-- Carly & Wade
2005
THREE NICE THINGS THAT I CAN SAY ABOUT THIS MOVIE
Nice thing #1 is the way the eyes in Dalton's severed head flutter and blink before they go dead.
Great effect, done just right.Nice thing #2 is the poster art. This really is a beautiful and effective image: simultaneously alluring, creepy and provocative with its sensual form, blacked-out eyes and the emulsion of flesh and wax dripping into darkness.
I'd happily hang it in my living room.Nice thing #3 is burning down the house. I loved it when they did it in '33 and again when they did it in '53 and I loved it in this film. It's possible I just like to watch stuff burn.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This whole remake theme was born of a conversation I had earlier this year in which a friend said that he hated this movie but loved the original with Vincent Price. I pointed out that Vincent Price wasn’t in the original. House of Wax (1953) was a remake of The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). This led to a prolonged debate about cinematic reincarnation. We must have named a hundred remakes in less than twenty minutes. We talked rip-offs, homages, parodies, adaptations, wanna-bes and the inevitable emergence of an orthodoxy in the horror movie formula. Before I knew it, all the lines I’d worked so hard to draw around my cinephilic biases had blurred.
I realized that they’re all remakes in one way or another. Half the horror movies we’re watching now are Americanized versions of Asian horror films. Half my favorite movies from the 50's and 60's were remakes of movies from the 30's and 40's which, in turn, were remakes of silent films, updated for the talkie generation. It isn’t just film either, we’ve been retelling the same stories since we wormed out of the sea and sprouted diction. Literature from eastern cultures varies a bit but we western types set our heroes up, knock them down and watch them struggle and eventually find redemption, usually through an unselfish act. It’s the Soter Principle over and over again. Whether our hero’s falling in love, solving a mystery, fulfilling a magical prophecy or just trying to outrun an axe-wielding psycho until sunrise, the story always comes down to whether or not salvation was earned. Fall, crawl, rise, redeem. Welcome to the samsara of occidental prose. Hope you enjoy your stay.
We can’t help it, the concept of our worthiness being tested and rewarded has been burned so deep into our respective psyches, be it in the form of religion or capitalism or nationalism or Darwinism or Sopranoism (I might be making some of these up), that every story we tell, inevitably, is a simulacrum of the human condition. We’re born out of the perfection of the elements (fall), we struggle and mature (crawl), thrive and expand our culture (rise) and pass our essence on through our offspring (redeem). Death is not absent from this equation, it’s omnipresent, lording its own perfection over us, pushing us to complete the cycle before the credits roll on our story. This is life. The moment we became capable of intellectualizing life we also became capable of fearing death and romanticizing the relationship between the two: mourning our lost ones and imagining utopian possibilities for their essences beyond the decay of their bodies; discerning a supreme purpose in the evolution and perpetuation of our species; finding poignancy and poetry in the ephemera of humanity. From the theologist to the scientist to the philosopher, we are all beings of purpose and that purpose is to prove our worth. Am I worthy of heaven? Am I among the fittest of my species? Have I actualized my personal potential? Am I the conquering hero of the story or just chaff shaken off along the way? The questions may vary but the dilemma itself is always the same.
So, why wouldn’t the struggles of our fictional heroes reflect the struggle of the human condition? Our respective falls and redemptions may vary but I think we can agree that we’re all down here in the dark together, crawling through the same muck, our eyes glancing ever upward in search of a little light. And why wouldn’t we return again and again to spinning our best yarns, seeking comfort in the familiar, attempting to rekindle the stimuli that once inspired us so hotly? Humans are nothing if not redundant.
It’s quite possible that freshness has no value outside the produce section, so go ahead, keep singing your favorite songs, tell that story again, steal that joke, remake that movie for the fourth time. It’s okay, it’s what brings us together. This is our muck, our darkness and maybe we’re all being led by different points of light but we can still crawl together, at least for a while, along these little patches of common ground.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This seems like a good time to mention that Agnes says my brain needs a three second rule because, no matter how trivial the subject matter, at about four seconds I've already over-thought it.
