Muffled Screams (or not)

The MUFF (Melbourne Underground Film Festival) is on at the moment and on Saturday night I went to see Jim Van Bebber's 2004 film The Manson Family at Dendy which was also attended by the delightfully inebriated director (complete with an American accent totally reminiscent of The Dude). I really enjoyed the film, except...I was expecting to be really shocked and frightened by it, but I wasn't. Perhaps I've become desensitized to violent imagery in films (although one throat-slitting scene was a little disturbing), but I guess even Van Bebber acknowledges his constraint, as we see in his interview with DVD Talk:

DVD Talk: And yet there are a lot of critics who complain about the sex and violence in the film. But that's the point, isn't it?

JVB: Absolutely. Look, if you're going to tell this story, why shortcut the truth? This story is NC-17. Life is not all R rated. Life is not a PG-13. And certainly, if you're going to discuss these guys and tell the truth, it's obviously going to be NC-17.

DVD Talk: Still, you can hear people saying "well, he's just doing it for a marketing hook - or he wants to appeal to the gorehounds..."

JVB: Exactly. Look, all I can tell them is read the text. Actually, they should congratulate me on how much I restrained myself.

DVD Talk: Is (the sex and violence) perhaps one of the reasons why, 37 years later, we are still fascinated by this case?

JVB: Probably. I mean, it was so appalling. We've had Jim Jones...the Heaven's Gate cult...we've had David Koresh...but just for the sheer insanity...and the sex and the drug use...and I mean, you know, it's the late 60s. It's Hollywood. And I mean, you know, Manson did rub shoulders with a lot of people: Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Dennis Wilson. And so it gets pretty crazy. He was smart...and talented. I really wish Terry Melcher had given him his shot (laughs). Maybe this film would have never been made.

This last bit goes against what Jack Sargeant (who curated Van Bebber's films for the festival, and gave an intro on the night) wrote in his blurb in the MUFF programme about Van Bebber - "...films [like Van Bebber's] don’t have to make hip references to the detritus of pop culture": they don't have to, but they still do, after all, the Manson family is precisely this detritus of pop culture (falling into the shame register of celebrity, of course). For me, I think that what was so conventional about the film was the framing narrative that was used (a TV journalist putting the finishing touches on a documentary about Manson in the 90s, uh oh, violent crazy teens have arrived!...). The Manson family scenes we see in the film were supposedly taken from this documentary. I found that the frame held things together, kept history safely distanced (with fuzzy-looking film deliberately aiming for authenticity). This is a technique that has been absorbed into the cinematic mainstream for years (The Blair Witch Project, et. al). If we could define The Manson Family as an "underground" film, then it is so in the way that Dogma film is. I am not knocking the film here - as I said, I thoroughly enjoyed it - I just question the way that it was represented in the programme and I don't feel that this kind of promotion is necessary for what was a soundly-made horror film with amazing visuals, especially for the drug-fucked scenes.

I so wish that I had sat near Van Babber though - I could hear him talking for most of the film, and I'm sure that if I'd sat closer it would have made for the most entertaining live director's commentary...