In my last post I wrote a list of 50* books I wanted to read in 2012 and I’ve already made a good start. The reason I included The Killer Inside Me was not based on whim but on [vague] research. I’d Googled “disturbing novels” and in doing so I wasn’t wanting to be faced with some King-Koontzian horror that M. Night Shyamalan has his researchers fondling themselves over; I wanted something deemed to be ‘truly scary’. I wanted a psychological tour-de-force which would nestle between my bones and leave me eyeing up passers-by in the street, mentally questioning the contents of their basements and the potential for their lampshades to be made of human skin. It turned out that a frequent flyer aboard the ‘psychologically scaring novels’ blogosphere was, you’ve guessed it, The Killer Inside Me. Now TKIM wasn’t just popular amongst this crowd of disembodied type-faces; plastered across one of the cover designs there’s a quote from King himself stating Thompson as his favourite crime novelist and King’s claim just happens to be sitting next to a quote from my own private God, Stanley Kubrick, who informs us that TKIM is “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered”. This is coming from Kubrick. KUBRICK. This guy adapted A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and The Short-Timers for the silverscreen. He’s no stranger to things disturbing as all hell. Kubrick was such a fan of Thompson that he even worked with the guy when writing his early film The Killing. I won’t comment on Thompson’s inventiveness when it comes to titling what he writes, but HE.WORKED.WITH.KUBRICK. So sign me up, Sir.

TKIM was published in 1952. Here the alarm bells started to ring – this is 2012, you watched Haute Tension while eating cereal Sunday morning before not going to church. You come home from work and watch A Serbian Film then you text your friends about how tame you thought it was when that guy beheaded that slut whilst he fucked her. Hell, later, you even lick the dribble of ketchup off your chin during that** scene. A novel written in ’52? You’ll read that shit to your kids as a bedtime story.

So here’s the crux of it: it didn’t live up to the hype. It didn’t even live up to the downgraded 1952-reserved hope. It’s not a bad book, don’t get me wrong. I said I read it in one sitting, didn’t I? I wouldn’t have done that if Thompson didn’t have some skill at sucking the reader in. Truth is the book is a nice little read. I didn’t feel my life had been improved for reading it, I didn’t feel smarter, I didn’t feel that I had been welcomed into something special. I didn’t even feel like I’d remember it. But it is well paced and it has enough intrigue to keep you turning the pages at 2am. We follow Lou, the local nice-guy-officer-of-the-law who just happens to have his sociopathic tendencies, or “sickness” as Lou calls it, re-awakened from his youth when he meets a hooker who is involved with a family he wants some pretty hefty revenge on. There’s some death, sure. There’s some misogyny. There’s Lou’s overall detachment and lack of empathy, you know, the ‘criminally warped mind’ Kubrick was talking about in his cover emblazoned quote. But then, again, there’s the overwhelming 1952-ness about it. Remember, this was 10 years before Chuck Palahniuk was even born. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather read TKIM than anything [we'll negate Fight Club] that shock-whore has ‘written’. I use quotations here not because I doubt he has written it, but because for the most part a lot of his novels can only be deemed as ‘writing’ in so far as they use words. Maybe I’m being a little harsh but I want to get my point across: Palahniuk’s novels sell like baseball bats in a zombie apocalypse because all we hope for in our generation of saturation is the chance to be shocked into feeling something. And we’re always left fucking disappointed – truth is our imaginations are going to come up with the most terrifying self-specific thing it is possible to construct whilst in anticipation of a new ‘shocking’ piece off of the Palahniuk production line, and when all he gives us is some guy sitting at the bottom of a pool having his intestines sucked out of his ass-hole, it’s laughable. It’s a kid in a Freddie Kruger mask at our front door at 6pm on Halloween. Fuck that shit, what’s really terrifying? Oblivion. Being alone with your own thoughts. Jersey Shore. Going to a 9-5 you hate for 50 years then dying. Sorry Chuck, and Jim? You never stood a chance. But that’s my fault… our fault. We’re all nice-guy-law-enforcer Lou, we just wear different disguises. And worse; we’re bored.

I’d give it a 6/10.

-

*not quite 50… yet.

** if you’ve seen it, you know the one.

*twiddles thumbs*

1. Freedom – Jonathan Franzen

2. Room – Emma Donoghue

3. Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon

4. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

5. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

6. Vernon God Little – D. B. C. Pierre

7. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer

8. The Castle – Kafka

9. Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

10. Notes of a Dirty Old Man – Bukowski

11. The Fault in Our Stars – John Green [8/10]

12. Great House – Nicole Krauss

13. The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson [6/10]

14. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers

15. Nausea – Sartre

16. Lord of the Flies – William Golding

17. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon [7.5/10]

18. House of the Dead – Dostoyevsky

19. The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolano

20. Complete Prose – Woody Allen

21. A Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

22. A Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin [9.5/10]

23. A Moveable Feast – Hemmingway

24. Anna Karenina – Tolstoy

25. I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

26. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

27. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing – M. T. Anderson

28. The Secret History – Donna Tart

29. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell – Susanna Clarke

30. The Book Thief – Markus Zusak  [6.5/10]

31. The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien

32. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood

33. Life of Pi – Yann Martel [6/10]

34. The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky [6.5/10]

35. Vineland – Thomas Pynchon

36. Paris Was Ours – Penelope Rowlands

37. Love in The Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

38. The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern

39. The Woman in Black – Susan Hill [5/10]

40. I am Legend – Richard Matheson

41. Eragon – Christopher Paolini

42. Animal Farm – George Orwell

43. Transmetropolitan – Warren Ellis / Darick Robertson [6/10]

44. Ghost World – Daniel Clowes [6/10]

44. Mostly Harmless – Douglas Adams

45. And Another Thing – Eoin Colfer

well… we’ll leave a few blank for now, as reading is an impulsive affair.

So, Melancholia, Lars Von Trier’s latest offering from his darkly colourful and controversial oeuvre. Von Trier has tackled it all; from domestic violence and mental illness to persecution and capital punishment. He was a pioneer of the Dogme 95 movement and, well,  what more really needs to be said about Dogville; his successfully engaging 2003 offering which challenged our preconceptions of cinema whilst simultaneously seeking to present a powerful allegory for the presence of evil in society? Not too much, other than a few further murmurs of awe. Which leads us to today – in 2011 what was there left for Lars to try his hand at? Oh, yes, the apocalypse.

To start with an incredibly base statement; Melancholia is a film that you have to want to watch. You can’t just absent mindedly stumble upon it on and become enraptured in a narrative tour de force, or absorbed in the kind of fast-paced and fantastical visuals that could very well pass as an ILM wet dream. You have to want to invest in Melancholia. That isn’t to say that the narrative is lacking or the visuals aren’t stunning, believe me, the shots are so sumptuous at times that if you were feeling particularly Tyler Durden you’d want to cut a slice and eat them, just to destroy something beautiful.

The film comes in two parts, divided by Von Trier’s signature title cards, which focus on Justine and Claire respectively (of course it does – Von Trier’s passion for depicting women in various states of emotional turmoil is perhaps equivalent only to his conviction of his own genius). The film opens with a beautiful and distinctive Von Trier montage of dream like re-imaginings of scenes from the rest of the movie. Then we cut to the first half, which opens in the middle of Justine’s wedding day; the ceremony is over and the guests have gathered in an elegant country mansion for the reception which remains our primary focus for the first half of the movie. This presents the audience with the opportunity to slowly get to know the characters and understand the dynamic between Justine and Claire; sisters with the usual opposing outlooks to life, the universe and everything. You know, the kind of divergent views which mean one answers “42″ and the other answers with a Beatles’ song. Of course we’re dealing with Von Trier here, so the differences don’t necessarily stem from the stereotypical sibling rivalry of the younger sister acting out against the role model older sibling with drugs, art and hippie sex communes. Instead we’re left with a subtle and intimate examination of the effects of depression. We are presented with Justine, a young woman on what society dictates is “the happiest day of her life,”  surrounded by friends and family, at a lavish party which is being paid for by Claire’s husband. As opposed to relishing this attention, however, every guest, every perfunctory social duty, every forced smile, becomes a bar on Justine’s cage; trapping her at every turn.

The sadness of caged birds ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The first part of the film touches on it’s namesake, yet the focus doesn’t properly shift to it until Claire’s half begins. From here on out we have four characters: Justine, Claire, her husband; John, and her son; Leo. The four are alone in Claire and John’s home and faced with the news that the planet Melancholia is hurtling towards earth. John; a scientific man, assures everyone that the given trajectory means that Melancholia will miss earth but provide a grand spectacle as it passes by, Claire; neurotic and caring, continually badgers John and maintains a state of panic as the planet comes ever closer, Justine; depression colouring her apathetic, remains as indifferent to her potential destruction as she does to affection, and Leo; a child, acts as a totem for the other characters to indulge their own characteristics.

I would insert the standard “spoiler alert” warning here, but with Melancholia you know what you’re getting from the outset. This is a movie without hope. The planet hits at the end, as we know it will, but it’s the characters, the elegance, the nuances and the silences which make this film a must see, and why one can’t read the Wikipedia plot outline and then argue that “there’s no point in watching it now”. There’s no big reveal, no twist. It is just simply 136 minutes of delving delicately, rawly then savagely into depression and helplessness. Before the ending. That ending. That ending rendering the audience speechless, breathless. Sitting in awe, gaping at a black screen for moments after the film dramatically cuts out, whilst your brain tries desperately to comprehend what you’ve just seen.

Much has been made of the ending of Melancholia, the beauty, the impact, the noise. Truly, watching this in the cinema is not an experience that you’ll likely forget. I can’t tell you the last scene of a hell of a lot of films that I really liked, but this, this I could describe in unparalleled detail after only my first viewing. I’ve heard people talk about the noise, how the sound is turned up in the final moments so the film literally engulfs your senses, but honestly, I didn’t even notice. The visual was enough. It was everything and nothing all at once. I can’t pretend that it would be anywhere near as good on the plasma-screen in your living room, but I reckon it’ll still fair pretty well. Especially if you stick it on after Armageddon.

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

Melancholia: 7.5/10