Giving Heads

For a clearer sense of Burton's stupendous achievement, take a gander at one of his recent competitors. Ask the average decapitation film buff to cite his greatest disappointment and he is almost certain to mention the film Se7en. This is the 1995 thriller where Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt play a pair of spectacularly ineffective detectives hot on the trail of a serial killer. At the end of the film, a delivery man hands Freeman a box containing the head of Pitt's pregnant wife Gwyneth Paltrow. Inexplicably, the director never shows us her head. Does this suck or what? Whether Paltrow had it written into her contact that her body and her head could not appear separately, or whether the director thought the ultimate head shot would have been too offensive to feminist audiences, I have no idea. But the shocking failure to show Paltrow's severed head in all its muted majesty is the biggest consumer rip-off since viewers were cheated out of an opportunity to see Helena Bonham Carters head go rolling into a ditch at the end of the 1985 Elizabethan costume drama Lady Jane. Directors have no right to trifle with audiences this way. If you're going to use decapitation as a theme in your movie, then the public has the right to see the severed head. With movies running $9.50 a pop in places like New York and Los Angeles, people expect a dead head shot.

We now arrive at the most important topic of this essay: the future of decapitation movies. In almost all the films we have touched upon so far, decapitation is a technique that coheres nicely with the film genre in which it appears._ Braveheart, Conan, Gladiator, The Patriot, Khartoum_ and the Highlander series are all action films depicting a world where the occasional severed head is to be expected; that is, societies where, if a bloody, lacerated head didn't occasionally go bouncing down the hill, the locals would start to wonder if something was wrong up in the Manor House. The problem is, in movies like these, decapitations are becoming so commonplace they are rapidly losing their shock value. What I would like to see is a gradual expansion of the technique into other genres where decapitation would come as a complete surprise. Examples? I would have loved to see Roberto Benigni's head come flying off in Life is Beautiful. In fact, I would have loved it if Benigni had a recurring nightmare about getting his head chopped off throughout the film, so that I could have seen his head come flying off more than once.

Other suggestions? If someone had taken a scimitar to Madonna's head at the beginning of The Next Best Thing, Rupert Everett might have been able to salvage something out of this mess. And had the screenwriter figured out some way to keep Madonna's decapitated body alive on life support, it would have vastly improved her acting, which is mostly done from below the head anyway.

Unexpected decapitations would be a much-appreciated addition to any Woody Allen movie, particularly if his head was the first to go. Tea With Mussolini would have been much better if Cher's head had gotten lopped off, and I think the same can be said for just about any movie starring James Spader or Woody Harrelson. Since Gwyneth Paltrow escaped being seen sans tête in Se7en, it would have been awfully nice to see both of her personalities senza testa in Sliding Doors. Finally, I would love to see a head-hunting Nora Ephron sequel called Headless in Seattle and it wouldn't matter to me whether it was Meg Ryan's or Tom Hanks's skull that came flying off. (Obviously, a double decapitation would be too much to hope for.)

One vital point needs to be made here. Though it is clear from the tone of this article that I am a huge fan of decapitation movies, I am not suggesting that the mere fact that a movie features a beheading guarantees that it will be good. Lake Placid is a mess. Se7en is idiotic. The Highlander movies bite. And the only thing that keeps Crazy in Alabama from being the worst movie of the year is the fact that Madonna made a film the same year. Yet there is something to be learned from the decapitations that occur in each of these films. And it is this: If you're going to chop off somebody's head in a movie, make damn sure that you get the right head. Call me a lunatic, but I will go to my death believing that Lake Placid could have worked if Bridget Fonda's head had come off. Similarly, I believe that Se7en would have been a whole lot more interesting if Pitt had gotten his head chopped off; with that nitwit out of the way, Freeman might have had an outside shot at solving the case. And while it is doubtful that Crazy in Alabama could ever have been a box-office hit, it would have had a much better chance of finding an audience if Griffiths head had been sniffed in a hatbox early in the film, or perhaps even before shooting began.

If anyone has any other suggestions, I'm all ears.

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Joe Queenan wrote "What Lies Beneath Ghost Story" for the October issue of Movieline.

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