In the Flesh: White of the Eye

The script of Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye never tries to match the fever pitch of what’s happening on screen, but that’s not to say it doesn’t fall short. As towers of blasted earth are heaved up skyward and Cammell’s camera soars over vistas of junk, machinery, and barren Arizona desert or hunches and skitters through the bizarre 1980s-era brutalist homes of the idle rich, the film’s characters mumble and mutter, whisper and sigh, talking about beer and sandwiches and hi-fi sound systems as the world comes apart around them. Fitting, considering one of the movie’s central themes is the casual monstrosity concealed within the architecture of the American nuclear household. Even at the fatal moment of revelation when Joan White (Cathy Moriarty) follows a loose thread to the sealed bags of human flesh hidden within the walls of her home, much of the dialogue remains even-keeled as the characters weave in and out of traumatic shock, trying and failing to run the same scripts which have taken them through their daily lives thus far.

When, before donning Kabuki makeup and a suicide vest, Paul (David Keith, tousled and dustily sexy) lays out his motives for murdering women and carving into their bodies, it sounds less like a serial killer’s rant than it does a relatively downbeat Jordan Peterson video. He expounds with a calmly whiny rationale on the mystical relationship between women and a black hole at the center of the known universe, his overriding emotion a sort of disgusted but paternalistic pity for the women he variously sleeps with and/or murders. This is his normal, and he reveals it not like a supervillain monologuing about his own inevitable victory, but like a suburban dad having a minor meltdown. The scene in which Paul — strapping on his suicide vest and feeding shells into the breech of his shotgun — calmly asks his young daughter Danielle (Danielle Smith) to make him a baloney sandwich on white bread, apple butter on both slices, is almost grotesquely bland.

The “white of the eye” from which the film takes its title, a sort of folk curse not unlike the malocchio, or “evil eye”, remains prudently unexplained, a psychic phenomena wielded by Paul and akin to Mike DeSantos’ (Alan Rosenberg) second sight. “It’s like a television,” Mike says of his own powers, gained after a traumatic head injury. “The future, the past. I can see it all, like on television.” Even to a man who can glimpse the flow of time, nothing is quite real. Everything is seen through a daydream’s soporific haze, obtusely violent omens like the giallo-esque sight of a goldfish drowning in the drippings of a standing roast. Like the glamorous socialite Paul binds with copper wire and drowns in her half-full bathtub, holding her down almost effortlessly as her last breath streams out of her mouth and nostrils, the film’s reality is inches from the surface, held suspended in a single moment of liminal anguish as normality and catastrophe rush irresistibly toward one another.