No Escape: Purgatory and the Inferno in After Hours
The trailer for Martin Scorsese’s black comedy After Hours begins with a man—Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne)—recounting the myriad crises of his night with increasing mania. He says that he “just wanted to leave his apartment...maybe meet a nice girl...and now I’ve gotta die for it”, referring to his chance encounter with the deliciously cute Marcy Franklin (Rosanna Arquette) in a coffee shop earlier that night. Paul’s anger and confusion stems from what he sees as the abject unfairness of the universe, revealed in this one long night. But After Hours isn’t just about a date gone horribly wrong; it’s about Paul’s existential urge to break free from his pedestrian life, even if he subsequently recants that wish. Paul Hackett, a humble word processor at some faceless company in New York City, lives a life with no purpose and no meaning. But if its alternative is rampant chaos and instability, his “Purgatory” of working nine-to-five doesn’t seem so horrible by comparison. This explains his smirk of satisfaction in the ending when he is greeted with more warmth by his simple work computer at his good old desk than he got from nearly anyone else during his long night in SoHo.
The common interpretation of Purgatory originates from Catholic doctrine, describing an intermediary realm after death where the soul awaits judgment before either ascending to Heaven, or being cast down into Hell. It is the afterlife’s equivalent of a waiting room; but even waiting rooms have weathered magazines and canned muzak to pass the time. Paul’s life is about filling time; he works in an unfulfilling career, and doesn’t indulge in any excesses. He channel surfs and goes out for coffee when he gets bored, rereading the same Henry Miller novel over and over again, because he has to budget for food and rent—like we all do. Paul’s life would have stayed this course had it not been for Marcy; is that sad or a relief? Paul’s life is in Purgatory, and what After Hours bitterly suggests is that his lot is the same as it is for all of us.
After Hours—like many great films that (even subtly) challenge audiences—was met by the public with mixed reactions. Few people go to the movies to discover that their lives are a hopeless trap with no escape, and that their pointless job crunching numbers for a soulless corporate machine is probably what they’ll keep doing until they die. Even other popular Scorsese movies—even those grounded in reality—feature larger-than-life characters, and embrace a certain degree of escapism. Paul Hackett is an “everyman”, and his adventure in SoHo shakes his foundations so fundamentally that he spends most of After Hours trying to cut his losses and run screaming back to his stagnant office, to returning to a life of slowly decomposing under the gentle glow of fluorescent lighting. That’s depressing, especially for a comedy.
If everyday life for Paul is like Purgatory, Marcy’s alluring invitation to the dark side transforms the artsy life of SoHo “after hours” into a Dante-esque journey into the Inferno. He is ferried to the first layer of the abyss by a speed-demon taxi driver (Larry Block), who denies him any means of egress by (not once, but twice) parting him with his cash to go home if things get too hairy. The “Circle of Hell” in Dante’s Inferno that comes after Limbo is dedicated to Lust; this is what Marcy excites in Paul, compelling him to make this late-night booty call in the first place. (To be blunt, haven’t we all inconvenienced ourselves by degrees at the prospect of getting laid? And haven’t most of us had that blow up in our faces when our “fantasy girl” turns out to have real problems like Marcy?) Marcy entices Paul like a succubus—after all, he calls her up later that night, and drops everything to catch a cab just shy of midnight, which is certainly more expensive than taking the subway. Paul’s lust is ratcheted up further by Marcy’s sultry—and topless—sculptress roommate, Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino). She stokes his ardor by inviting him to work his hands over her sculpture, and then her shoulders for a massage, making him take off his shirt after he spills plaster on it. By the time Marcy does show up, he’s primed for passion; yet his patience wears thin as he slowly discovers Marcy isn’t looking for sex but friendly company, heralding the first of many tortures yet to come for poor Paul.
Paul’s progress through the neon-lit, rain-slicked streets of SoHo continue to resemble the stations of Dante’s journey through Hell, especially through its oddball denizens. Already on edge after Marcy, he flees through the pouring rain to catch the subway home, only to discover that the fares are now more than the loose change he has left in his pockets. Soaking and desperate, he retreats to a dive bar to contemplate his next move, where he encounters the helpful (if short-tempered) proprietor, Tom Schorr (John Heard), and his self-absorbed waitress with a beehive named Julie (Teri Garr). Tom’s initial offer to loan Paul the money to get home would cut the rest of the movie (and moral lesson) short, so of course the register jams. Tom’s brief outburst here—and his later reaction to hearing about the death of his girlfriend, “Marcy”—hints at deeper anger management issues, making him something of the scion for “Wrath” in this underworld realm. (Even his rolled-up sleeves add a suggestion of readiness for violence.) Conversely, Julie seems to see the world through her own bizarre lens. She claims to hate her job, but does nothing. When Paul reunites with her, she invites him into her apartment for shelter, but puts on bubblegum pop and sketches his portrait for her amusement, rather than show any genuine sympathy or consolation. Her ultimate revenge for some perceived slight against her by Paul is so extreme that it threatens his very life by stirring up an angry mob of “concerned citizens”. Julie’s solipsistic worldview is so defiantly at odds with any reasonable social behavior, that she embodies the spirit of the circle of Hell reserved for heretics.
It seems obvious to describe a pair of thieves named Neil and Pepe—performed by none other than comedy duo, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, a.k.a. Cheech and Chong—as the representation of the circle of Greed, though After Hours plays off of this in a couple of ways. Paul sees them loading Kiki’s TV into their van outside of her walk-up apartment and assumes they are stealing it; that she’s bound and gagged at the time does little to dispel this impression. The implication of this is that the series of burglaries being committed in the neighborhood are being performed by this larcenous duo, which is further supported by their van full of swag. (Pepe even comments about the irony of buying something legitimately only to have it stolen later, instead of just stealing it in the first place.) But the only thing we see them actually steal is the plaster cast around Paul at the end of the movie, because they mistake it for Kiki’s sculpture, which Pepe claims he purchased legally—so in essence, he’s only trying to reclaim it. Paul is branded the thief by Julie’s spiteful wanted posters, and is presumed to be a thief when he enters Tom’s apartment—albeit with Tom’s key and its ominous skull-in-a-top-hat keychain—by a pair of residents. Furthermore, Paul actually does steal twenty bucks from Kiki’s own screaming sculpture while storming out on Marcy, perhaps believing he’s entitled to a “refund” on services not rendered.
Gluttony is explored in a couple of off-hand ways in After Hours. The first is the all-night diner where Marcy takes Paul, operated by Pete (Dick Miller), who graciously comps their coffee if only because Marcy has an easy smile. When Paul returns, he is met instead by a gruff cashier (Victor Argo) who demands he order if he is to use the bathroom. Out of spite, Paul orders a cheeseburger he can’t afford, hits the restroom, then dashes. (The punchline comes later when he returns to the diner for a third time, and the surly cashier brings him his burger.) Paul could have just ordered a coffee instead but deliberately overdoes it. Why? Paul has built up an expectation of how his night was going to be, one that was supposed to be bigger and better than so many others in his miserable life that came before it, and he’s angry that it hasn’t panned out. He orders a juicy burger out of the idea of having something better than just boring “coffee”, even if he has no intention of eating it, just to fill some inner need. The other way that Gluttony is explored comes in the form of the bouncer (Clarence Felder) at Club Berlin, a punk/fetishist hot spot where Kiki tells Paul she’ll meet him and Marcy later...before Paul could tell her that Marcy offed herself. The nameless bouncer and Paul perform a routine drawn from a parable in Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, called “Before the Law”, as Paul desperately tries to gain admittance into the club. With regards to Dante’s Inferno, the bouncer is a stand-in for Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog of the circle of Gluttony—only here, he’s keeping sinners out instead of in.
Violence is the seventh circle of Hell, and the threat of it against Paul emerges after he encounters Gail (Catherine O'Hara), the surprisingly vicious operator of a Mister Softee ice cream truck. From the first, she (accidentally) smashes a taxi cab door into his arm, causing a cut through his blazer. (Just consider for a moment how hard someone would have to hit another with a car door to cause this kind of injury, and Gail already appears like someone who is in tune with violence, intended or otherwise.) She offers to let him use her phone, but is setting him up for a round of “psychological” violence back at her apartment, including interrupting him repeatedly as he attempts to get the phone number from information and dial a friend afterwards. (Note how Gail doesn’t offer him a pen and paper.) She even deliberately mishears his polite small talk to launch into an impassioned defense about her job, which Paul tactfully tries to ignore. But the real terror comes after Gail finds one of Julie’s posters of Paul; she threatens, “you’re dead, pal”, while armed with a sour expression before boarding her jolly food truck and assembling a posse to lynch poor Paul. It’s as if Gail was aching for a reason to unleash her fury against the world on someone, and Paul’s the perfect punching bag.
The penultimate layer of Hell is Fraud. Part of the film’s exploration of it is played for laughs after perhaps the only rational person left in SoHo mistakes Paul’s second solicitation to use a stranger’s telephone as an altogether different kind of solicitation. The stranger (Robert Plunket) is visibly disheartened at the revelation that his would-be one-night stand instead takes the opportunity to sum up the plot, while looking for sympathy for his plight; ironically, this makes Paul the “fraud” here. But more significantly, Paul is treated like a fraud or crook through much of After Hours, including by Tom’s antagonistic neighbors, an unsympathetic subway teller (Murray Moston) who wouldn’t give him a break to take the subway home, and even Kiki’s S&M enthusiast boyfriend, Horst (Will Patton), who chastises Paul when he comes up to check on the bound sculptress. (Notice how neither of them even bother to come down and open the door for Paul in either encounter. Instead, the keys are launched at the pavement for him to scoop up and let himself in.) Paul is treated poorly from the moment he steps into the fateful cab that takes him into SoHo. Compare this with his job, where he is clearly respected enough to train a disinterested new hire (Bronson Pinchot), and even his apartment—boring as it may be—is a safe place. Paul belongs in his world, and the twilight realm of SoHo comes across as scary and menacing to the straight-laced word processor.
Dante’s Inferno and After Hours both close with the final Circle of Hell: Treachery. In After Hours, this sin is deliberately inverted, and instead Paul experiences its virtuous counterpart in the form of charity from June (Verna Bloom), an enigmatic sculptress who “saves” Paul, both from a mob and his long night. Trapped in his waking nightmare, Paul often revisits locations looking for answers, which is how he comes to meet June at an artist’s showing that is far more restrained than his first visit to Club Berlin was. She saves him from Gail and her lynch mob by transforming him into an objet d’art, specifically a screaming plaster of Paris sculpture like Kiki’s, which ultimately serves as his ticket out of Hell. But before that, Paul shows a little tenderness to the withdrawn artist by inviting her to dance with him—he even puts on a tie. With a single quarter left to his name, he spends this widow’s mite to play “Is That All There Is?" by Peggy Lee, a song that becomes a badge for the fundamental need for something more from life—a question answered with cynicism, if the night’s events are any evidence. Paul opens his heart to June; and unlike his previous efforts to solicit sympathy through other encounters, he is vulnerable and doesn’t want someone to just placate his ego and tell him that he didn’t deserve all of the horrible things that happened to him. He just wants someone to know that he truly wants to live, and to find some transcendent meaning in all of it...to know that beneath all of the pain and humiliation, the meaningless rituals of everyday life, that there is something important...something good and kind. June doesn’t have the answers, and Paul isn’t really asking her for them. I think that Paul’s journey is the answer, and when he emerges from his plaster chrysalis at dawn, he understands that Purgatory can be Heaven if you let it be.
The common interpretation of Purgatory originates from Catholic doctrine, describing an intermediary realm after death where the soul awaits judgment before either ascending to Heaven, or being cast down into Hell. It is the afterlife’s equivalent of a waiting room; but even waiting rooms have weathered magazines and canned muzak to pass the time. Paul’s life is about filling time; he works in an unfulfilling career, and doesn’t indulge in any excesses. He channel surfs and goes out for coffee when he gets bored, rereading the same Henry Miller novel over and over again, because he has to budget for food and rent—like we all do. Paul’s life would have stayed this course had it not been for Marcy; is that sad or a relief? Paul’s life is in Purgatory, and what After Hours bitterly suggests is that his lot is the same as it is for all of us.
After Hours—like many great films that (even subtly) challenge audiences—was met by the public with mixed reactions. Few people go to the movies to discover that their lives are a hopeless trap with no escape, and that their pointless job crunching numbers for a soulless corporate machine is probably what they’ll keep doing until they die. Even other popular Scorsese movies—even those grounded in reality—feature larger-than-life characters, and embrace a certain degree of escapism. Paul Hackett is an “everyman”, and his adventure in SoHo shakes his foundations so fundamentally that he spends most of After Hours trying to cut his losses and run screaming back to his stagnant office, to returning to a life of slowly decomposing under the gentle glow of fluorescent lighting. That’s depressing, especially for a comedy.
If everyday life for Paul is like Purgatory, Marcy’s alluring invitation to the dark side transforms the artsy life of SoHo “after hours” into a Dante-esque journey into the Inferno. He is ferried to the first layer of the abyss by a speed-demon taxi driver (Larry Block), who denies him any means of egress by (not once, but twice) parting him with his cash to go home if things get too hairy. The “Circle of Hell” in Dante’s Inferno that comes after Limbo is dedicated to Lust; this is what Marcy excites in Paul, compelling him to make this late-night booty call in the first place. (To be blunt, haven’t we all inconvenienced ourselves by degrees at the prospect of getting laid? And haven’t most of us had that blow up in our faces when our “fantasy girl” turns out to have real problems like Marcy?) Marcy entices Paul like a succubus—after all, he calls her up later that night, and drops everything to catch a cab just shy of midnight, which is certainly more expensive than taking the subway. Paul’s lust is ratcheted up further by Marcy’s sultry—and topless—sculptress roommate, Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino). She stokes his ardor by inviting him to work his hands over her sculpture, and then her shoulders for a massage, making him take off his shirt after he spills plaster on it. By the time Marcy does show up, he’s primed for passion; yet his patience wears thin as he slowly discovers Marcy isn’t looking for sex but friendly company, heralding the first of many tortures yet to come for poor Paul.
Paul’s progress through the neon-lit, rain-slicked streets of SoHo continue to resemble the stations of Dante’s journey through Hell, especially through its oddball denizens. Already on edge after Marcy, he flees through the pouring rain to catch the subway home, only to discover that the fares are now more than the loose change he has left in his pockets. Soaking and desperate, he retreats to a dive bar to contemplate his next move, where he encounters the helpful (if short-tempered) proprietor, Tom Schorr (John Heard), and his self-absorbed waitress with a beehive named Julie (Teri Garr). Tom’s initial offer to loan Paul the money to get home would cut the rest of the movie (and moral lesson) short, so of course the register jams. Tom’s brief outburst here—and his later reaction to hearing about the death of his girlfriend, “Marcy”—hints at deeper anger management issues, making him something of the scion for “Wrath” in this underworld realm. (Even his rolled-up sleeves add a suggestion of readiness for violence.) Conversely, Julie seems to see the world through her own bizarre lens. She claims to hate her job, but does nothing. When Paul reunites with her, she invites him into her apartment for shelter, but puts on bubblegum pop and sketches his portrait for her amusement, rather than show any genuine sympathy or consolation. Her ultimate revenge for some perceived slight against her by Paul is so extreme that it threatens his very life by stirring up an angry mob of “concerned citizens”. Julie’s solipsistic worldview is so defiantly at odds with any reasonable social behavior, that she embodies the spirit of the circle of Hell reserved for heretics.
It seems obvious to describe a pair of thieves named Neil and Pepe—performed by none other than comedy duo, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, a.k.a. Cheech and Chong—as the representation of the circle of Greed, though After Hours plays off of this in a couple of ways. Paul sees them loading Kiki’s TV into their van outside of her walk-up apartment and assumes they are stealing it; that she’s bound and gagged at the time does little to dispel this impression. The implication of this is that the series of burglaries being committed in the neighborhood are being performed by this larcenous duo, which is further supported by their van full of swag. (Pepe even comments about the irony of buying something legitimately only to have it stolen later, instead of just stealing it in the first place.) But the only thing we see them actually steal is the plaster cast around Paul at the end of the movie, because they mistake it for Kiki’s sculpture, which Pepe claims he purchased legally—so in essence, he’s only trying to reclaim it. Paul is branded the thief by Julie’s spiteful wanted posters, and is presumed to be a thief when he enters Tom’s apartment—albeit with Tom’s key and its ominous skull-in-a-top-hat keychain—by a pair of residents. Furthermore, Paul actually does steal twenty bucks from Kiki’s own screaming sculpture while storming out on Marcy, perhaps believing he’s entitled to a “refund” on services not rendered.
Gluttony is explored in a couple of off-hand ways in After Hours. The first is the all-night diner where Marcy takes Paul, operated by Pete (Dick Miller), who graciously comps their coffee if only because Marcy has an easy smile. When Paul returns, he is met instead by a gruff cashier (Victor Argo) who demands he order if he is to use the bathroom. Out of spite, Paul orders a cheeseburger he can’t afford, hits the restroom, then dashes. (The punchline comes later when he returns to the diner for a third time, and the surly cashier brings him his burger.) Paul could have just ordered a coffee instead but deliberately overdoes it. Why? Paul has built up an expectation of how his night was going to be, one that was supposed to be bigger and better than so many others in his miserable life that came before it, and he’s angry that it hasn’t panned out. He orders a juicy burger out of the idea of having something better than just boring “coffee”, even if he has no intention of eating it, just to fill some inner need. The other way that Gluttony is explored comes in the form of the bouncer (Clarence Felder) at Club Berlin, a punk/fetishist hot spot where Kiki tells Paul she’ll meet him and Marcy later...before Paul could tell her that Marcy offed herself. The nameless bouncer and Paul perform a routine drawn from a parable in Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, called “Before the Law”, as Paul desperately tries to gain admittance into the club. With regards to Dante’s Inferno, the bouncer is a stand-in for Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog of the circle of Gluttony—only here, he’s keeping sinners out instead of in.
Violence is the seventh circle of Hell, and the threat of it against Paul emerges after he encounters Gail (Catherine O'Hara), the surprisingly vicious operator of a Mister Softee ice cream truck. From the first, she (accidentally) smashes a taxi cab door into his arm, causing a cut through his blazer. (Just consider for a moment how hard someone would have to hit another with a car door to cause this kind of injury, and Gail already appears like someone who is in tune with violence, intended or otherwise.) She offers to let him use her phone, but is setting him up for a round of “psychological” violence back at her apartment, including interrupting him repeatedly as he attempts to get the phone number from information and dial a friend afterwards. (Note how Gail doesn’t offer him a pen and paper.) She even deliberately mishears his polite small talk to launch into an impassioned defense about her job, which Paul tactfully tries to ignore. But the real terror comes after Gail finds one of Julie’s posters of Paul; she threatens, “you’re dead, pal”, while armed with a sour expression before boarding her jolly food truck and assembling a posse to lynch poor Paul. It’s as if Gail was aching for a reason to unleash her fury against the world on someone, and Paul’s the perfect punching bag.
The penultimate layer of Hell is Fraud. Part of the film’s exploration of it is played for laughs after perhaps the only rational person left in SoHo mistakes Paul’s second solicitation to use a stranger’s telephone as an altogether different kind of solicitation. The stranger (Robert Plunket) is visibly disheartened at the revelation that his would-be one-night stand instead takes the opportunity to sum up the plot, while looking for sympathy for his plight; ironically, this makes Paul the “fraud” here. But more significantly, Paul is treated like a fraud or crook through much of After Hours, including by Tom’s antagonistic neighbors, an unsympathetic subway teller (Murray Moston) who wouldn’t give him a break to take the subway home, and even Kiki’s S&M enthusiast boyfriend, Horst (Will Patton), who chastises Paul when he comes up to check on the bound sculptress. (Notice how neither of them even bother to come down and open the door for Paul in either encounter. Instead, the keys are launched at the pavement for him to scoop up and let himself in.) Paul is treated poorly from the moment he steps into the fateful cab that takes him into SoHo. Compare this with his job, where he is clearly respected enough to train a disinterested new hire (Bronson Pinchot), and even his apartment—boring as it may be—is a safe place. Paul belongs in his world, and the twilight realm of SoHo comes across as scary and menacing to the straight-laced word processor.
Dante’s Inferno and After Hours both close with the final Circle of Hell: Treachery. In After Hours, this sin is deliberately inverted, and instead Paul experiences its virtuous counterpart in the form of charity from June (Verna Bloom), an enigmatic sculptress who “saves” Paul, both from a mob and his long night. Trapped in his waking nightmare, Paul often revisits locations looking for answers, which is how he comes to meet June at an artist’s showing that is far more restrained than his first visit to Club Berlin was. She saves him from Gail and her lynch mob by transforming him into an objet d’art, specifically a screaming plaster of Paris sculpture like Kiki’s, which ultimately serves as his ticket out of Hell. But before that, Paul shows a little tenderness to the withdrawn artist by inviting her to dance with him—he even puts on a tie. With a single quarter left to his name, he spends this widow’s mite to play “Is That All There Is?" by Peggy Lee, a song that becomes a badge for the fundamental need for something more from life—a question answered with cynicism, if the night’s events are any evidence. Paul opens his heart to June; and unlike his previous efforts to solicit sympathy through other encounters, he is vulnerable and doesn’t want someone to just placate his ego and tell him that he didn’t deserve all of the horrible things that happened to him. He just wants someone to know that he truly wants to live, and to find some transcendent meaning in all of it...to know that beneath all of the pain and humiliation, the meaningless rituals of everyday life, that there is something important...something good and kind. June doesn’t have the answers, and Paul isn’t really asking her for them. I think that Paul’s journey is the answer, and when he emerges from his plaster chrysalis at dawn, he understands that Purgatory can be Heaven if you let it be.