Handi-crapped

Even a limited amount of research into the phenomena of people wishing to have limbs removed or to be paralyzed will quickly reveal that the explanation is rooted in a dysfunction or injury in the physiology of the brain and how it maps your recognition of your anatomy, like a kind of an offshoot of 'body dysmorphia syndrome", in which you are extremely thin but are consumed by the idea that you must lose weight. In other words, the brain is perceiving something in a distorted manner that makes one feel compulsively "incomplete" or "incorrect", and they believe that having a limb removed or a self inflicted spinal injury will cure this condition or feeling. People suffering from this do not take an erotic pleasure in the concept, and they are unable to explain why they feel they have extraneous limbs or function. In fact, they will tell you that they wish they didn't have this problem, especially after the third time they are rushed to the hospital because they ate 20 valiums and placed their legs into buckets of dry ice.

This movie irritated me in that it seemed apparent that it was an attempt to use this very real medical condition as a jumping off point to instigate a plot concerning a state of being or condition that was wholly conscious and rooted in memory and guilt. It seems like research was done only when and where it could benefit the imaginative, wishful thinking of the plot. The entire concept of this being a chosen and elaborately designed and enjoyed lifestyle is pure fiction.

That said, Crash(1996), in which the entire concept of this fetish of car crashes was dreamed up for the original J.G. Ballard story, was a great film.

I think it is worth mentioning, that in the "facts you need to know about this" dialogue Vera Farmiga gives early in the film, she mentions "devotee" subculture, which is a fetish involving the erotic attraction to others with amputations. Quite different than the inability to percieve yourself as whole until you have a limb removed, and completely irrelevant considering "devotees" do not themselves wish to be amputees. This film was more poorly researched than "Pearl Harbor". It's also worth mentioning that in that brief moment, I instantly wished this was a movie about a person who is compelled to have a limb removed and their dysfunctional romance with an actual "devotee" who indulgently conspires to help him/her. Would that have been any less interesting? It would have been awesome, I think, and relevant to the discussion of two actual real world occurring mindsets. Unfortunately, this movie touches so close to something like that, and yet f's it up so badly, that that movie will never be made. This director/writer spoiled the concept, spilling it's innards onto a 10 year radius of untouchability.

With 'Quid Pro Quo", the better movie would have been to construct realistic characters dealing with this very real problem. This medical condition was distorted and practically shoehorned to fit into a mysterious set of circumstances that would play out in three acts. A movie like Crash 1996 was a greater film, a greater story to me, because the whole concept of an erotic attraction to car crashes, which sparked the mystery in the story, was constructed, as opposed to the story and characters constructed to fit a real, observable condition and doing a bit of give and take each way so that things would ultimately line up. This is art imitating art while twisting life so it can all add up to have the appearance of deep and relevant ponderance in regard to a real medical condition. Throw in a little sex too to make it interesting, by the way.

Aside from all this, Vera Farmiga's entire performance was like seeing a wristwatch peeking out from under E.T. the extra terrestrial's costume. In other words, she played it so transparently that from the get go I knew she was going to be the crazy character who was guiding the whole debacle and was going to reveal that she was the purposeful instigator of it all and even perhaps the original catalyst in Nick Stahl's character's own predicament. In her very second scene she is shown sensuously caressing the circular armrest of a park bench in the exact manner one uses a wheelchair, while practically lasciviously oggling Nick Stahl's wheelchair. The symbolism was so thick that when things were supposed to be a surprise later, it was redundant. Again, for the sake of erotic "mystery", which failed anyway, they sacrificed realistic characters and story development. I personally dislike films that have the fingerprints of the writer left all over them. That's not something I like to notice in real time.

With such an interesting premise, I have never seen a lead actress and writer/director conspire so willingly to ruin what could have been. This tag team was like the movie-making equivalent of Lennie Small from Steinbeck's "Of Mice And Men". They loved their little pet so much they pet and pet it until they crushed it's head.

To give you an idea of how much it hurt watching this unfold- to me, "Boxing Helena" now seems like a wonderful film by comparison, and Bill Paxton's mulleted, angry, gun-toting, mesh-belly button-exposing-shirt wearing character seems entirely plausible.

toodles