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Health & Fitness

Highbrow Horror: Genres Blur in Zack Parker's "Proxy"

As I tweeted Sunday to Proxy's co-writer and director, Zack Parker's fourth film hardly needs my little plug on the HollywoodPatch, after the attention lavished on the sophisticated thriller by publications like the New York Times and the New Yorker (to say nothing of the buzz in the blogosphere and the film's success at the Toronto International Film Festival).  

In just five days, Proxy became the 7th horror film on iTunes and to judge by its Facebook page, it impressed audiences on both coasts. 

But since I have no more use for horror than sci-fi (read: none), I wanted to add my unlikely voice to the chorus of praise. Perhaps I can even help broaden the film's audience by explaining why it appeals to filmgoers like me, who dislike slasher films and prefer straight character dramas to psychological thrillers.

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Proxy is not a film I would have seen unless I knew one of its stars. Certainly, I didn't expect to love it (and in fact avoided watching the trailer because I knew I was going to support my friend whether or not I liked the clip).

But you don't have to enjoy the genre of horror to find the film's acting, writing, music, cinematography and direction compelling, and even poetic (though as a literary critic by training, I cringe when a reviewer applies to term to a film or novel). An epic, sonnet, or lyric even of the same century have little in common, and critics invariably fail to specify in what sense a non-poetic work of art is “poetic.”

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I use the word primarily in a structural sense. That is, just as a good poem creates a precise and distinctly “other” realm that operates according to its own epistemological and linguistic principles, Proxy depicts isolated, damaged people in a small but appealing Indiana town, which aside from the ubiquitous iPhones, seems remote not just from urban, but suburban, modern life on the coasts. 

Aside from epics (Paradise Lost, The Odyssey, Aurora Leigh),poetry is also compressed, which often makes poetic language more deliberate and multivalent than prose. This isn't to denigrate the novel or narrative theory, but rather to say that formal poetry is constrained in ways prose fiction is not. And Proxy's depiction of pathology in small-town America is poetic in both senses.

Esther Woodhouse (Alexia Rasmussen) periodically checks an answering machine in the quaint kitchen with scalloped white curtains and red brick. A "princess phone" (a touchtone with a cord) like the one I had in high school circa 1987 sits on her nightstand. The department store in a key early scene fits this LA native's image of a Woolworth's or small Sears in the 1970s.

In last weekend's New York Times interview, "One Man Hollywood in the Midwest," Parker gives largely logistical and financial reasons for staying in Indiana. But there's an aesthetic benefit to setting his “difficult, dark and challenging” films in Richmond, Indiana (just an hour from Indianapolis but a world away): the tree-lined streets , the charming and large older houses, and the gentler pace of life, to some extent mitigate the intensity of Parker's psychological films featuring “fractured characters and depictions of murder, assault and child endangerment.” Meikado Murphy is surely right that Proxy is the among the most disturbing domestic dramas ever written by two stay-at-home dads (Parker co-wrote the film with Kevin Donner). 

Revealing too much about Proxy's plot or characters would diminish much of its first-time pleasure. But the plot twists will surprise even the savviest filmgoer. Even those with high standards will be impressed by the performances of Alexa Havins(Melanie), Alexia Rasmussen (Esther), and Kristina Klebe (Anika). All three characters are psychiatrically ill--though by the end it's tough to say who's craziest (and most evil). Yet we're mesmerized rather than repulsed by their illness, wanting to understand as much as to judge. 

After the screening, Kristina Klebe discussed her physical preparation for the role of Anika Baron (a role about which she was initially skeptical, but which she grew to love), including lessons with a professional boxer and rigorous personal training. No trace of Klebe's reticence is evident in the final product; her manic sit-ups with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth communicate as much about her character as any words she utters in the course of the film. Klebe has far less screen time than Havins or Rasmussen, but the film is as much hers as theirs. 

Klebe, an elegant, graceful Manhattan native educated at Dartmouth and NYU's Tisch School of Drama convincingly morphs into Anika, the tough, masculine lesbian with an oddly vacant stare and fierce, if misplaced, sense of loyalty. The only nudity in the film is Klebe's, but it's hardly erotic or titillating: a brave performance all around.

So often films botch group therapy or 12-step meetings, butProxy succeeds on this score as well. From the moment Melanie approaches a frightened and withdrawn Esther at the grieving mothers support group, I was hooked. 

Even minor characters, like the police officer who interviews Esther in the hospital after the assault, and the blunt, borderline callous social worker who stresses the need to reach out for help, set a high bar for the rest of the actors. Also crucial to the film's power is the score by the Newton Boys, a 30-piece orchestra Parker was incredibly fortunate to secure for just $7000.

Horror fans who enjoy the sight of blood and the feeling of their hearts pounding will be disappointed. Proxy isn't like like The Shining. The iconic Nicholson film induced weeks of nightmares in me at the tender age of 11 after I saw it on video (for those under 30, this is how we saw movies at home before the Internet: a VHS cassette played on a VCR). Proxy isn't scary in a make-you-hear-footsteps-and-fear-garages kind of way: its more heinous moments unnerve and fascinate more than they terrify or disturb.

So I take issue with some of the film's marketing and press (though I realize fans of horror are intensely loyal, which likely explains the producers' marketing strategy). The posters, blurbs and reviews not only miscast the film as in the first instance horror (“a worthy successor to Rosemary's Baby” said the LA Times), but downplay or altogether omit a key part ofProxy's (and Parker's) brilliance. 

A one-paragraph plot summary is likely to induce a reaction like Holly Hunter's in Broadcast News when William Hurt pitches his date rape story: “Eew” or “Ugh!” (Mom, a lifelong lover of film, fairly recoiled when I recounted the film's turning points.)  

Remarkably, the film sustains our intellectual engagement while preserving a frankly necessary emotional detachment. Proxy is real enough to move us, but aestheticized enough not to destroy us. The drops of water which slowly fall into the claw-foot tub are like miniature paintings in motion. Filmed as it is with a slow-motion camera to which Parker had access just one day, even the “money” shot (from the standpoint of horror fans) is quite beautiful in a Yeatsian “terrible beauty” sort of way.

This is not the place to discuss the relative merits of realistic and aestheticized violence. And the film isn't really all that violent to begin with (four or five minutes out of some two hours). I personally think both sorts of types of violence have a place in film and TV as reflections of our Hobbesian condition. And Proxy is unquestionably dark and thematically even savage. 

However, what kept Proxy from being an unremitting downer was the pleasure I took in appreciating the film as an aesthetic object,seeing its individual elements work together as a unity. This may sound overly cerebral (full disclosure: my unfinished doctoral dissertation was in part about Kant's aesthetic theory). But an essential function of criticism is to identify and analyze the sources of our instinctive response to art. As Alexander Pope famously wrote in Essay on Criticism, the critic captures “what oft was thought/but ne'er so well expres't.” 

I don't claim that my more muted emotional response to Proxy is everyone's, but in Q and A, the audience seemed fascinated rather than devastated. This I think is the genius of the film. Even the most unspeakable of crimes didn't elicit tears. The foreboding is palpable from start to finish, but not once did I get a knot in my stomach or need to avert my gaze. The film's saddest scenes are its most naturalistic; they revolve not around physical threat, but the excruciating emptiness of two grieving mothers. 

I told my boyfriend in Santa Barbara about Proxy and he responded much as Mom did. Proxy is demanding, but less than you might imagine. I urge those serious about film to see it the theater or buy it on iTunes. 

P.S. I saw Proxy the night before Easter and from the Palisades, it took just 26 minutes! In no traffic from Studio City, Arena Theater is not far. I ate at Berlin Currywurst on Cahuenga and walked. I loved my spicy beef bratwurst but do not recommend leaving car in valet and walking. Highland is not walking distance from Cahuenga, at least not in 5-inch Cole Hahn heels. 


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