Disasterpieces

Someone was talking to me the other day about Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, a film I've never seen. He used the term 'mess-terpiece' to describe it, which was entertaining, and got me thinking of similar movies: flops that may not have been vindicated by time, but nevertheless leave the world a better place by deviating that much from the norm.

But then I was troubled by a couple of films that you couldn't describe as 'mess-terpieces'. These were films I'd seen that weren't simply a critical disaster and poison for those who made them - but so notoriously flawed that only someone who can hold perverse affection for the unloved (like me) would even think about talking about them. I'm talking about what I'm going to call disasterpieces - films whose execution from start to end are so astonishing (often astonishingly bad) that they provoke admiration as well as hurt and bafflement.

To define disasterpiece, I'm going to use two films -  both highly anticipated - both horror films from world-class directors. John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic, and David Fincher's Alien 3. These films for some reason bare an uncanny resemblance to one another - and not just because they're both follow-ups to perhaps the two greatest horror movies of the 1970's.

They're similar to one another in that they stay with you after you've watched them - just like really good films do. To begin with, you think it's only because they're such a disturbing waste of talent. But there are scenes in both films that are quite haunting - often in a strange and intangible way - the way a Kubrick scene can haunt you. It doesn't make sense in a logical sense, but certain scenes muddle around in your limbic brain: an experience that is absolutely absurd and yet absurdly cinematic. The image of a shaven-headed Ripley confronted by the salivating Alien in a close-up is probably the single-most iconic image within the entire Alien series. The first Exorcist II scene showing the terrified Kenyan villagers  fighting a plague of locusts within a dream is genuinely startling.

I think these movies have a weird appeal because a lot of the wrong choices made in them, coupled with startling if unintelligible imagery, gives you a sense of what a big-budget hollywood film directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky or Louis Bunel would look like - even if we only get this sense for ten percent of the movie. They also stay with me because they raise interesting questions about the nature of sequels and the our ability to transform and grow ideas. It's almost impossible to imagine either of the films as a dramatically successful movie - nearly all because of the underlying concepts behind them.
 To start with, both Alien 3 and Exorcist II seem to have been made without understanding what made the previous films effective. In the first forty minutes of Alien, you don't see any aliens. Ditto Aliens. In The Exorcist, the change in Reagan is slow and steady, and the whole movie is designed around slowly persuading you that demonic possession is actually possible. These films were about the worlds the characters lived in before they were about the monsters that terrified that well-established world.

This is partly a problem with sequels. People who went to see Alien 3 wanted to see aliens. What's more, they knew more or less everything about the aliens. What's wrong with cutting to the chase? Similarly, people who went to see Exorcist II: The Heretic clearly were paying to see exorcisms. Maybe these audiences also forgot that their favourite parts of the previous movies was slowly being persuaded that these horrifying things that don't actually exist are real. That's certainly the case with the film-makers, who seem to have completely forgotten this: what do you see in the opening shots of Alien 3, and in the first scene of Exorcist II?

You see a face-hugger bleeding acid, and a girl possessed by the devil.

In doing this, both films not only create a world with the story's extraordinary selling point - an alien, a possessed girl - and render it completely mundane. What they do with these antagonists is even worse - acting as a giant slap in the face to the audience in relation to their expectations to the previous movies. How so?

You know how you felt good at the end of Aliens because Ripley saved Newt and killed the Alien Queen? According to Alien 3, you were a moron to feel catharsis at the end of that movie, because right after the credits stopped, a face-hugger shat an egg down the main character's throat, it sent the ship into a spiraling crash and then all the others died. BOOM! Welcome to the movie.

Remember how The Exorcist totally shattered your nerves by showing you a young girl transformed and tortured by the devil over two long hours, finally being released by the brave acts of two magnificent priests who sacrifice their lives to exorcise her? According to first act of the Exorcist II they shouldn't have wasted their time, and neither should you. The devil's still inside Reagan. So the movie is more or less telling you that the last one is a complete waste of fucking time.

I don't know if this is simply a problem of sequels reaching their terminal arcs - their story places of no return, where no continuation can be made that doesn't harm the characters or concepts that have come before - but both of these beginnings are involved in actively destroying the point of the previous films. Even if they were brilliant from that moment onwards (and they're not), they would still have failed because they act as a slap in the face to everything in the story that's happened before. This is perhaps why I have a grudging affection for both movies, because they have an tremendous amount of balls to turn to the audience and raise both middle fingers.

This sense of bravado  stems from very similar attitudes of both directors towards their source material. Boorman turned down the first Exorcist because he hated what the story did to a little girl - and intentionally created a sequel that was "about good, not evil". Fincher consciously wanted to drag Alien 3 as far away from Aliens as possible - back to the lean, cruel, stripped-back horror of the original. But both in doing so bypassed what had elevated the material with audiences and kept it moving forwards. I'm no huge fan of Aliens, either - but I think it's an incredible sequel (even if it changes not only the tone and genre of the series, but completely changes the character of Ripley from the first film). As much as I love Alien, I can't imagine an Alien 2 treated like, say, Jaws 2 - a re-hash of the first film, trying to go after the same scares, the same revelations, with a second-hand aping of the first director's famous style. In fact, I can imagine that film, because that is pretty much Alien 3.

I still can't help liking both movies. We could spend another ten paragraphs eviscerating the films, but instead I think there's only one other aspect you really need to cover.  The seed of all the problems with both these films isn't that they failed to meet their audiences' expectations: it's that from the beginning, they were not resolved enough to not meet their audiences' expectations and take their own paths. They still get bogged down in exactly the same exorcism stuff and (almost exactly) the same aliens as in the previous movies. I'm not saying it's in the realms of possibility to let a comedy sequel of Alien slip through production at Fox, but if you're turning a horror movie whose unique feature is the subversion of the supernatural into a technological and biological form (the Alien, which shorned of these trappings is just another spooky killer ghost), and turn it into a metaphysical psychodrama in which this monster becomes a devil and figure of temptation - essentially turning the whole series into a religious allegory - then you've got to go all the way. If you really want to make an Exorcist sequel about goodness, you've got to cut out all that spooky bullshit.

But the thing that inspires me personally about disasterpieces is that they inspire me to think of better ways of approaching the subject matter than plain, crappy sequels that simply make you say, "They should never have made another Die Hard film".

So after the jump, I'm going to put some thoughts together about how we might construct - from a purely conceptual level - more successful jumping points to these two troubling films than where Alien 3 and Exorcist II: The Heretic started off.


In the meantime, does anyone else have a favourite disasterpiece of their own?