Consider the immense chore you create for yourself when you title your film Arachnophobia. Think about it. When film motivates a phobia in the viewer, it’s because the viewer has little foresight in what the film contains, or of the film’s potential to inspire a viewer’s phobia. This example carries no weight now, but Psycho was carefully deployed to theaters, with little or no mentions of its notorious scene. (Jaws doesn’t support my argument, but I accredit its relentlessness in instigating the viewer’s fear.) Conceptually, you watch Arachnophobia and you inherit a fear of spiders, but this isn’t what happens because you’re expecting close-up shots of inordinately venomous spiders, and tracking shots of them creeping ever so slowly up someone’s pant leg. The film is an adequate slasher film: it is replete if not constructed entirely with scenes in which the Future Victim is completely oblivious to the slasher killer, and the slasher killer has no human identity, and is even iconic. But – better yet – Arachnophobia works as a critique of capitalist malaise.
It’s the story of Dr. Ross Jennings. He’s arachnophobic, but that’s not important. In an early scene he and his family are moving in to their new country home. One of the moving trucks is filled with antique wines, which he organizes obsessively in his basement. What’s clever is that for Jennings overcoming his phobia is equivalent to renouncing his materialist vice. (In the aformentioned early scene, he quantifies the value of one of his more priceless bottles: “At that price, who can afford to drink it?”) The film’s epilogue has he and his family moving to San Francisco, harmed but alive, with no room for a wine cellar.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: AMC
24 Oct 2005 11:27 AM | Submit Comment