Fear X: The Whole History of My Life, Page 2

THE WHOLE HISTORY OF MY LIFE

marcus pinn

FEAR X (page 2)

My strange obsession with Refn's misunderstood masterpiece, which mimics Turturro's obsession with uncovering who killed his wife in the very same film, started almost a decade ago...

The summer of 2004 going into early spring of 2005 was probably the strangest, loneliest, least responsible period of my adult life. I graduated from college with a degree in architecture and had no aspiration to put that degree in to immediate use, I was living in my parents' house in Connecticut (can you believe they charged me rent?), my kidneys were failing (unbeknownst to me), my aunt passed away and I was technically working 2 1/2 jobs. I was DJing whenever I could, tutoring at an afterschool program in Norwalk and working part time at the now-defunct Connecticut video store chain Tommy K's.

Throughout all this I remember watching Fear X more than anything else. For me, returning again and again to a movie is the same as listening to an album or reading a great book over and over, yet for whatever reason it's deemed strange to watch a movie repeatedly. Last time I checked, when someone claims to have a favorite song or a favorite album they listen to it repeatedly. So why are movies exempt from that rule?

When we're in a certain mood we turn to appropriate music or books to keep us in that mood for a while. When we're in good spirits we listen to uplifting music. When we want to relax, we listen to music that's soothing and calm. Sometimes we listen to uplifting music when we're feeling shitty to get us out of a funk. But we also listen to slow, dark, depressing music when we're feeling down to keep us feeling down for a while. I honestly wasn't conscious of it at first, but I was drawn to Fear X because it's partially about loneliness, which I was definitely going through during the time I was watching it a lot. Like I already said, there's not a lot of dialogue in the film, which makes sense because when you spend a lot of time by yourself not much gets said, and there's something very sad and pitiful about Turturro's lead performance right down to how he delivers certain lines that really got to me. Plus I was living in Connecticut. No offense to the residents of that state, but there's honestly nothing there. Maybe my subconscious was taking over and telling me to stay in the lonely world I was in for a while.

Until the day I die, Fear X will always make me feel a certain sense of loneliness because I know that no one besides me will share the same love I have for it.

I discovered Fear X on a whim while working at the video store. After a while the DJing thing and afterschool program fizzled out, and I found myself working more than part time but not exactly full time at Tommy K's various locations (Milford, West Haven and South Haven). Even when I wasn't working, I would still hang out at one of the stores (mainly the Milford location) to take advantage of the free rentals that employees received. Along with my time as a summer camp counselor at a local YMCA and my job in a record store in high school, being a video store clerk is easily the greatest job I ever had. Ever. I may have been the only employee who enjoyed picking up someone's shift when they couldn’t come in. Think about it - if you're a cinephile with few responsibilities and even fewer bills to pay, working at a video store is like heaven. To say I took advantage of the free employee rentals perk is an understatement. I took a movie home almost every night I worked. Fear X was just another random nightly rental. If anything, I guess I decided to rent it because it co-starred James Remar, who was a fixture from childhood movies like The Warriors and 48 Hours. I took the DVD home with no expectations and was hypnotized right away.

It's not just that I automatically sympathized with a man working a low-paying job where he's surrounded by video tapes. I think a big reason I was so drawn to the film is because I watched it for the first time around 2am. Not that it matters a whole lot, but I almost feel like Fear X is most affective when you watch at night. It has that kind of ambiance about it.

In the film, Turturro plays Harry Cain, a recently widowed mall security guard whose pregnant wife Claire was murdered by an unknown person in the parking lot of the very same mall he works at - the killer has yet to be found. In the first 15-20 minutes of the film, we slowly discover how unhealthily obsessed Harry is with finding the killer. For the last year he's been borrowing old surveillance tapes from the mall to hopefully find the footage of when his wife was killed: he follows suspicious people around the mall he thinks might be the killer and he has one of those Beautiful Mind rooms in his house filled with newspaper clippings, note cards and clues that all have to do with his wife's murder. Eventually, one vague yet important clue leads Harry from his home in Wisconsin to Montana where we're introduced to James Remar as Peter, a haunted police officer who clearly knows something about Claire's death.

Because this is a psychological thriller/murder mystery made around the same time as Memento and The Machinist, some of you might be thinking right off the bat that it was Harry who killed his wife all along and Peter is a figment of his imagination in some split personality plot twist, but trust me when I tell you that's not the case here. That's not to say that Harry Cain isn't losing his grip on reality. Like Guy Pearce or Christian Bale, it's more than obvious that Cain has become so obsessed with getting to the bottom of a mystery that his perception of reality has been twisted. The only difference between the Harry Cain character and protagonists in similar films is that Turturro plays Harry as a sad and broken man instead of a neurotic mess.

John Turturro is certainly the star here, but Remar has always been my favorite actor in this. His character isn't even introduced until almost 40 minutes in to the story, but from the moment his face hits the screen you can see that he's holding on to some deep dark secret. Like the film, Remar's performance is cold and intentionally stiff, yet at the same time sad and heavy. I can understand if people find his performance to be somewhere between forced and nothing special - but it just works for me.

He's had an interesting evolution as an actor. In the early/mid 80's he was the quintessential hothead. He was so much of a hothead that he was actually fired from Aliens and replaced by Michael Bein. Nowadays he's more reserved in the mostly supporting roles he plays in stuff like Fast & Furious, Pineapple Express and Dexter. Sometimes I cringe when he's referred too as "Dexter's father" by regular everyday people. Is that really the thing he's going to be most remembered as? I would never be so bold as to say Fear X is Remar's greatest performance. His roles in the films of Walter Hill have too big of a reputation to compete with, but his performance as Peter in Fear X is definitely up there. [What about QUIET COOL?? - john.] [I'm embarrassed to say I've never seen. I'm sure he's amazing in it. - pinn.]

On more than one occasion, Refn has expressed how unhappy he was with some of the casting choices for Fear X, which I find strange because there's only a few prominent actors in the film with very few lines between them and they all do an excellent job in my opinion. If you're familiar with Refn's filmography then you know he puts bits and pieces of himself in some of the characters he creates. According to Mads Mikkelesen, Refn's unofficial muse and most frequent collaborator, the character of Lenny in Bleeder is supposed to be Refn. And according to Nicolas himself, the character of Driver in Drive is supposed to be a kind of cinematic alter-ego of his. Only recently did I come to discover that certain elements of the Harry Cain character are lifted directly from Refn's personal life too. In a documentary on the making of Only God Forgives, we see the Danish director brainstorming ideas in pre-production with note-cards and post-it notes all over the wall of his hotel room. Harry Cain also works through clues in a similar fashion with notes pasted all over his wall as well.

I was not happy with the casting. Casting was forced upon me from investors and sales companies who put money into the movie. - Nicolas Winding Refn

I've always wondered what performances Refn wasn't pleased with. What’s interesting is that Turturro seemed to have a more positive experience making the film...

I liked it because the idea of the story was about a simple man thrust into this overwhelming, debilitating circumstance, and he never really finds out what happens. - John Turturro

The main issue that critics and audiences had with Fear X was that they found it painfully boring. "Nothing happens!" critics complained. In my opinion plenty of stuff happens in this movie; at the same time I understand where that negative critique comes from. This was wrongly marketed as a borderline horror/psychological thriller with elements of the supernatural in the vein of Roman Polanski. There were even ads for the film that ran in Fangoria magazine. Sure there's a touch of Polanski in Fear X, specifically The Tenant, as both ambiguous films deal with a lonely man losing his grip on reality, but a horror film or straight thriller Fear X is not. There's no traditional climactic showdown between Harry Cain and the mysterious person who killed his wife. We're talking about John Turturro here. The lead character wasn't portrayed by Jason Statham or Sylvester Stallone. You knew from the jump Harry isn't going to have some kind of hand-to-hand battle with the villain in the end. Harry is a broken, borderline wimpy guy. He doesn't want to fight. He genuinely just wants to know why his wife was killed. It's even implied that she was unfaithful to him before she was killed and that he's conscious of it but in denial at the same time. Maybe finding out why his wife was killed would confirm that she was cheating on him, putting his suspicions to rest and allowing him to move on with his life.

Phil (Stephen McIntyre): How you gonna find one guy?

Harry: I believe I can.

Phil: You know even if you do, he’s not gonna wanna sit down and talk to you 'til you feel better.

Harry: Maybe I won’t have to know who if I can find out why.

Fear X was hit with a double whammy of false advertising in that it was associated with Requiem for a Dream. This was the last and only screenplay written by Requiem author Hubert Shelby Jr., so naturally Fear X was marketed as being "from people who brought you Requiem for a Dream..." I hate when movie studios do that. I know you have to get people to see your movie but jesus christ. Fear X couldn't be any more not like Requiem for a Dream. All that false advertising did was get people's hopes up for a cocaine-induced, jump cut frenzied movie when in fact Fear X is a 90-minute long heroin trip.

In a way, Fear X is part of an unofficial trilogy of neo-noirs released in the first half of the last decade along with Memento (2000) and Irreversible (2002). All three films are about men trying to track down their wife's killer/attacker. Each film features an intense lead performance (Guy Pearce, Vincent Cassel and John Turturro, respectively) and is scored by a well-known contemporary musician: Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm (Fear X), Daft Punk (Irreversible) and David Julyan (Memento). Yet Fear X is the least-recognized of the three, probably because there's no 10 minute rape scene or lovable Joe Pantoliano sidekick. Fear X is also the only one out of the three told in chronological order, whereas the big draw to Memento and Irreversible is their backwards narrative structure.

Fear X also laid the groundwork for Andrea Arnold's Red Road (2006). Both films are pretty much the same basic story except the genders of the main characters are switched. Like Refn's film, Red Road is another dark, slow, moody surveillance-heavy film about a security guard trying to get revenge on the person who murdered their significant other yet Red Road, although still slightly underrated, received a decent amount of praise while Fear X quickly fell into direct-to-video obscurity after being released.

I could go on and on about how Fear X lifted this scene and put a twist on that director's style and how it was unfairly judged, but there will always be this unexplainable void as to why I love it so much. A lot of it comes down to the ambience and mood courtesy of the score, co-produced by Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm. It's easy to break down why music featuring vocals can touch someone so easily - the lyrics speak to us. But an album made up of ambient sounds, like the music in Fear X, is a little difficult to analyze. How much can you write about the way Brian Eno used a certain frequency noise? I'll leave that stuff for the racist elitists over at Pitchfork media. At the end of the day, experimental music is like any type of modern art - either you feel it or you don't, and I certainly feel the score for Fear X. It's moody and extremely melancholic. My favorite music comes from artists like DJ Shadow, Portishead, Tricky, Massive Attack, etc. The score to Fear X fits right in with that type of ambient "trip-hop," except Eno and Schwalm didn't rely on vocals or the use of percussion. Everything is stripped down and minimal yet heavy at the same time. I make music myself and Eno and Schwalm's score helped to shape the way I produce.

My obsession with cinema knows no bounds. My unhealthy fascination with all things Claire Denis led me to essentially track down and become buddies with one of her regular actors (Alice Houri). My obsession with the Fear X score got me to seek out J. Peter Schwalm on MySpace back in 2007 to see if he had a personal copy of it, so I could somehow purchase it for myself. Fear X made no money so there obviously wasn't any kind of a budget to put out the soundtrack. To my surprise, the German producer was a very nice guy and quite open about talking about the music he helped create. He couldn't believe someone actually cared about it as much as I did. To my disappointment, he didn't have any of the music in his personal library but we've kept in touch over the years, making the transition from MySpace buddies to Facebook buddies and I still randomly drop him a line from time to time about music randomness.

This is the kind of film that makes me want to become a famous influential movie director only so when I'm asked in interviews what my favorite movies are I can mention it as that one rarity in the group with hopes of someone seeking it out. I keep hoping some reputable filmmaker will mention it in an interview in the same way Joe Swanberg or Darren Aronofsky list forgotten works like Ivan's XTC and Parents, respectively, as major influences on them.

Normally I hate when people defend a movie by falling back on that defense of, "You just don’t get it. It's too challenging for you. Its over your head." But in the case of Fear X I'll make an exception. Cinema is too oversaturated with predictable psychological thrillers and for whatever reason, nobody wants anything new. They want the same Psycho/Se7en/M. Night Shayamalan plot twist in the end. Fear X was a slightly new approach to the psychological thriller genre - a meticulously paced, existential journey about a man trying to find answers.

In no way am I trying to imply that if you don't like Fear X that means you're stupid. It's a challenging movie to sit through. It's certainly boring...but in a good way. If you have the patience and can sit through it you'd be doing yourself a favor.

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