Knife+Heart

And How Much Prison Costs

I had some initial hesitancy about doing a Pride Week to celebrate LGBTQ themes. For one, I’m a straight male, and discussing these issues feels like a minefield, given the changes in language (perceived or otherwise) while I was locked away in an aggressively heteronormative environment. But for another, many movies about LGBTQ themes seem to revel in tragedy or disaster. I didn’t want to pursue films depicting intense tragedy or death, I didn’t want movies that pushed a Kill Your Gays mentality.

But I did want to save space for “Knife+Heart”, the wild slasher from France that is rather precise about killing more than a few gay and lesbian characters. This is a rather explicit film – not the LGBTQ+ movie to watch with your LGBTQ+-leaning grandmother. Vanessa Paradis, one of Johnny Depp’s former wives, stars as Anne, a director of several popular gay pornography films in 1979. She’s got a most-unpleasant problem – her actors keep dying. The first one, her lead, is murdered in an imaginative but not exactly work-safe method. She recasts with a young construction worker, but the deaths on the set don’t stop.

Anne is being pulled apart by this trail of torment. Her longtime partner left her, a problem because she was also her film editor. She also begins to recklessly insert ideas and motifs in her movie from the first murder, and later the following murders. This particular project morphs into “Homocidal”, a gay porn slasher reflecting not only her anxieties about the murder, but losing her own girlfriend. She is a lesbian (seemingly?) but her cast are all strapping gay males. There is no hint of attraction, but the tension in the air is considerable. Is Anne trivializing a gay male murder spree? Does she see herself in the murdered men? Or does she identify with the killer, who keeps adopting sexualized methods of murder for each victim?

“Knives+Skin” is a wildly adventurous visual experiment from director Yann Gonzalez, bursting with color and emotion within every frame. Part of that is credited to Gonzalez’ own younger brother, whom he convinced to record the dreamy score. You might know him as the musician M83, who has previously soundtracked several ads and trailers with his cinematic pop, and who also previously crafted the soundscape for the Tom Cruise actioner “Oblivion” – a pedestrian movie, but one with a compelling and cool sound.

“Knives+Skin” owes its existence to the giallo genre – the Italian horror pictures of the sixties and seventies with flexible logic, wild ultraviolence, distracting bright colors and groovy soundtracks. I am not a Professor Of Gialli, though I would say “Knives+Skin” counts as one, though one that is attempting to be a bit more open-minded about its roots. Gialli/Giallos usually depicted LGBTQ characters as cruel and perverted – many seemed as if they were taking notes from “Psycho” with a crossdressing killer every once in a while, completely divorced from the political dimension of said identity. Here, no one is merely here to die, and there is an effort to generate sympathy for those that are the victims of a homophobic murder spree. What’s notable is the focus towards men as the recipients of the typically sexually-violent murder you normally see in these movies, the penetrative threats, the hint of sexual violation within the act of killing. “Knives+Skin” is a seedy slasher, but it’s also a movie that shows a plainspoken respect for gay sex and intimacy. Yes, they’re killing their gays. But maybe they’re doing it lovingly? I hope this came across similarly to others.

It’s interesting to me to hear “normies” discuss the purpose of prisons, because they neglect the primary one: prisons are a business. Prisons make money. Maybe they punish or rehabilitate, depending on what side of the fence you live. Either way, those are relatively highfalutin explanations as to why we continue to perpetuate mass incarceration as a pivotal element of society. Prisons exist to fatten wallets. These people are criminals, they’re “bad people” – what’s the harm in making a buck off them, right?

This interesting article from NPR does a decent job of interrogating the issue lightly, as far as the “cost” or prison. I’ve said it many times – as much as prison broke me down, it also challenged many I knew financially. Consider your commissary funds: you’ll need these to shop every week, once a week. It’s not like a regular supermarket, where you can buy enough for the next few weeks. No, there are limits on how many of a specific item you can buy, given the fears of the institution that you will resell the material at a higher price. So that’s one weekly shopping option, mandatory, depleting your funds so you can have more than the nearly-invisible sizes of cafeteria food. Every month, everyone will need an infusion of money, and it’s not going to come from within the prison walls. Much of the rest of the commissary money goes to phone calls ($3.15 per fifteen minutes), clothes and toiletries.

Visiting is the most difficult for casual supporters of prisoners. It’s an all-day affair no matter who you are, so you’re losing money, plus there’s the gas investment considering many prisons are far away. The clothes of women are heavily policed, which means an additional wardrobe change might be necessary. And if you’re in a waiting room with someone, you’re not eating unless you feed yourselves with the vending machine meals and sandwiches. These are basic expenditures. Multiply them by how many people that are in custody (two million currently) and you can see how certain people are really counting their inflated bank accounts as inmates sit in prison.

On Monday, strap in, we’re doing SPACE WEEK.