Habit

Show me the way to go home...

I would be fully prepared to call Larry Fessenden’s Habit the best vampire movie ever made, except I don’t think it believes in vampires. After watching it twice, I’m more comfortable dubbing it the heir apparent to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which also utilizes an unlikely premise that reveals the isolation of one quiet drifter through the streets of New York City. The irony in both films, of course, is that New York is an overpopulated megalopolis containing millions of people, yet it is one of the easiest places in the world to be lonely—so easy that psychopaths and vampires (real or imaginary) could live silently and relatively unnoticed. Habit’s power comes in the utilization of this isolation; it is one of the saddest reflections on solitude and alcoholic self-destruction that I’ve ever seen, and it takes an allegorical vampire’s curse to make its misery absolutely clear.

Not to say that vampires are not normally presented as lonely, miserable creatures. The two greatest sound-era vampire films, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979) and George A. Romero’s Martin (1977), not to mention countless lesser films, have successfully exploited such gloomy ruminations so that new vampire pictures rarely have anything fresh to add. The trick to Fessenden’s Habit is to remove the expectations of vampire conventions and to watch the way he rebuilds them to tell a story that doesn’t concern vampires at all. Think Taxi Driver crossed with Leaving Las Vegas, told from the point of view of its protagonist’s reality/dream-blending hallucinations. These dreams involve vampires because for the hero Sam (played by Fessenden), bloodsucking nightstalkers make a perfect metaphor for his monotonous life of alcoholism and drug abuse.

Also like Taxi Driver, the film really doesn’t have a focused plot. Characters interact, discoveries are made, and Sam’s interpretation of events progress, but this is foremost a vehicle to carefully develop the frantic weariness living behind Sam’s eyes. He is a reclusive bartender who has recently broken up with Liza (Heather Woodbury); she still loves him but can no longer tolerate his drinking binges that lead to emotional aloofness and depression. He doesn’t seem to mind the separation; it allows him the freedom to meander the streets endlessly and hop from bar to bar, always looking for an excuse to indulge in another beer. Any excuse will do, but we also detect immense intelligence working inside Sam: He has an impressive library and literary knowledge, and his recently-deceased father was a respected university professor. But between his pointless roaming with fellow drinkers Nick (Aaron Bell) and Rae (Patricia Coleman) and his dead-end job at a basement-level grunge bar, all higher motivation seems to have fled from his pickled brain.

Indeed, Sam is so pickled that we’re not sure what the stunning, intelligent Anna (Meredith Snaider) sees in him when they first meet at a party. Nevertheless, they make small talk, casually flirt, and she gives him her number. Her past is vague—“The less you know about me, the better,” she says—and she doesn’t come around in the daytime to bother Sam when he’d rather wander the streets and brood quietly. Still, she is a mesmerizing, mysterious beauty who seems to read Sam’s mind and sympathize with his angst. She soon offers him the type of superficial, non-committal affection that he requires, and the two begin a fast-moving, passionate affair that involves erotic experimentations in which Anna sucks Sam’s blood during coitus. “I’ll take you a little bit at a time,” she teases. Sam at first is into Anna’s kinky, unlikely lovemaking (“It’s like a dark secret between us,” he tells Nick), until his health begins to fail and he grows farther and farther removed from other friends and family. His drinking escalates as Anna continues to drain his blood during sex, and the self-destructive tendencies that were hinted upon by Liza’s reservations begin to reveal themselves more fully.

A point comes in the film when Sam tries to put the pieces together; he is quick to blame his problems on Anna, who he finally decides is a vampire. The primary question that Fessenden presents is whether or not we can accept Sam’s point of view and acknowledge Anna as a supernatural force out to destroy him. Most scenes present Anna as an unusual but seemingly human young woman who is attracted to Sam’s vulnerability and hidden depth, and who simply has an unorthodox fetish for sucking blood and having sex in forbidden places (like a hospital storage room). The instances in which she reveals otherworldly powers cannot be considered reliable, because they are presented from Sam’s point of view and feature him so intoxicated and drugged-out that any hallucination would seem quite real to him.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is how drug abuse is never directly stated but is clearly a factor in Sam’s troubled psyche (the same way that Scorsese never directly diagnoses Travis Bickle’s mental illness but makes it apparent in all of his actions and mood-swings). Booze and drugs are apparently how Sam deals with his father’s recent death and his subsequent breakup from Liza; they are what made him abandon his art degree and demoted him to a third-rate bartender. When he delivers a eulogy for his father at a local university, it is a careful portrait of a nervous, wild-eyed paranoid whose substance abuse has already removed him far from reality. It is easy to blame his troubling mannerisms on a bloodsucking vampire, but watch them out of context of the film and you will see that it his symptoms are far easier to interpret. The final shot in particular suggests that Sam is a victim of his own acid-related dreams, and Anna is merely in over her head. And listen with particular care to Nick’s attempts to reason with Sam when they finally have a heart-to-heart about Anna: Nick’s analysis of the situation, though crass, is absolutely correct.

So with Habit, which is also a subtly revealing title, we are literally given the portrait of a likable fellow so consumed with regret and boredom that he destroys himself through allegorical fantasies that he is convinced are real. Like most alcoholics and drug abusers—the ones I’ve met, anyway—Sam is willing to admit that he has a problem but is unwilling to see it as the primary foundation for what is wrong with his life. He sees these dangerous substances as not the cause, but the effect.

I said this is one of the saddest films about isolation that I’ve ever seen, and I did not intend this as a hyperbole. The mood is constantly thoughtful and regretful, and I think the largest groundwork for the film’s emotional power is Fessenden’s always subversive writing and his decidedly Cassavetes–inspired approach to filming. Fessenden’s two other films, No Telling (1991) and Wendigo (2001), have a cinematic style that is far different from the naturalistic approach found here, even though both have genuine moments of realism. With Habit, the director focuses on natural lighting and apparent improvisation that makes these proceedings seem less like staged performances and more like quiet, intimate glimpses into the daily lives of the characters. When something terrible happens to Sam, Fessenden has carefully allowed us a realistic glimpse into his life so we’re watching the plight not of a movie character, but of a friend with whom we are invested.

Here’s a good example of Fessenden’s realistic effect: I watched Habit on DVD in my house, and at one point I paused it to answer the phone. It was during a scene in which all the principle characters sit around a Thanksgiving dinner table and cheerfully discuss fairly trivial matters. As I talked on the phone, I felt less like I was briefly looking away from a piece of art and more like I’d just left a delightful conversation that continued without me. The urgency I felt to return to it—the desire not to miss anything—speaks for the film’s lifelike quality. Fessenden shoots the details of both the characters and their surroundings in a way that make us feel intimate, as if we’re fellow characters glancing about and noticing little things on our own that perhaps other characters might not be noticing. Consider the shot on the Ferris wheel, in which we focus not on Anna’s seduction of Sam, which seems like the crucial event, but rather on the rusty noises of the machine and the various windows in surrounding buildings, which reveal the faces of unhappy people stuck in their own daily ruts. The implication is that Sam’s loneliness is just one of many the many potentially sad stories, and it comes across as an attentive observation that we could be potentially making as Sam and Anna sit above us on another wheel. Travis Bickle could be just around the corner.

That’s saying nothing of Fessenden’s performance as Sam. All of the acting is superb—Snaider stands out as a vixen cloaked in ambiguity, and Bell is effectively hammy as the abrasive best friend—and I suppose these could be considered breakthrough roles if not for the director’s turn as this troubled young man. This is frankly one of the great modern film performances—Fessenden is so believable that we have remind ourselves that he is indeed acting and that this is not some sort of documentary. This never plays as a vanity project for the director—Sam’s nuances, his deep flaws and troubled psyche, render any such accusations meaningless. It’s a performance that seems to penetrate deep from his nervous system and bleed onto the proceedings with realistic ferocity. Watch the subtle reaction on Sam’s face during a late scene in his apartment when Nick tells him, “You really look sick.” For that matter, watch Fessenden throughout this entire scene—the delivery of his lines, the way he blinks and hesitates and glowers and turned all of these expressions into an extreme revelation of his most intimate worries. It’s no wonder that Fessenden has since acted for the likes of Martin Scorsese and Jim Jarmusch; I never saw what he was doing as a performance until after the film was over, and now that I reflect on what Fessenden accomplishes as Sam, I now cannot imagine Brando pulling off some of these scenes with more power.

I suppose that I should briefly compare Habit to the other films I have seen by Fessenden—No Telling and Wendigo (as of this writing on 10/9/07, I have not seen The Last Winter). Both are very good, though the former is better than the latter. Together, they all make up what Fessenden has called his “horror trilogy”—No Telling was a Frankenstein update, and Wendigo dealt with a forest spirit that bore resemblances to werewolf legends. Like Habit, the films are more concerned with human’s fears and flaws than actual monsters, and all are shot from the perspectives of characters not entirely reliable. But Habit is the best of the three; indeed, it is one of the best psychological horror films I have ever seen for the way it pretends to be about vampires and then uses these images to indicate that there are more dangerous ways for people to have their blood sucked. I actually found a stronger link between Habit and Lucky McKee’s extraordinary May (2002), a similarly realistic update of the Frankenstein story suggesting that a young woman’s need to create new life is based on her intense loneliness. Both films play with the notions that vampires and Frankenstein creatures really exist, but then undercut our expectation by suggesting that such monsters are preferable to the kind of disturbed mind that could think to manifest them.

Habit is the kind of film that stays with you and grows stronger with repeated viewings. You surprise yourself just how engaged with Sam and his lonely plight you become, as his accumulated bad lifestyle choices and habits slowly drain his energy until all he has left is his dead father’s empty apartment, surrounded by garlic cloves and obsessed with his impending doom. He is completely real—totally convincing, and endlessly compelling as an authentic human being. Which is ultimately why this movie cannot about vampires.

Cast:
Larry Fessenden: Sam
Meredith Snaider: Anna
Aaron Bell: Nick
Patricia Coleman: Rae
Heather Woodbury: Liza

A film by Glass Eye Pix. Written and directed by Larry Fessenden. No M.P.A.A. rating; contains graphic sexuality/nudity, some violence/gore, and language. Running time: 112 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: November 14, 1997.