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| The Revenant is meaningless pain porn | |
| (about 11 hours later) | |
| Ritualised brutality. Vengeful blood lust. Vicious savagery justified by medieval notions of retribution. We all know how dark the world can be these days. A world where men are garrotted and impaled. Where they’re speared and disembowelled and have their necks slashed and their genitals sliced off. Where they’re killed for no other reason than revenge. This isn’t Raqqa, though, it’s The Revenant: the hottest blockbuster of the season, winner of three Golden Globes a week ago, nominated for 12 Oscars last Thursday and yours for around £10-£15 this weekend at your local multiplex. | Ritualised brutality. Vengeful blood lust. Vicious savagery justified by medieval notions of retribution. We all know how dark the world can be these days. A world where men are garrotted and impaled. Where they’re speared and disembowelled and have their necks slashed and their genitals sliced off. Where they’re killed for no other reason than revenge. This isn’t Raqqa, though, it’s The Revenant: the hottest blockbuster of the season, winner of three Golden Globes a week ago, nominated for 12 Oscars last Thursday and yours for around £10-£15 this weekend at your local multiplex. |
| It’s a tale of “revenge, retribution and primal violence”, according to the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin”. This is praise, by the way. It’s “unthinkingly, aggressively masculine,” says GQ. That’s praise too. | It’s a tale of “revenge, retribution and primal violence”, according to the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin”. This is praise, by the way. It’s “unthinkingly, aggressively masculine,” says GQ. That’s praise too. |
| The film is based on a true story of the American frontier from 1823 and I’ll summarise the plot for you: man seeks revenge, man gets revenge. That’s it, basically, for two and a half hours, though there is a brief reprieve when you get to see Leonardo DiCaprio being mauled by a grizzly bear. Early reports suggested that he was raped. But no, that’s a fate reserved for one of the two women who appear fleetingly on screen. (The other one is slaughtered. But don’t worry, you have no idea who she is so you won’t actually care.) | The film is based on a true story of the American frontier from 1823 and I’ll summarise the plot for you: man seeks revenge, man gets revenge. That’s it, basically, for two and a half hours, though there is a brief reprieve when you get to see Leonardo DiCaprio being mauled by a grizzly bear. Early reports suggested that he was raped. But no, that’s a fate reserved for one of the two women who appear fleetingly on screen. (The other one is slaughtered. But don’t worry, you have no idea who she is so you won’t actually care.) |
| Related: The Revenant review – a walk on the wild side | |
| The woman is not actually raped, of course. She’s faux raped. Because this is what we call acting. And because The Revenant is what we call entertainment. There’s a crucial difference between us and the people we are currently trying to blow to smithereens with million-pound missiles: we choose to pay to watch women being pretend raped rather than watching women being actually raped for free. | The woman is not actually raped, of course. She’s faux raped. Because this is what we call acting. And because The Revenant is what we call entertainment. There’s a crucial difference between us and the people we are currently trying to blow to smithereens with million-pound missiles: we choose to pay to watch women being pretend raped rather than watching women being actually raped for free. |
| I wasn’t entertained. Can you tell? I saw it at a press screening two weeks before Christmas when the streets were filled with twinkly fairy lights and I tripped past a Salvation Army band playing Silent Night to spend what felt like several weeks in a dark room waiting – oh dear God, do you wait – for Leo to just get on and hack the other man to death so I could finally go home. A well-oiled publicity machine of the type that fuels an Academy Awards clean sweep has carefully leaked how gruelling the shoot was, how authentically the actors “suffered” in the making. (They got a bit cold, apparently.) And Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography – all shot in just a few hours of natural light each day – really is gorgeous. | I wasn’t entertained. Can you tell? I saw it at a press screening two weeks before Christmas when the streets were filled with twinkly fairy lights and I tripped past a Salvation Army band playing Silent Night to spend what felt like several weeks in a dark room waiting – oh dear God, do you wait – for Leo to just get on and hack the other man to death so I could finally go home. A well-oiled publicity machine of the type that fuels an Academy Awards clean sweep has carefully leaked how gruelling the shoot was, how authentically the actors “suffered” in the making. (They got a bit cold, apparently.) And Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography – all shot in just a few hours of natural light each day – really is gorgeous. |
| Director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s idea was for it to look as real as possible. Which would have been magnificent if there was something in the way of a story or any meditation on the nature of retribution or anyone – anyone – that you could give one toss about, but there’s not. So the landscape is chilling and the violence is pointless and the whole thing is meaningless. A vacuous revenge tale that is simply pain as spectacle. The Revenant is pain porn. | Director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s idea was for it to look as real as possible. Which would have been magnificent if there was something in the way of a story or any meditation on the nature of retribution or anyone – anyone – that you could give one toss about, but there’s not. So the landscape is chilling and the violence is pointless and the whole thing is meaningless. A vacuous revenge tale that is simply pain as spectacle. The Revenant is pain porn. |
| And in all probability, it will win every Oscar going. Critics have lavishly praised its “visceral” imagery, its “authentic” feel; it is, they say, “immersive” film-making at its finest. Though, arguably, not as immersive as putting a camera in a cage and then setting a man on fire. Have you seen that one? Where the man is burned alive? It’s not by González Iñárritu, but Isis. It wasn’t nominated for anything but the pain is even more real, more visceral, more – what was the word, thrilling? – than DiCaprio’s. | And in all probability, it will win every Oscar going. Critics have lavishly praised its “visceral” imagery, its “authentic” feel; it is, they say, “immersive” film-making at its finest. Though, arguably, not as immersive as putting a camera in a cage and then setting a man on fire. Have you seen that one? Where the man is burned alive? It’s not by González Iñárritu, but Isis. It wasn’t nominated for anything but the pain is even more real, more visceral, more – what was the word, thrilling? – than DiCaprio’s. |
| But then, all of Isis’s video output is inspired by our own entertainments – in its subject matter, its soundtrack, its editing. Islamic State hasn’t invented new narrative tropes, it’s simply lifted them straight from Hollywood. All it’s done is to go one step further, trumped Hollywood at its own game. It has seen what we want, what we thrill to, and given it to us. If there were grizzly bears in the Syrian desert, there’s no doubt that they’d put one in a cage and let us see what it really looks like when one rips a man apart. | But then, all of Isis’s video output is inspired by our own entertainments – in its subject matter, its soundtrack, its editing. Islamic State hasn’t invented new narrative tropes, it’s simply lifted them straight from Hollywood. All it’s done is to go one step further, trumped Hollywood at its own game. It has seen what we want, what we thrill to, and given it to us. If there were grizzly bears in the Syrian desert, there’s no doubt that they’d put one in a cage and let us see what it really looks like when one rips a man apart. |
| The Revenant isn’t responsible for this. It’s simply the kind of tedious, emotionally vacant film that has certain critics and Academy Award judges wetting their pants. Don’t pay £10-£15. You might as well wait for it to come out on Netflix and fall asleep on your own sofa. Or stay awake and enjoy the raping and somebody or other getting a machete in the head just for the hell of it. Or just wait for the next Isis offering. | The Revenant isn’t responsible for this. It’s simply the kind of tedious, emotionally vacant film that has certain critics and Academy Award judges wetting their pants. Don’t pay £10-£15. You might as well wait for it to come out on Netflix and fall asleep on your own sofa. Or stay awake and enjoy the raping and somebody or other getting a machete in the head just for the hell of it. Or just wait for the next Isis offering. |
| Your choice, though perhaps we could all try and act a little less surprised by the Islamic State’s next video spectacular. Or ask ourselves why pain and suffering and brutalising women and pointless, fetishistic violence – when it’s done by Hollywood – wins awards. Or why we’re so keen for it to look “real”. What neurotransmitters are we releasing? What thirst are we slaking? Isis’s films are simply the next logical step of our films. Their culture is actually our culture too. Isis hasn’t invented any of this. It is just a bit more honest about it. More “authentic”. More “visceral”. More “real”. | Your choice, though perhaps we could all try and act a little less surprised by the Islamic State’s next video spectacular. Or ask ourselves why pain and suffering and brutalising women and pointless, fetishistic violence – when it’s done by Hollywood – wins awards. Or why we’re so keen for it to look “real”. What neurotransmitters are we releasing? What thirst are we slaking? Isis’s films are simply the next logical step of our films. Their culture is actually our culture too. Isis hasn’t invented any of this. It is just a bit more honest about it. More “authentic”. More “visceral”. More “real”. |