The horror! The horror! Kurtz’s last words evoking the unspeakable reality in Africa, were brought home to Europe by the narrator of Heart of Darkness. They were meant to convey for the reader the visions of what he had witnessed in a distant and exotic land. As both, witness and perpetrator of the horror, Kurtz embodied white man’s greed and mingling in foreign soil.
Who is narrating for us the unspeakable things that are taking place now in Iraq? Is art echoing the drums of war beating frenetically in a different, faraway continent? Surprisingly, a small unpretentious Hollywood film seems to be the latest signal from commercial cinema acknowledging that there is a horror extending beyond our pruned lawns. Written and directed by Bruce A Evans, Mr Brooks points out indirectly to the horror that we have to live with while we go on with our orderly lives. It takes note of the social malaise, the psychic uneasiness of our shared responsibility in another horror taking place in a distant, exotic land.
Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner) leads the perfect life. He is an affluent businessman whose beautiful, symmetrical house seems analogous to the harmony in his life. He has a beautiful wife and lovely daughter. He also has a secret. Nothing turns him on as much as the murders he ritualistically perpetrates every couple of years egged on by his alter-ego (William Hurt). Two films come to mind in relation to this theme. They are both, like Mr Brooks, dark comedies and were directed by European masters during or right after the second world war: Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Charles Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947).
The inherent violence and irrationality madness of war is represented in the two main characters of the earlier films. The suave and charming uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) in Shadow... andthe impeccably mannered gentleman, Verdoux (Chaplin). While they both lead seemingly innocent lives, they are unrepentant killers, who kill women for their money. Earl Brooks does not need the money: he needs the thrill.
For the audiences at the time when Monsieur Verdoux was released his exclamation that it "is a blundering world and a sad one,” was hard to believe. In 1947, the western world was still congratulating itself with the evil it had just defeated. Verdoux talked about a "monoxide world of speed and confusion," Earl Brooks never gets to utter similar sentences, but present day audiences are certainly most familiar with their meaning. Mr Brooks comes at a time of great uncertainty, in a world were the moral landscape is not as clear. It is in this indirect manner that Mr Brooks seems to capture the same irony of Chaplin’s film in a very different time. A man who has a seemingly perfect life, devotes himself to carefully planned murders.
Verdoux marries rich women to kill them for their money (to support an invalid wife and child). For him, murder is a matter of necessity; he refers to his victims as "dumb animals.” Charlie also despises his female preys, whom he also marries and murders for their money. Charlie represents the evil that intrudes the seemingly perfect small town America that his sister and her family represent in a sort of ridiculous Pollyanna way. The screenplay of Shadow of a Doubt was written by the expert in small town America, Thornton Wilder.
Verdoux loves beauty. He recites poetry before he mercilessly kills one of his victims. Earl Brooks is also an aesthete. He designs ceramic pots and places his victims (naked couples) in aesthetically balanced positions before he takes pictures of them. The love of the macabre is part of the joke in both films. But even though Chaplin indirectly holds society responsible for Verdoux’s acts, in the end the writer/director makes the character pay for his crimes. So does Hitchcock punish uncle Charlie, but Brooks gets away with it. Here is the main difference and the motive for wondering whether Mr Brooks has taken a step further in a world where nobody can really be innocent anymore of the horror that lingers quietly around us.
In spite of the mainly bad reviews that Mr Brooks received, the film is important because perhaps it reveals a society with a psychological environment that differs from the one of the “greatest generation.” No one in a globalized world can turn a blind eye to the horrors that exist in far away places. No one after 9/11 could believe that life in an isolated, beautiful place is still possible without having evil permeating it. Maybe, we live in a time when the murderer is not only among us, but just as in the prewar Germany as depicted by Fritz Lang’s M, the murderer... isus.
