You may already know Bob Balaban. Maybe you’ve seen him as a repertory player of Wes Anderson or Christopher Guest. Maybe you know him as Russell Dalrymple, the fictional head of NBC subjected to George Costanza’s hardball pitch of a “show about nothing.” Or maybe you’ve seen him supporting the youth as Hannah’s therapist on “Girls” and Ilana’s dad on “Broad City.” You probably don’t know him as a director. But he’s been directing on the small and silver screens since the early 1980s, and in 1989, he made his feature debut, with a relentlessly peculiar film called Parents.
Parents concerns a small boy named Michael and the gradual discovery that his parents are cannibals. That is the extent of what I knew before buying a copy on Amazon Instant Video. The only Balaban film I had seen was My Boyfriend’s Back from 1993, his sophomore feature about a teenager who comes back from the dead to take his crush to prom. I had seen it on one of those cable superstations, where it padded out the schedule alongside other underperforming studio properties between showings of The Shawshank Redemption. Written, acted and lit like a sitcom, My Boyfriend’s Back took a broad, talky approach to the obstacles a high schooler faces when his limbs keep falling off. I expected something similar from Parents, especially since My Boyfriend’s Back gets so much mileage out of its zombie protagonist’s strict diet of human flesh.
Instead, Parents is a kind of mongrel hybrid of Eisenhower-era spoof, horror and art film sensibilities. It’s billed as a black comedy, which has less to with any gags getting staged, than with Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt doing their best Ozzie and Harriet impressions while harvesting cadavers for sausage. The young protagonist meanwhile sustains a tone of unironic, solemn dread. Michael, as played by one-off child actor Bryan Madorsky, is an owl-eyed drone; The creeping sense that something is seriously amiss with his forebears has, it seems, pummeled him into a flat affect. His scarred psyche expresses itself in oblique camera angles and stark nightmare visions, such as an image early on of Michael sinking through his bedsheets into an undulating sea of blood. Such a blatant ripoff of The Shining’s elevator flood surely cannot be meant seriously, yet nothing about the tone indicates that the scene is satirical.
Balaban’s second film is unambiguous entertainment, but his first has the clunky eccentricity of a self-styled auteur. Otherwise straightforward action is accented with faint over-ripeness. Scenes proceed choppily, and the performers – especially Hurt as Mom and Sandy Dennis as the ill-fated guidance counselor – toggle between hysterics and deadpan according to what seems to be impulsive logic. The result is a dreamlike quality that we’d now simply call Lynchian, which was, just three years after Blue Velvet and one before Wild at Heart and “Twin Peaks,” a still freshly-minted concept in film aesthetics. No doubt this is partly a credit to the orchestral score from Angelo Badalamenti, whose high-camp potboiler soundtracks are a pillar of David Lynch’s work.
The comparison with modern cinema’s premiere surrealist speaks more to ambition than actuality. Parents is not a good film, exactly – its conceits are consistently undercooked, so to speak – and yet its images sometimes transcend the material. The film often evokes the deep focus framing of the great Gregg Toland, the cinematographer behind many of Orson Welles’ and William Wyler’s most iconic shots. An early shot juxtaposing Michael’s face in closeup, and his parents necking at the dinner table in the far background, is masterful. Even better is the choice to hint heavily at their cannibalism without making it visually explicit. Robin Vidgeon and Ernest Day’s camerawork lingers often on the vaguely identified “leftovers” as they sizzle on the stove, pass through the meat grinder, and overflow the serving plate. If the aestheticization of human meat on Bryan Fuller’s “Hannibal” takes its cues from Flemish still lifes, Parents’ reference points are cookbooks circa 1953, all desaturated color and Formica furnishing. One recurring close-up shows a row of livers in a frying pan, sprinkled with rice, suggesting the insurgence of maggots.
Also like “Hannibal,” in Parents, cannibalism is a flexible metaphor for hedonism. The parents’ dark secret is conflated with their sex life, and the first confirmation of Michael’s suspicions is staged as a Freudian primal scene: he emerges late one night to find them in the living room in the throes of ritualistic congress. But theirs is a sanitized kind of libertine attitude, a far cry from Hannibal Lecter’s old-money epicureanism. The extent of the scandal is wrestling on a cotton sheet in matching white underwear, spotless but for telltale red smears. Like their Long Island iced teas and the Perez Prado tracks that play over the credits, their idea of sensuality has been standardized and domesticated. Parents thus functions as a heavy-handed, mildly condescending critique of the lack of imagination that coincides with the suburban middle class’s sense of entitlement to leisure. In this context, cannibalism is the sign of mass-produced suburban consumption, brought to its inevitable decadent conclusion.
As I said, Parents is no masterpiece, but it’s never boring; its box office failure deprived it of the legacy it deserves as the formally adventurous cousin of Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands and John Waters’ Serial Mom. Balaban owes much in this regard to Randy Quaid’s pitch-perfect turn as Dad. Like the late Robin Williams, Quaid’s elastic comic performances often carry an undertone of mental volatility. In Parents, Quaid brings into sharp relief the violence lurking in the wings of his needy Cousin Eddie of National Lampoon’s Vacation films. Even well before the slasher film conclusion – replete with ill-advised escapes to the basement and an indestructible villain – menace seethes from behind Quaid’s clubmaster glasses, as he pulls up in his pastel Oldsmobile and asks his son, “Wanna ride, sport?”
Incidentally, the same year Quaid starred in Parents, he also married his current wife Evi. They have been since caught up in an extended criminal folie à deux, animated by the belief that their money and lives have been targeted by a legion of Hollywood conspirators called “star whackers.” (These high profile hijinks may very well explain Quaid’s absence from this summer’s Vacation reboot.) Quaid’s public descent into madness is much funnier, and more disturbing, than Parents ever is. But both address the same theme, one of Hollywood’s favorites: that underneath the white cotton veneer of American normalcy lies a bottomless sea of blood.