Two guys in a garage (1/12/01)
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The Cell. [Tarsem Singh, 2000. Written by Mark Protosevich.]
Very tired FBI dude Vince Vaughn is doggedly pursuing looney serial killer Vincent D’Onofrio — a guy who likes to kidnap attractive young women, cage them in glasswalled cells that look like outsized aquariums, leave them there for a few days, pump water in until they drown, admire the aesthetic effect of the floating female corpse within the giant fishbowl, and then suspend his naked body by hooks embedded in his flesh above the naked stiff while watching video replays of the drowning and scream until he reaches a sexual climax. [Presumably he also recites passages from the
Canterbury Tales and farts the Star-Spangled Banner, but mercifully the suthors scanted on detail.] Fortunately D’Onofrio is nice to his dog, or we’d think he was a monster; unfortunately it’s just this canine companion who leads the Feds to his door, which they bust down, by bizarre coincidence, just as he collapses in the throes of a rare viral form of schizophrenia and lapses into a catatonic state. This happenstance leaves Vaughn momentarily baffled as to how to locate the Buffalo-Bill memorial dungeon in which the latest victim still languishes, until his sources refer him to megababe shrink action figure Jennifer Lopez, the point chick in an intriguing set of real-virtuality virtual-reality experiments which allow intrepid psychiatrists to enter semibodily into the psyches of their patients and explore the rather-too-vividly-realized landscapes of their imaginations; and in a trice our heroine finds herself crawling through the cellars of the D’Onofrio Bastille, populated by clockwork-automaton Barbiedolls representing his former victims and furnished with flashy rock-video production design. Ms. Lopez makes contact with both the Good and the Bad D’Onofrios — the Inner Kid and, uh, Idi Amin — witnesses re-enactments of both the childhood abuse and [oh, take that, you Christian-right denouncers of Hollywood as fount of all moral corruption] the traumatic baptismal ritual that formed the killer’s unorthodox views of water, and falls prey to the Dark Side just long enough to allow Vaughn to ride improbably to the rescue before a denouement that suggest that even the boogieman may find redemption. — Very striking imagery, production design, and costumes; lots of very flashy religious iconography. But you have to wonder what Dali and Buñuel could have done with this kind of money.
Though I doubt anyone will admit it, it seems obvious this scenario must have derived from an old novel of the late Roger Zelazny,
The Dream Master, which at the time of its appearance [the Sixties] was the first and only substantial piece of science fiction ever written about psychoanalysis. Therein the intellectually formidable but disturbingly arrogant protagonist was supposed to be one of the pioneers of a techno-therapeutic technique which, once analyst and patient had plugged themselves into womblike immersion chambers, allowed the construction of a shared dreamlike fantasy [invariably based on classical sources, allowing Zelazny to engage in his characteristic literary namedropping] in which the patient could dissipate his neurosis by role-playing: an inversion of the supposed causal chain connecting the internal representation of the self and the dreams which mirror it. — The plot followed a Greek dramatic arc: the hero’s pride, which involved him with a dangerously selfwilled female patient, led to his downfall; and we left him gibbering in an endless remake of
Tristan and Isolde. — Unfortunately for the Zelazny estate, all this happened quite a while ago, and
The Cell appears in the wake of a barrage of virtual-reality pictures from which, who knows, these authors may have stolen more. But Zelazny would be able to console himself with the reflection that he got there first, and made a better story of it.
____________The chariest maid is prodigal enough (1/6/01)
