lolita, by stanley kubrick

And now a few words about the necrophile community.

If you look closely at any group of people who appear, at first glance, to be unified by creed, interest, or fetish, you will inevitably learn that there is some issue or point of order that divides members of that community. And, indeed, so it is with necrophiles. According to a necrophile FAQ that's circulating around out there, the issue that divides necrophiles above all others is the question of how, er, "recent" the remains should be, with some necrophiles preferring freshly deceased remains, and others preferring older, more skeletal remains. Apparently, the rift between these two groups is severe enough that it's devolved into name-calling, with members of the first group referring to members of the second group as "dust-fuckers."

This was all brought to my attention by my good friend A., who claimed that she was going to start using "dust-fuckers" as her new favorite put-down, because she could think of no phrase more pejorative than the one a necrophile would use to describe an even worse necrophile.

So how does all this relate to this week's Film Club pick, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962)? Well, as we've been going through our tour of cinematic sociopaths these past few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about how filmmakers build audience sympathy with twisted characters. Lolita, as you probably know, tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a pedophile who spends nearly the entire film pursuing (and eventually consummating) a sexual relationship with Dolores "Lolita" Haze, a 14-year old girl (she's 12 in the novel). Pedophiles are probably even lower than serial killers in the big catalog of American Enemies, so how do you get the audience to swallow their distaste and accept one as the protagonist of a two-and-a-half-hour-long film?

By using the Dust-Fucker Principle, of course, and squaring him off against an even worse pedophile.

In the case of Lolita, that Even Worse Pedophile is Clare Quilty, played memorably by the great Peter Sellers. Quilty dabbles in a wide variety of perversions: he's a pedophile; he's an aspiring pornographer; he organizes orgies; he gets off on being slapped around by exotic-looking Judo practicioner Vivian Darkbloom; he hangs out with submissives who themselves get off by being used as furniture. ("I know one guy, looks just like a bookshelf," Quilty quips, early in the film.) By contrast, Humbert's own (blunderingly direct) focus on non-polymorphous fucking seems practically old-fashioned, nearly wholesome.

If we buy into the setup that the Dust-Fucker Principle provides for us, however, we fall into a typically Kubrickian moral trap: although the movie takes advantage of the parallels between pedophilia and standard-issue heteronormative romance to gloss over the former's more repulsive aspects, Humbert is still a monster, and an ultimately unrepentant one at that. In this way, Lolita fits with the rest of Stanley Kubrick's body of work, which almost to a film has a notoriously problematic relationship to the whole concept of a sympathetic protagonist to begin with. (Quick quiz: who is the protagonist in Dr. Strangelove? In Eyes Wide Shut? In A Clockwork Orange? In The Shining? How many of the characters you came up with are good or likeable people?)

So Kubrick joins Romero, perhaps, in Film Club's annals of misanthropic directors. The parallel is more apt than it might first appear: not only do both directors share a focus on monstrous beings, but each of them reach further, observing trenchantly that the society that the monsters inhabit itself fails to succeed in its bid for "non-monstrous" status. The end result is that their respective bodies of work end up depicting a social moral schema in total confusion, with the distinction between [amoral] figure and [moral] ground completely collapsed. Lolita illustrates this as well as any of Kubrick's films: take, for instance, Charlotte Haze, Lolita's mother. She's the character who the film could most easily cast as a martyr, but she is instead presented as deeply predatory in her own right, forcing herself on Humbert sexually despite his marked disinterest:

This tendency towards violation is reflected in the film again and again, as many of the film's minor characters also engage in some form of inappropriate boundary-crossing—whether they solicit Humbert and Charlotte to participate in a round of "progressive" partner-swapping or simply cross the threshold of Humbert's home uninvited. In this way, even a concerned neighbor can become a Kubrickian grotestque:

Everyone who isn't a simpleton is a transgressor, in Lolita's moral universe, and the Dust-Fuckers in the bunch are simply the transgressors who have come more fully into bloom.

Pretty bleak stuff, and yet, the film's not without its sense of humor. Humbert is a representative of European high-mindedness, which makes him a great straight-man figure. It seems like Humbert spends half his screen-time trying to maintain his dignity in various humiliating situations that Kubrick and Nabokov have devised for him:

It was these reflections, on Humbert's Old World nature, that led me to think that Humbert might be so uncontrollably attracted to Lolita less because of her nubile winsomeness and more because she's a walking embodiment of ahistorical slangy New World crassitude. Note the way she eats junk food right out of the bag:

Anyway, anytime I get thinking about the European take on "ahistorical slangy New World crassitude," I start thinking about Paul Verhoeven's infamous Showgirls, which brings us to next week's pick. Brace yourself.

the vanishing (spoorloos), by george sluizer

So, this week, Film Club continued our investigation into cinematic sociopaths by looking at George Sluizer's The Vanishing (the 1998 original).

The setup of The Vanishing is relatively simple: a Dutch couple, Rex and Saskia, are on a roadtrip together...

They stop at a roadside service plaza and Saskia goes in for a Coke and a beer while Rex waits outside. Rex, waits, and waits, and waits... but Saskia never returns to the car.

Like Psycho, then, The Vanishing uses a woman's disappearance as an early turning point in its narrative, and it spends the later part of its narrative following the lover of that woman as he searches for her. Both films also spend large chunks of narrative time following the psychotic or sociopathic individual to blame for the woman's disappearance.

Unlike Psycho, however, which spends its time following Norman Bates in the aftermath of his murders, The Vanishing's narrative attention goes to the sociopathic individual, Raymond Lemorne, in advance of his act: we see a number of flashbacks which show him planning out the abduction, working out key details, revising and re-revising elements of it. Here, for instance, we see him rehearsing exactly how he might chloroform someone:

This is interesting because it presents an alternate view of the psychology of sociopathy. In Psycho, Norman Bates' psychology is driven completely by emotion and impulse— grief, jealousy, arousal, rage— emotions which clash inchoately until they find form in violent outburst. Raymond functions as the exact opposite: his actions are methodical, pre-meditated, and even (we learn) in line with an internal philosophy and morality which retains integrity even as it leads him to do evil things.

Watching a character work out a plan like this tends to generate a desire to see the plan play out, although we never quite identify with Raymond the way we did (momentarily, horrifyingly) with Norman (discussed in full last week). Part of the reason for this is that this film, unlike Psycho, has the investigating male, Rex, serve as a stable protagonist throughout the entire run-time. So the (potentially troubling) desire to see Raymond's plan come to fruition is neatly folded into Rex's more socially-acceptable desire to learn exactly what happened to Saskia.

This keeps us in a "safer" space, psychologically-speaking: having Rex as the point of audience identification allows us to maintain a comfortable distance from Raymond. However, Sluizer is a canny enough director to exploit this "safe" identification to great effect. Late in the proceedings, the narrative presents Rex (and, by extension, us) with something of a diabolical choice. I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen the film, but suffice it to say that Rex is given the opportunity to learn what really transpired, although taking advantage of this opportunity will put him in the path of real danger; in fact, even at the outset of the decision it is almost certain that he will be killed, or possibly something worse (earlier on, Raymond casually makes mention that he doesn't consider killing someone to be the worst thing you can do to them).

Rex wants the knowledge of Saskia's fate, however horrible. He wants it badly enough that he's willing to risk self-annihilation. And in effect, we are presented with the exact same bargain: do we want to know what happened, enough to be willing to risk our protagonist / self-analogue? Even though we know it will be horrible? Only the most sensitive viewer could decline such a bargain. But why? What do we gain from taking in disturbing knowledge? Why would the film feel so emotionally disappointing were Rex to decide he had learned enough, and to walk away at the last second? In these final scenes, The Vanishing looks nakedly at the core offer that is at the root of horror / shock films from Psycho to Hostel II: I have something terrible to show you. Do you want to see it?

Next week: more sociopathic abduction narratives: we'll be watching Skunkcabbage's pick, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962).

psycho, by alfred hitchcock

This week, Film Club continued our investigation into early serial killer pictures by looking at Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (from 1960, as was our last pick, Peeping Tom). I'm making the assumption that anyone who reads this blog for the film writing already knows the major surprises in Psycho, but if you don't, you should be forewarned that this essay-let discusses most of them, so you might want to check out now.

The first forty-odd minutes of Psycho stand as one of the all-time great acts of directorial misdirection. We're introduced to Marion Crane, a nice-enough woman from Arizona, who is carrying on a relationship with Sam Loomis, a strapping young divorcee from California.

Both of them suffer from some degree of financial hardship—Marion is employed as a low-wage clerical worker, and Sam runs a hardware store but is saddled with some pretty punitive-sounding alimony payments. Consequently, they're forced to stay apart: neither one appears to have the wherewithal to up and quit their job and relocate to where the other one lives. That is, until one day some loaded Arizonan comes in waving a huge wad of cash:

Long story short: Marion, entrusted to take this wad to a safety-deposit box, instead decides to go on the run to California, planning to use the funds as a means of achieving her escape velocity. So far, this is all relatively standard fare for a romantic melodrama of the era—although what it's all doing in a movie called Psycho isn't exactly clear, at least not until the second night when she's on the road.

Marion opts to stay at the creepy-looking Bates Motel, whereupon, as you probably know, she is promptly stabbed to death in the shower.

Now, the "shower scene" is one of the most famous scenes in all of film history: even if you have never seen Psycho, odds are that you know that Psycho features a scene where someone gets stabbed in the shower with a giant knife (you can even probably imitate a short chunk of Bernard Hermann's memorable score). The scene is famous enough that we might forget just how much it flouts narrative convention: what has happened here is that Hitchcock has essentially set up a movie which, nearly an hour into it, has killed off its own protagonist. I see a lot of movies, and I'm hard-pressed to come up with another protagonist-centered movie that takes a similar chance. (Pulp Fiction kills off Vincent Vega in its second act, but has rearranged chronology so that he's back for the third. A very special and possibly nonexistent Film Club prize will go to the first person who can identify Pulp Fiction's more blatant lift from Psycho.)

Anyway. With Marion gone, the narrative leaves us in the hands of Norman Bates, the main proprietor of the motel. We follow him through the process of cleaning up the murder, disposing of the corpse, etc. There's something very odd that happens here, and Hitchcock highlights it through one profoundly troubling sequence. It comes when Bates tries to get rid of Marion's car by pushing it into the swamp. It sinks about halfway and then stops:

And then we're granted one of the great "oh fuck" reaction shots in all of cinema history:

What's remarkable about this moment is that the audience, too, thinks "oh fuck." We have somehow, through the magic of narrative psychology, bought into Norman's own wants and desires. In effect, Norman has become the film's new protagonist, the key figure of audience identification. This has an unsettling effect even if we only think he's an accomplice to his mother's murder—which is what the film, at this stage, wants us to believe—and that creepiness grows exponentially after the first viewing, because we know, in fact, that Norman is the one doing the murders. It's a nasty trick, making us realize just how easily we can identify with a murderer, and it's also vintage Hitchcock—at least as early as Strangers on a Train Hitchcock is probing the various ways in which even the most genteel-appearing people are fascinated by and attracted to ghastly violence. (1958's Vertigo also presents a variation on this theme, in the way that it radically deconstructs the folksy, likeable persona of one of the most folksy and likeable actors of all time, Jimmy Stewart.)

Ultimately, however, both Vertigo and Psycho back away from the darkest ramifications of their own nightmarish logic(s). Psycho tricks us into uncomfortably identifying with its central killer, but it chooses not sustain this discomfort. It balks at having a serial killer as the protagonist (making Peeping Tom the more daring film), and instead has to resort to bringing back Sam and introducing two new characters, Marion's sister Lila and a private investigator, Arbogast.

In a way, it could be said that the film's reluctance to stick with Norman as the new protagonist creates something of a "protagonist vacuum," into which the film's remaining characters temporarily step. For a while, we follow Arbogast on his investigations...

But then he comes to a bad end, too:

Inasmuch as Arbogast had become the protagonist for a while, this is essentially the same trick the movie used when it did away with Marion, although it functions less well the second time, for three main reasons: 1) we care less about Arbogast, having followed him for less time and having less sense of his motivations and character, 2) the film doesn't toggle back to Norman as the protagonist, but rather back to Sam and Lila, and 3) perhaps most simply of all, any shock repeated in a film is less shocking the second time.

So, in the end, this is Psycho's flaw: in its third act, when the tension should be ratcheting up to a great finale, we're instead left swamped in a bunch of talky scenes with a bunch of, well, nobodies:

This perhaps explains why, although Psycho is such a seminal film (all the great slasher franchises owe something to it), its most notable narrative moment has been copied so infrequently. (Of course, trying to keep a central protagonist alive for the whole run of a horror movie can sometimes post its own sort of challenge: see my write-up of Aswang (Film Club XVII) for a reminder about those perils.)

Next week: the latter half of Psycho becomes something of a missing-persons drama, so we'll take a look at a similarly-minded picture, The Vanishing (the 1988 Dutch original, not the 1993 American remake). Stay tuned~

peeping tom, by michael powell

One of the things that's going on in Diary of the Dead that I didn't write about last week is the film includes a critique of spectation: the human desire to look at things. Specifically, the film wonders aloud about the part of human psychology that wants to look at horrible things—violent acts, accidents, etc.—and it repeatedly holds up the film's documentary-filmmaker character as a character who possesses a hypertrophic form of this particular desire. (It's not too hard to speculate that Romero intends this criticism to extend to horror filmmakers as well, and thus functions as a form of self-critique.) For Romero, spectation serves at best as a form of passivity and at worst as a kind of morbid perversion. We don't look because we want to help, we look because it gratifies some vaguely unwholesome impulse in us.

As a critique, Romero's definitely holds water, although there are more extreme critiques of spectation out there, including the one found in this week's pick, Peeping Tom (1960).

Peeping Tom announces its interest in "looking" pretty baldly in its opening shot:

...and, like Diary, it draws a bridge between "looking" and "filmmaking": our main character is not only an aspiring filmmaker with a handheld camera:

...but he also works as part of a film-production crew (making a suspense thriller entitled The Walls Are Closing In):

...and, just to emphasize the focus on "looking" even more strongly, the film has him also working as a smut photographer:

In terms of its take on pornography, Peeping Tom would seem to echo Diary's concerns about spectation (or LOL's for that matter): in all three of these films, the consumption of visual matter is seen as a somewhat gross indulgence of the suspect desire to look. Here's how Peeping Tom portrays the average consumer of pornography:

However, Peeping Tom is willing to go a bit further, explicitly equating the viewing of bodies with the suffering of those bodies. It does this both subtly... (note the repetition of the word "PAIN" here outside the newsstand among the bodies of pin-ups):

...and also, as we will see, more explicitly. For, in the world of Peeping Tom, it's not merely that suffering is connected in some vague way in the production of pornography, but rather that the act of viewing in and of itself is a form of violence, making the camera a sort of weapon-technology. Here's the view through Mark's camera:

Those hairlines aren't just there for show, either: the main premise of the film, for those of you who don't know it, is that Mark is not merely a voyeur, but also a psychopath. Periodically he converts one leg of the camera's tripod into a blade, which he then uses to murder the women he's filming, while simultaneously filming the murder. We've learned this before the opening credits are finished:

Mark's obviously an extreme case, but the film doesn't hesitate to draw parallels between his behavior and the behavior of every other filmmaker in the film. The director of the film-within-a-film is also governed by sadistic impulses, as we see when he presses his lead actress to do take after take, until she collapses from exhaustion:

[To cement the parallel as explicitly as possible, Mark later murders the actress' stand-in, on set: a sequence during which he occasionally sits in the director's chair.]

There's a third sadistic filmmaker in the film, too, namely, Mark's father, a psychologist studying the physiology of fear in children. As the film unfolds, we learn that the young Mark was subjected to fear experiments, being used essentially as a human guinea pig, and having the results documented, on film, by Dad himself:

So. An interesting result of the filmmaker's decision to show Mark as having himself been the subject of spectation and the victim of sadistic impulses is that the film ends up generating a considerable amount of empathy for him (putting this film perhaps in the category of earlier Film Club picks like Spike Lee's 25th Hour (Film Club VII). In point of fact, Mark ends up being one of the most sympathetic serial killers in film history (Mark's character owes more than a small debt to Peter Lorre's portrayal of an also not-entirely-unsympathetic killer in Fritz Lang's fantastic M (1931)).

This empathy is pretty essential for the narrative of the film to hang together, because it's set up not so much as a horror-thriller (the way it seems to commonly be understood) but rather as a kind of doomed romance between Mark and his downstairs neighbor, Helen.

Helen is kind, and reaches out to Mark in a way that he's clearly not accustomed to: she invites him to her 21st birthday party, and even after he declines in the most squirrely, nervous way possible, she brings him a piece of her birthday cake:

Like other romances, then, Peeping Tom is structured narratively in a way that sets up a couple that looks like they should be together, and has them attempt to surmount obstacles that are in their way. It's just that, in this case, the obstacle is, well, irreperable psychosis. Much of the film is spent showing Mark putting energy into attempting to resist his psychotic impulses, an endeavor that also involves actively attempting to re-think his relationship to women, in order to think of Helen as something other than prey.

It's an odd choice, and in order for it to be successful we have to erase our memory of the humanity of Marc's vicims, and our desire to have him be brought to justice. However, this aspect does add a lot of extra pathos to a story that's already shocking, and clever, and theoretically interesting to boot. Next week we'll compare it against that other 1960 proto-slasher-film, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Stay tuned!