"Cannibal Holocaust" and "American Psycho"

Today's show continued the month-long Halloween theme with a look back at two very controversial films: Cannibal Holocaust and American Psycho.

Cannibal Holocaust
Cannibal Holocaust was directed by Italian filmmaker Ruggero Deodato. The film premiered in Italy in 1980 and played very successfully for a few weeks. Sergio Leone, the director of films like The Good the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in America sent a letter to Deodato that said, “Dear Ruggero, what a movie! The second part is a masterpiece of cinematographic realism, but everything seems so real that I think you will get in trouble with all the world."

That prediction came true, and the film was seized by Italian authorities and director Ruggero Deodato was arrested on the belief that this was a snuff film. Although Deodato was exonerated of murder charges, Cannibal Holocaust was labeled obscene due to footage of real animals killed at the hands of the actors, and the film was caught in legal limbo for years. The film did not appear in the United States until 1985 but when it did, it was given an X-rating and so its circulation was limited.

In other territories Cannibal Holocaust was heavily cut or banned outright. It is hard if not impossible to determine how many countries actually banned the film, although numbers as high as thirty to fifty have been suggested. If those numbers are correct, Cannibal Holocaust would probably be the most widely banned film of all time. There is some nuance to film bans since a cut version of Cannibal Holocaust is now allowed in locations such as the United Kingdom and Germany, although the complete version is still banned in both places.

Despite the thirty years that have passed since its premiere, Cannibal Holocaust remains a lightning rod of controversy for its animal killings, the portrayal of indigenous people, and the extreme anti-personal violence. But I think most of those explanations are red herrings that distract us from what Cannibal Holocaust is really about, why it really distresses the audience, and why it is distinct and important among horror films.
Cannibal Holocaust is not troubling to the audience for any one charge made against it, but for its cumulative effect. The barbarity of the animal killings, the display of economic and sexual exploitation, and the acts of violence craft a vision of humanity darker than the stories of Joseph Conrad or William Golding. There is a totality to its nihilistic presentation of humanity that stamps out hope.

When a viewer watches a horror film, he or she intentionally submits him or herself to trauma. Most mainstream horror films like Jaws or Psycho scare us and thrill us but in the end leave viewers knowing that good has triumphed over evil and all is right with the world. More challenging horror films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes do not offer quite the same solace of a closed resolution but generally there is a survivor who we can empathize with and whose self-preservation is a source of relief. These films have a cathartic effect on the viewer, allowing him or her to experience terror and fear from the safety of the theater seat and then walk away to carry on with his or her life.

Cannibal Holocaust refuses to engage in this kind of pattern. It piles on the awfulness and as the rapes and murders accumulate, the film abandons all unwritten agreements of propriety between the filmmaker and the audience. For those who expect to see a liberal humanist notion of human decency emerge from the darkness, the film offers a moral black hole. And in this, Cannibal Holocaust confronts an awful truth.

We spend much of our time avoiding the truth. Psychologists tell us that we create fantasies and dreamscapes to escape them. We subterfuge desire and convince ourselves that we are civilized by building libraries and court houses and creating laws and philosophy. And we reject those things that do not coalesce with our collective assumptions.

Cannibal Holocaust is most awful and unendurable at the moments that it shows us things we are aware of subconsciously but would never want to see and are loath to admit about ourselves and our species. But these things exist. Genital mutilation and honor killings occur. Sexual and economic exploitation are real (and sometimes connected, as they are in the film). We live at a time when religious fundamentalists videotape themselves cutting off the heads of their enemies and broadcast the footage on the internet for all to see. Unscrupulous media hacks cherry pick video clips to distort our view of reality. Such things are not defeated by illusions of hope.

From time to time, an artist, either by accident, madness, or intent, creates a work that violates our collective assumptions. From Marquis de Sade to Bret Easton Ellis, there are those who create pieces of art that aren’t merely incendiary, but attack the most cherished and sacred illusion of all: the spiritual and moral development of humanity. Ruggero Deodato accomplished this in Cannibal Holocaust and his film is simultaneously profound and obscene. And that tension is exactly why I think it merits a place at the table, even if—or because—its appetite is exclusively for flesh and blood.


American Psycho
First released in 1991, American Psycho was the third novel by author Bret Easton Ellis and the book was a source of controversy before it was ever published. The novel American Psycho includes very detailed descriptions of women being tortured and murdered and when pages including these descriptions were leaked, they caused an uproar. Enraged feminist organizations protested the book before it was even on the shelves and convinced Simon & Schuster to drop the project. Vintage Books picked up the manuscript and published it in paperback form. After its publication, author Bret Eason Ellis was the recipient of death threats and the book became a prop for demonstrations, such as when a protestor entered a bookstore and poured blood on copies of the novel.

Although there were various efforts to mount a movie adaptation, American Psycho was considered un-filmable until screenwriter Guinevere Turner and co-screenwriter and director Mary Harron took on the project for a film that was released in 2000.

American Psycho was a moderate box office success although its take was far less than a lot of film released before and after such as Scream or Saw.

The film had mixed reactions from critics. Most of the reviews were positive, such as Roger Ebert who wrote, “Christian Bale is heroic in the way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability; there is no instinct for self-preservation here, and that is one mark of a good actor.”

Negative reviews criticized the film for being as vacuous as the characters it was condemning. Stephanie Zacharek of Salon wrote, “If 'American Psycho' worked better as a thriller or a comedy or some combination of the two, its reason for existing would be much easier to explain. As it is, the picture seems to exist solely for self-congratulation, as a kind of sacred text designed to remind us (as if we could ever forget) how ridiculous we all were some 10 or 15 years past -- and to toll a half-hearted warning, in darkly comic tones, that we may be headed that way again.”

Since its release, American Psycho’s legacy has been aided by a few factors. One of them is the rise of Christian Bale to movie star status which he has done primarily on the success of his Batman pictures with Christopher Nolan. Another is the media environment of postmodern satire that we now live in. Cable channels like Comedy Central have made irony their major export with programming like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and online entertainment like funnyordie.com has created a market for self conscious work.

The legacy of American Psycho has also been aided by events in the world of economics and politics. Historical films, whether they are placed in the distant past or recreate recent episodes, are made in order to parallel and comment upon current events. The collapse and bailout of Wall Street, scandals involving corporations like Enron and Halliburton, and the corruption of government institutions like the Department of Interior under the Bush administration, have made this film immediately relevant again. Patrick Bateman surrogates have been and are running things and the extreme interpersonal violence that the fictional character commits is a metaphor for the institutional violence that is wrought on the lower and working classes.

At the same time there is another cultural dimension in which American Psycho is again relevant. The 1980s were characterized by an emphasis on bodies and physical perfection. Although this has never really gone away, the plethora of messages selling us bodily improvement and perfection, from mail order diet plans, to reality television programs, to pharmaceutical sexual enhancement, is at a level never seen before. American Psycho is a story about a character who constantly rips and tears through the superficial layers of name brand clothes, inedible designer food, and finally human flesh. Patrick Bateman’s rage at the vacuity of his existence is a reaction to a state of 1980s culture that corresponds to our contemporary consumer culture.
Ten years after its original release, American Psycho’s message about superficiality is as on target as ever. In 2000 it was a film ahead of its time and now that our age has caught up with it, it’s time to revisit Patrick Bateman and consider what this story has to say.