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This week's Answer: Foggy
Writing
Hello, Morgan, and thank you for your question,
which I'll try to answer as best I can without venturing into the film
critic's corner. (You're not the Morgan who was the last man on
earth and whom the ungrateful dead always tried to eliminate when
night came, are you? I figure Charlton Heston would only do a
drama based on a true story. Maybe not.)
I guess the best way I can put it is that The
Fog is a big foggy. Both literally and figuratively.
Let's focus on the figurative side, shall we? I'm not perfectly
clear exactly what the story is about besides some conned and
mistreated lepers returning from the sea to seek revenge on a town
where they were expecting to take up residence (sounds like a typical
anti-developers story to me). Apparently the leper colony's
leader has a great deal of supernatural powers such as being able to
catapult hapless townies through windows when they're closed, start
things and people on fire, and cut humans with swirling glass.
And he knocks on doors very nicely, too. Maybe he got his power
from the fog, which moves in from the sea and onto the Oregon island
(I didn't even know Oregon had an island. It must be covered by
fog all the time.) whenever it has a mind to. The powers of the
fog or ghastly arms that seem to come out of it through drains and
other such places where fog lurks unbeknownst to those who do not
understand the ways of fog seem to incorporate the ability to grab,
hold onto -- unless it lets go -- and turn innocent humans into
darkly-blotched and eventually very crisp creatures that become
skeletons before they hit the floor. The fog also seems to like
little boys who only want to play at the shore (hmm. Could we
have a pedophilial fog here by any chance?) The fog also seems to have
it in for old, harmless sea codgers. If you're a wizened sea
captain or somebody who looks like they want to be one and wear a
captain's cap, and you happen to pick up a buried rope in the sand
that leads out to sea or just happens to like dogs, the fog apparently
can get you, too (and your little dog, too!).
It's usually helpful when endings clearly inform
the viewer exactly what he or she has been watching, clarifying what
has gone before and explaining the why's, what's, when's, and
whatnot's. In the case of The Fog, this is not clearly
the case (in case you were wondering). The upset lepers (and who
wouldn't be if one were betrayed and locked in one's own ship, which
was set fire, only to break out and end up in the ocean's depths --
but more importantly, and much worse, lose one's hairbrush and watch
and some other thing that nobody knows what it is?) end up in the
cemetery, setting afire the father of somebody connected to the town
-- after cutting to death a priest who didn't know what to do in every
scene but drink alcohol (better writing would have been to have him
cut to death by his own liquor bottle), and the leader of the upset
lepers, Captain Leper, who must have had much more charm than the
young, attractive boyfriend (who looked a lot like Superboy only with
something on his face that resembled a beard or three days worth of
super hair growth) somehow manages to merge and disappear with the
female who returned to the island of bad development ideas and looked
a lot like somebody in a picture with the captain before (or was it
"after"?).
And why did that poor dog have to be fried to
death (or whatever it was that happened to it?)
The through-line of the screenplay is that
everything eventually returns from the sea. Or something pithy
and profound like that. I was thinking (and I don't mean to be a
revengeful leper who lost out on a good development deal and
returns from the sea)...
Maybe this screenplay shouldn't have.
DcH
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