"Prisoners" and hurting people

The US Government has just released a report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, in other words on the use of torture by the CIA. You can get it as a pdf if you like >500-page documents full of horrifying details and the word [REDACTED].

David Simon has written the most basic and heartfelt howl of pain and outrage about it, echoed here by Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism. Doug Muder at The Weekly Sift does a more analytical breakdown which is also good. The fellas over at Mind Hacks have a really interesting article about how the directors of this particular torture initiative either totally misunderstood or criminally misrepresented the psychology that they based their operations on, and how (terrifyingly) the CIA fell for it regardless.

Between the Doug Muder and Libby Anne piece, there's a pretty good indication as to how the CIA got it so badly wrong here. What Muder refers to as the "bomb in New York scenario"* is seductive because it connects the very human desire for immediate revenge on wrongdoers with the promise of an immediate, tangible, and morally valuable aim. If you read Libby Anne's roundup of right wing US commentary on this report, you'll see the basic structure of the bomb in New York repeated over and over again.

In his article, Doug Muder does a pretty good job of taking this argument to bits, moral-logic-wise.

On the other hand, I've been reading a bit of research that suggests that humans cling to stories above all else, and tend to reject facts that get in the way of our preferred story (hence the persistence of Andrew Wakefield's MMR-causes-autism thesis, flouridation panics, so on and so forth). The suggestion seems to be that having a counter-story is a more effective way of dealing with faulty information.

If that's the case, I would strongly recommend watching Prisoners, and getting other people to do so as well. The basic setup is that two young girls disappear, and in the absence of any progress from the police, one of their fathers kidnaps the initial suspect in order to try and beat the truth out of him. Without getting too deep into spoiler territory, the striking thing about Prisoners is its absolute condemnation of revenge and vigilantism. In this film, without fail, every single act of vigilantism, torture or retributive violence is counter-productive, and makes the overall situation much much worse.

I think that's a story we need to hear told more often.

* This scenario (and variations thereof) is beloved of people who want to be able to say that torturing people is OK when the "good guys" do it, and it goes as follows: "There's a bomb planted in New York that will kill thousands - maybe tens of thousands when it goes off/ You have a guy in custody who knows where it is, and torturing him is the only way to get that information. What would you do?" 

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Review update for those interested in such...

It's been a while since I posted anything, but I've kept writing reviews so those have been stacking up a bit. Love & Pop has currently got my reviews of:

• Muscle Shoals - a fascinating look at the disproportionately influential Muscle Shoals music scene, and the improbably tragic life of one of its central figures. It's a must for music nerds (like me) but my less-nerdy co-watchers said they could have used more music and fewer talking heads.
• Lucky Bastard - a found-footage thriller about murders at a porn shoot which is also a commentary of a sort on male entitlement and the violence it engenders.
• The Angriest Man In Brooklyn - a minor Robin Williams vehicle that suffers (I think) from unfortunate proximity to his death. If it could be safely ignored, it'd probably annoy people less.
• Enemy - Jake Gyllenhaal plays two unpleasant men who are exact doubles. Giant spiders stalk above the Toronto skyline. Everything is a ghastly piss-yellow. (It's actually frustratingly, tantalisingly good, and will glue itself to your brainpipes tenaciously.)
• Savages Crossing - an Aussie thriller hoping to capitalise on the menace of John Jarrat's "Mick Taylor" character from Wolf Creek, and the star power of Craig McLachlan. Falls flat through lack of commitment.

I'm working my way through a giant boxed set of Jacques Tati films, and will be reviewing those in a bit. It's slow going at the moment, though as people in my household are resistant to the (to me) obvious charms of French-language physical comedy.

Lobotomy

Way back in 2011, in an attempt to stop neglecting this blog so much, I reviewed a terrible movie I'd watched called Asylum. If you can't be bothered going back and reading it my post in full, the movie was about teenagers being stalked and murdered by the ghost of a sadistic psychiatrist who wielded lobotomy picks as weapons. It was really very bad.

Anyhow, one of the things I mentioned in that review was that it was that the non-stupid bits of the killer psychiatrist's story loosely mirrored the life and work of Dr. Walter Freeman, the American physician who pioneered and did much to popularise the transorbital "icepick" lobotomy. I thought that it was a shame that Asylum ignored this connection in favour of really dumb slasher-backstory, because I feel like Freeman is kind of a tragic figure. He genuinely seems to have been motivated by what he saw as the best interests of people who would otherwise have been confined to state asylums.

The Psychologist has just put up a really interesting article about letters to Freeman from his patients and his responses - it's a really fascinating look at the way lobotomy was viewed at the time, and how it was able to continue for so long.

(Hat-tip to Mind Hacks for the link.)

The Cherry Psychomaniac and the Darkest Corner of Paradise

Cinemania has my reviews of Cherry, The Death Wheelers, and The Darkest Corner of Paradise.

Cherry and The Darkest Corner Of Paradise both felt like concept overreach to me. They seemed like they had big ideas in the back of their creators' minds which didn't end up actually translating to the screen. In Cherry, this was a meditation on the destructive capacity of human relationships and the "nice guy" myth which got muddied by the general unlikability of all its characters, while Paradise aspired to Taxi Driver but ended up with lots of scenes of a guy walking around in the dark (albeit attractively shot, and with a neat soundtrack) that led up to nothing much.

The Death Wheelers (originally and confusingly titled Psychomania) is an entirely different kettle of fish - an amazing 70s-kitsch time capsule and a great piece of English spooky-pagan horror. Sadly (I looked it up) the charmingly brutal Nicky Henson who plays the lead seems to have come to nothing in particular. This was also the last movie for George Sanders* before his suicide, and there's some suggestion that its poor reception at the time contributed to his depression.

Really the only downsides to Death Wheelers are its over-reliance on now-dated car chase scenes, and (on the version I got at least) the poor sound quality. Otherwise I'd highly recommend it to anyone who's into that sort of thing.

* The voice of Shere Khan in the Disney Jungle Book, amongst many many other things.

Pointless Mysteries

Cinemania has my reviews of Iron Doors and The Hunt.

They're both kinda average, though for my money The Hunt is slightly better. What's interesting to me is where they fall down - in both cases it's a mishandling of a central mystery.

It's an oft-repeated semi-truism that the stuff you make up in your own head is cooler, sexier, funnier or scarier than whatever an artist can depict. This is how H.P. Lovecraft's stuff works (his horrors are typically more suggested than described) why you hardly see any footage of the Alien in the first movie, and why the Goon Show is better than Monty Python.

Where this falls down, however, is when the mystery is more interesting by far than the actual content of your film. The plot of The Hunt presumes the existence of an organisation that exists to run human-hunting games for the rich. From the implications in the course of the movie, we see that this society is ancient and secretive, as well as highly ritualistic. Unfortunately, we never get more than implications - instead we watch a gutter journalist struggle through the forest while masked men shoot arrows at him.

In Iron Doors the central question is who decided to spend a vast amount of money turning a series of bank vaults into a hybrid of Cube and one of the more irritating point-and-click adventure games of the 1990s. There's a vague implication that it's perhaps to do with aliens or something, but that's pretty unsatisfying when the movie opens up the possibility that alien-abduction-by-Fear-Factor-style-gross-out-challenge is actually a thing that happens to people. Why? What purpose do the aliens fulfill by locking an oddly-accented* German banker in a vault until he finally has sex with a random African woman**? I mean, if that plan solves a problem then the problem must be pretty bloody interesting - more interesting by far than watching a guy agonise about drinking piss and eating maggots.

I did an improv workshop once as part of a conference I was at, and the presenters talked at length about "opening the door, and then going through it" - by which they meant having the courage to follow your ideas to their logical conclusions, even if those conclusions take you in strange directions.

Go watch The Cabin In The Woods (assuming you haven't already) for an example of how to do this right. No seriously, go watch it. It will improve every single bad horror movie you have ever watched or will ever watch by its simple existence. Do it.

EDITED TO ADD:
Film Crit Hulk has a great essay on the "convoluted blockbuster" over at Badass Digest which is relevant here - especially the bit about judging whether revealing stuff is more worthwhile than concealing it at any given time.

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*Seriously, the box says he's German and the movie is German - but he starts out sounding American then swings between generically-European and Irish for the rest of the film.

** The woman is pretty problematic in and of herself. The fact that she seems to be introduced into the maze for the benefit of the German banker is pretty gross, and I found myself really pissed off by the fact that she got subtitles when she was by herself, but not when she talked to the man. 

Profane is sort of Magic

Cinemania has my review of Profane. It's.... interesting.

If that sounds like backing-away-slowly "interesting", that's kind of a shame. I thought Profane was a good movie, I just hesitate to recommend an explicit BDSM picture with long unfocused psychedelic sections unreservedly, because it's either going to be your thing or emphatically not your thing.

It's hard to explain why I think this movie is good without potentially spoiling some stuff, so if you're desperate to hunt down a copy of Profane and hit it full-force with the Beginner's Mind (which is what I did, albeit inadvertently) you might want to stop reading and go organise that. If you want a pre-taste of what's about to hit you, but not to have things spoiled, here's Usama Alhaibi's Vimeo feed (the link is safe, but at least some of the videos are not even slightly Safe For Work - you have been warned).

Now read on...

I read a book of interviews with Tom Waits a while back, where he talked a lot about "the hair in the gate". Back in the days of reel-to-reel film, it was possible for pieces of grit or hair to get stuck in the gate that the film passed through. When that happened, the audience would see it superimposed over the picture, jumping about as the fast-moving film agitated it on the way past. Waits says that he enjoys the hair in the gate (a sonic equivalent would be someone else's music heard through a wall or in a crowded noisy market) because it forces audiences to make up their own minds about what's happening behind the distortion*.

Profane is very like that. One of the functions of the psychedelic segments and extended BDSM scenes is to confront you with "noise" that can't be processed logically and forces you to try and reconcile what you're seeing now with the information that was revealed in the more "documentary" scenes. As a result, it's hard to say what definitively what happens in the course of the film.

It's possible that Muna undergoes a spiritual death and resurrection in line with the Hero's Journey, and reconciles her cultural Muslim upbringing with her current life in a new sort of mystical spiritual synthesis. It's an equally valid interpretation of the events as presented to say that she fails to reconcile with Islam and becomes an atheist, or to say that the movie is an account of her total spiritual destruction and that by the end she has been entirely consumed and/or possessed by the Djinn. I know which of those I believe, but I'm fairly sure that someone with a different psychic makeup would draw an entirely different conclusion.

The other function of the psychedelic scenes is to mirror Muna's state of mind. This isn't new - lots of films have attempted to convey the experience of taking mind-altering drugs - but Profane is the first movie I've seen to attempt to show drug effects relative to one another, from a subjective point of view. Muna drinks and smokes pot as well as snorting coke and assorted crushed-up pharmaceuticals, and each drug changes the film in noticeable and highly characteristic ways. It's a really interesting device to try and get you into a character's head (as well as making a subtle point about allowable and banned forms of perception) and I thought it was really effective.

What Usama Alshaibi has done with Profane is a sort of Magical cinema. The closest cousins I can think of would be David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky (I've also seen him compared to Kenneth Anger, but I haven't seen any of Anger's films so I can't really comment on that). Both Jodorowsky and Lynch rely on symbolism to carry a lot of the weight of their films, and construct them with a specific psychological impact in mind for the audience.

The Magical element of this is that, because the nature of the symbols is not explicitly decoded, the viewer's subconscious does a lot of the processing in line with their own perceptual reality filters. The full effect of the film is then felt over the course of the next few weeks or months as it slowly unpacks its baggage into the conscious mind. Because the decoding filters aren't "up" and screening the information as it comes in, charge** isn't lost or diffused and it's actually possible for the film to change you (albeit subtly) in ways a more straightforward narrative can't.

I am not the same person I was before I watched Profane - not much different, but certainly not the same.



* This could also be understood as forcibly opening up a gap between perception and reality (or "reality" as relates to the medium in question) as discussed here.

**I try hard to avoid New Age-yness, or "Magickal" language here, because my point is that Magic is a way of explaining a set of processes (for example "negative energy" is a metaphor, not a measurable physical phenomenon) that can be explained in other ways, but (I believe) less effectively. However, I can't think of a better word here. "Charge" in this context would probably be best described as the sense of emotional realness and immediacy in an idea - the difference between reading about something and experiencing it, for example.

The Mark of the Beast (and also I'm gonna try and write more stuff)

I'm reviewing movies for an outfit called Cinemania now. They tend to get a lot of horror/exploitation, non-English, art-house and documentary things - so that's obviously what I'll be reviewing. With any luck this'll prompt me to do more non-review writing as well.

The first thing I've done for them was Rudyard Kipling's Mark of the Beast - it wasn't very good. The short story I checked for reference, I found here if you're interested.

As a post-script to the review there (to sum up - the problems almost all stem from a clumsy transposition of the story form Kipling's India circa 1890 to a modern "Forest" which makes a very poor substitute) I had a minor revelation this morning. Actually, America does have a modern equivalent (or at least, enough of an equivalent for the story to make sense) to Kipling's India - the Middle East.

Sure, it'd have been on-the-nose to set the story there and might have made the movie quite controversial. However, it'd let the characters continue to be military with all the "protect your mates" culture that goes with that instead of no-one-in-particular civilians, as well as providing a plausible "subject population" instead of the movie's awkward references to "Natives". The questions that Kipling raised in his original story about the relative values of "civilised" and "uncivilised" lives, as well as the unease about the way that the use of torture subverts the cause it is used to support would also have made much more sense that way.

Oh well.

Movie Review: Asylum

Another "light" post for now, as baby is impending and life is full of things. Anyhow, let's get to it...


A very wise (at least about movies) man once said: "The one thing you CANNOT do in a monster movie, is make it boring." And he's right. Nothing else is essential - there are great monster movies with ridiculous plots, terrible acting, dreadful scripts or some combination of the above. It's not even necessary to be ironic about it, The Mummy (no, not that one, the good one) played the entire setup totally straight, without even recourse to wacky character deaths and still manages to bring it off.

Unfortunately, this is where Asylum falls down. Of course, the fact that it was directed by the man responsible for Final Destination 2 really ought to have been a clue. Technically, it's a slasher, rather than a monster movie - but it's a supernatural slasher, which is very nearly the same thing.

The premise (I'm really not spoiling anything by telling you this) is that a group of blandly generic teenagers haunted by blandly generic "dark pasts" get murdered by an undead psychiatrist who was murdered by the inmates he'd tortured in his asylum. The teenagers are exposed to the undead psychiatrist because their university dorm used to be his old asylum building (and naturally they go exploring in the shut down bit of the building, 'cos why wouldn't you?)

The sad thing is that Asylum could have been saved at any point by simply turning the knobs up to 11. The characters are pretty dull, but that could have been ameliorated by having the undead psychiatrist kill some minor or background characters as well as focusing on the 6 central ones. The psychiatrist is a pretty crappy supernatural slasher, but that could have been fixed by having the "tripout" moments he inflicts on his victims intensified, and having him break out the crazy barbed-wire gimp-suit (no, I'm not kidding) earlier on.

Instead, the movie keeps breaking away from the murders (which, after all are the point of a slasher movie) to focus on "character development" - by which I mean dull characters sitting around and telling each other their "tragic back stories". This is clearly an attempt to give the movie some depth, but it fails horribly. The "issues" each character has are so mind-numbingly obvious and grounded in such ham-handed pop-psychology that each revelation elicited a new and louder groan from my wife as we watched.

Think I'm kidding? OK, see if you can pick what issues each character has based on their thumbnail character sketch (don't worry - these are also all played straight up from the start and never change, this isn't a spoiler either).

So, we have:

1. A precocious 16-year old "genius hacker" who's quirky and makes cat's-cradles.
2. A studious "generically ethnic" girl who never lets anyone get too close.
3. A musclebound "jock" who never shuts up.
4. A broodingly-interesting "artistic" type.
5. A blond "hot chick" who is implied to be promiscuous.
6. Our flavourless protagonist who occasionally hallucinates.

I'll put some lines in here so you can think for a second, and then scroll down to see if you guessed right...

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Dooby-dooby-doo...

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OK! Enough! Time to see if you guessed right...

1. A precocious 16-year old "genius hacker" who's quirky and makes cat's-cradles.
   Neglected by an alcoholic mother who doesn't understand him. Because no well-socialised person is ever good with computers, that's why.
2. A studious "generically-ethnic" girl who never lets anyone get too close.
   Used to be in a generically-violent relationship with a generically-ethnic man. Because that's what ethnic people are like, obviously.
3. A musclebound "jock" who never shuts up.
   Used to be fat and self-conscious, because of his family who have food issues. It's clever because he's the opposite of what he used to be! Get it? 
4. A broodingly-interesting "artistic" type.
   A recovering drug addict, obviously.
5. A blond "hot chick" who is implied to be promiscuous.
   Sexually abused by her father (Duh, why else would a woman want to have lots of sex?)
6. Our flavourless protagonist who occasionally hallucinates.
   Her father and brother both killed themselves as a result of "insanity*" and she's afraid she might go the same way.

The reason the characters' mental health is an issue is that the undead psychiatrist preys on people with "issues" under the guise of trying to "cure" them. This might be an interesting concept** if the characters' histories were interesting in any way, and if the psychiatrist actually addressed them at all in his attacks. Instead, he simply makes them hallucinate their traumatic circumstances for a couple of minutes before (usually) stabbing them.

The final disappointment here, is that there's (tangentially) a real story buried under the rubbish - and an interesting one too. The undead psychiatrist is was at the forefront of the "icepick lobotomy" technique popular between the 40's and 60's. He was supposed to have gone off the rails when the procedure was discredited, and been killed by his patients shortly afterwards. Aside from the "torturing people for fun" and "being killed by patients, then coming back as an undead killing machine" parts, this story mirrors that of the real-world psychiatrist Walter Freeman II.

Freeman actually did pioneer transorbital (or "icepick") lobotomy as a neurosurgical treatment for mental illness. He was motivated (at least initially) by his concern that the people who would benefit most from the "miracle of lobotomy" (patients in state mental wards) would never have access to the procedure, as it was prohibitively expensive. Transorbital lobotomy provided a cost-effective alternative, as it could be performed by someone without neurosurgical qualifications. Having developed the technique, he became a celebrity travelling around the US doing demonstrations and training people. He was eventually discredited after one too many of his patients died on the table, and retired to run a quiet psychiatric practice in California. And he's much more interesting than the character he seems to have inspired.

In short, Asylum is a disappointing movie in every way. Not deep enough to be deep, or deranged enough to be any fun, it simply limps along until it reaches its contrived and uninspired conclusion. Do yourself a favour and watch a proper slasher movie instead.

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* It is a mark of the kind of movie this is that, even though it's reasonably common knowledge (even in shitty pop-psychology like this) that the kind of mental illness most likely to cause people to see things and hear voices is schizophrenia, the flavourless protagonist looks up "Insanity" as a generic condition when she wants to research her chances. "We're trying to be deep, but we don't even have the Psych 101 chops to look up schizophrenia." 

** For a more interesting (if still flawed) take on the idea, check out Dread...