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The Cell (2000)
Oct. 30th, 2009 09:56 amNo, not Prospero's cell.
My favorite movie of 2008 was Tarsem Singh's The Fall. The Cell was Singh's first film. (His next will obviously be called The Pill or The Toll. I suppose it's too much to hope for The War against the Rull.) I remember a good friend raving about the beauty of The Cell when it came out, but I had no interest because it was a horror film and worse yet a psycho-killer film. However, The Fall made me curious about Singh's earlier work, and the stills looked absolutely gorgeous. Besides, it's Hallowe'en, right? Perfect time for a scary movie.
The Cell is actually a science fiction movie too. It's about a technology that allows therapists to enter the mind of a patient, and thus it's similar to Roger Zelazny's The Dream Master (based on the novella "He Who Shapes") or Pat Cadigan's The Mindplayers or the recent Japanese anime film Paprika. The basic set-up in this movie is that a serial killer (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) has put a potential victim into his infernal device, which will kill her in 40 hours, and then falls into a coma. A therapist (played by Jennifer Lopez) is asked to enter his mind and try to find out where the victim is being held. When she gets trapped in the killer's mind, an FBI agent (played by Vince Vaughn) goes in after her.
Well, this movie is certainly filled with extraordinarily beautiful and powerful imagery. Singh has a talent for making even prosaic story elements, such as police cars arriving at a house, look odd and fresh. The subject-matter allows for a wealth of symbolic visual detail as well, and there's a lot more going on at that level than I was able to absorb in one viewing. I could also begin to pick up on some of Singh's visual obsessions, such as undulating sand dunes and bizarrely ornate masks.
That said, I really had a hard time getting into this movie. For one thing, I was on a hair trigger the whole time I was watching it, ready to turn it off if it got too disturbing. It never did, and yet at the same time I just really don't enjoy stories that involve women sobbing from extreme fear of being violated and murdered. It honestly seems much more obscene than any pornography I've ever seen. This is countered somewhat, I have to say, by the therapist character, who overcomes her own fear (with a little help from the FBI agent) and masters the demonic psycho-killer. Yet in comparison to the other psycho-killer film I recently watched, Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel (1989), The Cell still panders too much to the exploitative fascination with victimized women for my tastes.
I did actually find the resolution of the psycho-killer's story quite interesting. (The resolution of the the trapped victim story was more perfunctory, as was the FBI agent character in general.) The Fall is a brilliant exploration of story-telling and the relationship between the story-teller and the audience. There's something similar going on in how the therapist finally confronts the psycho-killer's psychological problem, but I still haven't fully digested it. Some of it is working on a purely symbolic level -- there's a lot of religious imagery in the finale -- but if feels like some of the symbols are being flipped on their heads (e.g., baptism as a death rite). Also, who is the story-teller in this scenario, the therapist or the patient? That may be the key question.
My favorite movie of 2008 was Tarsem Singh's The Fall. The Cell was Singh's first film. (His next will obviously be called The Pill or The Toll. I suppose it's too much to hope for The War against the Rull.) I remember a good friend raving about the beauty of The Cell when it came out, but I had no interest because it was a horror film and worse yet a psycho-killer film. However, The Fall made me curious about Singh's earlier work, and the stills looked absolutely gorgeous. Besides, it's Hallowe'en, right? Perfect time for a scary movie.
The Cell is actually a science fiction movie too. It's about a technology that allows therapists to enter the mind of a patient, and thus it's similar to Roger Zelazny's The Dream Master (based on the novella "He Who Shapes") or Pat Cadigan's The Mindplayers or the recent Japanese anime film Paprika. The basic set-up in this movie is that a serial killer (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) has put a potential victim into his infernal device, which will kill her in 40 hours, and then falls into a coma. A therapist (played by Jennifer Lopez) is asked to enter his mind and try to find out where the victim is being held. When she gets trapped in the killer's mind, an FBI agent (played by Vince Vaughn) goes in after her.
Well, this movie is certainly filled with extraordinarily beautiful and powerful imagery. Singh has a talent for making even prosaic story elements, such as police cars arriving at a house, look odd and fresh. The subject-matter allows for a wealth of symbolic visual detail as well, and there's a lot more going on at that level than I was able to absorb in one viewing. I could also begin to pick up on some of Singh's visual obsessions, such as undulating sand dunes and bizarrely ornate masks.
That said, I really had a hard time getting into this movie. For one thing, I was on a hair trigger the whole time I was watching it, ready to turn it off if it got too disturbing. It never did, and yet at the same time I just really don't enjoy stories that involve women sobbing from extreme fear of being violated and murdered. It honestly seems much more obscene than any pornography I've ever seen. This is countered somewhat, I have to say, by the therapist character, who overcomes her own fear (with a little help from the FBI agent) and masters the demonic psycho-killer. Yet in comparison to the other psycho-killer film I recently watched, Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel (1989), The Cell still panders too much to the exploitative fascination with victimized women for my tastes.
I did actually find the resolution of the psycho-killer's story quite interesting. (The resolution of the the trapped victim story was more perfunctory, as was the FBI agent character in general.) The Fall is a brilliant exploration of story-telling and the relationship between the story-teller and the audience. There's something similar going on in how the therapist finally confronts the psycho-killer's psychological problem, but I still haven't fully digested it. Some of it is working on a purely symbolic level -- there's a lot of religious imagery in the finale -- but if feels like some of the symbols are being flipped on their heads (e.g., baptism as a death rite). Also, who is the story-teller in this scenario, the therapist or the patient? That may be the key question.
