February 25–March 4, 1999
movie shorts
8MM
|
A Columbia Pictures release
There are as many kinds of porn as there are people to arouse, and sometimes it seems as if there are twice as many people desperate to define the term. About the only noncontroversial way to define pornography is the way the Supreme Court defines obscenity: as something that a) exists only for the purpose of titillating its audience, and b) has no redeeming social, artistic or intellectual merit. A glossy, high-toned production about a private investigator who gets sucked into the world of underground pornography, 8MM aims for the Moral Majority crowd, its squalid sets and seedy characters bearing witness to the depravity and soullessness of the dirty books and fuck flicks crowd. But the irony, one that runs too deep for the makers of this film to possibly get, is that by the definition quoted above, 8MM is itself pornography, its only intent to push buttons and make its audience dance like electrified lab rats. Granted, it's porn of a particularly unappealing (and ineffective) kind, but since the lexicon does not provide a suitably odious term, we'll have to stick with porn (and offer apologies to legitimate pornographers everywhere).
For those familiar with the back catalog of Joel Schumacher, 8MM's director, proving b) is a lead-pipe cinch. A Hollywood hack of the highest order, Schumacher directs with all the conviction of a hooker faking climax; jumping from hapless entertainments like the second pair of Batman films to heartless pseudo-dramas like A Time to Kill, Schumacher can find the common in any denominator.
As for a), what 8MM has in mind isn't anything as honest as titillation; it's more like prefab moral indignation mixed with prurient voyeurism. One certainly wouldn't come out of the theater with the idea that pornographers are good people, and the film's ending provides grotesque finishes for all its deviant sex merchants. But underneath the makeup-trailer grime, the manufactured disgust, what drives 8MM is the secret thrill of discovery, like a boy finding a Playboy in his father's sock drawer. What gets Schumacher's rocks off isn't the sex—which is almost wholly absent, barring a dimly lit marital interlude—but the violence and the exploitation, the spectacle of men using women as products. The film seems so repulsed by the idea of sex that violence becomes its acceptable replacement, even as the guilt accompanying that switch-off contributes to the movie's general queasiness.
The audience's stand-in in all of this is Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage), private investigator with a wife and kid to support, and more ambition than experience. When the widow of an elderly millionaire calls him into her house, Welles sees it as his big break, and he takes the case she's offering even though common sense would keep him as far away as possible. What the woman wants is for Welles to find out whether or not the film she found in her late husband's vault is real: a film that looks to be of a young girl being murdered by a beefy man in a leather mask.
The reel of 8 millimeter film found in the deceased millionaire's vault is purported to be what's known as a snuff film: an act of murder deliberately staged for the camera and sold for sexual gratification. As an article in this month's Premiere points out, such films are in all likelihood no more than urban legends; although there are people who claim to have seen them, none have ever become a matter of public record, nor has anyone ever been prosecuted for creating or selling them. Never mind, though, this is Hollywood, where illusions of women meeting grisly deaths are common currency, so why not believe—fantasize, even—that such a tape could be real? Hey, it's a hell of a premise.
After some improbably successful research, Welles identifies the girl in the film, and sets out to track her down alive, thus proving the film is a forgery. Following her trail to Los Angeles, Welles casts about for a way to find a group of people who are at least sick enough to make a fake snuff film, and happens upon Max (Joaquin Phoenix), a blue-haired adult bookstore clerk who plays Virgil to Welles' Dante. In a series of scenes so inauthentically written they might have been drawn from old Dragnet episodes—except for the shot of a guy with a dildo jammed in his ass—Max and Welles traipse through a series of what look like underground swap meets, albeit populated by men in leather thongs instead of bargain-hunting seniors. Sidling up to shady characters and asking, "Got any snuff?," the two display the collective subtlety of a mallet-wielding chimp.
Needless to say, that approach fails to pay off, and the two follow a different trail to the East Coast studios of one Dino Velvet (Peter Stormare), whom Max calls "the Jim Jarmusch of smut." Wearing a wine-red crushed velvet shirt open to the sternum, Stormare seems as if he's wandered in from a far less self-serious movie, and when he leaves, you wish you could go with him. Ignoring 8MM's generally dank tone, Stormare camps to the hilt. When Welles tells Velvet he'd like to watch the master make a film, Velvet immediately senses a potential copycat: Stormare leers back, "You're not here to steal my special recipe for hot sauce, are you?"
Sad to say, he's not, and while Cage goes through the inevitable series of grimaces, we're treated to the telegraphed spectacle of Welles dissolving under the weight of all that smut. The script by Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote the vastly and dangerously overrated Seven, peddles the same brand of sadism overlaid with comic-book morality, a cheap excuse for cheap thrills. Walker's misogyny is as putrid here as it was in Seven. Cage is positioned as the dead girl's savior, but that hardly makes up for the fact that erotic fascination with brutality toward women is the only point of entry; if that doesn't interest you, then there's no reason to keep watching. Before they begin their odyssey, Max warns Welles, "There are some things you'll see that you can't unsee. They get in your head and they stay there." Not so 8MM.
