1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 103: The young poisoner’s handbook
My dear grandpa (R.I.P.) would have disliked this morbid, cynical movie.
It recounts the career of serial murderer Graham Young – or, rather, it embellishes it. It makes it downright funny. Some of the movie’s characters and events are admitted to be fictitious. Other happenings – even some of the murders – are, officially, mere speculation.
For an account that purports to be more factual, if not less sensational, see “The Teacup Poisoner” (Fred Dinenage: Murder Casebook, season 1, episode 2).
The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is more like an inverted morality play.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The movie is not, as Roger Ebert would have it, “a wickedly satirical view of ambition in a gifted, if misguided, youth.”
Satire and ambition: let’s consider these notions in turn.
The purpose of satire is to correct behavior. It assumes that redemption is possible. This movie appears to take the contrary view. It isn’t satire; it’s the bleakest kind of irony. (I could tell you what kind if I knew Northrop Frye’s literary taxonomy better.)
Ambition isn’t this protagonist’s driving motive; it’s his smokescreen. Graham (Hugh O’Conor) has genuine scientific interests, but his self-portrayal as a scientist is largely a pose. He tries to convince his prison psychologist that, deep down, he’s a sensitive soul who permitted his thirst for knowledge to lead him too far, as if he’d only added heavy metals to people’s food and drink out of scientific curiosity.
Graham tries to convince himself of this, too. But he knows too well that he’s a vindictive little cuss.
Alas, the psychologist decides that Graham is no longer homicidal and arranges Graham’s release from the prison hospital where he has been confined since his teens.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The movie has three acts:
One: Early misdeeds
Two: Confinement
Three: Release
In each act, the object of satire – or, more accurately, of ferocious contempt – isn’t Graham himself so much as his social environment. Yes, Graham does terrible things, but he does them to silly, grotesque people. They are always the butt of the joke.
Take Graham’s best school friend, who brags about his forthcoming date with the girl that has captured Graham’s attention (a serial flirt). This friend has the habit of asking Graham to swap sandwiches with him. (An outlandishly reckless habit, if you adopt Graham’s point of view.)
Soon this friend is laid up in bed. Graham escorts the girl to a music hall, where she beams worshipfully at the crooner.
But then Graham’s supper-talk is too gruesome for the girl, and she flees. For all her insinuation, she’s disappointingly ordinary, after all.
Next, consider Graham’s family members, who appear to have been dreamed up by Roald Dahl. They park in front of the television while Graham experiments upstairs with his chemistry equipment. These philistines have the gall to complain that Graham’s chemicals have fouled up the tea-set. Even though it’s his sister’s fault! (She has been mixing together face-creams in the teacups.)
Graham puts something nasty in his sister’s eyedrops.
Then Graham’s stepmother – Ruth Sheen, at her most acrid – finds some dirty magazines in the house. Graham’s father guiltily lowers his eyes, but it’s Graham who’s blamed. His stepmother scrubs him down in the bath and destroys his precious chemistry set.
Not long afterward, she’s bent over with stomach pain. Her hair falls out. Never lovely, she becomes hideous and weak.
Graham volunteers to spoon-feed her. Too feeble to protest, she peers out in terror at her family.
It doesn’t end well for the stepmother.
Graham’s subsequent confinement in the prison hospital is not unlike Paul Pennyfeather’s, in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. We’re treated to the same bureaucratic dispute of that novel – rehabilitationism vs. disciplinarianism. The argument is rehearsed by hospital officials in front of the the inmates themselves, who, in a really clever scene, are locked up in a row of steam-baths so that only their heads are visible. We’re reminded of Dante and Virgil having it out over self-excusing sinners. (Silver-tongued these souls may be, but they are buried in mud.)
The harshest treatment is reserved for Graham’s victims of Act Three – his senior colleagues in the firm that employs him after he is released. They are ordinary factory workers. Some are cruel; some are kind; all are tawdry.
In one late scene, Graham sits on a grassy bank next to a reservoir, a bottle of poison in his hand. The implication is that he wishes to take revenge on all of society.
What damage might emptying the bottle do? Graham can’t know. It’s one thing to painstakingly monitor subjects one at a time, measuring the dosage slipped into each victim’s tea and finding out and recording each bodily symptom. It’s something else altogether to pour poison into the general water supply. The effects can’t be inferred from the prior experiments. Nor would Graham be able to observe them.
Graham isn’t a sincere experimenter. He just wants to hurt. And the movie comes uncomfortably close to suggesting that his victims – indeed, that all members of society – deserve their suffering.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Pauline Kael, in her famous review of A Clockwork Orange, says:
Does this difference make the movie less or more misanthropic? At least in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, there’s one alluring character – even if he is a ruthless Nietzschean “overman.” The protagonist of The Young Poisoner’s Handbook has considerably less attraction.
There’s one way to avoid interpreting this movie as an expression of pure misanthropy, and that is to insist that since Graham is the narrator, everyone is seen through jaundiced eyes. The key is to look for details that Graham doesn’t emphasize in his narration. Graham, we observe, is a Nazi enthusiast. But very little is made of this. We just know it because of some pictures on his wall. An obsession with Hitler was a large part of the historical Graham Young’s life. But when Graham tells us his story, he leaves it out. It’s as if he’s back with his prison psychologist, eliciting sympathy, omitting details on purpose, making his victims seem worse than they are.
What the movie shows us, then, is a weakling who tears down other people, in his thoughts and with his deeds – but always at some remove – to compensate for his own smallness. This leaves us with one contemptible figure, not a wholly contemptible world. But, wicked though he may be, since he’s just one small person, he can’t deprive us of the magnanimity or the resources to pity even one such as himself, should we choose to do so.
It recounts the career of serial murderer Graham Young – or, rather, it embellishes it. It makes it downright funny. Some of the movie’s characters and events are admitted to be fictitious. Other happenings – even some of the murders – are, officially, mere speculation.
For an account that purports to be more factual, if not less sensational, see “The Teacup Poisoner” (Fred Dinenage: Murder Casebook, season 1, episode 2).
The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is more like an inverted morality play.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The movie is not, as Roger Ebert would have it, “a wickedly satirical view of ambition in a gifted, if misguided, youth.”
Satire and ambition: let’s consider these notions in turn.
The purpose of satire is to correct behavior. It assumes that redemption is possible. This movie appears to take the contrary view. It isn’t satire; it’s the bleakest kind of irony. (I could tell you what kind if I knew Northrop Frye’s literary taxonomy better.)
Ambition isn’t this protagonist’s driving motive; it’s his smokescreen. Graham (Hugh O’Conor) has genuine scientific interests, but his self-portrayal as a scientist is largely a pose. He tries to convince his prison psychologist that, deep down, he’s a sensitive soul who permitted his thirst for knowledge to lead him too far, as if he’d only added heavy metals to people’s food and drink out of scientific curiosity.
Graham tries to convince himself of this, too. But he knows too well that he’s a vindictive little cuss.
Alas, the psychologist decides that Graham is no longer homicidal and arranges Graham’s release from the prison hospital where he has been confined since his teens.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The movie has three acts:
One: Early misdeeds
Two: Confinement
Three: Release
In each act, the object of satire – or, more accurately, of ferocious contempt – isn’t Graham himself so much as his social environment. Yes, Graham does terrible things, but he does them to silly, grotesque people. They are always the butt of the joke.
Take Graham’s best school friend, who brags about his forthcoming date with the girl that has captured Graham’s attention (a serial flirt). This friend has the habit of asking Graham to swap sandwiches with him. (An outlandishly reckless habit, if you adopt Graham’s point of view.)
Soon this friend is laid up in bed. Graham escorts the girl to a music hall, where she beams worshipfully at the crooner.
But then Graham’s supper-talk is too gruesome for the girl, and she flees. For all her insinuation, she’s disappointingly ordinary, after all.
Next, consider Graham’s family members, who appear to have been dreamed up by Roald Dahl. They park in front of the television while Graham experiments upstairs with his chemistry equipment. These philistines have the gall to complain that Graham’s chemicals have fouled up the tea-set. Even though it’s his sister’s fault! (She has been mixing together face-creams in the teacups.)
Graham puts something nasty in his sister’s eyedrops.
Then Graham’s stepmother – Ruth Sheen, at her most acrid – finds some dirty magazines in the house. Graham’s father guiltily lowers his eyes, but it’s Graham who’s blamed. His stepmother scrubs him down in the bath and destroys his precious chemistry set.
Not long afterward, she’s bent over with stomach pain. Her hair falls out. Never lovely, she becomes hideous and weak.
Graham volunteers to spoon-feed her. Too feeble to protest, she peers out in terror at her family.
It doesn’t end well for the stepmother.
Graham’s subsequent confinement in the prison hospital is not unlike Paul Pennyfeather’s, in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. We’re treated to the same bureaucratic dispute of that novel – rehabilitationism vs. disciplinarianism. The argument is rehearsed by hospital officials in front of the the inmates themselves, who, in a really clever scene, are locked up in a row of steam-baths so that only their heads are visible. We’re reminded of Dante and Virgil having it out over self-excusing sinners. (Silver-tongued these souls may be, but they are buried in mud.)
The harshest treatment is reserved for Graham’s victims of Act Three – his senior colleagues in the firm that employs him after he is released. They are ordinary factory workers. Some are cruel; some are kind; all are tawdry.
In one late scene, Graham sits on a grassy bank next to a reservoir, a bottle of poison in his hand. The implication is that he wishes to take revenge on all of society.
What damage might emptying the bottle do? Graham can’t know. It’s one thing to painstakingly monitor subjects one at a time, measuring the dosage slipped into each victim’s tea and finding out and recording each bodily symptom. It’s something else altogether to pour poison into the general water supply. The effects can’t be inferred from the prior experiments. Nor would Graham be able to observe them.
Graham isn’t a sincere experimenter. He just wants to hurt. And the movie comes uncomfortably close to suggesting that his victims – indeed, that all members of society – deserve their suffering.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Pauline Kael, in her famous review of A Clockwork Orange, says:
The trick of making the attacked less human than their attackers, so you feel no sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there’s no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says, “Everything’s rotten. Why shouldn’t I do what I want? They’re worse than I am.” In their new mood (perhaps movies in their cumulative effect are partly responsible for it), people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims – that they are dupes and phonies and weaklings. I can’t accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassinations, post-Manson mood; I think he’s catering to it. I think he wants to dig it.It’s an interesting question whether The Young Poisoner’s Handbook “wants to dig it.” Certainly, it presents the victims as “dupes and phonies and weaklings.” What it doesn’t do is glorify the victimizer. Graham is vicious, but, unlike A Clockwork Orange’s protagonist, he’s not a tough person; he wouldn’t instigate a physical fight. His choice of weapon betrays his cowardice. Nor does he dress or speak boldly. He’s essentially an overly formal, petulant little boy brandishing a chemistry set that has all the awesomeness of a model train.
Does this difference make the movie less or more misanthropic? At least in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, there’s one alluring character – even if he is a ruthless Nietzschean “overman.” The protagonist of The Young Poisoner’s Handbook has considerably less attraction.
There’s one way to avoid interpreting this movie as an expression of pure misanthropy, and that is to insist that since Graham is the narrator, everyone is seen through jaundiced eyes. The key is to look for details that Graham doesn’t emphasize in his narration. Graham, we observe, is a Nazi enthusiast. But very little is made of this. We just know it because of some pictures on his wall. An obsession with Hitler was a large part of the historical Graham Young’s life. But when Graham tells us his story, he leaves it out. It’s as if he’s back with his prison psychologist, eliciting sympathy, omitting details on purpose, making his victims seem worse than they are.
What the movie shows us, then, is a weakling who tears down other people, in his thoughts and with his deeds – but always at some remove – to compensate for his own smallness. This leaves us with one contemptible figure, not a wholly contemptible world. But, wicked though he may be, since he’s just one small person, he can’t deprive us of the magnanimity or the resources to pity even one such as himself, should we choose to do so.
