I recently wrote a book chapter arguing that Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81) stands as an important influence on American filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Even if one brackets off Scorsese’s own interest in Dostoevsky, which he has admitted in interviews over the years, it is clear that films such as Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), Life Lessons (1989), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) are concerned with classic Dostoevskian motifs such as urban loneliness and the (not always successful) quest to overcome psycho-spiritual despair. My essay was largely written in 2018, well before the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent crises. Indeed, if I were starting it today, I might instead focus on Scorsese’s underrated triumph After Hours (1985) and its relation to Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial (Der Prozess, 1925). The Trial begins with the arrest of a bank manager named Josef K., who is not told why he is being detained or to whom he is ultimately accountable. Kafka has fun with K.’s predicament, portraying his arresting officers as doltish bureaucrats, more bored than evil. Yet, as the story unfolds, the direness of K.’s situation becomes clearer. In one late scene, he is told a parable (published separately as “Before the Law” [Vor dem Gesetz] in 1915 and 1919) about a man who, for unknown reasons, is refused entry through an important passageway to “the law.” The man believes that, if persistent enough, he will eventually gain admittance. But he never does, foreshadowing K.’s own grim fate. Scorsese’s After Hours borrows more from The Trial’s comedic elements than from its tragic ones. However, the latter are never far from the surface—a point implied by the recurring appearance of a sculpture resembling Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream (Skrik, 1893). Scorsese’s protagonist Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) finds himself alone and lost in lower Manhattan, unable to go back uptown to where he lives. At first, this situation is more annoying than dangerous:
But later, in a scene that even quotes Kafka, things take a turn for the worse:
After a series of additional misadventures, followed by an absurd stroke of good fortune, Paul eventually makes it out of his quandary. But Scorsese’s ostensible “happy ending” leaves us with a question: in an unpredictable world, made no more happy or secure by modern amenities and tools, from where (or from whom) do we find the energy to keep going? It is telling, after all, that Paul winds up back at work the next day, poised to get on the hamster wheel again.
From Kafka’s The Trial: “What kind of people were they? What were they talking about? Which department did they belong to? After all, K. had rights, the country was at peace, the laws had not been suspended—who, then, had the audacity to descend on him in the privacy of his own home? He had always tended to avoid taking things too seriously, not to assume the worst…even when everything looked black. In this case, however, that did not seem to be the right approach.”