Do you like to people-watch? I know, I do too. Surely we’ll be seeing each other, and so many others, at the Iowa State Fair — one of the best places for people-watching on the planet. To get your gaze all lathered up ahead of time, Little Big Screen has nothing but blue-ribbon peep shows to stream this month.
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Ye Old Mill floated its first boats of lovebirds at the 1921 Iowa State Fair. That gave fairgoers 30 years of untroubled makeout sessions before Alfred Hitchcock had to go and stage one of his signature kill sequences on the same kind of ride in Strangers on a Train. The film’s plot, taken from Patricia Highsmith’s first novel, sets in motion when a train-car meet cute takes a wrong turn, and Guy (Farley Granger), a ditzy tennis player, soon finds himself trapped in conversation with Bruno (Robert Walker), an unmedicated dandy type. Bruno railroads Guy into an ideation session, spitballing that these two perfect strangers could, you know, commit two perfect murders. And that’s how one of them arrives at Ye Old Mill, or Tunnel of Love, as it’s called on the fairgrounds in the film. Good luck looking away from the museum-piece payoff waiting on the other side of this five-cent River Styx.
Strangers on a Train is a no-shit entry in the canon of what could be called — to borrow the last half-decent catchphrase coined by the cast of Jersey Shore — “Spiral Cinema.” In 2018, when MTV’s gymmed, tanned and laundered phenomenon returned for the first season of Jersey Shore: Family Vacation, the various stops along Ronnie’s continued odyssey to rock bottom were catch-alled as “spiraling,” a word that must’ve been said one million times by the entire cast, who at that point had become masters of t-shirt message merchandising. What we’re talking about when we talk about “Spiral Cinema” are the movies where a regular guy (common and/or proper noun) makes a couple dumb decisions that then have him drowning in a comedy of hard-luck consequences. Hitchcock’s spin on these death spirals ends, naturally, on a carousel.
Bones and All (2022)
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
For me, Bones and All, based on an adapted screenplay by Iowa Writers Workshop alum David Kaiganich, was a Thanksgiving Day matinee. The theater was empty except for a family of three. From the not-so-hushed sounds of it, the mom had wanted to see the new Timothée Chalamet movie — trailer, sight unseen; people-eating subject matter, totally unknown — on account of his family-friendly work in Lady Bird (2017), Little Women (2019) and The French Dispatch (2021). They ended up leaving less than an hour in, and on their way out, asked in rhetorical fashion if I thought it was as god-awful as they did. To be fair, I can understand how this tender on-the-road-again romance, with its spurts of brutal body horror and intangible, bygone Hollywood vibes, might be an acquired taste. But no, not god-awful.
The first bite happens at a slumber party. We have to watch Maren (Taylor Russell) hunger for her friend’s fingers, then we have to hear a loud crunch, and then we’re off on a runaway ride through the Midwest. In Indiana, Maren meets another cannibal, Lee (Chalamet), and together, the two stop in small town after small town for a series of lovey-dovey, and also bloody, vignettes. Not too long into the runtime, just after that family of three had had enough, the world outside Maren and Lee’s windshield flattens into cornfields and the great big title text tells us they’ve arrived in Iowa. It’s here, on a Ferris wheel at the Cerro Gordo County Fair, above so much consumption per capita, that the two can finally be another cheesy couple in the crowd of many. But then, on the way back down to the midway, Maren breaks their storybook kiss to say something: “I’m hungry, Lee.”
(Also, this scene is set to “Atmosphere” by Joy Division, almost like Luca Guadagnino is scattering Ian Curtis’ ashes over the doomed date.)
Fear (1996)
Directed by James Foley
I was going to talk about State Fair (1945) for a whole litany of gimmes: 1) it’s titled after and takes place at the Iowa State Fair, 2) it’s the only Rodgers and Hammerstein musical written for the big screen and 3) one of its songs, “It Might As Well Be Spring,” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. But then, there I was, thinking that none of these timeless Technicolor musical numbers could compare to the dumb fun of a certain needle drop in Fear. The track is The Sundays’ cover of “Wild Horses” by The Rolling Stones — the same one that had already bedrocked this Budweiser ad — and as it starts to strum over misty-eyed images of carnival prizes and cabochon bulbs, you’ll understand why so many YouTubers have miscredited it to Mazzy Star. “You know who I am / You know I can’t let you slide through my hands,” the cover continues, eerily, as Nicole (Reese Witherspoon) and David (Mark Wahlberg) take a ride on a roller coaster. I won’t say what happens next on their ascent but just know a body double was needed for the scene’s below-the-waist shots.
And just in case you skipped the parentheticals, Fear is packed with people you want to watch: Witherspoon, in a thick of thornier roles that turned out to be the best run of her career; Wahlberg, long before a burger empire helped make him a judge for the Hy-Vee corporate Halloween costume contest; William Petersen, somewhere between his uncanny detective work in Manhunter (1986) and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”; Alyssa Milano, oh so close to cashing the first of umpteen “Charmed” checks; Amy Brenneman, only one year after expressing too much interest in Robert De Niro’s reading habits in Heat (1995).
The Elephant Man (1980)
Directed by David Lynch
When, where and how The Elephant Man lets us see its subject, John Merrick (John Hurt), at first might seem like a consideration on his behalf, but it’s actually a consideration on our behalf — to protect the audience from becoming no better than the hellbound gawkers who frequent the film’s freak shows. There’s an internet axiom that suggests we still don’t deserve such consideration: “Each day on Twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.” Of all the main characters who have been name-branded and paraded across my feed over the years, The Bagel Man is who came to mind as I watched Merrick suffer the misfortune of being the main character for cities across Victorian England. But when I went to look up the video of The Bagel Man, Google delivered me many Bagel Men, all captured on phone cameras doing various degrees of embarrassments in the general vicinity of bagels. I did find the video I had in mind, but this time, I didn’t click play. I had already seen enough.
On the Big, Big Screen
Dog Day Afternoon, directed by Sidney Lumet
Wednesday, August 7, The Iowa Theater in Winterset
The Neverending Story, directed by Wolfgang Petersen
Friday, August 9, Last Picture House in Davenport
Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Verhoeven
Sunday, August 18, FilmScene in Iowa City (Rooftop!)
A Nightmare on Elm Street, directed by Wes Craven
Thursday, August 22, The Varsity Cinema in Des Moines
Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
