Lend Me Your Ears

Dutifully, I rented the film once again and fastforwarded to the relevant scene. Alas, the reigning mythology about the film is untrue. Just as horror-movie buffs always say they can recall the sight of Janet Leigh's red blood vanishing down the bathtub drain in Psycho, even though the film is in black-and-white, people insist that Brad Davis physically rips off another character's ear in Midnight Express. This is totally untrue. Davis does gouge the ratfink's eyes, smash his face into a set of stone steps and rip his tongue out with his own teeth, climaxing his performance by spewing the tongue into the air, but at no point does Davis attempt to rip off the man's ear.

Understandably, many cinephiles have deluded themselves into thinking that a movie scripted by Oliver Stone would almost certainly contain a scene where a human ear is torn off, but in this case their memories deceive them. The fact that three of my friends inaccurately recalled such a scene lends credence to the theory that Oliver Stone is the victim of a vast conspiracy on the part of the media, the ratings board, and even the general public to make him appear an even more depraved sadist than he actually is. Or at least it did until Stone made Natural Born Killers, in which someone does get their ear mutilated.

Although Godfather III was not a huge commercial hit, it was, at the time of its release, the largest-grossing film in history to feature a scene where a human ear is mistreated. With this repugnant scene in Godfather III, ears finally entered the mainstream of cinema and became an acceptable focal point of dramatic tension. The same year that Godfather III came out, Robert Altman released Vincent & Theo, yet another look at the life of the doomed, uni-eared van Gogh, which, like The Last Temptation of Christ and Blue Velvet, features a scene where one man (van Gogh) surprises another (Gauguin) by kissing him just before an ear gets hacked off. Two years later testing the waters a bit further, Quentin Tarantino made his odious Reservoir Dogs, which contains the most graphic auricular violence in the history of motion pictures. Ears were here to stay. Though they were not going to stay put.

The central theme of Reservoir Dogs is honor among thieves: that even cold-blooded murderers recognize that there are bounds of good taste beyond which even they dare not venture. Harvey Keitel adumbrates this theme when he draws the crucial distinction between ordinary murderers such as himself and psychopaths such as Michael Madsen.

"A psychopath ain't a professional," fumes Keitel after a botched heist turns into a bloodbath because of Madsen's itchy trigger finger. "You can't work with a psychopath. You don't know what the sick assholes are gonna do next."

These lines, it should be emphasized, are uttered before Madsen carves off a hostage cop's ear with a straight razor while dancing to "Stuck in the Middle With You," before he asks the cop, "Was that as good for you as it was for me?" before he whispers into the severed ear, "Hey, what's going on?" and before he douses the cop with kerosene. For the record, I would just like to say that I cannot remember where I was when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot, but I can perfectly recall where I was when I first saw Reservoir Dogs. I was at home, sitting in my favorite armchair, poised in front of the television set, wondering what kind of sick fuck makes pictures like Reservoir Dogs.

Despite the failure of Reservoir Dogs to set the world on fire commercially, other moviemakers are showing no eagerness to soft-pedal the auscultative depravity in theirs. John Woo had one henchman scissor the earlobe of another in the Jean-Claude Van Damme masterpiece Hard Target (1993). Gary Busey lost stereo in The Firm (1993). The fact that not one, not two, but three motion pictures depicting graphic acoustic trauma have appeared in 1994 strongly suggests that audial savagery is here to stay. Only time will tell whether playing the role of a somewhat cuddly kidnap victim who takes a huge bite out of a psychopath's ear in A Perfect World will lead to a big career for eight-year-old T.J. Lowther; many moviegoers probably wish that the kid's role had been played by Macaulay Culkin, and that it was the murderous jailbird who got to take a bite out of his ear. But the one-two punch of Speed, in which Dennis Hopper cheerfully jams a knife into a man's ear, and Natural Born Killers, in which Robert Downey Jr. goes mono, leaves no doubt that auricular mayhem has assumed its rightful place in the vocabulary of contemporary filmmaking, and that in the months and years to come we can look forward to many more films in which actors get their ears mutilated. In a sense, there is a poetic justice in all this: Actors have been sticking it in our ears for years, so now let's all sit back and enjoy them getting it stuck in theirs.

Or is a remark like that a lobe blow?

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Joe Queenan wrote about actors who act with their hair in the September Movieline.

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