L.A. <i> NOIR </i> : ‘Slam Dance’--The Look of a Lonely Paradise

“Slam Dance” is a slick thriller with a dazzling cast, but the leading lady that steals the show is the City of Los Angeles. Set in a mythical New Wave underworld where ‘40s Art Deco collides with the jagged edge of punk, the film suggests provocative parallels between the city as an entity unto itself, and the heroes and villains that roam her mean streets.

Written by Chicago-born Don Opper, directed by Japanese film maker Wayne Wang, and art directed by Italian Eugenio Zanetti, “Slam Dance” is an immigrant’s portrait of Los Angeles that doubles as a bittersweet homage to the fantasies that compel outsiders to come here.

The capital of the movies, Los Angeles is often depicted on screen as a place where appearances can be deceiving--i.e., “Chinatown,” “To Live and Die in L.A.”--and, as we saw in “Double Indemnity,” a place where looking good can get you what you want. It’s a “Rebel Without a Cause” place of recklessness and speed, and as William Holden discovered in “Sunset Boulevard,” a place of easy anonymity with plenty of room to hide. Central to all those films is a breezy attitude of morality gone slack.

In “Slam Dance” we’re taken on a hellish ride through a realm of sleek surfaces, random violence and an all-encompassing, if not particularly virulent, web of corruption. Above all else, “Slam Dance,” opening Friday, depicts Los Angeles as a haunted paradise where isolated individuals are shipwrecked with their dreams.

“ ‘Slam Dance’ is about small promotions, petty crime and a man who doesn’t take responsibility for his actions,” says Opper, who began working on the screenplay in 1981. “I’ve lived in L.A. for 20 years and I’ve found those things to be very much an element of this city. L.A. is hospitable to short-term relationships and superficial attachments, and bodies are seemingly more available here because there are more people in a state of undress.”

Starring Tom Hulce, Harry Dean Stanton, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, John Doe, Opper and Adam Ant, the film is built around a complex plot that’s kicked into motion when the glamorous mistress of a married New Wave cartoonist is murdered. The viewer is thus led into a nightmarish netherworld where the protagonist’s laissez-faire approach to life results in a series of deaths.

“The story investigates the repercussions of picking someone up in a bar and not knowing who they are; somewhere along the line someone has to pay for this casual interlude,” Opper says. “At the center of the plot is an irresponsible guy (Hulce) who travels in a world that touches on violence and sexual things. That situation is common to all urban environments, but because of the geography of L.A., it looks different here.

“The smog and the quality of the air mute the edges of things and make them look softer than they might actually be. The layout of the city makes it hard to get people together and you don’t run into your friends here. We exist in our cars, so it’s a highly segregated city; you can chose to live in a particular neighborhood and avoid ever crossing any color lines. It’s easy to isolate yourself here and the characters in the film all hide themselves from one another.”

The idea of isolation was central to Zanetti’s visual conceptualization of the film.

“When I moved here from Italy four years ago, I found a very different city from what I expected. Instead of blue skies and palm trees, I found a place of wide, empty boulevards lined with huge, fascistic Art Deco buildings. It inspired me to do a series of paintings called ‘Wilshire Boulevard Memories,’ which had a big effect on how I visualized ‘Slamdance.’

“In Los Angeles the individual is overwhelmed by the environment and is often isolated in vast stretches of space, and the film has several Kafkaesque images of the protagonist dwarfed by huge, fascistic public places.”

The central metaphor in the film is slam dancing, a violent dance-floor activity spawned by the second generation of punk rockers. Slam dancing enjoyed a long period of popularity in Los Angeles. In fact, many aficionados say it originated here.

“We use it in the film as a metaphor for the random violence that’s invaded the protagonist’s life,” says Opper, who sees slam dancing as Los Angeles’ version of a dance that was born as a means of striking a symbolic blow at repressive culture. “Kids here appropriated the form of the movement, drained it of ideas, and converted it into something purely physical.”

At odds with the contemporary phenomenon of punk are ‘40s Art Deco motifs that appear throughout “Slam Dance.” The combination of these two disparate elements throw the film into a time warp that Wang sees as being a primary ingredient in the mood of Los Angeles.

“L.A. is a uniquely eclectic city in that the past and the future are all mixed together here, sometimes in the same building,” Wang says. “For instance, the protagonists’ studio is an Art Deco bathhouse from the ‘40s that’s been converted into an ‘80s artist loft.”

The film’s distorted sense of time is further accentuated by a score that flip-flops between New Wave songs by Stan Ridgeway and the Fibonaccis to a vintage rendition of “Sentimental Reasons” by Eddie Howard.

“Wayne and I are foreigners and we wanted to create an homage not only to a city, but to a film genre as well,” says Zanetti in explaining the various periods that are alluded to in the film. “It sounds pretentious, but our idea was to use sets evocative of ‘Citizen Kane’ and transpose them into the ‘80s; a very grand black-and-white set, for instance, with a color TV flickering in the foreground.”

Dark existential themes and Art Deco motifs are primary components of that ever-popular movie genre, film noir , and many conventions of the style are employed in “Slam Dance.” Smoke-filled rooms, Expressionist lighting, venetian blinds, street light reflecting off a rain-drenched street--we’ve seen it all before, yet the allure of noir remains strong.

“ Noir has a timeless appeal,” says Zanetti, “because a noir hero has no exit, no options, and is constrained to do what destiny bids. People respond to noir because it is an element of daily life. We are all constrained, because of conditioning, to do things we’d prefer not to do.”

Adds Opper: “ ‘Slam Dance’ updates the classic noir formula in that the hero’s only triumph is to survive. In most detective fiction the mystery is successfully resolved, but nothing gets solved in this story. That’s a rather cynical, ‘80s view of the individual’s ability to affect the world. Even more cynical is the fact that the character obviously learns something in the course of the film, yet you don’t come away convinced it will make him a better person. The film is very nebulous about distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys; in fact, the hero himself feels partially responsible for his girlfriend’s death simply because he wasn’t straight with her during their affair.

“ ‘Slam Dance’ is an indictment of the kinds of arrangements that are made within the story, but it’s not meant as an indictment of L.A. When I first came here when I was 16, I thought it was paradise, and I still love it.”

“Coming here for the first time,” says Zanetti, “everything seemed smaller and less impressive than what I expected. It was like a joke. Everything is badly done, like a shoddy set. You touch the wall and it’s not real. In that sense, L.A. disappointed me. However, what I did find here that surprised me--and that I love--was a wonderful loneliness. Living in L.A. is like living on a lonely island. Or perhaps I should say, a movie set of a lonely island.”