1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 80: Cure
I’ve been stumbling across references to mesmerism – in Poe, in William James. Even this month’s E. M. Forster reading, Maurice, touches on hypnotism, mesmerism’s better-regarded cousin.
This is the key difference between the practices, as I understand them. Hypnotism, to be effective, must be welcomed – or at least not resisted – by the subject. In contrast, mesmerism, due to its eerie basis in “animal magnetism,” is supposed to influence even those who resist.
Mesmerism once was widely feared. After the French Revolution,
major politicians and people in power were accused by radicals of practising animal magnetism on the general population.Not everyone objected to being mesmerized. Desperate people welcomed it as a cure. Scientists lent it credibility.
In his article “Under the Influence: Mesmerism in England,” Roy Porter notes that James Tilly Matthews suggested that the French were infiltrating England via animal magnetism. Matthews believed that “magnetic spies” would invade England and bring it under subjection by transmitting waves of animal magnetism to subdue the government and people. Such an invasion from foreign influences was perceived as a radical threat.
No longer. Now it belongs to history – and to the horror genre.
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The distinction between mesmerism and hypnotism is blurred in the thriller Cure (1997). Subjects are induced to commit murders they wouldn’t ordinarily commit. The question is whether they murder willingly.
How different, really, are you and I from the “monsters” we condemn? This is the theme of many policing stories, and of such cringe-thrillers as Oldboy. Cure belongs to both traditions.
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Bizarre killings plague Japan. The victims are slashed with similar markings. Each killing is done by a different person.
Each killer immediately and remorsefully confesses and is taken into custody. Each killer had never done violence before. Each is baffled.
So are the lead detective, Takabe, and Sakuma, the psychologist he consults.
Even if you manage to hypnotize someone, you can’t change their basic moral sense. A person who thinks murder is evil won’t kill anyone under hypnotic suggestion.So says Sakuma, a rather naïve figure. His manner conveys that this is the scientific orthodoxy. I don’t know if it is, but the assertion, in this unqualified form, is doubtful. People murder deliberately while believing that murder is wrong; if people act wrongly while aware of their moral beliefs – if their urges aren’t stopped by the safeguard of their own conscious disapproval – why wouldn’t they acquiesce to a hypnotist’s suggestion?
Sakuma’s personal advice to Takabe is better. Don’t let the investigation consume you, he urges; look after yourself. Not all is well with Takabe, whose wife is psychologically disturbed. His own smooth façade has started to crack.
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The investigators learn that a young drifter has been seen near every crime. They track him down. He appears to have severe amnesia.
The scenes with the drifter are, to me, the movie’s most absorbing ones. Do-gooders take him in, try to help him. Police question him. Or, rather, he questions his questioners. Where am I? Who am I? Then, after a half-dozen questions, the sequence resets: Where am I? The drifter is quiet, laconic, apparently uninterested. His failure to supply answers suggests insolence as much as memory loss. As his questioners’ frustration mounts, he imposes his own rhythm on the interrogations. Then, he flips the questions back on the questioners. Who are you? He asks about their lives, their homes. He plants suggestions. In short, he hypnotizes, or mesmerizes. I don’t know how realistic this is. I’ve not seen conversations like this in life, or in any movie. But they’re fascinating; their rhythm is … hypnotic. They’re worth the price of admission.
There are dreamlike locations, too: an empty, wintry beach; an abandoned, old, wooden dormitory; the bowels of hospitals and prisons. There are hallucinatory sequences (the halluciations are Takabe’s).
Here is a long video about Cure’s unsettling techniques – an exposition of how movies use ordinary sights and sounds to subtly re-tune our emotions.
Don’t watch it now if you plan to see this movie; do if you don’t.
