The Travolta/Cage Project #55 8MM (1999)
When my wife and I are trying to decide what to watch on any given evening, I generally express a desire to watch something fun and light-hearted, that will allow us to briefly escape the unbearable misery of existence while my wife insists we watch a true crime documentary about 37 children who were tortured and murdered in a Satanic cult in 1980s Manchester.
I am like Tom Welles, the character that Nicolas Cage plays in Joel Schumacher’s unintentionally hilarious 1999 snuff film sleaze fest 8 MM in that I am unusually sensitive and have a hard time dealing with child abuse and child molestation and sexual assault and brutality of various sorts.
The big difference is that I just barely eke out a living writing about silly movies while Tom is a spectacularly successful private investigator whose work, I would have to assume, gives him a pretty good glimpse at humanity at its ugliest and most unhinged.
Tom should not be a dewy innocent. He should not be a babe in the wood. He should not be a Neo-Noir Pollyanna. He should be jaded. He should be tough. He should be world weary.
Yet when Tom watches what we are told is a REAL snuff film where a woman REALLY dies that looks for all the world like a rough cut of a bad early Marilyn Manson music video he’s so impossibly traumatized by it that it looks like God is punching him over and over and over again in the dick.
The infamous scene of Tom, a grown-ass man who has presumably seen some things no man should ever have to see, writhing in horror at the literally unbelievable savagery of what’s before him is Cage’s version of the even more infamous scene in Tough Guys Don’t Dance where Ryan O’Neal responds to news of his wife’s infidelity by famously screaming, “Oh God! Oh man! Oh God! Oh man!”
But where O’Neal was able to use volume and movement to convey a comically exaggerated sense of shock and horror Cage is limited to using facial expressions and body language to convey that his physical revulsion towards something so extreme and horrifying that he literally will never be the same again, that it’s traumatizing him down to a cellular level.
Didn’t enjoy the show, I take it?
In order for 8MM to work dramatically, we need to believe that what Tom Welles is looking at in the film’s most important scene is someone being brutally murdered onscreen, a genuine snuff film so intense and disturbing it could make a profoundly good, moral man do unspeakable things in vengeance.
There are filmmakers who could pull that off. David Fincher, who directed 8MM screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker’s breakout film Seven could make us believe that Tom is looking at a teenager die an unmourned death of unspeakable brutality in gritty, grubby 8 MM. The same is true of William Friedkin or Brian DePalma.
Joel Schumacher, however, cannot and does not make us think that our hero’s psyche is being shredded by access to a horrifying document of man’s inhumanity to man. So a scene that NEEDS to be harrowing and almost unbearably intense is instead absolutely hilarious.
Oh but watching Cage’s wildly expressive face sweatily contort into a cartoonish burlesque of shock and disgust brought me joy! How I adored every second of it!
To amuse myself I imagined that Cage wasn’t responding to a snuff film but rather the Space Jam 2 trailer, a Donald Trump speech or Piers Morgan storming off the set of Good Morning Britain.
Cage spends a lot of 8MM looking at snuff films and violent, hardcore pornography with a wounded, devastated expression that suggests that his very soul is being throttled mercilessly. It never stops being hilarious.
In 8MM our straight-shooting, straight arrow detective is hired by Mrs. Christian (Myra Carter), the wealthy widow of a recently deceased titan of industry to determine whether the murder of a teenaged girl in an 8MM recording in her late husband’s possession is real.
So a clean-cut family man who prides himself on his professionalism and discretion kisses wife Amy (Catherine Keener, picking up a paycheck) and baby goodbye and descends into a nightmare world of S&M and violent pornography, a sordid holiday in other people’s misery.
Tom chooses as his guide through this seedy realm of debauchery and sin a pornographic bookstore employee played by Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix’s snarky musician/sex shop clerk is named Max California, which is what happens when the Red Hot Chili Peppers stop by the set and you decide to have them name your characters on a whim.
Max California is introduced reading In Cold Blood but pretending to read hardcore pornography so that customers won’t make fun of his middlebrow taste in literature. The implication is that only a secretly smart closet intellectual would be familiar with one of the most famous books in American history, a seminal tome pretty much everyone in the audience would know.
The sarcastic porn store clerk tries to get a rise out of his customer by continually asking him if he would be interested in purchasing a “battery-operated vagina.”
Max is certainly amused by the phrase “battery-operated vagina” but its ubiquity ever so slightly compromises the movie’s unbearably grim, pitch-black tone. It turns out that you can either make a grim, gritty Neo-Noir about the most brutal, de-humanizing extremes of human behavior or you can make a movie that exploits the comic potential of the phrase “battery-operated vagina” but you cannot do both at the same time.
Tom turns down Max California’s offer to sell him a battery-operated vagina but he does pay him to introduce him to other players in the disgusting world of snuff-adjacent violent pornography, including auteur Dino Velvet (Peter Stormare, in the Peter Stormare role of the crazed libertine), Eddie Poole (Travolta/Cage All-Star James Gandolfini) and a gimp-like fellow known only as “Machine.”
When Tom meets The Machine, he very politely volunteers, “Hello Machine. Love your work”, which is almost as unintentionally hilarious as his wildly expressive viewing of the snuff film.
We’re told that Dino Velvet is the Jim Jarmusch of violent pornography, which honestly, does not seem either accurate or fair to the director of Coffee & Cigarettes. I mean, sure, John Lurie and Tom Waits are in a lot of Dino Velvet’s stuff, and he got Robby Müller to shoot his early work and Jay Rabinowitz to edit but Dino Velvet’s stuff contains more genuine murder and less deadpan comedy than Jarmusch’s oeuvre.
Tom is deeply affected by everything he sees and everyone he comes into contact with because he is apparently the most sensitive person in the history of the universe.
When people talk about women disrespectfully, use profane language or generally behave like the human scum they are Tom looks so devastated that he has to hold back tears because it wouldn’t look professional if he broke in sobs any time anyone wasn’t nice.
C’mon, Joker isn’t that bad.
Within the context of the movie it makes no sense whatsoever for Tom to be such a naive babe in the woods, particularly since he’s played by an actor more than capable of infinite darkness.
Tom is so moved by the snuff film that after determining its authenticity he sets about murdering all of the people involved in its creation.
They’re very different films with very different tones and textures but 8MM and Guarding Tess nevertheless have weirdly identical arcs that find Cage playing an ambitious, accomplished straight arrow who gets way too close to his work and becomes a crazed vigilante.
The only thing keeping 8MM from being a contemporary Hardcore or Joel Schumacher’s Seven is that it’s really fucking stupid and really fucking silly and utterly devoid of danger and edge.
Schumacher’s direction of this material is dark in the most punishingly literal manner imaginable. 8MM is shot in near total darkness that renders it damn near impossible to even make out what’s going on much of the time. Yet 8MM is also so dramatically inert that not knowing what’s happening at any given moment honestly doesn’t feel like much of a loss.
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