Film Friday: Men in Black (1997)

Men in Black is an excellent film. It was such an excellent film that it made a fortune, spawned a franchise, and has proved to have very strong staying power. What’s interesting about this film though, is that it is the perfect marriage of a tent-pole film with a cult film. Seriously.

The Plot

Although it appears to have a complex story, Men in Black is really just a superhero origin-story centered around Agent J (Will Smith). Smith is a New York City cop who gets recruited by Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) to work for a shadow organization known as M.I.B. (Men In Black). Located in New York City, M.I.B. polices all the extraterrestrials who live secretly among the human population of the Earth. Their job is to make sure that the aliens behave and that the humans never discover the aliens. They also protect the Earth from various threats.

J’s first case involves tracking down a bug (Vincent D’Onofrio), who has come to Earth to kill an Arquillian prince. The prince lives in Brooklyn and his people are at war with the bugs. As J and K track down the bug, they are given an ultimatum from an Arquillian battle cruiser, which threatens to destroy the planet unless something stolen from the prince (“the galaxy”) is returned within a few hours. Simple.

What Makes This Movie Work

So what makes this film work? Well, in a sense, everything. The actors have a strong screen presence and excellent chemistry. Will Smith was a rising, bankable star at this point, having just come off of Independence Day. His presence in what appears to be a lighthearted summer film all but guaranteed success. Adding to that, Smith gets teamed with the cranky, quasi-redneck Tommy Lee Jones, also a bankable star at the time, which evokes memories of prior successful opposites-attract buddy-cop films like Lethal Weapon. Barry Sonnenfeld had cache as a direct as well, having just directed Get Shorty and the Addams Family films. Sonnenfeld did a great job too: solid pacing, clean visuals, memorable scenes and great effects. The film also had the right feel. It came across as lighthearted, funny, and easy to enjoy.

Those are the perfect tent-pole traits and are guaranteed to put butts into seats.

What kept them there, however, and what has kept people enjoying this film so many years later, is the thing almost all tent-pole films lack: intelligence. In fact, at its core, this is one heck of a smart film. That intelligence, however, was hidden within a ton of ambiguity, just like a cult film.

As I’ve said before, what makes a film into a cult film seems to be that the film is highly intelligent, but lacks the clarity most general audience require. Thus, the film finds an audience because of its intelligence, but it is a limited audience because of its ambiguity. You would think Men in Black would suffer the same fate because of its ambiguity, but it doesn’t. Consider this:

● Unexplained Jokes: This film is crawling with jokes general audience will never get on their own. I saw this film in the theaters and it was fascinating to watch the audience. When Will Smith calls K’s car a “Ford POS,” about ten people laughed. The rest waited for the joke. When Z tells the smug guys who just brutally bombed the test to become members of M.I.B., “You’re everything we’ve come to expect from years of government training,” the same ten people burst out laughing. The rest didn’t see the joke. Oh, they laughed a moment later when Will Smith said, “Yo, yo, with the thing,” but they didn’t see the joke about government training leading to hopelessly rigid thinking.

Throughout this film, there are jokes that don’t pay off until a scene or two down the line. There are jokes that require you to grasp that what the characters say isn’t what they mean. There are jokes that require you to have some understanding of the outside world to get the joke. The general audience I sat with didn’t get those. Those other ten people got each one. Fortunately, there were enough other simple jokes that the general audience didn’t miss them. In effect, both groups laughed, they just laughed at different things.

● Unexplained Background: So who are the M.I.B.? You never really find out. You get a lot of words thrown at you, but in the end there’s little in the way of clarity. In fact, it’s a running joke that Tommy Lee Jones avoids answering those questions. Then they toss out ideas like the nature of “the galaxy,” but they never clearly answer it, unless you are smart enough to connect the ending of the film to that answer -- it turns out the Earth is in a “galaxy” of its own, which is in a bus station locker, which is itself in a marble being played with by some kids.

Throughout this film, we are introduced to characters whose fates we never learn. We run into subplots that go nowhere. We get no answers to basic questions. This is the sort of stuff that excites cult-film fans because it leaves it up to the viewer to debate the answers and fill in the movie... this is the stuff a thousand web pages are made of. But general audiences don’t normally like this. So why did they like it here? The reason is that every time something ambiguous happens, the scene finishes with Will Smith distracting the audience... “Look, shiny!” That way, both audiences get what they want.

● Hidden Depth: The film is crawling with hidden depth too. A good chunk of the jokes involve scientific principles or theories. The film constantly makes hilarious analogies, always without telling you. For example, the film starts with border patrol agents rounding up illegal aliens. That is exactly what M.I.B. are, which makes that scene rich with irony. But no one points this out. The bug is driving around in a truck belonging to an exterminator. The fact that “superior” aliens view coffee and cigarettes as our highest achievement is hilarious too.

Then there’s philosophical depth. Throughout the film, you are constantly being bombarded with ethical, moral and philosophical questions. Is it immoral to change someone’s memories? Does it make it less immoral to give them a happy memory? Would you want to be able to block out memories? What is the nature of the human race? One of the most insightful comments ever in film was this:

J: “People are smart. They can handle it.”
K: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”

There was also this: “The only way these people get on with their lives is they don’t know the truth.” That’s very true of humans. Do our prejudices blind us to truth:

“Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.”

These are not only intensely complex questions, but the film frames them in amazingly clever ways to allow those who “get it” to think about it and to allow those who don’t to just see dialog.

So what does all this mean? Well, on the one hand, I think the intelligence is what has given this film its longevity. Tent-pole audiences are remarkably fickle, but cult-fans tend to be the ones who watch movies over and over. It also tells us that you can make a film that appeals to both audience. This film provides a guidepost on how.

Think about this. Here is a film that actually satisfies both groups, groups who rarely see eye to eye: “It was mindless and stupid” v. “It was confusing and stupid.” The reason it did was that it let each audience see what they wanted. People who are looking for smarter films got deep, philosophical points, jokes that trusted the audience, and rich depth throughout. Then people who are looking for something mindless got The Big Shiny from Will Smith to punctuate each joke or close out each philosophical moment.

I would call this a model for successful filmmaking.