It's time to make a confession. I only like one film by Peter Jackson, a director known for a trilogy, Lord of the Rings, that only has one interesting feature: its use of New Zealand's landscape to estrange medieval England. As for the wizards, rings, caves, kings, elves, and what have you—might as well put a stone in my mouth because that kind of fantasizing is stone-dead to me. Also, I have no idea why he decided to remake King Kong. Did the world need another King Kong? Did black people really have to see a King Kong poster at the cinema again? Why won't that awful and racist monster just die?
The only film by Peter Jackson that I think has any real value is Heavenly Creatures. This means he has not made anything worth watching since 1994, and we can also give him credit for discovering a great English actress, Kate Winslet, whose performance electrified Heavenly Creatures, a psychological thriller that's based on a true crime and concerns two teenage girls who, in the early 1950s, become obsessed with each other.
This film deserves a thorough Marxist/Lacanian reading because it explores with great depth and detail the power that attracts the lower classes to the rich, and how the rich psychologically need (feed on) this attraction their power makes possible. Kate Winslet (the star of HBO's "Murdur Durdur") plays Juliet, an upper-class teen who entrances Pauline, a working-class teen played by Melanie Lynskey. (The latter was Leonardo DiCaprio's wife in Don't Look Up.)
The price of this real fatal attraction? The murder of a working-class woman, of course. How the girls get from an intense, high school friendship, which is confused by the specialists with lesbianism, to the crime, is precisely the story of why it's so hard for the far left to convince large sections of the working class to make their masters their true enemy, even in a democracy. When watching this masterpiece of '90s art house cinema, keep your eye on how the relationship between Juliet and Pauline is structured. And, most importantly, notice who introduces the fantasy, and who consumes the fantasy, and what this fantasy is all about? Do this, and you will certainly dismiss the Lord of the Rings trilogy as easily as I do. As for King Kong, read James Snead's essay "Spectatorship and capture in King Kong: the guilty look."
Heavenly Creatures screens at The Beacon March 5 through 7. See more top picks from The Stranger here.
