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CHAPTER FOUR

QUID EST VERITAS:

THE REALITY OF UNSPEAKABLE SUFFERING

Objective anxiety became manifest at the height of the dot.com bubble in the late 1990s and the panicky anticipation of the Y2K “virus,” the period Rodowick calls “the summer of digital paranoia,” when (as he paraphrased Marx) The Matrix, et al. suggested that “all that was chemical and photographic [was] disappearing into the electronic and digital.”

Hysterical anxiety can be even more precisely dated. For many, and not just those in Hollywood, the events of September 11, 2001 provided the ultimate movie experience—spectacular destruction predicated on fantastic conspiracy, broadcast live, as well as repeatedly (and even recorded by some participants on their cell phones), and watched by an audience, more or less simultaneously, of billions. This surely is what the composer Karl Stockhausen, among others, meant when, in the course of a press conference at the Hamburg Music Festival on September 16, 2001, he undiplomatically referring to the events of 9/11 as “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.”1

These events—or rather, this Event—established a new cinematic paradigm and Hollywood’s response was fascinating, particularly in that magical thinking is what movies are all about. Only days after the Event, the studios eagerly reported that the FBI had informed them they could be the terrorists’ next target. On September 21, rumors of an impending attack swept Los Angeles. The industry felt somehow guilty and even responsible, although not everyone was as blunt (or innocent in his megalomania) as Robert Altman, who told the Associated Press that, “These people have copied the movies. Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they’d seen it in a movie … We created this atmosphere and taught them how to do it.”2

Did the history-changing shock of this cinematic event plunge the nascent twenty-first century into an alternative universe, one in which motion picture fairy tales actually did come true? Or was it rather a red pill that parted the veil on a new reality that already existed? The 9/11 Event was understood by some filmmakers as a horrible unintended consequence of their medium and taken by others as a challenge to the notion of the movies as a medium with a privileged relationship to the real.3

This was not necessarily conscious as when, during the course of an on-set press conference, Steven Spielberg would describe his fantastic War of the Worlds (2005), the first Hollywood movie to allegorize 9/11, as an exercise in realism, even insisting upon a key concept of the New Realness: “The whole thing is very experiential [sic].” War of the Worlds, Spielberg maintained, was not simply entertainment, like such earlier fantasies of interplanetary warfare as Independence Day (1996) or Starship Troopers (1997): “We take it much more seriously than that.” The movie, he promised reporters, would be “as ultra-realistic as I’ve ever attempted to make a movie, in terms of its documentary style …” Spielberg, like Altman, was speaking on behalf of his medium. Cinema itself would insure that the post 9/11 disaster film would be experiential, communal and above all naturalistic.4

Although the mayhem in War of the Worlds references 9/11 in every instance, the most brutal New Realness is manifest in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), a movie that seemingly stands opposed to all entertainment values and which, in fact, aspired to be far more than a movie by representing and, in a sense, identifying with a unique instance of divine intervention—and hence, proposing itself as a cinematic event to trump even 9/11. For a true believer, The Passion of the Christ is not a narrative but an icon—an object through which to meditate upon the spectacle of a defenseless man beaten, stomped, and tortured to death so that he might redeem the sins of all humanity since the beginning of time!

As a subject, Gibson’s Jesus Christ has less in common with any previous movie protagonist than with the greenish-purplish, pustulent, putrifying subject of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. As a movie, The Passion passes the point of no return with the eleven-minute chastisement sequence in which Jesus is lacerated, first with rods and then studded whips, until his back resembles a side of raw beef. The crux of The Passion is the experience of a crucifixion; the near continuous violence and gore is meant to excruciate the viewer. Using numerous overhead shots, Gibson assumes a fallen world and projects an essentially medieval worldview. (The crucifixion only emerged as a subject for artists with the first millennium; passion plays didn’t exist before the twelfth century.)

As detailed by art historian Mitchell B. Merback in The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 1999), medieval Christian devotion required immersion in the Passion’s “grisly details,” while other devotional practices centered on the experience of a tortured, pain-racked body. (Merback finds analogies in medieval Europe’s contemporaneous fascination with martyrdom, flagellation, extravagant forms of punishment, and public executions.) The antithesis of a film like Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Gibson’s atavistic Christian art goes for shock rather than sublimity. The filmmaker employs extreme, even gross, horror movie tropes, as well as blatant digital effects—the Roman whip and Christ’s wounds in the chastisement sequence, as well as the final shot of 3-D stigmata.5

From the silent era on, movies drew power from their affinity to religious ritual; The Passion inverts this equation, and redeems movie-going. The cinema is transformed from a questionable, possibly sinful activity into a source of collective identity as well as a communal rite. Entire congregations rented theaters in order to the share the experience, often bringing young children. For these religious audiences, The Passion functioned as a sermon but, unlike a sermon, the end of the screening was greeted with applause—or so I’ve been told. However gruesome its presentation, The Passion was taken as a gift from God. Evangelical leader and child psychologist James C. Dobson was not alone in welcoming this redemption of a debased popular culture: “In any other context, I could not in good conscience recommend a movie containing this degree of violent content. However, in this case, the violence is intended not to titillate or entertain, but to emphasize the reality of the unspeakable suffering that our Savior endured on our behalf.”6

As The Passion’s sanctified violence and horror impressed a devout audience with the reality of “unspeakable suffering”, so the real-ness of Gibson’s extreme filmmaking intrigued more secular artists. Not everyone was as honest as Quentin Tarantino who, when asked by interviewer John Powers if he’d seen Gibson’s Passion, replied that he “loved it … I think it actually is one of the most brilliant visual storytelling movies I’ve seen since the talkies.”

It has the power of a silent movie … It is pretty violent, I must say. At a certain point, it was like a Takashi Miike film. It got so fucked up it was funny … I was into the seriousness of the story, of course, but in the crucifixion scene, when they turned the cross over, you had to laugh.

Tarantino would subsequently lend his imprimatur to exploitation director Eli Roth, author of the quasi-pornographic torture-based horror films Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005), low-budget DV productions with stylistic affinities to the New Realness, by employing Roth to contribute a trailer to his compilation film Grindhouse and by producing Hostel II (both 2007).7

Gibson’s blockbuster stimulated other filmmakers—but not simply because of its mayhem. Movies as varied as Gus Van Sant’s crypto-Kurt Cobain ode Last Days (2005), Cristi Puiu’s black comedy The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), Julia Loktev’s structural suspense film Day Night Day Night (2006), Paul Greengrass’s 9/11 docudrama United 93 (2006), Julian Schnabel’s medical case history The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2006), Steve McQueen’s prison story Hunger (2008), Filipino director Brilliante Mendoza’s true-crime Kinatay (2009), Jerzy Skolomowski’s existential chase film Essential Killing (2010), and Danny Boyle’s self-amputation ordeal 127 Hours (2010)—many based on or inspired by true stories, and all built around a discreet experience—are examples of post-Passion anti-entertainment, aspiring to a visceral realness and being additionally “experiential” in their emphasis on real-time duration.8

Noting their over-determined endings, film critic Nathan Lee bracketed several such movies with The Passion of the Christ, as “death trips.” No less crucial is their interest in constructing an ordeal—both on the screen and for the audience. Last Days was immediately recognized as analogous to Gibson’s project. Washington Post reviewer Anna Hornaday called it “the grunge generation Passion of the Christ,” predicting (erroneously) that it might prove “as powerful a communal and spiritual experience.” Van Sant’s suicidal rock star is only the most obvious martyr. Others include an alcoholic non-entity who dies on a hospital gurney, a would-be suicide bomber, the passengers and crew of a hijacked plane, a French fashion writer sentenced to a living death, an Irish revolutionary who embarks on a fatal hunger strike, and a Filipino hooker. In every case, their passion is presented as an object of contemplation.

United 93, which more or less demands that its audience live through a doomed flight from take-off to crash, is the most therapeutic of these movies. The quintessential new disaster film, United 93 is explicit in its use of real time and designed for audience participation. New disaster is experiential and communal. Just as the now notorious trailer distilled the movie’s narrative arc (albeit without offering the final catharsis), audiences mimicked the action: having paid to see Inside Man, unsuspecting viewers had their attention “hijacked.” According to some descriptions in the press, the angry patrons at AMC Loews Lincoln Square banded together to yank the trailer.

Kinatay (the title means “slaughter” in Tagalog) is the most radical of these films. The movie is crudely shot from the perspective of a twenty-year-old police trainee who, moonlighting for extra money, finds himself trapped on behalf of the spectator, in a hellish world. Over the course of a forty-five-minute, more or less real-time sequence, and before his eyes, a young prostitute is abducted, beaten, tortured, raped, sodomized, murdered, and matter-of-factly dismembered. That these atrocities are murkily rendered on HD, more often heard than seen, serves to add insult to injury, even as Mendoza’s anti-technique amplifies the horrifying spectacle of relentless degradation. Kinatay is not a movie to be lightly recommended but it is something that must be endured to be understood.9