Enter the Void (2009)

     In a pulsating phantasmagoria of acid-tripped title cards, Noe introduces his latest feature atop a pulse-pounding electronic heartbeat hyped on amphetamines.  There is no doubt that many, many narcotics are to come.  If the endless neon lights of Tokyo side streets weren’t clue enough the POV DMT hit seals the deal.  This is a drug movie.  One that resists the ethical considerations surrounding their use and instead gets strung out on life, death, and sex.  There are no moral debates to the aforementioned topics, unlike Irreversible; Noe doesn’t delve into ethical implications.  Rather, he inhales the intoxicating fumes of Dimethyltryptamine and trips through death in the labyrinthine Tokyo streets.  The viewer must be willing, or equally intoxicated, to join the ride.
    Our point of view is through the eyes of Oscar, a twentysomething American living in Tokyo.  He is also a heavy drug user, a literal motherf*cker, and a prospective spiritualist.  He takes a few hits of DMT, the same chemical released when one is about to die, and disappears into a psychedelic stream…  From the hands of his friend, Alex, comes The Tibetan Book of the Dead.  It tells of the afterlife.  They discuss this existence, explained by the book, as a cycle where the spirit is absorbed into light sources to higher and higher levels.  The concepts are nominally intangible yet conceptually akin to someone accustomed to different plains of consciousness.  As the pair walks the carnival-like streets to The Void we experience every footstep, every blink, nearly every sensory input Oscar receives.  He enters the neon bar, black lights illuminating the darkness like a synthetic Pandora.  Seconds later he is in the bathroom frantically dumping pills into the ground level Japanese toilet.  He hurriedly scrapes them from amongst the cigarette butts and unclean tile.  A bullet rips through his chest; his fingers fumble in the warm blood.  Oscar dies on the disgusting bathroom floor, the only cinematic locale to rival Trainspotting. 
    The remaining two hours are a beautiful nightmare, one in which he watches over his stripper sister; seeing both conception and abortion of her baby.  He drifts through walls, passing countless, rooms, stairways, and endless partitions.  There is a renowned sense of freedom not even possible during the heaviest trips.  He cycles, passing through glowing orbs in the environment before starting again with the events that carry on after his death.  More walls, more lights, more sounds textures and luminescent voids.  Until finally, as dreamed of before death, he floats through a hotel filled with friends.  He glides above room after room of copulating couples and passionate threesomes; a sexual cornucopia that fuses Eyes Wide Shut and 2001 A Space Odyssey into a relentless foray until he becomes, almost perfectly, the starchild.
    Gasper Noe’s style is very much intact.  The opening title cards, perhaps seizure inducing, introduce the strobing, neon color space in which the entire film exists.  Oscar’s room is illuminated heavily by blinking advertisements from outside, shifting from green to purple to red and yellow.  White, it seems, does not exist.  Nearly every shot is from behind his eyes.  The single exception may be his initial DMT hit that slowly floats above even him; but it is still clearly his point of view.  We are treated to the unreal trip sequences as otherworldly shapes intertwine and morph between colors, sometimes resembling dendrites or caterpillars or mind-tunnels to other dimensions.  Present too, in amplified color swirling accents, is raw, uncensored, pornographic exploits.  Where Irreversible teetered between violence and sex, Enter the Void dissolves the former for heavy doses of the latter.
    The film may be the new ultimate trip, clearly influenced by Kubrickian obsessions.  It, too, runs a little long for the conventional viewer yet is fully motivated by its content.  And more than many filmmakers today, Noe has created an experience, one fraught with visual and audible stimulus and intending an experience beyond the typical drama.  In this case, a psychedelic melodrama.

Irreversible (2002)

            The first frames are credit roll.  Last names only and backwards E’s, N’s, and R’s.  The words are at first cryptic and stream by in blood red capitals before slowly titling sideways and finally spinning out of control.  This flows naturally into the first shots of the film; tilted, off-angle exteriors with flashing lights and brick walls.  The camera twists and turns out of control, unencumbered by the formal expectations of feature film viewership.  Through the S&M nightclub, The Rectum, Marcus searches for le Tenia (the tapeworm), the man who raped and abused his girlfriend.  He falls victim instead, his arm broken backwards before his friend Pierre smashes the man’s face with a fire extinguisher.  The blows are relentless, the camera-eye unflinching, the metal body unyielding.  The man is left with only his lower jaw and a pile of mush where his face and skull used to be.

            Noe’s film is relentless; a series of long takes playing in reverse chronology that follow a man seeking revenge and the irreversible consequences that take place during a night of extreme violence.  Yet these first few minutes, complete with infrasound at 28Hz, while indeed disturbing and horrific are nothing compared to the inciting incident that takes place in an underpass below the Parisian streets.  Noe is clearly asking if the violence we are introduced to initially is justified by the ungodly time spent in hell; a red lined tunnel converging in the distance, void of any earthly familiarity.

            I’d be inclined to say yes, if the man Pierre obliterated had in fact been le Tenia.  Instead, le Tenia looked on amusedly knowing the pair will soon be arrested and his crime will go unpunished.  The complete lack of consequence with which Tenia observes the murder foreshadows the complete lack of humanity with which he commits his own crime.  If anything, the man’s unrecognizable face is a reminder of earlier in the night.

            It cannot go unquestioned how images like Noe’s can be put on film.  The weight of what they represent and the vérité in which they are presented leave a considerable impression on the viewer’s mind.  It is one that is immediately shocking and unendingly disturbing.  They serve as warning, as cautions, as artistic testaments to the evils of mankind.  Yet we can still wonder why Noe chooses to show what he does; why he wants his audiences to be uncomfortable both physiologically and emotionally.  Is this exploitation cinema or are they raw warnings?  For me, the jury is still out but both remain plausible explanations.