The Cell: a disturbing voyage into the mind of a serial killer

I remember watching the trailer for The Cell, which came out in 2000, starring Jennifer Lopez and not thinking that much of it. It came out on the heels of The Matrix, and so a lot of the scenes that show Lopez spelunking into a serial killer’s subconscious looked reminiscent of all the stuff Neo or Trinity could do: stay suspended in the air, the camera circles them, time slows down, and all that jazz.

But then I got a fresh look at the movie a couple months ago and watched it again today and I must say that this has got to be one of my favorite movies. A favorite idea of mine has always been the possibility of exploring someone else’s inner mind, their inner, private consciousness. Who knows what secrets we’d find lurking in there?

Hasn’t this been the wish and desire of every psychologist, of just anyone who’d love to know the darkest desires of a certain self, a desire that’s been repressed, sublimated under layers and layers of subtle or imperceptible self-delusion?

Or, who wouldn’t want to go back to your past and find the key events in your life that made you the person you are? While the event happens, you have no idea the effect it’ll have on you down the road. So, what if you could storm this ‘interior castle’?

Well, Jennifer Lopez plays Dr. Catherine Deane, an expert in child psychology, who is part of experiments which enter the inner, conscious world of coma patients to bring them back to consciousness! Dr. Deane is hooked up to this virtual reality device that is connected psychically to the mind of the coma patient. This lets Dr. Deane explore the minds of her patients.

We then get to see Carl Rudolph Stargher, a serial killer (same guy who played the psycho, marine recruit in Full Metal Jacket) who has fallen into a coma! But the problem is that police don’t know the whereabouts of his latest victim. So, Agent Novak (played by Vince Vaughn!) persuades Dr. Deane to probe Stargher’s mind to find clues about where this victim might be!

When we get inside Stargher’s mind, something strange happens. It’s so easy to paint despicable people in all black. We say they’re evil through and through. And I don’t say this to mitigate whatever heinous act they did; but I always wonder if things might be more complicated than the surface implies.

We see the demonic, bestial, ferocious side of Stargher; but we also see the child-like, innocent, hurt, wounded side, a side that’s been buried in hatred, perversion, vice, and violence. But it’s very interesting to see that even in the mind of a serial killer, there are regions of consciousness that are beautiful beyond words or horrible beyond belief.

The sequences in Stargher’s mind in which Dr. Deane journeys are very exotic and strikingly beautiful, inspired by art the director had himself been spellbound by. The special effects here work perfectly and I don’t see how some critics call them pretentious or overly grandiose or too voluptuous or what have you. I don’t think we have the special effects tools to capture exactly whatever it is that goes on in our minds. Haven’t you had dreams that defy the ability of any special effects team to simulate?

We learn that when he was a child, Stargher killed a bird out of mercy, to put it out of its misery. This motif is reechoed near the end of the movie when Dr. Deane lures the pure part of Stargher’s consciousness into a paradise of beauty and goodness; if she does this, Stargher will awake from the coma as a normal person instead of a twisted serial killer.

But the impure part pops up in the form of a snake. Since she can’t kill one without killing them both, she kills them both in the same way as Stargher killed the bird: to put it out of its misery.

This is a very good movie, and a very good evolution of the psycho, serial killer genre, whose company is Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, and Natural Born Killers. Instead of strengthening plot idiosyncrasies, they enter a new dimension. Who wouldn’t want to enter into the consciousness of Hannibal? The visuals are unmatched, and much of the dreamscapes seem like postmodern paintings that evoke and symbolize different truths about the hidden secrets of the nooks of our minds.