THB #162: The Horror of the Mundane

Two movies came into my life in the last 4 days… Alex Garland’s Men and David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. Both are from filmmakers I admire and follow closely. Both have been shocking critics with their graphic extremes. One is being distributed by A24 and the other by Neon, the current cutting edge distributors in mainstream but challenging indies.

Both, from my view, are much less complex, in terms of their macro arguments, than they seem. In this way, they both bring to mind Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, a movie that boils down to 2 nights of dreams of a man trying to decide whether or not to cheat on his wife with whom he no longer connects.

In Men, Garland (writer and director) builds a film around the emotional trauma of a woman, Harper (played by Jessie Buckley), whose husband commits suicide when she is leaving the relationship. The bulk of the movie takes place in the beatific setting of a rented cottage in the country. There, she encounters 8 different men - landlord, naked man, police, priest, kid, bartender, 2 pub guests - all of whom are played by Rory Kinnear. There are only 2 woman in the film, aside from Harper… one of whom is happy to ignore the situation and the other, who seeks to empower Harper.

Throughout the film, Harper’s efforts to settle herself and to find a peace with what has happened… even joy in moving forward… find themselves repeatedly stopped by these men, who often start by presenting as kind or supportive and end up being anything but.

The film, like Eyes Wide Shut, is mostly set in an unreal state, if any of it at all is reality. The film baits the viewer throughout, bending the border between reality and imagination. For instance, there is a violence done to a vehicle in a sequence that can’t really coordinate to cold reality… but the vehicle is still damaged in the view of a character who apparently stands for some kind of reality.

The big finale’ (which I won’t spoil here) involves all the male characters in the film showing themselves and reflecting their limitations as a group.

New York Times’ AO Scott wrote, “There isn’t really an argument here, and what looks like feminism is more like mansplaining.”

I don’t think Alex Garland is pretending to be a feminist in Men. His last film, Annihilation, was much more about women than this film is. All three of Garland’s directing efforts, as well as Devs, his FX series, and Never Let Me Go, the co-screenwriting effort in 2010, have had a strong focus on women.

I think Garland’s obsession is with women’s choices as reflected in the actions of the patriarchy, which he clearly does not see as being as evolved/devolved as men believe it to be.

Has Garland made himself vulnerable to complaints by making his first work as writer/director that doesn’t involved genius and higher questions of science? Maybe. Did Garland challenge audiences in a very different way by making the “answer” to his film so simple, while leaving out what may be the most important moment for his female lead as an off camera event? Probably. Did Garland confuse a high percentage of viewers (even some of the smartest ones) by making graphically real a metaphor about birth and re-birth, causing them to focus on the imagery instead of the idea? Yeah… for sure.

David Cronenberg has been working with body parts for a very long time. Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Nightbreed, Naked Lunch, Crash, eXistenZ, Spider… seatbelts on. But even in the less visually extreme and body-consious Cronenberg films, like A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method, Cosmopolis, Maps To The Stars, there is at least one “Cronenberg moment.”

Crimes of the Future is filled with whispers and mysterious motivations and an endless parade of disturbing images. But is there any image more disturbing than a parent murdering a child with a pillow, no special effects needed?

For me, Crimes is about where we are now and what comes next. In a way, it’s like Cronenberg reminding us that he told us so, going all the way back to Scanners and Videodrome, which happened before he turned his mind to more character-focused, less societal commentary for the last 40 years, with the occasional film speaking more broadly. Of course, all of his films have bigger messages. A movie like The Fly works primarily as a love story, but it is also about the potential dangers of scientific ambition.

Crimes of the Future keeps clarifying that it is about the art culture. “Saul Tenser” is a name that screams New York, Jewish, over-moneyed art scene guy. He has a partner… and I don’t see the oft-displayed Lea Sedoux’s face and body as coincidental to her position. She is a talented character, but also a reflection of Tenser’s power and money. He has groupies, but one in particular, Kristen Stewart, who is obsessed with the “work” he is doing and has chosen her own profession as a way to connect to that work. And there the the art world aspirant, who understands the beauty of natural evolution, but still is willing to lower himself to abusing that nature to rise within the culture.

You can read a lot into Crimes… and many will. I am willing to go as basic as the film as a much darker read on Wall-E, charting the next steps as humans screen themselves into disconnection from feeling anything. (One of my objections to the madness of “everyone is going to watch everything on TV and never leave their couch for a shared film experience” that I don’t think is seriously engaged by the many smart people who keep making the argument as though this is a form of progress.)

All of the “gore” of Crimes of the Future seem to distract from the details that are far uglier. Humans, at the time of the film, have eliminated pain. Physical human evolution is happening, but not understood. Governmental mishandling (including the use of crude power tools to manage people) has pushed evolutionary cults underground. A tech company has made extremely expensive furniture and tool kits to manage the internal activities of our bodies.

I read a couple critics reading Tenser growing new organs as a gift. I read it as something he has spent a fortune to be able to do… the “natural” equivalent of hard-core S&M or extreme penetration. (The “pee tape” of 2022 is in the season finale of Atlanta… now on Hulu.)

I have a friend who was dating a much, much older man and who got kinkier and kinkier, even after he had a colestomy bag and had increasingly frequent trips to the hospital. Ah, romance! That’s how some of this movie feels to me.

To simplify further, people are never satisfied. Pushing and pushing and pushing, looking for some kind of satisfaction that can never exist, because our unhappiness is deep within.

In the final sequence of the film, a gathering around the corpse of an innocent, becomes inflamed by the details of the moment, completely disconnecting from the brutal truth of the loss of an innocent life… people seeing only their unfulfilled needs.

This is the horror… not the “gore,” but the loss of humanity.

It seems to me that we are not called on to manage metaphor in cinema as was once much more the norm. We are too easily distracted by what is meant to distract when the filmmaker is clearly wanting us to see beyond the distraction.

One of the funny beats in the film is that the image below isn’t enough to qualify as a significant variation of the norm… Cronenberg telling us to be more stringent in viewing?

Until tomorrow…