Best of 2023: Asia Argento's The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is a Uniquely Disturbing Motion Picture
A disturbing movie with Asia Argento and Marilyn Manson? That’s unpossible!
Movies do not get ickier than Asia Argento’s 2004 drama The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things with the prominent exception of R. Kelly’s NSFW home movies and Louis C.K.’s unfortunately titled I Love You Daddy.
Yes, I certainly have a whole lot of options if I want to continue writing about the films and television shows and projects from artists whose careers hit a brick wall called #Metoo and, of course, their own crimes and moral transgressions. Asia Argento is a special case. She has the curious and unfortunate distinction of being first one of the biggest heroes and icons of #Metoo and then the highest-profile woman accused of sexual misconduct and abuse in the wake of the great global reckoning that followed Harvey Weinstein’s long-overdue downfall.
Argento, of course, played a big role in exposing Weinstein as a rapist and a monster but her reputation as a fearless feminist badass speaking truth to power at considerable cost to her own career and personal life took a massive hit when Argento became the subject of sexual assault allegations when musician and actor Jimmy Bennett accused Argento of assaulting him in a hotel room when he was seventeen in 2013.
To make everything sadder, and weirder, and even more disturbing, Argento came to know Bennett when he played her physically, emotionally and sexually abused son in her grubby, unbelievably depressing 2004 adaptation of J.T Leroy’s semi-autobiographical The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that it’s an adaptation of “J.T Leroy’s” “semi-autobiographical” novel because, in a scandal that at one point seemed pretty sordid and juicy in its own right, mysterious cult writer J.T Leroy, who transformed the messy raw clay of a transient childhood as an abused and abandoned outcast living on the margins into raw art, turned out to a Brooklyn born and raised writer named Laura Albert. Consequently, the famously “semi-autobiographical” elements of J.T Leroy’s work were in fact pure conjecture.
That was the ugly, strange, sad context in which I watched The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things the first time around. It lent the already grim and sleazy subject matter an additional element of meta-textual creepiness. This time around everything became so much sadder and more dispiriting. Bennett very publicly accusing Argento of abusing her position of power over him as an adult and a director to sexually assault him is just the tip of a very unsavory iceberg.
Argento in turn accused Bennett of sexually assaulting her as a 17 year old as the fulfillment of a longtime Oedipal sexual fantasy and Argento’s boyfriend of two years, the late, beloved author and television personality Anthony Bourdain paid Bennett anywhere from 250,000 to 380,000 dollars in hush money to keep what happened in that hotel room in 2013 a secret.
A small fortune in blackmail money. Conflicting allegations of sexual assault. The high-profile suicide of a glamorous, popular chef, author and bon vivant. A troubled relationship formed while working on an ugly, brutal movie chockablock with child molestation, child rape, drug abuse, physical abuse and every kind of ugliness the world has to offer. The details of Argento and Bennett’s relationship are so dark that it’d take someone like “J.T Leroy” to really do them justice.
I’m watching Lifetime’s harrowing R. Kelly documentary mini-series Surviving R. Kelly now. One of the more jaw-dropping elements of that deeply disturbing expose is that in a particularly shameless case of hiding in plain sight, R. Kelly wrote a song for `14-year-old protege Aaliyah called “Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number” about an underaged woman longing sexually for an older lover around the time he was reportedly engaged in an illegal sexual relationship with the R&B icon himself.
On a similar note, in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things Argento’s roaring hurricane of dysfunction Sarah, who is a cross between Courtney Love at her heroin-addled worst and Nancy Spungen at her heroin-addled best, abuses Jeremiah, an innocent, helpless, fragile boy played by Bennett (and later by Dylan and Cole Spouse of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody) in seemingly every way a maternal figure can: emotionally, physically, sexually and pharmacologically.
In a characteristic bit of evil, Sarah tells her heartbroken son that if he even tries to go back to his loving foster parents, they will pound nails into his palms and crucify him. She’s lying outrageously and abusively, of course, but considering what’s in store for poor Jeremiah at the hands of his mother and a string of malevolent stepfather types he might have had an easier time with a crucifixion. At least then he’d die at a certain point and be put out of his misery.
The scene of Jeremiah being ripped away from his loving foster parents is melodramatic and hard to watch, but then so is the experience of being ripped asunder from your only sense of stability and security and placed in the care of someone hopelessly incapable of handling their own life, let alone the lives of their children.
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things has the dark, archetypal feel of a punk rock fairy tale about an innocent young boy ripped out of the loving arms of his normcore foster parents and given to an evil and sadistic biological mother whose cruelty knows no bounds. It also feels like a decidedly European take on American culture and society as ugly, exotic and depraved, a never-ending blur of truck stops, cheap motels and hypocritical bible-thumpers with roving hands, cowboys, strippers and other All-American types.
After liberating Jeremiah from responsible adults who love him, Sarah wastes no time immersing him in the murky depths of the drug, sex and kicks-fueled low life. Most of Jeremiah and Sarah’s life together consists of him looking like he’d like to disappear, perhaps permanently, while his mother has degrading sex with an endless series of one-night-stands, each seemingly worse than the last within earshot of her traumatized son. Jeremiah is robbed of a childhood and introduced to everything much too early: drugs, sex, prostitution, violence.
When Jeremiah goes to live with stern, harsh God-fearing grandparents played by Peter Fonda and Ornella Muti, he simply trades one form of abuse and repression for another. When his mom pops back into his life a few years later when he’s ministering to the public as a street-corner preacher like a miniature Marjoe Gortner things go from unbelievably, unbearably, almost inconceivably terrible to even worse.
Sarah stops having awful sex with the dregs of humanity for free and begins having sex with them in exchange for drugs or money. She has Jeremiah dress up in drag and pretend to be her sister so that Jeremiah can join the family business selling sex at truck stops. At various points in this oddly star-studded affair, poor Jeremiah is sexually assaulted by a pre-stardom Jeremy Renner and a post-superstardom Marilyn Manson.
When I first saw The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things it resonated with me as someone who survived a brutal childhood where I had to grow up fast and learn how to take care of myself. I watched it again in the long, sad, shadow of #MeToo and Bennett’s allegations but I also saw it through the prism of my own fatherhood.
Maybe it’s just me but I cannot see a child suffer onscreen without projecting that pain and anguish onto my own children, without wondering how devastated I would be if it were happening to my boys. On that level, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is less a grim melodrama about life in the gutter than a horror film about the spiritual ugliness of adults and their unconscionable capacity for abusing the most vulnerable among us.
In the early going, Argento, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Alessandro Magania, shoots extensively from the POV of Jeremiah to highlight his powerlessness. In doing so, Argento captures the way the world seems, and feels, impossibly vast when you’re a child, not to mention confusing, overwhelming and hard to navigate and understand.
When it comes to suffering, Job had nothing on Jeremiah. He’s a profoundly passive character cursed to forever react to life’s rampant cruelties and his mother’s indifference to his suffering because he has no power or agency of his own. My childhood was not as barbaric as the one depicted in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things but a lot of it felt familiar all the same.
Much of Argento’s movie feels like poverty and misery porn. It’s a grim wallow through mankind at its ugliest but it gets many of the details of life at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder right, like the bare walls and peeling paint in ugly motel rooms that seemingly have never been cleaned, that are dirty spiritually as well as as physically.
The Heart is Deceitful Above all Things conveys, on a visceral level, the sense of helplessness and vulnerability that comes with being a child abused and neglected by the people who are supposed to love and protect you. In its most vivid and powerful moments, it’s true to the emotional devastation that ensues when the selflessness inherent in being a good mother or father who puts their child’s needs above their own is replaced by the pathological, narcissistic selfishness of a parent prioritizing their own bleary, self-destructive, never-ending hunt for cheap thrills above all else, particularly the needs of children doomed to serve as collateral damage for their parents’ moral emptiness.
Even without the revelations regarding Leroy’s true identity and Bennett and Argento’s accusations of sexual assault against each other, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things would still be a brutal watch. It’s even tougher now that the line separating the ugliness onscreen from the ugliness that was to come for Bennett and Argento has become so blurry that it’s hard to know where the pitch-black drama of abuse and degradation in the movie ends and the real-life tragedy begins.
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