Shadow Hours (2000) is an independent drama film written and directed by Isaac H. Eaton and starring Balthazar Getty, Peter Weller and Rebecca Gayheart. IMDB
Michael Holloway (Getty) is a recovering drug addict who works the night shift at a Los Angeles gas station. He’s trying to plan for the future with his pregnant wife, Chloe (Gayheart). The pressures and isolation of his job push Michael towards using again. One night, Michael meets Stuart Chappell (Weller), a wealthy, mysterious stranger who claims to be a writer. Stuart takes a liking to Michael, buys him a new suit, and pulls him along on nightly expeditions into the dark underside of the city.
Shadow Hours is basically a morality play, defined by the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms as “…dramatized allegories, in which personified virtues, vices, diseases, and temptations struggle for the soul of Man.” Michael is the everyman struggling between right and wrong. Stuart is the Satan/Lucifer/Devil figure, throwing every possible temptation at Michael, particularly drugs, alcohol, money, and sex. Will Michael follow the right, narrow path of sobriety, heterosexual monogamy, marriage, traditional gender roles, and the nuclear family? Or will he jump or fall into the abyss of hedonistic excess? That’s the binary choice Shadow Hours presents to the viewer.
Like 8MM, Hardcore, Strangeland and other films we’ve looked at, Shadow Hours uses BDSM imagery and practices to signify the deeper regions of Hell on Earth, the extremes of human depravity, and social decadence. It included figures of the Los Angeles BDSM and performance art scene like Ron Athey, Crystal Cross and Stosh Fila. The film’s poster, trailer and promotional website (see the Wayback Machine) prominently feature BDSM and modern primitive imagery, such as a full-body hook suspension.
To quote Rosenfeld, Kathryn. “S/M chic and the new morality.” New Art Examiner (2000):
The official Web site of Shadow Hours offered blurbs on [Ron] Athey and the other artists, chats for fans on S/M and piercing, and a list of links, lifted directly from the Web site of online kink paraphernalia retailer the Stockroom, which ranged from the American Civil Liberties Union to free fetish pornography. The site further produced the impression that the film featured the S/M community prominently, and suggested that the filmmaker actively aimed to promote and align himself with the artists he depicts and their subcultural milieu. […]
What a surprise, then, to discover that Athey and the other artists and players appear onscreen for mere seconds. Where the trailer makes them central, in the film their performances are tangential at best, replaceable in the narrative with some other pedantically understood fringe activity.[Pg.28-30]
Michael is already stuck in the underworld in his gas station job, dealing with various unstable and threatening individuals. Stuart takes him deeper in to the underworld, full of different bodily practices, such as rock concerts, bare-knuckle brawls, BDSM clubs, pole dancers, a brothel, a drug parlor, and even a gambling den where people bet on Russian roulette. Stuart describes all of this as a product of humanity’s depravity. (I also couldn’t help noticing that the places Stuart takes Michael to are often coded as Asian, Latino and/or Black, as if no white person could do such depraved things.)
Some of this is actually kind of mild, at least in my jaded view. While I can understand that Michael would want to stay away from situations with alcohol and drugs, why can’t he go to a rock show or do something else for fun? Michael says that when he isn’t working, he goes to AA meetings or just paces around his apartment, while Chloe is on the day shift. Shadow Hours operates on a Puritan-meets-AA logic that even the mildest indulgence could damn a person’s soul forever.
To quote Rosenfeld again:
The film heavy-handedly sets up its supporting cast of perverts as moral and cultural foils — as exotic but savage Others — to the temptation-prone but essentially virtuous main character; the obvious message is that cultural and sexual deviance equal addiction, danger, and evil behavior. The film, marketed as a daring exploration of a “real” sexual subculture, turns out to be a conservative morality play. Similarly, S/M chic in the general culture signals less a growing openness about sex and sexual variance than a growing conservatism about sexual morals, which needs visible but meaning-deprived deviance as the foil against which to fashion itself. [Pg.30]
Rosefeld wrote that before the popularity and commercial success of Secretary and Fifty Shades of Grey, but I would argue that those works support her point, as their politics are essentially conservative.
The makers of Shadow Hours engage with the imagery of Athey’s performance art only on the most superficial level of shock, and doesn’t bother to go any deeper to explore ideas about AIDS, homophobia, etc.. As Rosenfeld put it:
One of Athey’s signature gestures, in which he contorts the planes of his face with hooks that pierce his skin and pull lips and eyelids taut, is reduced to a curiosity in Shadow Hours, the credits of which list Athey as the “Man with Hooks in Face.” [Pg.30]
The characters Michael glimpses aren’t people with their own histories and subjectivities and reasons for doing what they do. They’re just pawns in the game for Michael’s soul, terms in an equation. The audience is drawn in with titillating curiosity provoked by these images, but the messages is ultimately to turn away from the deviant and just be normal.
It’s possible to deconstruct and invert Shadow Hours’ moral schema. The ideal of a good life that Michael clings to, that he’s been told to want, could be his problem, and the people in the underworld he encounters, if he actually got to know them, might help him find a solution.
But that’s not the kind of film Shadow Hours is. It promises arousal with one hand and punishment with the other, a venerable formula.
