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Showing posts with label MGM HD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MGM HD. Show all posts
Monday, August 20, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
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Some moments in film leave an indelible mark on the viewer, and there are few more memorable than the introduction to Dr Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in 'The Silence of the Lambs'. Hannibal Lecter is in terms of the narrative almost an ancillary character in the film, yet he exudes a gravitational pull over every other aspect. Mention the film to anyone, and doubtless the first image that springs to mind will be that calm, composed body language coupled with those staring, somehow maniacally relaxed eyes. Eyes that stare straight into the camera rather than at any element in the film. He's looking at us.
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| Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector |
But he's just a component in a wider narrative of a rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) in a race against time to find serial killer 'Buffalo Bill' (Ted Levine) before his latest captor becomes another victim. It's a coolly tense film from beginning to end, one that takes place in a desaturated world populated by a series of damaged and neurotic people. There are few truly psychologically healthy characters in this film, and those that are tend to become traumatised as events spin out of control around them.
Demme is exacting in the world he creates. He makes sure that everything is interestingly tactile; for example in Starling's descent to the cells in which Lecter lives, all the doors squeak and creak alarmingly. Everything seems to be slowly decaying around the characters. Even something as simple as opening a storage space requires a car jack, and Starling to crawl underneath in the dirt and dust. The upshot of all this grime and ruin is that it is very hard to spot light at the end of the tunnel. Even though Starling eventually saves the day, a happy ending never feels like a guarantee at any point.
In a very 'dirty' film, it's telling to look out for the clean and bright spaces. Here Demme defies expectations. Hannibal Lecter built up as a character expertly. People talk about him in hushed, awed tones.
"Do not touch the glass. Do not approach the glass. You pass him nothing but soft paper - no pencils or pens. No staples or paperclips in his paper. Use the sliding food carrier, no exceptions. If he attempts to pass you anything, do not accept it. Do you understand me?"
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| What's on that photograph must be pretty horrible. |
We are thus primed to meet a monster. As Starling is led down into the Lector's prison/dungeon she is warned over and over again how dangerous he is. She is shown a photograph of what Lecter did to someone's face the last time he got free. While Starling looks on, we are left to imagine what horrors the photo depicts. She walks down the corridor to his cell, the last one on the row. She passes a row of wild-looking, terrifying degenerates living in filthy conditions, their hair ragged and wild, muttering to themselves obscenely.
Then we meet Lecter. Standing composed, still, neatly turned out in the middle of a spotless cell. No bars to keep him in, but solid and transparent perspex, almost like there's nothing there at all. His body language so composed we might suspect he's made of wax. Demme has carefully raised our expectations and then dashed them in one swoop. In this world of filth it is the cannibalistic psychopath that is set apart by his cleanliness, manners and perspicacity.
We later venture into another underworld, one seems to fit into expectations of what a serial killer's lair should be. It almost too neatly fits into certain categories of horror though. It's a dank, dirty basement populated by fluttering moths and caterpillars. Disturbing images adorn the walls and as a centrepiece there is a huge dark pit, the sides covered in bloody handprints. This difference between Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill allows us to separate the two thematically. We are gently encouraged to admire Lecter's taste and intelligence, while deploring Buffalo Bill's lapse into serial killer cliche. Lecter knows himself inside and out, knows what he is, why he kills and what he wants to achieve. Buffalo Bill is a man desperately seeking a purpose and identity, a man trying to transform himself into something else.
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| Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill |
Throughout the film there is a constant motif of metamorphosis and transformation. Buffalo Bill's goal is to kill enough women to make a 'woman suit' from their skins in an attempt to achieve this aim. He keeps moths and butterflies, placing their chrysalis' in his victim's mouths. The chrysalis is a pretty unambiguous symbol of change here. But it's not just Buffalo Bill who's in the process of change, or of trying to change what they are.
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| Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling |
When Lecter meets Starling he almost instantly manages to deduce her past, and her insecurities.
"You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Good nutrition's given you some length of bone, but you're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you've tried so desperately to shed: pure West Virginia. What is your father, dear? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamp? You know how quickly the boys found you. All those tedious sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars. While you could only dream of getting out, getting anywhere, getting all the way to the F-B-I."
Starling is trying to hide her somewhat tragic past as an orphan from the country, but gives herself away fairly easily. She's mostly succeeded in her self induced transformation, but tends to give herself away in unguarded moments. You can pick up hints of it when she refers to a victim of Buffalo Bill being 'from town', an expression only someone who wasn't from 'town' would use. Lecter gradually teases her tragic past out of her, exposing her latent 'daddy' issues and childhood trauma (the titular silence of the lambs). Starling's attempts to get over this trauma add a personal element in her crusade to save Bill's latest victim. She may not have been able to save a lamb marked for slaughter as a child, but saving this woman helps make up for that. Jodie Foster is grippingly realistic as Agent Starling, and more than holds her own against the overtly attention grabbing performances of Hopkins and Levine.
She's self-confident, ambitious and smart, but she's in a man's world and is never allowed to forget it. In general the gender discrimination that Starling suffers isn't done consciously by the male characters, but they rather tend to unthinkingly place her situations where her gender can be seen as a liability. A prime example of this is when she and her superior, Crawford have travelled to the autopsy of one of Bill's victims. Demme positions her standing in the middle of group of gawping policemen, panning around their faces as they look down at her with a faint hint of contempt on their faces. She takes command, raising her voice and authoritatively ordering them out of the room:
"Excuse me! Excuse me, gentlemen. You officers and gentlemen, listen here now. There's things we need to do for her. I know that you all brought her this far and that her folks would thank you if they could for your kindness and your sensitivity. And now, please, go on now and let us take care of her. Go on, now. Thank you."
It feels like a test of some kind, and one that she passes with flying colours. Another way in which Starling's gender becomes an issue is that of touch, and I see this focus on touch, and particularly skin on skin touch as being an important aspect of the film. Throughout the film, men are touching Starling. It's often quite innocent, but even a simple act like placing a hand on her shoulder has definite paternal implications. She gets advances in one form or another from most of the men in the film, even the nerdy etymologist tries to ask her out for "cheeseburgers" while invading her personal space.
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| Lecter makes contact with Starling. |
The two most intense examples of these moments are from the two killers she comes into contact with, Lecter and Bill. Lecter has been repeatedly defined as 'untouchable'. While other prisoners are behind bars, he is behind glass. Starling has been explicitly told not to go anywhere near him, not that she would naturally - he seems to radiate danger like a shark or tiger. But towards the middle of the film, when Lecter has been placed in a cage in a hotel, he moves to hand her a dossier he's looked through. Starling breaks free from the men dragging her outside (more manhandling of her) and rushes forward. As she takes the papers, Lecter strokes his finger against hers. It's only a microsecond of contact, but seems strangely erotic. It's a vague hint of forbidden passion. This strange quasi-romantic relationship between Starling and Lecter is only hinted at in this film, Lecter taunts Starling at one point saying, "people will say we're in love" and there's a grain of truth to it.
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| Bill reaches for Starling's hair |
The contact between Bill and Starling is in another context entirely. Starling has discovered Bill's lair. Bill has turned the lights out, plunging the cellar into pitch darkness. As Starling claws her way through the dark, panic etched onto her features, Bill puts on a pair of nightvision goggles and stalks her through the dark. From his perspective we see his hand come forward, and reach out to gently stroke her hair. At the moment of contact, Bill's revolver clicks, Starling 'sees' him and empties her gun into him, killing him. In some way this feels like a culmination of her frustrations with men over the film. Throughout they are, as Lecter puts it 'coveting' her in some form. In killing Bill, who after all, covets women in the most destructive and sadistic way she is exorcising this spectre and indeed in the next scenes we see her receiving her full agent status. The final direct contact with Starling comes from her boss, she offers her hand to him, and they shake as equals in a scene that seems free of any sexual overtones. Although (and I may be imagining this) he seems to hold her hand just a moment too long.
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| Starling shakes Crawford's hand. |
Skin plays an important role throughout this film, and not just in the way the men treat Agent Starling. The most notable example is Buffalo Bill's attempted construction of the 'woman suit', made out of real women. But Bill isn't the only person in the film to use another's skin for a piece of clothing of some kind. In escaping custody, Lecter cuts the face off one of his guards and poses as him, only revealing himself in the ambulance when he memorably pulls the bloody mask from his own face. Both of these men take pleasure in cutting and intruding upon the human form, but their methods are different. Lecter in his cannibalism ingests his victims, on some level undergoing a kind of communion with them. Bill attempts to undergo a communion with his victims too, but his methods are cruder and inelegant. He seems, unconsciously, like a poor imitation of Lecter.
There is an awful lot to discuss in 'Silence of the Lambs'. Issues of gender, transformation, sex, violation of the body and the contact with the world. What stays with me is the way the broken characters within this world interact with each other, and particularly with Starling. This is a film where various boundaries, of the body and elsewhere are sacrosanct, and those who violate this are committing a horrific, fascinating blasphemy.
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| Lecters communion? |
(Seen as part of the 'MGM Terror in the Tunnels' at the Old Vic Tunnels)
'Carrie' is a film that wears its subtexts on its sleeve (and eventually all over the rest of the body as well). In adapting Stephen King's story, DePalma doesn't pull any punches in telling us of the passion of Carrie White. It's a chilling film, but on a quite a few levels, 'Carrie' shares a lot of beats with a 'Revenge of the Nerds' style high-school comedy - all of the beats of the genre are here: the bitchy cheerleaders, the girl with the heart of gold, the doofus dorky guy, the pleasant 'Prince Charming'. The school itself seems anonymous, a faintly antiseptic archetype of the 1970s school. But DePalma gradually twists the knife and slowly the nostalgia (to modern audiences anyway) boils away to reveal immense cruelty bubbling just under the surface.
In the famous opening credits sequence scene DePalma puts us on a slow motion tracking shot through a steamy girls changing room. It's a tableaux of innocent, wholesome feminine behaviour. The girls play tricks on each other, giggling and gossiping. The billowing clouds of steam in the air coupled with the dreamlike slow motion and the soft, lilting flute music playing lulls us into dreamy state, it seems like a distilled idealisation of a girls changing room. As a male viewer I begin feel like an interloper, a peeping tom in a feminine world absent from the influence of men.
We track through a cloud of steam to find the Carrie White alone in the shower. She's depicted here as something like a classical nude, something vaguely classically statueesque in the steam clouds. But this image is dashed when, she's brought back down to earth with a bump. At the moment she touches between her legs and sees blood on her fingers, this pastoral scene shatters. She staggers out seeking help and the girls, who have just been explicitly painted as communal, friendly and beautiful, quickly morph into a terrifying pack of harpies. They pelt Carrie with sanitary napkins as she cowers screaming in the corner. It's this sort of duplicity and rapidly transforming identities that DePalma exploits throughout the film. It's also the first of many examples of femininity unexpectedly morphing into something uncontrollable and violent, the ultimate example being, of course, the climactic prom sequence.
As far as famous movie monsters are concerned, Carrie White is one of the most obviously sympathetic. This is someone who's been systematically ground into the dirt by almost everyone she meets. Even those who are ostensibly trying to help commit tiny, thoughtless atrocities against her without noticing. One of the earliest demonstrations of her telekinesis occurs when the principal of the school repeatedly addresses her as 'Cassie' even when corrected repeatedly by both Carrie and her sympathetic gym teacher. He's trying to help, but not out of sympathy, but because it's his job.
As I said before, DePalma is not particularly subtle about any of the essential misery of Carrie, and this on-the-nose symbolism comes to a head when Carrie returns home. From the outside her house looks like any other US suburban home, but inside it's a candle-lit gothic nightmare. It's a space filled with dirty surfaces covered in religious icons. We repeatedly focus on a statue of the martyrdom of St Sebastian, the tortured human body covered in tiny bleeding wounds. Draw your own connections here.
I hadn't seen the film in a long time before this, and I'd forgotten just how much of the rest of the film spends rehabilitating Carrie. The opening sequences are such a concisely powerful demonstration of the miserable life she leads that there isn't any need to underline it. We properly meet Amy Irving (who feels genuinely guilty about her behaviour in the changing room) and Tommy Ross. In what can begin to feel like a straightforward revenge horror, it's nice to see two genuinely pleasant people who want to do make amends and do a nice thing for someone.
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| Tommy Ross |
Tommy Ross especially is an interesting character. He seems cut from the cloth of the meathead quarterback, but is perhaps the only truly good person in the film. Despite initially being sceptical of Amy's plan for him to take Carrie to the prom, he persists and succeeds, treating her well and surprisingly even himself by genuinely feeling attraction to her.
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| Chris Hargenson (Nancy Allen) and Billy Nolan (John Travolta) |
As for antagonists we have the amoral Chris Hargenson who comes up with a very complicated and cruel plan to humiliate Carrie for extremely petty means. Her sidekick is John Travolta's Billy Nolan. He's more of a sketch than a complete character, but Travolta manages to make him completely venal, slapping his girlfriend more than once and taking an obscene pleasure in killing a pig.
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| Carrie and her mother (Piper Laurie) |
Closer to home, as far as enemies go is Carrie's mother. She is the ne plus ultra Christian fundamentalist oppressor. She is so obviously bonkers, sinister and genuinely odd that you begin to wonder how exactly she fits into society at large. In the rare moment of her interacting with someone that's not Carrie, people seem to humour her with the intention of getting rid of her without causing too much offence. It's interesting that Carrie seems to live in an authoritarian matriarchal world. The people that have active power over her, whether they have good or bad intentions are all women. The men are relegated either to incompetence, or in Tommy's case elevated to the level of a faintly intangible holy icon. This pushing back against a matriarchy from the point of view of the outcast is intriguing, for me, it represents a violent rejection of the plethora of potential feminine roles that have been offered to her by society. Everyone seems to think they know what would be best for her, but even if they have the finest intentions they are still intending to impose their will upon her.
All of these plans for Carrie converge at the prom. On one side we have the perhaps overly complicated revenge plan of Chris and Billy. This has involved killing a pig, draining it of blood and setting up a complicated pulley system that allows them to hide under the stage waiting for just the right moment to dump the blood on her head. To make sure they'll get her on stage they've contrived to have someone infiltrate the prom organising council with the plan of rigging the election for Prom King and Queen. You've got to hand to them, as far as sadistically diabolical revenge plans go it is at the very least competently executed. We also have the far more straightforward plan of Amy and Tommy. Tommy will take Carrie to the prom, and give her at least one enjoyable night.
It's a sign of a great film that even with a famously grand guignol and fun sequence like Carrie's psychokinetic rampage, I find myself wishing that maybe just this once, Carrie will dodge the bucket of blood and go on to live a happy and fulfilled life. Pre-rampage, the prom is shown as heavenly, shot in soft-focus and in the same ethereal slow motion as the changing room sequence in the beginning. The emotional high point is the slow dance between Tommy and Carrie. It's as if they're floating on air, and as Carrie looks at him we see his blonde hair illuminated from behind giving him a clear angelic halo.
But once more in the film, as soon as we are lulled into a sense of the heavenly we are brought back to earth with a bloody bump. The echoes of the opening shower scene are unmistakable. In majestic slow motion, with a flute playing softly, Carrie takes the stage with Tommy as King and Queen. Everyone smiles and claps, seemingly pure, sincere praise. But cross-cut with this are sharp, 'Psycho' like violin stings as we see the bucket teetering above the stage. We flash to close-ups of Chris, teasing the string that'll bring the bucket down. She's hidden under the stage, lit from below and looking utterly devilish. The tension expertly build and builds, crosscutting back and forth, panning around the stage. Suddenly it all feels inevitable, and with a lascivious lick of her lips and a smile she pulls the cord.
Carrie is rebaptised in pig's blood, and at the moment of this corruption of Christianity her repressed witch-demon self is unleashed. The empty bucket strikes the angelic Tommy on the head, and he collapses like a slain sacrificial lamb at her feet. From powerless to all powerful she controls wind, water, fire and earth, cutting a sadistic and cruel swathe through friend and foe alike. He shows the rampage through moving split screens (in a style that's faintly reminiscent of the documentary 'Woodstock'). This allows us to keep focus on the now wide-eyed and masklike visage of Carrie as well as simultaneously seeing how she uses the architecture and infrastructure of the school itself to wreak havoc. In an unforgettable shot we see the backdrop of the stage erupt into flames as Carrie seems to glide through the panicked crowd.
What is DePalma telling us about femininity and womanhood here? He seems both awed and fearful of the power of women. Prior to this we are encouraged to view Carrie as a sympathetic protagonist, but now she has tipped over into the world of the movie monster. Her rage is indiscriminate: one of the most disturbing images is when her sympathetic and friendly gym teacher stares in fear at Carrie before being crushed by a falling gym sign. Even though 'Carrie' is a film about interactions between women and the internal life of a high school girl, the power of these images suggests DePalma's conscious inability to know the workings of the female mind, and the fear that this lack of understanding creates.
In the concluding scenes of the film, Carrie ends her telekinetic rampage by destroying the remaining aspects of her life. She is ritually penetrated by her mother upon returning home, and in her final moments impales her mother in return with kitchen knives, leaving her in the same pose as the martyrdom of St Sebastian. Then in the last paroxysms of rage brings the house down around her. Her rage has ended in self-destruction, and her epitaph is 'Carrie White Burns in Hell!'. In the iconic closing scene she proves that her influence will extend beyond the grave in the minds of both the characters and the audience, reaching out of her grave to pull a dreaming and traumatised Amy in after her. This archetypal 'furie' has returned to the land of mythology. The bucket of blood being a direct callback to the menstruation in the opening scenes leads me inevitably to the conclusion that DePalma's intention is to paint a repressed fury as an crucial facet of femininity. Truly, "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned".
After 35 years 'Carrie' still works amazingly well, and still has many valid and relevant points. To modern eyes there are a few scenes that approach camp, and some of the fashion is a bit laughable, especially Tommy's ridiculous powder blue prom suit. But in another sense the concept of the bullied outcast going on a violent, murderous rampage has new cultural currency in the modern era. In particular, it is hard not to think of the Columbine massacre as Carrie gets her sadistic revenge on her classmates.
It's fast-moving, propulsive plotted and darkly satirical. All of the performances are spot-on, with Sissy Spacek giving a career defining performance. Her horrified transformation into a cold-eyed force of destruction is chilling, especially in contrast to the beaten down and submissive girl in the rest of the film. DePalma uses rapidly cut montage sequences throughout, as well as the split screen techniques and occasionally cheesy vaguely synthesised bubblegum music to create an ephemeral 'pop' aesthetic that only makes the inevitable horror more shocking when it arrives. But, shocking as the events may be they remain always enjoyable.
Because while only a real monster couldn't empathise with Carrie, we also take pleasure in watching that bucket wobble precariously over her head. We're filled with the same kind of sick anticipation that the bullies are feeling, crouched in the wings, waiting to see her disgusted reaction. This carefully set up duality is what makes the film so much fun, so memorable and so effective.
It's midnight in the big city. The heat is stifling, the air muggy as you make the turn down Leake Steet and into the underground tunnels underneath Waterloo station. Graffiti of all kinds adorns every wall you see. You turn down a side tunnel into pitch darkness, a corridor illuminated only by a row of candles on the floor guiding you through. The walls, are covered in flowing, paganistic winding spirals. You enter a huge, underground room full of sofas and chairs, with a cinema screen at the front. The only other sounds are the deep booms as trains thunder overhead.
What I'm trying to say here is that MGM HD picked a pretty damn good place to have their 'Terror in the Tunnels' weekend. It's a promotional 'celebration' of their digital movie channel being decrypted for this weekend, but that's not really important. What is important is that whoever's come up with this has picked out four smart and genuinely chilling films to watch. The programme was 'Carrie' (1976), 'Misery' (1990), 'Silence of the Lambs' (1991) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). All films universally acknowledged as occupying the very highest pantheon in horror. I'm pretty familiar with all four, but went to see 'Carrie' on the Friday and 'Silence of the Lambs on the Saturday'.
As I've said, this is a very nice environment to watch films in, there's complimentary popcorn, a bar and sofas to relax on. The slightly 'off' environment only accentuates the creepiness and tension in the films. Fittingly for a promotional event for a HD movie channel, the picture is amazing. The only slight problem is with the sound. Watching in a film in a large, brick sealed tunnel is fantastic in terms of atmosphere, but not so much in terms of acoustics. There is a quite a bit of echo and distortion at the lower frequencies, but then I know both the films I saw well enough to know what the characters were talking about. The noise of the trains rumbling away overhead is also slightly intrusive, but the room gently vibrating and the deep low bass contributes to the sense of things 'about to go wrong' in the films. It seemed particularly apropos in Carrie, and the trains seemed to time themselves after a while to coincide with her episodes of telekinesis.
Review of 'Carrie' here.
Review of 'Silence of the Lambs' here:
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