The "Snuff" Film

The idea that one can't "unsee" something has gotten me thinking.  I like the idea that something can be so disturbing, so raw, so potent, so...real, that just viewing it leaves scar tissue on the skull, bruises on the brain.  As a soldier, I have seen some things I find my self not being able to un-see, images, settings, even surprises, ironies and dystopias that juxtapose so hard with the notion of my naturally ignorant "assumptions" about the world.  Things I would call...funny, perhaps: A live cat struggling to hold a beer in its paws in Thailand; a little man beating the shit out of a giant camel, forcing it to collapse and contort its knobby limbs until it sat squashed, in the back of a micro-truck; a line of a hundred hungry humans in Hong Kong lined up, patiently watching "Popeye Cartoons" at a Popeye's Chicken.


All things that are disturbing in the way that a room is disturbing when a pair of dirty underwear has been left on the floor, or when the stench of someones shit still lingers in the latrine when you use it, the seat warmed to butt cheek level.


Nothing too bad though...nothing terrible.


But there are terrible things out there.  In America we film them and give them awards, fictions, fabrications, alienating the terror away from the heart, the mind, the soul...the eye.
It all starts with the eye...


Snuff Film is a documentary that tries to expose this notion, the idea that seeing something can be almost as powerful as doing it...and it is, in the heart of seeing something happen, lies a complicity, a participation.  In film theory, they call it a "suture", a moment when the fictional world on the screen becomes so harsh, so accurate, so "real", that for a moment, it becomes truth, it becomes the viewer, and the viewer in a way becomes, the viewed.


I know, I know, it doesn't make alot of sense, but I do think that there is a vast power sitting there in the dark, watching something you can't ever "unwatch".  Life lives in those moments, in those screams, in those tears...


In the end, the Snuff Movie may be fake, or it may be real, but after this documentary, as horrible as you may claim it is, one finds that it IS...necessary.


The Circle Jerks used to call this idea, The Rats of Reality...rodents that can never be forgotten, impervious to mans brainwashing and long lobotomy needles.