The Dark Backward: A Freakish Touch

With thanks to J.G. Michel, host of the Parallax Views podcast, I have been taking in the films of Adam Rifkin. Rifkin strikes me as the rare journeyman-auteur hybrid. His filmography looks like a Jackson Pollack, covering everything from Charlie Sheen-narrated sororial dramas to sex-laden slashers and comedies starring wrestlers. Almost all “trash” by typical, middlebrow standards but always rich in canted angles and pitch perfect cuts.

He does it all, it seems, for studios. Maybe for the money. But never without his own touch. I’d say he’s Soderbergh’s heir, if they weren’t almost the same age.

Nowhere is this fact clearer than in Rifkin’s purest of his own films in his own telling: The Dark Backward (1991). It’s the kind of work I’d almost rather say nothing about—its world a trash-filled alter-New York populated by sweaty freaks and conniving mustaches, all of whom think they’re the normal ones. Our protagonist is a meek, failing comic aptly named Marty Malt (Judd Nelson). He lisps his jokes in the voice of an abused teacher, screamed over by hordes of manic children. Except in Marty’s case no one ever makes noise. No one laughs. And then the body horror starts.

The film is so unabashedly itself, so hilarious in its commitment to deadpan deliveries and sad ironies that I cannot help but recommend it. It’s best I saw less. Give Rifkin a shot—reach out and touch freak.