Interrogating images: Lacan at the Scene

If the title alone doesn’t grab you, let me offer the premise of Lacan at the Scene (MIT Press, $28.95) as a best-chance hook. Author Henry Bond’s opening statement is sufficiently clear and concise as to dissuade me from any fumbling paraphrasing. It asks: “what if Jacques Lacan—the brilliant and eccentric Parisian psychoanalyst—had left his home in the early 1950s in order to travel to England and work as a police detective? How might he have applied his theories in order to solve crime?” It sounds like the prompt for a work of speculative fiction, but what this book actually is—a study of an under-examined use of photography; a method of de-mystifying an ostensibly inscrutable body of work; a series of case studies intended for practical use in homicide investigations—probably makes for a richer and more satisfying read, if a tough slog for the squeamish. Considering how appalling some of the subject matter in Lacan at the Scene is, and how brutal are some of its images, I’m almost embarrassed to admit how utterly compelling I found it to be. But I digress—this post isn’t about my personal neuroses. Okay, at least not more than any other.

In developing his proposition, Bond—a London-based writer and photographer whose author photo suggests a guy suffering from chronic insomnia—became a regular visitor to the National Archive in order to study extant materials pertaining to murders that took place in England between 1955 and 1970. He was surely regarded by the more judgmental clerks with some suspicion. He offers an anecdote in which he requested to re-examine a case file he’d already looked over only to find that it had since been deemed unfit for public inspection. When he made inquiries he was escorted by a senior archivist through hidden doors and down a long corridor into a conference room where three men waited for him, the closed case file box resting on a table between them. These men explained that Bond’s previous access to the file was granted only by accident—the file was in fact still under a sort of quarantine. “Such material is not withheld for a logistical reason,” writes Bond, “…it is simply too contagious to release.” This assessment seems intended less as a way of poking fun at Archive policy or its cabalistic culture as much as to emphasize just how taboo the perusal of images of violent crimes is. Which goes some distance toward explaining why, despite the wealth of superb writing out there covering photography in myriad forms, the critical writing on crime scene photography remains undernourished. It is, nevertheless, the cornerstone of Bond’s thesis.

Henry Bond, looking a little more rested

Bond takes Lacan’s tripartite model of mental functioning—the categories of perverse, psychotic and neurotic—and meticulously “reads” a series of murder crime scene photos in order to uncover evidence as to under which model the killer could be classified. Bond also makes frequent use of Roland Barthes’ two categories of photographic observation, studium and punctum—respectively, the details that appear obviously relevant to an image’s context or meaning, and those that strike the viewer on a purely instinctive level—as laid out in Camera Lucida, so as to interrogate his own process of looking. Given that psychoanalysis urges us to regard the seemingly incidental as potentially significant, there’s a whole lot of punctum being heeded here, and fruitfully so. Bond suggests an apparent order in the chaotic disarray left in the wake of a psychotic murder, for example. Whether or not this methodology signals any sort of innovation in the established standards of police investigations I have no idea. But to the layman, especially one with a special interest in photography, psychoanalysis or both, Bond’s theorizing is both fascinating and enlightening. We may enter into each of these studies with only a certain morbid, perhaps guilt-ridden interest in the sick or tawdry aspects of their implied narratives, but in every case Bond goes deeper into the psychological ramifications implicit in these vestiges of murder than you’re likely to find in Faces of Death, a Weegee compilation, or whatever equally lurid work of exploitation—or, to be generous, exploitation art—you might find yourself compulsively surveying.

The perverse killer is found in a case where a woman is killed in her back garden, in full, almost theatrically staged view of a window, or potential witness. The psychotic killer is found in a confession that explains how murder was necessitated by mortal danger emanating from a bar of soap. The neurotic killer is found in a crime scene where beside a neatly piled column of books there lies both a confession to the killing of the corpse left behind and a polite request that these books be returned to the appropriate library before they’re overdue. The neurotic impulse to “undo” violent acts is further exemplified by a case in which the killer murders the victim and subsequently places a pillow under the victim’s head and a glass of water by the victim’s side. Imaginatively citing the writings of J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Slavoj Zizek—who also happens to be the curator of the series to which Lacan at the Scene belongs—and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, Michelangelo Antonioni, David Lynch and Christopher Nolan, among many others, Bond offers numerous points of reference through which to contextualize his investigatory process. Straddling fact and fiction, the established and the untested theoretical, using language that is always to the point without being excessively cold or alienating, he takes the reader through a labyrinth of nightmare to gain wider insight into how our minds betray us, and how we can understand the residue of trauma. It might even help you understand non-homicidal behaviour a little better.

TIFF '09: "Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing..." Two new films from Werner Herzog

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

The 34th Toronto International Film Festival draws to its close today, and if the end of press and industry screenings, the evacuation of virtually all movie stars, or sheer fucking exhaustion hasn’t sent everyone slouching back home, the sudden, bracing, vertiginous drop in temperatures last night should have done the trick. So here I am, wearing a sweater for the first time in months, goosebumpy, teeth rattling, trying to drink my coffee before it freezes, trying to put the last ten days of movie love and publicist aggravation into some sort of order. Fortunately, every time I think about the interview I was able to do with Werner Herzog, or Herzog and Nicolas Cage’s appearance at the premiere of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, or Herzog’s comments during the film’s press conference, I start laughing so hard as to generate a surge of body heat. Herzog, whether on stage in a grandiose theatre or in the relative intimacy of a Yorkville dining room, is a true showman, proudly discussing his encouragement of Cage to “let the pig loose” (apparently a Bavarian expression), or affectionately calling Woody Allen “a lazy bum.”

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

Herzog had two films at TIFF this year, both with very long names. Besides his batshit, supremely bad-ass Bad Lieutenant—don’t even think of calling it a remake, sequel, or anything that might associate it with Abel Ferrara’s cult classic—there was also My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, “presented” by David Lynch, featuring Willem Defoe, Michael Shannon, Chloe Sevigny, Grace Zabriskie, and Udo Kier, set largely in suburban San Diego, and like its companion work, also a crime film, though one where the investigation is an entirely psychological and essentially irresolvable one that takes us to the wild rapids of Peru and the (fictional) architectural wonders of Alberta. (It says something about the filmmaker, I think, that he journeys deep into South America and apparently Central Asia to shoot fragments of flashback material for this low-budget feature yet doesn’t feel it necessary to visit Calgary.)

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Both films centre around protagonists who perform acts of violent transgression yet are haunted by mystical visions of nature. Both films, need I even bother to mention, feature cameos by dwarves. If the former is quite clearly a compromise between Herzog’s signature preoccupations and his desire to “deliver the goods” and prove he can make a crowd-pleaser (okay, a totally demented and bizarrely digressive crowd-pleaser), it should be said that it reaches delicious heights of audacity, and offers one of Cage’s finest, most tirelessly inventive performances ever. At one point he hides behind an open door, waiting for the arrival of two women he needs to interrogate, shaving. The most quotable line of any movie at TIFF this year? “Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing,” Cage demands of a Louisiana gangster as he watches another, much older and fatter gangster's errant spirit bust some serious moves on a marble floor. The latter meanwhile, though equally wobbly with regards to narrative coherence, shows Herzog’s approach to atmosphere at its freshest in years, my favourite moments being ones where all characters onscreen suddenly fall silent and stop moving before the camera while a song by Caetano Veloso or Chavela Vargas plays out on the soundtrack.

More TIFF notes on the way...

Crime doesn't play: Public Enemies

The very public slaying of legendary bank robber John Dillinger outside Chicago’s Biograph Theatre in 1934 is as much a moment in the history of film as American crime. The poetic unity of the event is the stuff of dreams. In typically flagrant disregard for his own infamy and imminent peril, Dillinger left a jam-packed screening of the gangster flick Manhattan Melodrama with two attractive women when the heat closed in. They were not there to make an arrest. The fatal bullet exited just below one of the eyes that had been watching the silvery likenesses of Clark Gable and Myrna Loy only moments ago. So the life of John Dillinger ended with the movies, and the movies would soon make a habit of resurrecting him.

Public Enemies is the most recent and surely most expensive retellings of Dillinger’s legacy, and most of its 133 minutes as perplexingly lifeless as Dillinger’s bullet-strewn body once the ambulance arrived. The material, derived from Bryan Burrough’s book of the same name, seems tailor-made for director Michael Mann, yet I’m not sure that any Mann film—and there are contenders—has ever seemed so prosaic, so mechanical and museum-like, so, well, dull. The showdown of masculine archetypes so boldly rendered in films like Heat is here a sort of Hollywood kabuki, stately and un-invested with tension, much less flamboyance.

Questionable choices were made at the executive level. The casting of beautiful and delicate Johnny Depp in a role previously—and marvelously—embodied by the likes of Lawrence Tierney, Ralph Meeker and Warren Oates does neither the often very fine actor nor the film any special favours. With Christian Bale playing the FBI’s top Dillinger hunter Melvin Purvis and, most especially, Billy Crudup playing FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, there seems to be a conspiracy of prettified historical revisionism that even by Hollywood standards reads as laughable. While Bale gives an especially remote performance here that does very little to endow Purvis with texture, Crudup provide several of the film’s finest moments in his small role, using a bare minimum of facial and vocal mannerisms to convey a barely restrained and perverse rage for power. It almost makes you forget that this cutie is supposed to be playing a man that more closely resembled, let’s just say it, a troll. Marion Cotillard provides the film’s sole source of warmth as Dillinger’s devoted girlfriend Billie Frechette, yet what seems ostensibly her showcase scene, where she’s tortured by a sadistic and misogynistic cop, is saddled with dialogue that’s strictly boilerplate gangster’s moll.

It’s unclear whether Mann and company are interested in the brutal facts—some of which are present, others ignored, none of which convey new insights—or glamorous myth—the fedoras are so uniformly crisp, the coats splay just so, the cars so clean. There’s so little glamour or fun of even the most vulgar variety in Public Enemies. Though he does have a handful of wonderfully delivered one-liners, Depp mostly seems to be enjoying himself relatively little. Dante Spinotti’s handheld HD cinematography, with its emphatic fleetingness and the weird oiliness of the imagery when brightly-lit and in motion, is deeply exciting in how it furthers the frontiers of this new technology’s visual vocabulary, yet the way it, in collaboration with the costumes and production design, drains all colour from the Great Depression—a potentially timely sociological factor barely registered by the script, incidentally—feels like an empty cliché, making the whole film seem like it was reflected on the surface of an ice-cold razor. The action scenes feature impressive sprays of Tommy gunfire, especially during the nocturnal raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge, yet there’s little spatial coherence, and the piling up of identically dressed and bloodied bodies—some of them famous actors in non-cameos—is easy not to care all that much about.

I can imagine how the overriding aesthetic of Public Enemies could be regarded as admirable, as lean and cold and maybe kind of Jean-Pierre Melville, if you wanted to go that far. But such a take doesn’t account for all the other things the film seems to want to do, like tell an oft-told tale with some new imperative, give us a thrill, or speak to our need for outlaws.

Waste, disposal: Gomorrah

Based on the 2006 Italian non-fiction bestseller that made its journalist author Roberto Saviano into both a literary sensation and fugitive from the mob at the age of 26, Gomorrah is a sprawling crime film involving a range of characters and narratives linked via their individual contributions to the poisoned ecosystem of the Camorra, the powerful, organized syndicate whose influence seeps deep into the social fabric of its native Naples, of Italy, and beyond. As directed by Matteo Garrone, this is a film that weaves its way through an immense grid of institutionalized crime as though it were charting an infernal floor plan in time. It’s an epic without the token grandiosity. An epic of pathos? Anyway, something uniquely monstrous, cold and fascinating, and not to be missed.

Waste and disposal form the bedrock of Gomorrah. The proliferation both literally and figuratively throughout is a product of the film’s structural and thematic elegance. That life is cheap here is made clear from the slaughter in the spa that kicks things off. The motives behind these killings are left unexplained because, really, what difference does it make? The carnage is conveyed flatly, the camera nonplussed by the display of a few more bodies being tossed into the mafia’s self-generating meat grinder. Garrone’s approach to the material emphasizes the network and durability of crime, not its allure, because its allure isn’t even necessary in a milieu that dutifully perpetuates its existence. The world of Gomorrah is deterministic. There is no ethnic charm. There is no glamour, no beauty, no opera to the violence, no catchy tunes or flamboyant editing or orgasmic geysers of blood. But there’s plenty horror and insight, too, or at the very least inspired exposé. You have to admire Martin Scorsese for coming on as presenter of Gomorrah for its North American release. It’s in many ways the antithesis of the sort of exhilarating, frenetic bloodletting found in several of Scorsese’s most celebrated films, but Scorsese’s smart enough to recognize that this is precisely why the film is vital. By taking distance from its subject, by capturing it in a documentary style conventionally alien to the genre, Gomorrah excavates the myth of the crime syndicate in a way I don’t think we’ve seen before.

There are two young punks (Marco Macor and Ciro Petrone) under the idiotic belief that they can work independently and even in opposition to the Camorra. They delight in stealing a secret stash of heavy weaponry, and a memorable sequence finds them stripping to their underpants and running along some sludge-lined shoreline blowing random shit up. There is a dour money handler (Gianfelice Imparato) who makes the rounds of the dismal housing complex that functions as the film’s nucleus, collecting and doling out payments. There’s a 13-year-old (Salvatore Abruzzese) who feels ready to be recruited into the Camorra, allowing himself to be shot in the chest while wearing a battered old ballistic vest. “Now you’re a man,” he’s told afterwards. He seems so young, but his youth’s put in perspective by a bleakly comical scene in which a large crew of little kids are employed to drive trucks whose pedals they can’t reach and whose dashboards they can’t see over. In one of the film’s most surprising narratives we find a compromised tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo) who risks his life to teach a warehouse full of Asians the finer points of haute design and construction. He’s escorted to the training facility in the trunk of a car. The tailor was for me the closer thing the film offers to identification, perhaps because of the character’s almost singular thread of integrity, perhaps for the simple fact that Cantalupo gives such a curiously detailed and intriguingly enigmatic performance.

My favourite part of Gomorrah however involves a businessman (Toni Servillo) and his apprentice (Carmine Paternoster) who find locations for their hired crews to illegally dump toxic waste. It’s rare to find modern stories that explore waste disposal as a major theme, through Don DeLillo’s Underworld serves as a brilliant prototype. Where we put the colossal heaps of poisonous trash is arguably one of the great taboo subjects, its invisibility—at least in wealthy countries—being essential to our false sense of peace with our surroundings. It’s an inspired metaphor that manifests here in some awesome and troubling imagery. The burial of undesirable matter is brutally echoed toward the film’s end, when the bodies of undesirable men are disposed of through similar means. I suppose the only hope we’re given that this state of affairs might change comes through the implication that, sooner or later, everything poorly interred will rise to the surface.

Savage Grace: the rare occasion where we could use a little less of Moore and a whole lot more of something to truly care about

This long-awaited second feature from director Tom Kalin, who made such an impression way back in 1992 with the Leopold and Loeb retelling Swoon, comfortably nestles up against its predecessor with regards to categorization: it’s a true crime movie, involving sex, horrific murder and characters with deeply pretentious ambitions, and it’s as queer as any movie can hope to be, with its personage mixing in all sorts of combinations untraditional, kinky, or downright deviant.

Besides apparently being exactingly tailored to the thematic interests of prolific producer Christine Vachon (an instrumental force behind Swoon, Boys Don’t Cry, I Shot Andy Warhol, Party Monster, The Notorious Bettie Page and Infamous), it’s the sort of material that also seems to draw in some of our finest actresses of a certain age, especially those who continually crave adventure and edge. Given that Joan Crawford is long gone, I can’t think of a better choice for the star role of Savage Grace than Julianne Moore—yet at the same time I think it might just be the worst, or at least the least enjoyable performance I’ve ever seen Moore give. But then, are we even supposed to enjoy this movie? Even the somber enjoyment of more closely understanding some bleak, troubling aspect of human nature?

Narrated by the real Tony Baekeland, Savage Grace dramatizes the story of his life leading up to his notorious arrest in 1972 at the age of 25. It says a lot about Baekeland’s life that the real star of his story is actually his mom, Barbara (Moore), heiress to the Bakelite fortune, an uncultured, desperately unhappy society woman who, after being abandoned by her understandably demoralized husband (Stephen Dillane) for her son’s girlfriend, focuses all of her overbearing energies on her only child, who she constantly needles, travels all over Europe with, lives with and, as it turns out, has sex with. Tony himself (played by the suitably stunned-looking Eddie Redmayne, once more, as in The Good Shepherd, the psychologically under-developed son) is rather a wisp of a boy next to her, nervous, uncertain, largely unloved and internalizing more rage than most of us will ever know.

For those of us who aren’t survivors of incest but always suspected it made for a pretty miserable home life, Savage Grace, the antithesis of Murmur of the Heart in more ways than one, certainly confirms that and some. But I suppose what’s truly terrifying in this utterly tawdry tale is not the aberrant sex itself but the suffocating mothering from which the sex is but one manifestation, and hardly the most toxic. Savage Grace is really a sort of horror movie about the stifling effects of family and affluence, one beautifully photographed in exquisite locales and filled with beautiful people, where the monster just keeps coming back to embarrass herself and everybody else with her incredibly awkward attempts to seem sophisticated before throwing yet another shrill hissy fit.

I didn’t actually know Baekeland’s story before seeing Savage Grace, which is just as well—at least there were some surprises. But these surprises, like Kalin’s craftsmanship, itself a bit overdone and noodlely, didn’t make Baekeland’s story any more enlightening, just grotesque, sad, jarring, intermittently fascinating and ultimately kind of pointless.