Paul A.J. Lewis
In one of the most memorably gruesome scenes from Ryuhei Kitamura’s The Midnight Meat Train (2008), a commuter (played by Ted Raimi, brother of The Evil Dead director Sam Raimi) has one of his eyeballs knocked out of his head by a blow to the cranium. Dislodged from its socket, the organ flies towards the camera in a shower of CGI grue. The perpetrator is a serial killer named Mahogany (Vinnie Jones), who travels the titular midnight train, murdering and butchering its travelers in order to feed them to subterranean creatures that dwell beneath the city.[i]
The scene, one of a number of moments within the picture that feature Lucio Fulci-esque levels of violence against the human ocular organ,[ii] foregrounds Midnight Meat Train’s emphasis on vision and the gaze: something that is consolidated by the profession of the film’s protagonist, Leon (Bradley Cooper). Leon is a street photographer who, struggling to break into the fine art world, stumbles across Mahogany’s nocturnal activities when shooting a project for inclusion in an exhibition orchestrated by gallery owner Susan Hoff (Brooke Shields). However, Leon’s obsession with Mahogany’s nocturnal activities places both Leon and his loving girlfriend, Maya (Leslie Bibb), in mortal danger.
The Midnight Meat Train is based on a short story by Clive Barker, originally published in volume one of Barker’s Books of Blood. After the success of Bernard Rose’s film adaptation of another Clive Barker story, “The Forbidden,” as Candyman in 1992, Rose planned a sequel based upon “The Midnight Meat Train.” Where Candyman had transplanted “The Forbidden” from Liverpool to Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, Rose intended to relocate “The Midnight Meat Train” from New York’s subway system to London’s underground (Stokes). A number of other adaptations of the story were mooted (by David Campbell Wilson, and by Mark Pavia and Jack O’Donnell) but, for various reasons, never produced.
In 2003, Barker decided to self-produce a film based on “The Midnight Meat Train,” as the first of a planned series of adaptations of stories from the Books of Blood. The script was written by Jeff Buhler in 2004, and remains structurally faithful to the story, with one particularly notable amendment: in Barker’s short story, Leon is an accountant, and whilst writing the script Buhler was motivated to make Leon a photographer so that the character’s “observations [of the city] could be visually communicated to the audience through his work” (Buhler, quoted in Stokes).
Midnight Meat Train was produced during a decade (the 2000s) in which the American slasher film was divided between attempts to revitalise undead franchises (Marcus Nispel’s reimaginings of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th; Rob Zombie’s reworking of Halloween), and the excesses of the “torture porn” cycle that is most commonly cited as beginning with James Wan’s Saw in 2004. The decade also saw American horror films, more generally, to be increasingly influenced by the iconography of J-Horror (and K-Horror) imports.
Lakeshore Entertainment, which financed Midnight Meat Train, recommended Japanese director Ryuhei Kitamura (whose breakthrough picture had been the kinetic zombie-action film Versus, released in 2000) as the director of the film. The picture would be Kitamura’s first English-language feature; once on board with the project, Kitamura intended Mahogany to become as iconic as slasher franchise figures such as Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddie Krueger. This was the motivator for the huge metal tenderiser that Mahogany uses as his weapon of choice, to provide the character with a weapon equivalent to Jason’s machete or Freddie’s claw (Kitamura, in Stokes).
Much has been written about the scopophilic pleasures of the slasher film, articulated through point-of-view shots from the perspectives of killers as they enact brutal acts of violence. However, in allowing the stories of Leon and Mahogany to dovetail (with the film’s final epiphany resting on the notion that Leon is being groomed as Mahogany’s replacement, doomed to perpetuate the cycle of violence that keeps the carnivorous subterranean monsters from storming the city’s streets), Midnight Meat Train draws parallels between the conventional, punishing, voyeuristic gaze of the slasher movie and the exploitative gaze of the documentary/street photographer.
From its opening shot (a tight close-up of a man’s eye as he awakens to the rocking sound of the subway train on which he is riding) Midnight Meat Train emphasises its focus on the gaze. Our introduction to Leon comes shortly after this man’s murder. On a city street, cars and people pass by, time lapse photography making their movements unnaturally rapid. Suddenly, a man’s face appears in close-up. This is Leon. Everything slows down as he turns to the camera and moves a Leica M4-P, a photojournalist’s workhorse, up to his eye, composing a shot and pressing the shutter release.
In On Photography, her iconic examination of the photographed image, Susan Sontag observes that “the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own” (Sontag 57). The photographer sees life clinically, as a frame or composition, to be exploited artistically: the lens of the camera separates the photographer from her/his subject.
Sontag makes her comment in the context of a discussion of the manner in which documentary, and “street,” photography has traded on an “othering” of the disenfranchised: the privileged photographer turning their gaze upon the underprivileged, in what Sontag refers to as “the sustained look downwards” (Sontag 57). The photographer – especially the documentarian/street photographer – all too often tries to justify their voyeuristic gaze by suggesting their work – their “picture-taking” – “serves a high purpose: uncovering a hidden truth” (Sontag 56).
Midnight Meat Train emphasises the paraphernalia and practise of photography, with notable accuracy for the most part. Leon shoots with a 35mm rangefinder, a Leica M4-P: a type of camera associated with street photography because of its unimposing appearance and near-silence of its shutter, facilitating the capturing of candid moments of reality. The apartment Leon shares with Maya is littered with art books, the walls adorned with black and white photographic prints. The couples’ kitchen doubles as a darkroom, an enlarger sitting next to the dishes, and a blackout blind enabling Leon to develop his rolls of 35mm film and make prints, which he pores over with a loupe.
When Leon approaches Susan, having been introduced by their mutual friend Jurgis, he shows her his portfolio. Susan asks Leon to explain his artistic vision to her; he tells her, simply: “The city [….] ‘Cause no-one’s ever captured it. Not the way it really is. The heart of it. That’s my goal, that’s my dream.” Leon is driven by the documentarian’s purpose, the intention to expose a “hidden truth” – which, for Leon, is a nebulous “thing.” However, after encountering Mahogany on a late-night train, and becoming convinced that he is in some way associated with a spate of disappearances, Leon develops a focus for his art: he stalks Mahogany with his camera, submitting these images to Susan’s exhibition.
One image in Leon’s portfolio catches Susan’s eye: a candid shot taken on the subway, it depicts a seated man in a suit gazing in disgust at a seemingly drunken man, who having fallen asleep is almost touching the suited man. (The image consciously alludes to Walker Evan’s sustained photographic study of the denizens of New York City’s subway system in the 1930s, Many Are Called.) “You were at the right place,” Susan tells Leon, “But not at the right time”: she suggests that Leon missed the “decisive moment,” and should have waited longer to press the shutter release. “I want to see the face of the businessman when the filth touches him. Next time you find yourself in the heart of the city, stay put. Be brave. Keep shooting.”[iii]
“Photography has always been fascinated with social heights and lower depths,” Sontag tells us (Sontag 55). Photography is “the gentlest of predations,” practised by “the comfortably-off” with the intent of “document[ing] a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them [the photographer]” (Sontag 55). The documentarist’s gaze is cold, detached. It is an “extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur”: Baudelaire’s aesthete, who prowled the streets of 18th Century Paris, “reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes” (Sontag 55). The flâneur is drawn to the urban milieu’s “dark seamy corners, its neglected populations—an unofficial reality behind the façade of bourgeois life that the photographer “apprehends,” as a detective apprehends a criminal” (Sontag 56).
Susan’s advice impels Leon to venture into the city at night with his camera for company. Leaving Maya sleeping in bed, Leon becomes a flâneur of the night. Seeing a group of rowdy young men, he decides to follow them into the subway, in the hope of photographing them surreptitiously, maintaining the distance from his subject that Sontag discusses. There, on a stairwell, he sees the youths harassing a woman (Nori Satô). Leon photographs the scene, but the woman’s imploring gaze, as the harassment begins to escalate into a sexual assault, leads Leon to interrupt by shouting “Hey!” Leon’s interruption places him intimately, dangerously, within the unfolding scene. One of the youths menacingly climbs the steps towards Leon, who responds by photographing the young man as he nears, directing him as if in a fashion shoot. “Yeah, that’s good,” Leon observes before pointing to the CCTV camera next to him, which has captured the whole event, and asking the youth, “You ever starred in a movie before?” The gaze of Leon’s camera is thus juxtaposed with the omnipresence of surveillance technologies within the urban environment: CCTV cameras designed to prevent or document criminal acts. (The irony is that whilst the presence of the CCTV camera dissuades the young man from assaulting Leon, the murders that Mahogany commits seem to be sanctioned by the city’s authorities, and there are no surveillance devices on the midnight meat train itself.)
Susan is impressed with one of the frames Leon captures during this moment. “Get me two more images that strong, and you’ll be a part of [the exhibition],” she tells him. When the woman Leon saved is identified as one of the missing, Leon eventually comes to believe there is an association between the disappearances, the subway, and the mysterious Mahogany. Following Mahogany to the subway in a later scene, hoping to photograph evidence of his involvement in the disappearances, Leon finds himself the target of state-sanctioned surveillance when a policeman stops him. In a moment that is probably all-too-familiar to many street photographers within the context of the paranoia about photography and terrorism that developed during the War on Terror, Leon’s camera is taken from him. “Officer, you can’t do that,” Leon protests. “Yes I can. Orange alert and above,” the officer responds, “I can search whatever I want. How do I know you don’t got explosives in this thing?” “It’s a camera,” Leon sighs, as the officer opens the camera and exposes Leon’s film to light, destroying the images he has captured.
This scene offers a potent dramatisation of a much wider debate about street photography and surveillance, highlighting the manner in which CCTV is framed by the authorities as necessary, legitimate, and benevolent, whilst candid street photography is seen as voyeuristic, unsavoury, and potentially allied with terrorism. The irony is that were the authorities not sanctioning and covering-up the murders committed by Mahogany, Leon’s photographs would provide a highly effective body of evidence identifying the killer.
As if in validation of Sontag’s assertion that the camera will eventually make the photographer a “tourist” in their own world, Leon becomes increasingly alienated in his own life, neglecting his relationship with Maya. To Maya, Leon’s thinking seems increasingly chaotic and paranoid: she tells Leon simply to give his photographs “to the cops and move on.” The toll taken by Leon’s night-time excursions on his psyche boils over in a scene in which Leon and Maya argue over his obsession with Mahogany, and his belief that the sacrificial murders are directly linked to news reports of a series of killings enacted by a butcher over a hundred years earlier. Maya tells Leon, “No more night-time shoots!,” adding: “I just want you to shoot the stuff that makes you happy. What makes you happy? What do you love?” “You,” Leon tells her, “I love you.”
With that, Maya gives Leon his camera, and she poses for portraits, stripping as she does so: presumably with the intention that the couple will reconcile through sex. However, as Leon looks through the viewfinder he experiences abrupt flashbacks to the scenes he has witnessed at night: the hoodlums in the subway; the missing woman; Mahogany. Leon becomes nervy: sniffing and holding back tears as the flashbacks escalate, Leon breaks down and cries. “I’m sorry,” he tells Maya: she retreats into the bedroom, sobbing, and firmly closes the door behind her.
Leon’s photography appears in Susan’s exhibition, the centrepiece being a photograph Leon takes of Mahogany butchering the corpse of an animal in the meat-packing plant. The butcher-murderer glowers at the camera, the sense of enmity palpable to the gallery’s patrons. “Clients will want some alone time with you,” Susan tells Leon, “a little postmodern chit-chat. Humour them: it’s a sale.” Leon has learnt that the world of fine art photography, far from being a realm of limitless self-directed projects, is driven as much by compromise and commerce as photojournalism, and success comes at a deeply personal cost. His “othering” of the subjects of his photography (the city at night, and its inhabitants) in retrospect seems like training for his ultimate role in the film, as the replacement for Mahogany: the gaze of Leon’s camera, and his candid street photographs, becomes subsumed into the surveilling CCTV-led gaze of the city’s authorities, outwardly intended to prevent crime but secretly complicit in the murders committed by Mahogany, whose focused annihilation of his victims’ eyes is a symbolic challenge to the gaze. The fates of photographer and killer become grisly intertwined, in a picture that focuses (pun intended) reflexively on the scopophilic pleasures of the slasher film. “A little postmodern chit-chat,” indeed.
Notes
[i] Mahogany’s murders, the film suggests, are sanctioned and covered up by the city’s authorities: if not sated by the sacrifices conducted by Mahogany, the creatures will rise up and devour the city’s inhabitants.
[ii] In another scene, Mahogany dislodges the eyeball of another male victim by, again, striking him on the back of the head. Later, Mahogany is shown removing the eyes from his victims before butchering their corpses.
[iii] Though he is a butcher by day, working in a distinctly blue collar meat packing plant, Mahogany dresses by night in a similarly formal manner to the businessman in Leon’s photograph.
Works Cited
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Penguin Books, 1977
Stokes, Phil & Stokes, Sarah. ‘The Midnight Meat Train: An Introduction.’ Clive Barker Archive, 2014. https://www.clivebarkerarchive.com/midnight-meat-train
