schrader/moroder

You probably remember this David Bowie gem from a striking sequence in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. It is one of the filmmaker's fantastic anachronisms that show his strengths as a director-as-dj, scoring a key sequence of an alternate-history movie set in the '40s to a pop song that so thoroughly oozes '80s.* The song is notably not a David Bowie album track (though it was re-recorded and shoehorned into Let's Dance), but the kind of beautiful collaboration that could have only happened in the DeLorean decade.

The music is by living legend, '70s visionary and '80s titan Giorgio Moroder. In the '70s, on his own and with muse Donna Summer, he had a heavier hand than most in imagineering not just disco but modern music as we know it. By the '80s, Moroder was really too much of an artiste to limit himself to pop production, and he was branching out into film scores. At the time, this made the movies he blessed sound invigoratingly modern, then later dated, and now timeless. Even Bowie was lucky to land the promo single/theme to such a movie. The rest of it was pure instrumental Moroder bliss.

1982's Cat People, which spawned the Bowie track, is very much a product of its decade, despite being remade from a 1942 classic.** Ubiquitous horror remakes are currently something of a blight on the ol' pop culture, but there was a golden age from about 1978's Invasion of The Body Snatchers to 1988's The Blob. This period included John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing and David Cronenberg's 1986 The Fly, both all-time greats that improved upon the originals. Cat People isn't that good, but it is an unjustly half-forgotten stylish, sexy '80s ride.

The movie's director, Paul Schrader, isn't always thought of for such films. He's more likely to be thought of as an independent writer/director of good-to-great stone-cold-bummer movies. He's still more likely to be thought of as the intense, Calvinist-raised writer of Martin Scorsese masterpieces. Schrader, however, left a big stamp on the cinematic aesthetic of the '80s, and not just with Cat People.

Even more emblematic of the emergent style was his earlier collaboration with Moroder, American Gigolo. This movie's fingerprints can be found all over Mary Harron's viciously hilarious adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. Like Cat People, American Gigolo had a splashy promo single/theme, in this case featuring Moroder collaborating with Blondie.

Schrader has outgrown his association with this period. Moroder will always be attached to it, having invented so much of it. Without Moroder, Schrader made another unique, half-forgotten product of the '80s, written and titled after a Bruce Springsteen lyric. Light of Day was an attempt to create a screen vehicle for Joan Jett, who seems like she should be a movie star anyway. Schrader's instinct was to throw her in a working class drama with a popular, talented young comic actor eager to prove his dramatic chops, Michael J. Fox.

*Thoroughly Oozing '80s is, incidentally, the title of a nostalgia movie I'm writing for Lady Gaga, kind of an homage to Desperately Seeking Susan.

**Back to the '40s now. As mega-genius Stephen Hawking famously noted, "Time is all sorts of fucked up."