A Film Canon

It's difficult to make a film critiquing snuff, just because snuff's fixation with depicting the fleeting moment of death is an apotheosis of cinephilia as much as paraphilia, producing a paranoia of small differences, and a challenge to retain enough identification with snuff to engage with it, but enough distance to not actually be snuff. In 8mm, Schumacher's approach is to present Andrew Kevin Walker's screenplay - in which private detective Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage) is hired by an aristocrat's widow to check the veracity of what appears to be a snuff film discovered in her husband's safe - as a piece of pornography, insofar as he understands it as a hyper-generic exercise, an over-identification with genre, that renders it continuous with pornography, the most streamlined and consistent of all genres.  Although this allows for a series of conventional, stylized gestures of moral disgust and panic, the very conventionality of those gestures eschews psychological depth, opening up the singularity and aura of the snuff film as a kind of sublime aesthetic horizon, infinitely more experimental and interesting than the film itself. In doing so, it dovetails the 'horror' that snuff engenders and the 'horror' that a film about snuff engenders into a single, generic reaction, leaving room for a more unsettling and rapturous engagement with both. It also turns the question of whether or not the snuff film in question is real, and the accompanying insistence that the film itself isn't a snuff film, into a generic requirement, a non-issue, as evinced in the generic migration from sunshine noir - and its peripatetic, procedural fixation with knowledge - to the more static suburban horror and melodrama of the closing scenes, as well as the eschewal of any twist that might shock us into critical distance or knowledge. What's unusual is that the grungy, low-budget realism of the snuff film stands in both for analog nostalgia and digital anticipation, setting them against the luscious, hyper-cinematic, atmosphere-drenched aestheticism of the film itself, in a midpoint between the 90s erotic thriller and 00s art and torture porn. Fusing nostalgia for a hardcore world of underground, black-market pornography with anticipation of a post-hardcore world in which everything that "can't be unseen" is only a search engine away - Welles uses digital image processing to pick apart several frames of the snuff film - Schumacher ultimately presents himself as a pornographic auteur, poising pornography's quaint atonality at the threshold of a realism so real that it denudes and desecrates reality.