Plinth

A vacuum-cleaner salesman, a priest, and a backing vocalist walk into a shady hotel, each harbouring a secret. The fact that this could be the set-up for a joke clues us in to the slippery tone of writer-director Drew Goddard’s work. ‘Bad Times at the El Royale’s sort of like everything I do,’ Goddard tells Variety, ‘It falls into a “hard to classify” genre.’ While resisting classification, I’d say that the genre Bad Times is most clearly flirting with is film noir.

Whether or not you have an affinity for noir might depend on how you feel about rain. Why is it always raining? Is it because the rain is isolating, making it plausible that no-one else is around? Is it the perfect backdrop for cruel and vicious acts? Is it simply because, at night, a wet pavement looks cooler than a dry one, in low-key lighting? Obscuring one’s vision, does rain suggest more than meets the eye? You might think rain is a dull cliché best kept in the clouds. Or, like me, you might see rain as essential to the hazy, iterative nature of noir, a genre whose discrete fictions emerge from the same shadows of the same alleyways of the same hopeless town, where it is always raining. Like me, you might not go to noir looking for hard-won human truths, but to sleuth in recycled tropes, seeing how the shadows on the sidelines can shine a spotlight on corruption and injustice in our society. Settle in!

Incidentally, one of the film’s best lines concerns rain. Without giving away spoilers, all I can say is that we’re in the middle of a tense and climactic set-piece. Darlene, the backing singer, has reached her limit. ‘I’m just bored of men like you,’ she says. ‘I’d rather sit and listen to the rain.’ Besides being character-driven and well-timed, the line is also oddly poetic; self-referential. Darlene could be addressing the genre itself with its proliferation of cynical, morally ambiguous, alienated male anti-heroes – and so could Goddard. There is a preparedness here, on his part, to sit with each of his characters, and listen to where their dark pasts might take them. The tropes of film noir are pulled into three dimensions, characters permitted the space to be more than archetypes. Their skeletons are not just brought out of the cupboard, but danced around the El Royale’s lobby for twelve hours to see what sounds.

The privilege of watching a film is being on the right side of dramatic irony. We see everything, and Bad Times is sincerely concerned with who sees what. Knowledge is power, and surveillance – double mirrors, secret passageways, bugs and hidden cameras – is built into the fabric of El Royale’s plot and the hotel too. Surface appearances, secret motives, and memory loss are no match for the ostensibly objective evidence recorded when you think you’re alone in the El Royale – but it all depends on your perspective. One of Bad Time’s plot-drivers is a reel of film containing compromising images of a prominent public figure. Depending on whether you want to sell it or hide it, it’ll be imperative to possess or destroy it respectively; to zero in on the symbolism of the reel is to find Bad Time’s central themes — truth and lies, dark pasts — echoed not just across the ensemble cast, but in its plot mechanics. For Goddard, it seems less important to balance an equation than to compound a poetic fantasy, playfully crossing wires. It’s an approach worth sitting with, and listening to.

The unresolved (though widely theorised) film reel plot line in Bad Times calls across and out to the society which built the film reel we’re watching, referencing its own medium and contemporary politics, too. After all, it’s 1969 for most of the film, the beginning of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Nixon was dogged by major FBI investigations and accused of obstructing justice. He lashed out at the media for broadcasting those investigations, describing the coverage as a witch hunt. Meanwhile, internet detectives claim that clues in Bad Times and the hotel on which the El Royale is based (Cal-Neva) point to the tape featuring J. F. Kennedy, president from 1961 until his assassination in 1963 – and doesn’t history repeat itself? While we’ve all seen Trump’s Access Hollywood footage, there remain enduring rumours about the president’s ‘Pee Tape’, said to be filmed in a hotel room in Moscow and held by Russia as blackmail leverage. It’s a veritable Día de los Muertos in Trump’s closet – but we’ve all got skeletons. Bad Times asks you to imagine if yours were on film, and to question which ones really matter.

In Bad Times, everyone and everything (the MacGuffin, the setting) has a dark secret. The sheer profusion of skeletons-in-closets bespeaks a wider anxiety for our times. The truth will out is an ominous proverb that kept us in check for hundreds of years. In point of fact, the Watergate scandal forced Nixon’s resignation. Nowadays — with everyone’s shortcomings disseminated across social media for all to see, and with politicians sidestepping the most ruinous media scandals and still clinging on to power — we live in a time of widespread moral uncertainty. And noir, with its emphasis on moral greyness, provides the perfect set of tropes to explore all this.

When a story is set in a different period, it often allows us to see the present. And when I watch genre fiction — anything that would have been called a B-movie back in the day — I like to see what the bloody footprints might tell us about today’s major accidents. El Royale’s widest veering from film noir’s conventions is in its tone. Normally, the genre’s bleak, defeatist and pessimistic; no-one gets what they want, but everyone gets what’s coming to them. Earnest or schmaltzy – depending on how much you like the rain – Goddard offers his characters a shot at redemption; tapes can go up in flames, for instance. Memories fade, if you’re (un)lucky. The rest of us ought to keep umbrellas handy. It never rains but it pours – if you’re standing in the wrong place, that is.

By Sammi Gale.