John Carpenter has directed 18 features film, from 1974’s Dark Star to 2010’s The Ward. Some of his films have been huge box office successes. Some of his films, like The Thing, were box office flops that were later retroactive recognized as being classics. Carpenter has made mainstream films and he’s made cult favorites and, as he’s always the first to admit, he’s made a few films that just didn’t work. When it comes to evaluating his own work, Carpenter has always been one of the most honest directors around.
Amazingly, Carpenter has only directed one film that received an Oscar nomination.
That film was 1984’s Starman and the nomination was for Jeff Bridges, who was one of the five contenders for Best Actor. (The Oscar went to F. Murray Abraham for Amadeus.) Bridges played the title character, an alien who is sent to Earth to investigate the population and who takes on the form of the late husband of Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen). The Starman takes Jenny hostage, though its debatable whether or not he really understands what it means when he picks up her husband’s gun and points it at her. He and Jenny drive across the country, heading to Arizona so that he can return to his ship. Pursued by the government (represented by the sympathetic Charles Martin Smith and the far less sympathetic Richard Jaeckel), the Starman learns about emotions, eating, love, and more from Jenny. Jenny goes from being fearful of the Starman to loving him. Carpenter described the film as being It Happened One Night with an alien and it’s not a bad description.
After Jenny and the alien visitor make love in a boxcar, the Starman says, “I gave you a baby tonight,” and that would be an incredibly creepy line coming from a human but it’s oddly charming when uttered by an alien who looks like a youngish Jeff Bridges. Bridges definitely deserved his Oscar nomination for his role here. Speaking with an odd accent and moving like a bird who is searching for food, Bridges convincingly plays a being who is quickly learning how to be human. The Starman is constantly asking Jenny why she says, does, and feels certain things and it’s the sort of thing that would be annoying if not for the way that Bridges captures the Starman’s total innocence. He doesn’t mean to be a pest. He’s simply curious about everything.
Bridges deserved his nomination and I would say that Karen Allen deserved a nomination as well. In fact, it could be argued that Allen deserved a nomination even more than Bridges. It’s through Allen’s eyes that we see and eventually come to trust and then to love the Starman. Almost her entire performance is reactive but she makes those reactions compelling. I would say that Bridges and Allen deserved an Oscar for the “Yellow light …. go much faster” scene alone.
Carpenter agreed to make Starman because, believe it or not, The Thing had been such a critical and commercial flop that it had actually damaged his career. (If ever you need proof that its best to revisit even the films that don’t seem to work on first viewing, just consider Carpenter’s history of making films that were initially dismissed but later positively reevaluated. Today, The Thing, They Live, Prince of Darkness, and In The Mouth of Madness are all recognized as being brilliant films. When they were first released, they all got mixed reviews.) Carpenter did Starman because he wanted to show that he could do something other than grisly horror. Starman is one of Carpenter’s most heartfelt and heartwarming films. That said, it also features Carpenter’s trademark independent streak. Starman not only learns how to be human but, as a result of the government’s heavy-handed response to his arrival, one can only assume that he learns to be an anti-authoritarian as well.
Starman is one of Carpenter’s best films and also a wonderful showcase for both Karen Allen and Jeff Bridges.
Through the Shattered Lens 