It Gave Me the Creeps

Rating: Null/10 (9 December 2003)

***SPOILERS!*** "Mystic River" shocked me and, from a certain point on, made me nervous and sweating, wishing I could leave the house to escape watching the friends-kills-friend murder scene. This was because of its underlying sense of trauma; now I have absolutely nothing against the use of terrible moments in high drama -- it's almost inevitable, as we all know too well since we first read a page of Dostoevskij or sat through a Shakesperean tragedy. However, one thing is the description of the dark side of reality (AND human beings), another is the spectacle of trauma, an experience capable of twisting or damaging our personality at a very basic level, and in earlier stages of our life. Dave, the scapegoat-victim of that terrible sequence, is such a damaged man; witnessing his prolonged, delayed execution on the shore of Mystic River gave me the creeps, like I was caught in a recurrent nightmare. Note that trauma as such is unknown to classic tragedists: it is Freud who invented the Oedipus complex, not Sophocles. When that doomed character killed his father (by accident) and married his mother (unaware it was her), he was a full-grown man: Oedipus was probably never `traumatized' in our present sense of the word, but became all the same a perfect embodiment of guilt and ill-fate. Discovering what he had done, he blinded himself as a form of repentance: self-mutilation as atonement. In contemporary film, however, guilt and trauma seem to matter a lot more than their catharsis. In "Mystic River", all proportions established, there is no way for atonement; its characters seem to be doomed from the start, one (Dave) is destined to function as scapegoat of this particular tragedy, and when the truth finally surfaces, there's nothing that can be done to change things. The only thing that CAN be attempted is to immediately stop the chain of killing and abuse, which is why the cop Kevin Bacon won't even arrest former friend-turned-murderer Sean Penn. It's the sole "catharsis" we are permitted in such a drama, nothing more positive than that. In the end, everybody is "blinded" in `Mystic River': Tim Robbins by losing his mind and life (after turning a murderer himself); Kevin Bacon by losing a wife; Sean Penn by losing a child and the apparent normality of his squalid life. That violence will stop at this level, and that Bacon's wife will return with a baby, are the only thin hopes in an otherwise ultra-black movie verging on horror. It seemed to me a film about an impossible "pursuit of loneliness" on hone hand (the characters, like so many Americans and other Westerners today, try with all their force to escape friendship, because of an innate sense of guilt or disturbance), and about a metaphysical truth on the other -- that "evil begets more evil", as Mr Eastwood is reported to have said. This is a completely justifiable statement, but being the gloomy film that it is, "Mystic River" remains a hopeless drama, so as to testify a modern approach to tragedy which largely consists in making a monument to feelings of guilt, impotence and loss of innocence (if any). Child abuse IS a tragic reality, but maybe not an hopeless one; in a world that is still human, traumas should be fought back and/or or accepted, not necessarily elevated to a metaphysical rank. Certainly, movies such as `Mystic River' offer more than one level of understanding, so that its ultimate theme may not deal with child abuse or revenge at all. In fact, it ultimately deals with the extremely thin interspexing of chance and chaos from which our lives are fabricated. With the fatality of our very appearance on Earth. Mr Eastwood, as an artist, showed us with painful participation the evil that was done; it's time for his public to find some way out.