White of the Eye (Donald Cammell, 1987)

Watching Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye, your mind oscillates between wanting to dismiss it as essentially dismal I-married-a-serial-killer stuff, and constant wonderment at how Cammell ventilates and expands every aspect of it, generating a movie that feels at once frostily deadened and almost Messianically possessed. David Keith plays Paul White, a hilariously bland label for a character depicted as hypernaturally connected, carrying out his work as an installer of high-end audio equipment as much through heightened senses as technical expertise, a proficient hunter (until his wife Joan made him give it up, sort of) coded through various Native American appropriations. He met Joan (Cathy Moriarty) when she was passing through his hometown of Glory, Arizona with Mike, a boyfriend, on the way to Malibu – she never made it out of Glory, and a decade or so later, she finds that Mike is also back there, mentally diminished after an accident while serving time in New York. Paul comes under suspicion in a string of killings, and for a while it seems like a classic wrong-man set-up, until Joan finds something, and he turns on a dime, rapidly shedding every element of established personality and morality, becoming something close to sheer abstract threat (the corresponding swerve in Keith’s performance is no less startling). The endgame has Mike improbably showing up in the middle of nowhere at the right time – a tired narrative device converted here into something expansively formative (with a homoerotic undertone), as if we’ve been watching the culmination of God’s own plan. Almost every scene makes a mark of some sort, whether through oddity of character, flamboyance of design, or sheer penetrating strangeness, and if one often feels that Cammell should have managed bigger and better films, the film almost seems to be embracing displaced self-destructiveness at its heart, and daring people to find it lacking.