You know, frankly I was somewhat disappointed with Irreversible. The horror of it has been very much over-hyped. I was actually a little scared to put the DVD into the player and start it up. I procrastinated watching the film, as advance reviews assured me that this was heavy stuff and I didn’t know what I was getting into. And well, all that build-up and nothing that terribly shocking happens. I'm not trying to prove how tough I am for taking in what Irreversible has to offer and dismissing it, which is inevitably how these things tend to read. But I know what shocking is and my friends, Irreversible is not all that shocking.

The film’s supposed shocking material is basically contained within in two scenes: the rape of the Monica Belluci’s character Alex by the evil pimp Le Tenia, and the revenge on Le Tenia by her current and former lovers (Marcus and Pierre respectively) in the gay nightclub “The Rectum.” As the film is told in reverse chronological order and we see the revenge before the rape, I’ll be discussing the revenge first.

The first thing I want to note is director Gaspar Noe’s chaotic camerawork. For all the talk of this film’s brutal content, I have to say that the critics did not properly prepare me for the cinematography. The picture bobbles, flips over, twirls, spins, dances back and forth -- Noe hasn’t just made an ugly and visually incoherent film, he has made a forcibly ugly and visually incoherent film. You can tell that he has had to work really hard to get his film to look this awful. The film ends with an overhead shot that rapidly spins around. It was then that I realized why we don’t normally see shots like this in the movies. Noe has shot his film in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, much too long for these clockwise rotations of the image to make any aesthetic sense. Doing this with the more squarish standard ratio would certainly work; a square turned onto its side is still a square. But widescreen is a terribly cumbersome image and demands some sort of formalist restraint. Above all, it simply does not feel natural for the camera to move in the way that it does in this frame. Noe’s garish camera movements aren’t audacious or innovative as much as they are naïve. The filmmaking in Irreversible is so bad that it reads like a failed film school experiment.

Noe only seems to use this technique when depicting the revenge and road leading up to it, suggesting I think that it meant to express the rage that Marcus and Pierre are feeling as they seek out Le Tenia and perhaps to provide the film with some kind of frantic energy. Alas, these are not things that can be properly conveyed by shaking the camera around. In fact, there is something dodgy about this technique. Rather than heightening the horror of what we are seeing it distracts from it and hides it from us, effectively neutralizing it altogether.

The Rectum is not only a gay nightclub; it’s a 24-hour-a-day orgy of cocksucking, fisting and butt-fucking. Andrew O’Hehir, who probably wrote the best review of the film, described it as “probably what Jerry Falwell dreams about when he's alone in the john.” Ah, but that damn floating camera obscures all the psychotically disgusting homosexual fucking. It certainly seems to be going on, but we aren’t able to make any of it out. O’Hehir’s snarky comment is characteristic of much of the criticism lodged at Irreversible. The film had a reputation for being among one of the most homophobic films ever made, and technically it is indeed very anti-gay (we will be tackling that monster later). By homophobia, we are talking of course, of a Freudian projection of latent homosexual desires; thus the crack about Falwell. But personally speaking, I found this journey into The Rectum (har har) to be short on horror of the body. Noe doesn’t want to linger on these degenerate faggots doing degenerate faggot things. It seems that he doesn’t make a point of it and would prefer to simply swing his camera around the orgy, masking the fact that he isn’t earning his reputation as a modern day P.T. Barnum. I mean, for Christ’s sake can’t we at least get a good and gruesome come shot?

I do have to admit that the soundtrack during this sequence is effective. Noe says in an interview with Salon that he mixed two separate tracks and played them at different levels. He then added 27 Hz of infrasound, a low frequency sound used by the police to “quell riots.” I don’t know if it’s simply urban legend or more to the point if my rather utilitarian home theater set-up is able to pick it up. Whatever it is, the sound was able to produce a strong visceral reaction from me. I genuinely felt sick and apprehensive about what I knew was coming up. And when it finally did, this throbbing soundtrack helped us to tie our sympathies to the guy whose head was getting smashed in as opposed to the guy doing the smashing.

Now about that head smashing: it just plain doesn’t work. You know robot scientist Masahiro Mori’s theory of the “uncanny valley”? His theory is that the more that a robot resembles a human being the more attracted we become toward it. Eventually however there comes a point in which we no longer recognize the ways in which the robot is like us, but all the ways in which the robot is unlike us. At which point we become repulsed. Violence in cinema has something similar to that. You can only take a violent act so far, because once you reach a certain place it ceases to be horrible and begins to get hilarious. This guy’s head is getting smashed in with a fire extinguisher and it’s brutal to watch, but soon his head has been smashed so thoroughly that he is no longer recognizably human but rather a Muppet covered in grue. As soon as we see him as a Muppet and not a human being, our sympathy dissolves and is quickly replaced with snarky condescension.

There really isn’t anything in Irreversible that Japanese director Takashi Miike hasn’t already done, and done better at that. Miike understands violence a lot better than Noe does. In Dead or Alive and Ichi the Killer Miike went just as far with the violence and probably even further, but he recognized this uncanny valley of violence and he went with it, allowing his films to become surrealistic slapstick comedies. But he also understood how to avoid this. With Audition Miike took things pretty far but knew when to stop lest things turn into comedy, and as a result the film retained a strong psychological credibility and was powerfully effective. There is no such recognition of the uncanny valley in Noe’s film; the head bashing is presented as a serious moment, and it needs to be perceived as a serious moment for the themes in the film to be adequately illustrated. Again, the degree to which Noe takes the head smashing is neither audacious nor innovative as much as it is simply naïve. And again, his floating camera even further neutralizes the sequence. While we get a very good look of the attack, Noe can’t help swinging his camera with each blow and later canting it toward a ninety-degree angle. The attack becomes stylized and overly filmic in a way that is congruent with his misuse of violent obscenity. The scene quickly becomes about little more but itself.

The rape scene is a little stickier. At this point in the film, Noe has abandoned the floating camera and more or less films things normally. The entire rape happens within one nine-minute unbroken shot. This has been praised, in its own way, for being unflinching about the experience and not giving us any reprieve or escape from it. The scene has also been called brutally unwatchable, if ultimately carefully considered and decidedly anti-rape. I argue that it can only be one or the other. To be brutally unwatchable it must, in some way, glorify and idealize rape as to better implicate and disturb its passive audience. If the audience is able to make a clean moral judgment on what they are seeing, you haven’t effectively gotten under their skin.

They seem to have gotten the dialogue right. Le Tenia apparently targets Alex because she is a “rich bitch” and at one point taunts her by asking if she is getting wet or if she is just bleeding. Noe and his actors (all the dialogue was improvised) seem to have a good grasp on the rapist mentality. This is stuff that could have easily have been written for Gary Roberts’ Violent Comix series. (In a rare exhibit of good taste, I have opted not to provide a link. You’ll have to Google it yourself.) But the scene contains very little nudity or gore and by holding everything in a static shot Noe seems to be making a moral statement about rape as opposed to accentuating its horror or, it would follow, its thorny eroticism.

To be fair, I can imagine that this all played much differently during the film’s theatrical release. With an audience, the viewer is able to be made embarrassed and guilty for staying to watch this instead of leaving in outrage. As it’s nine minutes long and adds nothing to the narrative, Noe gives you ample opportunity to make a run for it, or at least opt out for the moment. There isn’t really any “reason” for the scene and certainly it plays on a very primary level as voyeurism. And so there is then a subtle implication that those who stay and watch it are perverted.

There are several tonally dissonant elements within the scene. The sound effects are quite vivid; as Le Tenia finishes we can hear the squish of his ejaculation, demystifying the sex act into ignobly biological terms. Le Tenia talks through the whole thing, taunting his victim and telling her how much he is enjoying it. He just doesn’t shut up. This feels terribly unrealistic and inorganic and we soon realize that he is talking in order to convey the elements of the attack that Noe refuses to depict visually. Even worse, Noe folds in a gratuitous and completely transparent homage to David Lynch’s immortal Blue Velvet -- Le Tenia takes amyl nitrate tablets to heighten his experience. This detail seems to exist for no other reason than to pay homage to Blue Velvet. It does not make any statement about Blue Velvet, mind you, it’s just there to show us that Noe has seen it and wants to pay tribute to the forefathers of shock cinema.

All of this comes very close to detaching us from the characters and seeing them less as human beings and more as filmic concepts. Noe hasn’t quite done this as thoroughly as he had with the smashed head, but he is really toeing the line. If I were to see this in the theaters, I think that I could easily imagine a row of teenage boys laughing hysterically at the more lurid aspects of the sequence. The film has, of course, provided them with plenty of room to do so. And simply by being in the same theater, the more reflective and mature members of the audience who have been troubled by what they saw on the screen would find themselves implicitly equated with the laughers. I suppose what I am getting at is that is nothing inherent in this scene that implicates (which, to me, is nearly synonymous with deeply disturbs) the audience. All the implication happens within the social context of theatrical viewing.

On Le Tenia’s dialogue: I’ve described its content as authentic and its very existence as inorganic to the scene. It has artistic truth, I guess you can say, but it doesn’t have any dramatic truth. It breaks the reality of the scene and leaves itself vulnerable to snarky condescension. There is something else that bothers me about it. Noe is really trying very hard to get a rise out of us. There is so much of this nasty dialogue, and it is so utterly inorganic, that it gets to feeling like heavy labor. I think that Noe knows what he is doing is offensive and I think that there is something safe in that knowing. He’s breaking boundaries, you see, and in breaking them he is in effect acknowledging their existence. He’s being a bad boy, and being a bad boy can’t help but register as cute because it shows that he is able to tell the difference between good and bad.

Many will ask, “If this doesn’t disturb you what the hell does?” Well, Marcus Nispel’s remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects for starters, both films rated a hard R. But the king of them all has to be Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The Passion of the Christ has been and probably always will be left out of conversations like this. The film was, as you might remember, a huge hit grossing nearly 400 million dollars in the United States alone. Too popular then to be regarded as truly subversive or countercultural, audiences and critics seem to be unable or unwilling to acknowledge that this film has broken new ground for depictions of violence in the cinema. The U.S. release of Irreversible predated Passion of the Christ’s by a good year, so I know that most of those perturbed by Irreversible hadn’t had the opportunity to compare to the Gibson film. Still, Passion of the Christ is so unbelievably brutal that it really effectively invalidates Irreversible status as the shocker du jour.

Key to the power of the violence in The Passion of the Christ is Gibson’s deep Catholic faith which in effect disables his internal censor. Gibson is, at heart, a raging sadomasochist and The Passion of the Christ is essentially an act of self-flagellation. He loves giving pain and he loves receiving it. The more that he makes himself suffer the closer he comes to spiritual actualization. Gibson is numb to everything else surrounding to him, and this makes him a true according-to-Hoyle psychopath and a genuinely dangerous film artist. The Passion of the Christ is on some level a pro-torture film. The film’s artistic intent is deceptively basic; Gibson takes something that he loves, the story of how the body of the Carpenter Jew was torn apart by scourging and crucifixion, and he elevates it to a high art. If The Passion of the Christ is, as the South Park kids suggested, a snuff film, it is probably the greatest snuff film that we will ever see. It’s an uber-snuff film really, every visceral effect of the snuff film revved up to 11.

I believe that the uber-movie will be seen in coming years as having been the dominant cinematic trend of the ‘00s. The movies have become bigger and slicker than ever before and for those of us addicted to cinema itself, meaning the joining of sound and image to produce a primitively visceral sensation, there has never been a better time to attend the movies. This has, of course, had a tremendously positive effect on horror films. I believe that the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is greatly superior to the 1974 original and that the difference quite simply boils down to one of divergent world views. The seventies were basically agnostic, you see. “In space, nobody can hear you scream,” right? There were no heroes in the seventies. Nobody cared, we were all left to our own devices. In the age of the uber-movie of the ‘00s however, there is no longer that great spiritual void. The serial killers, villains and monsters have filled it in. They have become their own Gods. This idea is considerably more disparaging. Amorality has evolved into immorality, anarchy has evolved into fascism, and the good people now have even fewer places to hide. Despite whatever tricks or weird visuals that Noe may try to tack onto Irreversible it doesn’t stray far from the agnostic minimalism of 1970s cinema as the statically shot (and visually timid) rape scene illustrates, and as such it doesn’t have nearly the punch of its contemporaries.

The uber-movie approach not only has more impact, it is also a more thematically potent choice. The film’s message is that we cannot look into the past for happy memories as they will always be tainted by all the tragedy that came after them. Noe tells the film backwards so that the happy moments before the rape will be tainted for us by our memory of the rape. “Time destroys everything,” goes the slogan of the film. By depicting the rape as happening in real time, Noe seems to be trying to show how easily lives can be altered forever. Where he messes up, though, is in not acknowledging how both the structure of his film and his minimalist style have given the rape the exact same significance as everything that comes before and after it. Everything in the film is equally meaningful, which of course means that everything is equally meaningless.

Noe is right that we mustn’t look into the past to reclaim the happiness that we have lost, but being a hip nihilist he doesn’t bother acknowledging the obvious solution to this problem. One must accept tragedy instead of simply covering it up. It must be approached, embraced and understood as now being part of your life. Irreversible subtly makes an argument for such progress in its style and structure. The nine minutes of the rape are simply nine minutes of a ninety minute movie, and once placed within that context, their power will naturally become diluted. That’s not something that we can say about The Passion of the Christ, which was pretty much utterly without any greater context. In a way, even though nine minutes is a long time, we have an understanding that it will stop and we will be able to move on. You could say that there is an optimism embedded within the structure of Irreversible that disarms its defeatist thesis.

While Irreversible isn’t a very good movie, it is quite an interesting one. Strangely enough, the best defense against its charges of homophobia is that it is also tremendously racist. I somehow picture the film’s core audience as being a lot like the Marcus character: white heterosexual 18-25 males casually oriented to the far right. The France in Irreversible is a post-apocalyptic wasteland that has been long since been eaten away by sexual degenerates and racially inferior immigrants. Angrily trying to get an Asian cab driver to take him to The Rectum, Marcus shouts, “Why don’t you rummage through your shitass genetic code?” It’s rather startling to see such purely racist thought being articulated so effortlessly; I would certainly doubt that it’s uniquely French but it feels like it is.

The two things that nobody can touch on Marcus are pussy and drugs. There is a sexual frankness to the chronologically earlier scenes that feels young and fresh. Heterosexual sex is idealized and lionized as pure love, closing out the film even with a pregnancy. Although Marcus is high on coke, I think it was, when he decides to get revenge, it is the clean and sober (and sexually inadequate to boot) Pierre who enacts the head-smashing. That Marcus and Pierre enact revenge is seen as somewhat of a tragedy, which is why I find it especially interesting that the thirst for it was planted by an Arabian gangster friend of theirs. It’s sort of a cautionary fable: Marcus loses his life of rudderless youthful hedonism all because he was mesmerized by this degenerate Islamic philosophy of an eye for an eye. While all of this certainly helps to make Irreversible a rather ignoble film, its core assumptions are so transparently simple-minded and refreshingly off-beat that it retains a certain fascination simply as a document of a certain mindset.

The film is also able to maintain a genuinely feminist slant. Alex is essentially something to be stolen (from Pierre by Marcus), something to be lusted over, something to be idealized, something to be destroyed, and finally something to be avenged. There is never any point in the film where she ceases to be a “something.” What makes this aspect of the film work is that Alex does not see herself in those terms, she is forced into them through the structure of the movie suggesting inversely that there is a human being in there that we have never been able to know. The film never gets around to solving the ultimate problem of feminist theory (is there even a moment in which femininity gains a concrete definition or is it doomed to be forever formless), but on its own terms it works splendidly as simple illustration of feminist frustration.

In a 2004 interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Armond White characterizes Noe as a fraud and a deliberate senstationalist. "He's not serious," White thunders. That is certainly neither unfair nor innacurate. The issue of the racism was brought up in the Salon interview and Noe weasels out of it, proving to me that he doesn't really understand what he's doing. But still, there is something almost adorably inoffensive in how hard he tries to offend. He can't help but betray some sort of moral core. And not as much in spite of as because of it's dubious motives, Irreversible is profoundly rich as sociology. This proves to be a somewhat difficult film to dismiss, albeit not in the way that Noe and his defenders have intended.