More Funny Games

8/19/09 (Journal Notes)
After I did my 30 laps in the pool at LA Fitness I walked across the street to Blockbuster’s to pick up “Sunshine Cleaning” only to find it’s not available to next week. So instead I picked up four films more or less at random, at least two of them straight-to-video type films. The one I decided to see first was something called “Surveillance,” a film directed by David Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer, starring Bill Pullman and the lovely Julia Ormand. David Lynch was also listed as Executive Producer. Right from the opening sequence, of a grisly murder, you could see the influence of father on daughter. The scene was dark, obscure, and unexplained. Altogether it was a strange and violent film: If I counted correctly there were 14 murders. Those are Tarantino totals. Bloody mayhem. It was extreme, ghoulish, and bizarre, like the director wanted to rub your face in it, with there also being an underlying absurdity to the killings, almost as if they were recreational, like in the recent film, “Funny Games,” directed by Michael Haneke. There are references made to two black-clothed killers wearing bag masks in the opening sequence and in a few flashbacks but we don’t find out who they are till the last quarter of the picture. Their Identity is something of a surprising twist.
The story starts out with two FBI agents, Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormand) arriving at a police station in the middle of god-forsaken country out West somewhere. There is the usual conflict between the local police, who are atypical and sometimes outside the law themselves, and the FBI, who want to interrogate everyone, including some officers, about the death of one cop and several other people on a nearby highway. The agents act with decorum and take over, with Elizabeth grilling with sensitivity an 8 year old girl, one of two survivors of the highway killings. But the agents knew what happened because they were there; it turns out they are the psychotic killers in disguise. The only person who figured that out early was the little girl, who whispers in Hallaway’s ear, “I know who you are.” That kicks off the bloody last section of the film. Elizabeth goes off with two officers to investigate the murders we saw at the beginning of the film, the killing of the real agents, but one of the cops finds some photographs in the back seat that show erotic scenes between Sam and Liz, which forces her hand and she kills them both. Meanwhile back at the station Sam has revealed his true identity and starts killing cops, leaving only the other survivor, a pretty blond cokehead. Lynch is saving her for the finale. When Liz comes back to the station their passion for each other is revealed; they are literally MAD for each other. Liz takes off her belt, gives it to her lover, climbs on the blonde’s lap, and starts to kiss and fondle her, while Sam puts the belt around her neck and slowly tightens it, killing the blond woman while Liz continues to passionately kiss her. That really gets the couple off, and shortly afterward they drive off, their dirty work completed. They see the little girl off in a field. Sam says to his mate, “Because she guessed who we were, I am going to let her live.” Liz smiles and says, “That is so romantic.”
I once saw on film one of David Lynch’s paintings, which had rotten meat on it that was filled with maggots crawling around the surface of the painting. Looking at this movie was comparable to looking at that painting. If there is a category below low-life, the characters in this movie inhabit that category, and that includes the scummy cops.
The erotized murder of the blonde was the next shocking and uncomfortable killing on screen that I have ever seen. Number one in my estimation remains the opening sequence in Sam Peckinpaugh’s “Osterman Weekend,” where another blond woman is assailed by two bad men moments after making love to John Hurt who had just jumped out of bed into the shower. Suddenly these two men break in, hold her down while one of them takes a long hypodermic needle and injects something lethal into her brain by going up her nose with a long needle. She’s dead in seconds. That scene still rattles my cage and disturbs my sleep. It’s not only the method of killing but the abruptness of the scene and how it was accomplished in less than a minute that is so creepy and disconcerning.