The Cell Feasts on Misery, Gore and Torture

The Cell Directed by Tarsem Singh The baroque sci-fi horror picture The Cell looks like it was punishingly hard to make. The crew must have spent forever designing, building and lighting the elaborate sets and costumes that simulate the inside of a serial killer's subconscious. The actors probably had to steel themselves to withstand all the physical punishment the director asked them to accept in the name of edgy pop art. They're beaten, shot, stabbed, chased through terrifying dreamscapes, wrapped in formfitting bodysuits and hung from wires. In one scene, the serial killer, played by Vincent D'Onofrio, hangs suspended by hooks embedded in his back, then is lowered onto a naked corpse and proceeds to have sex with it. But believe me, it wasn't. The Cell disturbed me, but not for the reasons the filmmakers doubtless intended. What disturbed me about The Cell?which was directed by commercial director Tarsem Singh and written by newcomer Mark Protosevich?is its utter lack of moral vision. It serves up a parade of superficially "stylish" setpieces that feast on misery, gore and torture. None of them is connected in any way to recognizable emotions?only visceral responses.

D'Onofrio's killer, Carl Stargher, kidnaps women and brings them to his private dungeon, where they're subjected to the most hideous tortures this side of a Hellraiser movie. They're imprisoned in glass cells and bombarded with jets of water, then slowly drowned while Stargher videotapes their deaths for his archives. Then he gets really nasty, having sex with the corpses and then soaking them in bleach to make them look more like dolls. Compared to this guy, Hannibal Lecter is Mr. Rogers. Stargher's obsession with dolls might have something to do with the horrific abuse he suffered at the hands of his fundamentalist cracker dad, but the flashbacks to childhood abuse are an excuse for Stargher's awesome, unreal sadism rather than a compelling psychological explanation. That's to be expected, though. The Cell is nonsensical even by the standards of a sensationalistic, surreal, art-directed-to-death summer thriller. Stargher is just a humble property manager, yet his hideout is huge and dark, with hanging chains and vivisection tables, holding cells and video monitors; it looks like it was designed by Ernst Stavro Blofeld on crack.

When Stargher is rendered comatose by a rare brain disorder, Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), a therapist who can enter the minds of patients, goes spelunking in Stargher's subconscious to uncover the whereabouts of his latest kidnappee, who might be still alive. Judging from Deane's monotonous, whispery delivery and glassy-eyed stare, she got into the dream-spelunking business to exorcise some pretty fearsome inner demons; in the manner of a Thomas Harris profiler, her work makes the pain worse rather than better. She's aided by hotshot FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn), a brooding blank with a three-day beard who seems to have been horribly traumatized by something, though we never find out what. At the end of the film, the two embrace warmly?a couple of dear friends with untapped sexual chemistry who went through hell and came through battered but stronger. The scene might've been powerful, or remotely interesting, if the two had been properly introduced, then developed as characters via one of those way-square, old-school filmmaking techniques, such as conversation and conflict.

When they join forces inside Stargher's head, they seem to spend a lot of time fighting Stargher on his own terms?in fantastic fits of rage, often with medieval weaponry, as if taking part in some terrifying 3-D videogame programmed by Freddy Krueger in collaboration with the Lawnmower Man. Granted, The Cell is a fantasy, but you've got to wonder if it wouldn't have been easier and smarter to obtain a list of properties tended by Stargher and send a few cops to check them for drowning cells and torture chambers. Or peruse the sales records of area Home Depots to see if any private citizen recently purchased 1000 gallons of bleach. Or check with local piercing salons to see if a large, dead-eyed stalker recently paid cash to get hooks embedded in his back.

Lest my concerns be dismissed as the ignorant rantings of the literal-minded, let me be clear: I have nothing against unreal or surreal movies?movies that seek to create a dreamlike, free-associative stream of images in order to replicate unconscious fears and emotions. Some of my favorite films, past and present, fit this description: The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari, The Exterminating Angel, Vertigo, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Limey, The Matrix and Fight Club, to name just a few. But though all these films differ in tone, style and access to money and technology, they share one characteristic: the fears and desires they reference are tied, however loosely, to characterization and real-world concerns. Extending this notion to The Cell, I ask: exactly which real-world fears and desires are being referenced in the director's elaborately baroque and frequently sadistic visuals? Well, there's our all-too-common fear of being kidnapped by a serial killer, trapped in a dungeon and then drowned, raped, bleached and dumped by the side of the road. Also, our collective desire to overcome the miseries inflicted by two-fisted, foaming-at-the-mouth fundamentalist cracker fathers who savagely beat us at every opportunity, never seemed human or likable for a solitary instant and filled our heads with images not just of distorted biblical imagery and memories of torture, but also art-school references to the bisected livestock dioramas of Damien Hirst and the video installations of Nam June Paik.

Obviously I'm being sarcastic. But the Hirst and Paik references are in the film. In fact, very few of Stargher's unconscious images bear even the faintest resemblance to the experiences of an abused rural fundamentalist boy with, it appears, very little formal education, and no extensive experience in trendy art museums. Stargher imagines himself as various sorts of demons, but they're not Old Testament monstrosities; they look like rejected characters from Francis Coppola's version of Dracula, or maybe a high-flying Hong Kong action fantasy (think The Bride with White Hair or Heroic Trio).

The near-total disconnect between the serial killer's subconscious imagery and the experiences that supposedly inspired same suggests that the filmmakers?indeed, the entire behind-the-scenes creative team?care nothing for the characters. They don't imagine them as credible people, however mythic in scale or distilled in purpose. They don't really imagine them at all. They're just puppets moving through elaborate sets, occasionally pausing to don striking but stylistically nonsensical costumes and torture, stab and disembowel one another. Even Seven, for all its art-directed flashiness, was contextualized within a vision of Old Testament vengeance from start to finish; even The Silence of the Lambs, for all its lip-smacking, antiheroic showboating by Anthony Hopkins' cheeseball Dr. Lecter, tied its fears to Clarice Starling's awe of her dead father (and father figures in general) and women's dread of violation, imprisonment and sexual objectification.

In The Cell, there's no hardcore of emotional reality?not even a puny sunflower seed. It's just a big ball of pain that degrades the filmmaking process, the actors, and the good-faith efforts of its designers and technicians to give the audience something new to look at.

A few years ago, I interviewed James Ellroy about his memoir My Dark Places, about his fruitless quest to solve the murder of his own mother. We got on the topic of contemporary crime stories in literature and cinema, and when the subject of serial killers came up, he looked as though he could barely restrain himself from spitting on the floor in contempt. "As far as I'm concerned," he said, "the people who write books about serial killers are cowards." They were cowards, he explained, because serial killing, while certainly fascinating and scary, is a statistically meaningless blip in America's crime statistics. And because so many serial killers murder for their own private reasons?reasons only tangentially connected to social, political and economic factors?stories about them don't explore any meaningful anxieties and fears. "It's bullshit," he said. "These people might as well be writing about the bogeyman."

Real crime fiction, according to Ellroy, deals with the realities of crime and violence, and that means it must confront the realities of human experience: male rage and female insecurity, poverty and racism, the abuse of the powerless by the powerful, the corruption of politics and law enforcement by money. "You want to make the audience recoil in horror?" Ellroy asked. "Don't write about serial killers. Walk up to a stranger and rub a piece of raw meat in his face. You'll get the same reaction."

That's The Cell: a piece of raw meat rubbed in moviegoers' faces. But stylish.