Category: Movies

Movies

Prometheus Gets Bogged Down by Bad Creationism

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I guess I should have know what I was in for after seeing the movie posters with a head reminiscent of the statues from Easter Island, but I had seen the trailers for Prometheus a couple of months before the movie debuted. The music from Alien was used, along with a similar chase scene, making me think I was in for another hunter-hunted story like Alien delivered. But no, I was duped once again.

What did I want from Prometheus? I wanted an explanation for how the aliens came to be and why those pods were hanging out in a spaceship, like Venus flytraps, waiting for willing victims to dock. A simple explanation would have sufficed, but instead Prometheus delivers a heavy-handed origin story that references world mythologies, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Christianity. The movie creaked with all the symbolism and religious overtones loaded into it, and all I really wanted to see was a good sci-fi/horror story. I didn’t need everything else about where we come from. I look to Joseph Campbell for that, or simple stories that hit the right points.

Prometheus opens with a humanoid character drinking something coffeelike that causes him to disintegrate—he falls down a waterfall into a stream and his blood and specifically his DNA and chromosomes start to corrode and morph. I’m guessing this is an allusion to the original Prometheus, which is never completely followed up. Flash-forward to a similar environment several thousands of years later, where a team of archaeologists have uncovered an artwork that corresponds with that of four other ancient civilizations, who could have had no contact with one another. The two archaeologists, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Halloway (Logan Marshall-Green), puzzle over what the message means; they interpret it as an invitation.

The two are then shown in stasis aboard a ship as an android, David (Michael Fassbender), tends to them. David acts like a kid left home alone with complete access to the ship for years while the others sleep. He plays basketball in the large, arenalike spaces. He taps into the dreams of the crewmembers in stasis. He watches a movie over and over again, mimicking the speech patterns; studies a language that seems vaguely Arabic; and cuts, dyes, and styles his hair so as to appear as one of the characters that he likes to watch.

Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) is the first human to wake from sleep and informs the android David to wake the others. I appreciate how the chronological time order of the Alien series is considered at this point, and the humans coming out of sleep have a rough time of it, spewing all over. In movies that are supposed to have come later in the time line (though they were filmed earlier), the human subjects rise from years-long sleep easily, seeming only to crave some food and coffee.

The crew is summoned and realize that they are chasing the dreams of a very rich and old man, who says he will be dead before they come back to Earth. Their ship is docked outside of a large, unnatural structure, and they go exploring. Inside, they find holograms depicting what happened thousands of years ago, some nonorganic “pods,” and fossils of these humanoids (called Engineers by the archaeologists), who turn out to have the same DNA as humans. A storm comes up, artifacts are brought back to the ship, and the crew is split up. Some cross-contamination occurs, and then the real purpose behind the mission is revealed, which seems to cancel out the first three-fourths of the story.

There are some good things in Prometheus. There’s some great acting by Charlize Theron, Noomi Rapace, Idris Elba, and Michael Fassbender, but the motivations for these actors’ characters all fall a little short by the end. Some nice, gory parts crop up in the film, one in particular with Noomi Rapace in an impossible situation, hanging on with pure grit. However, these good bits get lost when the screenwriters, director, whoever, try and weight this movie with more importance than it can support. Allusions are made to great works, but their meanings are lost because they’re not used effectively. It all seems like so much great material thrown to the wall and what happened to stick is Prometheus, which comes off as flimsy considering its origins.

Movies

2011 The Thing Is Just Meh

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Last week we experienced our first summerlike days and nights with temperatures in the high eighties and lots of humidity. It was too early to turn on the air conditioner, so I kept cool another way: by opening a can of frosty beer and popping in a DVD of an Antarctica-based horror movie. You can think yourself cold this way.

The 2011 version of The Thing is billed as a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing, and I think that’s where the movie goes wrong. It starts out so sincerely, trying to root the movie in the early 1980s. Grad student Kate Lloyd, a paleontologist, who ends up being the lead in this movie, gets a little tired while working in the lab so she slips on large, wonky headphones and pushes a button on her Walkman to listen to Men at Work. I thought, Aw, how cute.

Later, she’s recruited by a scientist and his American assistant, and the illusion is ruined for me. The grad student and assistant end up looking like kids from my neighborhood. It made me think, Did they do the casting call at my local bar?

These scientists are transported to the Norwegian base in Antarctica where an unnamable “Thing” has been found, and I tried to line up the similarities that fit with the opening of J.C.’s The Thing. There are a few characters who could physically pass for the living and videotaped Norwegians from J.C.’s The Thing, and they’ve got a husky. Okay. I tried to will myself back to a certain time in 1982, a few months before the Thing bursts into the American camp, but I found it impossible.

The sets are too shiny and new. The equipment is streamlined and compact. Don’t these people know anything about the ’80s? Everything was big and clunky and buzzed with electricity. As I followed these characters, I had a very hard time believing that they are functioning in a world, a time, without palm-held devices that tell them everything.

I can see that the filmmakers are being respectful to J.C.’s The Thing, trying not to step on any toes. Instead, they make many homages to the 1982 version, replicating many scenes with just a little twist. But nothing new is brought to the table in this 2011 version. I found myself just not caring anymore, especially when the tenuous links to the opening scenes of J.C.’s The Thing are destroyed. I thought I had been watching the prequel here. Now, it turns out there’s a pre-prequel?

Later, in the very ending credits, after the Norwegian/American team is killed off, a new crew comes in, and now things start lining up with the beginning of J.C.’s The Thing. These scenes are shown in eyeblinks, and it turns out that this is the “prequel” I was duped into watching.

I have to say I felt cheated, but looking at all the ice did make me feel a little bit cooler on this early summer night. Next time, though, I’m going to be cooling off using John Carpenter’s The Thing or maybe the X-Files episode “Ice” that brings a different take to the Thing story line.

This prequel to a classic horror movie also has me a little worried about the upcoming Alien prequel that’s coming out this week, Prometheus. Am I going to get a satisfying backstory to one of the scariest creatures of all time, or is Ridley Scott going to do me wrong?

Books, Movies

Headhunters Shows Gory Side of Today’s Workforce

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I started out on Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series, which is quite dark, but last year after returning from Germany, I thought I would give his stand-alone novel Headhunters a try. It was a bit of a challenge going from Harry Hole’s nihilistic worldview to the supercilious one of Roger Brown, but once he scolds a potential candidate for his headhunting agency with this, I was hooked:

“My God, man, you applied for this job! What you should have done was to set up a straw man to tip us off and then pretend you knew nothing about it when we contacted you. A top man has to be headhunted, not arrive ready-killed and all carved up.”

This just reminds me so much of the economic climate we’re in today and how desperation is the kiss of death when you’re job hunting.

The last place where I did in-house work as an editor, the company first made me sign up with a temp agency—that was how they handled their payroll. (I later found out that some of the company’s “temps” had been there for years—one for up to seven years, I believe—and still were not considered full-time employees.) While I sat at a computer entering my employment information and so on, I heard the voices of desperate people, who were put on speakerphone, begging and pleading for jobs, and this is what Headhunters reminded me of—the lengths that people will go to in order to secure jobs.

Headhunters takes this issue and warps it deliciously into a Neanderthal kill-or-be-killed game. Roger Brown is an agent at a top headhunting firm and is looking to fill a position at a defense weapons company, which could be quite lucrative for him. However, the agency does not pay him enough to support his lifestyle and that of his beautiful wife, who’s recently started an art gallery on his dime, or krone, I should say. To subsidize their way of life, Brown is part of an elaborate art heist scheme, and he uses his job to find worthy pieces.

He discovers Clas Greve at his wife’s gallery opening and starts salivating. Here’s the man who would be a worthy candidate for the company he’s currently headhunting for. The man also has an original Rubens piece that was believed to be lost in World War II. Suddenly Brown is desperate to recruit Greve—for both the commission and the artwork—until he finds out that his wife is sleeping with the man. That’s when all hell breaks loose.

After reading the book, I found out that a Norwegian movie version had been made of the book, but it hadn’t been put out yet in the United States so I had to patiently wait.

A week ago it was finally in New York theaters, and I was able to see it with my friend Allie. Enough time had elapsed between reading the book and seeing the movie that I had forgotten some of the pivotal plot twists and truly was surprised when they occurred onscreen. All in all, the Norwegian version of Headhunters has stayed amazingly close to the source material of the book, including keeping in the truly cringe-worthy moments of the story. I’m afraid the upcoming U.S. version of the movie might have to avoid that, but time will tell.

 

Another thing I like about the Norwegian version of the movie is how real the people look—except for Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who Allie says looks like a male model. For the most part, the movie’s characters remind me of people that I see on the sidewalk, in coffee shops, while shopping; they’re not from that airbrushed fairyland of Hollywood. I hope that when the U.S. version of Headhunters is made, they keep the people real to reflect American society and the current economy. The story really isn’t too far from the truth about what people will do to get a job or support themselves.

Movies, Personal

The Exorcist at 80

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During a mini–family reunion many years ago, my mother’s side of the family piled into cars and pickup trucks to go to the nursing home where my great-grandmother lived. When we got there, my great-grandma was still laying down for her nap, and we had to mill around in the common room waiting for her.

I had worked in a nursing home during high school and my first few years of college so I knew what to expect. Nursing homes are all about routine, getting up and laying down. The days are built around that and three meals, which are generally the most exciting things going on during the day. The conversation can go on for a whole hour between roommates, discussing what had been eaten for dinner.

I sat down in the TV/common room for a good, long wait, knowing the lifting, diapering, and denture scrubbing that would go on before my great-grandmother appeared. I can’t remember what was on the TV before the creepy intro music of The Exorcist came on, but this little old lady was just ecstatic when she heard it and pulled her purple chair up close to the TV, cooing, “Oh, The Exorcist. This is a really good one. It’s scary.”

She rose pretty high on my old-lady-idol list right there, because that’s exactly what I aim to be: eighty and watching The Exorcist. My mom had her camera out to take snapshots of her grandma, and I begged her, “Mom, please, please, please, take a picture of this.” She did, and in one of those moments of right-on timing, she got the nursing home residents gathered around the old-school TV set just as the title flashed for the movie. It’s one of my all-time favorite pictures, and I’ll be forever grateful to my mother who’s indulged my quirks since birth. Actually, she probably gave them to me.

Movies

Top Five Horror Movies Featuring Old People

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My Girls Write Now mentee hates horror movies, but she likes to make sure I’m keeping up on mine. A few months ago, Danni and I were talking on the phone about writing projects, but then we got to horror movies and she wanted to know if I was excited to see Cabin in the Woods and The Raven. At the time I hadn’t even heard of them, so she e-mailed me the trailers; then she asked me, “Why are so many horror movies about teenagers?” I gave her what I’ve been told so many times—that one of the scary things about being a teenager is having your body change so dramatically in such a short amount of time and a horror movie mimics or shows what a teen might be feeling inside and outside. Then I told her that not all horror movies are about teenagers, and I would make her a list of some. So here it is: my top five list of horror movies featuring old people.

1. CRONOS: This one’s got a special place in my heart since it was my first horror magazine assignment. I was supposed to be reporting on a cult movie Raw Meat, but the magazine I was working for couldn’t get any art from the movie. Thankfully, Guillermo del Toro was introducing Raw Meat as an inspiration for his work, and he talked quite a bit about Hellboy, which was in preproduction at the time, and that ended up being my first horror movie article. At this event, del Toro showed his first full-length feature Cronos about a vampiric device created in the Middle Ages that gives users eternal life. An elderly antique dealer stumbles upon it and is menaced by the nephew of a dying man who will stop at nothing to get his hands on it. Ron Perlman plays the nephew, and this movie is the beginning of the artist-muse relationship shared by Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman. It gets extra points for the most innovative use of a toy box that I’ve ever seen.

2. ROSEMARY’S BABY: Though Rosemary (Mia Farrow) is barely out of her teens in this movie, I chose this one because of the evil old people that surround her, never letting her make a move without commenting on it. Once Rosemary and her husband move into their dream apartment at the Bramford, the elderly in the building start to take an unusual interest in her. At a critical point in Rosemary’s pregnancy, which has been accompanied by constant pain, she decides to throw a dinner party and tells her husband, “I’m having a party for our old…I mean our young friends—Minnie and Roman are not invited. Neither is Laura-Louise nor is Dr. Sapirstein. It’s going to be a very special party. You have to be under sixty to get in.”

3. ALIEN: I think this is such a groundbreaking movie, and since it came out in 1979, not many other movies have been able to touch it. It starts out slow, building up the tension. We have a group of workers out in space starting their mission: They wake up, get dressed, eat a little something, drink coffee. Then they get their assignment, but it’s work—a little boring but something they have to do. First up, go check out this alien spaceship. They do, and worker Kane (John Hurt) provides the first scare of the movie with his alien rape from a pod, which leads to one of the scariest movie moments ever: the Alien birth scene. Probably the most brilliant part of this movie, though, is casting thirty-year-old Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. It was her first major film role, and she tore it up.

4. DAWN OF THE DEAD: While I love George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead, I prefer the 2004 remake because U.S. shopping habits have changed so much and that is the main point of the movie. After flesh-eating zombies have taken over the world, a few surviving humans hole up in a mall, which is perfect for their needs. There’s food, water, furniture, supplies, and most importantly, security. Zombies, too, are attracted to the mall, remembering it as a place of importance. I love the casting of nurse Ana (Sarah Polley); it’s always important to have a medical authority in a zombie apocalypse who can tell you exactly what’s going on. And Ving Rhames as tough guy Kenneth is a joy to watch. I enjoy apocalypse movies so much because you have a large cast representing the general population and how it reacts after Earth is blighted by a natural or “unnatural” disaster.

5. THE THING: This is such a scary movie, and I’m glad I didn’t see it until my twenties. My friend’s teenage daughter was permanently traumatized after seeing this one at a tender age. It starts brilliantly, a beautiful panning shot of mountains, white, and ice and endless expanses of it. You know these characters, working guys, are out in the middle of nowhere and nobody’s around to help them. A helicopter mercilessly chases a beautiful husky dog, taking shots at it. When the copter crashes, you’re glad because these guys were trying to shoot a beautiful dog, but later in the kennel, all hell breaks loose. I knew a few guys in college who modeled themselves after the main character MacReady (Kurt Russell)—to the point where they would only drink J & B whiskey. I’m still not sure if that was deliberate product placement or not. Knowing John Carpenter, probably not.

Looking back on this list, I see that all the movies have to do with body horrors—using a vampire device to stay young, giving birth to aliens or a devil, or fighting off dead people who want to eat you. So maybe there is some truth to teenage horror movies being rooted in that scary thing known as puberty. Anything I’ve left off the list? What are some other horror movies with older people that should be included?

Movies

Vincenzo Natali’s Splice

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I came out of the theater feeling rejuvenated after seeing Splice (directed and written by Vincenzo Natali). It’s been awhile since I’ve seen anything fresh and creative on the American horror front, and Splice hit the spot–a combination of The Bride of the Frankenstein crossed with Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum.

Splice stars the talented Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody as a pair of rock-star scientists, Elsa and Clive, who create a few genetically mutated monsters named Fred and Ginger that only a mother and father could love. Elsa and Clive are also romantically involved, and fortunately they do love their creations.

The scientific team’s primary responsibility is to mine Fred and Ginger for a synthetically produced protein that will aid humanity, but Elsa and Clive (especially Elsa) are champing at the bit to use human DNA in one of their creations. They eventually do, unknown to anybody else in their lab, and create a “child” with a rapidly accelerated growth rate who’s part supermodel, part dinosaur.

Elsa takes on the role of the mad Dr. Frankenstein, crossing all sorts of boundaries that shouldn’t be, while Clive serves as the conscience for the two scientists. What makes Splice especially twisted is how the mother-child relationship is bastardized. A mother’s love is usually held up as a paradigm–an unselfish love that’s supposed to transcend all others. The mother’s expected to be calm, patient, and nurturing toward her child, even in the nine months before the infant appears. Nothing seems to make the public angrier than an unfit mother–smoking and drinking while pregnant or beating on her kid in the supermarket.

Polley’s Elsa is the mother character toward her and Clive’s creation named Dren, providing the nurturing side while Clive wants to take a more objective, scientific view of their experiment, knowing its nature. When Dren becomes willful and Clive starts to have feelings for their experiment, Elsa turns against her creation and this change of heart seems much more horrific because the audience has seen how much love Elsa has already shown Dren.

I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the ending of Splice, but I have no problems with it. The movie raises so many questions about what is ethical behavior and what is not, and I rather liked the open-ended, ambiguous ending, which just gave me more to think about after leaving the theater.

Movies

Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard

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Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard is a fairy tale told by two pairs of sisters close in age. The first pair play the characters in the Charles Perrault story Bluebeard and are sent home from school after their father dies since there is no more money to pay for their education. The second pair of sisters locate a copy of Bluebeard in an out-of-the-way attic that they’re not sure is forbidden, and they tell each other the story (with their own variations) in tandem with the first pair. Which set of sisters will come to a violent end? In a Catherine Breillat film, it’s only a matter of time.

Sisters are a major theme in the Breillat films I’ve seen, Fat Girl and Bluebeard, with the younger sister playing the role of the put-upon child and the elder being the beautiful, arrogant one. With the two sets of sisters in Bluebeard, Breillat varies this arrangement somewhat, and it makes me think of sisters as they have appeared in fairy tales I’ve read or heard, where one is the most beautiful or the pluckiest or the most clever.

With the actual Bluebeard part of the movie, the contrasts are marked, which seems to be a crucial element of fairy tales. There is the family with two marriageable daughters shown dealing with mean poverty while the castle of Bluebeard and the feasts at his manor are displayed with grandeur and decadence. There is the child-aged and -sized bride contrasted with the much older, uglier, and mammoth groom. Her innocence with his experience, his kind, generous side with his unbending murderous side, and so on, and so on.

Bluebeard is an adult’s fairy tale that focuses on the darker side of human nature rather than the picture-perfect marriage of a princess at the end of a Disney cartoon. Here, the movie ends with two images: One similar to Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes and the other like one of the terrible ends that happens to Edward Gorey’s creations. It’s a movie that I think of in terms of images and colors rather than a story line.

Movies

Rod Stewart’s Sharkwater

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I’ve always loved sharks. When I lived in Guam, I can remember my second-grade class going on a field trip to see sharks. A woman stood on the inside edge of a tank, holding up a giant hook with a bloody piece of meat, and one of my classmates made a fake move to push her in with the white tips that swarmed below. She didn’t go in, but it was thrilling to think so for a minute. Though the white tips were enclosed in a dirty tank that was much too small for them, I could see their beauty and grace–perfectly proportioned, smooth, sleek … streamlined. They were built to go, go, go, because a shark can never stop swimming, or ironically, they will drown.

In Rod Stewart’s documentary Sharkwater, he, too, was bit by the shark bug early in his life and went on to become an underwater photographer so he could study the sharks up close, becoming familiar with their habits when they decided to go near him. Stewart portrays the sharks as wise creatures, not the ignorant water dinosaurs who will eat license plates if they come across them in the water, as shown in Jaws. He films schools of hammerheads from below near Cocos Island, a beautiful sequence that looks like nature’s ballet as the hammerheads go through their mating rituals. The hammerheads are so sensitive to electromagnetic energy, he says, that he has to keep his heart rate down in order not to scare off these sharks.

Then Stewart surfaces from the dive, and the true purpose of the documentary is revealed. Stewart’s boat comes across fishermen illegally line fishing, a process where up to sixty miles of fishing line is sunk into the sea, the line baited with thousands of hooks. The fishing boat flees the scene, and Stewart and his crew try to clean up the mess the best they can, releasing those fish and sharks that are still living. By the time Stewart finishes, he counts more than one hundred dead sharks.

The goal of line fishing is to catch as many sharks as possible, and any tuna or sea turtles that are captured by the lines–well, too bad for them. The sharks are brought up to the boat, where they are definned and then their corpses are thrown into the sea. The fins are a tasteless cartilage that’s mixed with chicken or beef broth to make shark-fin soup, a dish that has grown in popularity because it is seen as a status symbol, billed as “food of the emperors.” And shark fins bring in a lot of money, up to $200 a fin, so people can make a fortune very quickly. The sea shown here is an aquatic Wild West, and sharks are unfortunately the buffalo.

Stewart casts himself as the main character of this documentary, and he comes off as egotistical and overwrought at times, using a voice eerily similar to the Morpheus character from The Matrix, but with purple prose-like content. The section where he films himself in a hospital room, displaying his emotional anguish after catching the flesh-eating bacteria, is hard to stomach and hammers home the phrase conceited ape, which Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson uses in the film. I think Sharkwater would have resonated with me more if Stewart had stuck to giving the sharks first billing rather than himself.

Movies

Brotherhood of the Wolf directed by Christophe Gans

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Brotherhood of the Wolf is one of my favorite movies, and I wanted to watch it again during my current research, though it’s not technically a werewolf movie. During the reign of King Louis XV, a small French village is terrorized by a wolflike creature, with steel fangs and a spiny back, that will eat man, woman, or child. Besides an army regiment, the king sends forth his naturalist Grégoire de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan), along with the man’s companion, an American Indian named Mani (Mark Dacascos). This all takes place before the French Revolution, but the conditions that lead to the revolution are played up in the movie.

The naturalist de Fronsac falls in quickly with the powerful and rich de Morangias family, enchanted by the young daughter Marianne (Émilie Dequenne) while equally repelled by her one-armed brother Jean-François (Vincent Cassel, who always plays such a good bad guy). Marianne is watched over carefully by the town’s priest Sardis, her chastity worth much money, and through the portrayal of female villagers, aristocracy, and prostitutes in Brotherhood of the Wolf, it’s shown that the value of women in eighteenth-century France is mainly as sexual creatures. The women that appear to have the most freedom during this time period are the prostitutes, and the unlikely person who possesses the most power in this movie is Sylvia (Monica Bellucci), an intriguing Mary Magdalene character, who holds the key to all the secrets.

Despite all of the political, religious, and social maneuvering, the movie is not boring, and where the Brotherhood of the Wolf succeeds best, in my opinion, is in its violence, its lovely, beautiful violence. The harsh rural countryside is shown as the arena, and when the "wolf" hunts, action is shown through both its eyes and the omnipotent eye: jittery, bloody scenes, where the human is hunted and humbled. The violence serves a purpose like in Flannery O’Connor’s work–it is used to bring the villagers closer to the unexplainable, the mystical, or God.

The wolves are treated callously by the villagers in Brotherhood of the Wolf; they are vilified and slaughtered, seen as something evil. But in the cinematography and through the recurring white wolf motif, the director portrays wolves as majestic, mystical creatures–they are leaders, seers.

I think that is what I’ll take from this movie–the idea of wolves as noble animals.

Movies

Opera by Dario Argento

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I love ravens. My love affair started with them in college at the University of Iowa, where flocks of ravens would wing around the Pentacrest and other areas of the campus–it was so thrilling to watch, like nature’s fury unleashed, but with bodies attached. I’ve always been a fan of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and that’s been my golden standard for creepy use of birds, the strange alien intelligence they seem to have. Second in line is Sam Raimi’s ravens in A Simple Plan, a bad omen, symbol, used most effectively. But I think both are surely eclipsed by Dario Argento’s use of ravens in Opera. (Check out the link below for Opera‘s international trailer.)
www.youtube.com/watch
Opera begins with a fabulous opening shot from the perspective of reigning opera diva Mira (Daria Nicolodi) as she has a meltdown during her rehearsal for Verdi’s Macbeth when the ravens start attacking her. The camera jerks aggressively up and down and side to side as the diva, who we never see, makes her way from the stage and out of the theater to the street, all the while hurling insults and comments to those who dare get in her way. Mira is injured when a car fails to yield to her and runs her down.

The ingenue and understudy Betty (Cristina Marsillach) then gets her chance to step up as the lead at the opera house, but she has deep misgivings because in the theater world a debut as Lady Macbeth is bad luck. This production of Macbeth is put together by former horror director Marco (Ian Charleson), and though his crepe trappings are made fun of by the press, Betty is applauded for her brilliant debut.

It’s soon shown that Betty has deep psychological problems. She’s frigid due to something dark that happened in her childhood, which she doesn’t remember, and hates sex, proclaiming she’s "lousy at it." Shortly after Betty makes this announcement, a psychotic with shiny black leather gloves takes a fancy to her, tying her up so she’s immobile, a perfect audience, and taping needles beneath her eyes, forcing them wide open, so she has to see what he has to show her.
The psychotic then performs most artful murders that only Betty witnesses. When he is done, he lovingly caresses Betty’s body before freeing his captive audience.

I loved the ideas of performer and performance that are played on in Opera, and my favorite scene, when the ravens from the production of Macbeth take on a life of their own, wheeling around the auditorium and frightening the glitzy, well-heeled audience with more than they bargained for–that particular mise-en-scene is going to stay with me for a long time. Maybe forever.