I
“You’re A Really Good Liar When You Wanna Be”
In Something Wild, lying is fashionable.
Before a single word is spoken—before a clichéd rom-com meet-cute is unzipped to expose something sensuously depraved, before the camouflage of a high school reunion story is ripped to reveal something sinister and dangerous, before the disguise of a road movie is stripped to unleash something shockingly violent—the truth is costumed in deception. A film unfurls in fakery.
The opening panoramas of Something Wild (1986) sew together one timeworn trope after another, a series of swooning angles on an onrushing New York City from the East River, the same tourist-pamphlet opening-credits-establishing-shots that you’ve seen announcing hundreds of NYC films in the same manner. And it’s all a liar’s promise: That this is yet another Fun City flick, likely some off-the-rack After Hours imitation, a previously-worn and threadbare entry into the New York yuppie nightmare subgenre of the 1980s—when Something Wild is anything but.
Even as the mothworn cityscape shots stretch across the screen, the energy of something different, something vital, something else sweats through the fabric of the film, a dark, wet heat staining and betraying this staid bit of costumery by hinting at the wild thing underneath:
The caffeinated jitters of David Byrne and Celia Cruz’s “Loco De Amor (Crazy for Love),” all Afro-Cuban polyrhythms and nervy worldbeat (“wiiiiiiiiiild thing!”), propels the opening sequence out of the sky and into the streets of Manhattan where a diasporic diversity sprawls. A dynamic crossweave of Black, Puerto Rican, White, Jamaican, and Asian threads contrast the decidedly caucasoid advertising of the film’s poster and marketing campaign, all of which tapers into a crucial shot at the climax of the opening credits, a billboard-ready image name-tagging both a vision and visionary: DIRECTED BY JONATHAN DEMME, stitched into the frame in a goldenrod font, lies slung low beneath the image of a hip Black man with a massive Panasonic boombox carried Atlas-style on his sweatsuited shoulder and blaring Byrne and Cruz as he passes Homecookin Heroes, a greasy-spoon-and-paper-plate joint just as overstuffed with stories as the streets outside.
Inside, a polyblend tapestry of faces—some young, some old. Two achieve prominence over all:
Charles Briggs (Jeff Daniels) sits at his table pretending to use his calculator, hiding inside his dark grey heathered wool suit, powder-blue button-up shirt, oversized pager clipped to his thin brown leather belt that matches his brown leather loafers, sensible just-in-case umbrella with dark gray canvas and shoe-matching wooden handle, silver wedding band, and a tie noosed around his neck. Hiding inside the bland disguise of a yuppified Wall Street investment banker, which he is—and isn’t. Only the burning red diamond patterns vibrantly pulsing through the dark void of his tie hued a versatile navy blue (a color capable of adapting to nearly any other tone surrounding it, a quietly rebellious capacity to evolve when pushed by its environment) hint at something more. Something complicated.
That, and the fact that he thrill-sneaks out of the diner, intentionally skipping out on the bill he clearly has the money for.
Lulu (Melanie Griffith) sits at her table pretending to read a biography about magical realist painter Frida Kahlo’s seemingly mismatched but passionately intense love affair with muralist Diego Rivera, boldly announcing herself with a stark black bob (styled after Louise Brooks’ dangerously sexual character Lulu in 1929’s Pandora’s Box), a body-sucking black dress, various appropriations of red-yellow-green’d contemporary African jewelry (multiple chokers spiraling her neck, massive earrings, bracelets so numerous they run from both wrists to both elbows, a waist-hugging belt, and a medallion of Africa itself), mint green shoes to match the same paintjob on her 1974 Datsun 260Z, oversized turquoise sunglasses with little astronaut figurines orbiting both lenses, and lipstick the same startling red as the diamonds bleeding through Charles’ tie. Announcing herself as a brazen and daring man-eater just like Brooks’ Lulu, which she is—and isn’t. She watches Charles as he pockets his bill, this bland yuppie conformist with a wedding ring glinting in the sun and what seems like the very slightest hunger for something more. Something dangerous.
That, and Lulu is shopping for a man. Someone mass-produced, a type, an empty suit, available only for short-term use—someone she can wear for the weekend.
It’s why she alternately chases and charms Charles on the street about his unpaid bill, a flurry of baby-voiced taunts and flirts, incisions and insights, running her verbal measuring tape up his inseam. “Let me guess,” she coos. “Sometimes you don’t pay for your lunch. Or maybe you steal the occasional candy bar or newspaper. You’re a closet rebel.”
She’s sizing him up, tailoring him for the road journey to come. For the afternoon in which she semi-kidnaps the perpetually frazzled yet strangely pliant Charles, supposed husband and father of two, and loosens him with whiskey and a detour to a roadside motel. There, she ravenously tears into his second skin of yuppie wardrobing, ripping the clothes from his body like something feral, something alive, literally splitting his undershirt down the middle until it falls from his body like shedding scales, leaving him naked and capable of being anything, before dressing him only in something of hers: handcuffs.
It’s a jarringly carnal sex scene, one that strips these characters of their (literal) costumes. As the lipstick-smeared Lulu forces Charles into a phone call with his boss to blow off a weekend’s worth of work while she blows him, it also undresses Something Wild of any pretension that it will be a leaden proto-manic-pixie-dream-girl adventure about a wild woman whose noble heart saves a straight-laced sadboy from himself. While Lulu’s African bracelets slap and jingle in time with Charles’s new carbon steel ones to the slinky fuck-funk soundtrack of the Jamaican band Fabulous Five, Inc., the film presses ever-so-slightly past it and its characters’ lies. Like the high slit in a dress parting to reveal the aching swell of a thigh, something is revealed here. Something animalistic. Something messy. Something real.
II
“Who Am I Supposed To Be?”
IDs abound in Something Wild—driver’s licenses, corporate security cards, Christmas Club vouchers, nametags, name stickers, names stitched onto work shirts, state-slogan’d tourism t-shirts and billboards and bumper stickers and baseball hats, high school reunion pamphlet bios, cutesy and clever meal titles in diner menus, business marquees, slogans painted on used cars and roadside signage—a crazy-quilt cross-stitching of the ways in which we advertise ourselves to the world, the commercial images of selfhood we strive to live up to, and the slogans of others that we use to superficially understand them by. And there is no greater, nor more dishonest, advertisement for wished-for selves in Something Wild than the clothes of its characters.
It’s something that Charles (or, rather, “Charlie,” as he has been rechristened by his newfound roadtrip partner) understands on an almost instinctual level, somewhere deep beneath his daily uniform, which—as he sits with Lulu for a warm postfuck dinner in the appropriately fake Italian eatery “Mom & Dad’s Italian Restaurant”—has begun to change. His powder-blue shirt collar is unbuttoned and open; his once-tight tie hangs loose down his shirt as Lulu’s handcuffs spill out his right jacket sleeve like a slipped secret, one cuff still braceleted around his right wrist. Lulu is different as well, her dress looser, her bra gone, spaceman sunglasses left in the car. As they sit in the anesthetized artifice of a simulacra supperhouse, something has been inadvertently knocked loose within them both, something mysterious, something unspoken.
What they do speak about are nametags.
Lulu giggles as Charlie—Charlie, even his name is loosened, like his tie and Lulu’s cuffs—continually calls their waitress by her name, Rose. “Well, that’s what nametags are for, jeez,” Charlie explains. “Just makes things a little friendlier, a little more personal. I like that.” Nametags are easy shorthand for identity, something Charlie—as Charles—has struggled to present to the world around him. Nametags allow one to tailor and live up to an idea of oneself, but they also allow something more, something deeper. The further Lulu takes Charlie away from New York City and his paper-fashion-doll life there—and the more exposed he becomes to the different classes and colors of America on his NYC-to-Pennsylvania road journey—the more Charlie discovers the desire to connect with the people around him he previously ignored: the laborers and the servers and the communities he did economic violence to from his Wall Street office, or when stealing lunch from a diner. Charlie Briggs, as he smiles and nods hello at the Black man dressed exactly like him across the restaurant, begins to look past the surfaces that clothe us and discover empathy.
It’s what makes Charlie the defining avatar (or nametag, or billboard) of director Jonathan Demme’s cinema, in what is the Ultimate Demme Film (or Marquee, or Slogan):
Something Wild is an atomic undressing of genre clichés, lies, and costumes. As with the best of the rest of Demme’s work, it uses a genre getup solely as an excuse to explore the truth, the realer-than-real funkyjunky Americana (and its multiculti makeup) that so many of Demme’s characters can be at first oblivious to (or costumed appropriators of). The film, like Charlie’s gradually-widening and disrobing POV, restlessly stitches together a pattern that is wholly unique, something totally its own: costume designer Norma Moriceau’s ceaselessly rainbowed designs, the unflinching rawness of Tak Fujimoto’s photography, a score by The Velvet Underground’s John Cale, the David Byrne frills, the American sensuality and vulgarity, the stylistic gearshifts from wicked comedy to wickedly violent darkness, and most of all a natural-born rebel’s deep empathy for—and extreme close-up on—women, rock ’n roll, and the disenfranchised.
All of which suffuses the bright, boldly-colored, and breezy top hour of Something Wild—until the patterns jarringly shift for the bottom, like from polka-dot to paisley, like from vibrant plaid to dark leather.
Until Ray.
***
“GREET A VISITOR, MAKE A FRIEND, IN PENNSYLVANIA” declares a billboard next to the rather appropriately-named “Charley’s” flea market in Lulu’s hometown of Quincy, Pennsylvania. As she and Charlie unpocket a flood of hitchhikers from their car—an aging hippie, a Black blues musician and his grandchildren, two female fitness freaks—Lulu begins to hint at why she chose Charlie to complete her weekend ensemble. She’s in town to celebrate her 10-year high school reunion, and to convince her mother, Peaches (Dana Preu), that she married a decent man, “just the kind of man [she] always said I should marry.” Instead of something like Ray.
Oh, and she reveals her name is actually Audrey Hankel, after she accidentally forgets her suitcase full of New Wave and Africa-appropriating costumes back at their motel. After she leaves everything that is “Lulu” (except for her trademark black bob) behind.
The flea market is a junkdrawer of Demme’d Americana and is Something Wild in microcosm, full of Disney knickknacks, bald eagle statuettes, kitten posters, stacked TVs playing the same monster truck rally, and whole mountain ranges of fluorescent and decade-spanning fashions. Together with the owners (played by Jonathan and David’s mothers, with Dorothy Demme decked in a monster truck ballcap and a t-shirt for British roots reggae band Steel Pulse, and Emma Byrne laid out in vibrant Hawaiian vacationwear), Lulu strips Charlie of his yuppie costume and dresses him for her mother and the reunion party to come.
“Oh, Charlie, it’s you,” Audrey squeals in recognition as he dons the luminous sheen of a blue dupioni silk suit, white suspenders, white diamond-woven satin shirt, 1940s-styled yellow necktie featuring a palm tree’d beach scene, pale blue socks, and a pair of red-soled white bucks. Despite Charlie’s horror, the suit fits him. Still, something is a little off. Something too brash, something not quite right. But there’s also something transformational about the new outfit. Charlie begins to find himself more at ease with Audrey’s chaos, her shapeshifting and whiplashing tones, so much so that he doesn’t even notice when he drops his wallet—containing everything that identifies him as Charles Driggs—outside of “Charley’s.”
So much so that he doesn’t think much about the newspaper clippings in Audrey’s high school bedroom regarding Quincy’s notorious “Hit and Fly Gunman” being charged with multiple robberies.
So much so that he almost keeps his composure when Audrey reveals her reunion attire later that night: a gardenia-white prom dress, jeweled crucifix, sequined white high heels, and the short ’n spiky bleach-blonde hairdo that had been hiding beneath her “Lulu” wig.
Together, they leave for the reunion as Audrey had planned: as “Audrey and Charles Driggs,” married parents of two, just in town from New York for a high school reunion. Charlie is her costume, her suit of the normal life she thinks everyone else has and that she never really lived. It’s what she sized Charlie for at Homecookin Heroes, what she broke in while on the road, and what she wears to her reunion. The life she could have lived, but didn’t. And it’s close to something lovely. Something dreamy.
But it isn’t. It’s still another costume. When they step into the reunion and Charlie asks Audrey who he is supposed to be, the answer is something fake. Something not made to last.
Something like Ray.
III
“Better To Be a Live Dog Than A Dead Lion”
In Something Wild, lying is fashionable, yes, but fashions change.
Black t-shirt made tight by the muscle underneath, black jeans, black boots with Western-style metal toe-tips, a bizarre half-blazer/half-leather jacket that’s a mix of forest green and dark blue plaid with rawhide shoulders and collar, eyes the cold glistening color of blue charmeuse fabric, a face pockmarked by scars and rage, a smile of dickswagger charm and a killer’s confidence.
When Ray Sinclair (the volcanic Ray Liotta) enters at Something Wild’s halfway point and makes the film’s suit a three-piece, everything changes. The tone darkens, the stakes heighten, the soundtrack shakes off its worldbeat funk ’n soul for rumbling and ominous whiteboy rockabilly and dark new wave. Even the color timing shifts from bright, popping colors to the iceslush blue of Ray’s dead stare.
In fact, everything changes—everything except Charlie Briggs. Instead, Charlie is revealed.
Perhaps it’s telling that, on the same night he loses his wallet and meets the man who will attempt to murder him, Charlie is more terrified of losing his identification than his life.
Earlier in the evening, in an auditorium costumed in Bicentennial reds, whites, and blues for this Class of ’76 reunion party, Charlie bolts outside from the fake 1976, from the fake marriage, from the fake Mr. and Mrs. Charles and Audrey Driggs. His wallet is missing. As Audrey smiles and watches, Charlie screams and tantrums, panicked that everything with which he has defined himself—his driver’s license, his corporate plastic, his Social Security card—is now gone, and all that remains is a silk blue suit. Yet when Audrey reassures him that she found and collected his wallet outside of the flea market, it’s not the return of his identification that brings him willing and happy back into the reunion’s costume party of adulthood. Instead, it’s Audrey’s sad Cinderella promise that their shared fantasy might be all they have together, the fashionable lie and the lie of fashion they have created, that brings him back:
“Tomorrow you’re gonna wake up, you’re still gonna be Charlie Driggs, you know? And this’ll all be over and done with. So why don’t we enjoy it while we can? And then tomorrow, no more Lulu.”
This awakens something in Charlie, something searching, something eager. As the house band The Willies (in reality, post-punk band The Feelies cosplaying as a covers group) launches into a masquerade of David Bowie’s “Fame,” Charlie explodes across the dance floor with Audrey, enacting their fantasy, loosening something deep within him, something neither he nor Audrey knew he had.
And then surprise reunion guest Ray strips the film bare of its road genre trappings, and reveals the character-based thriller shivering naked beneath.
He’s Audrey’s husband, Quincy’s very own “Hit and Fly Gunman,” just out of jail and ready to angrily fold his wife back into his life’s wardrobe. Back into his identity as Audrey’s Man.
So many other films would present Audrey as the galvanizing force that forever changes Charlie, the one that drives him to empty out the closet of his fake life and instead build the real apparel of an authentic existence for himself. But Something Wild presses beyond that cliché for something else, something darker and more unique.
When Ray kidnaps Audrey and Charlie, shattering Charlie’s nose bloody and forcing them into his scumdusted motel room, he stands as a kind of strange, funhoused dressing-room mirror to Charlie. In Charlie, Ray sees everything he isn’t upon the lying, superficial trappings of Charlie’s clothes—a weak, ineffectual yuppie, high-born and higher-educated, spineless. Everything Audrey thought she saw when only looking at Charlie through “Lulu’s” eyes.
Charlie, though, looks at Ray and sees a twisted version of himself: someone lost and frightened hiding beneath a ridiculous bad-boy costume. Another closet rebel. Ray, for all his leonine strength and violence, is a little boy hiding behind self-conscious mannerisms (such as theatrically running his hands through his hair James Dean-style in dramatic moments) and leather-clad cool.
But unlike Ray, Charlie has begun to look past the clothes, past the surfaces, to truly know the names on the nametags. His roadtrip with Audrey may have stirred him, but it’s Ray who has awakened him. When he looks at Ray, he sees the man-child in adult clothes that he himself has been for so long. As Ray cackles at Charlie’s discovery that Audrey is still married, and at Audrey learning that Charlie’s wife actually left him with his children months earlier (“you’re a really good liar when you want to be, Charlie”), Charlie only stares at Ray with a kind of eerie confidence. “What goes around comes around,” he growls to Ray. “You’re gonna learn that someday.”
What happens next is something unexpected, something extraordinary.
Something wild.
As Ray forces Audrey onto their own bargain-bin knock-off of a road movie together, an ugly, abusive, and ill-fitting version of the film’s first hour, Charlie follows. Wearing Audrey’s spaceman sunglasses, he stops in a Virginia gas station and strips to his underwear amidst a sea of tourist trappings and costumed Civil War reenactors. Immediately able to connect with the gas station attendant Nelson (Talking Heads percussionist Steve Scales) in a way both real and vital by clocking the man’s name on his workshirt, Charlie disguises himself in white khaki shorts, a white “Virginia Is For Lovers” t-shirt, a blue Civil War hat (navy blue, in fact, the color that can adapt as-needed to the changing patterns around it), and high white socks. Nelson smiles at him: “You’re beautiful.”
In this almost totally colorless, fashionless state, it’s as if Charlie is being reborn. As if he could be anything he wants to be. Even himself.
And that’s exactly who he becomes:
It’s the real Charlie Driggs who marches into the Americana diner where Ray and Audrey are eating, and it’s the real Charlie Driggs who points out the table full of police officers just behind the parole-violating Ray, and it’s the real Charlie Driggs who bravely walks right out of the diner with Audrey at his side.
And later, when Something Wild reveals the shockingly dark truth of its nature, so does Ray, and so does Charlie:
In the Civil War of Charlie versus Ray, Ray arrives at Charlie’s home dressed in a white t-shirt and blue jeans, dressed to kill Charlie and take Audrey back. Charlie is still in his near-colorless garb, while Audrey is trapped between the two in her Ray-styled blue jeans and a man’s button-up shirt of Charlie-white but barred with bold Ray-blue lines.
As Charlie’s bathroom becomes their warzone, burst pipes spraying water over all as a thrown Audrey watches from the bathtub, Charlie picks up Ray’s dropped accessory—a pocket knife—and before he can warn his dark reflection, Ray runs straight into the blade. Unlike a lesser film, Charlie doesn’t kill Ray; Ray destroys himself. Only in this moment does Demme deploy his trademark dead-center close-ups on both men—making explicit what Charlie already knew, that they are the bathroom-mirror reflections of one another.
Except not anymore. Even in death, Ray shakily gives himself one more self-conscious hand through his hair, costumed to the end, as he moves to the room’s real mirror and watches his reflected self die.
Ray dies as the bespoke character he crafted: the “Hit and Fly Gunman.” Charlie is reborn as who he was always supposed to be: himself.
Earlier in Something Wild, during his first hungover morning with “Lulu,” Charlie experiences a moment of empathetic kindness when a motel handyman—reading Charlie’s bedraggled clothes, his bloodshot eyes and gut-twisted discomfort—hands him a crusted bottle of Pepto-Bismol and a bit of advice. “Remember,” he says, “no matter what, it’s better to be a live dog than a dead lion.” Charlie receives this Bible-inspired philosophical nugget with nothing more than confused, glassy eyes and a nod of thanks. But days later, when Charlie repeats the same advice to a coworker as his explanation for why he’s quitting his job as a Wall Street drone, he says it with a warmth and a wistfulness and, above all, a worn-in understanding. With an empathy that comes from walking in old shoes, new shoes, strange shoes, and the shoes of others.
Shoes like the stylish vintage black-soled white bucks you’d wear with grey slacks, a black-and-white plaid shirt made chaotic in a way you’ve never been before, with a loud grayscale floral print tie, altogether a strange but just-right mix of NYC nerd and New Wave cool, one that somehow matches the love of your life when she arrives in a vintage black dress made wild with white polka dots, a wide-brimmed white hat, and long white satin gloves, the two of you totally mismatched in your asymmetric patterns of plaid and polka dots and yet somehow matching in your monochrome colors. All as she picks you up from your lunch at Homecookin Heroes like she did that first day, two sartorial rebels who’ve finally found something real, something true, something that fits.