Friday 29 May 2020

Broken (1993)



Directors: Peter Christopherson (with contributions by Serge Becker, Eric Goode and Jon Reiss)
Screenplay: Trent Reznor

The origin of Broken, a mythic production hidden in the history of the band Nine Inch Nails, originates from Trent Reznor hating his record label. This will not be the last time nor was it the first, his animosity with TVT Records just one of many. Famously or infamously from this era, Prince would being performing in the ninety nineties with "slave" branded on his forehead, calling himself "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" and be very happy when Warner Bros. finally cut their ties to him by realising two three disc epics. Most disgruntled musicians do not get a fake snuff film created as the visuals for a new EP (extended play). That is why the short film is notorious and, alongside how it has been treated by Reznor himself over the years, is why it is being covered.

The Broken album itself, not an LP (long play) but less than thirty minutes, is well respected and certainly is held as significant in the early days of Nine Inch Nails, with many still thinking of songs like Wish and Happiness in Slavery among the band's biggest songs. It is, in hindsight, from all its lyrics and in context a fuck you from Reznor to TVT Records, where the infamous phrase "fist fuck" from Wish is now for me clearly what he imagined they were doing to him continually. Contextually, he had only released one album, Pretty Hate Machine (1989), a guy in his twenties who started recording material in his off time working in a recording studio, getting some interest as a result. Only in a few years, however, he felt his back was against the wall and felt the Broken album, recorded in multiple places for secrecy, was a needed act of catharsis. He however decided to go further than this.

That required the director Peter Christopherson, one of the founding members of seminal industrial band Throbbing Gristle, one of the founding members of Coil, and who was also a member of Hipgnosis, a British design agency whose legacy in album covers is significant. Structured with music videos interspliced in-between from other directors, the Broken film covers all the tracks on the EP barring the track Last and the cover songs that were included at the end of the album. The first images are in stark, gloomy black and white of a man awaiting his execution by hanging. Afterwards, we immediately cut to grimy videotape footage of a man being taken captive in a garage by another man, interspliced with scenes before of the later driving around in a car with the intention of picking up a victim from a working to poverty class area of a community.

The fake snuff film, which will get increasingly more brutal as various forms of torture will transpire, begins with the victim being forced fed gasoline/petrol, and I will elaborate now as a nod to how the film will follow from this that this short, in context of the period of underground and splatter films I have seen from the era, immediately sets itself up as something still unsettling and disturbing decades on before you get to how utterly disturbing the film will get. We will elaborate on that however a little later.

The first film-within-a-film is for the instrumental piece Pinion, and whilst I have reservations about the entire Broken project, almost all the films (shot in rich black-and-white baring Wish) are evocative and of an incredible artistic merit, this one in particular of striking simplicity following a toilet whose pipe is connected to the mouth of a gimp wrapped up like a rubber turkey. That is a really glib joke to suddenly place in what is a review of an incredible dark, still gruesome music art project, but the Pinion segment has to be called as it is in its strangeness, arguably one of Broken's most effective visual sequences and a perfect set up for what is the intro of the album itself.

The next, for Wish, is definitely the most embarrassing and sadly derails the twenty minute short. As an idea, a combination of a post apocalypse if inside one of the gay leather bars from Cruising (1980) and cast members of a circus acrobat show is sound. What you get however is a young Trent Reznor looking awkward in leather chaps for what is a tedious music video of a band playing, the kind I saw in countless videos in the early 2000s on Kerrang TV and developed an aversion of as a result. Help Me I Am in Hell is thankfully another instrumental piece set to an evocative and a needed change of pace, an intentionally surreal sequence of a man trying to enjoy his steak dinner in a room where he and his food is covered in flied. Both this segment and Pinion were directed by Serge Becker and Eric Goode

Next is however arguably one of Nine Inch Nails' most famous videos, notorious in itself for Happiness in Slavery, directed by Jon Reiss. This segment for me is a high point for the Broken project, both for its execution and arguably as much because it involves performance artist Bob Flanagan. Flanagan, a performance artist and writer, was born with cystic fibrosis, the agony of which he wished to overcome in his practice of sadomasochism, the pain he likely experienced in his constant treatment for his condition probably not as painful as hammering a nail into his own penis, something he did as part of his performance work and is witnessed in the documentary on his life and career, SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997).


Flanagan's appearance alone already adds to this striking piece. It is still grotesque, a ritualistic suicide chamber where Flanagan eventually is completely naked and with what appears to be modified tongs in close-up clenching around his testicles at one point, willingly part of a torture machine that will eventually kill him. The images of a man entering this death chamber, lighting a candle and proceeding to his own destruction on a mechanised bed is impactful, down to that he is grounded down into literal worm food. Knowing the Broken EP is Reznor's anger at his label it is a very obvious metaphor for the grinder of the music industry. Helping it considerably though is how distinct and eerie it is, the music complimenting and complimented by the perfect images, including Reznor lighting his own candle and preparing to be the next person to enter. It is with good reason people know of this music video by itself.

The finale, set to the last original track Gave Up, cuts between another striking monochrome sequence, of police finding a house filled with rotting bodies and limbs in refrigerators as a crime scene, and the breaking point where the masked killer in the fake video proceeds to rip the victim to pieces. This includes castration (not explicitly seen), use of a blow torch (managing with pretty decent effects to make this work) and chainsaw dismemberment are among what transpire as the frenzy imbued in the song soundtracks this atrocity. As mentioned earlier, this is a bar higher than most extreme I have seen from this era for video or other formats, the closest thing to this extremity being the German shot-on-video film The Burning Moon (1992), which even then feels over the top and more obviously fake in comparison.

Altogether, I admire Broken in its disgusting glory, but I will admit that it does feel like it would have suffocated the music itself with how extreme it is. If the short film had been released, Trent Reznor would have caused a controversy that could have helped him in reputation but could have hurt him in a precarious period.

It succeeds as an uncomfortable experience, but a poignant detail is that, even when we still have the infamous music video for Closer to still appear, with a crucified monkey among other sequences, Nine Inch Nails changed drastically over only a few years after this. Broken the film is still too uncomfortably close to the likes of Cannibal Corpse's albums covers in terms of visceral extremity, where Pretty Hate Machine was more Goth nihilism, and Nine Inch Nails would change and be sculpted over the years into more interesting directions. The band is Trent Reznor, which fans are aware of, and he has changed. It is significant that, as a fan with a lot of the band still left to discover, the albums I got into Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor's work were Year Zero (2007) and The Slip (2008). This is long after Reznor hit mainstream success with The Downward Spiral (1994), toured with David Bowie, and combated drug addiction. Year Zero was the work of an older veteran, whose health and priority to it lead to a literal transformation to a performer utterly alien to the gaunt and pale twenty or so year old in the Wish video. This was not a time of nihilistic self destruction, but a dystopian novel in an album, one where the additional games played with fans in real life were as important. The Slip, once released for free as Reznor finally got sick of music labels and took his ball home, is not held highly but I feel in love with. This period also led to him eventually collaborating with Atticus Ross, which alongside April Fool's Jokes1, led to a side of Reznor so different to the man from the Broken era, especially when he eventually co-created a soundtrack with Ross for a Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War.

The history of Broken the short is one as notorious for its history. Certainly in the early nineties when it was made, circumstances suggest even the creators were uncomfortable with what they had created. Director Christopherson felt uncomfortable with how effective the video was, especially as when you had a bootleg of a bootleg of the video when it was leaked, it would have looked like an actual snuff film. Meanwhile, this was also the time to the recording of The Downward Spiral when Reznor was living at the 10050 Cielo Drive mansion, notoriously the home where Sharon Tate and others were murdered by members of the Manson Family. Testimony from him says he found out about this and did stay at the mansion to record the album with knowledge of this, which in hindsight from a younger musician was a poor choice. It did however probably did not help when it came to Broken as, when he finally saw the final results, a thought occurred to him that how disturbing it was would have crossed a line that would, as I feel, have compromised attention away from the music itself2.

Now, you could say it was hypocritical of him to do what he did, secretly leak tapes out, but in an interesting detail, the original hand-dubbed tapes were initially distributed to his friends, even having technological glitches intentionally added in order to let him know who leaked any copies that might surface. (He has even suggested that Gibby Haynes, lead singer of the Butthole Surfers, was probably the person responsible for the most prominent leak3).

Reznor, wisely, whilst never releasing the Broken short has made the project available continually, which I do not consider in the current day hypocritical for him as time has passed and, now that the notoriety is for the fans of Nine Inch Nails who would be interested, he has made a decision that does not suppress it either, be it secretly releasing the short on torrent on Pirate Bay, an attempt to have it streaming on Vimeo, even a secret link on the NIN website like as gruesome Easter Egg. The notoriety and secrecy is now the gimmick, and it is not in bad taste or wrong for him to do so, especially as a man who, alongside transforming considerably as a person over the years since the Broken EP in his own work, has been a vary savvy person who takes account of his audience, even releasing both free albums and also compiling fan remixes into canonical work. He is not a person to bury his past, and whilst I have my reservations about Broken, it is entirely because it feels at odds to the older veteran I came to his music from, this a part of this band's history I accept and I am glad is not ignored.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric/Grotesque/Oppressive
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None


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1) HERE
2) HERE
3) HERE

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