Trouble Every Day (2001)

Claire Denis’s Paris-centered anti-colonial horror film Trouble Every Day even more explicitly transforms bodies into landscapes. The Wendigo disease has been imported from post-colonial South America after a research expedition led by Dr. Leo Seneneau (Alex Descas). And the disease infects both Leo’s wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle) and an American male colleague, Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo). But the responses to cannibalism are even more gendered in Trouble Every Day than in American Psycho. Whereas Coré must be sacrificed after preying on and devouring several men, Shane remains unpunished, even though he too cannibalizes at least one victim, Christelle (Florence Loiret Caille), a hotel maid. Her interactions with both Shane and his wife June (Tricia Vessey) humanize Christelle, heightening the horror when Shane tortures, murders, and feeds on her flesh; yet because Shane is a respected male doctor, he is free to return home washed clean of guilt. As both victim and perpetrator, Coré must die, perhaps reifying her pleas to Leo: “I can’t wait any longer …. I want to die.”

Although scholarship exploring Trouble Every Day primarily highlights how the film plays with genre^[i] and/or style^[ii], we see the film as a comment on intruders violating interconnected frontiers. As in American Psycho, the literal cannibalism both Coré and Shane perform in Paris parallels the consumption of resources. This time the exploitation is in Guyana and also serves as the source of their disease. According to a website explanation of Dr. Leo’s bioprospection mission in Guyana, “These samples and analyses should in the near future help us to focus our pharmacological research into nervous diseases, pain, mental diseases, and problems of libido.” The following year, a bulletin article published in Revue of the Association of Neuroscientists explains, “Leo Seneneau has released several studies about botany applied to neuroscience.” And in flashback, we see Leo working in the jungle with a variety of plants. Other flashbacks show Coré and Shane with Leo in his rainforest camp.

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[i] See also Met, Phillippe. “Looking for Trouble: The Dialectics of Lack and Excess, Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001). Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European Film. 3.7 (9 Jun 2003). Web. 3 Jul 2013.

[ii] See also Morrey, Douglas. “Textures of Terror: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day.” Belphegor: Littérature populaire et culture médiatique. 3.2 (Apr 2004). Web. 1 Jul 2013 and Murphy, Ian. “Feeling and Form in the Films of Claire Denis.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. 54 (Fall 2012). Web. 30 Jun 2013.

Bodies as Landscapes in American Psycho

In American Psycho, however, women’s bodies have been transformed into landscape-like obstacles blocking Christie’s escape. Elizabeth becomes a landscape painted in blood after Bateman begins devouring her flesh. When Christie runs from the room, slamming the mirrored door behind her, we see Elizabeth writhing in pain on the bed. Christie meets other human obstacles as she runs down a darkened hallway, frantically opening doors, looking for an escape from a chainsaw’s roar coming from the bedroom. She opens a closet where she finds two dead women hanging inside. In another dark room, she sees a head on the top of a television. 

As she runs, Christie trips over Elizabeth's body, now halfway in the bathtub. Still screaming, Christie makes it out the front door and runs down the hall, banging on doors and pushing elevator buttons until she sees the stairwell and races for it. Bateman follows, revving the chainsaw. When he leans over the railing, aims the chainsaw at her and drops it, the stairwell looks like a canyon, and after the chainsaw stabs her, Christie’s sprawled body seems to melt into the floor.

Jean, on the other hand, survives despite the woman’s head visible in the freezer when Bateman offers her some sorbet. Although it is Evelyn’s phone call that disrupts Bateman’s attempt to shoot her with a nail gun, Jean’s desires for self-preservation saves her. When Bateman asks her if she wants to get hurt, Jean says no, “I don’t want to get bruised” and leaves, the only possible escape from gendered exploitation and a Yuppie Wendigo in American Psycho.

Women's Bodies and Wendigo in American Psycho

Women’s bodies also become landscapes captured by Bateman and his video camera in several scenes in American Psycho, as upper-class sex objects or disenfranchised female prey. Bates’s fiancé Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon) is the most prominent of the upper-class women Bates exploits in the film. Evelyn seems powerless in voiceovers Bates provides, declaring with annoyance, “I'm trying to listen to the new George Michael tape, but Evelyn – my supposed fiancée-keeps buzzing in my ear.” 

Although Evelyn rejects Bateman’s sexual advances, choosing to watch the Home Shopping Network instead, in the end he tells her “You're just not terribly important to me” and leaves her alone to “return videotapes.” As a rich daughter of a prominent family, Evelyn could provide the status symbol Bates at least initially craves, but ultimately, Bates chooses a more literal form of Wendigo/wetiko, not only consuming resources and identities, but bodies as well.

Even though women’s bodies become territories for Bateman in the film, as Stephen Holden of The New York Times asserts, “compared with … robotic cobras [such as Bateman], the women are almost poignantly human.” Christie (Cara Seymour), a streetwalker Bateman hires, and Jean, Bateman’s secretary, most explicitly highlight this connection between women’s bodies and landscapes. Bateman hires Christie to participate in videotaped sessions. She survives the first, leaving badly bruised and bleeding after an off-screen offensive that includes a coat hanger stored in an armoire drawer. She initially refuses a second encounter, but when he waves a huge wad of bills out the car window, she relents in desperation. 

Back at his apartment, Bates videotapes himself with Christie and a second woman, a model socialite, Elizabeth (Guinevere Turner). Christie shuts her eyes and grimly concentrates on her performance, turning her head every so often to check the progress of her partners promoting David Eldridge’s suggestion that the “camera … delivers a ‘moral gaze.’” Although Eldridge asserts that “the only object in the film that could be described as pornographic is Bateman himself, fetishized in the display of Christian Bale’s buff body” (24), the rest of the scene responds explicitly to Bateman’s viewing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

American Psycho and American Frontiers

American Frontiers in American Psycho

Although the female body primarily bears the brunt of masculine exploitation in American Psycho, Bateman also misuses more traditional frontiers where cultures clash and both a land and its people are threatened. As David Eldridge reiterates, Bateman’s “main victims are [according to Faye Weldon] ‘the powerless, the poor, the wretched,’ those who ‘don’t rate’ in Reaganite America” (23). The same could be said of those exploited at a distance.

In a conversation with friends in one of the many restaurants cited in the film, for example, Bateman challenges his colleague Timothy Bryce (Justin Theroux) about the extent of the massacres in Sri Lanka. Bateman exclaims, “There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about. Sure our foreign policy is important, but there are more pressing problems at hand.” He then delineates several more potentially exploitative clashes: “Well, we have to end apartheid for one. …We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women.”

When Donald Kimball (Willem Dafoe), a private investigator, interviews Bateman about the last time he saw Paul Owen, one of Bateman’s victims, Bateman again invokes frontiers, claiming, “We had … gone to a new musical called … Oh Africa, Brave Africa. It was…a laugh riot … and that's about it. I think we had dinner at Orso's. No, Petaluma. No, Orso's.” Both these examples connect the consumption of food with the figurative consumption of cultures, updating the American frontier in a late 20^th century upper class economy. They also introduce an indictment of Wendigo/wetiko that Bateman reifies on the bodies of his victims.