Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Shutter Island

(2010) **

I don’t know what can be done about movies like Shutter Island, because there’s no getting rid of them -- they occupy one corner of the horror movie game board as permanently as low-budget splatterfests occupy another. As long as people get involved in the intellectual implications of scare stories (like, on blogs for communal discussion of horror movie reviews) there will always be high-toned feedback into the art itself, so that movie characters can turn to each other and engage in deep conversations about “the nature of man” and “evil”—questions which, for the characters, have a greater-than-usual urgency (which is supposed to be the point). Is “man” a “killer”? (My meager “debating” training in school taught me never to answer trick questions.) I’ll bet you any amount of money that we’re not going to find out…but, by the end of the movie, we sure will have mulled over the question as gravely and fussily as possible, which will mean a very bleak outlook on everything—a social service for which we have the moviemakers to thank.

The last time I saw one of these movies -- “philosophy of the horror story” movies -- it was The History of Violence, and I absolutely hated it but I had trouble defining just what it was that made me so angry and irritated by the movie and its enthusiastic response. (“Angry enough…TO KILL?”) Seeing Shutter Island helped be figure out what the problem is, so I have a better understanding of why History of Violence and so many other movies of this type are so annoying to me.

I am actually very interested in thinking about actual evil, violence and aggression, the “need” for fear (from an animal-cunning standpoint) and the dark side of the psyche. I’d happily have (or listen to, or read) that discussion all day and all night. But that’s because I’m perfectly safe right now; nobody is chasing me with sniper rifles across the shattered, frozen clifftop rocks on the seaward face of a storm-drenched coastal island. I’ll have any conversation anybody wants to have about the duality of human nature because leisure time is the appropriate venue for that kind of abstract discussion. “Is ‘Man’ a ‘killer’?” is a question to be asked across a big oak table in a university-town bar, once everybody’s gotten their next round. The guy who actually kills me isn’t going anywhere near the topic…I’m pretty sure of that.

This all sounds obvious, but somebody must disagree or these movies wouldn’t get made. I’m sampling from a longer-form argument, but suffice it to say that people who aren’t comfortable with horror can’t get all the way through a horror movie without getting so put off and disgusted that it becomes necessary to remind them, out loud, of why they’re in the theater—of why they agreed to put themselves through this. The characters who deliver ethical lectures are speaking directly to those moviegoers, reassuring them that all of Leonardo DiCaprio’s profound suffering is an important mirror for their own, shared existential unease (and not just gratuitous sadism, which is what a horror movie looks like to a non-horror fan, which is why they think we’re “desensitized”).

I could go through the setup and the murky atmospherics and the various clever switchbacks but none of it really matters because the movie uses these elements disrespectfully; you can tell that the filmmakers are groping for some kind of aesthetic epiphany because they’re not operating from any natural love of the scary story (or any visceral grasp of why this script reached their desks; why somebody found it compelling). When Martin Scorsese is bad (as he is here) he’s just awful, because he purposefully abandons his natural rhythms and talents out of a misplaced “formal” obedience to the foreign genre environment. (And Scorsese is one of the few directors who should stay completely away from digital effects; he just doesn’t “get” them and the results are always baroque and overcooked, like he’s never seen the stuff before and thinks it’s great.)(Unlike Spielberg, who can flood the whole screen with ILM without you noticing.) If he really dug horror movies, he wouldn’t worry about it; he’d know that you can wander across the spectrum of vastly different styles of filmmaking and still hit “horror movie” right on the money every time, if you genuinely get what a scary movie is, what it’s for. If Scorsese liked horror, he might relax, stop lecturing and apologizing and lifelessly reproducing the genre's stodgiest, most traditional dance steps, and make a good one.

[bonus Oscar Goldman exploding briefcase action here and here]

5 comments:

Octopunk said...

Welcome to the party pal!

Okay, I have to just point to these:

"by the end of the movie, we sure will have mulled over the question as gravely and fussily as possible, which will mean a very bleak outlook on everything—a social service for which we have the moviemakers to thank."

Ha ha ha! Social service. And:

"People who aren’t comfortable with horror can’t get all the way through a horror movie without getting so put off and disgusted that it becomes necessary to remind them, out loud, of why they’re in the theater." (Italics mine.)

Clap. Clap. Clap. What a tight summation and satisfying dis to snooty non-horror fans at the same time.

I've been thinking for a while of a Horrorthon sub-theme about good actors slumming in horror movies. I'm thinking more of things like DeNiro doing Godsend and Hide and Seek than stuff like this, in which the director probably should admit to slumming but won't.

Catfreeek said...

Impressive review, I've seen this and totally get where you're going. No one can dissect a movie quite like you. Yes, welcome to the party indeed!

Landshark said...

I think you might be onto something in your overall point about people who make horror movies even though they don't really "like" horror movies. Feel like they're slumming, or that they can just "use horror" to do the type of really smart stuff they usually do.

Shutter Island is based on a detective novel by Dennis Lehane, who has won a bunch of mystery awards recently, and two of his other books were turned into Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, 2 critically well receieved flicks.

His last book (the only one I've read) was a big sweeping historical epic about Spanish influenza, negro baseball, and Italian anarchists, all set in the backdrop of the Boston Police Strike of 1919. I read an interview with him about that book, and I definitely got the sense that he saw his label as a "genre" writer (detective fiction) as somewhat of an unfair constraint. His attempt at historical literary fiction seemed a pretty overt attempt to say: "See, I can write pretty too!"

So it's possible that this same insecurity (is that the word?) comes across even when he's writing IN genre, as in Shutter Island. I guess what I'm saying is that it's possible that the thing you're reacting to was already present in the source material--indeed it may be what attracted Scorcese to it in the first place.

Johnny Sweatpants said...

I enjoyed the book (not normally the kind of book I read) and remember thinking it would make a decent movie but then passed on it when it came out.

Glad to see you back Jordan! I love the way you were able to pinpoint what specifically peeved you about A History of Violence.

50PageMcGee said...

other than obviously Kubrick, who do you think had the best output moving out of their genre and into horror?

Malevolent

 2018  ***1/2 It's 1986 for some reason, and a team of paranormal investigators are making a big name for themselves all over Scotland. ...