Week #15: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
Murder is everywhere. In real life, murder rates are in general decline in the last twenty years in the UK, but you wouldn’t know it from TV and film. Of course, what we’re talking about is not the reality of murder. Nothing is cosier than Midsomer Murders or Death in Paradise; Poirot’s perturbation at the body count is only registered by a wrinkling of a nose and an adjustment of the pince-nez. Luther, Line of Duty, Fargo… throw in a violent death and you’ve got a direct line to commissioners. Yet if you make a piece of art about the actuality of death for most people – slow, inevitable, creeping, indiscriminate – it’s something most would pass over (don’t worry, you’re among friends if this isn’t you: I took this week’s free time and sunshine to finally watch Hungarian eschatological misery piece The Turin Horse). Murder can be a crossword puzzle or baroque ornament (step forward TV’s Hannibal); it can hide among the dinner party guests or it can be the end of the journey, the mask pulled off the Scooby Doo villain, but it’s a purloined letter that must hide in plain sight. Explore the victim’s life, create genuine investment in the pain of murder and you’ll spoil the fun. There’s a reason it’s taken over a hundred years for a book to give serious enquiry to the lives of Jack the Ripper’s victims. Even today’s true crime boom puts a new patina on this same repression. For all the encouragement to ‘stay sexy and don’t get murdered’, the tone of soupy gossip pervades, a spooky tale round the campfire, rather than an enduring sadness that must be lived with.
Whenever I’m paging through the trending section of Netflix or searching for new podcasts, I think of this quote from a woman whose father was murdered when she was just ten (featured in an episode of This American Life).
You know, at the Parents of Murdered Children Conference, they have certain presentations really down to give you a little punch in the gut. And one of them is that they have a whole one on those murder mystery dinners. And the way that they always do it is they say, let's just pretend that you were going to have a rape mystery dinner and you were going to show up and the rule of the game was going to be that someone's been raped, and we're all going to find the rapist. That wouldn't go over. Nobody would do it. Everybody would feel that that was deeply distasteful.
Occasionally a work of art swims against the current and serves us murder with that true ‘deeply distasteful’ flavour. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) is one such film. The first feature by John McNaughton went far enough in the United States to create a new higher NC-17 rating for non-pornographic ‘extreme’ content (along with Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Pedro Almodóvar's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!). Tasked by the same producers for whom he’d made ultra-cheapie true crime documentary Dealers in Death (1984) to produce a horror film, he set about adapting episodes in the lives of real life serial killers Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole. Managing to be both harrowingly explicit and to leave plenty of gaps to haunt the imagination, it’s an experience that leaves you wishing for a long shower by the time the credits roll. Henry is a rarity in biopics, actually underplaying the real life confessions of Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas is unlikely to have genuinely killed the hundreds he confessed to. Much more likely is that he was a serial murderer who was also a useful patsy for the police to tie up cold cases. What we’re left with is something that hovers between Henry’s imagining of his murders and the real life facts. In the film’s version of events, lifelong drifters Henry (Michael Rooker) and Otis (Tom Towles) find each other during a spell in prison (Henry serving time for teenage matricide). The film focuses on an extended stop in their petty rampages cross country, working occasionally and dealing weed to teenagers. Otis’s sister Becky (Tracy Arnold) arrives, fleeing the abuse of the father of her child. Before long Henry helps Otis overcome his initial aversion to murder, and the two become cheery companions in homicide. At times, the film feels like a grand guignol reimagining of Laurel and Hardy’s knockabout, or a buddy movie with a high body count.
There’s a universe where Henry sits next to other serial-killer-as-antihero sub-genre films, alongside American Psycho, The House That Jack Built and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Yet Henry is no holy monster, damaged soul, nor a metaphor for the moral abyss at the heart of all things. Asked about his formative myth by Becky, he first claims he has murdered his mother by stabbing. ‘Otis said you hit her with a baseball bat,’ counters Becky. He begins to recount his life story, ending with ‘I shot her. I shot her dead.’
‘I thought you said you stabbed her.’
‘Oh yeah, that’s right. I stabbed her.’
It’s at moments like this that Henry seems to be pushing back against the reassuring stabilities offered by other true crime tales. The origin myth is its own type of comfort, a neat bow that puts villains at the far edge of human psychology, far away from decent people’s experience. It’s reminiscent of the way Heath Ledger’s Joker plays with this comic book staple, offering multiple macabre origin stories, withholding even this place of stability among the chaos. Henry knows there is a fictional symbiosis between the serial killers (the problem) and FBI (the solution). Remarkably prescient on serial killers (a term that had only entered the popular lexicon a few years before the film’s production), Henry explains how he evades capture to Otis.
If you shoot someone in the head with a .45 every time you kill them, it becomes like your fingerprint, see? But if you strangle one, and stab another and one you cut up, and one you don’t, then the police don’t know what to do… what they really like, what makes their job so much easier, is a pattern. What they call a modus operandi. That’s Latin. Betcha didn’t know any Latin, did ya? ... It’s like a trail of shit Otis, it’s like blood drippings from a deer you shot.
So Henry is neither a logical killer employing a methodology nor the neutral chaos of the ‘man who wants to watch the world burn’. Instead, he’s an encounter with true psychology: part product of his environment, part inherited characteristics and part sui generis perversity. As the original poster tagline had it, ‘He’s not Freddy, he’s not Jason… he’s real.’ This careful characterisation is backed by the chillingly genuine physicality Michael Rooker brings to Henry. By rights, this film should have launched his career as a major leading man (it took James Gunn to at least resurrect his villainous potential in regular roles since Slither and in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy), but perhaps Henry was as much a blessing as a curse as a calling card. Rooker tells a hilarious story here of a casting director refusing to pass on the VHS of Henry to director John Sayles (who would eventually cast him in Eight Men Out) because she was so shaken by the first five minutes of the film. From thirty five years distance, the fact that none of the actors in the film had many other notable screen roles gives an added air of cursedness. There’s no other associations to reassure, no thought of Travis Bickle in Meet the Parents to take the edge off.
What lingers about Henry is not just the man himself, or his partner in crime, but the pervasive picture of a cursed world. The film’s long journey to theatrical distribution was slowed because the American censors refused to countenance individual cuts, finding the overall tone of the piece too much even for ‘R’ rating. What makes the film so uncomfortable is that horrific things are a fact of everyday life, even if you haven’t elected a life of habitual killing. Becky is forced to endure incestuous abuse from Otis because her other choice is a life back home with her abusive ex-partner. Every encounter is full of casual violence and vitriol, every character spiteful or withholding. Henry goes to buy cigarettes immediately before the film’s bloody conclusion. ‘How about them Bears?’ casually asks the shopkeeper. ‘Fuck the Bears,’ comes Henry’s response. As she’s washing hair at a day job, Becky’s client describes being spat on in the streets. ‘It’s hard to have a decent night out in the city anymore,’ she says as Becky (our one kind soul) stares off wistfully. What ultimately pushes her to leave Chicago is not the fact that she lives with two serial killers but that she feels the city isn’t a safe place to raise her daughter more generally.
Framed this way, Henry is an extremely provocative film about class in America, and the brutal limitation of choices forced upon the working classes. There’s an inevitability to the strange attraction of Henry and Otis: abusive families, meeting in prison, borderline employment. Hired as an exterminator, Henry is then abruptly laid off. In the very next scene, we watch from a distance as he knocks on a suburban housewife’s door with his insecticide canister. Then her mutilated corpse. Otis deals weed to a preppy teenager in a sports car, a brat who refuses to meet him where his friends might see him with the underclass. As with Killer of Sheep’s abattoir workers, working class life is where we put things that we’d rather not think about (especially the death of animals). Henry’s rampage is less return of the repressed, and more revenge of the repressed.
As I said writing about Play, provocative works tend to implicate the viewer, and Henry is no different. Halfway through the film, Henry and Otis acquire a VHS camcorder (from the world’s rudest blackmarket TV salesman – yet another inhabitant of Chicago’s Seventh Circle of Hell – who gets a soldering iron to the chest for his troubles). They roam the streets, filming potential victims, random bum fights and eventually a home invasion. A sick inversion on the home movies the device was intended for, there’s a deep reflexivity that comes from us watching Otis and Henry watching a bloody murder. The connection between our act of watching and theirs would have been only more alive when Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer passed from hand to hand in sourceless samizdat VHS copies before its official release. It’s easy to imagine viewers wondering if this was less drama and more snuff documentary. We know why Otis and Henry want to watch these images. But, without being meretricious or superior, Henry asks us why we want to as well. Without asking those questions, probing our desire to see violence, we’re just setting another place at the rape mystery dinner party.
Recommendations
This very good book review by Rachel Monroe of Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered goes more deeply into the complexities of finding entertainment (and a form of protection) in real life crime.
Perhaps it’s a desire not to watch anything too overwhelming or cloying while in stasis, but Robert Bresson’s icy-as-hell, emotionally removed L’Argent was great viewing. To be honest, Henry feels more of a bedfellow with L’Argent than A Nightmare on Elm Street!
Derf Backderf’s graphic novel My Friend Dahmer fits in the same category of thoughtful works about a ‘monster’ that neither humanises nor panders to salacious detail.
If the above makes it seem like I’m absolutely against the Netflix crime story, I would strongly recommend the excellent Strong Island. Yance Ford’s story of her brother’s murder focuses on the victim, not the act, creating a scale map of horribly quotidian trauma.