Films That Get Under Your Skin

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The New York Sun

Beauty is skin deep, but then so is ugliness. Eros and Vanity build their temples on a paper-thin epidermal layer that masks a bloody, deteriorating mechanism most of us regard with fear and revulsion. Indeed, the society of the squeamish excludes only doctors, butchers, serial killers, and certain filmmakers for whom the other three are nearly interchangeable. The horror field has always been consumed with flesh and its concealments, producing medical men who double as ghouls, megalomaniacs, and shape shifting scoundrels. And this least respected of movie genres remains the most enduring and prophetic. Basic fears do not abate.


Better examples than Georges Franju’s “Eyes Without a Face” (1959) and David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome” (1983) would be hard to find. Initially greeted with derision and censorship, they have now received the Criterion Collection’s A+ imprimatur: superb restorations, film-school extras, and the companionship of strangely complementary short films. Franju’s grisly-lyrical documentary of Paris’s abattoir, the 22-minute “Blood of the Beasts” (1949), is an ideal prologue to his main feature, just as Mr. Cronenberg’s meditation on cinema’s theft of youth, the six-minute “Camera” (2000), is a suitable epilogue to his. Both films explore the corruption of flesh, the madness that is a by-product, and the gore beneath the surface.


Thematic parallels aside, the differences are more illuminating. Franju’s film unfolds as a dream, a poetical thriller pitched in the land where Jean Cocteau and Walt Disney nod. Mr. Cronenberg’s is an addled hallucination, a black comedy with a political soul that crosses Andy Warhol and George Orwell. Franju shunned color because, he said, it would make the subject of facial surgery repulsive. Cronenberg, fortified by Rick Baker’s special effects, loves the repulsive. If you think the 44 years of graphic slashing unleashed by “Psycho” has inured you to bloodletting, you may be surprised by incisions in both films. But it isn’t blood and guts that makes these films frightening; it’s the prognosis.


“Eyes Without a Face” begins with a lengthy traveling shot, as Alida Valli races through the night with a crumpled corpse in the backseat, surrounded by an endless line of skeletal trees and accompanied by a Maurice Jarre’s fun-house score – imagine Philip Glass programming a carousel. Daylight exteriors are no more comforting; everything is cold, gray, and remote, like the crazed trio of protagonists and the utterly ineffectual police. The basic plot is old-time Universal/Monogram: An arrogant doctor (Pierre Brasseur) causes his daughter Christiane’s disfigurement and, aided by the mistress whose face he successfully remade (Valli), kidnaps young women and grafts their faces to what’s left of his daughter’s. In the documentary “Blood of the Beasts,” we learn that butchers decapitate live cattle so that the veal will stay white. The doctor similarly operates on living – though not for long – women. Yet the grafts fail.


The Boileau-Narcejac screenplay (they also wrote the stories on which “Diabolique” and “Vertigo” were based), as photographed by Eugen Shuftan and directed by Franju with studied deliberation and a mesmerizing mixture of horrific and innocent images, explores issues of morality, patriarchy, vanity, guilt, beauty, and fixation that take the film beyond the realm of, say, Bela Lugosi’s insane plastic surgeon in “The Raven.” This film has little patience with kitsch or comedy and only begrudging tolerance for melodrama. Instead, it offers the indelible figure of Christiane, played by Edith Scob – a lean, blonde, elegant, and improbably expressive actress, considering that she wears a white mask with cutouts for her eyes.


Ms. Scob is reason enough to marvel at this film. Everyone remembers the unmasking of Lon Chaney in “Phantom of the Opera,” but his most affecting scenes are played with the mask in place; this is also true of Claude Rains in “The Invisible Man” and Peter Lorre in “The Face behind the Mask.” Ms. Scob’s mask is different: It is so form-fitted to her face that at times it’s like watching a botox experiment gone awry. Morally complicit, she haunts every scene, an often mutely accusing wraith. Only when she realizes that her father won’t succeed and that his motives have little to do with her does she take action, loosing his mistreated dogs (shades of “The Island of Dr. Moreau”) and her pet doves, which alight on her as she finally leaves the castle: Snow White in the enchanted forest – a fairy-tale finale, except that the price of restored innocence is madness.


David Cronenberg’s script for “Videodrome” seems to have metastasized from an urban myth of the 1950s: If you sit too close to the TV, kids, the radiation will stunt your growth (like smoking) or kill you (like smoking).The Videodrome signal, broadcast underground in Pittsburgh and devoted to torture and murder, causes cancerous tumors that drive you crazy and then kill you. It’s all part of a right-wing conspiracy to destroy eraser-heads who watch such drivel – an effort to make America tougher. “Videodrome” depicts a world in which the dependence on television morphs into sexual union, producing new high-definition flesh. For the climactic scene in which a television literally spills its guts, Cronenberg visited the local abattoir to stock up on pig entrails.


For all its undeniable originality, “Videodrome” is pitched on familiar territory. The fascist control of TV is central to “1984” and Elia Kazan’s post-McCarthy exercise in pop paranoia, “A Face in the Crowd.” Nor is reality television anything new. It derived from radio and was built into the video schedule from the beginning, in Senate hearings, quiz shows, and sports; “Queen for a Day” was the “Survivor” of the 1950s. The idea that fear can cause physiological growths generated William Castle’s spinal parasite, “The Tingler” – the violence of “Videodrome” similarly triggers spinal receptors for its deadly signal. Even Mr. Cronenberg’s sexual metaphors derive in part from Marshall McLuhan’s notion of television’s “tactility” and Stanley Kubrick’s astronaut crawling into HAL’s womb.


But Mr. Cronenberg’s radical visual style and storytelling ambiguities completely reshuffle the deck. He is concerned with the apparent inextricability of man and monitor. Millions of people now spend more time staring at a screen – television, computer, cell phone – than they do sleeping, making love, bathing, and eating combined. If “Videodrome” initially reflected the druggy humor of the 1970s (and a Warholian immersion in gore as reflected in “Flesh for Frankenstein”), it now mirrors a technological addiction that has yet to be fully understood or cinematically explored. In that sense, his 1983 film is about as contemporary a film as you will see this year.


“Videodrome” is rife with urban ugly colors and visual jokes (the Cathode Ray Mission is represented by a heart wrapped in thorns with a cross sticking out of its central ventricle). Its most disturbing images range from James Woods’s abdomen turning into a vaginal cavern roomy enough to house a Betamax and a television screen that billows forth in the shape of a gun to torture scenes that can’t help but remind one of Abu Graib and an assassin recruited with promises of a better world to come. The best visual joke was almost certainly accidental, though I was certain it had to be intentional when I first saw the film in a theater: James Woods gives one of the strongest performances of his career, but the more deranged his character gets – cheeks sunken, hair parted in the middle – the more uncanny is his resemblance to Zacherley. Such is the way of all flesh.


The New York Sun

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