1. The Running Man (1987)
Nobody paid to see Arnold Schwarzenegger movies in
the '80s for satire, much less satire poking fun at the public's bloodlust for
media violence. But The Running Man, based on the novel by Stephen King, did have a
fairly subversive message about the gory extremes our culture goes to for
entertainment. Thankfully, this message was tucked inside the warm, cozy
confines of gory entertainment. After all, surely the real-life viewers who are
enjoying watching game-show contestants kill each other for sport are above the
fictional viewers who are enjoying watching game-show contestants kill each
other for sport. The real-life ones are consciously critiquing the fictional
ones' society, so they can revel in the messy killings with a clear conscience,
and a self-applied pat on the back for their discernment.
2-4. Series 7: The Contenders (2001) / The
Condemned (2007)
/ Death Race (2008)
Since The Running Man, action-gore has gotten
slicker, but the films that let people watch action-gore while looking down on
the slobbering-bastard audiences who want action-gore haven't gotten any less
hypocritical. In the amateurish indie Series 7: The Contenders, a reality-TV show apes
and mocks Survivor and its ilk by making contestants assassinate each other. It's Battle Royale
with a particularly American twist, pointing out where all the vicious
schadenfreude of reality shows is headed. The Condemned and Death Race (the latter a remake of
the '70s film Death Race 2000) both follow similar tactics, but with bigger
explosions, as criminals are forced to fight to the death, ostensibly for their
freedom. Twist number one: They're in a corrupt system that isn't planning to
let them go, no matter what happens. Twist number two: Both films mock and
condemn the kind of people who would watch such entertainments, while working
overtime to pander to those same people. The message at hand: "You and everyone
in the movie theater with you are a bunch of jerks contributing to the downfall
of society by making exactly this kind of morally bankrupt, inhuman
'entertainment' possible. Hey, wanna see another guy totally explode?"
5. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
The thrill of seeing The Blair Witch Project at the moment it first
came out mostly came from the cleverly hyped-up possibility that it was an
actual snuff film. It isn't, of course, but its effectiveness is based on how
convincingly "real" it is for the audience. You have to believe these college
kids are actually being haunted by terrible north-woods spirits—or
suspend your disbelief, anyway—in order for this artless, occasionally
dull film to "work" as a horror movie. While the concept behind The Blair
Witch Project doesn't
really hold up on repeat viewings, it did prove prescient for the
just-blossoming Internet generation, where fantasy is fueled by stylized
versions of supposedly unfiltered "reality" that anyone can enjoy privately and
anonymously.
6-8. Fear Dot Com (2002) / Halloween:
Resurrection (2002)
/ Untraceable
(2008)
Similarly, a few horror films have addressed the
freedom and anonymity of the Internet by implying that it's used to give real
murderers an audience with an unslakeable thirst for ever-gorier thrills. Guess
what? That audience is you, the horror-movie viewer. And it's your fault that
people are being put into death traps in Untraceable (the more people tune in
to the killer's website, the faster the victim dies), or that hot, stupid
teenagers are locking themselves and a bunch of webcams into Michael Myers'
family home to create an online sensation. If there wasn't an audience for
these killer websites, the movies explain, they wouldn't exist. Similarly, if
you didn't keep buying tickets for these movies, they wouldn't exist. But
you'll get yours: In Fear Dot Com, the people who log into the titular
live-torture-porn site soon die horribly themselves.
9. Funny Games (1997)
A handful of filmmakers have openly,
rather than hypocritically, dared their viewers to face up to their own
involvement in the ugliness taking place onscreen, but none of them have been
as obvious—or as ruthlessly effective about it—as Michael Haneke.
His utterly remorseless film about a home invasion by a pair of young
psychopaths (and its 2007 doppelgänger, Haneke's scene-for-scene
English-language remake of his German-language original) is no more grotesque
than many similar thrillers; in fact, with its relatively small body count and
its reluctance to show gore or onscreen bloodshed, it seems almost gentle. But
the emotional brutality of what's happening kick-starts Haneke's bulletproof
film-as-threat: He dares viewers to walk out rather than tolerate a scenario in
which there is no hope of redemption or justice. If they leave, he wins; if
they stay, he wins. There is no crueler moment in contemporary cinema than the
moment when Paul, the more articulate of the two killers—and the one who
asks the viewers if they're on the victims' side—literally rewrites the
movie's ending rather than leaving the audience with a single thread of relief.
10. The Conversation (1974)
In films where the protagonist as well as the
viewer is a voyeur, the stars must often become active participants in what
they're watching, in order to save a life or prevent something horrible from
happening. In Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, paranoid surveillance
expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is hired by a jealous husband to spy on his
young wife and her lover. When Caul tapes a conversation implying that the
couple is in danger, he feels compelled to act. But who's really in danger
here? Be careful, peepers. In The Conversation, being a voyeur doesn't
mean being an all-knowing, omniscient observer. Sometimes what you see (or hear)
isn't what you get.
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11-13. Rear Window (1954) / Psycho (1960) / Body
Double (1984)
Reams have been written about Alfred
Hitchcock's sadistic treatment of his female leads, and his creepy tendency to
include scenes of desperate voyeurism in his best films. But when Hitchcock
went down that road—which he did again and again—he didn't go
alone: He took every single viewer with him. There's no need to go too far with
the armchair psychology: One look at the brutal strangulation of Grace Kelly in Dial M For Murder from a camera's-eye view is enough to know what Hitch was up to. Rear
Window, which explicitly has the main character as well as the viewer
passively watching a monstrous murder, ups the stakes significantly.
Hitchcock's triumphant statement of viewer complicity was Psycho, which made
way for the slasher film, in which the audience is allowed moral distance from
the villain at the expense of a substantial hike in gore and a nasty dose of
nihilism. Showing that he's adept at copying Hitchcock's substance as well as
style, Brian De Palma essentially remade Vertigo and Rear
Window simultaneously, raising the ante with more blood, more sex, and
even less possibility that viewers can escape with their self-esteem intact.
14.-15. Blowup (1966) / Blow Out (1981)
Bored sophisticates became familiar, fertile
subjects for Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni by the time he made his
English-language debut with Blowup, which may be why he decided to add extra urgency
to their usually half-hearted search for meaning. David Hemmings plays a
photographer who may have caught a murder on film. But the closer he looks at
the evidence, the more elusive the truth becomes. The obsession threatens to
consume him, or at least distract him from all the hard partying and casual sex
Swinging London had to offer. But the murder mystery is only the most explicit
example of the film's many illustrations of the disconnect between what we see
and what can safely be called real. Brian De Palma played explicit tribute to
Antonioni's film with the remake Blow Out. Here, it's a recording that may explain a
mysterious death. For a director obsessed with watching people watching (see Body
Double
above, or virtually any other De Palma film), the focus on sound almost counts
as restraint. But as he listens, re-listens, and remixes his recording of an
auto accident, John Travolta's sound engineer hero wears the classic expression
of a voyeur: He's both fascinated and appalled as his senses invade other
people's lives.
16. Peeping Tom (1960)
Released in the same year as Alfred
Hitchcock's Psycho, and dwelling on many of the same themes, Michael Powell's Peeping
Tom is in many ways nearly as great an accomplishment, but it was received
very differently. Hitchcock, who already had a reputation as something of a
brute, was praised for his sinister genius; Powell, a beloved British filmmaker
whose normal fare was considerably tamer, released this deeply disturbing film
about a brutalized child who grows up to become a sexual psychopath, and it
basically killed his career. Peeping Tom took decades to be
rediscovered by critics, who finally appreciated its masterful direction,
endlessly creepy mood and tone, and terrific performances. But there's no doubt
that one reason it didn't succeed is that it so directly implicates the viewer
in Carl Boehm's grisly killings: He secretly films his victims with a portable
camera, so that audiences are forced to go along for the ride with every murder,
and his murder weapon is the sharpened spikes of the tripod legs. Powell made
the guilt borne by audiences whenever they view an onscreen killing more
explicit than it had ever been—and they didn't like it.
17. Man Bites Dog (1992)
A combination of sly subversion and brutal
violence fuels the 1992 Belgian-made Man Bites Dog, a blackly deadpan satire
of how the media's dispassionate documentation of violence can all too easily
slide into outright complicity. Director-actors Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy
Belvaux, and André Bonzel play the documentary card perfectly deadpan, using
their real names for their characters and even filming Poelvoorde's real mother
and grandparents. Belvaux and Bonzel play documentarians following Poelvoorde's
charming, though pompously pontificating, psychotic freelance thug and killer.
Their status as detached observers is slowly perverted, as Poelvoorde becomes
their friend and eventually their movie's sponsor, until they become active
participants in his crimes. Man Bites Dog's careful use of cinéma vérité also
encourages the audience to be drawn in by Poelvoorde's surface charisma and
identify with him just as the camera crew does. That makes their descent into
depravity, gleefully helping Poelvoorde in a particularly grisly rape and
murder, all the more shocking: The monsters on the screen could have been our
friends, and could even have been us.
18.
The films of Lars von Trier
As cinematic provocateurs go, they
don't get much more provocative than Lars von Trier. A confrontational
filmmaker much in the Michael Haneke mold, von Trier has a particular
genius—and a particular menace—for taking audiences at face value.
He identifies particular film tropes, clichés, and stock situations, then
shoves them roughly down his viewers' throats, forcing them to deal with the
implication of some of their most sacred ideas taken to their logical extremes.
From the notion of the long-suffering, good-hearted heroine of musical
tradition to the eternally faithful lover to the wise simpleton to the
time-honored woman in peril, von Trier has taken them all at face value. And in
movies from Dancer In The Dark to Breaking the Waves to The
Idiots to Dogville, he says to everyone willing to
listen that if they like it, he'll give them all they can possibly handle. His
reputation as one of the most hated filmmakers alive seems to be evidence that
this approach doesn't win him many friends, but it's devastatingly effective.