This piece was originally published in Issue 6 of Notebook magazine as part of a broader exploration of the cinema of youth. The magazine is available via direct subscription or in select stores around the world.
The first time I watched somebody die—really die—on film, I would have been about fourteen, surfing the web on the clunky, Frankensteinian experiment of a desktop computer that my father, an IT guy, had made for me out of spare parts he had harvested from work. I can’t remember how I first came across a recording of the former Pennsylvania Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer taking his own life on television in 1987, but I do remember with surprising clarity exactly how I felt in the immediate aftermath of watching him, in the middle of a live press conference, put a bullet through his brain. I felt that something irreversible had happened: that there had been a moment in which I was still a person who had never watched a man die, and then, bam, another moment in the wake of it in which I had become somebody else.
In 2022, I published a book about the use of self-inflicted injury in art and entertainment, and the conversations that I had with fellow-millennial readers at promotional events often turned to the website Rotten.com—a shock site whose stock in trade was violent videos, crime-scene images, hideous medical photography, and miscellaneous (sometimes mocked-up) gore, and which was one of several places that hosted the video of Dwyer.1 The site, which was created in 1996 by a pseudonymous web developer going by “Soylent,” functioned like an electronic game of chicken: its front page, a sparse white design studded with no-nonsense hyperlinks with titles like “Meat Grinder II” and “Celebrity Morgue,” alongside a brief, provocative content description, dared users to click through.2 There has always been a market for depictions of the violent and grotesque; the tape of Dwyer’s suicide re-aired on several news stations on the day he died, and it has been digitized and recirculated endlessly since. The advent of the internet, however, made finding such material child’s play, and for a time in the late ’90s and the early 2000s—before many parents had wised up to the existence of auto-censoring filters—it also made seeking it out a popular adolescent hobby. Still, nobody I talked to about Rotten.com during that promotional cycle could explain exactly why they browsed the site in their teens. Was it curiosity? A desire for catharsis? An attempt at psychological self-harm? Perhaps they were all seeking the same sense of horrible transformation I experienced when watching that video of Dwyer—hoping to propel themselves over the line into adulthood, leaving childhood innocence behind. Sickness, death, injury, cruelty: These were things we had been told to expect from adult life, and the ability to look directly at them without flinching could be seen as proof of our burgeoning maturity.
Red Rooms (Pascal Plante, 2024).
Then again, perhaps the sick, cheap thrill of it all was enough. Red Rooms (2023), an intelligently spooky film by the Canadian director Pascal Plante, interrogates the impetus to look at extreme content on the web without ever settling on an explanation as to why we feel the urge to do so. It is nominally a thriller but is far more intriguing when viewed as a character study of a woman who appears to have no character at all. Our “heroine” Kelly-Anne, a statuesque and blank-faced professional model, is attending the weeks-long trial of an alleged child-killer and online snuff-pornographer named Ludovic Chevalier, sleeping outside the courtroom to ensure herself a prime seat for the action. “Asking human beings to watch these kinds of videos,” the prosecutor says of the evidence she has assessed, “is inflicting something on them.” About halfway through the film, we learn that Kelly-Anne has chosen to inflict this horror on herself: Having obtained two of the videos in question on the dark web, she has watched them enough times to have memorized the action.
Most reviewers peg Kelly-Anne as a deeply online edgelord, or as an unhinged vigilante who is out for justice. There is a third possibility to consider: Her extreme lack of emotion and her quasi-fetishistic identification with the victim may imply that she has been abused herself, and that her investment in Chevalier and his crimes—and, eventually, in helping to facilitate his prosecution—might have very little to do with titillation or with altruism, and more to do with performing a fucked-up exorcism on herself. By magnifying the impulse to look at images of violence to such a grand, repulsive scale, Red Rooms forces us to consider that desire from every angle. In time, we may begin to see a little of ourselves reflected in the obsidian mirrors of Kelly-Anne’s two-screen setup. Should we view the urge to seek out extremity as the result of a process of dehumanization, brought on by years of exposure to devices? Or as the continuation of an impulse that has always lain within us: an atavistic need to understand, and to test, the limits of the body and the self? In other words: Is it nurture or nature?
Perhaps it is a combination of the two—I suspect that being online in the early-to-mid 2000s had a lasting effect on the way I see the world, and I believe that it has also had an interesting effect on the culture I am drawn to as an adult, much of which is transgressive in an arthouse fashion, and is liberally spiked with sex and violence. Plante and I were born in the same year, meaning that we both grew up surfing the same era of the internet, and also that we were both in our impressionable teens when the phrase “New French Extremity” first appeared in print in 2004, courtesy of the critic James Quandt in Artforum. Quandt railed against a then-new wave of French cinema that he condemned for being preoccupied with “images and subjects once the provenance of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn—gang rapes, bashings and slashings and blindings, hard-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and incest, fucking and fisting, sluices of cum and gore.”3 The movement may have been officially christened in the mid-2000s, but it can be traced back to the late 1990s, with the release of films like François Ozon’s See the Sea (1997), or Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone (1998), and as such, its development ran in tandem with the rise of shock sites whose content—per Wikipedia, depictions of atrocities including “beheadings, execution, electrocution, suicide, murder, stoning, torching, police brutality, hangings, terrorism, cartel violence, drowning, vehicular accidents, war victims, rape, necrophilia, genital mutilation and other sexual crimes”—mirrored the fixations of the New French Extremity rather neatly (not least as they were somewhat sniffily outlined by Quandt in his piece).4 In both contexts, what was on offer was the most, the worst, a showcase of grueling ugliness and evil designed to make the viewer feel something real, even if that real feeling happened to be one of nausea. The writer-director Catherine Breillat once described the quasi-private, ritualistic setting of her literally pornographic 2004 film Anatomy of Hell as “this fantastical and hideous realm of obscenity [that] obsesses me”—a description that might just as easily apply to the Wild West of the early-’00s internet.5
Demonlover (Olivier Assayas, 2002).
Red Rooms shares some of the themes of the New French Extremity, though it is far less explicit. In fact, though it owes a great debt to the films of David Fincher, with its blue-bruise lighting and administrative briskness, it also recalls Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover (2002), which is frequently categorized as an Extremity film. Both films are about encrypted websites that host extreme, illegal S&M content; both center on hot, sociopathic-seeming brunette women who are good with practicalities and bad with people; both share a scuzzy internet-inflected vibe that is somehow cold and grimy at the same time. A corporate espionage thriller set in the (sometimes literally) cutthroat world of Hentai animation, Demonlover revolves around a dizzying flurry of double-crosses. Some of the film’s most interesting visual tics relate to Assayas’s depiction of the live-action, snuff-adjacent torture-porn site that becomes a crucial element of the plot, which he films in darting, quivering close-ups, sometimes tightly enough that the image is reduced to pixels and becomes impossible to parse, or at an angle that conceals most of the action, thus allowing us to imagine something worse. The deliberately high visual contrast between these fuzzy, frantic snatches of nudity and torture and the classic Assayasian offices and airports and hotels of the rest of the film, all relatively blank and sterile, makes the porn seem grimmer still. It’s not erotic, exactly—more startling and intriguing. “Does it turn you on?” one of the characters asks another about the site, which is dopily called the Hellfire Club. “Not really,” her nemesis replies, before pausing and then clarifying: “It fascinates me.”
Quandt also quotes the ultra-stylish and gloomy French director Philippe Grandrieux in his piece, as a little jab at the New French Extremity’s supposedly pretentious self-justification. “What do we try to reach so feverishly, with such obstinacy and suffering, through representation, through images, if not to open the body’s night, its opaque mass, the flesh with which we think,” Grandrieux asks, “and present it to the light, to our faces, the enigma of our lives?”6 However floridly, he makes an interesting point about the function of the movement by suggesting that all visual art is designed to illuminate the otherwise pitch-black interior of the body, and that this illumination also sheds light on the psyche. Speaking with Grandrieux in 2002, the critic Nicole Brenez noted that his film La vie nouvelle (2002) gives the distinct impression of being “the first film shot inside the human body.”7 Grandrieux’s best films are powerful because of their fleshy maximalism and their skittering, epileptic use of camera movement, a combination that at times produces a similar effect to that of Assayas’s scrambled depiction of porn in Demonlover: namely, one that suggests the hand of a pervert or a maniac, and which reduces the subject to its composite parts. It is a beautiful and artful kind of mess, but it is a mess nonetheless; the picture shakes, like a person who is spasming or trembling. What if a movie camera could go inside a wound—or, as Gaspar Noé’s actually does in Enter the Void (2009), inside an orifice? It would, as Brenez posits, look like this: raw, red, beating, obviously alive.
La vie nouvelle (Philippe Grandrieux, 2002).
And what more efficient way of “open[ing] the body’s night, its opaque mass” could there be, in cinematic terms, than with onscreen representations of autopsy or dismemberment—or, as in the case of Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008), the ecstatic flaying of the skin?8 There, Laugier explores the traditional religious concept of pain and endurance as portals to divinity in a movie that appears at first blush to be a bit of torture porn nastiness, but eventually reveals itself to be a meditation on the nature of faith itself. The director has said in interviews that he wrote the film while suicidally depressed. As somebody who has suffered from clinical depression since childhood, I am intimately aware of another reason that individuals might be drawn to especially transgressive subject matter: the need to be shocked out of numbness, and to be reminded that sensation—in its most extreme forms, but also in all forms—is possible. Late in the film, a cult that has been torturing young women, in the hopes that a great enough experience of pain will help their victims to see God, flays a girl alive. A shot of her hanging like Christ on the cross in the middle of their torture chamber has become one of the defining illustrations of the New French Extremity, in part because it is so brutal, but also because once the shock of the image has worn off, it is very beautiful: painterly and horribly serene. The film resolves itself ambiguously, in such a way that it’s possible to see its ending as a confirmation or as a denial of God’s existence. Like Red Rooms, it is meant as a catalyst for further self-examination rather than as a clear ethical or spiritual statement. Whether God or nature made the body, it is still man that we are watching deconstruct it in such movies. What the individual viewer then discerns hidden within the “night” inside it is entirely up to them, as if we were looking at a bloody Rorschach test.
In a brief scene in Demonlover, the protagonist, Diane, watches television in a hotel room, shortly before being dragged into a hellish torture chamber not entirely unlike the one in Martyrs. As she flips through the channels, we are treated to a brief glimpse of a music video by the heavy metal band Soulfly. “Back to the primitive!” the vocalist snarls. “Fuck all your politics!” It seems unlikely that a writer-director as meticulous as Assayas, himself a former critic, would not have thought about the inclusion of this line very carefully. Who can say if he agrees with it, or if he includes it as a warning? His concern in Demonlover does not seem to be with transgressive or pornographic content per se—he is, after all, French—but with the casual mediation of it through various screens, and in particular with our easy disengagement from it as a result of this mediation. His greatest condemnation is reserved for a teenager who appears in the final frames of the film, paying for Diane to be tortured on the Hellfire Club and then, disinterested and behind on his biology homework, scarcely looking at the screen as she stares out with pleading eyes. In a sense, it is the inverse of the situation in Red Rooms: too little investment in extreme material, as opposed to too much. Perhaps it seemed to Assayas that the authentic and primitive purposes of sex and violence were being lost through the cool, distancing filter of the internet and television, and that what might once have had a shocking, stirring, meaningful effect on the mind and body had been neutered. In 2002, when Demonlover was released, I would have been fourteen, about the age of this boy, and about the age at which I first watched that video of Dwyer blowing out his brains on television. This gave me pause, and I wondered whether Assayas had been right to worry. Still, hadn’t I been shaken by this exposure to violence? Hadn’t I arguably experienced something pure and primal—beyond politics in spite of its literally political setting, and closer to something existential or essential?
Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008).
When Rotten.com was still online, it had a manifesto, and that manifesto was in places every bit as self-serious and high-minded as anything ever written or said about the films of the New French Extremity. “To censor this site,” it claimed, “it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts, evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries, and other sources of information vital to the functioning of free society.”9 This was a rather grand statement of intent for a site whose front-page hyperlinks included phrases like “A Gallery of Severed Hands and Whatnot,” but there was something to it—life, it suggested, was unbearably violent and primitive itself, and our organization of it into something civilized and ordered had done very little to erase its basic undercurrent of sketchiness and cruelty. The manifesto positioned Rotten.com as a preparatory tool for the real world: something halfway between a research library and exposure therapy. By adulthood, however, most of us have had enough exposure to unpleasant things, and have little need to conduct extracurricular research. A 2006 study by the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience—conducted, incidentally, the year Martyrs was released, in the twilight of the New French Extremity—also suggests that “thinking strategies change with age”: “Brain activity shifts from the back of the brain to the front,” it concludes, “[so that] a teenager’s judgment of what they would do in a given situation is driven by the simple question: ‘What would I do?’ Adults, on the other hand, ask: ‘What would I do, given how I would feel and given how the people around me would feel as a result of my actions?’”10 Once we have left our teens, in other words, we should have learned whatever lesson we were trying to learn as adolescents by loading up a shock site and pushing our own buttons with its content, as the pain of others comes more sharply into focus, and we begin to experience a deeper understanding of suffering as a whole.
If I had not already overcome my curiosity about images of real death by the time I reached adulthood, the proliferation of photographs of murdered Palestinian civilians all over social media right now would have done the trick. Where we once had to search for depictions of cruelty, now we live in a world in which shots of dismembered children routinely appear on Instagram next to documentation of our peers’ villa holidays and dinner parties—a sickening state of affairs that makes the seeking-out of 2000s-era shock sites feel quaint, like an outdated rite of passage. With age, it has also become increasingly clear to me that in spite of my continuing love of openly transgressive cinema, there are myriad ways to shock a viewer into consciousness, and that not all of them necessarily need to involve the explicit use of violence. The most intense emotional reaction I have had to a work of cinema in recent months was prompted by a film that did not actually contain a single bloody scene: Jonathan Glazer’s beautiful and horrifying The Zone of Interest (2023). Seen entirely from the perspective of an SS commandant and his family, who live on the other side of a wall that borders Auschwitz, it is a work of psychic rather than visual extremity, designed to make us hurt. It reduces our experience of one of history’s greatest crimes to a vague, heavy, nauseating atmosphere, aided by a soundtrack that intermittently explodes into gunshots and screams, and in doing so, it turns itself into a kind of cursed object, emanating evil like atomic radiation. Once it was over, I excused myself to cry for a moment in the bathroom of the cinema—a confirmation of how skillfully Glazer collapses history, at once memorializing the Holocaust and offering a warning about averting our eyes from violence until it is too late to object to what is happening next door.
Assayas is right that we should avoid being numbed by the mediating scrim of the screen. If art does sometimes imitate life, then perhaps extreme art can deter us, in turn, from imitating it. We ought to use it as a tool for the manufacture of empathy, as well as of sensation—opening up the mysterious night of our own bodies, and allowing it to touch our souls.
- Philippa Snow, Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment (Repeater Books, 2022). ↩
- “rotten dot com,” Rotten.com, archived August 18, 2017. ↩
- James Quandt, “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema,” Artforum, vol. 42, no. 6 (2004), 126. ↩
- “Shock site,” Wikipedia, last modified August 11, 2024. ↩
- Quandt, “Flesh and Blood,” 128. ↩
- Quandt, “Flesh and Blood,” 129. ↩
- Nicole Brenez, “The Body’s Night: An Interview with Philippe Grandrieux,” Rouge, June 1, 2003. ↩
- Brenez, “The Body’s Night.” ↩
- “censorship @ rotten dot com,” Rotten.com, archived August 18, 2017. ↩
- Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, “Feelings matter less to teenagers,” University College London, September 7, 2006. ↩