First of all, if you haven’t seen the 1985 Martin Scorsese movie After Hours, you’ll need to stop right now and come back to this interview after you’ve watched the movie. I say this partly because there are spoilers, but mostly because the movie is great and acts as a scaffold for Ben Tanzer’s examination of grief, absurdity, fatherhood, and the creative life in his latest book, After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema. Okay, I’ll wait.
Back now? How did it go? Wild, right? After Hours feels delightfully different from most popular movies being made today, not just in its brief running time, but in its wholesale disregard for causality and its embrace of randomness. A similar movie in 2025 would need an extra thirty minutes exploring the protagonist Paul Hackett’s trauma backstory, perhaps scenes with his therapist detailing why he’s psychologically determined to have such a rough night. Does he deserve it? None of us deserve it. We get it anyway. Just like grief.
In following the hero’s escalating misfortunes over a night in SoHo, After Hours offers us not only a gritty portrait of mid-80s New York City, but a reminder of, as film critic Koraljka Suton put it, the “Kafkaesque notion of being stuck inside an absurd system without any means of getting out.” Often grief can feel like that; we never know what random association will have us taking turns down alleys of memory into seedy bars and dark apartments steeped in despair. Thankfully, unlike Paul Hackett, we’ve got a guide.
Jeremy T. Wilson
This book is a bit of a Frankenstein monster, assembling parts of self-help, memoir, film criticism, hagiography, interviews, and diaries into your own creation. How did this project come to be?
Ben Tanzer
I kind of love that metaphor—a Frankenstein monster, and assuming of course we remember that we’re encouraged to feel empathy and love for the monster and not fear. Still, if Frankenstein’s monster represents a living, breathing, organic creature we project our emotions onto—love, fear, grief, hope, sadness, anger, and so on, I dig the metaphor even more. Anyway, I always thought Ig Publishing’s Bookmarked series was very cool—authors writing about books they love, and I always wanted to write about my feelings and intense attachment for/to The Basketball Diaries. I had all these ideas for what I’d pitch—this multi-faceted approach to creating something live wire, and this desire to capture how the book had inspired my life. That never happened. But then I was invited to pitch them on their new Auteur series, authors writing about the movies they love, and I knew immediately I could only write about After Hours, which was even better than writing about The Basketball Diaries (which still made its way into this book) because now I could write about two of my favorite yet intertwined compulsions—being a creative, and grief. It also still felt to me that such a project called for something that wasn’t quite so straightforward, because these topics aren’t. Not for me.
Jeremy T. Wilson
Yet within your not-so-straightforward approach is an attempt to categorize or at least give structure to an experience as nebulous as grief through an examination of the film After Hours and its significance to your family. As you know, we have many things in common; here’s another: my first attempt at writing as an adult was an exploration of grief after my father died, in which I used the ritual of baseball attendance as my lens. What is it about loss and grief (and maybe more specifically fathers and sons) that compels us to come up with these very strange practices?
Ben Tanzer
I don’t believe there’s any one way to grieve. It’s individual and we all need to find ways to work through the suck. I also believe that no one understands how that’s supposed to work and this is where your question, your writing, and my book in this case find themselves lodged—how am I supposed to get through this, and how do I make sense of something so senseless? Yes, you can talk about the stages of grief and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ model for that but that’s a framework, and a way to say, okay this is what I feel today. And I love frameworks; however, we need things to grab hold of if we’re going to make sense of anything at all and what we’re likely to grab hold of is what we know or are attached to.
My family valued many things—travel, museums, art of all kinds, protest, talking, New York City, being cultural Jews, drinking coffee, taking pictures, and on and on. And we really loved watching movies, especially Scorsese’s. So, when someone says do you want to write about a movie, it has to be After Hours, because it speaks to New York City, dread, feeling trapped, and it’s funny and almost violent, and that reminds me of my dad and what he loved. So, if it’s connected to my dad, it’s about grief, and how ineffable his loss is, yet also his desire to be a great artist, and the struggles he had, something we talked about all the time.
Then there’s my brain—I’m so interested in everything and I try to consume everything, all media, all politics, all pop culture, all criticism, every podcast, every movie and television show, all the books, I want to meet everyone, eat everywhere, and drink every drink, and make every minute of every day mean something, and minimally feel something. Given that, what else would an exploration of grief, creativity, and making a life look like, but an embrace of everything I care about and makes me happy?
Jeremy T. Wilson
A common thread in baseball and After Hours and the Wizard of Oz (you mention as one of Scorsese’s favorite movies) and countless other stories is the idea that we are all trying to find our way home. I sense a similar dislocation in these pages. How is this book an attempt to find your way home?
Ben Tanzer
My belief about our desire to find home—and this most certainly has something to do with returning to the womb, and our need to feel safe and protected, is that the misnomer is that one is searching for some physical place we once knew, or might know, and that somehow that’s attainable. And of course there are times for some of us, that returning to the place of our birth or childhood, whether the actual home or city we come from, offers some sense of that. However, I’d suggest that finding one’s way home begins in finding one’s way to self, knowing who we are, what we want, where our passions and limitations lie, and what allows us to potentially be our best, at times, most effective selves. That’s certainly what After Hours is, a person in search of his better self. It’s what Scorsese wanted when he made the movie and he wasn’t quite sure he’d get there, or back to there—how many masterpieces do you need? It’s certainly what I was searching for as I wrote this book—how can I be my best self if I’ve played things safe, have at times fought succumbing to grief, other times drank too much, all the while acknowledging I’m in an ongoing battle between my desire to pay the bills, be a present and loving human, and the competing, equal, sometimes all-consuming, desire to create something glorious.
Jeremy T. Wilson
I want to return to what you said about needing things to grab hold of if we’re going to make sense of anything at all, yet After Hours suggests that making sense of anything is a fool’s errand. How do you square these apparently diametric positions: the absurdity of modern life versus your love of frameworks?
Ben Tanzer
This is a great question. It’s also posed as an either…or, versus say a both…and. These positions may be diametric, though I’m not sure they are. I’d reframe the main thrust of your question as one of the key facets to understanding the movie, though also really one of the key facets of this discussion—to understand modern life, and life, period, we need to embrace the endless paradoxes we face, and the endless obstacles we encounter that don’t allow us to face those paradoxes, including, and especially, ourselves. Which is also to say, I don’t believe it’s a fool’s errand. The question is whether we’re ready to do the work of becoming more aware of how we get in our own way. This is also at the heart of the book. I’ve been writing all these years, and yet it’s only in working on this book, I was struck that I’m most drawn to watching, and crafting, characters who are self-aware enough to know better, and make better decisions, yet not able to allow themselves to do so. They feel trapped, by themselves, and I find this fascinating.
One of the reasons I’ve always been obsessed with After Hours is that it came at a point in Scorsese’s career where his previous movie, King of Comedy—a classic—was considered a flop, and he found himself trapped in “director prison,” i.e., no one would take a chance on his next movie. To address this, he revisited his indie roots and made a movie about feeling trapped as he worked his way out of being trapped. Then he was off and running again. He adjusted and he went back to the “frameworks” he understood. Paul Hackett can’t figure this out. To some extent my father couldn’t figure it out either—how to feel less trapped and more successful. He didn’t have “frameworks” to draw on and then died too soon to figure it out. I have done things I loved most of my adult life and been able to pay my bills. I’ve also played it safe in terms of having a creative life. Living 9-5, with steady paychecks and health insurance, a 401(k), is not sexy, and in the context of this question it represents its own kind of fool’s errand. This is the paradox I’ve tried to manage for 25-plus years—make cool shit, like my dad or Scorsese, keep it safe with work that supports you and your family, find peace in the process.
Jeremy T. Wilson
It seems to me that you and Scorsese and the movie itself are answering my previous question in a similar way: art provides a means of exploring the paradox. In the end of After Hours, Paul quite literally has to become art to be saved. This is similar to the ending of your novel The Missing, where Gabriel’s act of creation is what ultimately salvages the family. Do you think this meta-narrative about the role of art is one reason the movie was so significant for you and your father?
Ben Tanzer
I’m going to start with addressing what it means to me to be saved. Is Paul’s life at stake in After Hours? It feels like it is to him, and when he is saved, what happens? He ends up arriving at the office in time for work. Did Scorsese feel After Hours saved his life? Not literally I imagine, yet the movie was made in an effort to save his creative life, and I wonder if he can separate his creative life from normal life. Is there even a normal life for an artist? My life is better because I started writing. Not just the act of writing, but being in it, the community, the dialogue(s), the drinks, and the readings. And I believe this is the true paradox here—can we live the lives we want to live without the art we create? I suspect it’s about having a thing that feels like a gift and not a hobby. A thing you can’t not think about all day long, or marinate in, a frame for your day, week, month, life about how you see the world and want to live in it.
One of the tensions for the protagonists in The Missing is that they don’t have a thing that elevates their lives beyond being parents and suddenly their daughter is missing. A creative act does save their emotional lives, though I also believe it’s something else—they fight through all the things that have left them stuck, trapped, without direction, and seeking out self-destructive alternatives. They surrender to the possibility that maybe something better can happen for them and that there may be hope. I believe that’s what Scorsese was trying to untangle with After Hours. Is there hope? You and I are writers; Scorsese is a filmmaker; my father was a painter. We don’t have a choice about making art, a switch is flipped, we’re in a new head space and we’re not able to leave it. Which is a paradox within the paradox. We’re trapped by something we have chosen to be trapped by. So, did After Hours appeal to my father and I for all the reasons we’re discussing here? It had to. The thing is, while the act of making art allows us to explore the paradox, it also allows us to live in a different, sometimes better, more enriching paradox that exists within the paradox. And sometimes, that’s enough.
NON-FICTION
After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema
By Ben Tanzer
Ig Publishing
Published May 6, 2025
