Trouble in Mind (Alan Rudolph, 1985) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: David Katz

For what strikes me as a minor film, its writer-director clearly wrote and directed the hell out of it. What's immediately striking about Trouble in Mind, apart from its "We Love the 80s" aesthetic, is the fact that Alan Rudolph's location shooting in Seattle (um, excuse me, "Rain City") generates images as mannered and light-sculpted as anything Coppola achieved on a soundstage for One From the Heart. While I wouldn't go so far to call Trouble in Mind a city symphony, Rudolph clearly gave a great deal of thought to how to design Rain City from available materials. The scale model that Hawk (Kris Kristofferson) has in his flat only reinforces the dreamlike, city-of-the-mind atmosphere.

Although to my eyes Trouble in Mind doesn't entirely work, it's certainly one of the most self-aware Eighties films I've seen, both capturing a hideous, neon-tinted decade and putting its cinematic language at a bit of a remove. One senses that Rudolph, ever the Altman acolyte, was taking an interest in the contemporary Cinéma du look, the superficial depths achieved by people like Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix. This sort of noir homage probably seemed like a logical exercise for these new formal concerns, but Rudolph is simply too sincere to pull off something slick and meaningless. 

The result is often awkward, suggesting a filmmaker who is trying too hard and allowing the flopsweat to soak through. Kristofferson's character, an honorable cop just released from prison, skulks around in an outfit a lot like Orson Welles's from F For Fake, looking less like a hard-boiled detective than a cardboard cutout. But then, perhaps that's the point. Trouble in Mind is filled with odd elements that suggest we aren't supposed to be taking any of this seriously (e.g., the mute busboy who keeps getting smacked by the door). But then other elements are doggedly, extra-textually weird (Divine's role as an effeminate male gangster), implying a kind of lurch toward poignancy.

The city corrupts absolutely, it seems. Coop (Keith Carradine) and Georgia (Lori Singer), a down-and-out young couple trying to eke out a living, bring their baby and their camper van to Rain City, and they are almost instantly transformed into movie archetypes. Coop hooks up with Solo (Joe Morton), a mid-level criminal, and transforms himself into a garish, John Waters caricature of a 1950s rockabilly rebel. Georgia, meanwhile, is so distraught that she abandons her baby in a moment of weakness, setting the stage for woman-centered melodrama.

This attempt at a selfless act is one of a number of incidents that place Trouble in Mind in a very disturbing light where gender is concerned. Georgia begs Hawk for help in retrieving her child and, in a single edit, voila! He's got the baby back. Not only does this treat Georgia's crisis as a comical nonevent; it's also used by Hawk to leverage against her, forcing her to pay him back with a date. Hawk, our putative hero, is sexually aggressive toward Georgia, ignoring her pleas to leave her alone. But then, near the start of the film, Hawk reconnects with old friend Wanda (Genevieve Bujold) and essentially rapes her. Next morning, she warns him not to do it again, and the relationship is all patched up.

These moves are far too deliberate to be unconscious, and I suspect Rudolph is trying to demonstrate the unreconstructed misogyny at the heart of film noir tropes, the sense that in this artificial world, even the good guy is a scumbag. That said, Rudolph doesn't push this quite far enough to really work as a critique. Like a lot of aspects of Trouble in Mind, it is hazy and unfocused, mirroring the misty, soft-lens cinematography. Through the tragic and the absurd, the still moments and the outsized gestures, the one consistent element is Mark Isham's score, a perfect specimen of classic 80s cool-jazz . Like so much of Trouble in Mind, the trumpet is a bit too muted.