A twenty-dollar bill spirals out the window of a yellow New York taxicab and launches word-processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) into a seemingly unending cycle of miserable absurdity, stranding him in SoHo of the 80s with no way back home.
“A parody of film noir and also a parody of a thriller,” Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” (1985) came about after the cancellation of his dream project and the failure of his previous film. It is unsurprising, then, that “After Hours” is a disorienting, Kafkaesque spiral into torment and despair, with Paul Hackett as its unwitting victim. Paul is a projection of Scorsese’s desperate need to right himself in a world that has shut him out.
The film begins with Paul at work: a droning office divided into cubicles, workers in stiff suits and not a smile. His mundane world is brightened when, while reading “Tropic of Cancer” at a diner, a strange girl, Marcy (Patricia Arquette), initiates conversation and gives him her number. “Maybe you should come on over,” she says on a late-night phone call, prompting Paul to leave his apartment towards SoHo, a world unexplored.
Already, this seems like a bad idea: all his money has flown out the open window of a taxi, the city is cold and empty, and in the apartment, Marcy is nowhere to be found. Her even stranger roommate is working on a paper-mâché sculpture, whose face is contorted in fear and arms thrown up in anguish. A long shot tells us this figure is important. Paul comments that it looks like Edvard Munch’s “The Shriek.” “The Scream,” Marcy’s roommate corrects him.
When Marcy finally comes around, she is different: uncannily moody and a bit hostile, and Paul, quickly giving up on his romantic pursuit, flees the apartment.
At this point in the film, the atmosphere is set; through a fog of confusion, you can pinpoint the absurdity. Like a falling sequence of dominoes, Paul’s night takes a turn for the worse. Chased through empty diners, missing keys, punk clubs and bizarre characters, it seems Paul, whose life was normal and familiar just an hour before, will never get home.
The film feels like a disorienting, unpleasant dream from start to finish, evoking (and even directly pulling a scene from) Kafka’s “The Trial,” where a man, Josef K., wakes up to find himself accused of a crime never specified to us nor Josef himself. Kafka’s works are famously illogical and set within oppressive worlds “without means of escaping,” and I found this to be true in “After Hours” as well—from the office setting in the beginning to Paul’s later escape from a mob accusing him of burglary.
“After Hours,” despite its hilariously surreal chain of events, is not so foreign. We have stepped into the psyche of Scorsese at the end of his rope, his seeming final chance to prove himself worthy of his place in cinema. He states in the “After Hours” DVD commentary: “And so this film (…) comes out of a feeling of being stuck in the underworld and never being able to get out, maybe never being able to get to make another big film in a sense or does one just continue.”
At its essence, “After Hours” is loneliness, confusion, guilt, and dread. Set in 1980s SoHo, a place ravaged by gentrification in the real world, the city is empty and illogical. It seems to warn us of the impending doom of displaced workers and artists, unable to find footing amongst a higher class. Paul’s eagerness to escape his dull, corporate life despite danger is familiar, a reflection of “dehumanization within the corporate enterprise.”
“Why don’t you just go home?” asks a man, to which Paul replies dryly, “Pal, I’ve been asking myself that all night long.”
The film constantly wonders, why? Why me? It feels surreal and disorienting, but stripped to its bare bones, it is not so far removed from reality. “After Hours” is a film worthy of watching for anyone stretched too thin over a corporate world, chased by responsibilities decided by faceless higher powers, and wanting to confirm perhaps reality is not so free of absurdity after all.
