Some of the fun of being a movie fan is making your own pairings that make sense for thematic reasons, or the same actors are in them, or same director, or whatever else you can think works. For me, I paired the films 8MM and HARDCORE and am shocked at how well they work together and inform one another. Two looks at the seedy underside of American lust and sin and the very dark alleys it takes one down.
Made in a different era, by a different director 8MM becomes pitch black and there is no room for anything but darkness. You have such a movie in A SERBIAN FILM, which more people seem to hate than have seen. That movie has no room for humanity in its portrayal of the vast nothingness that can sit at the heart of the porn industry.
It is a movie about falling and never hitting bottom. 8MM is more interested in the humans in the story and in looking at the horrors that the wealthy can pay to have done because they can. The idea of a sort of existential boredom, having done it all and seen it all so you push further into the darkness and take a seat with the devil to see if he can impress you.
Tool’s song Stinkfist makes me think of that too. The notion that we can become so desensitized, even to pleasure, that we push further and further out to find something to make us feel. Even revulsion.
For those who may not have seen it, 8MM is a film about a private detective being hired by a very wealthy woman to investigate an 8mm short film found in her dead husband’s belongings. The film seems to show a young girl being brutally murdered on film. The widow wants to know if the film is real. Thus the investigator, Nic Cage, delves deep into the darkness to discover whether this film is real or not, steeping into the shadows of the world of underground porn to find his answers.
The film is notorious both for what it is and what it isn’t. It was made in a time in Hollywood around when SE7EN was made which was Hollywood getting darker again but this came before that really had made its impact. It’s a dark film in an era where darkness was soft-pedaled. And it’s dark. It’s a film about the very nasty corners of porn and deals with snuff films, the making of a movie where someone is murdered on film. Snuff’s always been fascinating for me because I think it both does and doesn’t exist.
Do rich people pay to have people murdered?
Of course.
Has it ever been filmed?
Probably.
Is it distributed?
Lord, no.
And that’s the thing, there’s not that stuff OUT there to buy, really, but then there’s all many of nasty porn in the world that wallows in the gutter so has something ever slipped by?
Maybe.
Whatever it is, it’s not what we think.
Heck, you can go online and watch people die all day, if you really want that.
For many though, 8MM is simply a What If story of a screenplay that people loved which didn’t get the adaptation it deserved. For me, it’s well-made. It’s a bit schmatlzy, Cage still goes big here and there, and it’s a Hollywood-ification of things but all that said, it’s really, really dark. It’s really mean. It’s a product of its time, yes, but it’s well made, well acted – especially by the lower billed actors – and it sticks the landing. It gives you an ending that has resolution but not tidiness. It shows you a glimpse of what it looks like when you look into the eyes of Hell and return.
Similarly, you have HARDCORE, Paul Schrader’s second film and one that is even more bleak and less Hollywood than 8MM.
HARDCORE follows a devoutly religious father whose teenage daughter has run away and is in California in the porn industry. The film takes us with him as he inserts himself into that world to try to find her and bring her home.
Harrowing is a good word for HARDCORE. Seeing what the sex industry looked like in the late ‘70s is rough as every ounce of its ugliness was on view and waiting with open arms. The film does something really interesting in that it pairs the father, George C. Scott, with a young woman in the sex industry who is searching for faith but can’t understand his. As he tries to explain it to her she can only shake her head at how prudish and strict it is while he can only look at her as a lost sinner.
Scott is the heart of the film and his rage and anguish propel things forward. The movie gets darker and darker as the father has to search for news of his daughter, even going so far as to discover she may be associating with people making snuff films now. Schrader isn’t interested in tidy endings or infallible people. He’s interested in the muck that gets dredged up in the human heart if we look too deeply into it.
HARDCORE is much more cynical and, like 8MM, finds nothing attractive or alluring about the porn industry and its denizens. This is not a world of love but of usage and borderline slavery. It is where people go when they have fallen to their lowest and can be little more than prey to the people with the power and the money.
Pairing these two films is interesting in their looks at the darkest sides of the adult industry. Both show the reality and the hyperreality of those worlds and are as exaggerated as anything that might show porn as glamorous and exciting. That doesn’t seem to be a world of roaming danger so much as exhausting banality and painful abuse and addiction. The films aren’t looking for nuance, they’re looking to show what Hell on earth looks like, and they succeed.
HARDCORE is the better of the two films, but both are powerful and affecting and play really well together. Yeah, 8MM may have been made even darker by another filmmaker but it didn’t need to be darker. It just needed to tell this story. An alternate version might be interesting but it’s unnecessary. As for HARDCORE it’s basically another story in the world of Travis Bickle, a world of loneliness, loss, and barely restrained anger.
Both are absolutely recommended if you have a stomach for it.
…c…
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 