It is difficult for me to write about Stuart Gordon’s Stuck without also ranting about the state of London cinema distribution. However, I shall curtail my habitual rant on the subject by merely pointing out that Stuck is, much like Durabont’s The Mist (2007) and Friedkin’s Bug (2006), a genuinely impressive piece of genre film-making that was cruelly stripped from cinema screens just as it began to generate some decent word-of-mouth and thereby find its audience. Although best known for successfully joining up separate Lovecraft stories in order to create Dagon (2001), Stuck shows that Gordon is also adept with contemporary horror. By ‘contemporary horror’ I mean horror films such as Bug, Wolf Creek (2005) or Eden Lake (2008). Horror films that are stripped of fantastical elements and which, instead of dealing with their different issues through metaphor, deals with them in a synecdochic manner by having certain characters stand in for trends in human nature or contemporary culture that the director and writers wish to address. Despite the apparent nihilism of its cynicism and violence, Stuck is actually a deeply moral film. Beneath the brutal gore-filled images and the (admittedly ill-judged and self-defeating) black comedy, the film speaks not only of the worst in humanity, but also the best.
Category / Horror
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
One of the peculiarities of Western pre-scientific thought is its fondness for certain numbers. For example, consider the tenacity of the four elements that became the four humours or the trinity that also pops up in the works of Freud and Clausewitz. However, the undisputed king of pre-scientific theoretical numbers is the number two. From politics to ethics, metaphysics to epistemology, and cosmology to the philosophy of mind, humanity seems deeply wedded to the idea that reality can be seen as made up of two different kinds of things. I suspect that this strange fetish has its roots in some banal fact about us as a species; perhaps just as our fondness for base-10 arithmetic stems from having ten fingers, perhaps our love of dualisms comes from the fact that we can all hold up our hands and say “on the one hand… but on the other…”. Indeed, the near-universality of the concept of the ‘duality of man’ is unarguably behind the enduring popularity and the flexibility of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
Over the years, the story of a Victorian scientist who unlocks his darker side has been interpreted in a number of different ways. As well as the original duality of man as a mixture of good and evil, Jekyll and Hyde have also been used as personifications of introverted intelligence vs. extroverted cunning, superego vs. id and as metaphorical explorations of the use of drugs. However, while it would be interesting to compare and contrast all of the different tellings of Stevenson’s story, this review will deal only with one; the 1931 adaptation directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Fredric March, an adaptation that deals with the tension between man as an animal and man as a civilised being.
Ruthless Culture 