Monsters and Dust

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And yes, there is violence in Raimi's work — and plenty of it. The violence — as far from the verité-style of von Trier as can be imagined — retains both its subtle metaphors and its in-your-face effects. Both Drag Me To Hell and Spider-Man 2 use violence as metaphors for the darker ramifications and unwieldy manifestations of, you guessed it, modernist progress, capitalism and America as concept. But at its core, Drag me To Hell is a soulful morality tale. It is a winking horror-comedy that ponders the true nature of choice in a landscape of increasingly muddled ethics.

Von Trier is obsessed with implausible female martyrs: sexual, maternal, moralistic self-deniers who allow themselves to be punished by an equally implausible world solely comprised of greedy, materialistic rapists. This highly gendered, misanthropic worldview is essentially social Darwinism played out in front of a hand-held camera. And to what end? The martyrs of von Trier’s films suffer and die for nothing beyond our own flagellation. It is our punishment that he gives to us. I wept like a baby watching Björk hanging from a noose in Dancer in the Dark. I have no intention of letting Lars von Trier manipulate me like that again. It’s a ‘fool me once’ kind of thing.

Drag Me to Hell’s heroine, Christine Brown (a perfectly-cast Alison Lohman), may not be a martyr in the typical sense, but she becomes one anyway. Her woes begin out of an act of self-denial. She denies a cartoonishly decrepit old woman (played by Lorna Raver) a loan extension on her mortgage in an effort to impress her weasel of a boss and secure a promotion. This seemingly small moment of compromised morality snowballs into epic disaster when the old woman curses her. Christine Brown spends the next hour and half fending off tenacious nightmare bugs and fierce demonic tormentors, while continually bartering off her own moral code. The old woman spends the next hour and a half basically projectile vomiting on her. Christine Brown cannot escape the old lady’s bile any more than Lady Macbeth can get her hands clean. But, she is really suffering for our sins — for every choice we’ve made in favor of our own advancement over our basic humanity. And for Americans, most obviously she suffers for our complicity with the mortgage crisis. The potency of this moral lesson is precisely because Raimi understands that her curse-worthy choice — to deny a foul old woman an extension — is almost casual in our contemporary world, one that prioritizes success and capital gains over fulfilling basic human needs. Lohman’s performance is so perfectly realized, that we both want her to win and to be punished, yet neither one feels fully right. Of course, Raimi gives us plenty of reprieves in the Drag Me To Hell’s numerous expertly-crafted gross-outs.