by Walter Chaw
Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)
U.S.: Starz, DirecTV
Canada: rental only
John Patrick Shanley’s Joe Versus the Volcano allows for a lovely introduction to both Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan right when their stardom was about to reach such great heights. Part of the Nineties pantheon of A-listers who had breakout films in the ’80s (Hanks with Big in 1988, Ryan with When Harry Met Sally in 1989, her star-making moment), they collaborated twice more during the ’90s on the outrageously popular Sleepless in Seattle and the Shop Around the Corner update You’ve Got Mail. Hanks/Ryan felt like relics from Old Hollywood–or at least our nostalgia for Old Hollywood. Hanks could slot in for any number of Jimmy Stewart roles–even the darker ones favoured by Stewart post-WWII, as Hanks would demonstrate with 1993’s Philadelphia. Ryan’s persona was reminiscent of adorable bon vivants like Ginger Rogers, maybe. She was adorable, not sexy. Revelations at the end of the ’90s that she had cheated on husband Dennis Quaid with bad boy Russell Crowe while shooting Proof of Life (2000) exploded her popular persona and essentially sank her career along with her reputation. Hers is an Old Hollywood story in more ways than one.
I mention all this because I wonder if either of them would have done a film as strange and unconventional as Joe Versus the Volcano in any other year. The film itself would not exist without a very powerful champion: Steven Spielberg. Spielberg was offered the film to direct but gave it back to Shanley for Shanley’s directorial debut, for reasons I’ve never heard adequately explained. It’s possible he was too absorbed at the time with Always and the upcoming Hook, but that’s just speculation.
My kids have already seen several Spielbergs, as you can imagine. If Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, E.T., Minority Report, and A.I. hadn’t been key in their early film educations, they might have found their way into this program. We may do stuff like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan going forward; we’ll almost certainly do Catch Me If You Can. We’ll only hit War of the Worlds if we do decide to go ahead with Schindler’s–in a lot of ways, I prefer it as the definitive Holocaust picture in Spielberg’s oeuvre. I wish that both movies weren’t so compromised by their endings.
Likewise, we’d have screened Shanley’s Moonstruck had we not already watched it together as a family.
The reaction to Joe Versus the Volcano was rapturous. The kids loved it and were surprised by it. It’s bright, breezy, and charming, and its message about gratefulness led to some fruitful discussions during this dark period in our history.
- Why was Joe grateful?
- Why did Joe volunteer to be thrown into a volcano?
- What was happening in the world of 1989/1990?
- Who was the President? Who was about to become the President?
- What was the tenor of the country and how does it inform this film?
Watching Joe Versus the Volcano is a gateway to screenings of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal–the one for complementary thoughts on love and the immortal beloved, the other for complementary thoughts on eternity.
- Why do you think Meg Ryan was asked to play three different women in the film?
- What do each of the women in the film represent to Joe?
The sticky point I worried over with this film is the portrayal of the islanders as ridiculous, orange-soda-addicted simpletons and maybe cowards who wouldn’t sacrifice one of their number to save their friends and loved ones. Their fate is unfortunate as well in that the island sinks with, presumably, all hands on deck. My daughter noted it in a sardonic way. I countered:
- What is heroic about a Pyrrhic, empty martyrdom?
- The islanders are primarily played by white people–what is the damage potentially done when white people play people of colour?
- Is this still a form of “blackface” or appropriation if the race in question is a fabrication?
- What examples can you think of where an “imaginary” race is used as a cover for racism?
The obvious go-tos here are things like The Lion King with Matthew Broderick as James Earl Jones’s son (and presumptive king), or any of the Star Wars prequels that use alien species as cover for regressive attitudes towards Asians and African-Americans. Luckily for my kids, they have not been encouraged to see the Star Wars prequel trilogy and have shown no interest in it.
As we move forward and watch things like Broken Blossoms, we’ll dive more deeply into “yellow-face” and other “acceptable” forms of racism that persist into the current day.
In terms of Joe Versus the Volcano, these bits with the islanders are incredibly fun (and include the best gag in the picture), but are also fraught with payloads of cultural dysfunction, if not outright insensitivity. Is it possible to love something like Blake Edwards’s/Peter Sellers’s The Party and still cringe at its racial attitudes? Of course. Why do you love them? Why aren’t you offended? How would you have been offended had it been different? Challenge them to consider if they would have been offended if the islanders were clearly African stereotypes. (Native American?) Then wonder with them why it is this portrayal did or did not offend them in the same way. This isn’t about “cancelling” a film or feeling “triggered,” it’s about engaging in something like a healthy discourse about personal and collective bias. Film can help you do that, if you let it.
We dissected a brief scene on the island involving gongs and two islanders flung into them. Cut to a reaction shot–cut back to two stretcher teams carrying the gong-gongers away.
Why does this joke work better with the stretcher teams?
We were also able to talk about reaction shots and how it’s possible to manipulate a response through editing.
How would the chief’s reaction have played differently had it followed an image of a child in peril? Or a family starving?
This, of course, paves the way for an introduction to the Kuleshov effect. Russian editor Lev Kuleshov demonstrated that audiences project meaning onto images based on the associations made through editing. Show a man staring blankly and cut to bread, and the viewer assumes he is hungry; cut from the same man to a coffin and the viewer assumes he is mourning; etc.
We also found it instructive to pick apart the zig-zag imagery of Joe’s factory logo, the pathway leading to his job, and then the path up the side of the volcano.
- How does Shanley, visually, pull together Joe’s life at the factory with his impending death in the volcano?
- How are the two environments the same?
- How is Joe’s role in either environment identical?
- How is it different?
After Joe receives his diagnosis of “Brain Cloud,” there’s a long, unbroken shot of him greeting a Mastiff outside his doctor’s office. Shanley shot it in a single take with no alternate “coverage.” Coverage consists of multiple shots, often from different angles, of one scene to give options during editing. Without “coverage,” the editor is forced to use whatever constitutes the “master” shot. It’s dangerous to shoot only what you think you will need. Hitchcock, famously, filmed very little coverage, mostly to defeat editors he feared would come in later at the studio’s behest to dumb down his intent. Orson Welles was the victim of such meddling throughout his career. Discussion here of how Shanley defeated interference with this unbroken shot will lead us into what happened to Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons.
Shanley, in a recent interview with Matt Zoeller Seitz, said:
That’s right. I did that intentionally, and Steven, who in general was incredible, he was like, “You cannot do that! You must go back and get the shot of the woman hugging the dog! And do it soon, because dogs die!” It was the one time he was pissed off at me, because he knew what I was doing. He knew I’d done no coverage precisely to outwit Warner Bros.
I never did change it, and I never did the coverage Steven asked for, to my shame and embarrassment!
- Let’s pore over the idea of a “Brain Cloud.” For what could this be a metaphor? What does the term sound like? What is the “cure”?
- Who’s behind the plot behind the “Brain Cloud”?
- What does the “bad guy” represent?
- What is the tension between the industrial and the natural in this film? Are they polar opposites? What kind of overlap is there if not?
- Where else have you seen tension between the natural and the industrial?
I read to them this seminal poem by William Blake:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
“The Tyger” was published in 1794, well into the Industrial Revolution (c.1760) and five years into the British Romanticist movement. That movement was founded on the humanism represented by the French Revolution, itself inspired by the American Revolution.
- What is the Blake poem about?
- How does it relate to Joe Versus the Volcano?
- What is the nature of Joe’s heroism?
- What is the nature of Patricia’s heroism?
- How does Angelica’s painting reflect the ethos of this poem?
- Why did the French Revolution, in a nutshell, happen?
- How does the reveal of Joe Versus the Volcano‘s villain change our perception of what the film is about?
And finally, and again:
What is Joe Versus the Volcano about?
Next time, we travel to Britain with Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps.
