White of the Eye (1986)

 

Director: Donald Cammell

Screenplay: China Kong and Donald Cammell

Based on Mrs. White by Margaret Tracy (a.k.a. Andrew Klavan and Laurence Klavan)

Cast: David Keith as Paul White; Cathy Moriarty as Joan White; Alan Rosenberg as Mike Desantos; Art Evans as Detective Charles Mendoza; Michael Greene as Phil Ross; Danielle Smith as Danielle White; Alberta Watson as Anne Mason; William G. Schilling as Harold Gideon; David Chow as Fred Hoy

An Abstract Candidate

 

Because you can't change a channel, man. Future or past.

Your introduction to White of the Eye, a serial killer drama with a mystical and unsettled edge, is a series of shots within its setting of Tucson, Arizona, which alongside the soundtrack by Rick Fenn and Nick Mason, forces the viewer to experience the atmosphere of the environment, abstract in tone. The shock of the film soon after also sums up how unprepared you will be, even if the plot on paper is a traditional thriller, as the first murder scene of a suburban upper class woman continues the disconcerting rhythms and choices for shots. In a perfect white kitchen, among the glamour of the eighties in the cutlery and equipment within it, blood intermingles with the meat dish a goldfish is placed into, and wine and blood mixes against white walls and counters, all in a series of edits and cuts dismantling the imagery.

The films I have found myself obsessing over are those that cannot be easily defined - by genre and tone - and Donald Cammell's White of the Eye has clear things to its plot but undercuts it with a significant tonal choices. Margaret Tracy, the author of the source material, befitting a story about secrets is actually two men, Andrew Klavan and Laurence Klavan, Andrew Klavan of note as a crime and mystery author, one whose work has also been adapted into films like Don't Say a Word (2001). Irony is not lost that, Klavan the proud "unwoke" American conservative, ended up with his novel adapted by Donald Cammell, the complete and utter antithesis in persona in his tragically short life, but likewise, White of the Eye as with the other films, only four, in the director's career undermines the source material for a greater weight. Follow a person who is killing women, interconnected with the life of Joan White (Cathy Moriarty) and her happy marriage to her husband Paul White (David Keith), a supernaturally talented audio equipment specialist, you would find this plot in a paperback thriller and even a TV movie, not dismissive as comments from me but how graspable these plot points and the obvious plot twists you read into can be. White of the Eye, as with the few other films in Cammell's filmography, is a deliberately peculiar film, at odds with its standardised serial killer plot - someone killing women and performing gristly rituals in the aftermath - even in how only having two murder scenes are shown, in fragments and aftermath.

Instead, it concerns itself with Paul and Joan White, Paul a potential suspect for the police, and Joan's romantic view of him slowly turning along the running time. Considering this was made by the Cannon Group, a company that brought legitimately great contributions but also contrasted them with pulpy films like the American Ninja films, this feels appropriately one of their productions, feeling like the two sides of their work bleeding into each other like some of their best productions did. It is a film, mostly in truth, about a family unit falling to pieces, which however is placed within a gristly psychodrama of the most elliptical and unsettling of ways. Even that the breaking point is when Joan suspects her husband is having an affair feels appropriate for even a made-for-TV weepy, but the tone sets the film out greatly alongside how the story, slowly, itself is told with far more disconcerting aspects, quirks and nuances. His co-writer and widow, China Cammell, deserves as much praise as the co-author, adapting a novel which has touches in general which, when a character starts talking about the television in his head, are strange but fit the tone. It has a lived in reality, with side characters like a cafe owner, allowed moments to breath, alongside moments which take one back on purpose, asking why the shots were there on the first viewing, like abruptly cutting a side character, a police officer, flossing his teeth for no seemingly necessary reason in extreme close-up.

Cammell, co-director of Performance (1970) with Nicolas Roeg, became more potent an author for that film, even if Roeg became a unique figure in his own right. The sense of unpredictability with the tone there is as much found here. One key detail to how this film is told is in the flashbacks with Jean's first lover Mike Desantos (Alan Rosenberg), complicated when Desantos appears again in the main narrative. A daughter is between them all who could be harmed by this is also the obvious dramatic tension, whether this was the film it came to be or "more conventional", but likewise emphasises the tragedy of what presents the idyll life - happiness, a home in the Arizona countryside, the pet dog and tranquilly - only it has been built on a psychosis.

What the film does however around this content is more ill-at-ease, more gradually paced. Filmed in the eighties - prosperity, ridiculous perms on both genders' heads, slasher films and the Italian giallo murder mysteries of the sixties and seventies at their most lurid when the eighties came - it misses the real meat to merely say it is a critique on American ideology. The location of Arizona feels like an outside world only connected by the fashion and trends of the era, and the country music in the soundtrack, sung or playing on the soundtrack, is far too clearly sincere, for a genre that can be mocked but is also a sincere and emotionally strong part of Americana, itself adding the ill-ease with a lot of the music about heartbreak and despair, it itself aptly a genre like the blues about the tragedy apparently found in tranquil life. This film is set in a place here instead abstract with expensive audio systems, cars and kitchens which is more general, that in this apparent bliss, regardless of era and nationality, regardless of how much the kitchens cost, people can be both wonderful human beings on the outside but psychologically psychopathic. The abrupt explanation to why the killer does what they do is simplistic; the monologue appears a really ridiculous giallo or another Cannon Group production, but it befits the shift into the strange already here. From the cut to the flossed teeth to a goldfish in a Pyrex dish, this film from the get-go is uncomfortable and is much so because it is weird as it is nasty. Here you can literally find the worse nightmare just in a certain part of the bath, in a scene that would not leave many viewers' minds involving a mere thread. The landscape outside is wonderful, from dunes to vast plains, but it is isolated, the drama between the co-authors warping a novel into a world where the worst in human beings can exist in the apparent complacency of public, commercial life.

Early on, you could have read a cheap dig at the author of Andrew Klaven which could reveal this author's politic beliefs, but honestly, with little knowledge of him up to creating this review, it is instead, for a vague figure now in my knowledge I may never met or have fleshed out at all, an apt jumping off point to talk about these type of serial killer films with White of the Eye. In the grand scheme, thrillers could easily be a cheap excuse to explain the world through a conservative, black-and-white morality of good and bad, the idea that Dirty Harry is the hero for shooting a serial killer when, even if the 1971 original film has its cake and eat it, it came from a muddy ground where, unfortunately, the only person that could fight a monster is a monster himself in his attitude. Giallo are inherently exaggerated, the id onscreen for good and bad in aesthetics, style and transgressions, whilst the idea of the mystery thriller about a serial killer could be argued as being far less defendable than the Italian cousins. Many, for film or television, feel like they happily placate a vicarious desire for morbid death and mutilation, with the clean cut notion a cop or detective being able solve it the escape pad to not feel you are just ingesting in delight over dead bodies.

It would take more weight to deal with a serial killer, in real life or on a page, and many giallo murder mysteries are about corrupt people, usually middle class, bumping each other and a poor person finding themselves within as the improvised detective in the middle of it. Alongside how here the police are actually down-to-earth and alien to the trumped up notion of the arm of the law, ordinary Joes trying to work around these gristly murders, even butting heads with outside law enforcement, White of the Eye is compelling as it is entirely focused on a family disintegrating. The plot twist - [Huge Spoiler] that Paul is the killer [Spoiler Ends] - is incredibly obvious from the get-go, but that reveal is the start of the ultimate tragedy.   

Very little violence is shown. The most gore shed, reminiscent of Dario Agrento's Tenebrae (1982) and his fixation for pale white walls and blood, is a tomato sauce being splattered in the opening, the change still vile in suggestion of the brutality shown. A reminder of Peeping Tom (1960) that horrifies appears later on, with a mirror being shown to the victim of another sequence. Everything is ready to break into said violence without explicit mutilation. Paul White is not what he is expected to be, his wife showing her rage openly when it feels he has betrayed her, and Mike Desantos is someone who was violent before, released from jail and with apparent mental illness, comes as the wisest figure even when talking about a TV in his head. Summing up the reveal of the worse in a person, even if an absurd take on misogyny, as being stuck with reruns in the head TV if perfect, as flashbacks to the original relationships between the three bleeds into the current day, slowly complicating and showing the grim reality of the situation.

And then the film goes insane on purpose. The tone, even with its violence, before the final act was calmer, eerie with its score by 10cc's Rick Fenn and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, but even their score starts to become tense, bringing a sense of growing horror to the situation in the narrative. That this even has a sense of humour, if a bleak one, is apt, where you find yourself briefly wondering if a character actually strapped hotdogs to themselves, something the daughter as a child presumes, only to consider the fact that it is dynamite inherently bizarre still in itself. The delirious tone by this point may be seen as out-of-place, except for the fact throughout the film there has been weird humour, strange touches, alongside the fact that Donald Cammell's tiny career has these strange and divisive touches for many - Performance where it cuts to Mick Jagger's song Memo from Turner and turns into a music video; Demon Seed (1977) and its premise as general, about a computer that ultimate wants to conceive a child with Julie Christie; Wild Life (1995) having an extended scene of Christopher Walken, as a crime boss, threatening to literally bugger one of his henchmen. The organised chaos of the tone that White of the Eye develops into still conveys the most animalist in people, even if the content is silly on paper. The acting has a rawness throughout, worth praising especially from Moriarty, turning into a madden frenzy when that finale takes place. When logical reality is replaced with the notion of heightened emotions affecting that reality, it has an immensely powerful effect. The result, far from ridiculous in an undermining way, is adding to the disturbing nature of what takes place.

The film switches through time periods with fluidity, blurring them together. The editing, a trademark in Cammell's small filmography, breaks scenes and moments to lingering pieces when needed. Cammell, in both scenes of violence and out of them, examines objects in extreme close-ups, adding a layer that makes them new. That the film looks like a glossy eighties Cannon Group film, going against the content inside, befits this. Night scenes are intentionally grainy and vague, creating a tone to even love scenes by the fire where it is all not it seems. The flashback tale is intentionally washed out in tone. The music by Rick Fenn and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason adds as well to the film, atmospheric and adding a ghostly edge. The result, on paper, feels like a film anyone could make. The result, onscreen, called White of the Eye is not, which leaves with the aftershock of what has happened. As an expression of the failures of the family unit, it uses its distortion to startle.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Disturbing/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium