High Tension

A few nights ago I saw about ten minutes of the recent remake The Hills Have Eyes. It was so awful and so stupid and such a ridiculous pile of dreck that it made me curious who the hell would direct such a piece of shit. By utter coincidence, High Tension (also known as Haute tension, being French-made) had arrived that very afternoon, fresh from my Netflix queue, and I had watched it earlier the same night. Very different movies, made in different countries, made for different reasons, with the same guy behind the camera: Alexandre Aja. I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

Forget about Hills for now; like I said, I only saw ten minutes, and wanted to see no more; I knew it was a stupid movie last year just from the ads & trailers. But I'd heard good things about High Tension. That it was a different type of thriller, it was actually tense, not just needlessly gory with crappy fake scares. That it was actually terrifying because it seemed so real, and not like a horror movie. So I figured I'd give it a shot. I don't know what those people were talking about. They must be brain-dead.

Not only was it needlessly gory (which I don't necessarily object to if it isn't too stupid), and full of crappy fake scares (some guy turns around to find someone suddenly standing right behind him), there was absolutely no tension whatsoever. There are two main reasons for this: one, much of the running time is taken up by the heroine (Marie) either following, being chased by, or hiding from the Big Bad Psycho Killer. There's really no tension here, because we as an audience know exactly what Marie knows - BBPK is after her. There's nothing else to it. Hitchcock always said, show your audience something the character doesn't know, and the suspense comes from wanting the character to find out...usually before it kills him. Not Hitch's exact words, but...that's what he did, anyway.

Before I get to the second reason for the lack of tension, I want to add that in addition to every subjective thing that makes this movie not good, there is an idea, a long-standing concept of storytelling in film, that is so horribly despicable, ignorant, offensive, and just downright lazy for a storyteller, that I am simply appalled by its inclusion as a character motivation. It offends me as a person, as a friend of a certain group of people, and as a writer. Gets to me on all levels. From this point on, I will spoil the movie, even though I believe the filmmakers did their own spoiling, which is actually lack-of-tension reason #2. But if for some reason you really want to see it and think you might enjoy it, by all means, stop listening to me. You're on your own. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Reason number 2: they spoil their own big twist right in the very beginning. Marie is in the car with her friend Alex; two girls driving to the country to stay with Alex's family and study for exams. Marie wakes up in the back seat, describes a dream she had of a man chasing her. Alex asks who the guy was, and Marie tells her "That's just it, there was no guy, it was me chasing me." Well, as soon as I heard that, it was pretty clear to me that later in the movie, when the Big Bad Psycho Killer shows up, that there is no guy, it's just Marie chasing Marie. And yes, folks, that is the Big Fucking Twist. How pathetically lame is that?

Never mind the logistics of how she could follow herself in another car, or hide from herself in a gas station with the attendant looking at and talking to herself and the killer, or see herself chasing someone in a cornfield from the window of a room with another person in it whom she's talking to...forget all that. I don't care about that. How can they state the secret fucking premise right in the beginning! And then late in the movie, after she kills the bad guy, they show Marie on security video in the gas station, killing the attendant. That's how they choose to reveal it. It was so fucking stupid, I couldn't believe it. How is anyone NOT supposed to figure this out! They fucking TOLD you! Up front! How is there any tension at any point in the movie! She's hiding from herself! She's running from herself! She's chasing herself in the car! It just goes on and on, and since I know this guy is not going to kill her, that somehow some way she'll be revealed...I'm not feeling the tension. Bad bad bad bad bad.

But like I said, that's not the worst thing about this movie. Here's the real problem: why she does this. First off, why is it every time a character in a movie is revealed to have multiple personalities, which is now clinically referred to as dissociative personality disorder, one of them is a crazy fucked up psycho killer?!?!! Do the filmmakers not realize how wrong this is? How it creates the wrong impression of serious mental illness? Hello? We've seen that a hundred times, anyway. Fucking enough already. But it gets worse.

Not only is her second personality a Big Bad Psycho Killer, it is killing with oh-so-perfectly-understandable-psychotic-reasoning: repressed homosexual desire. Wow. This is the best they had. This is what they came up with. Because everyone knows that if you think you're gay, but don't want to be, you'd better do something about it before you start killing everybody you meet. 'Cause that's what people do. That's what my very good lesbian friend would have done if she hadn't been able to learn to express herself openly. Oh yeah. And can you believe, someone actually told her she'd like this movie because she's a lesbian. It's so maddeningly stupid...I'm completely flummoxed.

The things is, I didn't even have to wait until the end to realize this was her supposed motivation. Since I knew, after hearing about Marie's "dream", that she was in fact going to be the killer, that made it very easy to determine what brought about her slaughter of her friend Alex's family: the desire to be with Alex. They make it pretty clear, too; she's sitting outside having a cigarette when she sees Alex upstairs through the window, in the shower. In the very next scene she goes to her own room, undoes her jeans, and rubs one out. Pretty obvious where her interests lie, especially after the earlier conversation in the car, in which she not only describes her dream and reveals the twist but also makes it clear she's not dating any guys, and calls Alex a slut for dating a lot of them.

But anyway, while she's got her hand down her pants, this scene is intercut with shots of the killer's truck approaching the farm. Cinema at its best, right? Intercut her lesbian desire for her friend with the "killer", a.k.a. the damaged side of her psyche, bringing murder and hate to their happy little home. Her desire brings out the killer; how absolutely fucking brilliant, oh golly gosh what a story. What really bugs me about that is it's actually a good way to tell the story cinematically. This is what movies are about, this is how they should be told. And it flat out sucks that this is what they choose to portray, this is what they choose as their cinematic vision. It's awful.

But of course, how do we know it's the killer and his truck? Because we've already seen him, who knows where or why or how, apparently giving himself a blowjob with some girl's severed head. Again, logistically, this makes no sense, since Marie is in another car, miles away, and whose head is that? Has Marie killed before? Where did this truck come from? Supposedly she locks Alex in the back of it, alive and screaming, with the blood and torn photos of other dead girls. So where, and when, and why, did Marie kill these other girls. Did Marie kill any other girls? Does any of this add up at all? No, but it doesn't really have to.

I'm getting off-track here. I was bitching about the idea that Marie is unable to confront her lesbian desire for her friend, and kills the girl's family so that no one can come between them anymore. And she says this; she's muttering it in the beginning, and again at the end when all has been revealed. This is such a disgusting notion. That people who have a hard time thinking of themselves as gay would develop a split personality and kill entire families. She kills their dog, too; the dog always dies before the people, but killing dogs in movies is another rant for another day. The issue here is sexual repression.

In the movies, repression = homicide. And I'm sick of it. It's simple, it's stupid, and yeah, it's just a movie, but that's exactly why it needs to be better. It should be more motivated, it should be something specific to that character. It should NOT be something that groups an entire category of people into an over-simplified and essentially WRONG notion of personality and behavior. This is the part that offends me as a writer. I work hard to create characters and motivations that are true and unique and real; it pisses me off to see other people take the lazy approach, to copy what's been done a hundred times, especially when what's been done is so misconceived.

The end result is, it's just a movie, but instead of being pure and compelling and unique to itself, it's a pile of crap that goes beyond worth forgetting and into the realm of being vilified. Alexandre Aja is officially on my shit list. Sorry, pal. You look like you know what you're doing; too bad you're not smart enough to do it well.