The question of whether the depiction of violence is morally justifiable has been cropping up a lot in discussions of Michael Winterbottom’s new work ‘The Killer Inside Me’. The issue is certainly one worth exploring, but gives the impression that the film itself is an ‘8mm’ style investigation into the intersection of realism and fakery, violence and pornography, titillation and culpability. It is none of these things, instead settling for a slick, shallow-feeling noir with some seriously upsetting sequences, which utilises ambiguity a lot more than its occasional upfront brutality would suggest.
Casey Affleck plays small-town cop Lou Ford, an aw-shucks simpleton with a pretty fiancé and a penchant for stovetop coffee and classical music. Or at least that is what Lou himself thinks the rest of the town take him for, when in truth he carries the sickness – a compulsion to murder women, boys, and anyone else he can convince himself is an impediment to his half-baked schemes. Or at least, sickness (always italics) is what it is termed in the original 1952 novel by dime-store noir master Jim Thompson. The film itself suggests a Freudian web of troubling childhood episodes, Winterbottom calls it schizophrenia in interviews, while Affleck’s own performance suggests a self-deluded sociopathy.
This grey indeterminacy at the heart of the drama is what both makes it a hollow and unconvincing experience as well as a compelling and tense one. The reconcilement of such opposites is reminiscent of Emile Zola’s 1890 novel La Béte Humaine, in which various steamy affairs and murderous impulses are all simmered together in an overpoweringly gothic stew which makes nods towards social relevance, but only ever satirically so.
‘The Killer Inside Me’ flirts with the gothic in the dark impulses of the characters, but retains a blandly art deco façade. It is this matter-of-factness that makes the killings so vicious and potentially offensive, not just the calm way they are filmed or the bizarre continued devotion that everyone seems to still feel for Lou even when he is beating their face to a pulp. This disassociation from the protagonist and the film-makers intentions (the narrative has such a recycled clean-break-gone-wrong framework as to be almost invisible) threatens to estrange the audience; the sustained depiction of it pulls us back, forces us to re-associate with what we are witnessing in a way that Lou does not. These are ideas Quentin Tarantino has been playing around with for a decade now; unsurprisingly, Winterbottom’s clear-eyed commitment to them is more rewarding.
These killings, which stand so proud and vital within both the film and discussions about it, threaten to overshadow the rest of ‘The Killer Inside Me’. If they are not allowed to do so then the weaknesses surrounding them begin to reveal themselves: the ambling plotting, the disconnected final reel, the often sub-par musical choices, the plainness of the filming which seems ill-at-ease with what Winterbottom states is intended to be such a subjective experience of a killer’s own mindset. Such analysis reveals further how the film plays with violence as a structuring device, a marketing ploy, a (non)pleasure to be focussed upon at the expense of all else. Kathryn Bigelow does much the same in her cinema, and lays herself open to the same accusations of relying upon the very conventions she exposes.
The entertainment to be found in ‘The Killer Inside Me’ is not of the visceral variety, nor the generic. These pleasures are offered, but critiqued and disregarded to the extent that to come away from the film praising the shooting, or the cleverness of the plot, would be somewhat perverse. Lou, it turns out, is unaware that he has not quite pulled the wool over the eyes of those around him as successfully as he thought, and this revelation further complicates the interaction between the film and the spectator. Like Lou, we aren’t sure quite whether we are as secure in our received narrative as we seem, and like those around him we don’t understand what the motives for the crimes we witness are. These misgivings, and not the fierceness of the violence, are what offer ‘The Killer Inside Me’ its power.
No comments:
Post a Comment