Endangered 2010: The Killer Inside Me
Michael WINTERBOTTOM
I want to begin with a ludicrous and inexcusable journalistic move: a dictionary definition. The dictionary, in this case, is Urban Dictionary, and the content is user-generated. The concept I am looking to shed some light on is “cool,” one of the more popular entries on UD with over 150 entries. Browsing through the possible explanations of what is, admittedly, one of the more protean terms in popular usage, a certain interesting theme begins to develop:
“very conveniant [sic] for people like me who don’t care about what’s ‘in.’”
“laid back, relaxed, not freaked out, knows what’s goin on.”
“above and beyond a situation…characterized by strange masteries and hidden resources”
“a simplified way of telling someone to shut the fuck up because you don’t give a shit.”
“state of mind”
“on the down-low, secret, mum’s the word”
“a word used aimlessly when something doesn’t matter”
“A word that sometimes (not always) whores use in online conversations to show that they DONT GIVE A DAMN ABOUT WHAT YOU SAY in a polite way.”
“staying calm or not showing emotions, especially nervousness or fear”
I should also mention at this point, as a disclaimer, that one definition is “what you probably aren’t if you’re looking up ‘cool’ in the dictionary.” Suffice it to say, I knew going in that I wasn’t cool. The very gesture of the act of writing this article disobeys a fundamental aspect of “cool” I was trying to illuminate by pulling out the examples above. That is to say, cool is inherently related to the act of not caring. Caring about being cool (or caring about anything, really) precludes you from ever achieving that which you set out to achieve; that is, being cool. The act of writing a review of a film because you care about it (or, at a much more fundamental level, caring about the definition of “cool”) couldn’t possibly be less cool.
The reason I bring this up is because one of two dominant criticisms of Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me is that its portrayal of serial killer Lou Ford is overly glorifying, and that the director is to blame for painting the character in the same shade as Johnny Strabler and Sam Spade (the other criticism, which I won’t talk about here because I talk about it elsewhere, is that the film is sexist). This interpretation claims that the relation between the character himself and the violent acts he perpetrates is morally reprehensible and borders on the pornographic. David Denby makes this claim to the moral high ground in his review (subscription required) in the New Yorker:
“Casey Affleck is the young deputy sheriff of a small Texas city in the fifties, and he merely plays it cool, offering little sense of the madness churning around inside the character. He whomps on women’s bare bottoms, and they adore him for it. Externalized, the material seems like a sadomasochistic fantasy with a hero who’s simply smarter and more elusive—and therefore hipper—than anyone around him can imagine. Winterbottom’s directing is stiffly inexpressive—seemingly disconnected, and protective of his insane hero. The movie is disturbing in all the wrong ways.”
If we analyze Denby’s claims one by one, we can come to the following conclusions. First, a psychopathic killer must be upset in some turbulent way, although it is unclear what form this turbulence must take. Madness must “churn around inside” a character, perhaps what Denby expected from the title of the film was a Jeckyl/Hyde, Dr. Strangelove syndrome or Sybil-esque drama to unfold. Second, the idea that a killer could be smarter, more elusive, or hipper, than those who hope to apprehend him is problematic. This vision of an intelligent, charismatic and attractive killer is related to a “fantasy,” although I am making my own assumptions when I suggest that Denby believes this vision of madness to be make-believe. Third, and finally, Denby posits that Winterbottom’s treatment of the Ford character contributes to this effect in that it is “inexpressive” or distant; therefore, Winterbottom is protecting Ford. All of these claims contribute to Denby’s conclusion that The Killer Inside Me disturbs us for the wrong reasons.
My response to these claims is simple: for the most part, Denby is right. Ford is cool, he is aloof and indifferent to his own crimes. His ability to outsmart and toy with his peers creates the possibility of fetishistic treatment of his abilities, and Winterbottom’s direction of the film explicitly contributes to this reading. I think for the most part Denby’s analysis is spot on. I do not think, however, that Denby is correct that the movie is disturbing for the wrong reasons. I think that movies that are disturbing for the “right reasons” are ultimately not disturbing; if we can perfectly explain why it is that we are disturbed can we honestly say we are disturbed at all? If we look at “disturbing” images of a genocide or famine, are we not inscribing those images in preestablished conditions called “war” or “hunger” in order to give them meaning beyond their simple disturbing content? It is only the disturbing image or idea that can maintain its disturbance well beyond the initial experience of the abject that truly “disturbs” us in the literal sense of the word. The reason Winterbottom’s film is truly disturbing is because it’s depiction of mental disturbance is true.
Take, for example, the case of Ted Bundy. Bundy did not harbor in him a battle between good and evil, he did not live in the woods writing insane manifestoes, he simply and calmly killed people in the light of day and did not care. He was attractive enough that women got in his car repeatedly although he looked exactly like a widely-spread police sketch of himself (his coworkers taped the police sketch to his desk because they thought it was funny how similar he looked). He was a master manipulator, a genius who managed to get a judge to claim that Bundy would have made an excellent lawyer in a different life. Bundy was smart enough that on death row he fabricated the idea that his addiction to pornography caused him to kill women, although there was absolutely no proof of it, in an attempt to win the favor of the religious right. Bundy’s is the truly disturbing vision of psychopathy; a man whose psychosis is ingrained in his vision of reality, and yet his vision of reality is similar enough to the status quo that it goes undetected. Killers like Kaczyinski and Gein are popular faces of evil because we can rest assured we would recognize their madness immediately. But Bundy is the mote that upsets the binary of evil and the everyday.
Winterbottom’s film produces the same effect, especially where judgments of cool are considered. The Killer Inside Me links violence, sex, and cool in an indelible way that forces us to question whether or not our idea of what is “cool” is on a continuum directly linked to dispassionate cruelty. This upsetting possibility lead critics such as The New York Times’ A.O. Scott to conclude that Winterbottom is “a director primarily concerned with finding out what he can get away with, and not entirely sure what he’s doing.” This response strikes me as especially pertinent, because it seems to be presented in the form of a threat. What happens to a director who crosses the line? Is he run out of town? Tarred and feathered? The very syntax of the sentence reminds one of a lynch mob in a Western film: “I don’t think you’re sure what you’re doing, Winterbottom. And you certainly don’t know who you’re messing with.”
My lasting impression of this film is that Winterbottom is one of the few directors who knows exactly what he’s doing, and knows exactly who he’s messing with. Unlike so-called disturbing films such as The Human Centipede (which, to be fair, didn’t exactly draw rave reviews), The Killer Inside Me removes the taboo from the realm of the identifiably deranged into the field of the everyday, and, more importantly, questions the interpretive system that determine what we as human beings value. In this sense, Roger Ebert most honestly reads the film when he says it “is expert filmmaking based on a frightening performance, but it presents us with a character who remains a vast empty lonely cold space. The film finds resolution there somewhere, perhaps, but not on a frequency I can receive.” The void at the center of the movie is not an accidental effect of sloppy filmmaking, but as Ebert notes, a masterful and intentional movement that extends the emptiness at the heart of the movie into an ontological field that includes the viewer. In the end, the title of the film must be considered at least partially ironic; it may resides inside one man, yet it finds footholds in all of our perceptions of reality.
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