The Mean Season features a serial killer (Richard Jordan) who starts calling a newspaper reporter (Kurt Russell) providing clues about his next victims. The killer, in return, demands accurate well-written articles about his heinous crimes. The reporter is burnt-out and was planning to move away from the city and its criminality and isn't interested in the newfound notoriety these articles bring him, but his editor (Richard Masur) is elated about this scoop. The detective on the case (Andy Garcia) is frustrated that the media is involved with such matters. Eventually the killer gets envious of the attention the reporter himself is getting from the media rather than him and things get wild ...and stupid.
The movie is very on the nose about exploring the symbiosis between crime news and the media. The editor says "We're not the manufacturer, we retail. News gets made somewhere else, we just sell it." But as the relationship with the killer gets more complex, the reporter's partner (Hemingway) tells him, "Are you reporting it or participating in it?"
No, it's not a great movie. But Richard Jordan, while cast against type, pulls off a delightfully demented, menacing serial killer who is fixated on feeling significant in society, no matter what. And those are the lines I like the most, mostly because of Jordan's delivery.
On feeling insignificant:
"When I left I was covered with blood. I walked right down the street. I was invisible, nobody seemed to notice me. Nobody cared!"
"Have you ever noticed that the older you get, the smaller you become? When I was a little kid, the block we lived on was the whole world to me. But I knew everybody, I was significant, even important."
On how, before dying, two murder victims gave him the attention he hasn't had since he was a little kid:
"It was just like before."
On why he resorts to murder in order to be noticed:
"For the most part, good behaviour goes unnoticed."
Once he reaches the end of the road:
"Please spell my name right: Alan with one "L" Delour D-E-L-O-U-R. Thanks for everything."
In the 70s and early 80s serial killers in films were always shown to either have no motive (Scorpio in Dirty Harry comes to mind), or they had some motive based on trauma, or the motive was simply not shown as in Two-Minute Warning.
However, by the late 80s and early 90s straight-to-video movies and episodes of TV series involving serial murderers often depicted fame as the killer's main motive. Was The Mean Season the first movie to do this?
Less than 15 years later, fame, or rather infamy, became a recurring motive in real life mass murders that take place in schools. I wonder when and where real life killers got this notion from.
Comments
Post a Comment