Head Games
Porn, torture and a new world order are just a click away in the devious Demonlover
by Jim Ridley
Mongrel art form that they are, movies are always absorbing new influences from junk culture: music videos, reality TV, Nintendo. Of those, by far the most interesting—and the least explored—is the effect of video games. I’m not talking about the quarter-eater in Grandpa’s attic, gathering dust with Q-bert. I mean the new breed: the Grand Theft Autos, the Final Fantasies, which are as close as anyone has come to making interactive cinema. They borrow the look, form, and style of movies. And yet they allow viewers to switch roles and points-of-view at will. They defy the resolution that people traditionally want from a good story. They offer multiple paths and choices with different outcomes.
These options have started to trickle into mainstream movies, but almost never in movies taken directly from video games. The Final Fantasy movie was a turgid bore. The title House of the Dead describes any theater showing it. These movies retained the look and premise of video games, but lacked their only animating mechanism: interactivity. Who cares whether cardboard characters mow down hundreds of zombies, if none of those characters represents you? The failure of these movies convinces me that the main appeal of violent video games isn’t killing but dying—the opportunity to risk, and sample, one’s own demise ad infinitum without the long kiss goodnight.
Demonlover, on the other hand, is a success—a scary, shocking and weirdly liberating approximation of game play within the context of narrative moviemaking. It’s not that you watch Demonlover imagining yourself behind a sniper’s scope (although the movie’s plenty aggro). It’s that the movie sets your mind racing to fill in gaps, shift perspectives and process threats. Every one of these commands leads somewhere disturbing, like the sicko porn that’s just a few quick clicks away on the Internet—the borderless universe of director Olivier Assayas’ devious thriller.
Demonlover starts with a classic Hitchcockian setup: On a flight full of corporate bigwigs, an industrial spy sneaks into the loo and injects something nasty into someone’s bottled water. This simple act of sabotage secures the spy, Diane (Connie Nielsen), a higher berth at a shady corporation engaged in high-tech warfare. At stake is a site called demonlover.com, a billion-dollar trafficker in X-rated anime hoping to expand into 3-D. Diane’s employer means to buy it by hook or crook. Her employer’s rival, equally ruthless, is paying her to scotch the deal.
Nielsen, who played Russell Crowe’s wellborn lover in Gladiator, has bland, somewhat unmemorable looks that are well-suited to a Sega heroine. And that’s how Assayas uses her: as a game piece that’s always in danger of getting booted back to Level One. The corporation’s cold, gleaming hallways teem with likely predators—a resentful underling (Chloe Sevigny), a swinging-dick superior (Charles Berling)—and Assayas’ camera stalks Diane through them like a shark. In the movie’s boldest conceit, the narrative begins to splinter, mutate and offer alternate paths, just like the slice-and-dice video game Sevigny plays in her hotel room. Characters assume new roles and identities. One apparently dies, gets a new life, then returns to play—albeit with far less power.
Indeed, power plays are the movie’s primary motif—in business, in bed, in From Russia with Love-style hand-to-hand combat between Diane and her American rival (a well-cast Gina Gershon). By the time the plot uplinks to an interactive torture site called Hellfire Club, the comparison of the corporate ladder to S/M couldn’t be any clearer. The mastering of levels, so central to gaming, extends to office politics as well as sexual dynamics. Dominance and submission, in the movie’s terms, are currency. Interestingly, our relationships to the characters shift as their positions of power overturn. Playing a video game, we select a character who represents us, usually the one who looks strongest. Diane, by merit of her importance to the story, is the closest thing we have to an identification figure. Assayas repays our “selection” with a purposefully nasty closing twist—one that shows a corporate tool is just as capable of becoming the product.
Many reviews have hammered Assayas, himself a perceptive critic, for the movie’s apparent confusion—especially in the wildly disruptive ending. But Demonlover’s dislocation seems strategic. Assayas rarely signals a change in locale—a globalization joke that’s funnier for being left unstated. Like the Tokyo of Lost in Translation’s isolated jet-setters, the new-order world of Demonlover might as well be one big convention center. The movie leaves us to feel our way down its halls.
“To me movies are not movies, movies are part of the world, they are symptoms,” Assayas told the Canadian magazine Cinema Scope earlier this year. “Movies embody ideas that are bigger than movies.” So what does Demonlover embody with its highbrow collage of lowbrow totems—splatter video games, Japanese tentacle porn and disembodied Internet perversity? It captures a point when the commodification of our darkest fantasies has become global trade, and vice versa. It wants us to consider how the prism of electronic media, with its hidden agendas and its consequence-free gratification, affects the way we perceive the world. At the end, Demonlover asks which figure represents us in this new marketplace of weightless mayhem: the kid with his dad’s credit card, ready to type in his sickest request, or the terrified face on the screen, awaiting his command.
Comments (0)