Carpenter Trio: One Piece of the Formula
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both of these films the all-male casts have disintegrated into chaos that leads to
death.
Another situation that fails to elicit much in the way of the Hawksian
mode is found in Carpenter’s occasional forays into directing within the studio
system. As such, both his adaptation of Stephen King’s Christine and the
forgettable Chevy Chase-Darrel Hannah comedy-thriller, Memoirs o f an Invisible
Man, fail to develop female leads in the Hawks tradition. Both of these
productions found Carpenter working primarily as a director-for-hire, chosen for
his above-the-title cachet whose impact on the narrative was limited in
comparison to his independently produced efforts. Carpenter’s tendency to return
to the generic Hawksian woman, however, is one characteristic of his style that
makes his most recent works, Vampires and Ghosts o f Mars, intriguing in the way
they adapt the apparent formula for their own uses.
Vampires (1998) is based on John Steakley’s 1990 novel VampireS with
the film scripted by Carpenter, Don Jakoby, and Dan Mazur (Cumbow 280). The
adaptation is a loose one, and anyone familiar with the novel will only recognize
its parenthood in a couple of the film’s more arresting set pieces. Particularly
interesting is the way Carpenter and company play fast and loose with the
characters who make up the Hawksian group in Steakley’s tale. In his film,
Carpenter is satisfied to use the members of Jack Crow’s (James Woods)
vampire-hunting team as cardboard characters whose personalities are not fleshed
out as they are in the novel. Indeed, Carpenter sees fit to kill off all but two of the
team early in the narrative following their successful raid on an isolated
farmhouse that makes up the film’s opening scene. The team’s eradication occurs
when Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), the film’s master vampire, slaughters the
vampire hunters and the call girls who are celebrating post-raid at the Sun God
motel.
One substantial change resulting from the adaptation process lies in the
depiction of the film’s sole female character of any weight, Katrina (Sheryl Lee).
This character does not even appear in the Steakley novel, while two of the key
women who are, arguably, more interesting characters in the latter work are
totally excised from the film’s cast. Vampires' women are thus pigeonholed into
tertiary characters who are either hookers, vampires, or victims of abuse by one of
the hunters or Valek. The film’s men, on the other hand, get to have all the fun as
it is they who kill the vampires, get drunk, and screw the call girls. For a director
who has shown the respect for women in the Hawksian mode to the degree
Carpenter has, Vampires displays a misogynistic tone unlike any other title in the
director’s filmography.
One might argue that the females in this film merely follow the classical
vampire narrative tradition that repeatedly places women in a perilous position
from which they must be either protected or rescued by the tales’ men. As one
might expect, however, Carpenter’s vampire film derives from a different