how to kill your sex life in one difficult lesson

Cannibal Holocaust
1980

Why analyse an infamous schlock horror flick nearly as old as myself, especially one with such an unoriginal and heavy-handed moral as Cannibal Holocaust?  Especially when, barely a generation past Auschwitz and Dachau, said schlock horror grabs that shock value for its title?

Because it hurt to watch, and in the sense of pure horror—a thing of the wordless id—Cannibal Holocaust is worth some study and, guardedly here, emulation.

Anyone conscious in the late nineties will recognise the beginning: a team of young, photogenic and vaguely repellent filmmakers venture into the wild to document an eldritch corner of modern (Western) humanity’s fears, and disappear, leaving behind only spooky footage.  In this case, they are seeking the Yanomamo tribe, cannibals in deep jungle that “civilized man has never seen.”  The words “civilized” and “civilization” (and later, “savage” and “primitive”) crop up roughly three time each per minute of footage, making me suspect that Ruggero Deodato wanted his savvy audience to pick up on some subtle theme.

Cue professor Harold Monroe of NYU’s anthropology department publicised decision to penetrate the jungle himself with the rain forest’s answer to Crocodile Dundee as a guide, to rescue the filmmakers or, at the very least, their footage.  The first animal, a spider monkey (or possibly a raccoon-like coatimundi), is killed on screen, ostensibly for food, its front paws gripping the knife.  Several more animals are killed on film, sometimes just inefficiently, but sometimes cruelly.  They meet first one tribe, the “Yacumo,” via an extended rape and murder scene (the director’s go-to move throughout the film), who are wary of more Western visitors but lead them on to the Yanomamo and Shamatari—tribes named after highly studied indigenous people in Brazil who little resemble their portrayal here and, by 1980, had become significantly more modern as a result of continuous contact with outside researchers and miners.

Monroe locates and bargains for the miraculously intact documentary footage—after chowing down on partly cooked human entrails—but discovers upon his return to the land of fresh underwear that the footage shows that the filmmakers herded the Yacumo tribe into a hut and deliberately burned many of them to death, planning to edit the footage into an example of a Yanomamo attack.  Monroe is the only Western character who objects to broadcasting a version of the footage that casts the dead filmmakers as innocent victims, and only convinces the others after showing them further footage of the gang rape and grisly murder of a native woman, as well as the filmmakers’ own well deserved executions by the Yanomamo tribe. 

The vast majority of fake brutalities (aside from the real animal deaths) happen to women, and almost all have a sexual component.  In defence of his gender, the husband postulates that this is standard fare in horror flicks because it is more frightening to the male audience.  Men are culturally encoded as the perpetrators and victims of violence, particularly in coming-of-age scenarios, but physically hurting women is a reinforced taboo.  Watching fictional representations of women being hurt should thus make a socially “normal” man feel more visceral pain than seeing a grown man assaulted, who “should” be able to defend himself.

More cynically, I wonder if it doesn’t fulfil a semi-conscious masturbatory urge, giving the audience more of a visceral response to seeing the gender that has the power to sexually reject the overt or implied sexual advances of insecure, unlucky, or socially repellent males.  In Cannibal Holocaust, however, unlike the quick edits—teases of pain—of  traditional gore flicks and even later meme-droppings like Hostel, the pain and gore is drawn out, too sickening to allow any but the most sadistic to maintain the hazy arousal.

The on-screen killings of animals creates an infamous halo effect over the cinéma vérité style brutalities against humans.  This film was banned in many countries upon its release under the mistaken belief it was a snuff film (accidentally supported by the contracts that held the actors to not appear in any media for a year after filming), although the special effects are often clearly visible.  The viewer, however, has just seen several animals killed in torturous manners, and the more primitive lobes of the brain refuse to believe that the human victims are just actors pretending to rape and dismember.

It’s terrifyingly effective, in a way that most horror films can only pretend to feed the alligators, in Stephen King’s term.

It’s possible the director deliberately conflated rape with sex in some scenes to draw a contrast between the natives and the filmmakers.  The filmmakers don’t directly assault their script girl, perhaps because she is something of an equal, or because she is in a relationship with one of them, but she is the target of visual violation.  Twice when she’s vulnerable, her partners film her nude, and continue to film as she attempts to cover herself and deflect attention to other possible victims.  She can’t stop the filming or get an apology; her only option is to laugh it off.

The indigenous women are fair targets.  The men rape a Yanomamo woman, while their female colleague protests not the act but their filming of it, and joke that they’ll be able to sell it as a porno movie.  Afterward, they film documentary footage of the same woman, impaled on a pike, smirks peeking through solemn expressions as one narrates that she was likely killed by her own people due to an obsession with virginity.

When indigenous characters rape, it’s emphasised to be punitive, as prelude to execution for adultery or murder.  There’s a clear divergence between assault and reproductive or recreational sex. 

The contrasting attitudes to women and sex, however, are only part of the false moral relativism (the savages commit horrible assaults on each other, but it’s their way and we can’t hope to understand) and false liberal enlightenment (the Western, civilised characters are worse, raping for fun and murdering for profit).  The film’s view of indigenous people is purely colonial.  They are both inhumanly violent lunatics and innocent victims of corrupt Westerners, two stereotypical sides of the same outside judgements.   Their own point of view and interior lives remain opaque.

The same year this movie was released, white South African writer JM Coetzee published Waiting for the Barbarians, set in a universal colony surrounded by unspecified barbarians.  Typical of his work, Coetzee implicates his colonial protagonists for their complete incomprehension of the Other they feel free to use, oppress, brutalize, or lionise in turns.  Inside these narrators’ minds, we are shown their preconceptions to be cloaks thrown over real people, who are never completely covered but also never turn to the reader themselves with the truth.  The narrators will never understand them as people, and so the reader is never given the ‘in’ to understand them, either.  The end of his novels is designed to leave us with that loss, the knowledge that there was something fascinating that has been crushed and can never be truly recovered or even remembered—to feel the consequences of a postcolonial society ourselves.  Much like the Holocaust from which this film cribs some spare horror—the tragedy and survival become an indelible part of cultural identity, destroying the original context.

On a purely visceral level, this is a fine, uncompromising horror film that strips the viewer emotionally raw.  It displays the sheer power of film to affect a person’s real emotional experience like few movies I’ve ever seen.  Unfortunately, like the filmmakers portrayed, Deodato presents as savage monsters a remote group of people with no ability to refute his assassination of their culture as the worst fears and id impulses of all humanity—ostensibly to make the liberal point that Westerners are even worse under the nice clothes and tall buildings.  His Yanomamo are barbarians in a barbaric world, who we can never hope to understand or judge, so the finger points only to us…or, with better aim, at those like Deodato who cynically exploits everyone involved, from indigenous actors to every audience member.

A must-read review: 1000 Misspent Hours

limp, not-fit boy, limp

Run Fat Boy Run
2007

It’s always harder to analyze comedy than drama. Not only are there the internal and external grumblings of why one would bother when there’s so many movies out there trying very hard to be weighty, but the quality of the text tends to disintegrate under examination like cotton candy in a spin cycle. No matter how well considered, comedy either works or it doesn’t, and no comedy works for every audience.

At the very least, however, there is a reliable evolution in the craft of film comedy. Buster Keaton’s work is rougher than Jerry Lewis’ which is rougher than Mel Brooks’ which is rougher than the digitally enhanced spawn of the Farrelly brothers (to pick comedic auteurs at random rather than by personal preference). The craft becomes smoother and slicker, more FX’ed and less polite. Comedy has to be faster now—more laughs per minute, no convoluted set-ups—deeper—better characterization, more intricate plot—and aware of or within genres. The Butcher Boy is still funny, particularly in the sheer athleticism of Keaton and Arbuckle, but as a new movie, one that ignored the advances in craft and audience expectation, it would be a snore. New comedies like new horror films have to be novel, in a way that drama doesn’t.

Unfortunately, Run Fat Boy Run is a call back to the weak comedies of the 80s, only a series of unconnected jokes embedded together in sticky schmaltz. It has a long future ahead of it on Saturday afternoons on USA and SpikeTV, sandwiched in between the lesser efforts of Bill Murray and Steve Guttenberg. Semi-attractive loser has lost improbably hot girl to Mr Perfect. SAL spends two-thirds of the movie mouthing funny loser-isms while hot girl and various straight men gurn in reply. Eventually, SAL makes one dramatic gesture that wins the girl back without addressing the many good reasons he lost her in the first place, mostly because Mr Perfect is slowly revealed to be more evil than Rasputin, and there are only two males in the movie’s universe. Hot girl (and often included, The Kid), have no personalities other than reacting to SAL’s jokes, denying his demands, and in the case of The Kid, occasionally upstaging SAL. End on visual gag involving SAL’s secondary character best friend.

The title, a Run Lola Run pun nearly a decade out of date, should have been a warning and is invalidated in the first five minutes when a gasping Simon Pegg points out that, with his small stunt beer belly, he isn’t fat, just not fit. The audience has to do the work of mentally superimposing Pegg’s usual comedy partner, Nick Frost, over Pegg’s slim form and muscular legs as he pretends to gasp his way up Hampstead Heath.

Run Fat Boy Run particularly suffers because two of its stars earned their growing acclaim with hilarious, edgy—and well known—staples of modern UK comedy: Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, and Black Books. Run Fat Boy Run watches like a weak cup of tea brewed from the strengths of these—the genre-twigging, the appealing losers and drunks—while dropping the fast edits, ensemble interactions, and any personality in female characters.

The script has potential. There are funny, shocking visual gags and verbal pricks. But can I laugh at an older man bittersweetly remembering his deceased wife—Most of all, I miss all the fucking—in the same film I am to be sincerely swept up in a child-level domestic resolution?

Is this secretly trying to be a Hot Fuzz-esque send-up of romantic comedies? Nah. This is very much an example of the genre, one that only emphasizes the need for an intelligent meta-parody a la Shaun…something that both works as a romance and a comedy while salting the earth behind it. Possibly starring Mark Heap and Tamsin Greig.

In fact, rent Green Wing instead to keep your brain cells properly disturbed.

let them watch cake

Marie Antoinette
2006

It’s a rare privilege to experience a film not only so spectacularly wrong-headed but, according to the making-of special feature, one that was also exactly what the director was going for. 

Marie-Antoinette is shallowly humanized by stripping her of the propaganda and pop culture baggage, initially leaving a spoiled, undereducated 14-year-old pushed into an alien, suffocating world who seeks refuge in frivolity.  However this lack is quickly and unironically replaced with ill-fitting contemporary baggage, reimagining the child—as she would have been considered in her time, married or not—as an anachronistic teenager mired in a super-sweet sixteen. 

Other potential humanizing elements during her time in Versailles passed over in favor of clothes, hair and sweets were the deaths of her father and sister, her charity funds, and her growth out of frivolity as a mother, especially nursing her hunchbacked, bed-ridden elder son, who died at 7 of tuberculosis.  In fact her maternal tragedies are summed up by the changing of an official portrait to remove an infant (her second daughter) and a stylized funeral scene, before racing through the last days at Versailles with no foreshadowing that Louis’s decisions not to flee likely cost his family their lives. 

While the previous king does die of smallpox in the film (miraculously infecting no one else), there is no impression of the fragility of life in Marie-Antoinette’s time, even directly among the royal family.  Of peasants and the distance of their lives from hers, there are no hints.  This is a difficult failing for a movie that presents a false picture of the converse-wearing teenage queen.  In this reality, are the peasants revolting because they can’t afford to upgrade their iPod every year?  Are they encased in the fun, pretty bubble as well, or is their reality conversely more horrible than we vaguely remember from high school history, banished from the fun anachronistic royal world?

I suppose they don’t matter.  They can’t be part of the sheer joy of unbridled consumerism, so they have no place in this film, until they are the agent of destruction.

I am left with the impression that it wasn’t Marie-Antoinette who had no conception of the reality outside her privileged life, but the filmmakers.

If the making-of documentary was unbiased, this affect is the result of director Sophia Coppola attempting to make the subject and presentation more personal, “more personal” defined by her father and others as the magic ingredient to quality filmmaking.  Was no one watching the dailies?  Her directing style looked awful…simpering, shallow, and off-putting.  Because I enjoyed Lost in Translation so much, this was a painful disappointment.

not-quite-porn for a lazy summer afternoon

DOA: Dead or Alive
2006

I don’t have anything like a review for this one.  It’s a movie that shows up from the Netflix queue (or Tesco queue in our case) that no one will cop to putting on the list, at least while sober.  It’s not even much fun to mst3k.  Forty-five minutes in, the robots would be reduced to muttering, yeah, T&A…another close-up crotch shot…another wank moment…sigh…

The one thing worth mentioning is that Jaime Pressley seems to have a special talent for adding moments of actual character to one-note redneck stereotypes.  Jessica Simpson, take note.

Actually, don’t.

view from the inside

La Science des rêves
2006

The Science of Sleep* focuses on a young man who exists in a waking life of dream symbolism. He has returned to France following the death of his Mexican father, and the combination of his poor French and his new acquaintances’ poor Spanish and English compounds his shaky grasp of human interaction.

Stéphane is somewhat fortunate, however, that his dream state bleeds into the waking world. He is able to invent a working time machine (albeit a machine with a one-second range) and a fantastic mechanical structure that makes a plush pony gallop independently around the room.

The visuals are often lovely and surprisingly accurate to dream logic, especially as they resist the temptation to portray the dreamscape as huge, fantastic, and detailed. As in dreams, here the focus is on the immediate details, the huge clumsy hands, the bathtub filled with cellophane water, with backgrounds clumsily sketched in or misaligned. Fortunately as well no character forces those cutting-edge Freudian interpretations. Stéphane interprets his dreams, and his life, according to an interior neurotic mythology; the others tolerate his perpetual dream state, to varying degrees, with the attitude of those who want to avoid the effort of organising an intervention.

SoS catches and holds the limnal feeling between dreaming and waking, the confusion and relief and fear in the inability to separate actions from uncontrolled fantasy. While that’s an admirable feat, I question the romantic structural device. The film’s site includes a blurb from some outlet named Paper calling it the “ultimate date movie.” Perhaps for two people of the sort who want the main characters in every movie to settle down together, including the titular figures in Alien vs Predator, but most first dates taking in this movie would end partway into the final credits, as both parties decided to really give asexuality a chance this time.

The final scene breeches the line between successful romantic quirkiness and final descent into psychosis. While it’s easy for many to identify with Stéphane’s painful shyness and disappointments, it is difficult to root for him. He is as scattered and melodramatic as a dream state; people only exist as referents to his internal symbolic matrix and to his semi-formed desires. As Stephanie drew closer to Stéphane, she became a less interesting character, already a little weary, and if they were to settle down together in romantic-movie fashion, she would continue to sacrifice her own creativity and individuality to surfing his internal shifts. As a romance, with both characters lessening as they come together, it fails.

There are other, better threads in the narrative neglected in favour of the burgeoning “romance”: his mother, for all her efforts to bring him to her, never connects. His deceased father is the dominant force of the first quarter of the film, but disappears as a concept without Stéphane progressing. He forgets he is grieving? Interaction with these people and the past that has left him confused and disconnected would have developed him more and avoided the “relationship saves all” evasion.

In life, this would be for Stephanie a brief, disappointing but memorable affair, ending in a difficult disentanglement (which she would someday describe as “Johnson had an easier time pulling out of Vietnam,” before—of course—discovering him just behind her with a wounded ‘I am so going to trash you on my livejournal’ air), while he went on to idolise and drain girl after girl. A sad relationship for a sad imaginary world, making the final scene either forced and false to Stephanie’s character, or bitterly misanthropic.

 

*changed from the original, in French, The Science of Dreams, perhaps to make the title spell S-O-S—Stéphane’s social interactions as one inclusive cry for help.