Wednesday, January 27, 2021

The Sacrament: A Question Of Belief

 After the events of the last few weeks…oh, who are we kidding, the last four years...I find myself thinking about a lot of things. This week, I’m looking at what happens when a whole group of people decide to blindly follow someone who tells them exactly what they want to hear.

So, there’s this old, slightly hackneyed saying, that “truth is stranger than fiction.” Here’s the thing: It might be a cliché, but it’s also sometimes true. Whatever you can think up, some crazy motherfucker has probably done it, it’s just a matter of whether or not that particular rock has been turned over and exposed to the light of public attention. And an element of truth lends a certain bite to horror - The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was billed as being “based on a true story,” though the connection’s so thin you could read a book through it. The Blair Witch Project was marketed as being an actual disappearance of three filmmakers, and that added something to the film (not that it needed it). It’s why found-footage films, when they’re good, are really good - if something feels true, we experience in a way different from what we know to be fiction.

And this is sort of what makes The Sacrament both compelling and frustrating. It’s a confection made of layers of truth and fiction. It’s well-paced and tense, largely believable (for good reason), but it also struggles enough with the line between truth (or realism) and fiction that it doesn’t hit quite as hard as it could.

It starts off as a conversation between Sam and Jake, journalists at Vice, an actual media outlet that got its start as a nightlife magazine for gentrifying hipsters in New York City, but over the years has moved closer to actual journalism. There’s still a sex-and-drugs streak in their subject matter, but it’s just as often about investigating conditions in impoverished areas as it is about going to far-off lands to do exotic hallucinogens.  Sam’s been all over the world covering all kinds of crazy stuff, and Jake is a photographer who mostly works in fashion but yearns to do something more substantive. As it turns out, Jake has just received a letter from his sister Caroline. Caroline was in sober living for awhile, then she dropped out of sight entirely. Now she’s written him to say how much she misses him and to invite him to Eden Parish, the commune she calls home. It’s not in the U.S., and Sam smells an opportunity - he’ll go with Jake and bring his cameraman Patrick along. They’ll document the siblings’ reunion and get a look at some crazy commune out in the jungle somewhere. It’s exactly the sort of thing Vice does.

And so after a long flight to somewhere unspecified in what might be either South American or Africa, Sam, Jake and Patrick take a helicopter out to Eden Parish. Heading up to the entrance, they are stopped by men carrying assault rifles. These men are not happy to see any of them, especially a cameraman. Caroline has to intervene before things get ugly. She didn’t know Sam and Patrick were coming, but it’s fine, really.

She’s sure Father won’t mind. 

I’ve watched enough features on Vice to know what they look like and how they typically go, and at least in the broad strokes this narrative conceit works fine, because in my experience, actual features on Vice often consist of young city hipsters with gonzo-journalism aspirations getting in over their heads, and that is exactly what happens here. And it’s entirely plausible that Vice would show something like this - a trip gone horribly, horribly wrong - warts and all, but if the broad strokes are convincing, it falls down in the details. The narrative mode is realism - we’re supposed to believe we’re watching an actual documentary made by a real-world media company - but the acting and writing betray that sense of realism. The dialogue tends to waver between the naturalistic, the expository, and the painfully on-the-nose, and though most of the characters are believably acted, there are a few that get close enough to cliché to break the conceit. As often as not, you’re aware that you’re watching actors acting, instead of journalists interviewing people who live in an agrarian commune, under the watchful eye of Father and men with guns. For every thing that makes it believable, there’s something to interrupt that sense of believability and it’s distracting. 

I don’t, however, know that it’s fatal to the film. It’s well-paced, turning up the tension gradually but inexorably, moving from quiet menace to bleak, unblinking horror over the second half of the film. The important characters aren’t caricatures and it does a pretty good job of resisting cliché (with one glaring exception). The motivations of the important characters feel largely realistic, there are some slightly abrupt changes of heart, but nothing jarring. At first, everything seems fine at Eden Parish - a little odd, and maybe their medical supplies aren’t great, and it's a little disconcerting to keep hearing Father’s voice coming out of loudspeakers all over the commune, but people seem happy. Then again, there’s the men with guns always just on the edge of the commune, and Father is as evasive as he is avuncular. He doesn’t want to talk about how Eden Parish was financed by the life savings of everyone there. And he knows maybe a little too much about Sam for someone who forbids his community to the use of phones, television, or the Internet. 

The arrival of visitors from the outside world is more disruptive than anyone expected, and as Sam, Jake and Patrick keep asking questions, fewer and fewer things add up, and then in the third act it all comes to a head in a manner that doesn’t let you look away, and even if the dialogue feels a little stagey, it’s still acted in a raw and confrontational way. There is one plot hole that leapt out at me at the end - a moment of “wait, how did they have that footage?” - but I know I’m pickier about that sort of thing than most people. It’s not found-footage, strictly speaking, more of a mockumentary, but anytime you present something as realism, you have to do everything you can to get the audience to believe they’re watching something real, and there are just enough moments that violate believability that the impact is diluted somewhat.

Something else that ends up being a bit of a problem is the degree to which these fictional people working for a real media company experience events that are a pretty thinly fictionalized version of real-world events. It’s not going to take long for anyone familiar with the story of Jonestown to figure out what’s happening and about to happen in this film. It’s not a direct beat-for-beat recreation, it’s scaled down to fit the story of these three journalists, but though some minor details are changed, the sequence and nature of events play out faithfully to what actually happened there. If anything, it’s less horrifying in scale than the actual events on which it’s based, and it’s still pretty horrifying in the final act. It’s a fictionalization of real events, presented as a documentary made by fictional people employed by a media company that actually exists. That’s a lot of conceit in one movie, and I think it didn’t quite commit enough to the idea of realism to really nail it. It doesn’t always come off believable, but knowing that it’s pretty faithful to something that actually happened does make it a sobering testimony to the dangers of belief, to what happens when a bunch of people decide to put all of their faith, their money, and their lives in the hands of a man who seeks to create a world that revolves entirely around him.  

Monday, January 18, 2021

Videodrome: The Glass Teat

As I’ve said before, I prefer to look at films as finished, singular products, and focus less on the people who made them. Not that those things are unimportant - far from it, the choices and decisions filmmakers make shape and define the final product, and there are particular directors whose work I seek out as much as possible - but rather because I think it’s easy to lose sight of the film when you focus on the personalities behind it, and this is especially a problem in horror film. Horror film has its own level of celebrity, and it’s hard for the enthusiast press to be objective in the face of it. More cynically, as often as not the people being celebrated are just churning out another sequel or spinning off one franchise from another franchise, and I don’t think that’s anything to celebrate. To me, the film is what matters, more than who made it.

But goddamn is it ever hard to maintain that critical separation when talking about certain directors, and few directors are more difficult to divorce from their work than David Cronenberg. Over the course of almost 25 years, he made a series of films that confronted ideas about desire, control, technology and biology with both the clinical eye of a surgeon and a surrealist’s refusal of taboo. I’ve written about a couple of his earlier films - Shivers and The Brood - here, and though they have their shortcomings, they’re still really powerful if for nothing else than the ideas they present. 

Cronenberg envisions the body as, in some ways, technology - a collection of machinery that can be put to different purposes, often other than originally intended. And because there’s this tendency to see the body as sacred or pure, as emblematic of humanity, the ways he depicts this idea are often pretty damn unsettling. And I think it’s Videodrome where I really see this particular vision of his start to cohere, where a thesis about the intersection between technology, desire, biology and perception starts to come into focus. Like those other films, it’s very much a product of its time, and I wonder if that dulls its edge a little, but there’s still a lot going on here.

Max Renn is an executive at a sleazy television network - sort of the Canadian equivalent of public-access television. They’re a small operation with pretty low bandwidth, and a healthy chunk of their programming is soft-core pornography or violent exploitation. Cheap thrills for the indiscriminate consumer. Max secures programming in part by having a technician pirate signals from foreign networks using a satellite dish. It’s tough, I think, to appreciate this idea in the modern day. Once, everything was terrestrial broadcast, and if you had a powerful enough receiver, you could pull in signals from all over the world, not all of which were intended for public viewing. Signals could be scrambled, but it wasn’t exactly modern encryption. Things that were scrambled could be unscrambled. 

And it’s in this search for new programming, harder-edged programming for an increasingly jaded viewing audience, that their technician discovers a program out of Malaysia called Videodrome. It’s pretty low-budget - there’s a bare room, and two men in hoods, beating and torturing people. No narrative, no breaks. People get dragged on and brutalized, people get dragged off. Max is fascinated - he wants to find the people making it, he wants a distribution deal. He can’t believe how realistic it looks. Almost like it isn’t being faked.

Not all signals are intended for public viewing.

Max’s search for the creators of Videodrome take him to some strange places, but the world we’re presented with is already strange in its own right. Video is a medium permeating everyone’s life in a way that wasn’t really true of the time in which it was made, and it’s all shown in incidental details - a well-known media critic refuses to appear anywhere in person, only communicating through video broadcasts, homeless people gather at a mission, not to eat meals and hear sermons, but to watch television, and as Max soon discovers, rogue broadcasts have the power to reshape the brain. The film presents a world in which video broadcasts and videotape recordings have essentially infested everyday life like a fungus. Television was an established medium when this film was made, but its omnipresence in the world of the film feels sinister without being didactic, and as Max goes further down the rabbit hole in search of this mysterious program, the more the world around him begins to warp - nightmares, hallucinations, televisions and videotapes that pulse and breathe with animal life, and strange changes to his very biology. There must have been nothing like it at the time.

Watching it now, there’s still nothing else like it, albeit for different reasons. Almost all of the technology in the film is now obsolete, so there’s a quaintness to it, the unease of pernicious technology undercut by that technology’s antiquation. I suspect to anyone who didn’t grow up during this time, it could all feel faintly silly. Its age shows in other ways as well - like The Brood, it’s very much of its time in terms of relations between the sexes and the zeitgeist of the late 70s/early 80s in general (there’s plenty of casual sexism to go around, and some of the cultural preoccupations might not make sense to a modern viewer), and though the effects don’t let down the story as much as they do in that film, some of them are still somewhat dated to the modern eye. It’s not as choppy as Shivers, but it still moves a bit abruptly and doesn’t necessarily give some of the revelations room to breathe. Weird shit tends to happen and then the scene changes, so it’s less effective at building a mood than it could be, and the last act sort of loses focus and threatens to collapse into gobbledygook, but I think a lot of these limitations are more a function of a limited budget than anything else. That it got made at all is something.

It’s an audacious vision, regardless of the context,  and one that runs through the first half of Cronenberg’s career, from Shivers up to eXistenZ, one that doesn’t hold the body or bodily desires as sacred, that explores what happens when technology becomes as much a part of the body as anything else, how powerful entities will exploit it, and the ways we rebel against that control. These preoccupations, and its mix of high technology and grungy settings, the street finding its own use for things, the way people get in over their heads, running afoul of the wealthy and powerful, these all persist all the way up through today in films like Antiviral and Possessor, made by Cronenberg’s son Brandon, who hasn’t missed a step. None of these things have really changed, only their trappings. 

Monday, January 11, 2021

The Lovecraft Investigations/Archive 81: Listening To Horror, Redux

 Well, now that the holiday season has wound down, it’s time for me to get back on my horror movie bullshit, but I spent the last few weeks not really watching much in the way of horror film. The occasional break helps to keep me from feeling burned out, and under more normal circumstances, I would have been traveling anyway. What I have been doing is listening to horror podcasts, having been made aware of a few more by some of the fine folks who follow Old Gods Of Appalachia, and having devoured two - The Lovecraft Investigations and Archive 81 - over the last couple of weeks, I’d like to look at what they each do well (which is quite a bit), and what they each do not so well (which isn't too much).. 

The Lovecraft Investigations

This is a production of the BBC, and as you can probably tell from the title, it’s a series of audio adaptations of stories by H.P. Lovecraft. Now, there’s certainly no dearth of Lovecraft adaptations out there, but the hook here is, I think, a reasonably clever one: These adaptations are set in the modern day and presented as episodes of a modern true-crime podcast  called The Mystery Machine, hosted by plucky, enterprising journalists Justin Heawood and Kennedy Fisher. They report on unsolved crimes, the usual cold-case fare, but as the podcast begins, they’ve been drawn into a rather unusual case, that of a young man who apparently vanished from a locked room in a mental hospital without any assistance. This is, then, the Lovecraft story The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and soon enough what starts as a simple attempt to put together the details of a years-old mystery turns, as it does, into something much larger and much more sinister. Which is your standard true-crime podcast template, but here “larger and more sinister” means immortal body-hopping sorcerers, creatures that we can’t see clearly because our brain isn’t equipped to perceive them, and much worse.

It’s followed by adaptations of The Whisperer In Darkness and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and as a whole they’re presented in convincing fashion - the actors playing Heawood and Fisher have the easy conversational style of people who are comfortable with each other and with telling stories, but who aren’t professional broadcasters. For the most part, they sound like they could fit quite neatly next to something like Serial, though some of the supporting actors are a touch too theatrical at times, which can make it a little tougher to get really immersed. It’s sort of a similar problem to that of found-footage films that veer away from naturalism - it’s presenting itself as real-world media, but when the dialogue gets a little too arch or contrived, the illusion is broken for a bit and its power diluted some. But in general, it strikes a nice balance between faithfulness to podcasting convention and faithfulness to the original text, which preserves events and plot beats while updating them to modern settings and sensibilities.

The bigger problem, I think, is that the creators of the show attempt to create a single overarching narrative across the three stories, as if the things the protagonists discover in the beginning are leading them even further and further down a rabbit hole. This by itself isn’t bad, necessarily, and it’s handled well and pretty seamlessly even though the original stories weren’t really connected to each other, but the net effect is one of changing the scope and subsequent focus of what’s going on - the rabbit hole isn’t so much deep as wide, with Heawood and Fisher hopping continents and getting involved with clandestine government agencies and uncovering conspiracies both supernatural and natural, and so over the course of the three stories, things start to get more and more overstuffed, feeling less like cosmic horror and more like the X-Files. Make no mistake, it’s entertaining throughout, and to my mind just provides more evidence that Lovecraft’s work can be adapted effectively without including any of his awful racism, sexism, classism and pernicious xenophobia. His stories work in spite of those things, not because of them, so the more people find ways to bring them into the modern day and leave their egregiously backward aspects in the past, the happier I am. I wish that this podcast had been better able to preserve the sense of dread and menace of its first episodes throughout, but it’s good fun.

Archive 81

This one is a much stranger beast than The Lovecraft Investigations - it’s presented as a podcast hosted by a young man named Mark, who has obtained a bunch of recordings related to his friend Dan, who has gone missing under mysterious circumstances, and is publishing them as a way to try and solicit help in finding him. The recordings are audio-verite, set (at least to start) in a mysterious archive belonging to the LMG Corporation. They’ve hired Dan to listen to and catalog a very large number of audio recordings in the archive. He has been given very specific instructions to not attempt to fix or clean up the recordings in any way, and to in turn record himself as he goes through the process of listening and cataloguing these tapes. So we’re listening to recordings of someone listening to recordings as they record their reactions to the recordings, It’s not as difficult to follow as I’m making it sound, but it does set up a narrative through-line of audio recording as a form of alchemy, as something both process and product in creating a big, strange audio universe. 

There are three broad phases to the show to date - the first concerns Dan’s introduction to the archive and a series of recordings about a very strange high-rise apartment building in Manhattan. These work generally well as discrete vignettes and are consistently unsettling, as little details build up and paint a picture of a building full of people somehow drawn to and contorted by the building itself. The second shifts focus to recordings made by an expedition sent by LMG to someplace very, very different from any world we would recognize, and the efforts of that expedition to find their way home again. This broadens the narrative scope considerably, and though there are definitely moments of body horror (Dan especially is…repurposed…for the expedition), as this phase of the story moves on it starts to take on more of a feeling of dark fantasy, the expedition concerned with learning the rules of this place and how to outwit the corporation that sent them there.. The mood is still uneasy on balance (they are someplace very strange, and very far from home), but what made the first part so effective was the way something would start off normal enough and then as the episode progressed, more strangeness would creep in around the edges, and it was the contrast between the two that made those episodes work well. In the second part, everything is strange, so it’s less acutely felt - it’s a lower-intensity, but more pervasive uneasiness stemming from an utterly alien world. 

The third part is concerned primarily with a pair of half-siblings, Nicholas and Christine Waters, and their attempts to complete a magical ritual left to them by their late father. If the first part was a modern take on cosmic horror and the second was dark fantasy, the third splits the difference pretty neatly, as the action moves between our world and others, and characters from the span of the series reappear, sometimes at unexpected times or in unexpected places, and the story is as much about the relationship between these two siblings, about forgiveness and connection and friendship, as it is the increasingly bizarre and dangerous things they have to do. It’s not as consistently creepy as the first part, but it definitely has its moments, and it serves to gather together what appear to initially be disparate smaller narratives into something grander, and at its best it reminds me of Clive Barker’s ability to create worlds filled equally with horror and wonder. Or, to use a more contemporary example, at its best it feels like the people who made Resolution and The Endless decided to try their hand at SCP-style stories told as episodes of Radiolab. If that sounds like a lot to take in, it is, but though it has its weak points, it’s remarkably well-handled and evocative. A series based on the podcast is in the works at Netflix, and I have to say, I’m curious.