'Dune Part 1' (2021)

Going For The One

I just want to say at the outset I wanted this film to be not just good or excellent, but to be great. I had made allowances in my heart for it to utterly eclipse the 1984 David Lynch version which on the one hand I love, but I have felt much frustration with for many a year. If Denis Villeneuve was going to pull out all his show-stopper moves and make a great film, this one ought to have been it. Alas, as with 'Blade Runner 2049' before it, Villeneuve comes at a very important subject matter for a movie and somehow manages to under-deliver. Is it a good film? Yes. Is it an excellent bit of entertainment? mostly. But is it great? Ah, no. And that's a little unfortunate. 

But it is very thought-provoking so there is that. 

What's Good About It

It's nice to see a rendition of Dune that is closer to what the book describes. I'm not sure about the gender swap of Dr Liet Kynes turning into a woman, but in most part the film looks a lot more like what was described in the book. If you're a purist visionary (I'm not) it's a good thing. The specials effects are up to date, and the action sequences are fluid and succinct. The wardrobe is fabulous, while the surrounding casting is also a little closer to what was described in the book. Because the film only needs to cover the first half of the book, it is paced more evenly than its predecessor. And maybe that's the problem with this film. Everything in it can be scrutinised against the previous entries, whether it be the Lynch entry in 1984 or the Sy-Fy channel TV series which also traversed the sandy terrain across Frank Herbert's pages. 

It's worth mentioning that the casting of Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho is inspired, especially if they think they can make these films go deep into the world of Dune with sequels. The casting of Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica is also very apt, although it had me wondering if it was as good as casting Francesca Annis for the role in Lynch's movie. It also makes you wonder if Oscar Isaac really is a better bit of casting than Jurgen Prochnow (maybe, maybe not), or whether Timothee Chalamet is a better bit of casting than Kyle MacLachlan (I tend to think not). 

My best joke about the casting is that compared to Lynch's version, everybody looks shorter. 

What's Bad About It

There's nothing outstandingly bad about it that one ought to complain about. It's a well made bit of movie entertainment. Because I've read the book, and Villeneuve has read the book, and the principal actors have all read the book this time, there are no surprises. In fact the film plays out like it's in its own groove, and nothing is out of place or surprising. The performances are archly mannered, and there is no hint of spontaneity in it anywhere. It generally feels portentous without really going anywhere - but then we know all the ground-shattering revelations are in the second part of the book, so we have a way of just accepting all of it as is. The film is not going to pay off with a big action cue. It's a joyless exercise, but then it's not exactly a joyful book. 

For what it is - a blockbuster science fantasy based on a big fat book - it had very few moments of excitement. It also offered absolutely zero insight about what the book had to say about this world in which we live. It may have been the most -non-socially-conscious telling of this story. 

What's Interesting About It

The most interesting thing about it is the comparison to the Lynch version. More often than not, you're watching Villeneuve's choices as opposed to Lynch's choices - and the differences are genuinely interesting. Villeneuve comes to the project as a fan of the book and himself well into his 50s. Lynch came at the project as somebody who hadn't read the book until he was approached to do the project, as his second feature film. For his turn, Lynch got a lot of flack for making a film that was largely incomprehensible and still long at 2 hours 17 minutes. Villeneuve gets the luxury to make 2 films, and the first instalment alone is 2 hours and 35 minutes. 

As an aside, it was reported in the making of Lynch's Dune that the best cut of his film was a 4 hour 40 minute version - which sounds positively worth reviving if they could find all the components and whatnot. It probably won't happen, but it seems if we're really going to compare apples, then it's worth having the whole of the Lynch apple. I do have a 3 hour TV cut somewhere which, interestingly enough, Lynch disowned. Lynch disowning the whole Dune might be because of his distaste when remembering the arduous post-production and politicking. Nobody seems to have talked to him much about Dune, and he probably is shunning those interviews for all sorts of reasons. 

The crucial difference seems to be Lynch had a cineaste's vision for the weird and wonderful, while Villeneuve seems to have a Sci-Fi fan-boy's love for the original text combined with an easy facility for shooting a generic high end budget blockbuster. In Villeneuve''s vision, guild navigators are human-looking enough. In Lynch's version, they're disfigured and bloated embryo monsters floating in a tank of spice smoke. Villeneuve doesn't bother showing you folding space while Lynch uses the weird sequence to show us the power of imbibing space for the Guild Navigators. Villeneuve is not interested in pushing those boundaries of the human-weirdness in the way Lynch was in 1984, which is a shame.

Lynch worked very hard to have a heterogeneous sense of production design. Villeneuve's version feels more like a monolithic singular vision for the entirety of future civilisation. Lynch accentuates the contrasts and strangeness of people's affect like a German Expressionist. Villeneuve hones in on very internal feelings against the monolithic setting he places his characters against.  

Paul Muad-Who?

Unlike Lynch's Expressionist take on the raw passions underlying the weird tale, Villeneuve seems more interested in an introverted, almost navel-gazing take on the coming-of-age story. Having seen Kyle MacLachlan's Paul Atreides as looking too old, Villeneuve cast an older Chalamet who manages to play a younger looking Paul. A number of people have told me this fits the book better but I'm not really sold on Chalamet's Emo vibe as a better fit. MacLachlan's Paul comes at you straight, with an aristocratic bearing. Chalamet's Paul slinks along the wall, diffident and strangely disaffected. 

(NB Postscript. I've been corrected. Born in 1959, McLahchlan was also 24 turning 25 when he played Paul Atreides) 

I'm not sure Paul being 14 at the beginning of the book is as important as the tyrannous, commanding figure he becomes at the end of the book. I don't know who is going to play Feyd Rautha in the next film, but it certainly won't be as maniacal as Sting was in the Lynch movie. Ultimately whoever faces Chalamet's Paul is going to have to be menacing as hell and scary as all fuck to make the suspense work - but I fear they won't find such an actor. As somebody joked, whoever it is, they've got a big cod piece to fill. 

Anyway, the point is, when Kyle MacLachlan's Paul got to the end and squared off against Sting's Feyd Rautha, it was a knife fight between men. Watching Chalamet, I'm not convinced he's going to get there, as a man. 

The Baron Vladimir

Is it just me that looks at the name Vladimir these days and thinks of Putin? Psychologically speaking, Putin might be the most Baron Harkonnen-like ruler we've got going, followed by Kim Jong-Un and Chairman Xi.

Kenneth McMillan's portrayal of the Baron as this unhinged, pustular fat man floating around and barking orders seemed like the ultimate in perversity way back when (if only we'd known about the Trump presidency to come back then). It's a performance for the ages. Stellan Skarsgaard is a fine actor and can play all kinds of villains and conks, but I don't think he was anywhere near as chaotic, or threatening as McMillan's Baron. He comes across as more intellectual - even his brand of vileness seems considered. After all, the Baron is a thoughtful villain, but therein lies the problem with Villeneuve's version: This Baron is boringly rational. Everything horrible that flows from him is still rational. He doesn't seem like a man who would get overwhelmed by his own impulses and enthusiasms. 

Certainly, it's arguable that Villeneuve's version is a lot more repressed. Lady Jessica is voluptuous in Lynch's version. My high school friend joked that he wanted to be reincarnated as the inner lining of Lady Jessica's still suit. Rebecca Ferguson is a sexy woman. Somehow all that sexiness gets hidden away and we're treated to her doing a lot of histrionic acting. The Oedipal complex that is inherent to the text is repressed hard and instead we're given a drama that is devoid of base passions. 

In the books, we learn that the Bene Gesserit breeding programme that leads to the Kwisatz Haderach goes through the House Harkonnen. That is to say, Lady Jessica is the daughter of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen - unbeknownst to herself - but this fact eventually manifests itself as a problem through her daughter in 'Children of Dune'. The text is shot through with an embrace as well as anxiety over incest, and somehow Villeneuve's version of Dune is devoid of these psychological problems. Lynch at least had a fine radar for the grotesque. This is why the moment Alia the Abomination confronts the Baron in the last part of his film is so evocative and satisfying. 

The 'White Saviour' Critique

There was this critique going around that the problem with 'Dune' is that it's just another movie about a white saviour. Here's a taste of that line of critique. 

Despite the vision Dune evokes of a foreign invader whom the population welcomes, House Atreides’ purpose for coming to Arrakis remains selfish. Duke Leto knows that by controlling spice, the planet’s natural resource, House Atreides will grow fabulously wealthy and powerful.

The parallels between spice, found only on Arrakis, and oil, are plentiful: in the 1960s when Herbert wrote Dune, most of the world’s oil supply came from the Middle East. Transportation in each context is wholly dependent on spice/oil. By establishing relations with the Fremen, Duke Leto demonstrates a colonizer’s knowledge that he can more easily exploit the planet’s resources if he is on good terms with the population. 

Yeah right. That's like a Year 10 reading of the book. This isn't what makes Dune an interesting story. Cripes. How obtuse is that reading? 

What makes Dune interesting is that the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood set up the myth of the saviour and plants it into primitive cultures. They put them there because at some point in the future, it might help to activate them. And so the Bene Gesserit manipulate the gullible in to thinking they're seeing a messiah. And along comes Paul who activates it in order to survive, but unwittingly unleashes a galaxy-wide jihad.  

In other words, Frank Herbert the author doesn't believe in messiahs. Paul, his main character does not believe in messiahs, even as he rides on the force of myth set loose by the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. Paul to his horror cannot stop the metaphorical runaway freight train once it leaves the station. The only people who believe in the messiah in the book are the ignorant, pious, and gullible. Yet there are many of them - enough to unleash their own set of horrors. If anything, the book at least is about how untenable the saviour is, white or not.  If you believe in saviours and messiahs, or that Paul's placement in the narrative is that he is a first order Saviour character without any self-awareness or irony, you're not much smarter than the gullible folk in the book who believe in messiahs and saviours. That, is Herbert's very mid-20th century modernist view. 

It amazes me that I have to spell it out, but no, 'Dune' is not in favour of the colonialism inherent in the West's purchase of oil. Herbert's narrative is fully sceptical about the merits of an economy that rests on the back of one commodity. It is not about a white man who goes to be a saviour unto the barbaric towel-heads of the far future (and I mean that with the utmost irony thank-you-very-much!).

The problem I have with Villeneuve's version is that I can't shake the suspicion that he believes in messiahs and saviours. It's the same problem I had with his Blade Runner sequel. 

Visions of Future Past And All That

Having seen 3 iterations of the fall of House Atreides as well as imagined it when reading the book, I can't help but think maybe we've seen too many versions of this story already. I'm not really all that excited about the second part of this rendition. It all feels like a chore to get us to the next bit, which is Dune Messiah, followed by Children of Dune - which all might never happen. The gods of studio filmmaking are worse than fickle, they're like gay people at the Mardi Gras after-party after 3 eckies, but with less propriety. So, there's no guarantee we would get there. 

The thing is, the 1984 Dune sort of ends the way it does because they couldn't really conceive of a sequel. Getting the first book made in that form was an accomplishment an achievement enough. It left not much to the studios to think about. Certainly, the thinking back then was, if a film did well, the sequel can expect to gross about 70% of the first. That means the third instalment would be about 49% of the first and that's probably the limit to the diminishing returns. Lynch's Dune flopped so it had no future with sequels. If I had my druthers, I'd really want to see Lynch give us a 'Dune Messiah' with Kyle MacLachlan playing Paul. Talk about things that never will be. 

Villeneuve's version is something else. It clearly has an eye of pushing it out to the subsequent books. I don't know if he can get there. Would they be any good if this is the base from which we are working? but then again, Ridley Scott was able to make 2 terrible, horrible, no-good sequels to his 'Alien' on the strength of ... I don't know what, that franchise has been moribund since the late 90s ... so you never know. To that end, I sort of support Villeneuve doing all this. Let's say this: I'd be mighty happy to watch his take on 'The God Emperor of Dune' because boy, as sure as fuck nobody else is going to have that one up on screen in a hurry. So if this film is phase 1 in the plan to shoot entire Dune series, I still give it my thumbs up. 

   

News That's Fit To Punt - 13/May/2015

We Live In A Peeping Tom Kind Of World

Pleiades had this link for me today. It's about how the NSA surveillance reaches and, to not put too fine a point on it, they reach everywhere for everybody.

Few people, for example, are aware that a NSA program known as TREASUREMAP is being developed to continuously map every Internet connection — cellphones, laptops, tablets — of everyone on the planet, including Americans. 

“Map the entire Internet,” says the top secret NSA slide. “Any device, anywhere, all the time.” It adds that the program will allow “Computer Attack/Exploit Planning” as well as “Network Reconnaissance.” 

One reason for the public’s lukewarm concern is what might be called NSA fatigue. There is now a sort of acceptance of highly intrusive surveillance as the new normal, the result of a bombardment of news stories on the topic. 

I asked Snowden about this. “It does become the problem of one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic,” he replied, “where today we have the violation of one person’s rights is a tragedy and the violation of a million is a statistic. The NSA is violating the rights of every American citizen every day on a comprehensive and ongoing basis. And that can numb us. That can leave us feeling disempowered, disenfranchised.”

In the same way, at the start of a war, the numbers of Americans killed are front-page stories, no matter how small. But two years into the conflict, the numbers, even if far greater, are usually buried deep inside a paper or far down a news site’s home page.

So basically, if a crime is blatant and big enough, we stop caring. I guess there's some democratic insight into that. We all get taxed. We all get perved. If it's a burden of civilisation that falls upon us equally, maybe we just stop seeing it as an issue and just "learn to love the bomb", so to speak.

That being said...

In addition, stories about NSA surveillance face the added burden of being technically complex, involving eye-glazing descriptions of sophisticated interception techniques and analytical capabilities. Though they may affect virtually every American, such as the telephone metadata program, because of the enormous secrecy involved, it is difficult to identify specific victims. 

The way the surveillance story appeared also decreased its potential impact. Those given custody of the documents decided to spread the wealth for a more democratic assessment of the revelations. They distributed them through a wide variety of media — from start-up Web publications to leading foreign newspapers.

One document from the NSA director, for example, indicates that the agency was spying on visits to porn sites by people, making no distinction between foreigners and “U.S. persons,” U.S. citizens or permanent residents. He then recommended using that information to secretly discredit them, whom he labeled as “radicalizers.” But because this was revealed by The Huffington Post, an online publication viewed as progressive, and was never reported by mainstream papers such as the New York Times or the Washington Post, the revelation never received the attention it deserved.

That bits a lot more troubling. Even if this blog has nothing to do with porn, the NSA probably has you tagged as a 'radicalized' (sic) entity. Worse still, the powers that allowed the NSA to do this in America are up for renewal. It's been 14years since 9/11 and really, they have very little to show for doing all this perving.

What Next? The Academy Of Degenerate Art?

The picture of a publicly elected official handing out money to artists directly is not a good look. The Arts Council adds a kind of layer of respectability because presumably some committee meets and adds a cushion between the powers of the day and the artists seeking a grant. But why bother with the semblance of respectable distance when you can just control the budget and hand it out to your favourites?

$104.8 million over four years has been ripped out of the Australia Council’s budget to create a new slush fund, apparently to be decided at the discretion of the Arts Minister of the day. 

The funding cuts total $29 million in the coming year, a cut of 16 per cent for the Australia Council on 2014’s appropriation.
'The National Centre for Excellence in the Arts will allow for a truly national approach to arts funding and will deliver on a number of Government priorities including national access to high quality arts and cultural experiences,' Minister Brandis wrote in a media release.

The budget also removes $5.2 million in funding from the Australia Council, and gives it to Creative Partnerships Australia 'to foster private sector support for the arts'.
In the ministerial media release that accompanies the announcement, Minister Brandis launched a veiled attack on the independence and arms-length funding processes of the Australia Council. 

'Funds for these programmes will be transferred to the Ministry for the Arts from the Australia Council, ensuring that government support is available for a broader range of arts and cultural activities,' Brandis states in the media release.

'Arts funding has until now been limited almost exclusively to projects favoured by the Australia Council. The National Programme for Excellence in the Arts will make funding available to a wider range of arts companies and arts practitioners, while at the same time respecting the preferences and tastes of Australia’s audiences.'

What Mr. Brandis means by 'a wider range', God only knows (as in, "God Help Us All, God Help Us All"). The Arts Council already helps props up the vast village of cottage industries that subsist on government largesse, creating the propaganda that there is worthy Australian Arts - that while the average Australian might not opt to partake of it in any meaningful sense, we'd like to wave around at foreigners as something else to look at in-between a Koala and a Kangaroo. It's hard to say one liked Australia Council before but it's equally hard to say that what George Brandis is doing is any kind of improvement.

Oh, and they cut Screen Australia again. I admit I take great sadistic delight in this. It's more proof that your enemy's enemy is not your friend but still of some bloody use.

Speaking Of Western Civilisation

It so happens to turn out that the guy who started 'Jim's Mowing' has a PhD in history.

Who knew that the Jim behind Jim’s Mowing has a PhD in history? It turns out that Jim Penman only became an entrepreneur because couldn’t get a job as an academic.
Founding and running Jim’s Group has kept Penman pretty busy, but he snatched time here and there to continue his research and published various articles in peer-reviewed journals. Now, 32 years after completing his doctorate at Latrobe University, Penman has published a book called Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West. As the name suggests, Penman believes that Western Civilisation is already decades into a decline that could be terminal.  

His book applies the study of epigenetics – a branch of biology that looks at changes in genetic expression as a result of environmental influences rather than changes to the DNA sequence. Penman’s premise with biohistory is that trends in history have roots in biology – and there is more of this in the book and also on the website where there are two videos explaining the theory. 

It's quite an interesting interview. I can't say I agree with the man, his politics sucks, but he does make some interesting points. He thinks Western Civilisation is in rapid decline.

BRW: What is the cause of this civilisation decline? 

JP: “It’s to do with wealth. It’s the same thing that occurred in the Roman Empire and every other civilisation. When you become wealthy and urbanised, it changes temperaments and behaviours in a way that makes people less disciplined, less hard working, in the end less enterprising. It takes a few generations to take place and epigenetics explains why that happens. People think that technology is going to save us but in fact technology makes it worse because it makes us so rich.” 

BRW: Yet you said that Jim’s Group was investing heavily in technology – can it also be a force for good? 

JP: “Technology makes it worse to the extent that it makes everybody rich and that makes us have too much food. But technology that makes us understand the science to fight against those effects would be a good thing. If we could find a way to reverse it so people would not be inclined to eat too much and naturally want to eat less and be more disciplined in their lives, that would be a good thing.

“Technology is very exciting – Jim’s Group right now is investing heavily in new efficiencies and systems and I love it and think it’s fantastic, but we’ve got to use it in good ways not bad ways. Nitrogen-fixing technology is fantastic and helps us feed the world but it also makes it possible to have huge explosions and devastating wars.

I'm not sure I even agree with that last sentence for instance. He seems be a man beset by ideas about civilisation he can't let go, but he's blind to his own ideological bias.

Movie Doubles - 'Human Centipede' & 'Unthinkable'

The Horror, The Horror

I don't know what's more frightening; knowing you're going to be hit with something and being hit with it, or not suspecting what you're about to be hit with and being hit with it. That's exactly what we had here with these two films and really, moral repugnance of the subject matter in both these films is quite extraordinary.

I knew what was going to happen in 'Human Centipede' and when it hit, it was as gruesome as I had been told. But I was totally blindsided by just what 'Unthinkable' was going towards and in many ways I found the latter a lot more challenging to digest. What separates the two might be scale of the depravity in one and the consequences of the depravity in the other.

So here's the spoiler alert. I will have to talk about pretty specific things to make this movie double entry work. There's just no choice.

Both films are horrifying but one goes in a very transgressive personal way while the other commits to pushing the logic to the point of absolute horror. How do we in the civilised world countenance torture, let alone conceive of a methodology and a system for torture? Both these films shed immense light on just what it is that takes us to torture

The Sadean Vision

First, 'Human Centipede' is not as bad as the reviewers say it is. It actually has quite a bit of artistic ambition and pretension. In many ways it lives up to its ambitions as it goes inexorably to its central image, the human centipede. The human centipede is the surgical combining of 3 human beings, anus to mouth so that one long alimentary tract is created.

The logical ramification of this is that the second party is forced to eat the shit of the first party, and the third party is forced to digest the shit of the shit coming out of the first party through the second party. Why exactly a mad scientist wants to do this is not really well explained except for his one line, "I hate humans."

As gruesome as it is, there is a great deal of black humour in the conception. The director Tom Six is reported to have said that the film started a s a joke in a pub where he argued that child molesters should have their mouths sewn to the anus of fat truckies and forced to eat their shit. Well, this is that film all right in all its loving rendering.

It is a horror worthy of something straight out of the Marquis de Sade's collection. Indeed, even the story of how 2 tourists end up in the dungeon of despair (as Frank Zappa would have sung it) is similar to de Sade's 'Justine' where a girl wanders through the forest and wanders into an inn full of evil people. It's even in line with Hansel and Gretel, except the genders are reversed and the horror is coprophagy instead of cannibalism.

The Orwellian Vision

Compared to 'Human Centipede', 'Unthinkable' is flat out Orwellian. The film is about a desperate interrogation that entails significant amounts of torture. We don't quite know where the film is going until well into the second act when Samuel Jackson's character 'H' starts hoe-ing into Michael Sheen's Yusuf. This film is what happens in Room 101, extended out to its logical extreme.

There are a few caveats on this point. In 1984, the state's motive is gratuitous or so arcane as to be indecipherable. In 'Unthinkable' the state's motive is clear as daylight - it seeks to stop a nuclear catastrophe from taking place.  There is a big reason for the torture to take place because the guy is holding some vital information, It has to be extracted or millions will die. To that end of extracting the information, 'H' pulls out all stops from his bag of torture tricks trying to break Yusuf. Representing our relatively civilian and thus cozy point of view is Carrie-Anne Moss' Agent Helen Brodie.

Agent Brodie's moral dilemma is thus, should she be willing to commit acts of evil in order to  save a great many lives? She recoils in horror, but gradually her duty to the state forces her to tacitly condone H's methods. H, has long ago made ethical choices to affirm torture as his means of extracting information. In H's view, it is a moral weakness not to embrace the full ramification of committing to interrogation and thus torture. It's a joyless sadism in stark contrast to the joyous sadism of Dr. Heiter in 'Human Centipede'.

The Point Of Cruelty

It's never explained why the evil character Dr. Heiter came to hate humanity so much that he could commit such atrocities as they are portrayed in 'Human Centipede'. We can't even begin to guess at his disgust and thus it is hard to understand the whys and wherefores of 'Human Centipede'. Dr. Heiter is not seeking to squeeze out the truth or information from his victims like 'H'. He just likes the look of three people daisy-chained through surgery, which is to say his choice is an aesthetic one.

The aestheticisation of violence and cruelty is the hallmark of Marquis de Sade's work, which in turn explains things like Nazisms and the curious pleasure its meanest bastards took in devising concentration camps. Many people ask "how could the Nazis have done such terrible things?"  The answer was already written down by the Marquis who at least lived to see the French Revolution's high ideals devolve into the ritual of the  guillotine.

What then is the point of cruelty but pleasure?

At least, that is the point put forward by de Sade, and when you plug that through Freud, you can see how pleasure and cruelty can be conjoined and suddenly you have Nazism and concentration camps and Josef Fritzl the Dungeon Dad. Josef Fritzl for instance would not be such news if his crimes didn't push upon a bunch of our taboos but also our self-understanding about cruelty and pleasure.

The Torture Never Stops (The Uncle Frank Vision)


What if you then found joy in your work as a torturer? Or found that you were good at it, and that the state had great need of your services? The addition of duty makes for heady mix. Perhaps this is the big difference between say Fritzl's essentially domestic and private atrocity and the humanitarian catastrophe that was the Extermination Camps?

The character of 'H' is possibly the most honest representation of the ugliest face of American Imperialism. It is the face of all imperialism that has taken place in history. Here are the lyrics to Frank Zappa's 'The Torture Never Stops'. Check out this verse:

Flies all green 'n buzzin' in his dungeon of despair
An evil prince eats a steamin' pig in a chamber right near there
He eats the snouts 'n the trotters first
The loin's 'n the groin's is soon dispersed
His carvin' style is well rehearsed
He stands and shouts
All men be cursed
All men be cursed
All men be cursed
All men be cursed
And disagree, well no-one durst
He's the best of course of all the worst
Some wrong been done, he done it first

That is how the character of 'H''s handler works. 'H' is the very instrument of torture of the state.

Talk about misanthropy. 'H' has done so much torture in his life, he no longer feels any joy in it any more. He is jaded by his one talent, that used to give him so much joy. What he doesn't understand is that the duty allowed him to do all those tortures, but it is duty that slowly killed the joy in him. If it isn't perverse enough that our most important character is a Sadist, he is a sated Sadist.

Dr. Heiter can't restrain his joy as he yells, "Feed Her!" as the first person in the centipede defecates into the mouth of the second character. There's none of that with 'H', because he's just done it once too often. This is more frightening than Dr. Heiter, though that may be hard to believe. 'Human Centipede' is a black comedy next to the ethical direness of 'Unthinkable'.

The Utilitarian Ethos As Challenge

The direness of 'Unthinkable actually stems from a philosophical challenge that is being laid down to us. It's the re-imagining of the 'Star Trek: Wrath of Khan' and 'Star Trek: The Search for Spock' problematic of "Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" versus "The Needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many", but applied to the present day problem of terrorism.

Let's imagine for a moment we take the irrationalist Kirk position of the latter "needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many". Just how many of the 'many' are we willing to sacrifice or ignore before we come back to the rationalist "Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" position of Spock? In 'Unthinkable', it is made very clear that the rational view has to prevail when there is a nuclear threat to 3 cities - enough to compromise high principles of the society not to commit torture. Is this good? Morally speaking, absolutely not. But if you want to save those millions of people, then it becomes incumbent upon the interrogators to use any and all means necessary to squeeze the answer out of the one person.

And this is the horrible little secret of our society with all its wealth and privilege over other parts of the planet. It is exactly the truth we cannot handle, as per what Colonel Jessup says in 'A Few Good Men'. All our high principles and morals and ethics are luxuries upheld by the willingness of certain parties - the armed forces and black ops - to undertake unspeakable brutality in order to preserve the lifestyle of the many.  Every day we in the so-called civilised world are the beneficiaries and the many whose needs are outweighing the needs of the tortured.

If 'A Few Good Men' took us to the portal of understanding this problem, then 'Unthinkable marches right in and shows us how the house of horrors is furnished. Compared to that very real house of horror, the house of horrors created by Dr. Heiter is very tame. 'Unthinkable' grabs our moral sensibility by the scruff of the neck, and shoves its snout into the shit that comes from the hypocrisy we practice by preaching our moral sensibilities. For some this would be a surprise. If you've been reading politics for a while, you will know that this is indeed the be all and end all of our pretty civilisation: that we live and die by our hypocrisy. Mostly, we thrive happily, oblivious.

Coprophagy And Other Taboos

Any time a film is made that transgresses a taboo, the critics line up to condemn the film for getting made. For instance, 'Pink Flamingoes' by John Waters has Divine eating dog shit and caused a furor. Incest in 'Chinatown' also disturbed critics. 'Happiness' which featured a family man who happened to be a child rapist could not get rated. 'Salo' continues to be a problem for the Australian censor board.

It's interesting that 'Human Centipede' gets this critique from Roger Ebert:

I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine.

It's funny that he thought it was that bad. It's not. Meanwhile there's hardly a review for 'Unthinkable'.

Between the two films, you'd think that 'Unthinkable' would be the film that might be the most threat to the decency of our society given what it says about who we are. What's perhaps even more disturbing is that critics and censor boards think that torture by the state is okay, but private torture is not.