A Film Canon

The most underrated of 90s erotic thrillers, Sliver revolves around a sliver apartment building, and a handful of its tenants - an editor (Sharon Stone), an erotic thriller novelist (Tom Berenger) and the proprietor (William Baldwin). As a thriller, it's not particularly successful, at least narratively, partly because screenwriter Joe Eszterhas considerably alters and simplifies Ira Levin's novel, and partly because the film was dramatically and inconsistently reworked to avoid an NC-17 rating. However, this narrative redundancy is exactly what allows Eszterhas and Philip Noyce to transform the film into a pure mood piece, a vehicle for lush, baroque atmosphere - or, alternatively, to transform the sliver tower itself into the main character, and the basis of the film's whole aesthetic. Aesthetically, the tower feels like a greenhouse as much as an apartment complex - a concatenation of glass and foliage that forms part of a wider, vernal vision of Manhattan as a subtropical biome, as if Central Park had spread its cultivated tendrils over the entire island, or the island itself had been cultivated and made over by a new new age generation. By presenting the connective tissue of the apartment complex as the proprietor's obsessive network of hidden cameras, Levin, Noyce and Eszterhas define this new new age movement as a mystical return to technology - the yearning for a benign eco-ghost in the machine, or the pronoid fantasy that every lens is an empathic surface. It's this organic liquid-image, this digitised xylem and phloem, that positions the film at the cusp between surveillance cameras and rudimentary webcams, or between traditional soap operatics and reality television, and inflects Eszterhas' neo-noir atmospherics through something closer to the science fiction of an Evian adscape. In fact, for the most part, it doesn't necessarily play as a thriller at all, but more as a melancholy techno-romance - a computer saying "I love you" and delivering a computer generated flower - as if presenting sliver architecture as the apotheosis of Gatsby's dream of a window through which he could simultaneously gaze in and out, the slivering interface at which cellulose becomes celluloid.