Deathdream/Slither
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Deathdream / 9-11 / Slither
The final scene of Deathdream is a killer and makes up for all the goofy low-budget stuff that goes on before. The returned Vietnam vet, his face falling off in clumps, finally admits to himself and everyone else that he's dead, and in the light of the flaming car he used to drive himself to the graveyard, before his mother and the authorities and everyone, he proceeds to clumsily bury himself beneath a hastily scratched headstone. To call this scene political is to bury the fine work of politics under a lot of rubber makeup. But next to the passionate car crashes and kisses of the movies, it looks shocking: an snapshot of the year 1972 and what was happening in the dark corners of the nation's drive-ins.
Having seen Deathdream in the morning I went to see Slither in the afternoon to see how it stacked up. I was met first by the spectacle of the United Flight 93 promo. There are no rubber fright masks to contend with here, and apparently no pleasure to be had from the advertised film, nor nothing to be learned which couldn't better be answered by the available literature, but the presence of blipping radar screens and strategically blurred faces indicates that the film, when it is released, will display a tastefully constructed reality answerable only to the dull buzz of political confusion which may yet take us to war with Iran next.
Don't blame Hollywood. The dumptruck of 9/11 culture is wheeling back and it doesn't just contain celluloid. This week's New Yorker features a story by Martin Amis, who has long been ululating about the significance of fiction in the post 9/11 world, something about how it should be less fictional, or something. The story is called "The Last Days of Mohammed Atta" and it's as portentious and mechanically produced as a football-stadium scoreboard. We're to be reminded that terrorists are human, too. So it turns out that Atta, along with many of his cohorts, not to mention the generally devout among those of the Islamic faith, were a fastiduous bunch, or at least fastiduous compared to Western tastes. Thus some comical business with a motel shower: "He stepped within, submitting to the cold and clammy caress of the plastic curtain on his calf and thigh. Then he spent an unbelievably long time trying to remove a hair from the bar of soap." Also, he's backed up. He's like a Neil Simon character, except Islamic. Cue the New Yorker readership: How right and how terrible and it's funny because it's true, etc. This is weak stuff compared to the Semour Hersh reportage that appears in the front of the magazine, and it isn't going to end here or with United Flight 93. We're probably going to have five more years of this stuff, a fulfillment of every purist/modernist's nightmare: that kitcsh (and that's exactly what all this "relevance" amounts to) will have an armada of United States weaponry behind it, ready to attack at the drop of a wry smile. The result will be more purism and firmer modernism, not to mention more irrelevance and more dumb movies.
Anyway, it occured to me that that a movie about 9/11 should be a comedy, neither smart nor stupid but engaged, maybe a musical, and it should likewise involve body horror and comically horrific pregnancies and zombies and a chorus line and bugs that take over your brain and make you an asshole and then abruptly truncate your life, and should include every other horrible buried image from the last five years, of crashed planes and body armor and suicide/murder, and should in short be as free of tasteful judgement as the event itself or anything in its aftermath. Then it occured to me that I was watching Slither, and that Slither would do just nicely, except no dancing. Maybe next time.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:23 AM,
