“When does the human cost become too high for the building of a better machine?”
- Fox Mulder
In less than 48 hours I will be over that proverbial hill, lurching dramatically closer to death, a nearly elderly piece of shit. “Forty years old” sounds insane unless you’re talking about wine or literature, and I enjoy the former with zero distinction and question the validity of the latter’s existence. Smashed grapes get me smashed, and words combine to keep my brain entertained. Depending on your work habits and social proclivities, you can fit a lot of booze and books into four decades. I know I sure have. Results: fogged-over memories, mysterious pangs around the abdomen, friendships solidified or shattered and oftentimes both (in a single night), bruises & scars, amazing stories, a headful of hate & love & hope & despair & ideas concerning walkable cities, erotic possibilities, lords of many rings, vampire sex, latin-american history, endless threatening futures and the best methods for brewing coffee. A massive jug of Carlo Rossi hidden behind the couch for a week. Encyclopedic tomes of underground cinema. Biodynamic natural fermented wines that I love but can’t afford. Everything ever penned by Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag or Yukio Mishima. Entire evenings swallowed by the catacombs of alcohol and poor lighting and questionably curated jukeboxes or, increasingly, Spotify playlists. An isolated youth with few friends but a driver’s license and an impressive variety of clusterfuck used book shops within a 2 hours’ drive. I’ve managed to cram a lot of shit into my first forty years. I’ve been a lot of different versions of the same aging person. The drinking and the reading have been the unwavering constants, and as physical deterioration threatens louder than ever, the first has plummeted out of necessity and the second has fluctuated like a pulsing wave, continually guided by the stark unpredictability of outside forces and their inevitable dissipation of time.
I reach the crest of that hill in a strange, fortunate place. Essentially stranded at the base of the Cascade Mountains, a hard 25 or so miles from the nearest mindless distraction, I’ve been taking excellent care of my physical and mental selves. Finally doing the stretches strongly advocated by a litany of girlfriends and acupuncturists over the years, my posture is decidedly less slovenly than it has been for at least two decades. I’m eating healthy portions of healthy foods, doing abdominal exercises for the first time in my life and naturally burning calories by hiking back & forth everyday from a miniature paradise of natural hot springs that ease the aches & pains of a laborer’s life and keep my skin smoother than it has any right to be. I get enough sleep now, I’m breathing clean air, I once again spend long stretches of time just staring at trees. I can venture to say that I don’t really “feel old,” at least not in the way that I imagined it as a kid on my father’s 40th birthday, when we presented him with a cake bearing the phrase “OVER THE HILL” written out in edible lettering onto icing in the shape of a tombstone. Of course, at my age he owned a home and had progressed quite a ways towards a relatively comfortable retirement like all of the other Boomers. But I was born in the early months of 1982, just on the cusp of Millenialism, the fading vestiges of whatever the fuck Generation X was supposed to be. I’m on the vanguard of exponential hopelessness; I remember a pre-internet world of tactile pleasures and enriching uncomfortable conversations, and now I’m staring through screens at the dubious promise of endlessly cascading disasters just beyond the unaffordable horizon. Still, I feel great.
Internally, it may be a different story. The probably slipped/ruptured/whatever disc in my back is a nagging old friend by now. I’m increasingly aware that my liver and kidneys exist, which has to be bad. And god only knows what’s going on with my mythical prostate. I think about colon cancer all the time, but never think about doing anything about it. Vaccine refusal and an unfathomably cruel quagmire of an insurance system are currently making regular healthcare appointments difficult to maneuver and barely worth the paper your ludicrous bills are printed on. So I just keep eating my daily apple and rolling the dice like everybody else. For the first time in my life I’ve got an abundance of time unspoken for, so the mountain of unread paperbacks keeps shrinking, and maybe my mind is expanding? It’s hard to know whether or not I’ve turned over the proverbial new leaf early enough in my life to mitigate at least some of the physical & mental damage done during its first half, but I’m uncharacteristically optimistic that things are looking pretty good on a personal level. Ironic to feel this way in a world literally on fire, ravaged by mutating disease and compounding inequality and the rattling skull-cracks of war at every societal level. But fuck it, I’m 40 and I’m chillin’.
Regrettably (and inexcusably, tbh), it has been a while since I’ve fired off one of these entries. My current situation, blessed as it may be, comes with the specific mixed blessing of limited internet access. Out of necessity these future Movie Bogs will be less frequent, less meticulously researched (lol) and more focused on an eclectic mix of older films that a good friend of mine so graciously crammed onto an external hard drive for my semi-off-grid adventure, with an occasionally rented & downloaded new feature peppered in as possible. For this entry, in honor of the destroyed temple that is my body and the work-in-progress that is my old man mind, I’m focusing on two wildly distinct (and distinctly wild) examples of that most squishy squirmy sub-genre, the dreaded “body horror.” My own obsession with the horrors of bodily (dys)function began at a young age. My dad was a mostly unsuccessful hunter, but on the rare occasion that he shot & killed a deer, he would remove the chain-hung swings from our swing-set and hang the poor animal’s carcass from the frame, proceeding to gut & clean his kill, Jackson Pollacking deer blood, bile and other excremental elements all over the dusty ground where I would usually lay prone and pretend to be Superman. These rare instances were a veritable buffet of psychological implications, and naturally I spent my formative years ruminating over a lot of disturbing corporeal questions. The frightening quickness with which a previously living body could be broken down into its subsequent parts, robbed of their functional usefulness and deemed extraneous to my family’s winter meals, was a lot to take in for a kid who regularly engaged in long animated conversations with his dozens of technically inanimate stuffed animals. This stark, dramatically illustrated line between the living and the dead fractured a lot of my illusions, and a long & complex fascination with the body and its various stages of decomposition led to subsequent deep dives into violent illustrations that concerned even my Stephen King superfan mother, obscure and increasingly extreme gore films on VHS and the over-the-top aesthetic presentation of totally righteous death metal. Consult any of my former guidance counselors and they’ll tell you; I became a certified freak. Thanks, Dad!
But my own morbid dabbling with the politics of the flesh pale in comparison to the increasing liberties taken by our technocratic and blatantly anti-human societal overlords. The transhumanists may espouse some distinctly utopian ideals, but the corporatists—as always—will end up in control of everything, even the very vessels of blood and mucous and bone and neurons that we clumsily use to interact with the homogenizing world they continually craft around us. If we’re lucky, we may never end up with the cybernetic doppelgangers of The Terminator hunting us down en masse, but it’s nearly certain that the Peter Thiels of today’s world, who are going to live forever, will be harvesting our proletarian blood for their own nefarious purposes. As the inherent vampirism of our uber-capitalist masters ascends to its final, perfect form, the tenuous boundaries between human composition and inhuman excess will be continually blurred not by some metallic force of imposed will & order, but by our own idiotic acceptance that any new option is a positive one. As the forests and oceans of this solo livable planet which we still barely understand shrivel away—the victims of an insatiable human drive towards remorseless glut—we will transform ourselves into the very commerce-addicted, digitally enslaved click-generators of our oppressors’ most ghoulish wet dreams. Self-destruction willfully embraced, all in the moronic pursuit of a promised & promoted, marginally better simulated experience. And once the bodies have been sapped of their resources and discarded like so much soggy garbage, only the horror will remain.
TITANE (2021) dir. Julia Ducournau
Julia Ducornau’s Raw (2016) was a startlingly assured debut feature, hovering somewhere between the stomach-churning (although beautiful) nihilistic grue of Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001) and the blood-soaked sisterhood dynamics of John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps (2000). A movie about a vegetarian who develops a taste for human flesh amidst her sexual awakening was obviously bound to attract controversy from our regrettably puritanical worlds of discourse and criticism, and Ducornau’s new film doubles down big-time on the gleefully transgressive nature of her first. These days I tend to be a bit skeptical of artists who wield offensive ideas & images seemingly for the sake of transgression itself, and I’m not entirely convinced that Ducornau has quite as much to say with her new film as one might be tempted to imagine is hidden in there somewhere, but I honestly don’t give a shit. It’s increasingly rare to watch a film these days where you have absolutely no clue what might happen next, and the experience remains an inarguably thrilling pleasure. Titane certainly dabbles in some very current hot-button issues: gender fluidity, mental health, body modification, toxic masculinity and the boiled-over arguments about women’s pregnant bodies and what they choose to do with them. That Ducornau is able to paint such a simultaneously clinical and sensuous picture with such a fraught & varied palette is impressive in itself. But to do so without committing to any definitive stances or answers on a single one of these topics is a bold gamble, and I would argue that for the most part it pays off.
Tatted-up wunderkind Agathe Rousselle is visually mesmerizing from start to finish as a casually psychopathic dancer who fucks cars and kills people. That’s her character, and she nails it. Her dedication to the physicality of the role is, frankly, pretty terrifying. The intentional nose-breaking scene alone is a cringe-inducing masterclass in self-inflicted violence. I beheld it with a mixture of repulsion & glee, that picture-perfect response invoked by the finest examples of body horror. She also manages to imbue her serial-killer sprees with a relatable degree of exasperation, undercutting her very heinous acts with a sense of humor that doesn’t quite tip over into the satirical realm of the seminal Man Bites Dog (1992), but successfully renders the violence nearly nonthreatening enough for us to just enjoy the ride. And Ducornau’s blatantly horny ogling of Rousselle’s admittedly slammin’ body is both appreciated and integral to our reactions as said body suffers through a litany of dysmorphic horrors as the story progresses. Rousselle is remarkably game, and I’ll watch her in anything after this. Vincent Lindon could do a monologue reading of cereal ingredients and I’d pay good money to see it, so I was beyond thrilled to have him show up as a respected but troubled veteran firefighter who is haunted by the loss of his young son and is engaged in a steroid-enhanced battle against his own inevitable physical decay. Lindon has a singular gift for depicting dog-eyed vulnerability and brooding menace with equal, seemingly effortless intensity, and Ducornau wisely keeps his character’s internal life & motivations vague enough that we’re perpetually uncomfortable in his presence, although we’re never entirely sure why. It could be argued that the film as a whole plays out like an extended music video, which in and of itself could be a criticism, but any of the scenes where Rousselle or Lindon are dancing (and there are several) are perfectly hypnotic moments that could lift pretty much any film to an entirely new level.
Central performances aside, Titane is a relatively mixed bag. As I already pointed out, the film absolutely earns its body horror bonafides, and that balance of peeking-between-the-fingers disgust and how-did-they-do-that wonder earns a lot of mileage with a certain type of audience, myself enthusiastically included. To see a hotly anticipated art-adjacent film dive so wholeheartedly into grotesquery is a genuine thrill that should not be taken lightly in today’s seemingly risk-averse cinematic landscape. The murders are creative and gross without feeling too exploitative to enjoy, and Rousselle’s absurdist pregnancy and eventual birthing of the offspring of her automobile-lover provides more than its fair share of extremely discomforting visuals. But perhaps the most impressive instance of physical defilement is Lindon’s actual human body, pushed as it is to the very limits of usage and age. The man makes the basic act of doing pull-ups seem like a Herculean struggle against the very structures of time & decay themselves, his basic physical existence depicted as an inescapable misery. Every scene that the two of them share radiates with a bizarre concoction of queasy discomfort and increasingly genuine affection, none of which is ever given a comprehensive attempt at explanation. Maybe that’s a downside to the actual storytelling itself, but I found that the ambiguity increased my visceral appreciation of the film as a whole. I don’t really care about the how’s and the why’s; just make me feel something, man. And this movie certainly succeeds at that, for better or worse.
Thematically, you could probably ascribe any meanings you can personally make fit. I normally like that kind of openness to interpretation, but oddly enough I feel like Titane includes almost too many possible avenues. The end result is a bit overwhelming, and I honestly didn’t find myself thinking about the movie too much after watching it. The experience itself was, confusingly enough, both vapid and intriguing, somehow equally empty and rich. If nothing else, it’s great to see that Ducornau remains dedicated to her own uncompromising weirdness, and I’m very stoked to see what direction she heads in next. Perhaps my strongest takeaway from this one is an undercurrent of empathy to be found in surprising places; the beautiful idea that ultimately everyone is capable of some kind of human connection, and possibly even some degree of genuine love. It’s a pretty wild move to sneak that idea into a hard-driven psychological mind-fucked thriller about a seemingly irredeemable murderess and a hulking human wound entirely in denial of his own cast-iron reality, but Ducornau essentially pulls it off. And in a world that is absolutely devoid of easily parsed black & white issues, that kind of ambiguously democratic opportunity for redemption and understanding feels almost revolutionary.
THE FLY (1986) dir. David Cronenberg
Speaking of empathy in surprising places, who would have guessed that the dark prince of body horror himself could have injected a healthy dose of earned romanticism and legitimately wistful regret into his disgustingly graphic remake of a Vincent Price classic? David Cronenberg, the clinically ghoulish Canadian auteur, essentially invented body horror as we know and love it today, and you’d be hard-pressed to point out an oeuvre more wholeheartedly dedicated to the dubious practice of freaking people out. Horrific bodily mutilations, usually coinciding with some degree of fantastic psychic violence, are pretty much guaranteed in Cronenberg’s entire ::ahem:: body of work, usually the key difference being the degree of imposing intellectualism he chooses to apply to his gross-out special effects. From the sheer violence of will that can result in a telepathically exploded head to the not-so-subtle implications of a virtual reality videogame system phallically plugged into a player’s implanted vaginal console-slot, the shattered boundaries of human flesh can represent just about anything in a Cronenberg film. In fact, when compared to the more cerebrally-inclined films he’s made, his version of The Fly is shockingly down-to-earth in both its approach and its range of interpretation. This is a fairly straightforward story about a man whose unchecked ambitions supersede all other elements of his life, including a budding & sincere romance, and the repulsive consequences of science run amok don’t necessarily beg for a deeper explanation. In a lot of ways, this is Cronenberg at his least ambitious.
Oddly enough, it might also be my favorite film that he’s ever made. The simple joys of a concise and entirely self-contained story cannot be overstated, and Cronenberg proves unexpectedly adept at allowing a fairly uncomplicated tragic romance play out along its natural inclination. From the immediately intimate opening scene that finds complete strangers Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis meeting at a public function in the middle of a highly specific conversation, the entire film operates on a tightly framed scale of micro-specificity, regardless of how the scientific consequences of its storyline would play out on a macro scale. Yes, Goldblum’s character is literally trying to transform the very physical boundaries of our shared world—and these lofty ambitions result in a particularly harsh Icarus-like degree of punishment—but for the entirety of the film our main concern is the impact of his reckless experimentation on his relationship with Davis. These are two unique but entirely relatable people, adrift in the tangled interactions of ultimately lonesome big city existence, and we can’t help but root for them. Their early scenes together are believably awkward and impersonal, but their gradual slide into coupledom is equally believable and therefore genuinely compelling. Naturally (especially if you’re familiar with the filmmaker), an inescapable air of tragedy hovers over the romantic proceedings, but we like both of them enough that we hope against all odds for things to work out anyway. This humanistic approach is unusual for Cronenberg, who possesses the diabolical ability to make all human beings, from soft-spoken self-help gurus to seemingly harmless mothers, radiate with the possibility of an unhinged malice. In The Fly, even the pushy, disrespectful and frighteningly obsessed ex-boyfriend somehow comes across as a pitiable person just trying to make his way through a challenging world. Despite Goldblum’s horrific transformation and its attendant spikes in unpredictable aggression, he is never depicted as an irredeemable villain. The increasingly staggering level of his outer gruesomeness does not in fact coincide with the quality of his character trapped within. Davis knows this, and we empathize with her struggle against the inevitable loss of her new lover and the feelings she’s developed for him just as much as we empathize with Goldblum’s literal loss of humanity.
The movie world deserves a lot more Geena Davis than we’ve been given, and it’s hard for me to watch a movie like The Fly without bemoaning the fact that her career never quite took off in the same way as someone like Julia Roberts’. Goldblum, of course, is a pop culture icon at this point, with the unfortunate side effect being that it can be easy not to take him seriously as an actor. But they both put in fantastic work here. Davis’s guarded but obviously interested skepticism plays off against Goldblum’s dorky charm & boyish excitement like a prototypical Mulder & Scully, from that most profoundly empathetic amalgam of science fiction & horror, television’s The X-Files. In another deviation from Cronenberg’s usual proclivities, our two protagonists are even allowed the luxury of having some sex without any resultant mutations or dismemberments (one horrific dream sequence notwithstanding). Their connection grows stronger through physical contact, whereas in most Cronenberg films physical contact of pretty much any kind is an invitation to disaster. It’s almost like Cronenberg made an anti-Cronenberg movie, but imbued it with the most outrageous Cronenbergian effects in his entire filmography. The gradual human-to-fly transformation of Goldblum’s Seth Brundle is absolutely disgusting, and extremely impressive. Goldblum puts in a wonderfully physical performance, and maybe the most disturbing thing about the entire film is the fact that he comes across as genuinely sexy for a small but crucial portion of it. Again, we can empathize with and understand Davis’s character falling for him, increasing the stakes of the inevitable tragedy.
Bleak endings, especially the sudden ones, have a legacy all of their own in the realm of cinema. But few can compete with how sadly and immediately things end in this version of The Fly. If the sight of the helpless, miserable Brundlefly begging his lover to shoot him in the insectoid face and thus end his self-inflicted suffering doesn’t profoundly bum you out, then you’re the only real monster here. The fact that viewers can feel such an incisive sense of loss as the pulsating mass of Brundlefly silently solicits this desperate plea is a testament not only to Cronenberg’s masterful presentation of the story as a whole, but perhaps even moreso to the success of Goldblum and Davis at portraying a brief but intense relationship with such relatable romantic purity that the weight of its disastrous ruination is so legitimately affecting. The Fly buzzes around a small handful of noteworthy topics, including but not limited to the hubris inherent in humankind’s desire to break all boundaries, the deleterious effects of science run amok, bodily autonomy and the accepted boundaries of interpersonal relationships, but at its gooey pulsating heart it’s a love story, pure and simple. Now, as our own real-world technologies run quite amok themselves and computer-generated intelligences shatter previously unknown boundaries every single second, it’s vital to remember that something as human as love can never quite be replicated or experienced by the ever more advanced simulacra of existence that we increasingly seem to worship. I know it sounds cheesy, but I’m just an old softie now. And I’m growing more convinced every single day that we as a species need to figure out where we stand in the defense of the very real living world that we inhabit from the rapacious forces of imaginary economic interests and impossibly endless growth. The horrors are very real; it’s way past time to get as many bodies out there as possible to confront them. Not me, though; I’m too old!