Saturday, February 27, 2010

The Uninvited Other Identity We Sensed at the Fight Club

Sara and I went to see Shutter Island last Friday -- mostly because it was the film showing at the St. Louis Moolah Theatre (and who can pass up an opportunity to sit in leather couches in an old Masonic lodge, watching movies on a giant screen?), but partly because it was a thriller and partly because it's a Scorsese film and partly because of Leonardo DiCaprio. It's about two US federal marshals who come to investigate the disappearance of an escaped woman from a island-locked mental institution for the criminally insane.

And so the film begins rather provocatively: two men who barely know each other, visiting a very scary place on a very solitary island in what appears to be a thickening storm, trying to get information from increasingly recalcitrant and resistant hospital leaders and guards, mixed with unnecessary flashbacks to WW2 and their death camps which are meant to resonate with the possibly evil machinations of a hospital for the insane in the 1950s. So far so good, yes?


So does the film move in the direction of a horror film, where the lights go out, the storm sets in, and all the evil criminals run loose, doing unforeseen violence? or does the film move in the direction of a political thriller -- i.e. the push for further information slowly reveals deeper and darker levels of conspiracy and manipulation? or does the film become a psychological thriller, where the hero's psychological pressures begin to bleed into the dilemmas of the villains, unsettling reality as we know it?



Maybe Scorsese doesn't want to choose! so we get a half-hearted attempt at all three. But Shutter Island is mostly an attempt at the psychological thriller -- and that's the object lesson for today's class! Because it is becoming ever more popular to play the game of "catch the dangerous guy, oh, whoops, it's actually you -- surprise!" Why is this the case? And what are the general contours of such an enterprise?


The most conspicuous example of this phenomenon is, of course, The Sixth Sense (1999). It basically made M. Night Shyamalan's career, and everyone was generally very impressed with how seamlessly the movie tricked us into thinking Bruce Willis' character was not a ghost. It worked mostly by perching Willis' character awkwardly in doorways, behind coffee tables, never talking directly to other people, always talking past them -- and by clever cuts, beginning with the blackout after he gets shot in the very first scene: quick shots that make us forget to ask "wait a second! did he recover from that gunshot wound?"

Other movies tried to do similar things: Fight Club (1999) is a notable example, though it is infinitely more clunky. Take, for example, this explanation of the split-personality gambit from the film:

TYLER
Sometimes I control it, and you imagine yourself watching me [...] And, sometimes you control it [...] You can see me and hear me, but no one else can...

JACK
No! This isn't true. We--we were around other people, together, both of us.

TYLER
You never talked to me in front of anyone else.

JACK
Wrong, wrong -- what about the car crash... the two guys in the backseat?

TYLER
What about them? They're lunatics...

JACK
What about Marla?

TYLER
What about Marla?

JACK
She's... you... you're f***ing her.

TYLER
Um, well... technically, no.

This is known as "lampshade hanging" -- the act of putting every possible criticism in the mouth of one of your own characters in order to preempt any possibility of your audience saying "wait a second, you're breaking your own rules!" In a movie like The Sixth Sense, there is no lampshade hanging -- the reveal is seamless and often the final scene. In a clunkier movie like Fight Club, the lampshades are rather conspicuous, but get rattled off in a minute. In a movie like Shutter Island, it lengthens the already-terrible movie by a good twenty minutes. Whenever a psychologist shows up at the end of a movie to re-explain everything once and for all for those who were too slow to catch it the first time, it's a bad move: yes, I'm even looking at you, Mr. Hitchcock. In children's fantasy novel, this role is taken up by the resident schoolmaster and ought to be known as the "Dumbledore redub."

But let's continue our journey through the magical world of psychological disjunction. Later examples are sometimes refinements of these older examples: for example, The Others (2001) does a good job of taking the psychological thriller and infusing it with even older genres like the gothic. I understand that this modern turn towards schizophrenia is mostly a resurgence of the 19th-century predilection for the gothic: for though the earliest forms of the gothic included Italian dissolute noblemen and actual ghosts, later versions of the gothic (Radcliffe, Austen, Bronte) began to domesticate the gothic, attributing the scary to an obscure, but perfectly natural occurrence; in the later 1800s, it became yet even more tempting to attribute all those scary things to going crazy (Hawthorne, Henry James, Poe).



But time and time again, I feel that later examples are using the "enemy is us" trope as a simple way to evade more complex levels of narrative. If Identity (2003), for example, had to pose as a realistic narrative instead of a psychological allegory, it couldn't have the villain be the child who apparently can kill 9 grown adults without breaking a sweat. And if The Uninvited (2009) had to deal with a truly villainous stepmother -- okay, there's really no rescue from cliche for this movie -- then the female protagonist, as well as the predominantly female audience, would have to face the truly terrible prospects of being powerless. (instead, we're left with the moral: "you're incredibly powerful! but a little crazy")

In Shutter Island (2010), of course, everything is flattened in deference to the psychological plot twist: what might have been a political question about the rights of the criminally insane is suddenly flattened to whether we think Dicaprio's character ought to "live as a monster or die like a hero"; the heavy-handed, but possibly compelling parallels between Nazi Germany and Cold War America turn out to be the mere fancies of a crazy man (ah! glad to put those to rest); and instead of a denouement, we're given photographs of dead children and boring anagrams, the full purport of which we are not fully acquainted with until the letters are written on the chalkboard and shifted around.

So to all aspiring writers of thriller, horror, and neo-gothic films, I beg of you: stop taking the thinness of your narratives and attributing them to the thinness of your main character's fantasies! (Many critics accuse Hawthorne of doing this very thing with his failed novel The Blithedale Romance, and I can't help but agree for the most part.) It is the ultimate bait-and-switch: we think we're getting a careful weaving together of many plot threads, but in the end we're left holding onto a single plot twist.

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