Okay, disclaimers: I'm not saying that anyone should watch this movie. In fact, only two-point-five of the people possibly reading this should consider picking it up at the local Blockbuster, or putting it into their Netflix queue -- you know who you are. If you think it might not be you, it's not.
I'm not even particularly interested in "redeeming" The Human Centipede, any more than I would try to redeem the equally-tellingly-titled Snakes on a Plane. I'm more interested in discussing where Centipede fits into the generally available oeuvre of horror films, why it has a spot there (why that spot exists), and in proclaiming my disappointment with less-well-done horror films, such as the movie so bad I can't remember its title (IMDB reveals that it's called The Fear Chamber, and shockingly came out just last year).
The plot of The Human Centipede is simple: there's a mad scientist doctor who's only recently gone mad, who wants to sew three people together, mouth to anus, into a "human centipede." He was previously a world-class surgeon who separated conjoined twins. Spoiler alert: He succeeds.
P.C. and I chose to rent this movie (from the local, now bankrupt Blockbuster) because I felt it had been following me around for a few months; perhaps it was first hearing about it on NPR-like Sirius radio on the way to friend Becca's wedding in part of a comedy routine. Perhaps it was having it somehow pop up in ads online or somewhere I can't quite identify. Maybe it stuck with me because it's such a simple and grotesque idea. But yesterday, after an afternoon of reading about the "philosophy of horror," I felt ready to descend into the macabre world of a torture-film, and The Human Centipede seemed as good as any other.
In fact, it's better than most others, which was a pleasant surprise.
The front of the DVD quotes Eli Roth saying the movie made him sick, which was a high compliment for horror, and it's reviewed as being "surprisingly straight-forward," which is exactly what it is. Unlike The Collector, which makes a small attempt to explain the sadistic torturer's motives for entering the homes of families and then butchering them slowly ("he collects people" -- but what this means is never exactly clear), The Human Centipede has a certain elegant lack of explanation that is only elegant because an explanation is unnecessary.
In addition to the austerity of exposition (or lack of it), there's a modernist aesthetic to the German (of course German -- also, it's an apparently Dutch director's movie, though mostly in English, and subtitled, making the Japanese businessman's "Nazi!" epithet even more interesting) doctor's home, where most of the action takes place. The co-eds who find themselves victims to the doctor's plan aren't as stupid as they usually are in these movies, nor as deserving of torture, and that also streamlines the plot somehow. In general, this is a well-wrought, spare movie that revolves around a simple and simply revolting premise.
The Fear Chamber, a movie I picked up with seven others for less than a dollar each (a pack which includes the great classic Night of the Living Dead, making the other hideously bad movies worth the purchase), is the opposite in every way of The Human Centipede. The premise is so unclear that I can hardly state it here: there's a guy who likes to butcher women, for some reason, and later on he shows up in clown make-up. He stabs the detective-hero in the heart, but magically the detective doesn't die, even though he went to chase the killer alone on an abandoned roof in L.A. without calling for backup (but then, there are only 2 other cops on the LAPD force in this movie, anyway, and their investigative headquarters look suspiciously like a janitor's closet), and even though he got stabbed in the heart. But this all adds up at the end when it's revealed that the killer was selling organs on the black market, but that somehow the heart he'd removed from a psychic had been the transplanted heart that saved detective-hero's life.
In other words, it's a poorly written, poorly directed, slightly more macabre version of Return to Me.
But it's convoluted, non-sense-making movies like Fear Chamber (the title is never referenced in the movie, and its location is unclear; is the "fear chamber" the weird warehouse space the killer uses to kill victims, even though his locations appear to change? Or is it the janitor's closet where the 3 members of the LAPD meet?) that make The Human Centipede stand out. And for that, I suppose we must thank those movies that fail in their badness even to become fun camp films.
But in general, torture films do need an apologetic, even if I can argue successfully that The Human Centipede is a "good" version of such a genre. And the arguments in favor of the moral possibility of torture films (or the possibility of torture films being moral) are on about as wide a spread as the quality of the films themselves.
The best argument I've read so far, and the one that echoed in my brain as I looked over the Blockbuster's selection last night, finally to settle on the Centipede, is that great horror films -- particularly ones featuring sadistic torture scenes -- recognize, exploit, and make the viewer aware of the deep ambivalence in the human soul. While we feel the terror and pain of the victim, we are also often led (and Human Centipede is no exception in this; it dwells at length on the doctor's maniacal smiles and at times almost orgasmic pleasure with his creation, and also on the signs of his loneliness) to feel the sadistic pleasure of torture with the torturer.
This is disturbing. But it's supposed to be disturbing, and for me, that's the key. You're supposed to be disturbed by horror films.
People who don't like being disturbed, or perhaps more importantly people who aren't disturbed (but are instead turned on or made curious by these movies), probably shouldn't be watching horror films.
The most convoluted argument I've read in favor of allowing for torture films brought in the question of pornography (apparently relevant since these movies are often referred to as "torture porn"), comparing arguments about the suggestiveness of pornography (i.e., feminist argument that seeing women as objects in magazines will cause viewers to want to treat women the same way in real life) to supposed arguments about the suggestiveness of torture movies (i.e., you see someone pulling out another person's teeth in the movie and think "hey, that might be fun").
The author of that essay then spent a few sentences "debunking" the arguments against pornography, then attempted to apply the same logic to torture films, despite the fact that a few sentences don't suffice to redeem all porn from the arguments listed, and that if we agree that torture films aren't pornography, then the correlation in arguments is moot to begin with.
It was like Fear Chamber all over again; because I'm familiar with the genre, I can kind of see what he was trying to do, but it was clearly unsuccessful.
So if you like theorizing about, or pointing out the flaws in, badly made torture films and arguments about them, see The Fear Chamber and then read the third essay's final page in The Philosophy of Horror.
If, on the other hand, you like a good, well-founded disturbance now and then, but you want to feel okay about it, read the first essay in Philosophy of Horror and then catch a showing of The Human Centipede.
I can't say you won't regret it, but I can say that I didn't.
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