The Wake

Eric Brew

It may simply be my aversion to any discussion of morality that marks my distaste for The Machinist. It could also be the high hopes I had for its’ seemingly intricate and inquisitive plotline. Even until the end, despite the better part of my ego telling me precisely what the protagonist’s reality was, I refused to accept the obviousness of the resolution. I was set on a conclusion that I still couldn’t decipher—something I was waiting for the film to show me. Instead the film gives an overdone facsimile of the psychology of guilt, one that questions both the continuity of experience and the ability of the mind to harbor illness.

If I were to concern myself primarily with what The Machinist contemplates, in regard to morality, I would ask myself: is the guilt experienced by the protagonist, Trevor Reznik, a guilt birthed in fear or compassion? Unfortunately, I think it is the former—another idea that repels any preference for the film. The constant depiction of restrictions on life—the hostile workplace, Trevor’s materialistic notes (“Buy more bleach”), paying for sex, portrayal of a faulty police state—tell me perhaps there is nothing more than fear to Trevor’s delirium. Where is the humanity?

The subject matter is not the basis for all my dislike of the film. Perhaps both actors and writers are to blame for several careless, poorly-delivered lines sprinkled through the film. These lines took me from the cinematic moment and continuity that The Machinist requires to get across the relatively lackluster imagery. If the viewer is pulled from the harsh blues that the film is predominately shot in, the few scenes that do not immediately depict these tones (they’re outside, usually on suburban tree-lined streets) lose their effect.

Deniz Rudin

The thing that is the strangest about looking at a person whose skin is stretched so tight around their head that it is basically like looking at a skull is the bits of a human face that are not made of bones: the nose and the ears. Imagine a skull with a nose and ears. It’s eerie.

The brain pan curving up out of the back of the neck, arms like a snowman’s arms and legs long and sharp, the ribcage like lungs, spine running up the back like a lizard’s, like a stegosaur, and from it sprout shoulderblades like wings. Tiny bird’s bones. The uppermost tips of the pelvis clearly visible above the waistline of the pants. And the way it moves: this thing you’re used to seeing held up by a plastic stand in the science classroom moving under its will, like in a video game. The cheeks like big flat blades. This bizarre, otherworldly machinery somewhere down inside most people shown as clearly as it can be shown on a living person.

The body is obviously the star here and if Christian Bale would just keep his mouth shut and let the camera stay silently on him like a fly on a sideshow freak we might have a decent short film on our hands. If only his palms were thin and his fingers long and skinny, his hands like daddy longlegs.

But it is wrong to place the blame on Bale, for he was given words to speak and he did them justice. Though the film claims a Dostoyevsky novella as its main inspiration, the truth is that it borrows so heavily from Fight Club that a convincing plagiarism case could be made, and compared to either piece of source material it is poorly written and constructed, downright idiotic. And though the direction and cinematography are decent and at times better than decent, I feel like the director should not get off without punishment; he chose to shoot this script.

This movie is a passing well-shot work of dimestore existentialism and hollywood surrealism that succeeds only briefly in disguising its essential triteness, and its ending retroactively unravels anything that might have been interesting about what went before.

And the fucking music:
They tried to soundtrack “bleak” with oboes.