Splashes of fiction

Fiction tries to be acutely social. It's fashionable, but it doesn't suit her

The main pop character of recent months has suddenly become Schrödinger's cat. They talk about him in every second film, they devote entire episodes to him in television series, and now they have begun to give him advice. In the science fiction action movie The Rippers by debutant Miguel Sapochnik, when it comes to this cat, the animal is offered to scratch and break free at any cost. That is, they advise him to stop illustrating any speculative garbage and turn into an action hero as soon as possible. The film follows its own advice: it scratches and rips bloodily while illustrating all sorts of speculative social bullshit.

It is in "The Rippers" that it becomes clear that talk about social problems has become a common place in science fiction films. The action movie shows the near future as a cheerful study in bloody tones. A certain Union corporation issues artificial organs on credit, according to all the laws of marketing, talking to customers: “Do it for the sake of your loved ones. Do it for yourself." However, during the signing of the contract, none of the clients is told that in case of delay they will face severe sanctions: defaulters are visited by confiscators-rippers - tattooed angels of credit relations. They cut expired organs from people - hearts, lungs, kidneys, whatever - and return them to storage, leaving the non-payers to bleed to death. This is hard, dirty work, and not every ripper will be understood even by his own wife. But not to become a sales manager?

Once the hero of the "Rippers" - a bright-eyed aristocratic butcher with the appearance of Jude Law - himself falls under the distribution. After an accident, his heart is replaced with an artificial one, and now he has to pay the bills. In an old fairy tale by Wilhelm Hauff, the hero, having exchanged his heart for a cold stone, became deaf to the troubles of those around him. The hero of Jude Law, on the contrary, is no longer able to bring the knife over the debtor himself. Hands tremble, heart bleeds. This means that he cannot really earn money, and he is not able to pay for the new body. So a confiscator is about to be sent to the hero, and it looks like it will be his closest friend and partner - Forest Whitaker, who has lost weight and clearly enjoys the work of a ripper.

Director Miguel Sapochnik says that this is a film about male friendship. It is a pity that the film itself does not know about this and constantly palms off social criticism on the viewer. It seems to have become a fashion: is it possible to talk about male friendship in a real fantasy action movie? Guys will not understand, we must add something more topical. "District No. 9" is devoted not only to existential problems, but also to issues of illegal immigration, "Avatar" talks not only about the beauty of the mountain world, but also about ecology, "Surrogates" not only illustrates the joke "give me two!" regarding Bruce Willis, but also suggest thinking about the future of virtual communication. Why, even the fantasy "Alice in Wonderland" is the story of a coup d'état. So the film "Rippers", a movie about male friendship, decided to pretend to be a dystopia, take a sharply sharpened sociality in hand and go to saw the vices of modern society.

In fact, it turned out differently: "Rippers" is a movie about blood, which, in order to become fashionable, starts talking about social problems. It pretends to be about a possible future. It pretends to be dystopian. Nothing like this.

Dystopias have always warned mankind of the possible consequences. It is worth exaggerating some idea a little (general control, creating clones, a ban on emotions), and please - the dystopia is ready. You just need to make the scenery darker, let it rain and watch the familiar world roll into a lovingly drawn abyss. Rippers makes the dystopia scratch and rip: the director isn't even going to talk about the possible development of events, he talks honestly about the modern healthcare system and bank loans, using understandable metaphors. For the flesh of debtors is truly food, and creditors are not called bloodsuckers for nothing.

"Good fiction is always based on today's truth," Forest Whitaker explains. Jude Law adds that "Rippers" shows not so much the near future, but a parallel universe in which "the same questions are important as in ours." That is, it turns out not a dystopia, but something like a world where everything is taken literally: the health care system is such a big white room in which one person climbs into another person's open stomach with a machine for reading barcodes. A child is a creature ready to shut up its mother with a sleeping gun. Relationships between people are mutual picking in the internal organs. You can kill a creditor by dropping a typewriter on his head. In this parallel universe, a man with a knife chopping up a man in a taxi in front of the whole street looks normal: we, in our universe, are not surprised to see a man in a strict business suit on the street. Work is work.

The film is based on the novel Repossession Mambo by Eric Garcia, which may have borrowed the idea from the play Genetic Opera by Darren Smith and Terrence Zdunich. It was filmed a couple of years ago by Darren Lynn Bousman, the director of three films from the Saw franchise (for her role in Genetic Opera, Paris Hilton received the Golden Raspberry in 2009 as the worst supporting actress). At the same time, "Rippers" is much more similar to "Saw" than "Genetic Opera": the musical was not so much a bloodbath as ironic gothic kitsch. In The Rippers, blood replaces almost all emotions: bloody splashes on the walls are hatred, a red puddle on the floor is disappointment, red streaks in a white room are love, a typewriter stained with red is a warning.

The Rippers calmly admits that the film is all made up of clichés, like a body made of organs. Countless quotes from other paintings and books perfectly symbolize organ donation and senseless bloody mess. You immediately imagine how all the films from which the "Rippers" borrowed various body parts wait for a while, and then come to demand the return of organs. There will be a long line of rippers. The first in it will be "Oldboy" - Jude Law indecently-oldboy goes through a corridor with bad people, using knives to butcher bad people, and at the end of the corridor he gets a bonus - a hammer. The latest is David Cronenberg's "Car Crash" - a climactic quasi-love scene where the characters pick at each other's insides. And between them is the hilarious violence of A Clockwork Orange and a verbatim quote from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life: in one episode, two confiscators cut out the liver from a living person, and blood spurts out in fountains. In the same episode of Monty Python, a man in a pink suit lives in the refrigerator - is it not him that the Rippers say hello to with their Pink Room, in which the confiscated organs are stored? And, of course, the shadow of the great science fiction writer Philip Dick constantly looms somewhere in the background - as in any work in which a matrix failure is inevitable, and the unsteadiness of the world is the basis of its stability. Therefore, all the adaptations of Dick, from Blade Runner to Minority Report, will also be in the line of rippers. And the novel Ubik will cut the heart out of the Rippers.

But all these disparate parts of the body are not connected in any way in The Rippers, either some kind of fixer of reality is missing, or some kind of madness - in general, connective tissue. The ballet of Jude Law and Forest Whitaker with bladed weapons is one movie, frontal social metaphors and crude satire are completely different, a story about male friendship is a third. Cinematic clichés stick out from all holes, and the love drama of the hero and the homeless woman generally appears unexpectedly, like a creditor from around the corner. It seems that the actors were interested in jumping and cutting, the director was delighted with the splashes of blood on different surfaces, and the producers thought only that social metaphors are well paid today.

Maybe ask science fiction to at least temporarily digress from social problems and think about anything else, even about drops of blood on different surfaces? And let Michael Moore make films about the healthcare system.