After Hours (1985)

The horniest movie Scorsese ever made is also the one where nobody gets to have sex.

I somehow went years without seeing After Hours, and it caught me completely off guard. It’s short, it zips, and it’s horny as hell. Griffin Dunne plays Paul Hackett, a word processor from uptown who gets chatted up by Rosanna Arquette over a copy of Tropic of Cancer in a diner and takes a cab downtown at midnight on the promise of something. His only twenty-dollar bill flies out the cab window on the way there. He spends the rest of the night trying, and failing, to get home.

I’m pretty sure I’m in love with Rosanna Arquette. Possibly also Griffin Dunne. I’m still sorting that one out.

Everyone calls it Kafkaesque, and Scorsese isn’t shy about it; he lifted the doorman scene at Club Berlin straight out of Kafka’s “Before the Law.” Joseph Minion wrote the script as a Columbia film school assignment, which is almost insulting given how dense it is. You can read it as a noir, as a guilt nightmare, as a joke about the art world, as a punishment fantasy about a nice boy who wanted one night of fun.

My favorite reading is that it’s about AIDS. The movie came out in 1985, when a casual hookup in New York could kill you, and every door Paul walks through looking for a hookup opens onto something worse than the last one. Marcy hints at burn scars he never actually sees and then turns up dead. Kiki the sculptor mostly wants help with her plaster. The downtown he stumbles through belongs to artists, punks, and gay men, the people uptown office guys like Paul came to for a thrill, and a shy man who picks him up on the street is one more stranger whose apartment becomes another trap. The longer Paul stays out, the emptier those streets get. I watched the queer and punk underbelly of the city evaporate in front of him, block by block, like the neighborhood was losing people faster than he could meet them.

And the straight guy from uptown survives. He comes home encased in plaster, literally sealed off, and gets dropped back at his office desk at dawn like none of it happened. Marcy doesn’t get to go home.

I’m not especially New York pilled, so some of the geography and the downtown-versus-uptown class jokes probably slid past me. But if someone remade this beat for beat in the city I grew up in, with bars and people I actually knew, I think it would be an all-timer for me. As it is, it’s incredible. I just watched it as a tourist, which, to be fair, is exactly what Paul is.

Also on Letterboxd