is particularly peculiar since the program's premise necessarily suggests ideas involving sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV-AIDS.)  By the end of the second series, the show has become so profoundly obscene that it really has no place to go -- outrage is piled on outrage, although it all remains judgement-free and cheerful, and, at last, the show peters out.  

The characters, even the unpleasant Marcus, are all jovial and engaging.  It's a sit-com on the order of Friends in the sense that the viewer likes everyone in the show and wishes them well.  The dire premise doesn't interfere with the comedy although exactly how this is accomplished is unclear to me, a sort of alchemy.  It's a world without gravity, with butterflies copulating and fluttering about in relationships that are as light as a feather and that have no consequence at all.  I have said that Laid represents the future with respect to sexual relations and friendship and the supernatural in the developed world -- but it's just one version of the future.  The other version is represented by the resurgence of radical right wing politics in the world; in the coming decades, I think, it's either Australia or the Taliban.  You choose.  I prefer "down under."

(The show's theme is an old music-hall ditty called by My Girl's Pussy, based on obvious double entendre and performed with primitive, smirking efficiency by the American cartoonist, Robert Crumb with what sounds like a string and jug band.  The show is penetrating with respect to male sexuality -- it develops along the lines of a bit mimed by Richard Pryor in one of his seventies filmed comedy concerts:  there's a woman whose vagina kills those who ejaculate in her.  Pryor mimics a long line of men waiting nervously to have sex with the woman, sometimes, looking anxiously ahead to those who have gone before, but no one wanting to lose his place in the fatal queue.)