RATED R for being REALLY INCREDIBLY VIOLENT, full of MURDER AND BLOOD AND MAYHEM and having naked people.
Okay, this was the first official gauntlet thrown, and I’m sorry it took me so long to. . . uh. . . what exactly do you do with a thrown gauntlet? Pick it up? Stomp on it with your foot? Plant a little garden around it? I don’t know. Anyway. I have Brandi Woods to thank for suggesting that this movie would be virtually impossible to find a spiritual message in.
My Bloody Valentine is a slasher film of the “let’s see how utterly grotesque we can make this and still have it be 3D” variety. The quick synopsis goes like this. One Valentine’s Day, five miners are locked In a mine. Only one resurfaces, having murdered the other four to preserve his air supply. After being in a coma for a year, he wakes up and kills many of the hospital staff as well as a bunch of party-goers who are revisiting the mine for what I can only assume are masochistic reasons. He is “shot and killed.) Ten years later, when the mine-owner’s son (who was present at and largely responsible for the original accidental collapse) returns to town to sell the mine, the murders start again. They are brutal, physically unlikely, and often involve either a pickaxe or a shovel and a decapitation.
A great deal of the cast dies and there appears to be no path of logic to their killings. There is little to no redemption or catharsis for the ones that live. Also, often, women are naked.
So I understand why this seemed like a challenge to my gauntlet-thrower. It’s a slasher movie! What window pane cross could possibly be found in a slasher movie? I guess I could go the Old Testament route.
"And he brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes..." (I Chronicles 20:3)
That’s a bible verse about something that David did. Good old warmongering David.
But I think I’m going to go for something a little bit darker and STRAIN my cerebral matter for some kind of lesson. In order to do that, I’m going to have to spoil the big surprise ending. But that’s okay! Because if you’re one of the people that reads this blog, there’s a good possibility this is the kind of movie you wouldn’t see if it was the last reel in the last movie theater in the post-apocalyptic world. So I don’t mind spoiling it, really.
SPOILERS FOLLOW
The movie My Bloody Valentine is about internalized evil. The ten-year anniversary killings are not being performed by the original killer himself, but by someone he is possessing, or haunting, or possibly just someone who is obsessed by him. This man is so wracked with guilt for his part in the original accident that brought this killer into being that he actually finds himself a perfect vessel for the killer himself. All of the mindless destruction that he wreaks in his unconscious split-personality state carries on the original mission of the crazy pickaxe wielding miner that he trapped in the mine with his negligence.
So what’s the message in that? It’s about the line between guilt and repentance. They are two radically different things. Guilt is destructive. It takes a mind and soul with great potential for good and swallows them up until they are useless at best and perfect weapons for evil at worst. We tell tragic stories about the man who did something wrong in his life, and was so eaten by guilt that he could never forgive himself.
This Is Not A Good Thing.
We mistake it for a something we want. We say things like “Good! He screwed up! He should suffer!” Here’s a movie quote. . . “Just. . . feel guilty. Swim in it till your fingers get all pruney.” (drastically different movie, but still). We feel like that would be justice. But it isn't! A vessel of guilt is useless. A vessel of guilt is a vacuum. It sucks the life out of everything around it and destroys it utterly.
So the main character (and antagonist, as it turned out) in this movie allowed his life to be so swallowed up by guilt that he lost his identity and gave it over to a destroyer. And we should learn from his example and not do that.
Oh, what’s that? You think you could never be in a situation where you wreak that kind of destruction? Really? I know I can. When I am feeling most guilty about something is when I am the least capable of doing any real good. I may not pin someone to the wall with a shovel until their head is cut in half or open someone’s chest cavity and extract their heart for re-packaging in a Valentine’s candy box (and by the way . . . bleahgufisdlbleah) but I guarantee I can be at least as destructive to someone else’s spirit. I can cut someone down with casual disrespect and rip someone’s heart out with a bitter angry word. And at the heart of it is just my own preoccupation with my own screw-ups.
So the message is this. If you have done something wrong, intentionally or not, that is eating away at you, make amends. Ask forgiveness. And then – and here’s the tough one – ACCEPT forgiveness. That way you can go back to being a nice penitent person who screwed up but is trying to make things right. Letting yourself be wrapped up in layers of guilt is self-absorbed, egocentric, and eventually will empty you of anything good, making you a perfect weapon for the destruction of others.
DISCLAIMER: I cannot think of a single person in my immediate family who would enjoy this movie for anything other than its unceasing gorey 3-D violence. And there are some people in my immediate family who like that kind of thing. (We're not talking Last of The Mohicans or Gettysburg violence here, either.)
Now then. . . Where is My Next Challenger!
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