New Interview Pretty Much Proves There's No Explaining Killer Inside Me

If there's anything Movieline learned from viewing Michael Winterbottom's lady-pulverizing adaptation of The Killer Inside Me last January at Sundance, it was that the acclaimed British filmmaker may very well be answering for this one, like, forever. Keep in mind this is a guy who once managed to make graphic, unsimulated screen sex forgettable, so no one takes it lightly that Winterbottom might have really drilled into the cultural consciousness for the first time since 2002's In This World. This could get good -- if only he could articulate his impulse to make ground chuck out of Jessica Alba's face.

In a new video interview with The Guardian (sadly unembeddable, alas, but you can and should go check it out as long as you promise to come right back here), Winterbottom stammers and strains with some of the more tired platitudes defending the overbearing violence by Sheriff Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) against lovers played by Alba and Kate Hudson. This is not a guy customarily so flustered on camera. To start with, he was just being faithful to Jim Thompson's book -- which is true to an extent, though the author's first-person tense implicated and provoked a kind of awful sympathy in the reader, whereas the film is an exploitation flick with literally no sense of imagination.

Then there's the whole "morality" thing, tossed out there by Winterbottom with a kind of overcaffeinated salesmanship:

This film is killing people just in a totally self-destructive way -- killing people because... because they could make him happy. It's like someone who just doesn't want to have any happiness and so on. And so it seemed important to me that those scenes are brutal enough that you realize how horrible this is, how wasteful it is, how disgusting it is. And also to have time in those scenes to think about what Lou's doing and what's going on in his head and why is he doing this?

Everyone's accepted that violence exists. Everyone's accepted that a lot of films deal with violence, and everyone's accepted that men are violent against women. That's the reason they exist, is what makes this issue sensitive? It seems to be saying, "Well, it's all right if you don't... It's all right to kill a woman on film, it's all right to have violence in the film, as long as it's entertaining, it's acceptable, it doesn't seem so bad, it's done by a good guy or whatever." That's not a moral position; that's something totally different. So I think they're two things that are being totally blurred in a way that doesn't make any sense between, "I don't like seeing this; this is ugly and horrible," and "It's immoral." Those are two completely different issues.

Ah, I see. Or maybe not. The ultimate point is that Lou's motivations themselves are a completely different issue than Winterbottom's depiction of his violence. Sure, both are purposely consistent with the shock of the book. Yet it's pedantic and (ahem) on-the-nose in a way that Thompson never would have tolerated. The only logical response to deduce from Winterbottom's surface-level loyalty is not that we need to see how "disgusting" it is, but rather how matter-of-fact it is: This is the way the behavior happened, and there is no explaining it. It just is.

In which case the filmmaker will still probably face some outraged moviegoers, but at least he won't outrage more with the specious claim that he's making some commentary on violence beyond its shock value. There is no dramatic appeal to the violence in Killer Inside Me, whether it's against men or women. It is spectacle first and foremost in a way that Thompson, as a consummate observer of human nature, would have most likely disapproved of: His ideas of catharsis may have made readers squirm, but at least they never sunk to dilettantish depths of genre experimentation. He meant it. Cold-blooded psychosis means never having to say you're sorry.

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Michael Winterbottom on the morality of The Killer Inside Me [Guardian]