Kafka on the Screen: Martin Scorsese's "After Hours"

Abstract

The filmed version of work of literature is not usually the best tool for familiarizing student with that author's work. For example, the film of Dirrenmatt's Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit, with Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn) completely subverts the irony and grotesque character of the original stage play. Luchino Visconti's lush but misleading version of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice is untrue to its source in different way. To be sure, the filmmaker has no obligation to use the literary text as anything other than what Eric Rentschler calls creative springboard.' On the other hand, certain films offer such clear picture of an epoch or environment that they better capture an author's world than any direct filming of his work. Pier Pasolini's Decamerone, for example, would give students of Hans Sachs as good an idea of the world of the playwright as would any direct, but less inspired rendering of his Fastnachtspiele. And Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon might well be used to introduce students to the spirit and setting of eighteenth century German authors such as Lessing or Wieland. In the same vein, recent film by the American director Martin Scorsese can serve as an invaluable pedagogical tool for those of us who teach the work of Franz Kafka. Orson Welles' Trial notwithstanding, there has been to my mind no finer rendering of the world of Kafka than Scorsese's bizarre screen comedy After Hours, released in 1985. Despite its popular success, After Hours has been received with something less than adulation by many critics. Pauline Kael calls it a picture that just aspires to be an entertaining trifle and doesn't make it.2 National Public Radio's Tom Shales thinks that the film is ultimately pointless.3 For Stanley Kaufmann there is disjuncture all through the film between substance and style.4 The critics are disappointed by its failure to be what they envision, in Kael's case comedy with deeply drawn, realistic characters, in Shales', an accurate portrayal of night's odyssey through SoHo, in Kauffmann's, farce la Rene Clair. These critics, however, miss the point: Scorsese's is Kafkaesque vision of reality.5 The director himself indicates this fundamental orientation, this indebtedness to Kafka. In the middle of the film, its main character, Paul Hackett, attempts to enter one Club Berlin in SoHo, where he expects to meet sculptress and her boyfriend. At the door stands Checkpoint Charlie, beefy bouncer who bars his entrance, telling him that he may not enter at this time. He explains: I'll take your money 'cause I want you to feel you haven't left anything untried. This line is virtually direct quotation from Kafka's parable Before the Law, likewise spoken by doorkeeper at crucial point in Kafka's unfinished novel The Trial.6 In Kafka's work the man asking entrance never does challenge the doorkeeper, but Paul Hackett forces his way into the club and encounters no further resistance on the part of the doorman, although this same bouncer later helps an overeager barber try to shave Hackett's head.