Never mind romcoms, make your first date a trip to Martyrs or Antichrist
The date movie is perhaps the worst genre Hollywood has to offer. So vast is the gulf between Valentine’s Day, The Bounty Hunter and films someone in full possession of their mental faculties would actually want to see, that one must seek out other entertainment. Critic Mark Kermode has said that the litmus test is taking your girlfriend to a horror movie, but then he had the luxury of dating an academic who specialises in the erotic thriller. These days the horror film comes pre-packaged with a great deal of violence against women, and I decided to see just what a group of female friends were willing to endure.
We began with Eli Roth’s ‘torture porn’ Hostel series, which elicited few screams and little effect in general, chiefly because the films are crap. Our cohort laughed at a few bits of the terrible dialogue, so we can assume that films along these lines (from Saw and Saw II through until Saw: Infinity) make a safe bet for dates.
I upped the stakes, and went in for a round of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. Its prolonged psychological nausea was enjoyed by everyone except me: whenever a character breaks the fourth wall I quickly erect a fifth. The English remake and German language versions are essentially identical. Choose whichever. I can’t take Michael Pitt seriously after Last Days and The Dreamers, yet I am always too distracted by Arno Frisch’s insanely thin legs to pay attention to the original.
Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs makes for an interesting double bill with any Haneke piece. Wrapping two hours of gore in a bit of cod philosophy (after all, it is French…), the film subjects the viewer to various women being ritually beaten into a state whereby they might see a little bit of the afterlife. One girl, ribboned with cuts and unable to speak, scratches at a light bulb, and another finds metal plates bolted to her head and pelvis. By the time a long scene of a girl being skinned arrived, our group was mostly unable to endure any longer. The sight of Charlotte Gainsbourg producing blood-cum from her husband, before self-mutilating with dirty scissors, also proved a bit too much in Von Trier’s Antichrist.
Our journey stopped there, before Irréversible, in which Monica Belluci is raped for a good ten minutes. The point of this scene, I believe, is that by about five minutes, the viewer actually begins to find watching a rape boring, rather than disgusting. The rule really is that in terms of making these movies a romantic excursion, gross torture is fine as long as it isn’t directed in too serious a manner.
The real myth, though, is that men are the ones deciding what should be seen. Moviegoing men are actually exposed to women’s cinematic choices. I first started dating properly in 2003. I know this not because I’m a sad, obsessive diarist, but because it could only be in that year when my then girlfriend took me to see Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Bruce Almighty, the first Pirates of the Caribbean film and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
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