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I Would Like to See It: Special Effects
🕑 Added 2021-04-17 23:40:16 +0000 UTCImagine Vertigo, Hitchcock’s classic exploration of the things men read into women, the ways they demand a continuous and ever-changing performance from the women in their lives. Now imagine everyone in it is some kind of weird robot person reciting their lines like a room full of broken speak-n’-spells and the score is entirely synth. That’s Special Effects, more or less. Larry Cohen’s reflexive, purposefully stilted crime thriller is an oddity from top to bottom, a studiously un-real film about the manufacturing and imitation of reality. “What’s your biggest inspiration?” an unseen reporter asks recently crashed and burned director Henry Neville (Eric Bogosian). “The Zapruder film,” he replies dryly. Later, when aspiring actress Andrea Wilcox (Zoë Lund, her normal voice overwritten by a dub track in which she speaks in an affected mid-century Southern accent just slightly out of sync with her mouth’s movements) finds him at work in his townhouse, he’s poring over footage of Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald. “What makes it real?” he asks her. “That I know it happened,” she replies.
Andrea herself is a kind of farrago, an assumed identity donned by one Mary Jean Waterman during her flight from young motherhood and a rushed marriage to the violent, dim-witted Keefe (Brad Rijn). The bleach-blond hair, the doll-like face, big eyes with long, soft lashes, and spotless makeup. The unsettling phantom echo of a woman speaking over her own silence. Keefe’s struggle with Neville as the latter, who kills Andrea and frames Keefe for the murder as part of a plot to re-launch his career by gambling on the subconscious power his recording of the night he strangled Andrea will exert over audiences, makes a film about her life and death is not so much about avenging Andrea or solving the mystery of her death as it is deciding who which of the two men will control the idea of her. Lund’s return as the actress Elaine Bernstein, à la Maddy Ferguson in Twin Peaks, makes it clear that Andrea’s interior life is of no consequence to either man. She’s a role to be filled, whether in Neville’s twisted film or Keefe’s brutish quest to fetch his son’s mother back home from New York.
When Elaine is made up to resemble Andrea, the camera lingers in close-up under murky red lighting as stylists swarm around her, quickly and efficiently erasing every trace of her behind the mask of her role. As a treatise on artificiality Special Effects is much more interesting than any half-assed “what does it mean to be human?” android flick, in part because it offers no remove through the artifice of a novum, a speculative element made to crystallize social dilemmas into a comprehensible and compact form. There’s no explanation for why Elaine is so totally subsumed into Andrea’s life, no reckoning for Keefe’s dull, brutal behavior. All there is to see is a woman disappearing into the hole of another’s life like something out of The Amigara Fault, receding deeper and deeper into someone who never really existed at all.
