A bit of why/what about my style, my groove
Having just mentioned JCVD over on No Good For Me, I am reminded that a month or so ago I planned out another whole post on one of the inspirations/reinforcements behind my personal aesthetic. This influence being, The Movies of Jean Claude Van Damme (except The Order).
I say “except The Order” because that is a very bad film. It’s not good-bad, it’s just really lagging and laboured and basically feels like you’re watching a movie that ripped off Indiana Jones (the one with Sean Connery.. I refuse to remember which IJ movie is which because I think he is an ass and dislike his and his movies’ attitude to women), sucked all the rollickingness out of it, and then somehow saw into the future and sucked some plot strings out of the head of Dan Brown. And sucked all the rollickingness out of THAT, too (I like airport novels, and the only part of The DaVinci Code that really annoyed me was when they couldn’t guess that they were looking for AN APPLE. COME ON GUYS). And then shot it in an incredibly drab way, using that one from CSI: Miami on a bad, bad hairweek. That is the worst JCVD film, including Black Eagle.
Jean Claude Van Damme the man himself is not the target of my visual pondering. I don’t know how he dresses out of character (and I haven’t seen JCVD yet). It’s in the movies, and the entire movies themelves; the filmography of Mr Van Damme is a part of my lifelong lookbook. It’s so.. Butch-sensitive. Yeah. I think that’s actually the exact phrase I was looking for.
Jean Claude Van Damme isn’t Arnie. And he’s not Stallone either. But he is Jean Claude Van Damme; he is a name. He’s not one of
I have seen two separate movies where Jean Claude Van Damme plays two roles. No, wait, make that actually three. There are probably more. But three is enough! THREE MOVIES where he plays TWO GUYS. Okay, in one of them the identical twin is dead, but even so, a different actor-thinking-publicism would have said “no, sorry, I’ve already done a movie (TWO MOVIES) where I get credited twice.” That’s not exactly to do with visuals (though it also obviously sort of is), but the absurdism present in the fact that more than once the question “but doesn’t it need.. more ME?[/HIM, I like to be fair]” has been answered in the affirmative.. it appeals to me. That sub-surreal what??ness also carries to the rest of the show, actually.
He has just punched this snake.
When I watch a Jean Claude Van Damme movie, afterwards I think to myself or say to my beloved, “what was that movie about?”. And there’s not really an answer. Apart from “People kicking each other, and with guns, and not really dealing with the feelings brought on by completely bizarre life circumstances”. They all have stories, of course, but the stories aren’t really what the films are about. They’re sort of like my kind of poetry.
JCVD movies, to me, are atmosphere/attitude pieces. And the visuals are way important to that (because.. they are movies). Do you see the butch-sensitive? Most of these screenshots (from vandamme.ru) are shot in hard pastels, with that harsh hard dusty comfy familiar feelings of the streets that Westerns were shot on. There’s a whole bunch of denim, which I actually don’t like to wear ever but that is not the point. The point is in the culmination.
There’s a lot of pink and little fussy patterns, little details like a popped collar, combed hair, coloured lenses, that spandex. Tucked in shirts. Jean Claude Van Damme movies are not devoid of femininity, and I’m not even counting the ladies. The dude is kind of femme. But he’s also the butch hero kicking asses and faces and guys off of motorcycles, with the huge muscles and the wrestler hair and all the tough fabrics, frowny faces, boning of chix. BUT he’s also pretty big into caring for people and holding sulky grudges.
The thing I really enjoy about the films of Jean Claude Van Damme, is, I guess, his gender ambiguity. Not in an extreme way, the way you hear it everywhere now, not in an androgynous way, not in a questioning my identity way. It’s not so much ambiguity, in fact, as it is that he is UNambiguous - he just does what he does. To my feeling there is a Van Damme movie persona (I’m not saying he plays the same character in every movie; he doesn’t. I’m saying that the feeling you get having watched a bunch of his movies is cohesive). And it’s a guy, a movie, a world which just does what it does because those things are the way it is. I don’t watch his movies and think “is that guy confused?” I think “compromising himself is not something that he considers, so it doesn’t happen”. And that’s fabulous. I feel at home in those movies.
Even Replicant.
