All right, I hope this is not an abuse of my posting priviledges here, but I thought there might be a chance that someone here could help me. There’s bit in the Tank Girl movie with Lori Petty where Malcolm McDowell says,
“Eight, eight, the burning eight. Between Sunday and Monday hangs a day so dark it will devastate.”
Okay, what the hell is that from? (Might also be “The burning hate”?) Surely that’s not original to the movie; there’s got to be a source, hasn’t there? But Google turns up nothing but quotes from Tank Girl itself. McDowell later quotes some variation on “Abandone all hope, ye who enter here” from Dante, but the “burning eight” bit does’t turn up in a cursory glance of the English translation of The Inferno I have.
If anybody out there could tell me the source, or if it really is an invention of the screenwriter, I would appreciate the hell out if it, because it’s been driving me crazy since Friday.
Oh, and um … so that I’m actually providing some measure of content and not just a plea for assistance … Okay, I know that Tank Girl gets a bad rap, particularly among comics fans who see it as a travesty to the source material. And I guess it sort of is a travesty to the source material. But divorced from all that, it’s still a pretty iconoclastic movie. In the pantheon of Early To Mid Nineties Sci-Fi Dystopia Movies Made On A Modest Budget, it’s a very fun and unusual experience (and I will watch Malcolm McDowell in pretty much anything, frankly). This is a movie in which Lori Petty gets a weird haircut and takes a bath in sand, Iggy Pop cameos as a pedophile, a bizarre animated interlude takes the place of a proper ending, two songs by Bjork are played, and Ice-T receives second billing as a mutated kangaroo-man designed by Stan Winston’s company. It’s a testament to that insanity of the Hewlett and Martin comics that a movie like this comes off a totally watered-down, cleaned-up Hollywood adaptation. It could have been a little better, but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. At least it was directed by someone who wanted to get some of the visual feel and anarchic flavor of the comics, and who hard the absolute nerve to make a sci-fi movie with a female lead who wasn’t “conventionally” hot.
Weird thing, though, the box to the DVD has a banner across the top that says “AVANT-GARDE CINEMA,” and that’s probably stretching it. Avant-garde a clue, maybe. (Joke copyright 1968 George Harrison.)
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My copy of Fritz The Cat has that same Avant-Garde Cinema label.
Make of that what you will.
Could it have been written for the film as part of the script?
My Google-fu brings up the Kesslee quote, though occasionally it’s listed as “Eight, Eight, the burning hate,” mostly in reference to California’s Proposition 8.
Tank Girl is a very guilty pleasure movie. It can be quite entertaining in the proper context.
ITs really fun
Mmmm, Jet Girl.
I *did* love the kangaroo dance.
I second the “guilty pleasure movie”. Plus the soundtrack is pretty darned good. No help on the quote though I’m afraid…
Love the movie. Had the movie poster on my wall through most of my teens and into my 20s. (It became a casualty of ‘redecorating’ according to my girlfriend.)
‘Thief’ on the soundtrack is what got me into Belly and I now have every Belly and Tanya Donelly release available.
Regarding your question, I’m pretty sure it was written for the movie and intended to be bad poetry. It sure feels like something written in 8th grade english class.
Obviously if there never was an original source, there’s only one thing to do. Recreate the rest of the poem.
“Eight, eight, the burning eight. Between Sunday and Monday hangs a day so dark it will devastate.”
It’s a clue. There’s a golden rabbit buried under a rock somewhere and this refers to… Henry VIII’s first wife!!! Wait, someone already solved that…
Huh, I guess maybe it is original to the movie. It’s damn weird, though, out of the blue like that, that the number eight should trigger a poem that doesn’t relate to the situation at all except for the number. So well done, screenwriter, for fooling me.
JamesK: Heh, I actually thought about recreating the rest of the poem as per your suggestion for a moment, and then I decided that it would be more worth my time to do ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL.
Gr8 St8 Db8’s Cr8’s Gr8 H8 R8’s M8’s
That’s my theory of Eight 🙂