Memory in the Meat: John McNaughton's The Borrower
- heathermariedrain
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
Everywhere you look, that heavy feeling of jaded malaise hangs over you like the dankest smog…especially when it comes to genre cinema. In a sea of intellectual properties, fast-food film franchises, and remakes, the yearning for original storytelling has long gone into full-blown hunger pains!
So thank god for John McNaughton and his 1991 science-fiction/horror/comedy film, The Borrower.
The Borrower opens up in a room of massive white light.
Wait, are we in heaven or Las Vegas?
Turns out neither, since the illuminated room is actually a spaceship heading to destination Earth, with the aim being less conquest and more punishment, since this is a prisoner transport. Their species, though unnamed, is humanoid only in verbal skills and being bipedal and is otherwise insectoid. Except that the prisoner has been physically altered, or as the officer says, “genetically devolved,” into a human being as punishment. Even worse, they are dropping him off to Earth as the final capper to his sentence. Our very fragility and biology is the universe’s version of Alcatraz or Riker’s Island to higher beings, which is both brilliant and brilliantly depressing. If Sartre can say that hell is other people, then The Borrower is letting us know that it is not full damnation but is still a mucky-ass punishment.
Meanwhile, on that little blue marble where we’re all still trying to scream before we crawl, it’s nighttime in America. A father and his adult aged son bicker while waiting to illegally hunt deer via a rifle with a homemade silencer fashioned out of a two-liter soda bottle. Before I can start having more bad flashbacks to the family reunions of my childhood, Bob Laney (Tom Towles) and his son, Kip (Bentley Mitchum), are about to experience the worst strain of a “meet cute” as they witness the unnamed alien prisoner being dropped off by his saurian-meets-insectile captor.
The first of many messy follies begins here, with Laney and son assuming that the prisoner, because he is human (in appearance), is the victim in this situation and Bob in particular, jumps up and shoots the interstellar law officer dead. Checking on the prisoner goes about as well as meeting any cannibalistic hothead-psycho from outer space (oh god, here comes those bad family reunion memories again) who is trapped in a human body. Speaking of that, a major flaw in the design of that punishment pops up as his head explodes in piñata torrent of stringy flesh, goo, and righteous alien anger.
In a fine bit of the American entrepreneurial spirit, Bob has his son leave to go bring a bigger vehicle to haul the carcass with the hopes to sell it to the latest bidder. Now, this little detail is everything. It reveals both the absurdity of living in a world where everything is so rooted in money and capitalism that even a strange corpse ushers in the almighty sound of cha-cha-ching, as well as the hard scrabble situation of poor working class folk like the Laneys. When you’re bumming cigarettes from your adult son and fashioning soda bottles into silencers, life has definitely not handed you the fairest deal to start with.
Charles Bukowski once wrote that nobody suffers like the poor and Bob Laney ends up being poor in more ways than one as the prisoner’s body lives up to the title and literally “borrows” his head by ripping it clean off his body! Kip returns to the grisly site and immediately alerts the authorities, for the first and probably last time of his life. Meanwhile, law enforcement, in the form of detectives Diana Prince (Rae Dawn Chong) and Charles Krieger (Don Gordon), already have their hands full when a serial rapist and murderer, Scully (Neil Giuntoli), escapes after assaulting the female officer that was watching him.
From there we see the chain continue to link, as the Borrower soon rejects Laney’s head and takes the head of Julius (Antonio Fargas), a kind homeless man who befriended him and helped the confused being better navigate the streets. Between the newly escaped Scully and the strange pile of headless bodies slowly growing, law enforcement, and especially Diana, are knee deep in a bad, mad sea.
With The Borrower, John McNaughton creates something that is impossible for 99% of filmmakers and that is he is able to blend in humor and even darkly-tinged whimsy while simultaneously delivering a bleak worldview. Having Tom Towles, who first came to prominence to many a riveted (and more than a little traumatized) viewer with McNaughton’s debut, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, be the actor that plays the first human who is “borrowed” was the kind of right casting choice that is the living definition of inspired.
An underrated artist of unfathomable range, Towles goes from knuckle-dragging hillbilly bumming smokes off of his equally drain-bamaged son to a cannibalistic stranger from a strange land with blazing believability and commitment. When he’s Bob Laney, you can practically smell the cheap beer, Pall Malls, and gas station burrito grease off of the screen. As he morphs, the way he moves and walks and talks changes completely. As our iconic Borrower (because heck, it is Tom’s grin and new wave style sunglasses that’s on the poster and video art), Towles puts in this great mix of humor, brute force, and, somehow, guilelessness, that not only makes him compelling but also not the villain. (Granted, Tom Towles is one of those cats that could just make a toasted cheese sandwich and be full-tilt riveting.)
Villainy, something that is always handled smartly in many of McNaughton’s films, most definitely exists in The Borrower, but not quite in the ways you would expect. The OG Borrower is a classic bad guy, but he’s out of the picture before the twenty minute mark. With each new human head, he absorbs parts of his victims’ traits and even memories. Bob Laney, while no father of the year (but really, most aren’t) isn’t a horrible human. At worst, he’s a goober and a low-level criminal, but in a world of billionaires and other elites that view us all as expendable, Laney is not part of any major problem. (Except to those poor deer, that mercifully never show up. Which, now that I think of it, what kind of game were they aiming for while driving a compact car? I digress.)
But if you feel a little bad for Laney and his version of the Borrower, then it is devastation time when poor Julius gets beheaded and absorbed. First of all, Antonio Fargas, much like Towles, is one of our great and often unheralded actors. He is, no shock, so terrific here, with his natural charisma being put to perfect use. This character was so refreshing to see too, because it can be an all too rare occurrence to see someone who is homeless humanized. (Again, see, what’s scarier--one alien who, sure, might behead you versus losing the roof over your head because you get fired, local rents get raised to an obscene level, bad medical bills, addiction issues, etc. One bad is fiction, while the other is horror too real.)
Julius is a salt of the Earth character, which makes his demise such a bummer. That said, his iteration of the Borrower is the least violent, which is a nice and thoughtful touch.
Meanwhile, while all of this flesh ripping renewal process is going on, the very much earthy horror of Scully being loose and with his endgame target being primed on Diana. McNaughton is such a brilliant director. Even the grisliest parts with the alien are tinged with workable comedy and a sci-fi whimsy, but you can never get too cozy, because this genuinely terrifying psycho-sexual predator is on the loose. Anytime you might get too comfortable, McNaughton reaches through the screen and gently grabs you by the scruff of the neck, just to remind you that this is the man that traumatized you with his beautifully disturbing debut a short handful of years before. He’s done it once and will do it again.
The scene where Scully strips and assaults the female officer is legitimately creepy not because of the obvious, which is bad enough, but in the deft way it is handled. We actually see very little but the tight editing and expert use of audio makes it seep under the dermis nice and tight.
The balance between the science-fiction horror and more police procedural is a precarious one here, but never tips too much to one side. In fact, by the end, the true fear has less to do with any one foe, whether it’s from land or outer space, but more that we live in a society structured in where your cries for help will land on deaf ears regardless. It’s that sticky sweet kiss of the bleak that raises The Borrower from a fun ride to an essential one.
Surface level, McNaughton’s filmography is the living definition of genre and storytelling variety, but the common thread that unites all of them is the man’s innate ability to reveal genuine and raw truth about our existence. The Borrower is a key and unfairly undercooked at part of that tapestry.
Until now.
You know what to do.
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