The
Reflecting Skin (1990)
Umm...
er... um.. Ahem... er... aaaa... Hmmmm... eeee...
Wow.
What can you say about "The Reflecting Skin?" Neverbefore
has the incomprehensible horror of life been so eloquently
and abstractly put up on the screen. I can'timagine
how Philip Ridley ever got a penny out of anyone tomake
the film. I can't even begin to fathom what the hell
itis all about. Perhaps if I try to explain it here,
it willbegin to make sense to me.
First,
there's the vampires. Well, they aren't really vampires.
They are a boy's interpretation of a vampire. They
represent death. Death drives a black Cadilac here
though. So,the boy sees real death without truly comprehending
it yet he is enamoured and afraid of a fictional death,
a fictional fate. So, caught up in his imagined ideas
of horror, he is almost incapable of seeing true horror
when it appears on the horizon. That is, until, it
confronts him head on.
Ah.
The end. When he realizes that his vampire is actually
death. Not a mythological nightmare horror at all.
But the real deal. Flesh and blood death. He runs
into the dying sun and rages against it. Or is he
reborn? Kicking and screaming, born unto the Earth
again. Screaming like a terrified and confused newborn
at the incomprehensible horror of it all.
And
the angels. What are they? They don't really exist.
Theyare knocked down. Nearly missing. The are ideas
that aren't real. They are aborted fetuses. Those
things which come closeto life but actually do not
enter into it.
And
the sexuality. Homosexuality. Perversity. What does
itmean? The incomprehensibility of sexuality. The
horrible wonder of it all. The purity of it stomped
and trodden uponwhen discovered by powerful men. And
by virginal pre-pubescent boys. The beauty of it misunderstood
in childhood.The flowering of it tinted in hue by
the societal misinterpretation of it. Man's inability
to come to terms with his own sexual power, his own
sexual longing, his own sexual needs. Women's inability
to face it, only able to hide it and bury it. To deny
it.
These
3 pictures, one of the reflecting skin. Echoing sexuality
and hero worship. Finding them balanced on either
side of an equation. That boyish moment where were
are incapable of discerning our own hero worship of
an older boy from our sexual awakening to the world
of heterosexuality.The blur it creates. The unfathomable
horror and brilliance of it. The way it begins to
change. Or doesn't.
And
the horror of man's own unimaginable destructive nature.The
destructive nature of the A bomb. How it mirrors,
like the reflective skin, man's own inability to sustain
himself. Man's destructive power. Obsessions with
death. Killing tin yislands.Wearing sunglasses as
our only protection for the brilliant radiance of
the sun, which kills vampires. Wearing sunglasses
as our only protection for the brilliant radiance
of the A bomb. Which kills ourselves. We are our own
vampires. We bite our own necks. We suck our own blood.
"The
Reflective Skin" is a masterpiece. A delicately twisted
and beautifully bent cinematic journey deep into our
own American psyche intent on revealing the nothingness
in al lareas of our troubled and disdainful existence.
But not it's inherent nothingness. No, this is a picture
of human nature in negative, of our negation of life,
sexuality, childhood, freedom, and of the Earth itself.
The mirrored half of life seen on film.
The
= Equal = Sign.
People
says it's Lynchian. It is not. They say that because,
since it is an unparalleled dark American masterpiece
(or at least set in America), there is nothing else
to compare it too. But it's not Lynchian. File it
alongside those rare and remarkable films whose avant-garde
surrealism actually masks deep and significant commentary
of our very existence. That is, if you can find another
film anywhere that also fits into this genre.
Notes:
Written and directed by Ridley. Cinematographer is
DickPope. Music by Nick Bicat.
Cast
includes Viggo Mortenson, Lindsay Duncan, Sheila Moore,Jason
Wolfe.
Filmed
in Canada.
Ridley's
only other known film as director is "The Passion
of Darkly Noon" in 1995
