Witness the sickness: The Killer Inside Me

Lou Ford’s father was a doctor, and though he hides his intellect behind folksy platitudes Lou was more than capable of following dad’s footsteps. But Lou got stuck maybe, as deputy sheriff in the ironically named backwater of Central City, Texas, and as the reluctant betrothed to a local schoolteacher named Amy. The couple “just drifted together like straws in a puddle.” Those are Lou’s words, or rather Jim Thompson’s, whose 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me, one of this infernally gifted author’s most incisive portraits of a doomed and deranged mind, serves as the basis for the same-titled movie from director Michael Winterbottom. Scripted by John Curran with considerable fidelity to its source material, it’s an admirable, slick, horrifying and problematic adaptation, and is now available on home video.

Lou’s sent to run a prostitute named Joyce out of town, but when he delivers the message Joyce attacks him, and a cloud of ice drapes over Lou’s normally placid face. He retaliates with brute force, only to discover that beatings and bondage are Joyce’s cup of tea. They become lovers, but soon Lou gets an idea for a way to exact revenge on a local big shot, an idea that involves murdering both the big shot’s son and Joyce. Killing Joyce is supposed to exorcise “the sickness,” which is how Lou describes his fearsome urge to exact violence on others, women especially—women who love him most especially. But the sickness only spreads and one killing just leads to another, until simple plan slips into apocalyptic parody.

The casting of Casey Affleck as Lou is inspired both for his physicality—Thompson described Lou as lean and wiry, clean-cut, friendly, and 29—and his vocal peculiarity, that voice that creaks like an asthmatic 12-year-old. Affleck was the best thing in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and exhibits similarly creepy nuance and repressed ferocity here. Jessica Alba as Joyce is inspired in a different way. Her supple performance aside, it’s her sweet, heartbreaking smile that helps make it so difficult to witness Lou pounding her face in like a cantaloupe. The killings in The Killer Inside Me are appalling yet somehow detached at the same time, perhaps because Melissa Parmenter and Joel Cadbury’s score is so heavy with portent it takes you out of the moment.

Stunning moments abound, not the least being Lou’s final encounter with Amy, smartly played by Kate Hudson. But there are other issues keeping The Killer Inside Me from being as penetrating as it could have been and more alienating that it probably needs to be. There’s a moment in the novel where Lou explicitly states that he is literally writing what we’re reading, which we ultimately come to realize is deliciously nonsensical. Thompson was a masterful handler of the unreliable narrator, and many of the claims made in Lou’s first-person account become suspect. This is a precarious thing to realize on screen since the imagination is so much more powerful and flexible than the framed, explicit image, particularly when trying to register Thompson's violence. To read it is deeply disturbing; to see it is merely disgusting.

When movie stars should send screenwriters to jail: Law Abiding Citizen

Just before Clarence Darby (Christian Stolte) jabs a blade into his guts, just before Darby proceeds to rape and kill his wife and do about the same to his little girl, Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) hears this fat, sweaty, slovenly, drug-addled, disgusting pervert-ogre whisper in his ear, “You can’t fight fate.” Even by the standards of the overcharged Hollywood thriller this is ultra-portentous. Clyde takes it to heart. He stews over it for ten years, during which time Darby’s accomplice awaits execution while Darby himself does three years and goes free as thanks from the DA for ratting his buddy out. For ten years Clyde gets stoked on the ineffectuality of American justice and concocts a whopper of a plan to set things straight.

The central conceit of Law Abiding Citizen, that grief and frustration turns a contented family man and otherwise non-psychopathic maniac into Hannibal Lecter on steroids, could only have ever worked as utter camp. As an ostensibly serious, ostensibly engaging, ostensibly dark and brooding thriller about thorny issues of crime, punishment and bureaucracy, it’s a mind-numbingly absurd travesty of a movie. Clyde kidnaps Darby and slowly, messily tortures him to death, making imaginative use of power tools a poison isolated from the liver of a Caribbean puffer fish. Of course! It’s only his opening act. He gets thrown into maximum security and his rampage only escalates. Somehow he keeps exacting his flamboyant, baroque feats of violent revenge from captivity, gradually killing off anyone with even the most tangential connection to his case. Except for Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), the attorney who made the deal with Darby. Nick gets to watch as the whole house of cards collapses, wondering when he or his wife and daughter will get iced. Clyde and Nick play cat and mouse.

You don’t need a degree in law, psychology or engineering to balk at the mountain of risible improbability Law Abiding Citizen hinges on. Genius serial killers are among the most tiresome tropes, but Clyde Shelton and his reign of terror go far beyond the usual level of artifice and dumbness. Yet even if the basic story, which comes courtesy of Street Kings and Ultraviolet scribe Kurt Wimmer, weren’t so stupid, the details too feel all wrong, from our glimpses of Nick’s cardboard family life to the inner chambers of play-cynical Philadelphia lawmakers. The film’s only reason for existing is to try and keep you from guessing what moronic plot twist it’ll unleash next, until you finally realize that this thriller is really a horror movie, torture porn of sorts. It wants to be tough, I guess, but it’s really just crude, very, very silly, and more than a little sick.

Butler is on some kind of a roll. Here’s a sampling: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, RocknRolla, The Ugly Truth. Dude’s been in some of the worst shit I’ve had to sit through over the last few years. I’m inclined to indulge a guy trying to move up in the system a little, but to what end? Does his producer’s credit mean to imply that Law Abiding Citizen is his fucking dream project? Does he secretly fantasize being confined to a prison from which he can slaughter his own career by remote control?

One last stray observation. There's an important early sequence where Darby's condemned accomplice gets executed by the state. As the sequence builds to its climax we keep cutting back and forth between the execution and a musical recital where Jamie Foxx's daughter plays the cello. Followers of this blog wonder with me: were the makers of Law Abiding Citizen studying The Walking Dead, or what?

The Second Plane: Martin Amis on our being the involuntary guests to the blood wedding of terror and religion

If the numerous figures wrangled together under the big top of global intelligentsia, certain novelists among them, desire to distinguish their two cents from the clamour of collective pocket change, it mightn’t hurt to allow themselves to change their minds now and then, or at least develop their positions through time and experience, however subjective or limited that experience may be. If his various opponents have any single bone to pick with Noam Chomsky, for example, it’s that he appears to have the same response to everything. For many of us not graced with similar certainty, there’s something persuasive about thinkers who make some attempt to regularly tend to their thoughts, to bring to their ideas a sort of narrative that we can track, a path we can follow and perhaps more easily identify with.

Turning the development of political convictions into narrative seems to be the underlying point of The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (Knopf, $29.95), the new collection of previously published writing by Martin Amis addressing, through essay, fiction and book or film criticism, the new challenges of life after that fateful “day of de-Enlightenment.” Arranged in chronological order, the last entry written only last September, the pieces convey something of Amis’ wrestling with man’s capacity for darkness, violence, tedium and self-delusion, all themes that, were it not for 9/11, would otherwise signal just another day at the office for the author of London Fields, Time’s Arrow and Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. Okay, “wrestling” may be too fraught a term –Amis, as always, never sweats all that much under the heatlamp of heavy consideration– but he does in fact think out loud and articulately, resulting in a highly valuable read.

In ‘The Second Plane,’ written only a week after 9/11, Amis writes how for “thousands in the South Tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.” In ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd,’ written in June 2002, the future begins to form a network of links to the past that were perhaps not so easily discernable in 9/11’s immediate aftermath, and the links keep highlighting the role of religion. While Amis separates his stance from that of “humanist pit bulls” like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great) –Amis is a humbly confessed agnostic, rather than a tough-talking atheist– he begins to examine what he sees as the fundamental dangers of religion. And Amis being Amis, he’s not preoccupied with niceties.

“The twentieth century… has been called the age of ideology. And the age of ideology, clearly, was a mere hiatus in the age of religion, which shows little sign of expiry. Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful… if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.”

In ‘Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind,’ written in September 2006, Amis makes some refined distinctions: between Muhammad, who “no serious person could fail to respect,” and Muhammad Atta; between Islam, “the donor of countless benefits to mankind,” and Islamism, “a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination.” To be sure, Amis seems less concerned with excusing religious moderates from his attack on extremists than with directing our attention to the ways in which religious rhetoric, along with the new boredom of life burdened with arbitrary security measures, injects all post-9/11 powers with tacit permission to stop thinking. To put it another way, whichever side you’re on, so long as God’s on it, you’re allowed to be a bloodthirsty idiot.

Amis has been taking a lot of flak for what some have deemed his hateful, anti-Islamic attitude, an accusation that, once you actually read his work, can be seen as just a form of media-based bullying, an attempt to mob Amis into a corner, one cohabited by a truckload of right-wingers that would no doubt make for some rather uncomfortable chit-chat. Amis is openly hostile to the Bush administration –another house of destructive religious piety– and only friendlier to Blair by comparison. He’s hardly on side with the invasion of Iraq –see ‘The Wrong War’– but he’s willing to put things in some perspective. He declares the invasion of Iraq was not “wholly dishonorable.

“This is a more complicated, and more familiar, kind of tragedy. The Iraq War represents a giant contract, not just for Halliburton, but also for the paving company called Good Intentions. A dramatic (and largely benign) expansion of American power seems to have been the general goal; a dramatic reduction of American power seems to be the general outcome. Iraq is a divagation of what is ominously being called The Long War. To our largely futile losses in blood, treasure, and moral prestige, we add the loss in time; and time, too, is blood.”

Amis may be going a little too far out of his way (benign?) to avoid being lumped with the camp of the ineffectual Left that welcomes all manner of conspiracy theorist pundits, but his perspective is far more nuanced than any voluble variation on “stuff happens.” Above all, Amis keeps his eye on a bottom line peopled with mass murderers, whose culpability can’t finally be diminished by arguments of how the US had it coming. Throughout The Second Plane, and perhaps most especially in the fiction pieces –one of which imagines the final days of Muhammad Atta, a story which functions nicely as a sort of companion piece to the alternating chapters in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man– Amis keeps coming back to the sheer banality of sexually repressed, fleetingly inspired evil, seeing nothing noble or righteous anywhere in its vicinity, only something sad, deadly and all too familiar.

Unwatchable? Almost, but not quite...

While keeping vampire hours for the feds’ cyber-crime division, Portland, Oregon single mom Jennifer Marsh (Diane Lane) discovers killwithme.com, a locally-authored site rigged up in such as way that as viewership increases so does the rate at which a captive, onscreen victim’s torture hurries him toward miserable death. The first victim’s just a kitty, but Jennifer, unlike her dismissive superiors, smartly deduces that this is only the beginning.

Next in line is a hockey dad being slowly dosed with anti-coagulant, soon to be followed by a handsome broadcaster, hands and feet locked in cement, trapped under heat lamps that cook him alive as worldwide death porn junkies turn up the heat. Who will be next? And for the love of god why does the scumbag do it? And hey, look at those numbers logging on to witness the torment –doesn’t that mean we’re all somehow accountable?

Director Gregory Hoblit, who most recently helmed Fracture, has a soft spot for one of the most tiresome Hollywood tropes: the murderous genius. With Untraceable, Hoblit’s trio of scribes supply him with an evil mastermind that, while only 20 and afflicted with what would seem considerable emotional retardation, is clearly a prodigy of chemistry, communications, structural engineering and even carpentry. Instead of feeding YouTube with sleaze, this kid should be working for the space program. Jennifer meanwhile is marked as our hero because, despite her interweb expertise, her whole life is decidedly anti-tech: her butch live-in mom’s into extreme gardening, her little girl just wants to ride her bike, and Jennifer’s choice for a kiddie birthday party is a roller rink complete with live organ music.

Especially once we get past the mid-point hump, Untraceable just gets stupider and stupider, right up until the sad, risible final shot that reads like an ad for the long arm of the FBI (don’t even think about pirating this movie). Yet it should be said that, its failures in cinematic storytelling aside, the film is an interesting barometer of the times, an age where technology has made morbid voyeurism completely anonymous, comfortable and safe, facilitating our ability to participate in the suffering of others by rendering it utterly abstract. It also indirectly –okay, clumsily– questions the varying degrees to which we tacitly participate in suffering and torture, ie: voting for an administration that contrives wars that, perhaps inevitably, lead to torture.

Undoubtedly, Untraceable’s problems lie not in any lack of meaty themes to play with. Yet the horror of torture by anonymous remote control has already been mined far more elegantly and confrontationally in Olivier Assayas’ woefully underrated 2002 film demonlover. And it’s a shame then that, thanks to sheer advertising dollars, more people will have seen Untraceable in its opening weekend than probably saw demonlover during its entire theatrical run.