Film Daze Cinema Club #4 (February, 2023)

This month's picks is all about creatures and horror

Creature Comforts By Veronica Phillips

For the month of Valentine’s, a curation of movies about love and affection that go beyond human connection. (Dedicated to my dog, who sees me mainly as a source for food and walks and the occasional hug, while I am desperate for her love and attention at all times). 

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

E.T. is perhaps one of the most earnest films about your first time learning to love outside of the parameters of your family home. When tweenage Elliott stumbles upon an alien in his backyard, his instinct is to take him in and hide him out until they can get E.T. back to his own family. What starts off as shared childlike curiosity in each other is soon to be revealed as a deep, almost spiritual connection — soulmates found across galaxies. 

Pig (2021)

Pig is perhaps Nicolas Cage’s most tender role. Cage’s hero’s journey through the underground of the Portland restaurant scene to find his kidnapped truffle pig is an ode to the way our pets often end up representing a sort of pure love amongst an otherwise messy and unfair world. 

Grizzly Man (2005)

If we were to describe our interspecies affection stories in terms of usual human relationships, Timothy Treadwell, the man who lived amongst the grizzlies and posthumous protagonist of Werner Herzog’s iconic documentary, would be the ex who projected all of his shit onto you. A film, more than anything, about the price one pays if they decide they can control or fully fathom the uncontrollable circle of life, even if they claim to do so under the guise of compassion and affection. 

Starlet (2012)

When Los Angeles hot girl Jane (Dree Hemingway) unexpectedly stumbles into a huge chunk of morally questionable cash, one of the first purchases she makes is a bedazzled harness for her little chihuahua, Starlet. While Starlet is not Jane’s only unexpected platonic romance in the film, she’s a centerpiece throughout — Jane seems to find comfort mainly through bringing Starlet everywhere possible.

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The Burden of Responsibility by Alisha Mughal

I had a sudden craving for Twin Peaks in January, and to quell it, I fell upon The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer by Jennifer Lynch. In picking my way through Laura Palmer’s telling of the five years before her death, I found myself wondering, At what point does a person to whom horrible things have happened become responsible themselves for causing horribleness to other beings? Because what I learned through Laura’s account of things was in such contradistinction to the nebulous and almost flat, perennial, though still tortured, victim of Laura Palmer as presented by the series Twin Peaks. Through Laura’s diary entries, what emerges is a complex character, a human being who acts in the world as much as she is acted upon. What I learned through her diary is that Laura could be a shitty person sometimes. 

As Laura coalesced before me through her diary, for better or for worse, I couldn’t help asking myself more and more, whether a person remains a victim all their life, or whether the cycle of abuse continues, turning the victim into a monster. Where can a line be drawn between trauma experienced and trauma caused? How beholden are we to our pasts, and when do we become culpable in our own downfall? The following movies, though they provide no distinct answer to the problem of responsibility that’s been nagging me, certainly show that traumatic pasts leave marks on us indelible as tributaries.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)

Sheryl Lee strikes a tenor in this film that is perhaps unparalleled. As Laura Palmer, Lee fleshes out the beautiful but mysterious teenager who ostensibly had a perfect life, a gem of a girl who had everything going for her, and who turned up brutally murdered one grim, hazy morning in the shady town of Twin Peaks. As the series (created by David Lynch and Mark Frost) this film prologues progressed, Laura emerged more and more, but alongside her reification emerged something inscrutable that sparked a curiosity within us that only Fire Walk With Me could satisfy. This was a curiosity to do with the full dimensionality of Laura, which we only received through the film’s commitment to Laura’s point of view, giving us finally the missing piece of the puzzle: who exactly was Laura Palmer and what did she [choose to] get herself into? 

What Fire Walk With Me shows us is that not only did Laura experience brutality in her life that she couldn’t escape, she also couldn’t remain unscathed by it. Some of the badness got within her. In one of the film’s quintessentially Lynchian scenes, Laura is followed into a bar by her best friend Donna who is worried for her. Laura, pissed that Donna won’t leave her alone, agrees to let her best friend stick around, but expects her to fit in. “Chug-a-lug, Donna,” Laura says through narrow and mean eyes as beer is passed around by greasy, burly men. Donna ends up drugged. One can’t help but wonder whether Laura is responsible for perfect Donna making out with strangers topless, taken advantage of. This scene explicates the paradox of responsibility and how it is warped — sometimes delayed, other times expedited — by trauma. Does Laura become the monster that preyed upon her, or is she absolved of any responsibility because of how unequivocally the monster fucked her up?  

Cat People (1942)

In this stunner by Jacques Tourneur (an almost urtext for horror), Simone Simon plays Irena, a Serbian immigrant haunted by her village’s past. She fears that her fate will be similar to that of other women from her village: she grew up surrounded by tales of women turning into cat people once they had sex with a man, destroying him and themselves, or hunting any woman who might show the slightest interest in the man of their choosing. When she marries a dashing American, she is terrified of spending the night with him lest she turn into a wild cat and kill him. Simon’s Irena is certainly bound by an inescapable fate, and one might think she, a victim of her lineage, bears no responsibility for the havoc she wreaks. But a certain scene belies such an absolution by fate.  

In a scene that contemporary horrors must certainly take inspiration from, Irena haunts and torments her husband’s best friend, whom Irena sees as a threat, as she swims. When she emerges from the shadows, Simon’s Irena is wearing a smile that is acidic, that is more a prideful smirk, she holds her head high for she knows she’s spooked her rival. Almost mocking the other woman for being afraid, Irena seems self-satisfied, what was earlier jealousy has turned into cruelty and dignified derision. The knowing twinkle in Irena’s eyes has us wondering whether Irena takes pleasure in being a cat, whether, though bound by a mythological and perhaps biological fate, she holds a modicum of responsibility for what she does when she changes; whether once doomed to a fate she is now an active participant in it. It’s a thorny question that makes this beguiling film all the more delicious. 

May (2002)

Something all the films on this list have in common is shitty parents. Angela Bettis is May, a shy and awkward girl who many think is weird, a freak. She has a lazy eye and when she was young her mother, a doll maker, instilled, alongside a crippling disdain for her appearance, the lesson in her that if others won’t be friends with her, she can always make her own. May does some pretty messy and grotesque things in this stunning film, but as the film unfurls, we wonder how much of her strangeness May received from her mother and how much is May’s own doing, how much is May’s responsibility. This film is captivating from start to finish for the questions it raises about femininity, obsession, and perfection, but ultimately, I love it for how murky it is about culpability. Because that’s the thing about insane women in movies — society is shit to them, to us, and so it must be asked: should the individual or the culture be held responsible for the monsters it makes of women, and the monsters these women make in turn. 

Excision (2012)

AnnaLynne McCord is 18-year-old Pauline, and much like in the case of May, others think she is extremely weird. Pauline is bullied and ridiculed, and strives unsuccessfully to make her tough and cold mother (Traci Lords) proud. At the film’s start, Pauline, though blunt and uncaring of others’ ridicule of her, seems different, but she still seems as though she’s bucking under the growing pains of teenagedom. But as the film goes on and as the stakes get higher, as Pauline does more fucked-up shit, it becomes evident that there’s something else going on with the girl, and she knows it. Sure, her mother is an icy bitch, and perhaps she has made Pauline a bitch, too, but when Pauline begins doing some really dangerous and unhealthy stuff, who ought to be held responsible? Is it insanity? Is it her mother? Who is to blame for all this mayhem?   

I am so intrigued by the idea of responsibility raised by this and the other movies mentioned above because I often ask myself, How many of my missteps, how many of my fuck-ups, can I blame on my nurturing? I wonder whether a line can be drawn vertically through the flat timeline of one’s life to delineate the work of our upbringing (our nurturing) from the work of our nature. Ultimately, I am, alongside the women in these movies, wondering whether I am insane, whether I am really bad, or whether I’m simply reacting to my life. And if I am simply reacting, then am I responsible? But I don’t like the idea of simply reacting because it means that I am letting life live me, as opposed to living my life. And so, if I am not reacting, and if I am choosing to act certain ways, then I am to be held responsible, then I am perhaps bad. Perhaps I am choosing to walk with fire, too.