No on-screen appendage is truly safe in this age of violent cinema. If you think ears are, just listen up!
In the opening sequence of last summer's thriller Speed, mad bomber Dennis Hopper forcefully inserts a small knife in the eardrum of a security guard who has confronted him in the basement of a skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles. In doing so, Hopper became, as far as I can determine, the first major star in the history of motion pictures to appear in two movies in which he severs, mutilates, pierces or otherwise inflicts irreparable damage on another human being's acoustic apparatus, having already chopped off a man's ear in Blue Velvet. Although it is in some ways disheartening that the man who once embodied the countercultural ethos in renegade films such as Easy Rider and The Last Movie now plies his trade by mutilating other actors' auditory equipment in mainstream summer films such as Speed, it should not come as a huge surprise to the viewing public that Hopper should be the man singled out by the industry as the first recidivist ear mutilator in the rich history of the art form. If somebody has to be a serial ear brutilizer, Dennis Hopper seems like the right man for the job.
The ear-piercing incident in Speed, following so closely upon the scene in which a hired gun blows a hole through Gary Busey's ear in The Firm, and preceding by scant months Robert Downey Jr.'s having part of his ear blown off in Natural Born Killers, shows that we have reached a watershed in the history of cinema, signifying that auscultatory trauma has now become a staple in motion pictures made in this country. In recent years, ears have been severed in films as varied as Blue Velvet, Reservoir Dogs, The Last Temptation of Christ and Vincent & Theo, and ears have been bitten or gnawed upon in The Godfather, Part III and A Perfect World. But none of these films was a huge hit like The Firm or Speed. Godfather III and A Perfect World were commercial disappointments at the box office, Reservoir Dogs, Blue Velvet and Vincent & Theo are cult classics that have garnered far more fame than dollars, and Last Temptation was a marginal hit, nothing more.
Now, however, with the awesome success of Speed, whose very first violent act involves the brutalization of the human ear, and The Firm, we may very well have entered into a new era of cinema--the Ear Era--where tympanic trauma will be perceived by the general public as an acceptable, and perhaps even desirable, component of the moviegoing experience. In years to come, ear-piercing, ear-chopping, ear-slicing, ear-filleting, ear-microwaving and ear-masticating incidents may become so popular that they will replace head butts and kicks to the genitals as the single most popular cliche in the lexicon of popular cinema. Of course, as is often the case with my theories, I could be wrong about this.
The purpose of this essay is fourfold:
1) To discuss the history of auricular atrocity in motion pictures and pay homage to trailblazers in the idiom.
2) To draw attention to the different types of ear mutilation in motion pictures and stress the diverse cinematic objectives for which the savagery is utilized.
3) To draw a crucial distinction between films in which acoustic abuse is a peripheral, secondary element and those films in which the mistreatment of the human ear becomes a centrifugal force so powerful that no one can talk about the movie without mentioning "the ear scene."
4) To discuss the emerging role of children as ear mutilators in American cinema and speculate whether biting another actor's ear at an early age is a good career move.
First, a bit of history. From the time movies were invented until David Lynch hooked up with Dennis Hopper, ears did not play much of a role in the cinema. Actors used them to hear with, and that was about it. Occasionally, somebody would get yanked around by an ear-lobe, or have his or her ear affectionately nibbled on, but for the most part ears, like ulnae and femurs, were left pretty much alone. The single, shining exception to this was Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life, the much admired, albeit atrocious, 1956 film in which Kirk Douglas, playing the tortured Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, chops off his ear after an argument with Anthony Quinn, playing Paul Gauguin. This ponderous load of crap, bloated with every cliche about artists ever concocted, features the predictably dimwitted Douglas as a Dutch doofus who spends the entire film smoking a pipe and dashing around, with his forearms akimbo, looking for all the world like van Gogh the Sailor Man. The decision to chop off his ear is precipitated by a huge argument with Quinn about the role of emotion in painting, though there is abundant evidence--Douglas's clutching the sides of his head just before he performs the autoatrocity--that he has in fact been driven to this act of supreme desperation in the foolish hope of escaping from the soaring violin strains of Miklos Rozsa's unbearable score.
Actually, trouble has been brewing between Gauguin and van Gogh ever since Quinn first showed up at Douglas's rural French house and started complaining about Douglas's cooking and housekeeping. In this sense, Lust for Life can be viewed as a Post-Impressionist, monaural The Odd Couple, with Paul Gauguin/Anthony Quinn playing the role of the meticulous Felix Unger while Vincent van Gogh/Kirk Douglas plays the part of the slovenly Oscar Madison. Now that I think of it, both the Odd Couple movie and "The Odd Couple" TV series, good as they were, would have been a whole lot more enjoyable had either Walter Matthau or Jack Klugman chopped off his ear and walked around the apartment with a bandage wrapped around his head. Though in the best of all possible worlds, both of Jack Lemmon's and Tony Randall's ears would have come off.
Although Lust for Life earns innumerable cultural brownie points for being the first major motion picture to feature a severed ear in a prominent thematic position, it is not a very satisfactory mutilation scene, particularly when compared with subsequent ear slashings, such as those in The Last Temptation of Christ or Reservoir Dogs. For one, we do not actually see the ear get chopped off with the straight razor; Douglas performs the home surgery off-camera, and even after the ear has come off, we only see its reflection in the mirror. More disturbing still, one never gets a very clear sense of why van Gogh was driven to committing this act of self-transmogrification rather than taking things out on someone else. Did he think he was punishing Gauguin by chopping off his own ear? Was he cutting off his ear to spite Gauguin's face? Why didn't he simply chop off Gauguin's ear? Or Gauguin's nose? Another thing: If investors in the late '80s were willing to pay as much as $36 million for a bunch of sunflowers painted by a man most famous for cutting off his own ear, think how much that same painting would be worth if he'd cut off his dick.
Let us leave Starry, Starry Nightmare now and examine the subsequent history of cinematic auricular trauma. From 1956 until 1986, the human ear, as a focal point of dramatic action, vanished from the silver screen. Why? Your guess is as good as mine, but good taste can certainly not be the explanation. For whatever the reason, detached ears did not take center stage in motion pictures again until 1986, when David Lynch released his cult creep classic Blue Velvet. The movie opens with placid, reassuring images of Middle-American suburban life: attentive crossing guards, friendly firemen, happy schoolchildren, white picket fences, a man having a heart attack. But then a shadow falls across the screen as preppy Kyle MacLachlan, back from college to visit his ailing dad (the guy who had the heart attack), stumbles upon a hairy, moldy, insect-infested ear in the woods. Gingerly inserting it in a plain brown-paper bag, MacLachlan transports it to the police station where the chief of detectives tells him, "Yes, that's a human ear, all right."
This is where Blue Velvet parts company with Lust for Life. In Lust for Life, the audience knows all along that the ear-chopping scene is coming sooner or later, because we all know that the real-life Vincent van Gogh did actually chop off his ear. But after the ear has come off, the moviemakers drop the whole unsavory subject; they don't try to play it for laughs. Not so in Blue Velvet, where the bodyless ear becomes a powerful element in the movie.
"What can you tell about a person from their ear?" MacLachlan asks the town coroner. "Are you the one who found the ear?" Laura Dern subsequently asks the Kylemeister in one of the great pickup lines of all time. And when the coroner tells MacLachlan, "We'll check the morgue records, but I don't recall anything coming in minus an ear. The person may still very well be alive somewhere," it signals to the audience that something very troubling is taking place here. Surely, the coroner is suggesting, anyone unlucky enough to have his ear cut off, or anyone unlucky enough to have a loved one whose ear had been cut off, would immediately report it to the police. This isn't the sort of injury--say, a boil, or herpes--that one simply ignores.
In Blue Velvet, the severed ear also functions on a metaphorical level, when we are introduced to Isabella Rossellini, a mysterious lounge lizardess whose husband has been abducted--and had his ear chopped off--by the sex maniac Dennis Hopper.
Here, the severed ear is important for two very different reasons. One, after listening to Isabella's brutal rendition of the Bobby Vinton classic "Blue Velvet" during her nightclub act, it becomes apparent to the audience that she will never be able to raise any serious ransom money if she has to depend on her voice. Two, only a person who was missing at least one ear could possibly derive any pleasure from listening to her singing.
Ears also play an important role in Blue Velvet because without them, Kyle MacLachlan would not be able to make any sense out of the dream Laura Dern describes to him after he asks why there is so much trouble in the world. As she puts it:
"In the dream, there was our world. And the world was dark because there weren't any robins. And the robins represented love. And so along this time there was just this darkness, and all of a sudden thousands of robins were set free, and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference. And it did. So I guess it means there is trouble till the robins come."
Laura, as usual, is a big help.
From Blue Velvet, we naturally segue into Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Why? Because Blue Velvet is a movie about a small town with big problems where someone gets their ear cut off, and it also contains a scene where a likable young man (MacLachlan) is kissed on the lips by a creepy actor he would prefer not to be kissed by (Hopper), just as The Last Temptation of Christ is a movie about a small town with big problems where someone gets their ear cut off, and it contains a scene where a likable young man (Willem Dafoe) is kissed on the lips by a creepy actor he would prefer not to be kissed by (Harvey Keitel).
But first, some indispensable Biblical background. There are four different versions of Christ's arrest on the Mount of Olives on Holy Thursday (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) but only St. Luke's version of the Gospel describes the scene where Christ miraculously reattaches the right ear of the High Priest's servant after St. Peter has chopped it off. Perhaps because the ear-cutting scene did not go over so well in Lust for Life, or perhaps because they were basing their screen-plays on the Gospels written by the other Evangelists, neither Nicholas Ray in his 1961 King of Kings nor George Stevens in his 1965 The Greatest Story Ever Told include the ear-cutting scene. (In Stevens's defense, a director forced to cast John Wayne as the Roman centurion at the foot of the cross, intoning the words, "Surely, this was the son of God" is already trying the audience's patience enough without confusing the issue through audial anguish.)
But clearly the ear-lopping incident was far too wonderful an opportunity for the Roman Catholic Mob Director Marty Scorsese to pass up. Actually, Scorsese's ear-chopping scene is relatively tasteful, considering what immediately precedes it: Harvey Keitel, cast as a red-haired Judas with a Bensonhurst accent, kissing Willem Dafoe (Jesus of Nazareth) full on the lips. After witnessing a scene as unsavory as that--Jesus seems plenty surprised by the kiss--it's hardly surprising that one of Christ's disciples should whip out his knife and hack off the ear of the High Priest's hapless servant. Interestingly, the disciple uses a nifty uppercut to lop the ear off, creating the impression that this may not be the first time he's done this sort of thing. The ear fragment comes off cleanly, bloodlessly, and tumbles to the ground where Christ, who also seems to be used to this sort of thing, picks it up, reattaches it, and then goes on his merry way being taken into custody and crucified. Inexcusably, the man with the restored ear doesn't even thank Jesus. One other thing: unlike the revolting, hairy ear in Blue Velvet, the ear fragment that Dafoe retrieves from the ground in Last Temptation looks incredibly cheesy. I mean, where's the blood? What, were you saving it for Joe Pesci in GoodFellas, Marty?
This might be a good opportunity to say a few words about Scorsese's overall mutilative technique. The first time I saw The Last Temptation of Christ I was very impressed by the low-key way in which Scorsese handled this incident, which, in the hands of a lesser director--say Oliver Stone--could have been pretty nauseating, and which, in the hands of a lesser director, Quentin Tarantino, was pretty nauseating. Then I had second thoughts. There's something very unsettling about a movie where somebody gets his ear cut off and nobody thinks that it's that big a deal. Say what you want about Reservoir Dogs, but when Michael Madsen lops off the cop's ear, the victim at least reacts like something pretty horrible has just happened to him.
Contrast this with the relatively muted reaction to the auricular atrocity in Last Temptation. The disciple whips out his knife, lops off the ear, and the victim sort of groans, but he doesn't descend into the kind of full-fledged hysteria we see in Reservoir Dogs and he doesn't even get as upset as Joe Mantegna seems to be in Godfather III, when he merely gets his ear bitten. All in all, I think Scorsese should be censured for pussyfooting around in this scene, and if he ever gets to do one of those restored director's cuts like Francis Ford Coppola or Sam Peckinpah or Kevin Costner, I hope he'll add in some footage he must have lying around somewhere of the victim going completely fucking ballistic. Let's face it: if you got your ear sliced off on the Mount of Olives while you were arresting a man who claimed to be the King of the Jews, I know you'd make a pretty big stink about it. God knows, I would.
I don't want to make too much of this whole ear-lopping business but I must admit that it's always been the thing that prevents me from accepting St. Luke's account of the events that transpired on Holy Thursday as gospel truth. What really rings false is the reaction of the Roman soldiers after Christ has reattached the ear. Put your self in their situation: if you were sent out in the middle of the night to arrest a man who claimed to be the son of God, and one of his confederates chopped off one of your confederate's ears, and then the man claiming to be visiting divinity miraculously reattached it, don't you think you'd find yourself saying something like: "Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't this guy just surgically reattach Maximus Minimus's ear without the benefit of any known medical technology? And if so, don't you think it's a little bit risky to try bringing this guy in, armed only with short daggers, tiny spears and these fey little tunics?"
Similarly, right after Christ is taken into custody, he is interrogated by a rather ponce-y Pontius Pilate, played by David Bowie, who gets a bit flip with Him. Bowie, sporting what appears to be a First Century A.D. Beatles mop top, treats Christ rather dismissively, remarking, "It's also said that you do miracles. Is this good magic or bad magic? Could we have some kind of... eh... demonstration? I mean, could you do a trick for me now?"
By this point, if I'm Jesus Christ, I'm probably going to find myself saying, "Look, asshole, I'm the guy who just reattached a human ear that had been lopped off somebody's head, and you're a two-bit Roman bureaucrat who's been banished to a deadend job in Judea. Do you really think I'm the sort of person you should be fucking with?"
But, of course, I am not Jesus Christ, so I'll have to let the issue drop and start talking about Andy Garcia.
Garcia is our next subject of interest because of the unsettling scene in The Godfather, Part III where he takes a huge bite out of Joe Mantegna's ear. Mantegna, it will be recalled by the three of us who saw the picture, plays a mobster who has inherited most of Michael Corleone's empire after Al Pacino decides to go legit. Unwisely, he turns up at Pacino's house the day the Don is being awarded a very prestigious medal by the Catholic Church in recognition of the $100 million he has donated to a fund that will succor the poor, aid starving artists and contribute to the economic revival of Sicily. Mantegna tries to get on Pacino's good side by presenting him with a plaque from the Meucci Foundation, named after an Italian who purportedly invented the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell claimed to have done so. Pacino says he never heard of the guy. The telephone, bear in mind, is a device that involves the use of the human ear. Symbolism and foreshadowing. Symbolism and foreshadowing.
The formalities concluded, Mantegna now explains to Pacino that he has been having trouble with a cheap punk who claims to be related to Pacino. The punk in question is one Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), the illegitimate son of Sonny Corleone (James Caan), who was killed off in The Godfather. Pacino tells Garcia to join him and Mantegna in his study for a confab. Garcia arrives, improperly attired in a leather jacket, glances at Mantegna, and grabs his nuts.
Trouble is a-brewing.
Garcia now tells Pacino that Mantegna has been running around behind his back saying things like "Fuck Michael Corleone." Pacino asks Mantegna if this is true, noting that anyone who would say such a thing is "a dog." Mantegna concurs with the Don's forceful logic, remarking, "Yes, it's true. If anyone who would say such a thing, they would not be a friend. They would be a dog." Pacino ignores Mantegna's deplorable grammar and accepts this explanation, telling his illegitimate nephew to make his peace with his superior. Mantegna and Garcia embrace, but then Mantegna goes one step too far and whispers something in Italian while giving the chastened Garcia an affectionate but condescending chuck on the ear. The next thing you know, Garcia has his teeth firmly planted in Mantegna's external acoustic equipment, seemingly making a ferocious attempt to bite it off.
This scene is important for two reasons. One, it establishes in the minds of the audience that Garcia is a sadistic brute unfit for human company, and thus will almost certainly end up in bed with Bridget Fonda later that same day. More important, the bite on the ear seems to affect Mantegna's ability to act for the rest of the movie. Let us recall that the ear is the center of equilibrium in the human body, and once it has been damaged, however lightly, even a talented actor like Joe Mantegna will find himself muffing his lines. By the time Mantegna, now decked out with an ear patch, makes his farewell speech at the Convention of Tutti Capo in Atlantic City, where he vainly attempts to assassinate Pacino, his acting is so much out of the Rod Steiger On A Bad Day School of Dramatic Art that he can no longer deliver his lines with any trace of credibility, and really must be killed.
At this point, I'd like to clear up a confusing issue about the 1978 film Midnight Express. When I first conceived the idea for this story, I told all my friends that I would welcome any tips about movies in which aurally related mishaps occur. No less than three friends advised me to rent Alan Parker's sordid tale of savagery in a Turkish prison, assuring me that there was a memorable scene where the house ratfink has his ear ripped off by Brad Davis. In fact, I had already seen this all-purpose slimefest at least three times, and seemed to recall that scene myself.
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.