Moral edges

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 1999)

The new Nicolas Cage thriller 8 MM would be a disappointment, if it wasn’t directed by Joel Schumacher, who always works to this kind of standard. Cage plays a private detective, hired by a wealthy widow to investigate the authenticity of an apparent snuff film found among her late husband’s possessions. The trail leads him deep into the porn subcultures of L.A. and New York, constituting a wrenching lesson in the extent of the human dark side, and eventually putting him in severe physical and psychological danger.

Our lives with porn

I think most of us would have to concede the fascination of this theme. Even though we might lead lives apparently untouched by prostitution, drug-dealing, bondage, or any of the stuff that low-life dreams are made of, the reported magnitude of the industry ($300 million annually in Canada, according to a recent Globe and Mail article) seems to render it impossible that we’re not closer to it than we think. If I am not lying through my teeth about always walking by those stores and avoiding those street corners, then certainly one of the guys in the next few offices has to be. But movies like 8 MM, figuratively erect with melodramatic frenzy, treat pornography like a journey into science-fiction, winking with cynical calculation at the hush-hush hypocrisy. The fact is, the movie has virtually no potential audience except porn enthusiasts (who, given its box office failure, seem to have decided it’s no substitute for the real thing).

Is society’s silence necessary? It’s difficult nowadays to gauge the shape of the moral consensus, but yeah, it probably is. Many commentators in the States were obviously unprepared for the extent of public tolerance for Bill Clinton’s after-hours activities, and Clinton even seems to have come out of it all with a measure of dignity. People just didn’t seem to deem it that relevant to his job. But what if the revelations had been of regular Presidential visits to an underground dungeon, for a cleansing round of chains and whips? The jokes would be even more plentiful, but wouldn’t a hunger for domination and pain be considered far more damning to his leadership capability than his weakness for Lewinsky’s more submissive attentions? It’s a patriarchal society after all.

Dancing with the devil

8 MM clearly means to explore the effect on a relatively normal Everyman of facing our secrets head-on, the thesis being summed up thus: “Dance with the devil and the devil don’t change – the devil changes you.” But the film is so unsubtle, and the story-telling so melodramatic and wedded to easy conflicts, that one almost expects the climax to reveal Satan himself – hooves and fire and brimstone and all – hanging out in some sleazy warehouse organizing threesomes and bondage sessions (which would have been much more fun than the climax actually provided). It does exactly nothing to illuminate the small-scale human transactions that make up the industry’s life blood.

How clearly can one flirt with the devil without giving ground? Do we chip away at our better selves by renting a video from the back room of the local store? 8 MM implicitly asserts so; a premise that logically leads to Cage – overwhelmed by the wretchedness of the flesh peddlers – transforming himself into an avenging angel of destruction, hunting down the evildoers like the vermin that the movie clearly knows them to be. The morality of this behaviour – arguably even more damaging to our social fabric than the odd beaver shot – is not dwelt upon. That’s Hollywood.

Let’s shift moral gears. John Boorman’s The General is a rollicking, larger-than-life caper about Irish master-criminal Martin Cahill, who robbed his way to semi-Robin Hood status. The movie skims through Cahill’s formative years, the better to enjoy him at the peak of his rabble-rousing powers, and basically settles into a series of set-pieces – marked throughout by nimble handling, lip-smacking characterization, and irresistible earthiness.

Beyond redemption

One of the highlights is a multi-million dollar heist on a jewelry wholesaler, which we’re later told pushed the place out of business, and a hundred people into unemployment. And that, says Cahill, with his usual callous flippancy, will merely put them in the same boat with him (however much his business boomed, he was always in line to pick up the weekly dole money). Other than Jon Voight as his weary police inspector nemesis, there’s never anyone to call him on his self-serving trample through an already fractured and impoverished society. Most of the time, the movie takes Cahill’s voice pretty much as its own, and often seems to exist in a moral vacuum, downplaying contexts and consequences (and treating the various political factions as no more than competitors in larceny).

Towards the end, Voight’s character lets the years of frustration get to him and administers Cahill a beating. The subsequent exchange, focusing on Voight’s self-recrimination and Cahill’s goading of him, constitutes a more pointed accusation than anything else in the film. It initially seemed odd to me that an isolated infraction by an officer of the law was treated as gravely as two filmic hours of advanced crime by a confirmed villain. But later I thought Boorman’s apparently neutral treatment of Cahill was actually the ultimate condemnation – an acknowledgment that the man was beyond redemption or persuasion, outside the zone of conscience or rationality in which our ideals and fine-tunings make a difference. It’s possible a second visit to The General would reveal such moral subtleties embedded throughout, and it’s a rare film nowadays that suggests a persuasive case for an early repeat viewing.

Furthermore, it would probably be just as fresh and entertaining the second time around. In the past, Boorman’s work has often been ponderous and stuffy, but not here. The failings of 8 MM would have been much easier to take if the movie wasn’t so damn serious and self-important. It can’t even manage the easy stuff – imagine a movie about porn with not a single shot that you’d like to take a second look at. From a good director, that might have indicated something interesting going on.