A Film Canon

Apt Pupil was marketed as a Nazi-next-door film, but anything resembling the procedural, investigative thrust of that particularly memorable subsection of suburban horror is done away with in the opening credits, as high school student Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) discovers that his elderly neighbour, Arthur Denken (Ian McKellen), is really Kurt Dussander, a Nazi war criminal. Todd immediately begins to blackmail Arthur, but his blackmail quickly turns into a kind of solicitation, a search for some amorphous, fetishistic, sado-masochistic educational experience that Arthur, by blackmailing Todd in turn, more than reciprocates: "this is the story of a certain young boy who was, in a queer way, his friend." What's impressive about the film is that, like The Crying Game, it refuses to entirely delibinise politics or politicise desire, as Todd's fascination with Arthur's past is never fully framed as a fetish, but never fully divested of a fetishism that goes above and beyond political and historical fascination either. To that end, Bryan Singer suffuses the film with odd, polymorphous, orgasmic moments, usually related to tactility in some way - especially the brush of hands against other hands, or against fabric - building a cinematographic frottage that perhaps explains the critical role ascribed to encounters on public transport, and culminates with all the ways in which Singer manages to bring Renfro and the camera into apparently accidental, incidental contact. At these moments, Singer's loving attention to Renfro's face isn't that far from the Gus van Sant of Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park - and it's a face that's sufficiently nuanced, understated and magnetic to cry out for exactly this forensic attention, an elaboration that would never really be equalled over the course of Renfro's tragically short career. In fact, it often feels as if there's little else in the film than Renfro and McKellen's piercing faces - at least, everything else takes on the gossamer insubstantiality of late afternoon, the golden, honeyed, sepia tones of Stephen King's distinctive nostalgia mode. What little attention is given to the outside world poetically reimagines suburbia or small town infrastructure itself as a death camp - most pervasively a house, most terrifyingly a hospital - but, for the most part, it's as shadowy and peripheral as how the world might appear to a pair of ghosts. If Hollywood tends to equate homosexuality with arrested development, then Apt Pupil makes it poetically clear that it associates the fetishistic, sado-masochistic fringes of homosexuality with an even more arrested development, as evinced in the double pastness of the film - it's set in the 80s, and obsessed with the 40s - as well as the fact that Todd is provided with a more straightforwardly homosexual mentor alternative, in the form of his school counsellor (David Schwimmer) whose anxiety to provide him with a father-figure, instead of a grandfather-figure, helps set the quite uncompromising conclusion in place. It's a testament to the film, then, that it never quite succumbs to the temptation to flashback, producing a single Moebius strip of history and historicity, punctuated photomontage that seamless and subliminally seeps into film and back again. All in all, it's probably the closest Singer has come to a genuinely auteurist signature, if only because it's the only film that has landed him with a sexual misconduct lawsuit, cleared in court, but absolutely critical to the pedophilic historicity of the film, its proclivity to linger on childhood just a little too long.