Nomads

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NOMADS (1986)
MGM DVD (region 0)
d. John McTiernan; pr. Cassian Elwes, Elliott Kastner, George Pappas; scr. John McTiernan; ph. Stephen Ramsey; ed. Michael John Bateman; m. Bill Conti; prod d. Marcia Hinds; cast. Lesley Anne Down, Pierce Brosnan, Anna Maria Monticelli, Adam Ant, Mary Woronov (91 mins)
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Ambitious Anthropological Sci-Fi Debut from Future Hollywood A-list Action Director

Nomads is the directorial debut of John McTiernan who would, with the success of Die Hard, go on to be one of the top-ranking Hollywood action directors alongside such as James Cameron and later Renny Harlin and Andrew Davis.

What remains unusual about his first film is its treatment of a kind of anthropological obsession – a morbid fascination with alternative lifestyles and cultures that threatens to consume one the more one learns. While films about anthropologists are few, they are frequently bound by a tension between the needs of docudrama authenticity and in this case, the expectations of established genres (horror and even science-fiction). The clash between scientific objectivity and genre fancifulness has in many films led to unusually provocative works that seek to expand their genre’s surrounding sociology. In the process they use a form of anthropological speculation to render ambiguous cultural fantasies rooted in the diverse attitudes to alternatives to contemporary civilization that inevitably come clashing into it. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the anarchic punk ethos and lifestyle came under such scrutiny, and in Nomads, was combined neatly with the horror genre for a surprisingly inventive and still rather under-rated debut film.

Synopsis (contains spoilers)

Nomads tells the story of a doctor (Lesley Anne Down) at a busy hospital. One day she treats a raving patient (Pierce Brosnan) who speaks only in French.

ORIGINAL TRAILER

EXTRACT OF FAN FAVE SCENE -
THE KISS

In an effort to restrain him, he rises up and whispers something in her ear before dying. When home, she begins to get flashes in which she sees what appear to have been Brosnan’s last moments. She collapses at work from the stress. However, the flashes get worse and as she wanders, she begins to piece together the events surrounding the man’s death, just as he experienced them. She discovers that the man was a French anthropologist recently come to America with his wife. One night he sees a group of street punks in a van (led by counter-culture icons Adam Ant and Mary Woronov) who have apparently signaled out his house for graffiti attacks, and follows them, in the process neglecting his frightened and confused wife. He returns home increasingly obsessed, convinced that there is a cultural and even supernatural link between these nomadic street punks, and the nomadic Eskimo and Inuit tribes the photos of which adorn his study. He is convinced of this link, but once the punks become aware of him, he realizes that his life in danger. As Down re-experiences this, she too is driven to seek out the wife and the punks.

Former Andy Warhol factory icon Mary Woronov as
the Queen of Punk

Resting on a notion of deathbed psychic transference which rather obfuscates the film’s narrative, Nomads is a stylish look at the consuming fascination with alternative societies which threatens to devour and destroy the individual so intrigued by them.

Brosnan’s obsessive infatuation with the modern urban nomads is both dangerous and invigorating, perhaps a passion lacking in other aspects of his domestic life. It is a turn on for him. The film thus explores an unusual predicament as an anthropologist intent on objective behaviorist observation is slowly drawn to interact with what he would study, in the process destroying his hold on objectivity and even individuality as the object of his study penetrates and eats his psyche. Throughout the film, and making it a provocative psycho-thriller and horror film, is the notion of madness as a kind of psychic contaminant, a virus spread from person to person as they come into contact with the nomads, a kind of modern urban “other” who hide in the anarchic freedom of the punk ethos their true metaphysical intentions. Anthropology yields only levels of strange and puzzling malevolence from which decent people must flee. Although this amounts to a fear of the other rather than a validation of scientific objectivity, this is an approach well within genre confines.

Here, anarchic, alternative subcultures are a destructive plague on contemporary psychological and social well-being, the film finding much to fear in alternate lifestyles.

It thus treats the study of such groups with much skepticism as inviting only danger and even a kind of contamination, in the process perhaps negating and inverting the scientific credo. On another level though, the punks represent a kind of American anarchy and the threat they pose to the established order has socio-political overtones beyond the horror genre McTiernan draws upon for this film. However, in stressing the universality of the nomad, the film does posit a lifestyle that transcends cultural boundaries as much as it consumes them – the film carefully but irresolutely exploring the inter-relationship between one’s lifestyle choice and one’s sense of self as a kind of inherited psychic condition. The nomads are thus almost supra-human figures – the epitome of cultural otherness, a theme also put forward in another anthropologically provocative horror film of the early 1980s, Wolfen. The fringes of society also hide its most radical dangers according to these films, dangerous because rooted in traditions pre-dating American urban civilization, yet secretly preying upon it out of what amounts to metaphysical anarchy. The American fear of disorder and loss of control infiltrates these horror films.

The visual transfer on this DVD is for the most part effective in original widescreen.

It preserves director McTiernan’s self-consciously cold artiness, although not quite capturing the remote neo-noir urbanity found in early Michael Mann films for instance. Slick visuals and shock cuts make for a film not far removed in style from the gloss of early MTV. The film captures the glistening desolation of an urban world. It is cold, of icy colors as if life has been drained from all but the anarchic punks, whose restless energy proves enticing for the vicarious contrast it offers from a stagnant, if elegant, America. As the psychic link theme is explored, the film becomes more fragmentary in editing rhythm and the style becomes deliberately jagged as it seeks to convey both Brosnan’s plight and how that plight is re-experienced by another person. This makes for some intriguingly subjective point-of-view shots and clever visual trickery to some transition scenes. Costumes are well chosen as different cultural choices are reflected in look and design, the anonymous streets offering protection for the outsiders. Shadows and night scenes are paramount as are unsteady hand-held shots as the film manages to capture a non American’s fascination with sordid American street-life.

At first the score has a chilling quality which corresponds nicely to the icy visuals. Whether by design or not, the transfer enhances the film’s frequent stress on the naturalistic absence of all but subdued natural sounds and voices, the score used for jarring and intense effect. Indeed, it is often surprisingly subdued, making for some frighteningly sudden moments of sound mixing which keep the viewer on edge. Brosnan’s French accent, however, is something of an amusing distraction. The combination of mood music and visual stylization also recalls such 1980s horrors as The Hunger, where elegance concealed decay and perverse needs unfulfilled by the limits of conventional behavior (which is perhaps Brosnan’s personal psychological trap and the weakness the plague of madness feeds upon). The score is progressively disorienting, deliberately degenerating into a kind of noise, blended in with what seem to be unusual growls, making for ferocious effects in the latter stages. The guitar work of rock legend Ted Nugent is largely responsible for this success and would have been better served by a fuller home-theatre transfer with more directional possibilities. As is, the sound transfer is functional.

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