The Curse of Chucky

My research on cinema and puppetry is taking me to some odd places. If, for instance, you've never seen a kung fu movie performed entirely with glove puppets, I suggest you give some attention to Legend of the Sacred Stone. At the moment, I'm sketching the first draft of a section on devil dolls and killer puppets (seemed like the easiest place to start!), which has meant delving into the kind of stuff that wouldn't normally land on my "to watch" list. The three hours of When Puppets and Dolls Attack, a compilation of clips from the work of Charles Band, has not been a highpoint of my cultural life. Band's work at Full Moon Features has, as far as I can tell initially, received no sustained critical attention at all - perhaps the films are not arch enough to push them into the respectable sectors of trash film, and not good enough to stand up on their own merits, but for my purposes, they include an extraordinarily fetishistic playing and replaying of the motif of the killer puppet. I'll put this in my "to do" pile to write about at greater length another time, save to say that there is an entire ants' nest of movies in which murderous dolls play out their slalk-and-slash roles with numbing repetitiveness and manic persistence, carrying on a strain of cultural work that has been in play for as long as there have been puppets to be spooked by. And if The Gingerdead Man is one of the limpest puns in movie history, at least its sequel has one of the neatest (see image to the right).

Anyway, The Passion of the Crust (oh, I'm still chuckling about that one...) is not what I wanted to write about. I've been wading through the Child's Play movies, a cycle of films that I had never seen before, despite being firmly within the range of their target age-group of clueless teens first time around. For those who've never had the pleasure, the five (so far - a remake and franchise reboot is rumoured to be in the early stages of production) Child's Play films follow the fortunes of Chucky, a doll possessed with the spirit of a dead serial killer who desperately wants to quit the plastic body and find a fleshy one in which to be reborn. His attempts to perform the necessary voodoo ritual are always thwarted; despite his skill at offing the human obstacles to his progress with a variety of household implements, he just can't seem to get his hands on Andy Barclay, the little boy who first receives the demon doll as a birthday gift.

Let me lay my cards on the table, although I don't usually like to reduce my judgements to a qualitative assessment: the first three Child's Play movies are rubbish. Derivative and predictable in their cycles of slashing, stabbing and jumping out of the shadows, tiresome in their dogged, unkillable persistence. Oh, and clunky in their execution, perfunctory in their plotting and scripting. The only point of research interest for me has been to notice the ways in which the films use puppets as figures of fear and recepticles of animist superstition. Chucky is able to get away with murder because he can always slip into "Barbie mode" (a witticism that is only cracked in the much sharper episode 4) and become inert, indistinguishable from an ordinary plastic plaything. Therefore, the films play on the doll's loaded potential to spring into life at any moment, a simple jack-in-the-box fear generator that is endlessly replayed. In many sequences, Chucky is invested with a sense of life not just by the magic of animatronics that allow his facial features to contort with malice, snapping him out of the smiley congeniality of his factory settings, but by mediating his image through shot selections that are usually reserved for human characters in dialogue. For instance, the back-and-forth of this over-the-shoulder, shot/reverse shot sequence from Child's Play 3 builds suspense over when Chucky will fulfil his side of the filmic bargain and enter the conversation with the barber who has yet to realise that the doll is alive and preparing to take a razor to his throat.

Cute. But the analogy of film with animistic power, the ability to endow inanimate objects with an impression of life, and the correlative use of puppetry as a shorthand for that power, is an interesting one to me at the moment, not least because it is so frequently invoked in horror films.

Everything changes with the final installments, Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky. Together, these two invigorate the franchise with greater visual invention, a sharper wit and an extreme level of self-reflexivity. Having attained full franchise-royalty status alongside cyclical slasher series such as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Friday the 13th, the Chucky movies use their lofty position to look down on their previous efforts, and to try and shift the series to the heritage site of Universal horror. They thus join the ranks of the Scream, Nightmare and Gremlins films as franchises that become so self-referential that they end up chewing on their own tails. This interests me. Can a series of horror films not go for any length of time without getting self-conscious about its own naked repetititivity? Do they always need to turn inwards and act so "knowing"? Either way, the leap in quality from the stolid and ridiculous Child's Play 3 to Bride of Chucky is quite remarkable. Bride may not reach the giddy heights of reinvention and frenetic genre-thrashing of Gremlins 2, but it fixes a lot of the series' original problems by acknowledging the daftness of the diminutive doll's deadly prowess and telling the tale from Chucky's perspective instead of hiding him in shadows. Plus, the addition of Tiffany, his sweet but lethal partner undercuts Chucky's primacy and gives him someone his own size to bicker with. Tiffany, in human form (Jennifer Tilly) is the first to turn Chucky's dollhood against him by locking the little bastard in a cage and treating him like a naughty baby.

There's a long tradition of horror films offering alternative visions of family relations, whether its the inbred rustic nutcase clan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Satan's attempts at child-rearing in The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, or the abortive, cobbled-together union of The Bride of Frankenstein, which the fourth Chucky film repeatedly references (hey, you'll even find clips from Bride of Chucky on the Bride of Frankenstein DVD, just to claim Chucky's place in the heritage of the Universal monster cycles). With Bride and Seed of Chucky, the formation of a new family comes to the fore, with Tiffany reincarnated in doll form and later, their son (or is it daughter? They can't figure out which, leading to another movie reference - is he/she to be named Glen or Glenda?) struggling with his sexual identity and descent from a family of serial killers.

This increased focus on family drama (I'm stretching that definition a little perhaps) is matched by the filmic syntax of human drama, giving the puppets close-ups and reverse-shots to align the spectator more thoroughly with their story, instead of hiding them in the shadows as pop-up monsters. It kills the fear, but it heightens the pleasure.

It's not just the way the film insinuates itself into a nest of external reference points and self-mockery that allows Bride of Chucky to raise its game: the introduction of Ronny Yu (the man behind the delirious, insane and romantic Bride With White Hair films) as director, along with Crouching Tiger's Peter Pau on cinematography duties adds a bit more verve to the imagery, with faster cutting, canted angles and extremes of blue-hued lighting. This is in stark contrast to the flat and perfunctory style of the earlier films - there can't be many sequences less effective in horror film history than the protracted battle in a doll factory that drags out the end of Child's Play 2: the bright uniformity of the strip-lighting throws away the golden opportunities for the hiding places and grotesqueries of the setting, and the leaden set-ups do nothing to make the conflict more dynamic. Ronny Yu at least has some form as an action director, and even if he can't seem to do anything without hyperbolising the moment, at least it shows someone investing the franchise with some effort, care and attention by appearing to make aesthetic choices as opposed to just the most basically functional narrational ones.

Seed of Chucky is less successful, partly because it takes the self-referencing a little too far, but there is fun to be had. Jennifer Tilly plays herself as a self-absorbed, over-eating has-been ("I'm an Oscar nominee, for Christ's sake, now I'm fucking a puppet"), appearing in a film about the alleged Chucky murders, allowing for one of those mise-en-abime shots where the camera pulls back to reveal that the scene we were watching is actually taking place on a studio set, giving us a good view of the cables that work the animatronic puppets. There's a cameo from John Waters, a walking representative of the heritage of trash cinema (and apparently a big Chucky fan), the death of Britney Spears and a scene in which Chucky and Tiffany decapitate their own puppeteer. This latter piece of puppetic rebellion, with the proxy people rebelling against their status as objects on strings is, as I hope my project will eventually demonstrate, a recurrent motif throughout the history of puppetry. That kind of self-reflexivity, the ability to comment on the text from the position of one of its constitutive props, occupying that bordeline place as an animate/inanimate object, not quite in or out of the fictional world, is an embedded property of the puppet. Once Chucky acknowledges his status as a doll (not just a man temporarily trapped in a plastic body), he can come into his own and start performing his true function as the focus of the story and commentator on its construction. But more on that another day. I'm shocked enough that I just wrote a lengthy appreciation of a couple of films I expected nothing from, but maybe I was just pleasantly surprised that they weren't as god-awful as previous form had led me to expect. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The Georges Méliès Blog

Just a quick note to draw your attention to the heroic under-taking by Michael Brooke to write an analytical review of every single film in Flicker Alley's 173-film Georges Méliès DVD boxset. After receiving my copy (pictured) in the post a few weeks ago, I was hoping to get time over the summer to do something similar, but Brooke's blog reminds me that it was probably way out of my range. I can't wait to spend some quality time with the films, and his work will provide plenty of illumination. Even if you don't have access to all the films, it's a fascinating read. And if blogging was an Olympic sport....

http://filmjournal.net/melies/

Irony Man

I could start by fabricating the excuse that I was queueing for the Jia Zhangke screening and it was sold out, but whatever lie I come up with, I ended up foregoing more edifying entertainment in order to watch Iron Man. I'd been softened up by some warm reviews, and the assurance that its politics couldn't have been more right-on if Hans Blix himself had been transformed into a cyborgic weapons inspector and spent two hours of screentime failing to inspect any weapons.

How surprised was I to find out that Iron Man is not the liberal avenger and "ally of the United Nations" that he was purported to be in a Guardian Guide cover story? A bit surprised. This is the latest in a long line of films that deals obliquely with America’s post-9/11 situation, tentatively probing areas of moral ambiguity, but rarely with a whole-hearted commitment. Certainly, it seems to be about an arms dealer who makes a moral choice to withdraw from his position of complicity in the networks of retributive, territorial destruction that his trade fertilises, but it is actually less a fantasy about how a moral interventionism might work and more a vision of how the Bush administration seems to think it already acts.

The film dresses up tortuously complex geo-politics in a fantasy of precision-engineered bodies, a convenient replacement of diplomacy with kicks and punches. To most of us, a Middle Eastern warzone is a distant, scorching, no-go area of torn limbs, twisted wreckage and unreasonable locals. Iron Man can be there at a moment’s notice, picking off bad guys (with no stray “friendly fire”), thumping some sense into those toothless desert types. He can get in and out unscathed and withdraw to his default position of non-involvement, the ultimate in convert interventionism. Surely this is meant to be cathartic, a vision of weaponised body armour that does its job as surely and precisely as the algorithms used to make the CGI happen. Digital effects make it all seem effortless – there’s little in the way of tangible physicality, so there’s an over-compensation in the thudding sound effects and rock-solid violence, and since all the effects are plotted so carefully, there's little in the way of chaos to make it feel like real, rough-and-tumble combat with lives and limbs at stake. If nothing else, this kind of eye-defying, lightning fast action can only show up the elegance of the superheroic mayhem in Ang Lee's much maligned Hulk. In Lee's film, the customary "get me the president" sequence that announces the monster as a national threat finds the Leader of the Free World on a fishing trip, barely interested in news of the green giant that is currently trashing the fixtures and fittings of the military industrial complex. There's a grander political statement in that one moment than in all of Iron Man's hand-wringing.

As a character, Iron Man is not as interesting as Robocop, whose metal prostheses were permanently forced upon him, bringing on an existential crisis that makes Tony Stark's yearning for a cheeseburger seem like a state of luxury. (Neither character is as afflicted as the protagonist of Colossus of New York, which deserves more recognition than it gets, if only for having a mournful solo piano score at a time when the theremin was the 50s sf instrument of choice.) After Spider-Man, Hulk, Daredevil and Batman, it has become customary to see superheroes grappling with the internal crises created by their public status and physical difference, so it's a big surprise to find Robert Downey Jr's character embracing the diplomatic impunity and celebrity that goes along with his alter ego. It's just a bit of a boring surprise.

P.S. The pun in the title of this post no longer matches the way my argument turned out, but I liked the sound of it, so rather than teasing out some sense of irony from my reading of the film, I thought I'd just leave it there anyway. Who's going to notice?

P.P.S. I should also note that in Iron Man Gwyneth Paltrow ‘tackles’ the most thankless decorative role offered to an Oscar winner since Orson Welles advertised fish fingers. But I have nothing substantive to say about that fact. Unless a sigh of resignation counts as comment.

Extra: Since I published this post, AP at the Movies' review of Iron Man has drawn my attention to an intelligent and far more evenhanded discussion of the film than I could manage here, and it sounds like Dana Stevens has put a positive spin on exactly the kind of thing that energised my little rant about the film:

"[The] middle section, in which the newly energized Tony tinkers with his emerging superpowers like a kid in shop class, is the movie's finest and funnest hour. But when he starts to actually use those powers, zooming to random corners of Afghanistan to save cowering villagers from evil warlords, the movie's sharp intelligence gives way to a dopey wish-fulfillment fantasy. This is what we'd like our wars to be: a clearly defined moral crusade against a bald, glowering meanie who proclaims his Genghis Khan-like ambition to "dominate all of Asia." (With an eye on potential box-office buzz kill, the movie cannily stays away from the mere mention of the Taliban, the war in Iraq, or domestic terrorism.) Tony's invulnerable, omnipotent, impossibly expensive armor is an almost touching overcompensation for the moment of extreme vulnerability in which our country finds itself."

So, is Iron Man a soothing piece of geo-political wish-fulfilment, or a deluding bit of geo-political evasion? The choice is something akin to yours.