Benicio Easton Ellis?

Benicio del Toro in 'The Wolfman' 2010

Bret Easton Ellis

Lunar Park is Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel… and it’s a few years old now. In it, Easton Ellis provides an increasingly fictionalised and Stephen King horror-like autobiography. The key point here is that Bret Easton Ellis essentially penned a fictionalised account of the life of an author resembling himself, called Bret Easton Ellis.

And now… I’ve caught rumour that Benicio del Toro will be playing Easton Ellis in the film version of the book.

Easton Ellis’s last film version of a book he wrote, The Informers – a collection of short stories – was total shit, while the book was of course excellent. I saw 3/4 of the film on DVD before giving up – and I rarely give up on a film before it’s over. So now, is all caution being thrown to the wind in a hopeless gesture with the Lunar Park film project?

Maybe… but I somehow have a good feeling about this. At least – besides the big and obvious WHAT THE FUCK? circulating around in my head – I reckon, why shouldn’t del Toro play Easton Ellis? It would be too much for Easton Ellis to play Easton Ellis playing Easton Ellis… And so if the film is to go ahead, why not have someone else fill that role?

And I actually do think that del Toro has just the right kind of look and feel to carry off such a character – drugged out, writerly, haunted, sulking, troubled, family bound, and also (importantly) comic… these are within del Toro’s acting talents, I believe.

I reckon that, while obviously not total white bread like Easton Ellis, del Toro does also look a bit like a beefier, Puerto Rican version of the author.

I did like del Toro in the recent Wolfman. He had a reasonably complex and gentlemanly demeanour – even if it was under developed – that I hadn’t expected. (I still mostly love him as Dr Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.)

Dr Gonzo

Sheep in wolf’s clothing

'The Wolfman' 1941

I did not see the above, but rather, I saw the recent Benicio del Toro version.

At least the viscera was OK. A few well-placed beheadings, gorgings, some claws pushed into the throat then out through the mouth. Etcetera, etcetera.

But the affectations of the film’s a) characters and b) aesthetic were very poor.

The ultimate thrust, that we all become like our fathers – a very patriarchal message, yes – was clear but rendered pretty unemotionally. Sort of because Anthony Hopkins, playing the beastly daddy, seemed by-and-large pretty bored, more than emotionally terse, and because … well, every character in the film was treated less like a character and more like a narrative dot to be joylessly joined up.

The gypsy woman offers the film’s most significant line: “will you kill him or will you set him free? Do you know what that means?” As we come to learn – if not guess sooner – these words explain and resolve, via love, the dilemma of the sin of murdering a man versus slaying a beast, when beast and man are one in the same, and thus resolve the major conflicts between Talbot and his girlfriend, and Talbot and his father. But of course, such words and the story are left to undermine themselves by being led to largely support the spectacles of fire and blood instead.

Basically, the film is very poorly directed. The aesthetic of the film really emphasises this. Shadows on the walls remain only that. The camera lingers after them, searching for a strong sense of style but all that results is the want of a strong visual… without its realisation. It’s much the same with the characters – who want to be well-defined, but are left weak as fog. And it’s a real howling shame on both accounts.

(Watch Nosferatu by F.W Murnau for how to really cast shadows on a wall.)

I think I really want to see the original Wolfman. In a time when gore and effects were much less the point – or, wait, at least much more outside of the budget – were the characters much more solid, and did each frame carry much more considered impact, and did the film as a result have a lot more guts to be explored?

Though, you know, spectacle and gore really can be incorporated into a bloody well told story too…

From 'Nosferatu' 1922

A brief summary of gruesome mythologies

I have not seen either the original or the current remake of The Wolfman. (Though I’m fairly keen to see both. I don’t know why – for either).

But this review of the current version seems to give a good summary of the basic ideologies behind zombie / vampire / werewolf mythologies in a single and simple opening paragraph, which I thought worth sharing…

“Vampires and werewolves have long held a grip on our horrific imaginings, with good reason: They get the job done. Sure, other monsters have had their moments, and zombies remain a reliable stand-in for the mounting sociological problems of any era. But when it comes to more personal demons, werewolves and vampires cover the bases. Vampires make apt doubles for the forces that threaten to seduce and corrupt us. Werewolves represent the beasts already within, and all the attendant rage and lust we hide.”