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 killer Graham Young – or, rather, it embellishes it. It makes it downright funny. Some of the movie’s characters and events are admittedly fictitious. Other events – even some of the principal murders – are, officially speaking, mere speculation.
For an account that purports to be more factual, if not less sensational, see Fred Dinenage: Murder Casebook, season 1, episode 2: “The Teacup Poisoner.”
The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is more like, I dunno, 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 a bleaker position. So, it isn’t satire; it’s irony. (I could tell you what kind of irony if I knew Northrop Frye’s literary taxonomy better.)
Ambition is this protagonist’s smokescreen, not his driving motive. Graham (Hugh O’Connor) only poses as an aspiring scientist. He tries to convince his prison psychologist that, deep down, he’s a sensitive soul who permitted his longing for knowledge to go to far. (As if he only poisoned people’s food and drink out of scientific curiosity.)
Graham tries to convince himself of this, too. But he knows all too well that he’s really just a vindictive little cuss.
Alas, with the psychologist, he succeeds. The psychologist decides that Graham is no longer homicidal. He arranges Graham’s release from the prison hospital where he has been confined since the poisoning spree of his teen years.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
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 friend, who brags about his forthcoming date with the girl that Graham has fallen for (a serial flirt). This friend has the habit of asking Graham to swap sandwiches with him. (A reckless, unsanitary habit, if you adopt Graham’s way of thinking about it.)
Soon this friend is laid up in bed. Graham escorts the girl to a music hall, where she beams worshipfully at the crooner.
But at supper, Graham’s table-talk is too gruesome for her, 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 gaze, 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 looks 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 Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. We’re treated to the same bureaucratic dispute – rehabilitationism vs. disciplinarianism. This 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 in Act Three – his senior colleagues in the firm that employs him after he is released. They are ordinary factory workers. Some are kind; some are cruel; 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 possibly 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 will Graham observe them.
Graham isn’t a good-faith experimenter. He just wants to hurt.
The movie comes uncomfortably close to suggesting that his victims deserve their suffering.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Pauline Kael, in her famous review of A Clockwork Orange, says:
Is it better or worse this way? At least in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, there’s one attractive character – even if he is a ruthless Nietzschean “overman.” But the protagonist’s superiority over the herd is precisely what is subtracted in The Young Poisoner’s Handbook.
There is one way to avoid interpreting The Young Poisoner’s Handbook as an exercise in pure misanthropy, and that is to insist that since Graham is the narrator, no one in the movie is reliably depicted. The key is to look at what Graham doesn’t emphasize in his story. Graham, it transpires, is a Nazi fan. But very little is made of this. We just know it in the movie because of some pictures on Graham’s 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, and he’s going over his story again, omitting details on purpose. Only, this time, he can’t hide how he really thinks of ordinary people, how he despises them.
What we’re left with, then, is the story of 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 an entire contemptible world. But since he is just one small person, this leaves the rest of us enough room to pity even him.
It recounts the career of serial killer Graham Young – or, rather, it embellishes it. It makes it downright funny. Some of the movie’s characters and events are admittedly fictitious. Other events – even some of the principal murders – are, officially speaking, mere speculation.
For an account that purports to be more factual, if not less sensational, see Fred Dinenage: Murder Casebook, season 1, episode 2: “The Teacup Poisoner.”
The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is more like, I dunno, 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 a bleaker position. So, it isn’t satire; it’s irony. (I could tell you what kind of irony if I knew Northrop Frye’s literary taxonomy better.)
Ambition is this protagonist’s smokescreen, not his driving motive. Graham (Hugh O’Connor) only poses as an aspiring scientist. He tries to convince his prison psychologist that, deep down, he’s a sensitive soul who permitted his longing for knowledge to go to far. (As if he only poisoned people’s food and drink out of scientific curiosity.)
Graham tries to convince himself of this, too. But he knows all too well that he’s really just a vindictive little cuss.
Alas, with the psychologist, he succeeds. The psychologist decides that Graham is no longer homicidal. He arranges Graham’s release from the prison hospital where he has been confined since the poisoning spree of his teen years.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
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 friend, who brags about his forthcoming date with the girl that Graham has fallen for (a serial flirt). This friend has the habit of asking Graham to swap sandwiches with him. (A reckless, unsanitary habit, if you adopt Graham’s way of thinking about it.)
Soon this friend is laid up in bed. Graham escorts the girl to a music hall, where she beams worshipfully at the crooner.
But at supper, Graham’s table-talk is too gruesome for her, 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 gaze, 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 looks 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 Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. We’re treated to the same bureaucratic dispute – rehabilitationism vs. disciplinarianism. This 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 in Act Three – his senior colleagues in the firm that employs him after he is released. They are ordinary factory workers. Some are kind; some are cruel; 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 possibly 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 will Graham observe them.
Graham isn’t a good-faith experimenter. He just wants to hurt.
The movie comes uncomfortably close to suggesting that his victims 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, phonies, and weaklings. What it doesn’t do is glorify the victimizer. Graham is vicious, but, unlike A Clockwork Orange’s Alex, he’s not “a tough.” He couldn’t fight anyone to save his life. His modus operandi betrays his cowardice. Nor is he stylish; he’s essentially a petulant little boy with a chemistry set that might as well be a model train.
Is it better or worse this way? At least in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, there’s one attractive character – even if he is a ruthless Nietzschean “overman.” But the protagonist’s superiority over the herd is precisely what is subtracted in The Young Poisoner’s Handbook.
There is one way to avoid interpreting The Young Poisoner’s Handbook as an exercise in pure misanthropy, and that is to insist that since Graham is the narrator, no one in the movie is reliably depicted. The key is to look at what Graham doesn’t emphasize in his story. Graham, it transpires, is a Nazi fan. But very little is made of this. We just know it in the movie because of some pictures on Graham’s 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, and he’s going over his story again, omitting details on purpose. Only, this time, he can’t hide how he really thinks of ordinary people, how he despises them.
What we’re left with, then, is the story of 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 an entire contemptible world. But since he is just one small person, this leaves the rest of us enough room to pity even him.