REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)

By: Anthony Miller
May 8, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

MIRACLE MILE | STEVE DE JARNATT | 1988

At 4:03 AM, three and a half hours late to meet a woman he has only just met and fallen for, Harry Washello answers the phone in the booth outside Johnie’s Coffee Shop Restaurant to discover the world is about to end. It’s a misdialed call from a missile silo. Chip is trying to reach his dad. “I can’t believe it but we’re locked into it,” he exclaims. “And you could get it back in an hour and ten. Maybe 75 minutes!” A prank? Machine-gun fire. Another voice: “Forget everything you just heard and go back to sleep.” As Harry blunders back into the diner, having overslept only to wake up into Armageddon, he finds himself transformed into Chicken Little.

How to describe Miracle Mile? A romantic apocalypse? An apocalyptic romance? At the La Brea Tar Pits, Harry (Anthony Edwards), a bespectacled big band era trombonist, meets Julie (Mare Winningham), an endearing waitress. (Edwards and Winningham became a married couple in 2021.) Has Harry met the love of his life? Is he sure the phone call was real?

Back in the diner, the countdown is on. Harry reiterates the call to Landa (Denise Crosby) and she gets on the horn to verify his story and mobilize a plan. Many of the diner’s pre-dawn denizens bolt with her to LAX to seek shelter in Antarctica. Harry must get Julie. Landa tells Harry about a chopper on the helipad on a local building. Our introduction to Landa provides my favorite bit in the film. From her metal briefcase on the counter, she removes Cliffs Notes to Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow! No such Cliffs Notes exist. Landa runs her finger Evelyn Wood-style across a passage while scrutinizing the stocks on the diner TV. What late twentieth-century augury is this? (Notice the Tarot reader slumbering in a booth?) The Pynchon reference is a harbinger. A screaming will come across the sky.

We follow Harry on After Hours-esque encounters through a nocturnal L.A. to find Julie. Most of the action takes place within the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard which shares its name with the film. Tangerine Dream, purveyors of essential Eighties soundtracks (Thief, Risky Business, Near Dark), contribute a shimmering score that accentuates the anxiety and the unreality. Harry and Julie are reunited in the end, once again at the tar pits. Downed by an EMP, their helicopter joins Howard Ball’s doleful mammoth sculpture in the Miracle Mile’s primeval mire. A direct hit will metamorphose them, Harry consoles Julie. They’ll become diamonds.

At the corner of Fairfax and Wilshire, Johnie’s still stands, closed since 2000. Going past, I hear the ringing phone Harry picks up. From Johnie’s past LACMA and the white tower of the 5900 building (without a helipad) down to the Page Museum and the Tar Pits, Wilshire Boulevard looks to me like the scene of an accident I witnessed or a setting of a nightmare that stayed with me after waking. Sometimes I will ask the person with me, “Have you seen Miracle Mile?”

Most original disaster film? Still undersung Eighties classic? Your Miracle Mileage may vary. De Jarnatt’s film is a romance wrapped in a fever dream inside a doomsday fantasia.

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REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12)

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