God Said, "Ugh"
Andrew Kevin Walker, the
screenwriter of Seven (1995) and of the new snuff-film thriller
8MM , must have grown up watching hundreds of hours of kinky detective
shows. My guess is that they left him aroused but essentially ungratified.
Walker has made his fortune by packing in all the maggoty, sadistic details
that the creators of Hunter and The Commish left to the
imagination and that even such coolly clinical cop series as The X-Files
and Homicide have opted to leaven with reminders of the fundamental
beneficence of humankind. Walker's clean-cut detective heroes (Brad Pitt in
Seven , Nicolas Cage in 8MM ) embark on odysseys into the nether
region, where they view atrocity after atrocity before arriving at the source:
an evil that is pure, unrepentant, and infectious. You can lop off its head,
but the skull goes on grinning, serenely confident that it has passed on its
disease to its slayer.
David Fincher's
Seven thrust Walker's worldview into your viscera; I can still recall
that film's gun battle, set in a long corridor, with its slingshot angles and
bullets that seemed to explode beside your head, and the ghastly sight, both
riveting and repellent, of a partially flayed, obese corpse, its milky white
blubber framing intestines that looked like blue balloons. Joel Schumacher, the
director of 8MM , has none of Fincher's graphic originality, but the
material still carries a lurid charge. Cage plays Tom Welles, an earnest,
professionally polite private investigator summoned to the manse of a recently
deceased tycoon. The elderly widow (Myra Carter) has discovered in a safe an 8
millimeter film that appears to document the murder of a young woman. The
appalled widow needs to know if the killing is real or simulated and hands
Welles the financial resources he needs to ferret out the filmmakers and their
possibly unfortunate leading lady.
Leaving his harried wife (Catherine Keener) and infant
daughter in wintry Pennsylvania, the detective travels from Cleveland to North
Carolina to the subterranean S/M parlors of Los Angeles to a production office
in the meat market of New York City. What he sees twists Cage's hitherto poker
face into an increasingly Eastwoodesque grimace. His eyes bulge. His monotone
verges on the point of exploding into hundreds of hysterical semitones. He
stops taking calls from his wife (always clutching the baby) on his cell phone.
A wisecracking porn shop clerk (Joaquin Phoenix), whom Welles has hired as a
tour guide, delivers the film's thematic warning: "There are things that you
see that you can't un-see, that get into your head. ... Before you know it
you're in it, deep in it. ... Dance with the devil and the devil don't change,
the devil changes you." I won't spell out where 8MM leads but, trust me,
there are no surprises. As in Seven , there are devils and they dance and
everyone gets down. And down. And down.
Schumacher ( Batman
& Robin , 1997), a one-time costume designer and art director, usually
exhibits the aesthetic of an interior decorator, his pictures boasting the most
cluttered mise en scènes I've ever mise en seen. I'm impressed
that in 8MM he has managed to muzzle his fruitier impulses and work in a
chill, stripped-down style, reverting to form only in the black leather porno
basements and his characteristically semicoherent action scenes. The ambience
isn't as clammy as Fincher's in Seven , but it's dank enough, with eerie
intimations of a demon lying in wait. The score by Mychael Danna features
faraway muezzin wails--calls that could be emanating from the girl in the
flickering movie who's about to be slain. She stares doe-eyed into the camera,
like the naked waif in Edvard Munch's Puberty , who seems just at that
instant to realize her true vulnerability.
It gets to you, this movie--gets you titillated, then
spooked, then suffused with righteous fury. Murderous fury. It's only after the
picture ends that you realize that Welles hasn't really danced with the
devil, at least not by the standards of vigilante movies. He doesn't get a
sexual charge out of the brutality, nor does he develop a penchant for
torturing innocents. Apart from his stricken expressions and a couple of nasty
wounds, there's nothing even to suggest that he's damned by taking justice into
his own hands. If ever bad guys deserved to be executed, it's the bad guys in
8MM . They promise they're going to torture and kill the hero's wife and
baby daughter, they cast aspersions on his masculinity, they sneer at the
notion that anyone would care about their victims. It's up to Welles to say, "I
care"-- BLAM! What's to feel guilty about?
Movies like 8MM
make me appreciate what Paul Schrader tried to do when he chose to bring
Russell Banks' novel Affliction to the screen. Having written Taxi
Driver (1976) and Hardcore (1979) and other vigilante pictures in
which the underlying motives of the avenger are called into question, Schrader
embraced the story of a vigilante who turns out to be dead wrong, driven mad by
an increasing sense of his own impotence in a world that has left him behind.
Schumacher worked with similar themes in the poorly thought through Falling
Down (1993), in which Michael Douglas has a spell of road rage and doesn't
cool off. Next to these films, the moral contortions of 8MM seem
especially bogus, a sadomasochistic peep show booth pretending to be a
confessional.
The test of a piece of storytelling is whether its audience
can forget that it's listening to a history--something in the past tense--and
enter the living present. That doesn't happen in God Said, "Ha!" Julia
Sweeney's film of her own one-woman show. The subject is cancer--Sweeney's late
brother's and then her own. Sweeney stands in the middle of the stage and tells
the off-screen (but audible) audience how her brother got sick and took up
residence in her small Hollywood house and how her parents moved down from
Spokane, Wash., and threw her life into an uproar. She comes off as extremely
smart and likable--and she looks better than she did on Saturday Night
Live , with the soft face and sensuous blue eyes of Elizabeth McGovern. Her
monologue has some funny, dislocating observations: the unsophisticated ways of
her folks juxtaposed against her newly acquired yuppie tastes, her need to
sneak around like a teen-ager when a boyfriend comes to stay and, especially,
her dislocation when, after taking her brother to the hospital for
chemotherapy, she finds herself suddenly playing his part, as if, she says,
she's at a square dance.
But God Said,
"Ha!"--which has won praise for Sweeney's artistry and candor--is the sort
of work that gives one-person shows their bad rap. Few of the good bits flow
together; nothing builds. It's mostly one thing after another: I went here,
then I went there, then I went to a bookstore and cut a big fart and someone I
didn't remember from the Groundlings recognized me, then I tossed a cigarette I
wasn't supposed to be smoking out the car window and then noticed that the back
seat was on fire, and then ... Occasionally, she turns to look into
another camera--a move that unintentionally evokes the old Chevy Chase "Weekend
Update" shtick--but the movie is otherwise static, and the lines sound as if
she has said them hundreds of times before.
Sweeney tells instead of shows, declining to haul out the
big guns--her immense comic gifts--to put her characters across. I have a
feeling she must think it would be vulgar to get too showbizzy, too gonzo, too
Saturday Night Live -ish with this material, given that it's about (hush)
cancer. But then why do it? What's the point of going out in front of an
audience with a tale of illness if she's not going to bring all her imaginative
resources to bear on it--to transform it into something that transcends its
relatively routine particulars and gives us something to hold onto when our
time for tragedy comes?
Julia Sweeney chose to take the story of her
brother's illness and hers to the stage and then the screen; Pauline Kael made
no such decision, which is why Rushmore director Wes Anderson's New
York Times account of visiting the retired New Yorker critic seemed
an unseemly invasion of privacy. After writing about Anderson's piece in , I
sent a letter to the New York T
imes , which printed it Sunday.
Click to read my letter, Anderson's response, and my annotations.
