LIVE FROM MEMPHIS

"I can't get this exploitation auteur mask off," says Mike McCarthy. Sitting in India Palace over plates heaping from the subcontinental lunch buffet, we are supposed to be talking about the Thursday evening premiere of his new movie Cigarette Girl, but instead the conversation has meandered  through Robert A. Heinlein, Paul Verhooven, Leni Riefenstahl, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Herron, and now, Camille Paglia. "You combine Sexual Personae with Elvis Presley, and you get a great deal of my work," he says. 

^{Danny Vinson as Cowboy and Cori Dials as Cigarette Girl}

When I say I am reminded of the quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.", McCarthy laughs, because he has been pretending to be an exploitation auteur for a long time. Long before Craig Brewer drank his first draft at the P & H, before Morgan Jon Fox and Brandon Hutchinson cobbled together enough equipment in the basement of the First Congregational Church to call it a Co-Op, McCarthy was creating daring—and often baffling—films in the Bluff City. Works like Teenage Tupelo and Superstarlet A. D. were taken as bits of grindhouse-revival indie insanity, complete with gritty production values and generous use of bare, generous bosoms. But there has always been an undercurrent of ideas in his films beyond a wild combination of the director's obsessions with comic books, rock and roll, and drive-in movies. "I was trying to tell a story and spell things out without, you know, spelling things out," he says. McCarthy doesn't like being lumped in with sadistic horror films. Cigarette Girl is a movie about a woman turned killer, but she's not a mindless butcher like Halloween's Jason Vorhees. "I think that's offensive and I don't want to see that," he says. "When the Frankenstein Monster throws the little girl in the lake, that's a horror movie." 

Cigarette Girl is set in a future Memphis where coffin nails have been banned and smokers banished to a ghetto called the "Smoking Section". Resemblances to the present day, where smoking is increasingly marketed towards and identified with the lower- and under-class are no coincidence. "It's an art film," he says. "You used to have to watch art films at grindhouses. Is it an art film or an exploitation film? Why can't it be both?" The corset-and-stocking clad anti-heroine, identified not by her own name, but as her job ("Her mask," the director says), is less Hannibal Lector and more Gary Cooper. "The violence in Cigarette Girl is very drive-in violence," McCarthy says. "That's different than the violence you're going to see at the mall in any movie. It's candy-coated and specialized for a certain aesthetic."

^{Ivy Mclemore as Runaway}

McCarthy said the idea for the film grew from the character. "Cori Dials came here in March, 2008 for the OnLocation Memphis Film Festival," he recalls. "Hours before she got on the plane, we did a cigarette girl photoshoot with just the costume we could find at Mr. Lincoln's. Then she got on a plane and left. But that photoshoot was the beginning of it all." McCarthy knew that Dials' smokey charisma could hold a movie together and wrote the script around the character. "She's my gothic Brigitte Bardot," he says. "If you don't quite have a million bucks, but you have somebody who looks like a million bucks, then you have a million bucks." The story—equal parts Escape from New York and High Noon—draws parallels between environmental degradation and the loss of humanity that comes with the modern world. "Man fights a pointless battle against the planet," McCarthy says. "If the solar system is a bar, the Earth is the ashtray in the corner. We're all so alone. If you look for it, you can see it on people's faces." That this complex of ideas is presented in the form of a movie about a hot chick with a gun is typical McCarthy. "I'm breaking down the terminology to present something personal," he says. "It needs to be taken the wrong way. I was designed to be taken the wrong way."

^{J. Lazarus Hawk as Ace}

Helen Bowman provides the film's gravitas as Cigarette Girls' dying, addicted grandmother, and filmmaker J. Lazarus Hawk's turn as a shadowy underworld figure named Ace is chilling. The film was shot in subdued, shadowy noir by mononymned cinematographer Wheat. "You've got to give props to Wheat for what he did," McCarthy says. The film's gritty look was completed by visual effects guru H. G. Ray. "I've never worked with anyone who would do the practical bullet wounds on set and then go back and add to them in post," McCarthy says. The haunting soundtrack was created by cellist Jonathan Kirksey. "He's the most underappreciated, cinematic musician in this town," McCarthy says. "He wrote 145 pages of arranged music." 

The end result is the best film of McCarthy's career, a postmodern parable of psychosexual fear disguised as a scholcky romp. "Nature is personified by women," he says. "The power of woman is represented in Mother Nature, the Femme Fatale, and all of these other images we have in fiction." Maybe, like Cigarette Girl's male betrayers, we secretly expect an avenging woman to come pay us back for our sins. And maybe we secretly think we deserve it. And if all this seems a little scary, maybe that's kind of the point. "I want to encourage people to embrace their repulsion," McCarthy says.

^{Photographs by Robin Tucker}

Cigarette Girl premieres at Studio on the Square on Thursday, September 10 at 7:00 and 7:30 PM.