#2
Post
by colinr0380 » Mon Oct 19, 2009 10:44 am
Spoilers ahead:
I feel that Performance still stands as Cammell’s masterpiece, a complex discussion of power, sexuality and appearances whose influence can be felt throughout the rest of his films in the way they conflate mysticism with mystique – of a rock star persona being compared to a certain transcendence of societal limitations . But as I’m not sure there is much else I could bring to a discussion of that film I thought that with this initial post I would talk about the later and more troubled Cammell films.
Demon Seed for me is the most obvious illustration of the focus on male domination seen from the point of view of the woman being used simply as an, albeit important, object. This time however since the husband is the man responsible for creating the computer consciousness that traps his wife in their hi-tech home in order to impregnate her with its child, it could be seen as a battle between two different sides of one man bringing with it ideas that pure intellect and total control is not enough leading to a yearning to become more human and emotional, even though it leads to intellectual limitation and inevitable death (I quite liked the idea of technology becoming obsolete and being superceded by better and more effective technology that gets compared to human renewal from generation to generation, not in a constant improvement but in a more organic and experimental way of seeing and interacting with the world from each new person’s perspective). This also turns up in White of the Eye, which although the primary focus is on the husband and wife relationship, there is an eventual blackly comic turn to focus on the mutually destructive conflict between the woman’s serial killer husband and previous spurned lover. Wild Side turns around an irreconcilable split between the genders – while the men screw everyone over for status, women do it for love.
Demon Seed also introduces the idea of a ‘perfect, average home’, set against the more communal environment of Performance an environment which is everything the characters could wish or ask for but which is quickly revealed to be something oppressive and self destructive. White of the Eye takes this idea to its fullest extent, as both the average family home collapses as the father and husband is revealed as a serial killer (with bodies and even an entire arsenal hidden in cabinets around the home!), and the various scenes of solitary women inside showroom kitchens or bathrooms being murdered, as if the killing is as much about corrupting everything they stand for as about the person being killed themselves. The buildings and rooms in the film are constantly compared to the wider world, though even this wider world is being stripped bare by quarrying. In the speech about “going deep into the centre of the earth, then when we can go no further out into the stars†Paul is trying to be a man of action, though his pointless murders, insane reasoning, and pathetic little explosion (which takes place inside a more deeply excavated quarry) shows how he is failing to measure up.
There is a certain comic distrust of masculinity as a whole. Not just posturing machismo, though that often crops up, but of the whole gender. Men are overgrown children with over the top or unworkable plans and schemes while women are tormented by the knowledge of this idiocy and childishness but are often powerless to prevent events from playing out, and for being damaged by their consequences. In Wide Side the initial rape and exploitation of call girl Alex by double crossing chauffeur Tony is almost paid back by his boss raping him – not because he is disgusted by Alex’s rape, but because his underling has been using the person he paid for inappropriately and he has to reassert his dominance (this scene compares to White of the Eye in which the male characters destroy each other as the ‘weaker’ male carries an overcompensating phallic gun to reassert his dominance with the man he is fascinated with. This gets literalised in the threat of rape in Wild Side but tellingly never gets fully carried through). Meanwhile as the men play power games Alex and Virginia, the boss’s ex, make plans to escape themselves. Again like in White of the Eye there is a pathetic feeling to the interactions in various hotel rooms (even the house that Alex has been moonlighting as a call girl to pay the mortgage for is violated by her rape taking place in it), the feeling of fakeness to the relationships spilling out into the crummy interchangeable environment, with only brief moments of transcendence in car journeys and plane travel before plunging back into the machinations of the plot.
While I find all three later films flawed, they are all interestingly flawed. Mysticism and mystique are both things that make characters superficially interesting but often these aspects that people use to give themselves meaning, status and roles in the world fall apart on closer examination. The rock star has to die, the old way of life is abandoned. Yet there is an internal need for those things that recreates a new way of life with its own new set of mysteries to be considered – the final scenes of Wild Side seems a nice illustration of that – the male boss gets carried off in his helicopter after declaring himself a force of nature (the mystical, which may just be a self delusion), while the female characters escape to a new life where they will be unknown and others unknown to them (the mystique of and the potential of a fresh relationship).
The characters are always reinventing themselves in the search for a life they can live with, but only women can really do that in practical terms. It only leads to destruction for men who end up, for all their dominance and aggression, seeming more deeply trapped in their roles.
