Arts
Dog days
Peter Ackroyd
Cujo (`18', selected cinemas)
Stephen King must take the primary responsibility for Cujo, since he wrote it. His novels have often been successful in cinematic form, principally because his im- position of Gothic horror upon a 'small town' American setting can be brought ful- ly, if not vividly, to life upon the screen. There are some critics who believe that he is really writing for a cinema audience in the first place, but it is rather the case that his gifts as a story-teller are readily assimilable to any medium. With The Shining and Car- rie he was also blessed with good directors — Stanley Kubrick and Brian de Palma. He has not been so fortunate with Cujo.
There is an old adage that actors ought not to work with animals, a principle which is triumphantly reasserted in this story of a St Bernard dog which has gone to the bad — although, in this case, the animal may have made a mistake in working with humans. In Cujo the quondam defender of man's interests becomes rabid, and red eyes are substituted for a red barrel as he pro- ceeds to savage and kill several people before laying siege to a young mother and child in their car. For those who fear dogs of any variety, this film is not recommend- ed. Even those who have an affection for our four-legged friends will be rather shock- ed, although not half as much as those who have an affection for the cinema.
At first it seems we are being offered the old 'new style' in American pictures — a suburban setting in which the director lingers in an apparently ironical manner upon the conventional appurtenances of American life; the television at the breakfast table, the adulterous housewife and the husband engaged in commercial malpractice. And then, right on schedule, a familiar domestic comfort becomes an Unsuspected and deadly threat: in this case, the St Bernard. Every time it appears it is accompanied by music which suggests the crack of doom. The pooch, whose name I did not catch, was not particularly upstaged by the cast who were in any case equally Unknown; and at least it had the advantage Of being unconnected with the script, which Was a real dog's dinner of all the available cliches. As the acting degenerated, the creature became more and more bleary- eyed until in the end he might almost have represented the audience.
I suspect that some kind of statement was being made about the fact that human be- ing on occasion behave like animals, and therefore deserve to be thrust back into the natural world of predators and victims. The
wife has been having an affair with a plump young man who is known fondly as 'the local stud' (another animal metaphor?), and so she must pay for her sins by being savaged. In fact, scenes of torn flesh and ripped throats are the central feature of the film — not least in the constant and contemptible playing with the audience's expectations. For those of a sensitive disposition the only recourse is hands over the eyes — the music will tell you all you need to know, in any case.
For those who like to see such things, well, here they are. That is why the present campaign against 'video nasties', which does not include films of this kind, seems fundamentally misdirected. If the aim is to ban `nasties' of an egregious varity, it can only be because they are thought to have a deleterious effect upon human behaviour — either by so desensitising viewers to scenes of carnage that they begin to accept it in human situations, or by actually pro- voking them to such behaviour. But in that case the 'video nasties' are really a side- show. The greater danger of such conse-
quences lies in the large number of films, shown both in the cinema and on television, which contain examples of sexual and physical violence on a less blatant but no less insidious scale: the James Bond films, the Sweeney series now being repeated, and half the current output from what is truly called the American film 'industry', are deliberately fashioned in order to include scenes of sexual abuse or violent assault. Because they are accepted, they have become acceptable, although the difference between them and the 'video nasties' is one of degree rather than of kind. While legislators may congratulate themselves on removing perhaps 0.5 per cent of the available releases, they are leaving unchang- ed — and therefore implicitly condoning films which contain abbreviated or diluted examples of the same material. In fact it could be argued that the latter do more harm — the worst of the 'video nasties' are so bad that they produce feelings of revul- sion or a recognition of the fact that they are so unreal as to be merely comic. Violence and rape in conventional 'horror' films seem more authentic and become more familiar. By extirpating one symp- tom, the censors of the `nasties' leave the disease unchecked so that, in the end, it will be raging everywhere. It seems probable that they have not analysed or understood the principles behind their attempt at cen- sorship, and that it will as a result be counter-productive.
Perhaps the only efficient legislation is
that which is finally effected by public taste. It was gratifying to see that at the Classic Cinema, Chelsea, on Saturday night there were only a score of people in the audience for Cujo. This suggests that apathy, • uninterest or genuine distaste will in the end be far more successful in preventing the production and distribution of these films than the fiat of some empty-headed MPs.
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