I can understand why people often shrink back from Lars von Trier’s portrayals of suffering women.  Because arguments in film take the form of characters, setting, and action, it’s a slippery line between say, making arguments about the position of women vis-à-vis society and reenacting those conditions in portrayals that amount to voyeuristic sadism.   Lots of spoilers follow this paragraph, but you seriously should not waste your time with this movie anyway.

Asylum blurs the distinction between historical accuracy and leering, giving us a film that takes the existential paralysis offered to pre-feminism women and turns it into the cinematic equivalent of burning ants with a magnifying glass.  The film follows Stella Raphael (Natasha Richardson) as the restless wife of a doctor in a psychiatric hospital who forms an obsessive attachment to an inmate that tortured and disfigured his own wife but is really good in bed.  She’s a lazily feminist figure, if at all, since her response to the stifling strictures of gender expectations is to find a marginalized man to take care of her and beat her.  One of the creepy aspects to the film was the suggestion that the viewer understand this obsession, partly as a product of her caged freedom and partly because of the absolutely anarchic passions of the orgasm.  Apparently, once you find a woman’s clitoris, there’s just no talking to her.

It’s not just the voyeurism that’s a problem in portrayals of women like this, it’s that the sloppily liberal critique of cultural institutions often seems to have a reactionary undercurrent.  Stella can’t seem to handle even the limited role she’s given, allowing her child to drown in a river because she was off daydreaming about the hot, crazy lug who kicked the crap out of her and almost killed her.  In the end, we see her husband sympathetically, since he only wanted the best for her when he was instructing her on the proper way for a woman to act.  I mean, it’s certainly better to bake cookies than kill your kid and end up the sex slave of a psycho with loose fists.  

As a study of obsession, the movie would be better off not tackling the gender dynamics of the era through Stella’s loathing of her lack of opportunity.  Because then it seems to simply reiterate all kinds of stereotypes of women as irredeemably emotional with masochistic tendencies.  By far the most irritating aspect of Asylum comes from the phony defiant suicide ending.  Yeah, if only every woman who felt unjustly treated by society had killed herself. I hate the defiant suicide.  In terms of statement, it’s more melodramatic but no more effective than mooning someone.  Asylum might, in the wreckage of its plot, have something to say about the lives of intelligent women in an era that kept them anchored in the home.  For me, like Lars von Trier, the movie articulated the suffering too well, becoming more conduit than catharsis.  

Terry Sawyer

It’s impossible to know where to begin dissecting the broken sewer main that is the movie, Hostel.  Of course, any critique of a film with such obviously skyscraping levels of suckage begs the question of why someone like me didn’t see it coming.  Here, I admit to being a horror fan from childhood who, having had a few ecstatic scares before I had pubic hair, have been chasing the “first high” ever since.  

Hostel plays like it was written by two of the stupidest frat boys on the planet after a bong-fueled conversation where everyone thought their ideas were brilliant.  This is usually accomplished by the absence of anyone actually brilliant in the room.  The first three-quarters of the movie involve a group of friends and their casual sex travelogue through Europe.  Of course an enterprising foreigner tells them about this hostel tucked away in the Eastern bloc where the model-hot local girls tumble out of the trees, legs spread, waiting to get screwed by shitfaced lugs.  But, of course, the women are merely lures (evil, evil vaginas) leading the young men to a pay-per-kill dungeon where psychos act out protracted and theatrical murders.  

I won’t spend too much time savaging the plot for the simple reason that it’d be shooting fish on your plate at Red Lobster.  But I was intrigued by the almost backhanded inclusion of repeated homosexual panic, as the main characters police each other’s behavior with casual homophobia.  Methinks they doth repress too much. For those with fine-tuned gaydar, nothing is quite as obvious as the conquistador penis, the man desperate to prove his masculinity by having human-to-meat interactions with as many women as possible, as if sexuality can be denied with enough bed post notches.  In my experience, there are far too many men who hate women because they dig men.  When the entire film leads to a climax with the two nearly naked male protagonists getting tortured, I couldn’t help but wonder, why doesn’t everybody in this movie fuck so we could have less violence?  It sort of cements the sexual panic theory for me that one of the killers turns out to be an older man who had previously come on to one of the characters on a bus in a clearly dangerous spasm of gay.  Open homosexuals really must be the epitome of horror for closet-case jocks.

One side note that I must admit made me laugh out loud.  At one point Jay Hernandez’ character saves this Asian woman who just had her eye plucked out.  Of course she scrambles and fights to survive only to see herself in the mirror and commit suicide by train rather than live a life of imperfection.  Don’t they have plastic surgery in her country of origin?  I guess Asian women must be so obsessed with their looks that they’d rather die than face a life of asymmetry.  Since none of Gwen Stefani’s back-up Asians have glass eyes, the writers of Hostel couldn’t imagine a world where a woman they considered unattractive would want to live.    

Terry Sawyer

It’s hard to believe that Havoc didn’t generate more inquisition or outrage during its initial release.  It’s one of the most racially condescending films I’ve ever seen.  Havoc is the modern equivalent of Shirley Temple learning valuable lessons from her shucking and jiving servants.  Who would have thought THEY could teach US?  

Havoc follows the gapingly empty lives of rich, L.A. white kids who build their identities around a parody of hip-hop culture:  slang-drenched vernacular, rap video clothing, and a propensity for senseless displays of aggression and violence.  Their lives take a turn for the worse once they decide to cruise across the tracks to the “bad” part of town in search of slumming “realness.”  But at least one of the girls, Allison (Anne Hathaway), finds the illicit and violent drug culture to be sexually titillating and decides to start hanging out with the same drug dealer who put a gun to her boyfriend’s head.  At first, you think that this will be yet another Romeo and Juliet regurgitation, but this movie aims much lower than cliché, instead leading into one of the most uncomfortable sex scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Drug dealer Hector (Freddy Rodriguez) doesn’t want a relationship with Allison, he really just wants her to roll the dice to figure out how many of his friends get to gangbang her and her “I’m so drunk” friend.  Allison ends up opting out, but her friend goes forward only to have to scream her way out once the pile-on begins.  She accuses them of raping her, though the movie implies that she’s lying despite a few moments that most viewers would readily identify as rape.  That’s the major problem with Havoc — the fact that it flows like it’s written by the immature, inane, and carnivorously vacuous main characters.  Though Havoc clearly wants to indict these white teens for skimming a minority culture without developing a nuanced view of the people they’re shoplifting from, it really ends up being more often than not passive-aggressively racist.

The drug-dealing Latino gang has absolutely nothing redeeming in their lives which include hotel rooms stuffed to the brim with their babies’ mommas, gang bangs as entertainment, and one scene in which they oafishly try to cruise through the rich neighborhood looking to beat the hell out of the girl pressing charges for rape, only to be stopped by the racially profiling police.  Given the film’s portrayal of minorities as sociopaths on the fringe of culture, tempting pretty white girls who soon learn better, it’s impossible to draw any conclusion other than the fact that this “hip-hop culture” thing, whatever it is, is unambiguously bad for the white children of promise, who will be torn from their potential by a culture of unremitting pathology.  Sadly, I don’t think this is what director Barbara Kopple intended, but her fumbling after-school-special dialogue and Crayola character scribbles take complicated interactions and commit cookie-cutter massacres of them.  

Terry Sawyer

Director Marco Siega’s Pretty Persuasion begins with an essential fake-out of its mood, leading you on to believe that it’s just a slightly edgier take on the cut-throat puberty politics immortalized in Heathers. By the time the movie reaches its tragic, gutting ending, you realize that the film’s slicing superficiality belied a far darker core just as its lead character, Kimberly, wasn’t so much a misguided popular girl as a sociopath in bloom.

It’s easy to criticize this movie for biting off more than it could possibly chew, and in the end, the cultural criticisms levied in the story would be far better serviced if not embedded in the Hannibal Lecter rewrite of Mean Girls. But at least Pretty Persuasion tries to envision why the exporting of American values could prove traumatizing as it’s the story of Muslim transfer student, Randa Azzouni, who ends up at the martyred end of a web of sex, lies, drugs, and the trampling pursuit of fame.

Granted, this Muslim innocent eaten by the American devil-girl reeks of a simplicity that assumes being a woman in the Muslim world doesn’t come with its own indigenous trauma. Yet, watching her life rended into meaningless at the cross-section of our institutions — high school, the media, and the courtroom — it was difficult not to feel like perhaps our obsessions, our shames, and our pecking orders that reward pathology make living life from an authentically spiritual center next to impossible. Or, at the very least, fruitless.

Pretty Persuasion also seems to be asking us to consider our culture as an incubator for sociopathic behavior. As Kimberly, the main character, manipulates the school, her friends, family, and the entire media with oral sex and a marionette’s instinct for the pettiness of humankind, one wonders why these institutions seem ready-made for psychotic pliance. From the gullible jurors to the narcissistic journalist who can’t wait to get Kimberly into bed, everyone in the movie seems too morally compromised to be able to figure out the truth before Kimberly is ready to have the truth revealed.

As with most movies, the plot’s message amounts to little more than boxy clichés, and it’s the characters who carry the real weight and nuance. The final scene crops close to Kimberly’s face as we watch her discover that she’s imperially unparalleled in manipulation but emotionally barren. She quietly implodes under the weight of her own amoral, absolute power while never allowing her howling realization to disturb a single grain in her beautifully crafted surface. While it’s easy to pick at the film for its crass reductions of a complicated conflict in cultures, Pretty Persuasion deserves credit for showing us with disturbing clarity how easily high school can be paradigmatic for the entire world.  

Terry Sawyer

I don’t mind adding to the praise parade that has rained down upon Murderball because it’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen.  Murderball (which chronicles the lives of members of the U.S. Paralympic Rugby team) enlightens those not disabled by shattering the accumulated patronization of  the disabled in film.  Most importantly, Murderball presents us with a sweaty, sinewy pack of athletes that one can’t help but sexualize, especially when they’re talking about masturbation and their preferred penetration positions.  These guys embody defiantly aggro masculinity in all of its gladiator glory.   The disabled have long been emotionally eviscerated by pity on film, forced into egregiously noble roles where they’re allowed to create epiphanies for people who aren’t disabled.  Wow, our lives don’t suck, thank you for dispensing wisdom in a harmlessly non-erotic way, like a child or a kindly old person.  But the fact remains that if any of us happened to end up a quadriplegic tomorrow, would we want people to cradle us with sorrowful Bambi-eyes or would we want them to straddle our chairs?  Murderball helped me to realize that part of achieving social justice for the disabled involves getting over the tragically narrow categories of “hotness” and giving them lewd stares whenever appropriate.  I plan on starting tomorrow.

But Murderball’s humanization process proceeds at many levels.  Some of the people in the documentary seem like unrepentant dick wads.  As a gay man, I know how nervous I get when gay people get depicted as murderers, trashy whores, or generic bogeymen for free-floating heterosexual fears about the destruction of their always-imperiled families.  But the fact is that some gay people do murder and slut around, but only heterosexual white men have the luxury of individuality.  No matter how many of them rape and kill, they will never have to watch the news and then endure questions about what intrinsic aspects of their “culture” make them such pathological humans.  

Part of the process of having that kind of power comes from not having to be exemplary minorities.  The disabled have been given a heavy cultural burden symbolically, shoehorned into portrayals like the hunchback of Notre Dame who saves a woman’s life repeatedly, only to have her hook up with another man because the standard narrative for the disabled person is to provide wholesome illumination of how precious life is, a not-so-subtle stab in the back which implies that disabled life isn’t equally as precious.  Murderball gets ugly, with some of the men displaying petty, angry, infantile outbursts in the course of the competition, just as it should be.  It sounds contradictory, but I felt liberated from ignorance in that first moment when I realized that I totally loathed one of the central characters, but loathed him as a whole person.  I stopped seeing the chair and saw straight through to the asshole inside.

Terry Sawyer

The evil of Nazism was so totalizing that we’ve been collectively struggling ever since to imagine how so many people could be led down such a dark path and how best to make the person we disagree with at the cocktail party seem like someone who hides a pair of slick, Swastika-heeled jackboots under his or her bed.

There have been many attempts to try and impose explanatory frameworks upon Hitler, attributing his actions to everything from childhood abuse to my personal favorite, the failed artist theory. If only Hitler had been given undeserved recognition for his crappy watercolors, then he could have sublimated his genocidal tendencies. Under this theory, art schools should admit everyone who applies lest they turn away someone whose only two life choices are serial strangler or sculptor.

Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato tackle the thorny underwear drawer of Hitler in their documentary, Hidden Hitler.  Barbato and Bailey attempt to build the case that Hitler was homosexual through stories of trench warfare blowjobs, a hidden rap sheet where Hitler tried to score some public action, and even tales of Hitler renting out his money-maker to randy old guys. The problem in isolating Hitler’s sexuality for analysis comes from the fact that, when it comes to minorities, questions of individual psychology have a way of morphing into group conjecture. Throughout Hidden Hitler, a hazy line between exploring a hot-button historical issue and attributing homosexuality to Hitler’s broader pathologies gets inadvertently crossed.  Though it’s certainly intriguing to examine topics that might have been avoided for political reasons, it’s also irresponsible to take an unproven claim and thread that assertion back into a portrait of Hitler’s unknowable motivations.  

The anecdotal evidence does indeed pile up, leaving one to wonder if Hitler perhaps liked man-on-man action when he wasn’t busy keeping the death trains on time.  But the question ultimately won’t be the talisman that unlocks Hitler’s sociopathic rule any more than the genocide can be reduced to German nationalism or to some adolescent bully trauma involving a Jewish kid who took Hitler’s lunch money.  Despite all the potential paths of exploration, it seems to me that the crucial duty of any filmmaker is to make sure that in the end, the viewer understands that all the forces that may have colluded in creating a certain personality environment do not exonerate the most crucial factor in Hitler’s personal history:  his ability to make choices, truly evil and abominable ones.  

Terry Sawyer

One of the best possible uses of a lousy movie comes from enjoying the tangents your brain makes to avoid smothering boredom. The Australian existential slasher movie, Lost Things, has all the intellectual overkill and execution underwhelm of a D+ student art film.  Essentially Groundhog Day meets Friday the 13th, the movie centers around horny teens caught in a loop of repeating their last day on Earth that starts over once they realize that they’ve already been murdered. As I said, the movie itself was less interesting to me than the idea that, beneath the surface coherence of our belief systems (e.g., Christian, Muslim, etc.), we adopt passively syncretic worldviews.  Watching Lost Things, I started to think about that fact that, despite all our culture’s putative religious fundamentalism, some people have an uncanny ability to incorporate beliefs seemingly at odds with their core values.

Of course Christianity is famous for this, borrowing traditions while burying cultures.  The Catholic Church was particularly adept at the brutal barter, slaughtering local gods but doling out a few Saints in exchange.  We have Easter eggs, Christmas trees, and an erroneous birthday for baby Jesus in part because, in absorbing paganism, Christianity kept a few of the nicer dresses for special occasions.    

It’s interesting to watch these cobbled beliefs play out on television.  Jennifer Love Hewitt talks to the dearly departed on Ghost Whisperer, a popular series in which she sorts out the problem-ridden world of the dead, where petty souls skulk around Starbucks waiting for supernatural waifs to listen to their bitching.  This dovetails nicely with The Medium where Patricia Arquette receives corpse communiqués in her dreams from people pissed off the police can’t solve their murders.  The only untapped entertainment angle would have to be a show about the backstabbing, sexually charged adolescents who party and betray each other in purgatory.  

If these dramatizations aren’t enough to quench your desire to shoot the breeze with the undead, then there’s always Jonathon Edwards whose carnie-in-chinos routine allows audience members to believe that relatives from the other side, speaking in muffled voices, have nothing to offer other than clichés and treasure map hints about sacked-away valuables.

I’m amused by this because, for a culture with so many religious purists, this seems to be an odd assortment of views to hold simultaneously.  Where in the ideology of heaven and hell are ghosts?  Why do these spirits skid past their life deadline only to fret and obsess over the details of the past?  Can the afterlife be this boring?  When did we start stealing from Buddhism so shamelessly?  Part of my sarcastic tone comes from living in Texas, where people with absolutely no understanding of their own religious texts, history, or theology seek to impose their moral order with the sort of ferocity that only people who have no idea what they’re talking about can muster.  Next time a fundamentalist Christian talks about ghosts, you should ask them if that’s their religion or just static cling.

Terry Sawyer

Ever since reading Joshua Gibson’s essay “Monsters in the Closet:  Killer Kids and Queer Identity,” I have a much more acute awareness of the ways in which gays and lesbians get configured as the monster objects in horror films.  One of the interesting aspects of Gibson’s essay comes from the way he shows that even characters not overly coded as gay can act as stand-ins for fears about homosexuality endangering the beloved and always besieged family.  

High Tension is a film that feels like it was made by a panting serial killer with one hand down his pants.  It’s the first horror film I’ve ever seen that made me feel guilty for watching it.  The camera puts you in the position of a sociopath, erotically lingering over images of women gored and distressed, eschewing plot for stark visual caresses of slit throats, gushing wounds, and sadism so prolonged and unrelenting that the movie becomes a marathon for your capacity to tamp your gag reflex.  I guess I should note that the next paragraph might spoil the one-trick,  wholly implausible plot twist in this rancid piece of trash.

The big shock in High Tension comes at the end when you discover that you’re simply watching a hyper-violent exploration of lesbian desire.  The character being chased and tortured throughout the movie is really the killer, who envisions herself as a fat, middle-aged, white man so that she can express her desire to have sex with her friend and attempt to kill her when her advances get rebuffed.  Of course, she can’t just get drunk and make out with her during spring break for the Girls Gone Wild crew; she has to gruesomely murder the family of the one she loves.  In this way, High Tension traffics in any number of right-wing slurs about the birth of homosexual desire necessitating the death of the traditional family.  

If it were just homophobic, it would be simply typical, but the retrograde notions of queer identity abound.   In one scene, the killer uses a decapitated head to simulate a blowjob in her fucked up terror-truck (every good serial killer needs one) before discarding the head out the window.  Not only does the movie equate homosexual desire with the extinction of the family, but it theorizes lesbianism as simple penis envy.  Thus, all the big rifles, buzz saws, and barbed wire sticks seem like frustrated dildos, the rage that apparently comes from being cursed with a vagina.  After all, what are two women-identified women going to do with two vaginas?  In this sense, homosexuality itself becomes inconceivable except as a stunted desire to reproduce the heterosexual model atop mutilated bodies.  

The tradition in horror films of packing conservative messages into surfaces that would appear antithetical to the family values crowd has been around as long as teenagers have needed to be impaled on film for having pre-marital sex.  But High Tension offers a new bottom in hidden messages.  It’s painstaking to dig through the depravity to find the secondary message of degradation.  

Terry Sawyer