Lawnmower Inferno

So this week Lovefilm engineered one of those unexpectedly felicitous double bills, serving up Lawnmower Man alongside Inferno, a documentary about the disastrous and abortive shooting of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Enfer. What turned out to link the two was SFX, with both films using lurid colours and lysergic patterns to communicate a loss of innocence: in Lawnmower Man a holy fool becomes a megalomaniacal cyberbeing, while in L’Enfer a husband is beset by surrealistic visions of his wife’s infidelity. Seeing the two in tandem, I was struck by the fact that, effectswise, they’re essentially coming at things from opposite angles: if Lawnmower Man’s animated sequences see computers clunkily attempting to replicate organic forms, one of the most moving things about Inferno is watching Clouzot’s team inventing ingenious and laborious analogue processes that produce results now reminiscent of nothing so much as the presets available in digital playback and editing software... Ripples, meshes and mirror images, hallucinatory composites and freakish colour schemes are conjured from rotating arrays of lights, sheets of water, layers of plastic and cellophane, sequins and ungents, wires and mirrors. Determined to turn a lake blood red, but unable simply to hit cmd+i, Clouzot dickies with the colour timing, has the make-up department paint the actors a cadaverous grey-green and commissions two sets of costumes - one for each side of the colour wheel.

 In both cases, and even more than in the typical effects-led film, there’s an excessive, flagrantly artificial quality to the SFX sequences. Not content to humbly serve the story, they demand attention on their own terms, as technical achievements. As if acknowledging this, Lawnmower Man’s title screen offers the option to watch just the computer-generated bits, skipping the film that frames them altogether. With L’Enfer, meanwhile, it’s almost as if Marcel’s hallucinations (which are the only scenes that take place in colour) literally refused to be integrated into a finished film, the flimsy narrative architecture designed to support them buckling under the weight of their sensory charge. While the documentary does a decent job of interweaving a sketch of L’Enfer’s plot with the story of its production (a story climaxing with the shock resignation of leading man Paul Reggiani and Clouzot’s subsequent heart attack) these contexts start to seem irrelevant faced with the sheer charisma of the surviving footage. I found myself wishing that they’d just given us a menu of these fragments to watch in whatever order we pleased rather than subordinating them to the (albeit fascinating) history of the project - which desire led to me capping and gif-ifying the bits of it I have.

In this respect, these films also highlight the weird irony of the DVD, a storage medium that allows for random access but which (at least in the case of DVD movies) masquerades as a film strip, surrendering images in a linear sequence. You could argue, in fact, that both movies fail because they attempt to tell A-B stories about things that are inherently non-linear: if it’s no surprise that Lawnmower Man can’t turn the internet and the videogame into material for compelling non-interactive entertainment, it’s perhaps strangely apt that Clouzot couldn’t work a profusion of rushes, alternate takes and freestanding optical experiments into a viable feature film: after all, Marcel’s paranoia can itself be understood as a state of narrative crisis, whereby the proliferation of terrifyingly plausible possible pasts and futures foils any attempt to reach a definitive understanding of what has happened or might happen. Trawling tumblr suggests that both films are fated broken up and strewn, contextless, across a thousand microblogs - but maybe that’s poetic justice?

Lawnmower Man images from:

http://www.virtualworldlets.net/Worlds/Listings/LawnmowerMan/LawnmowerMan1-Falling.jpg