1983: Eureka

This week we discuss Nicolas Roeg’s period drama Eureka, starring Gene Hackman, Theresa Russell, and Rutger Hauer.
Plus: Wynton Marsalis, washroom attendants, and James's recent trip to London.
LINKS:
Trailer for Eureka ( • Eureka (1983) ORIGINAL... )
Wynton Marsalis does Louis Armstrong ( • Potato Head Blues )
The Wolseley (www.thewolsele...)
Climax of The Natural (Randy Newman) ( • The Final Homerun - Th... )

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I love this film. A suicidal film about ecstasy. Reminds me of that come down you have off drugs, alcohol or even after intense affair. Roeg went from sex and death to exploring the link between suicide and ecstasy. The visual storytelling in this is amazing. It’s like silent cinema. The opening montage is an inverse reflection of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. That’s the whole films structure. Inverse reflections. Its bouncing between mirrors and sometimes passing through them. It’s like a mix between Alice through the looking glass and the tempest. The film opens on sexual jealousy. Two men fighting over a woman. This is also just Mcann fighting himself. We join him as he’s rejected partnership outright and we see him wrestle that part of himself to the ground. The woman is talking tongues if you notice because can’t understand her now. The film is amazing. The prospector who shoots himself at the beginning is a twisted funny mirror refection of Rutger Hauers Claude, at the end of his failed search. How does he end up at the beginning? He puts his head on the mirror in the halls of Eureka before departing on a journey to find his own gold. Time is not linear behind the mirror. Claude doesn’t realise that he himself is gold. Tracey loves him for more than that and has proven that time and time again but he’s a cowardly man. He hasn’t seen the gold beneath his feet. He leaves Eureka to go find Eureka. Gets on a boat so he’s in water with no clear land. He’s also the one who cuts off Mcanns head. He’s trying to steal his soul so cuts his head off when he’s basically already dead. He delivers the final blow. He’s a coward. When Mcann sees the prospector kill himself, a boy and his sister are playing near by. Their mother is calling them. That’s Mcann as a young boy, his sister, his mother and his silent stoic father. It’s his inner life. Time has collapsed here. It’s more lateral than linear. He dies in the gold strike. And the strike is more like a scientific discovery than riches. Mcann looks a little Einstein like in his old age. When he’s killed, if you notice, Joe Spinell is Mcanns funny mirror twisted younger reflection, the inverse here of the old prospector and Claude. Spinell has similar look. Same Cheshire Cat grin. Suit. Spinell is the one who looks at him through a looking glass at bottom of the stairs. He’s always wet, even out of rain to recall the gold flood. He picks up the snow globe and drops it. In that scene, Spinell is always caught in reflection in the mirror and the camera keeps capturing his actions in the mirror. I love the gold strike sequence, which is basically him smashing the snow globe, but the final 10 minutes for me as the play is already over, he is dead, their relationship died in the courtroom, the story has been left in a limbo, that final moment on the balcony is very special to me. It feels very mythical. The courtroom scene is Alice in wonderland mixed with Dostoyevsky. It is ridiculous. Pastiche of melodrama. It’s not doing itself any favours homaging one of the best court room scenes in all of film from Written on the Wind. But it’s also doing the opposite of what that scene is doing. It’s feels very British too. Rutger Hauer has his pants metaphorically pulled down in front of everyone. It’s also an inverse reflection of the gold strike. Their relationship dies a death here as did Mcann when struck gold. But one death feels glorious for a moment, this just feels suffocating. The blown up picture behind the witness stand of mcanns dead body is an image of his drowned body from under the gold flood. A blown up picture of Alice in wonderlands the carpenter and the walrus poem is placed under the judge. Also the gangster character portrayed by Pesci, it’s not romanticising him in anyway. It’s trying to pull all the charisma out of him that people are attracted too and put him across as a very fake person in a clownish way but in some quiet moments, as when he orders mcanns death, Pesci’s actually great. The character is a real performer but he’s no actor, that’s why he’s a gangster! Pesci cast as Jewish. Rourke is cast as Italian. Hauer is cast as French. The black British oxford accented barrister in the court room. It’s all very Alice in wonderland. And somehow I think it also has to do with when Pesci’s character Meyerkofsky has that speech saying everyone’s an American now. And Roeg was a fan of Borges so the chaos theory is in here. Bifurcated reflections. The Garden of Forking Paths. I should mentioned that first. But yes, the film is just echoes and reflections and like it’s main character, the film kills itself. Within discovery is death. Within death… discovery? Resurrection? The film is a speculation. I will also say that Tracey is also born same year as Thatcher and that’s intentional.