The Red Circle

Mental illness has long been a crutch in Hollywood. Movies make us feel like we should pity and understand those who are afflicted with mind problems. Shine, Sling Blade, I Am Sam, Girl, Interrupted are all movies that, in some way, try to shed a light on the people beneath the disease. They are always stories of triumph over an invisible demon. Even a movie like Memento spends a lot of its time documenting how Leonard Shelby deals with his short term memory loss alongside the presentation of what it leads to.

And this is why Lodge Kerrigan’s 1994 debut feature Clean, Shaven is such an interesting film. It tracks a few days in the life of a man named Peter (played with unnerving intensity and dedication by Peter Greene) with schizophrenia. Along the way we meet his disaffected mother, his daughter and the woman who adopted her, and a detective that is investigating the murder of a teenage girl. These stories intersect – but the specifics are left intentionally indecipherable.

It’s not a movie that wants you to sympathize with the characters. It’s barely even a movie that wants you to understand the characters. It’s a movie that attempts to show, as evenhandedly as possible, the life of a man with a mental illness. A an capable of terrible things, and a man that may have actually committed some.

Peter has just been released from a mental hospital, and has come to live with his mother. His daughter was given up for adoption by this woman while Peter was institutionalized. His only goal for the forseeable future is to get his daughter back from the woman who adopted her. This is made difficult by his condition, which has led him to believe that the hospital has implanted transmitters and receivers in his body so that they can track his thoughts. All the while, a young girl has turned up dead, and the detective in charge of the case has begun to suspect Peter. This is about all of the narrative the film offers. The rest is a course study in character, composition, and above all, sound design.

Due to Peter’s beliefs, he is constantly bombarded by a staticy radio station playing out the voices in his head. He cannot stand seeing his own image reflected back at him, even going so far as to smash a window in his car and layer the rest with old newspaper. The film has a constant sense of confusion and uneasiness to it. We hear things that may not really be there mixed in with the things that assuredly are. It’s really an incredible effect, and it mashes perfectly well with the jarring cuts and frames that Kerrigan is able to conjure.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the movie – and almost certainly the most effective – is the almost absolute lack of context it gives the audience. Besides a short scene that discusses Peter’s young life when he apparently had no signs of the disease, there is absolutely no backstory given to a single character. It forces us to interpret the images and sounds that are presented to us, as unreliable as they may be. We are not invited into the head of the man so tortured. We are kept at arms length as we rach for understanding. Only our predilection  to sympathize or condemn will decide how we feel about the 80 minutes of pictures and sound we’ve just witnessed. Kerrigan is keen to include visual and auditory cues that are intentionally ambiguous. Or, I suppose a better word would be ambidextrous. They simultaneously support more than one theory about the proceedings.

Peter is certainly portrayed as a potentially dangerous person. He is frighteningly calm when taking chunks of flesh out of his own body to disarm the transceivers buried within. It’s not a hard leap to make that he would display the same tendencies when performing the same to another human being. It’s this specific notion that makes the movie such a powerful experience. After, without any warning, we see Peter slicing a section of his own cheek out while shaving, it’s hard to suppress the urge to cringe whenever any sharp object is placed within arm’s reach of him. Even the placement of a spoon next to a coffee cup brings a certain amount of needless dread to your mind. To be sure, there are some grueling scenes to get through that show how far Peter is willing to go to get what he wants.

It’s all part of the plan. We are set up to see Peter as a violent man, capable of horrors unimaginable by a man without his condition. But, as the film wears on and on, there is little actual evidence to support these claims. In fact, Kerrigan himself as stated about this practice: “There’s no conclusive evidence that he is [the murderer] and if people feel that he’s guilty, I hope that the picture holds them responsible for drawing that conclusion.” It’s a film that completely allows itself to be processed in a variety of different ways, but makes the viewer complicit in his or her own reactions.

It’s a wonderful idea. Making an audience understand and live with schizophrenia by forcing them to involve themselves personally in the picture. Much like how Spike Jonze offered your own childhood back to you in Where the Wild Things Are, Lodge Kerrigan and Peter Greene offer a character’s existence and fate entirely tied to the way you are naturally inclined to deal with a person far outside of normal.

Many people will dismiss it as pretentious (it is), some people will stop watching because it contains frightening violence (it does), a few people will not understand its densely layered structure (guilty as charged), but everyone will be forced to have a reaction to it. This is the antithesis of “meh” cinema. For those willing to be actively engaged in the art of cinema, there are many rewards to be found in the viewing and reviewing of Clean, Shaven.

You may be surprised at how many different ways you can see the same story, and you may be more surprised at what the film finds inside of your own brain.

Clean, Shaven is available as Spine #354 from the Criterion Collection in the United States.

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