Humidity.
Relentlessly blood-hot and cum-sticky, the humidity cuts across all social and cultural strata along the long, hard shaft of the Florida coastline, all the way down to the oceanside frenulum of Miami and the suburbs like Blue Bay that are nestled just beneath the thick swell of the state’s southernmost tip. It greases the air with its turgid invisible soup, this humidity. It fills soft lungs. It soaks hard bodies. And it drives desperate and greedy brains into a kind of criminal Kama Sutra of decision-making contortions, all in search of avaristic relief from the miserable swelter in which there is nothing else to do but fuck and drink and drink and fuck.
It brings everything to the surface.
It raises dark Rorschachs of sweat through polyester rainbows of Day-Glo clothing. It pulses booze and coke out through dermabrased pores. Bodies—dead humans, live gators—bob upward just above the waterline that separates the infinite blue-orange sky from the placid marshes that mirror it. And it drives even the most hardened locals into escapist frenzy—to boats, to bumbleshit stupidity, to fuckbent beds inside fuckfogged motels, to money, to murder.
Nothing stays hidden forever here; all desires swell erectward in this heat, the truth thrusting forward for all to see.
How else to explain the opening and closing credits of 1998’s Wild Things, in which so many farcical secrets leak to the screen? From its first seconds to its final fade to black (after several smirky false finales), director John McNaughton’s sinuously slinky orgy of hothouse camp noirotica airboats across a myriad of knotty/naughty plot convolutions so densely packed within the film that its opening credits sequence is forced to slyly and subliminally blueprint for the audience the entirety of the scathingly satirical themes to come.
Indeed, so goddamn overstuffed is Wild Things with ludicrous and libidinal riches that its fundamental essay is loosed within mere moments of beginning:
Driven by the throbbing bedspring rhythms of a bluesy score slurred with sax squalls and breathy coos, the film’s title sequence swoons from swampmucked marshlands to the wooded green furnace of destitute and soul-sapping rednecked rurality crosshatched with freeways and gas stations and trucker fuckstops to a mini-malled suburbia acne’d with banks and GNCs and Cheesecake Factories that are outlined with endless rows of two-bedroom houses connected by the cerulean ellipses of modest backyard pools that lead to the jutting fangs of Miami skyscrapers whose profits pipeline to the nearby asymmetrical mansions that look more like art installations than homes with backyards spilling right out into the Atlantic and bordered by country clubs and golf havens and of course private schools with multiple tennis courts and boating docks peopled with sweaty adenoidal teen rage and synapse-frothing desire held tight within polo shirts and khaki shorts and Oakleys slung behind pimpled necks and frosted tips and swelling hips and lip-bit lust, and all of it that surreal South Floridian jumble of the rural and the rich and the poor and the urbane four-wayed on top of one another in such an impossibly tight space, and all of it crucially forming the funhouse thematic prism through which the film not just skewers the Sunshine State but also the same economic circles of sweat-stained hell in America overall, the country’s every class and race and gender bound together right here and forced to live and play and fuck side by side in this humid purgatory in which all are looking for a means to afford escape, and all of that is pouring into this sweating hormone-frappe of a private high school auditorium that organizes the film’s principle criminal foursome together—all cross-sected from those various walks of life—into this room this plan this scheme this film by the heat of deprivation and the need to escape it, as finally one of them takes to the stage, standing in front of a simulacra painting of that fucking neverending Florida swampland while fielding masturbation jokes and thirsty stares from the horny teenage crowd, and he writes in tall block letters across a chalkboard like a declaration of aesthetic and thematic and interrogative and satirical intent for his audiences on both sides of the screen the words “SEX” and then “CRIMES.”
This is how Wild Things begins.
This is how we meet The White Collar Cop, Sergeant Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon, and his cock).
This is how we meet The Poor Girl, Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell).
This is how we meet The Trust Fund Cheerleader, Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards, and her tits).
And this is how we meet The Florida Man, high school guidance counselor Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon).
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Wild Things’ storytelling utilizes a uniquely Floridian high-low culture smash, in which louche and moneyed elitists blithely live just minutes away from the state’s poorest citizens who are trapped in trailers abuzz with mosquitos and struggling wall-unit air conditioners alike. It does so as a savagely satirical microcosm of American inequity; similarly, it meshes the sleek and stylish genre artistry of the American film noir with its half-lidded and sexdrunk disreputable cousin, the erotic thriller, as a means to chart the various horrors and hilarities that Florida’s/America’s population will perform in order to escape those inequities for the dubious freedoms afforded by the ability to afford everything.
And nowhere in Wild Things is that fusion of disparate elements—the wealth and the deprivation, the film noir and the fuck noir—made more manifest than in the character of Sam Lombardo.
In the midst of America’s Great Depression, hard-boiled author James Cain wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice, a corrosively sexual and violent crime novel about an amoral drifter who kicks off a murder plot in order to steal another man’s wealth and wife, and fails disastrously at both. Nearly a decade later, Cain reworked and honed this basic story type into the novella Double Indemnity, which codified the character trope of “The Cain Man” for both pulp fiction and film noir to come: a resentfully poor and sex-obsessed man who is so hard-headed and cock-hard and hard-up that he plans to kill for money and sex but is unable to realize he’s being positioned for death by his seductress partner. Some 40 years later, this Cain Man type would move from the California setting of Double Indemnity’s novel (and film adaptation), and settle in the South Florida environs of the 1981 Indemnity remake, Body Heat. Portrayed by William Hurt as a man just smart enough to know he’s probably too dumb to outfox America’s rigged financial system or outfuck his femme fatale (Kathleen Turner), this Cain Man accepts his fate when she ends up living rich on a tropical beach while he ends up dying penniless on death row.
Body Heat’s Cain Man/femme fatale created for both films noir and thrillers softcore a dynamic that persisted for nearly two decades, even if the films that followed that dynamic didn’t always take place in America’s most phallic and fallacied state. Wild Things and Sam Lombardo, though, offered a fundamental growth in noir and erotica (and human) development, moving us one step forward on the Evolution Of Fuckstruck Man chart from The Cain Man to the “Florida Man.”
Inasmuch as Wild Things uses the humid deliria of South Florida to serve as a representative paradigm for the vulgar desperation of American life as a whole, so too does it presciently use Lombardo to presage the “Florida Man” trope of the 21st century—maniacal, insanely confident men who make headlines by getting self-ensnared in bizarre, Rube Goldbergian schemes of their own making, men whose unflagging confidence in their own intelligence blinds them from their own blood-simple naivety. This adherence to a plan of labyrinthine complexity, fueled by a thirsty need for financial escape, separates the Cain Man from the Florida Man, as the former is just clever enough to sense his own fate coming and resign himself to it, while the latter is just dumb enough to mistakenly equate his plan’s hyper-complexity for his own superiority, never sensing the chaotically comedic death he has inadvertently inevitablized for himself.
Such byzantine complicacy is therefore necessary to complete any cineportrait of the Florida Man, and that requires Wild Things to ratchet its plot to dizzying levels of logic-pretzeling luridity and madness, in which Sam hopes to ascend from social servant to economic master. Weaponizing the growing cultural sensitivities (for the 1990s, anyway) regarding sexual assault as a means to leverage a family’s inherited wealth after its rich patriarch’s suicide, Sam is the hub for perhaps the most stunningly offensive yet crazily crackerjack plot in erotic noir history:
Convince sexually voracious and wealthy student Kelly Van Ryan to accuse him of rape, with troubled girl-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks Suzie Toller corroborating Kelly’s story by accusing Sam of rape as well, all before orchestrating both teens to recant their testimony mid-trial—which frees Sam to then countersue Kelly’s family for millions in damages (thus opening Kelly’s heretofore locked trust fund early). Suzie then fakes her own death with Sam’s help in order to frame Kelly and cut her out of the deal, while Sam’s secret partner and corrupt cop Sgt. Ray Duquette doctors the evidence to make Kelly appear murderously insane—before going cowboy and deciding that killing Kelly and making it seem as if she tried to kill him would be cleaner. Suzie and Sam then speargun Duquette to death when it’s agreed that there’s no room for a cowboy in their criminal ménage à trois.
Oh, and along the way:
Sam fucks Kelly. And then Sam fucks Suzie. Later, slicked in the lime-green haze of sickly motel neon, Sam fucks Kelly and Suzie together in a threeway scene accented with secret revelations and champagne bottle ejaculations that’s as morally repugnant as it is undeniably, carnally hot. And then later Kelly and Suzie have a late-night slapfight in Kelly’s pool that descends into tearful lesbian sex as Duquette pervily films them while hidden in nearby bushes.
Whereas previous noir-couched erotic thrillers from Body Heat to The Last Seduction used the frenzied need for financial security in America to simply drive their plots, Wild Things instead uses the structure of noir and softcore as a means to examine that frenzy, to examine that clamoring clamber for security. And it does so by fusing the noir and erotic genres together, dropping them in a place of such unhinged Americanomics as Blue Bay, Florida, centering them around a Florida Man as dementedly dense as Sam Lombardo, and then letting their respective genre tropes circle Sam like wild, hungry gators.
Wild Things, then, operates at such a baroque pitch, such a grotesque burlesque of softcore, that it becomes a satire of the erotic thriller while also reveling in the erotic thriller. Like Scream, a film that used irony (and Campbell) to skewer the strictures of horror while also successfully delivering the pleasures of the horror genre at their unironic fullest, Wild Things’ wooziest and wildest high-low merging may be its ability to mock the Cinemaxxxing of 1990s erotic thrillers while also delivering a true erotic thriller that’s genuinely, devastatingly, toxically sexy.
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It’s a film that is almost impossible to imagine today:
A scathing take on wealth disparity and capitalism that hinges its plot on a high school guidance counselor who repeatedly and gleefully fucks his students, and which uses America’s own sexist myths against it (notice how long it takes everyone in Blue Bay to believe Sam could be a rapist, but how quickly everyone is willing to believe that two women would lie about being raped—a point further and horrifically muddied by the fact that both women are lying in order to wrench financial independence for themselves). A film directed by the man behind the shatteringly repellant Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer but which laughably deploys slick alt-pop earworms like Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” and the Smash Mouth cover of “Why Can’t We Be Friends” before a knowingly slo-mo sequence of two buxom girls laughing, wrestling, and washing Sam’s Jeep, ‘90s beer commercial-style. A movie that whips out Bill Murray as an ambulance-chasing lawyer in a neck brace, only to reveal that he gives the most subdued and nuanced performance in the film. A film in which Kevin Bacon’s cock deserves at least fifth billing. A flick that provides what may have been the final, delirious gasp for a kind of fearless fuck-for-all filmmaking that no longer exists. These shocking twists and turns all sweat through the skin of Wild Things.
Because all things rise to the surface in this humidity.
It’s why Wild Things’ closing credits require a hilarious pileup of post-credit sequences as dense as the film’s opening in order to explain the insanities and inanities that its viewers have just witnessed, the interconnections and secret histories, the complexities that a Florida Man like Sam Lombardo could never conceive of as he tries to highwire atop his insipid plan—fapsurdities like how a femme fatale named Suzie, her purported IQ of 200 hidden behind gunky layers of Manic Panic and combat boots (the megarich Kelly on the boots: “Where’d you get those shoes? ‘Whores For Less’?”), could organize a stunning series of counter-plots against him each step of the way, deploying them for her avarice and our arousal, uniting tropes and schemers together into a plot that could only take place in the most American of locales, in the most desperate of swamps, a plot that by its very multifarious and multifaceted nature requires a very specific, very special kind of oversexed genre and overconfident man at its center.
The truth always bleeds through in Wild Things, bobbing to the top like a hungry gator, looking for something to devour out of desire.
“Florida Man Drowns in Bizarre Boating Accident,” Sam’s press clippings will read.
But viewers of Wild Things know the real truth—there from the very first frames of the film to the very last—even if it’s not the kind of truth that gets printed:
“Florida Fatale Gets Last Laugh.”