Anne Billson on Film 2010
collected columns from the Guardian, 2010
Copyright 2012 Anne Billson
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Foreword
This is my second collection of film columns written for the Guardian's Film & Music section. The first collection was of columns first published in 2009; all the columns in the following selection were originally published in 2010. I am hoping it won't occur to you that, instead of coughing up $0.99, you could have gone straight to the Guardian's website to read them all there, but just in case it does, I've been trying to think of all the reasons why you shouldn't mind paying those 99 cents.
Firstly, by buying this ebook it means I have already done all the hunting and gathering for you, and am presenting the raw, bloodied pelts to you here without the distraction of adverts, creative subediting or cuts made necessary by increased advertising or reduced space.
But as a sweetener, I have added to the end of this collection an article about the Alien films, published in British GQ to tie in with the release of Alien 3 in 1992 and not, as far as I know, available anywhere online (unless, of course, somebody has pirated it without my knowledge). It's an overview of the franchise up to that point, rather than a critique, but it does contain a couple of original comments by Sigourney Weaver, to whom I talked on the telephone.
I'm afraid I've had to remove all the accents from the following texts, as I'm told unusual key combinations can play havoc with e-publishing. So apologies to Alejandro, Erzsebert and the Paris Peripherique.
In any case, whatever you think of the finished results, I'd like to thank you for buying and reading. Please feel free to tell me what you think (preferably in a civilised manner) via Twitter or on one of my blogs, links to which you can find at the end of this collection.
Anne Billson, 2012
Chapter 1: Nerdy Girls
Sandra Bullock has starred in some turkeys in her time, but lately she has been getting some of the worst reviews of her career for All About Steve, in which she plays a dysfunctional cruciverbalist who becomes obsessed with a TV news cameraman. "Seriously annoying", wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "Unwatchable, unbearably unfunny," said Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. "Grimly unfunny," was Manohla Dargis' verdict in the New York Times. All the reviewers like Bullock; you know they do, because they're always saying so. But they hate All About Steve.
I have yet to read a review which acknowledges that the film, for all its faults, is unique among mainstream rom-coms in concluding that geeky girls don't need boyfriends. This, for me, is a radical proposition and one that merits attention. So what if Bullock's character is annoying, with stalkerish tendencies and a sort of social Asperger's which makes her babble and wear inappropriate clothing? In the movies, it seems, women can be geeky only if they're also adorable, perhaps with mildly eccentric fashion sense, nothing that can't be corrected with make-up, a personal shopper and the solid affection of a studly male. They're not supposed to lurch around in shiny red boots, being loud and embarrassing.
Bullock has played geeks before, though in While You Were Sleeping she was self-effacing and sweet. In The Net she was a computer nerd. Miss Conviviality and its sequel were dismissed as fluff, yet they peddled the message, still pretty unusual for Hollywood, that a) women don't necessarily need men to rescue them and b) they usually look better before rather than after their Barbie Doll makeovers. So, in her own way, she's been doing her bit for the sisterhood for years now, even if the films weren't slapped with a feminist label. If she's prepared to push her geekiness to uncomfortable extremes, as she does in All About Steve, I think she deserves a pat on the back instead of all this grumbling that she's not playing her usual charming self.
Because while nerdy guys like Seth Rogen and Shia LaBeouf are all over the place these days, their female counterparts are still barely to be glimpsed. In every genre other than the shopping-and-weddings rom-com, women are little more than decoration, trophies or spoilsports whose function is to remind the guys it's time they faced up to adult responsibility instead of smoking pot/watching Star Wars/putting their albums into alphabetical order. So shouldn't we be treasuring those rare female characters who don't conform to these stereotypes? Even the annoying ones?
Bullock recently became the first female star to single-handedly power a film past the $200 million mark at the US box-office - not All About Steve, alas, but the dismal inspirational true-life sporting yarn The Blind Side. She and a handful of other actresses, such as Drew Barrymore (who recently made her directing debut with the adorable roller-derby girl-fest Whip It!) wield a certain amount of clout through their own production companies, and are constantly being exhorted to make not so much movies as some sort of Enriching Female Experience, that sliver of legendary cinematic gold which will somehow bridge the gap between the populist Mamma Mia! and artier, more rarified fare such as Frozen River or Bright Star - a miraculous all-purpose artefact which women can enjoy but which will also provide nourishment for their souls.
Well, bollocks to that. Male directors don't come under this kind of pressure - they make the sort of films they want to make, or that the studios want them to make, and they don't get berated for letting their entire gender down if they make mistakes. They're not being urged to make Enriching Male Cinematic Experiences all the time. Occasionally they do, more often they don't, but the films that enrich your soul are not necessarily the ones that deliberately set out to do so.
Nor am I looking forward to this mythical Enriching Female Cinematic Experience, which looms dreadfully in my consciousness like a sort of Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants as reimagined by Sally Potter. I'm all for more leading roles for women, but the only thing we should exhort female film-makers to do is make more films.
Chapter 2: Verse Case Scenario
Invictus, Clint Eastwood's new film, is named after a poem by William Ernest Henley, who wrote it in 1875 to jiff up his spirits after his leg was amputated. Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) quotes the lines, "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul" as a source of uplift and inspiration, and it's just a shame for everyone concerned that the very same poem was chosen as a pre-execution statement by Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
Henley's not the only Victorian poet whose work has provided memorable but, to the uninitiated, slightly baffling titles. Even if you've never heard of Ernest Dowson, you'll be familiar with at least two of the phrases from his work: Gone with the Wind and Days of Wine and Roses. Dipping even further back into literary history, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is borrowed from Alexander Pope's poem about Eloise wishing she could forget Abelard. The enduring popularity of Rudyard Kipling's If-, voted Britain's Favourite Poem in a 1995 BBC opinion poll, must be at least partly due to its having been adopted, with the dash replaced by an ellipsis, as a title for Lindsay Anderson's subversive school fantasy, though one imagines Anderson was being ironic; he reportedly loathed the poem and all it stood for.
I'm wary of poetry in the cinema, the same way I'm wary of poetry in general; I find it faintly embarrassing. I pretend to like it so no-one will think me a Philistine, but in reality the only volume of poetry I ever read from cover to cover was Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal, and then only because some of the poems had vampires in them. When I hear poetry in films, I automatically assume the screenwriter is co-opting someone else's words because they're too lazy to come up with their own. Easier for Richard Curtis to have John Hannah deliver WH Auden's Funeral Blues in Four Weddings and a Funeral than to write his own eulogy to a dead companion.
Meanwhile, characters quoting verse at one another is a sure way of making my toes curl; there's a particularly excruciating example in the duff thriller Half Moon Street, when Michael Caine says, "Let us go now, you and I," and Sigourney Weaver (playing an academic who moonlights as a call-girl) replies, "When the evening is spread out against the sky". Soulmates, you see.
You'd be entitled to ask for your money back if you didn't hear a bit of declaiming in poet-pics such as Bright Star or Howl (and if Allen Ginsberg looked anything like James Franco, who plays him, I'll eat my Pocket Poets edition, which incidentally I only bought because it featured as a gag in the werewolf movie The Howling). And you expect to hear poetry in a film called Dead Poets Society, which means Walt Whitman's O Captain! My Captain! (written in 1865 after Abraham Lincoln's assassination) will now forever be associated with standing on desks.
Nor are you surprised to come across it in the work of an inveterate intellectual name-dropper like Woody Allen, whose Another Woman features a scene, either breathtakingly poignant or cringe-makingly pretentious depending on your point of view, in which Gena Rowlands finds a line in a volume of Rainer Maria Rilke ("You must change your life now") stained by her dead mother's teardrops, the emo equivalent of a fluorescent highlighter.
But I'm not totally anti-poem. I like the way Christina Rossetti's Remember Me keeps cropping up in Kiss Me Deadly, where its context, sandwiched between torture with a pair of pliers and The Manhattan Project, makes it haunting rather than twee. Lines from John Donne's first Holy Sonnet ("I run to death, and death meets me as fast") add the finishing touch of suicidal gloom to the downbeat B-movie thriller The Seventh Victim, while Rodney Dangerfield's rendition of Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night is all the more moving for its popping up unexpectedly in the rumbustious comedy Back to School.
Otherwise, I feel safer sticking with John Lillison, England's greatest one-armed poet, whose Pointy Birds is quoted in The Man With Two Brains: "O pointy birds, O pointy pointy, Anoint my head, Anointy-nointy."
Chapter 3: Heavenly Features
"It's heaven!" says a dead girl as she drifts through one of the Weta-generated landscapes in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones. To which you feel like replying, "Duh, no. It's a field of corn." What is it about fields of corn? There was one in the afterlife in Steven Spielberg's Always as well, though at least that had Audrey Hepburn in it.
You wouldn't catch me dead in a cornfield, which I'd worry was just waiting for creepy children, crows or crop-dusting planes to roll up. Jackson hedges his bets by piling on dozens of other backdrops, ranging from Caspar David Friedrich to The Sound of Music, but like most film-makers' visions of the beyond, they're all corny. It's as though their imaginations have got stuck at Bosch's triptychs.
Movie heavens tend to be rural, because everyone's been brainwashed into thinking cornfields are preferable to, say, Paris or Berlin. But do they have to be so boring? They're like illustrations of those Talking Heads lyrics: "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens". The benchmark for bonkers representation of the afterlife is What Dreams May Come, which manages to combine Maxfield Parrish, Robin Williams and a couple of extras on penny-farthings into kitsch on a terrifying scale.
The same film's hell looks more like somewhere you could conceivably live, providing you didn't object to grey decor. It has a library! And an upside-down cathedral! What's not to like? Or I could see myself knocking back Tequila in Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry hell, which looks like a lively S & M nightclub with hot tubs, or negotiating the unnatural gravity of Cocteau's underworld in Orphée, preferably hand in hand with Death's sidekick Heurtebise, on whom I've always had a crush.
The subjective nature of hell is emphasised in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, where a boot camp colonel yells, "Get down and give me infinity!" at Bill, while Ted is tormented by the Easter Bunny. But as Milton wrote, "The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." The title of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs points to the bent cop's future in a Buddhist hell of perpetual suffering, while in High Plains Drifter Clint Eastwood paints the town red, literally, and renames it Hell.
Trends in movie afterlives come and go. The way-station where Warren Beatty finds himself in Heaven Can Wait consists of clouds up to the ankles and Concorde, which one imagines would have to be revised were the film to be remade again now, in the wake of the 2000 crash. But I daresay it's no coincidence that my three favourite afterlife movies all envision posthumous existence as some sort of civil service. It's as though man's desire to impose paperwork on the chaos of existence is so strong that it even extends beyond death.
That goes double for wartime. In A Matter of Life and Death, Kathleen Byron plays an angelic receptionist-in-chief who says, "Everyone on earth has a file," and, when a new arrival demurs, gently reminds him, "There are millions of people on earth who would think it heaven to be a clerk." The clerks in Beetle Juice, meanwhile, are less content, since an eternity of office-work is their punishment for having comitted suicide. "If I knew then what I knew now" says the flame-haired, green-skinned receptionist, holding up her slit wrists, "I wouldn't have had my little 'accident'."
Even better is Hirokazu Koreeda's Afterlife, which depicts a week in the tranquil routine of another of those way-stations between life and heaven, where dead people are given three days to choose their single happiest or most meaningful memory. Once they've done that, they can move on, persumably to a higher plane.
Koreeda's masterstroke is to dispense with CGI cornfields and kitsch Sound of Music mountains. In fact, he dispenses with special effects altogether. Afterlife takes place in a disused school. When the staff create their clients' memories for one last photo, it's with basic props such as cotton wool and electric fans. It's the idea that counts, you see, and an awareness that heaven, like Bill & Ted's hell, is all in the mind.
Chapter 4: We'll Always Have Paris
As if to atone for the absurdly warm-hued, nostalgic vision of Montmartre he gave us in Amelie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet has set Micmacs, his latest film, in parts of the Parisian banlieue I usually try to avoid after dark. A friend of mine lives there, and he double-locks not just his front door, but his garden gate, which is about ten feet tall, with spikes on it.
But fear not; though Jeunet wrangles corporate amorality and society's rejects into a semi-silent version of Mission: Impossible, he still manages to make the suburbs of Paris, where much of the 2005 rioting took place, look, yes, absurdly warm-hued and nostalgic. Gee, you think, maybe I'll buy a nice little pad there after all.
Jeunet's vision of the banlieue almost makes Luc Besson look like Ken Loach. Besson, godfather of new French action cinema, wrote and produced the two District 13 films, set in the near future, in which the suburban district in question is so dangerous it has been walled off. His latest production is From Paris with Love, in which John Travolta, in one of the brief intervals when he's not gunning down everyone in sight, fires a rocket-launcher on the Peripherique, the ringroad which acts as a rampart between agreeable central Paris and its less agreeable surrounds.
In the same film, there's an explosive sequence in an HLM (the French equivalent of a council block, pronounced "ash-el-em"). Besson and his director, Pierre Morel, started off filming in Montfermeil, to the east of Paris, but while they were blowing up cars for the film, 10 of their production vehicles were torched for real. The film promptly decamped to a less volatile suburb. Meanwhile, Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher set their new zombie movie La horde almost entirely within an HLM in Seine-Saint-Denis, with cops and gangsters beseiged by the undead while Paris centreville can be seen going up in smoke in the distance.
Not every suburb is a war zone. When I moved to France 10 years ago, I looked forward to sipping aperitifs on a terrace overlooking the Eiffel Tower, like I'd seen in movies. But I soon fond that none of my new friends could afford to live in St-Germain or Le Marais. Married couples had already upped sticks to some of the more child-friendly faubourgs. "Paris is a theme park for tourists, like Disneyland," said one chum who preferred living an hour away by train, in a house with a garden, to squeezing into a flat the size of a pantry. You can probably still buy a maids' attic room in central Paris for less than €100,000 - if you don't mind sharing a toilet.
The social gulf between the magical City of Light, still a frequent backdrop for French movies about the chattering classes, and the bleaker outlying areas, is nowhere better illustrated than in Mathieu Kassovitz's La haine, when the young protagonists from the banlieue find themselves hopelessly out of their depth after they crash a gallery opening and try to chat up high-tone chicks. More recently, Michael Haneke's Cache showed Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil ensconced in a nifty little house on the Rive Gauche, while the poor Algerian boy from Auteuil's past has ended up in a shabby HLM in the eastern suburb of Romainville.
It wasn't always thus. But the quartier around Canal St-Martin so vividly depicted in Marcel Carne's Hotel du Nord has been gentrified and would now be hopelessly beyond the pockets of the working-class characters in that film. Even the Pigalle of Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur is steadily being invaded by the bourgeoisie, who, despite the sprinkling of sex shops and strip clubs, are unwittingly continuing the social clearances initiated in the 19th century by Baron Haussmann when he deliberately ploughed his boulevards through all the most notorious hotbeds of proletarian ferment.
If films do show picturesque working-class Paris nowadays, it's likely to be courtesy of CGI. For me, the highlight of Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement was seeing Les Halles market before it got replaced by a shopping mall. And now I'm looking forward to Besson's Les aventures extraordinaires d'Adele Blanc-Sec - not because of its pterodactyl (though there is that) but for the recreation of olde Paris, circa 1911.
Chapter 5: Twist the Night Away
Martin Scorsese's latest film has a twist ending. That's all I'm going to write about Shutter Island, because I try to avoid spoilers... of recent releases. But I reckon older films are fair game, as are films so stupid they're impossible to spoil, which is why I'm issuing a Spoiler Warning here. If you've been away on Mars, you might want to stop reading now.
François Truffaut once said the key to a great film ending was to create a combination of Spectacle and Truth, and there was a time when audiences would have been satisfied with that. Today, though, we expect the rug to be pulled from beneath our feet as well.
Agatha Christie made a career out of wrongfooting readers; the killer in Ten Little Indians was someone we'd assumed was dead, while The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is mother to all those stories in which the hero or heroine is revealed as the guilty party. A couple of film noirs really caught me off guard in this respect (which is why I'm not revealing their titles). But the screenwriters in, say, Perfect Stranger or Righteous Kill are so busy strewing red herrings they forget to develop the sort of characters or situations which might help their twist make sense, while the actor's performance is dictated not by character but by the outlandish demands of the screenplay.
Alfred Hitchcock's most audacious twist came only 48 minutes into Psycho, when he prematurely bumped off his heroine, but the film's final reveal that Norman Bates and his "mother" were the same person has become a cliche, since recycled in Dressed to Kill, Fight Club and Identity, with the split personality conceit also echoing Edgar Allan Poe's story William Wilson. Hitch anticipated another narrative trick in Stage Fright - the Unreliable Narrator. In 1950, there was controversy about the way he flouted convention with a false flashback. Forty-five years later, there was nothing but praise for the way The Usual Suspects took that idea and ran with it.
They've Been Dead All Along, a popular horror twist showcased by Jacob's Ladder and The Sixth Sense but prefigured by Carnival of Souls, harks back to Ambrose Bierce's story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, beautifully filmed in 1962 by Robert Enrico. Even more prevalent, because it straddles several genres, is the Reality is a Construct twist, pioneered not just in Philip K Dick novels such as Ubik and Time Out of Joint but by The Big Con, David Maurer's seminal 1940 study of confidence tricksters.
Directly or indirectly, Maurer's book has provided inspiration for The Sting, The Game, The Truman Show and most of the oeuvre of David Mamet. Dickian variations include Dark City, The Matrix, and any other sci-fi scenario in which all the world turns out to be a stage, and all the men and women merely players. It's a set-up which appeals to the conspiracy theorist in us all, and perhaps to the narcissist as well - yes, I am the centre of the universe, and all this is for my benefit.
But it's becoming harder to hoodwink audiences, who can now spot a twist from a mile away. Back in 1985, it was shocking when Jeff Bridges was unmasked as the killer in Jagged Edge; we'd assumed his innocence simply because he'd been Suspect Number One all along. Nowadays this wouldn't be enough; only seven years later, the same screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas, was one-upping himself with the double-twist ending of Basic Instinct. Six years later, and Wild Things was giving us the triple-whammy. Film-makers are now tying themselves in narrative knots trying to keep one step ahead, but odds are that seasoned filmgoers will still guess what they're up to.
But we want to be fooled. Our desire for a juicy twist is surely related to the our pleasure in being misled by a magician's masterful sleight of hand. The best twists are the ones which make everything fall into place; my favourites are in The Prestige and the Korean horror movie A Tale of Two Sisters, and there's a doozy at the end of the otherwise unexceptional The Book of Eli. In retrospect it's obvious, and I should have seen it coming. But I didn't.
Chapter 6: Anime Chicks
Last week I watched films in which chicks snog each other before being hacked to pieces (Lesbian Vampire Killers), women are kidnapped (The Punisher: War Zone) or relegated to naked non-speaking extras (Valhalla Rising), and Oscar-winning actresses are reduced to the slutty denizens of one man's harem (Nine). I've also watched or rewatched a lot of Japanese anime, in which girls pilot giant robots, hunt down vampires or learn ninja skills. I think you can see what I'm getting at here.
For years I avoided anime because I was put off by the big saucer eyes. Then it dawned on me the faces and figures were no more stylised than in the prints of, say, Utamaro or Hokusai. It's just a way of looking at the world. The film which truly converted me, however, was Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, in which a ten-year-old girl has the oddest, most captivating adventure since Alice in Wonderland.
In the films of Studio Ghibli, co-headed by Miyazaki, girls and women aren't also-rans, as they are in 99 per cent of Hollywood output, but fly gliders, run with wolves or design seaplanes. Even ordinary schoolgirls lead lives of quiet enchantment, like 14-year-old Shizuku in Yoshifumi Kondo's sublime Whisper of the Heart (written by Miyazaki) who discovers first love and a talent for storytelling in a Tokyo setting which manages to be simultaneously realistic and magical. Where were these heroines when I was growing up? I had to make do with Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds.
Beyond Ghibli, even male-centric anime such as the junior-ninjas-in-training Naruto feature gutsy girls such as pink-haired Sakura, who starts off drippy but toughens up as the series progresses. "Girls need to be strong to survive," she says.
As far as I'm aware, all the anime I've ever seen have been written and directed by men. With sexism even more deeply ingrained in Japanese society than our own, it's perhaps not surprising so many female characters in adult-orientated anime are objectified. Major Kusanagi, the big-bosomed bionic heroine of Mamoru Oshii's mesmerising Ghost in the Shell (one of the inspirations for The Matrix and a plot I'm still unable to fathom, even after repeated viewings) is frequently nude or leaping around in a form-fitting bodysuit which makes her look naked. Maybe she is a male fetish object but hey, I dig her too.
Faye Valentine, the gambler in the sci-fi noir-western anime series Cowboy Bebop (almost a dry run for Joss Whedon's Firefly) wears va-va-voom hotpants and crop-top, not the most practical gear for slumming around a spaceship, though it doesn't stop her being funny and feisty. More ambiguous is the sexual presentation of Neon Genesis Evangelion's Misato Katsuragi, a strict lady scientist with a shambolic party-animal domestic life, who frequently thrusts bosom or bottom at Shinji, the schoolboy selected to pilot a giant robot to protect the remains of civilisation from other giant robots; but these glimpses of Misato are Shinji's point of view, and she's just one of a line-up in which girl robot-pilots and female scientists outnumber their male counterparts.
In the case of Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue (J-pop noir thriller in the style of Dario Argento), the hallucinatory sexual violence is as much commentary of the objectification of young female celebrities as a part of its protoganist's mental journey. Kon evidently adjusts his style to suit the material since his follow-up, Millennium Actress, couldn't have been more chaste with its tale of unrequited love played out via the history of Japanese cinema and a central character clearly inspired by the actress Setsuko Hara, who worked with Ozu, Kurosawa and Naruse, all of whose directing styles Kon subtly references.
If I had a small daughter, I would try to wean her away from Edward Cullen and Miley Cyrus and gently point her towards anime series like the thrilling steampunk saga Nadia: Secret of Blue Water - inspired by Jules Verne, conceived by Miyazaki and featuring a 14-year-old lion tamer and acrobat who teams up with a young inventor in 1889 Paris to discover her true identity. And then I would quickly teach my daughter to read subtitles, so she wouldn't have to settle for the naff dubbed version. You want strong female role models? Anime's got them in spades.
Chapter 7: First Person Singular
After the discovery of an abandoned car on a ferry and a shot of its driver's corpse washed up on a beach, Ewan McGregor is present in every scene of The Ghost, Roman Polanski's new film. He's the film's eyes and ears, our surrogate in the story, our entry-point into this world. The only point at which we're privy to information McGregor doesn't have is in the film's final shot.
Polanski has always excelled at this form of storytelling. Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, The Ninth Gate and The Pianist are each filmed from their protagonists' point of view, so seamlessly that we might as well be inside their heads. It's as near as a film can get to the first-person voice of written fiction without resorting to voice-over narration.
Alfred Hitchcock was another master of first person. We watch Rear Window from the viewpoint of James Stewart, who is himself watching from the apartment where he's laid up with a broken leg. In Vertigo and North by Northwest, we tag along with James Stewart or Cary Grant, just as mystified as they are, until, almost grudgingly, the director cuts to another point of view to explain what's going on. Part of the shock effect of Psycho, of course, is that our point of view is abruptly yanked away when our heroine takes a shower, forcing viewers to transfer allegiance to the nearest person at hand. Who just happens to be Norman Bates.
Naturally, when we're seeing events through a protagonist's eyes we're also prone to making their mistakes. Or hearing with a protagonist's ears, in the case of surveillance expert Gene Hackman in The Conversation, where like him we're nudged by sound editor Walter Murch into realising too late we've misinterpreted a vital line of dialogue.
But whether we're exploring Pandora with Sam Worthington or Shutter Island with Leonardo DiCaprio, we're now so familiar with the conventions of the first person viewpoint we take it for granted; whenever there's a close-up of a character looking at something, we assume the next shot will be of whatever they're looking at, and so on. Subjective camera which extends beyond a few moments, on the other hand, can still feel gimmicky or even physically disturbing. We've got used to the camera standing in for slasher-movie psychokillers stalking their victims, a device used to such creepy effect by John Carpenter in Halloween. But the impressionistic blur of the first reel of The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly traps the viewer in Jean-Dominique Bauby's locked-in syndrome so successfully that, at the screening I attended, one stricken filmgoer had to be helped from the cinema.
Even more troubling are the SQUID virtual reality sequences in Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, a film which now looks startlingly prescient in view of today's voyeuristic YouTube culture. But subjective camera can also work nicely in comedy; I love the shocked reactions to the unseen Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor as he strolls along the street after drinking his potion - all leading up to the reveal that he's not the hideous Hyde-like monster you've been expecting, but an ultra-smooth Dean Martin-esque lounge lizard in a snazzy suit.