: Can't open file: 'mos_core_log_items.MYD'. (errno: 145) in
: Can't open file: 'mos_core_log_items.MYD'. (errno: 145) in
|
Contributed by Sara Schieron
|
|
Sunday, 21 May 2006 |
| Based on a premise that was clearly inspired by Cronenberg, Brett
Leonard's FEED is a ‘horror of personality' in many basic ways similar
to PSYCHO, however, FEED treats the abject, the grotesque and the
ambiguous in a legitimately unique way. |
FEED is truly disgusting and not the kind of disgusting to which we've grown accustomed. With little to no blood, the most revolting content involves the excessive feeding of Deirdre, the antagonist's willing "gainer." Sheltered by her "feeder", Deirdre is bedridden weighing just past 600 pounds. The covert work of her feeder Michael is charted on a high security website he maintains. This site tracks the vital statistics of his gainers (also called "models"), and features web cams on them as they announce the accomplishment of weight related goals. The exchange the feeders and the gainers is somehow erotic to them and the undercurrent of dangerous sexuality is as much a threat to the audience as it is a pacifier to the victimizers.
A man of obsession, Phillipp Jackson is an international police detective with a knack for tracking cyber-criminals. Jackson lives in Sydney with a committed but promiscuous lover who engages him in forceful sex play. Jackson responds to her edgy if well intended aggressions in the bedroom with outright brutality. As a result, she leaves him and, beginning a theme of body inscription, she writes "PIG" on his chest. Lost at home, Jackson fills the void with an unsupported trip to Ohio to find the truer objects of his desire: the feeders and the gainers.
In a farmhouse in Ohio, Michael's arrangement with Deirdre revolves around her slow decay, but what is most complex about this arrangement is it's duration. Traditional models of crime are not at play here. The closest cause/effect model of law breaking appears in Michael's website in a gambling section linked to webcam footage of his previous model's "last moments." At the same time this slow, greasy crawl towards death is taking place, Michael maintains what looks like a normal marriage in a status-oriented house with a status-oriented car, and beyond the income generated by his exclusive website, it seems Michael can't balance one aspect without the other. What looks like decay on one hand reads like evolution on the other. The most evocative indicator of this relationship comes from Michael, who in a short exposition on evolution says, "The saber tooth tiger ate the human race into consciousness." The beauty of his perverse theory is its proximity to reason. It's this ambiguity that offers FEED its most putrid punch.
Swimming in parallel editing, the film takes no chances letting the audience miss any of it's themes: paralleling the sexuality of Jackson with the feeding of Dierdre, the voyeurism of Jackson's lover with the webcam "last moments" of the dead model. For as vast and plotted as the themes are, they're presented very explicitly. Structurally, the film isn't a tidy build. There are plenty of seemingly pointless edits, places of discontinuity and the like, but with such challenging and subject matter, these issues are easy to forgive. It's hard to make a new horror film when so much has been done. As little as I'd like to think this film represents a new wave of horror, treating pools of fat the way pool of blood has been seen before, I have to admit, I wouldn't rush to a festival of fat films. Seriously, it was gross. After I saw FEED I didn't eat for the rest of the day and God only knows when I'll be able to stomach the smell of burgers again.
|
Festivals 
