By Harry Perlich
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer has caused a minor controversy. It contains a series of brutal murders depicted with a powerful degree of realism, though not unusually graphic. They are undoubtedly gruesome, though not stylised or glamourised.
More importantly, the film provides a realistic cameo of the lives of three people who live on the bottom rung of life in the heart of an ugly industrial city. The film depicts brutality in social relations: drunkenness, apathy, sexism, alienation.
What has particularly raised ire is the belief that the violent aspects of the film are likely to provoke people who have a tendency to commit such crimes.
A Sydney Morning Herald review by forensic psychiatrist Dr Rod Milton panned the film as boring and likely to be dangerous.
Kevin Waller, a former state coroner and NSW magistrate writing in the Herald on March 9, suggested that Henry should be banned altogether because "The film does nothing but pander to the violent instinct present, but controlled, in most of us, and straining to burst loose in a few".
This presents interesting questions as to why his own instinct is so finely controlled. He claims that a copy of American Psycho was read by the Strathfield butcher, Wade Frankum, shortly before his killing spree. Why did Frankum not control his natural instinct, and why did a copy of The Female Eunuch, which was also in his possession, not turn him into a feminist?
Waller point out, and I believe it is correct, that the depiction of violence, in movies in particular, is related to the violent actions of some people who suffer from solitariness and low self-esteem. However, the irony is that Henry should be selected for condemnation in this regard. It is films of the Rambo ilk that depict killing in abundant, rampant, grotesque and heroic form.
Henry depicts killing as senseless and mindlessly violent. This murderer kills without reason and without conviction. The victims are indeed innocent and they are mostly women.
The depiction of death in Rambo-type movies shows that those who die are evil, and the hero is the mass slaughterer. Surely that would be the role model that mass murderers would seek to emulate.
The real crime of Henry is that it has no enemy, no justice, no hero, no police who apprehend the criminal, ultimately no happy ending. The killer lives to kill another day. Indeed, but this is life.
In Rambo it is the forces of good that destroy evil, the free market that triumphs over communism. In Henry it is social decay that triumphs. This is very disturbing for those who deem themselves fit to censor what the masses watch. Waller again: "Artists are hat you can kill or maim for pleasure [sic] and get away with it. I wonder what the types who are bashing old people in and around Redfern are watching?"
Funny you should mention that. Those old people, living in the Purcell Flats in Redfern and who are robbed at knife point for a few dollars, are victims of a cycle of poverty in which the poor rob the poor. The rich have high fences and homes in the suburbs. In response to these crimes the government has promised a review of security. All the residents ask for is security doors for the building entrance, better lighting and door chains. These have been promised for 18 months by the Department of Housing.
Waller complains of the film: "At no time is there any intervention or interest shown by police, neighbours or media. The wanton violence takes place in a seemingly normal and apathetic environment." This is another reason he considers it to be morally incorrect.
Yet this is the reality that many poor people face. If Waller is wondering what the police are doing, he might look at page 8 of the same edition of the Herald in which he is given an opportunity to speak: "A California Highway Patrol officer has told how a white policeman beat a black motorist ... with his baton, splitting his face from the top of his ear to the bottom of his jaw" (and that was for speeding). For the Australian scenario, we need go no further than the activities of police depicted in the recent documentary film Cop It Sweet. Should that have been censored?
But one of Waller's comrades in higher office has a ready answer to social problems such as those in Redfern that does not require additional security measures. Joe Schipp, the NSW minister for the above-mentioned Department of Housing, suggests that criminals should be flogged publicly: "A taste of the lash might well be something they remember". And what a fine heritage that policy comes from.
Public flogging would of course be televised live on TV at 7 o'clock to compete with splatter movies. The weals and blood gushing from the backs of the criminals would not be censored. This is because it is conducted by the state, which is benevolent and entitled to freedom of expression because it proves to the population and to the criminal element that justice will prevail.
Henry is brutal and ugly. But unlike almost all other splatter movies, it masks a genuine statement about modern society rather than presenting violence for entertainment, thrills and simplistic moral affirmation that all's well. This is the real reason for the censors' outrage.