A Film Canon

One of the most disturbing depictions of a serial killer ever committed to screen, Henry - Portrait Of A Serial Killer turns on the grotesque love triangle between Henry (Michael Rooker), flatmate and gas station attendant Otis (Tom Towles), and Tom's sister, Becky (Tracy Arnold). A more conventionally deadpan film might simply have presented Henry as devoid of motivation, but John McNaughton offers a series of subtly self-defeating explanations - psychological, economic, political - as if gesturing towards a motivational possibility that can only be conceptualized cinematically. It makes sense, then, that the two most striking stylistic features of the film are Henry's ceaseless, wandering drives, during which he finds and disposes of his victims, and the camcorder that plays an increasingly central role in his killings. It also makes sense that the only crimes that we see - that is, the only crimes that aren't relegated to a single, evocative image, or simply implied - are the murder of a television salesman with one of his own televisions, a videotaped home invasion murder, and the climactic violence inflicted upon a teleaddicted eye, which paves the way for an even more disturbingly anticlimactic conclusion. Taken collectively, these position serial killing as cognitive mapping, and Henry's brand of it as a kind of nascent sniping, a mere extension of the scopophilia that prevents him ever sleeping with his female victims. Hence his mantra that "the most important thing is to keep moving...nowhere", and his quest for a murder that never involves having to leave the comfort of a moving car, just as the camera he uses to scout his victims forms a prototype for some future rifle sight.  It's as much a portrait of commuter Chicago - or, rather, of nowhere - as of Henry, as well as a chilling evocation of television, video and home movies as agents of home invasion, and home invasion itself as nowhere smashing down the door.