Summertime and guns

I like the barrenness of this beautiful film poster for 1988’s BACKFIRE. I like the way the paucity of information fires up the feverish search for meaning in a thunderstorm of firing synapses. I like the way its emptiness invites us to pour our feelings into it.

It gives us nothing, as if it has nothing to give away. There’s only color, and light, and shadow, and a pair of beautiful leg, and a gun. And us. Mesmerized. There’s no place to speak of. Just surfaces. Somehow I think of a beach house. And of a summer morning. Maybe it’s the way the light pours in from left side that makes me think if that shadow is that of an open door. A door that opens onto the beach, onto the ocean. If so, his she leaving the house? Is she waiting for someone to come? Is someone lying behind her on a rumpled bed with light linen sheets, in a pool of blood? Blood, yes. Red is the color we don’t see on the poster but as a flimsy trim around the film title. But that’s the red of burning embers. It speaks of passion, of sweaty sex. The idea of blood comes from the huge gun on the woman’s slender, elegant, left hand. Somehow one feels the imminence of something drastic. A crime, perhaps. Is she the perpetrator? Is she about to become the perpetrator?

And who is she? We don’t know. We see only those long, firm and sexy legs. Are they Karen Allen’s? Are they the same shapely legs we saw dangling above the Well of Souls in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)? It doesn’t matter, for that is just the actress playing the mysterious woman whose light summer dress the cool summer breeze – a sea breeze, perhaps, coming through the window above the blood-soaked bed? – is pulling aside to allow us to ogle. Those legs. Those enticing legs, so relaxed. No, if there is a crime, the deed has already been done. And, again, somehow, one feels she’s the culprit. Those legs, so perfect, suddenly bring to mind images of a slim anklet, and other mesmerizing legs, those of Barbara Stanwyck as the primordial femme fatale in DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944). Surely, that’s what our girl must be. A femme fatale. A killer. A man eater.

And yet, all that blue, all that sense of a luminous morning seem to want us to dispel the nightmare. That light, that summer dress, those naked legs, I don’t know why, makes me think of my favorite of all Edward Hopper’s paintings, 1943’s Summertime. It's as if they are the same girl; perhaps some kind of girls find themselves in the same situation, facing the same choices, having to overcome the same adversities, throughout time. In Hopper's painting, there’s also a wondrous summer morning, awash with light. A curtain flutters on an open window, just like the skirt of our unknown woman’s summer dress. Also, in Hopper’s, there’s a girl with a half-bent leg and a summer dress, a light seethrough summer dress that also reveals much of the girl’s legs. And she is there waiting for someone (or maybe just leaving the building where a similar drama has played itself out?). Her left hand is hidden from view. And one wonders, is she holding a gun? Has there been a crime? Is she the culprit? I love that painting. The paucity of information fires up the feverish search…