"I thought I was dreaming."
Jane Campion's unfairly maligned work of genius, In the Cut, is a film interested in fragmentation- narratively, visually, and thematically. The editing is quick- frantically cutting from shot to shot in a matter of seconds to communicate the paranoia of the protagonist, many frames are blurred at the edges like the flimsy pages of a paperback book stained by water, the progression of the narrative is choppy and inconsistent, scenes end before conversations are finished, victims of murder are cut up into pieces, and the protagonist, Frannie Avery- played by the incomparable Meg Ryan- is an English teacher obsessed with diction. Her apartment is littered with individual words typed onto paper, cut out, and plastered on her doors and walls, in addition to sticky notes with random quotes and lines of poetry jotted down all over the place. She fixates on specific words and phrases as if she's searching for clues to put her own life together, but the harder she tries, the further she gets from knowing the truth.
The film begins with a door opening and ends with a door closing. In the beginning, Frannie has a morning of dreaming of her parents skating on an iced-over pond, then she wakes to walk out the door of her apartment with her sister, Pauline. Frannie and Pauline step out into a narrow staircase in this dark apartment complex and pass some neighbors on the way down; Pauline greets them, but Frannie doesn’t. They part ways outside when Frannie has to go meet with one of her students, Cornelius- at a bar interestingly. She’s there to learn more about the slang that he and his friends use, as part of her ongoing fascination with diction. The student, being black, comments that he feels like he’s just a “guinea pig” to her- like he’s a specimen for her to study through her white gaze. Perhaps Frannie’s intentions are innocent, but this reveals her ignorance of much of the world around her and illuminates her voyeuristic desire to be a part of something she doesn’t belong to.
When confronted by this by Cornelius, Frannie gets uncomfortable and goes downstairs to find the bathroom, where she stumbles upon a man receiving a blowjob in the shadows on the other side of the room. In the unrated version of the film, the camera lingers on a close shot of this very realistic prosthetic erect penis being sucked, and this intensely erotic scene- charged with a deep sense of danger just as much as it is with sexual desire- is what propels Frannie into her oneiric flirtation with death for the rest of the film. She descends the stairs of the bar to escape her awareness of her voyeurism brought up by Cornelius, but is only confronted by it again in the shadows. She literally travels to the darkest depths of her mind, and uncovers a desire that she may not have been aware of until now, and then rises back to the surface of Manhattan with this newfound knowledge, thrust into the crowded streets and the beaming sun to piece together her fractured psyche. All she has are her memories: a hand gripping a faceless woman's knotted hair, a three of spades tattoo on the wrist, a cigarette glowing in the dark, and the sound of a mouth moving around a penis. She holds onto these pieces of time like the words and phrases she has on the walls throughout her apartment. The pieces put together are meant to bring her closer to the whole, but as she fixates on each piece so intensely, the whole starts to fall apart, and the pieces just grow further away from each other.
This way in which Frannie struggles to separate her memories from her desires throughout the film mirrors the logic of a dream. When she descends the staircase into the dark basement of the bar, it's like she's entering a dream, and when she steps back up into the light, it's like she's waking up, but even when she's awake, her whole world remains hazy. There's this lived-in texture to the cinematography of the film where the grain of the film stock blends into the grime and business of the crowded New York streets and tight interiors so that the diegetic world of the film becomes inextricable from the lens of the camera; as images are obfuscated by blurred edges, deep shadows, fuzzy compositions, and intense shades of red and green, Frannie's daily life starts to feel feverish and almost intoxicating, like a dream. Memory is indistinguishable from dream and dream is indistinguishable from reality. Justine Smith puts it perfectly in her piece on the film, "Re-examining the Challenging Eroticism of In the Cut" when she says, "Her lust reverberates through her waking moments and dreams until her memories are poisoned by her primal desire; ruined and unreliable. eroticism, like a dream, exists in a fragmented form and just as the more you try and piece together a dream, the harder it is to grasp, the details of sex follow a similar pattern. As the details come together Frannie is no longer sure if this is as it happened, or if her imagination is filling in little gaps. Sex works similarly, breaking down bodies and sensations into these experiential flashes: In the Cut operates on that level." Films are like dreams in that they reveal emotions buried in the subconscious of the viewer, and films about sex may be the best example of this since sexual desires are repressed in the mind by many.
The dream gets more complicated when a woman turns up murdered, her dismembered body lying in the garden of Frannie's apartment complex. Detective Malloy- played by Mark Ruffalo- pays a visit to Frannie to ask some questions, and Frannie notices the three of spades tattoo on his wrist matches that of the man she saw in the basement of the bar. She’s excited by this encounter with Malloy, being able to talk face to face with the man whom she believes she saw at the bar; she now gets to play a part in this sexual fantasy that she once stood on the outside of. Unfortunately, just like all of Frannie’s encounters with men in this film, her relationship with Malloy is immediately linked to violence and danger. He is there to question her about the brutal murder of a woman, not just to flirt. Although he certainly does flirt; later, he invites her out to meet at a bar one night where he tells her he can be whatever she wants him to be. he tells her “You want me to romance you, take you to a classy restaurant, no problem. You want me to be your best friend and fuck you, treat you good, lick your pussy, no problem.” He’s a physical manifestation of her dreams of desire that are now bleeding into her real life, offering her everything she wants, yet it’s all entangled with an inherent danger.
It turns out the woman who was murdered outside of her apartment was the same woman who she saw giving the blowjob in the basement of the bar, and since she believes that man was Malloy because of his tattoo, she has good reason to suspect that he may very well be a murderer. Every moment she spends with him she is risking her life, yet she also feels protected by him because he is a cop. It’s this juxtaposition of men as both protectors and aggressors that drives Frannie’s struggle with distinguishing reality from fantasy throughout the film. She wants to trust men like Malloy, but she knows she can't.
Other untrustworthy men that Frannie encounters throughout the film include her sort-of ex-boyfriend, John Graham- played by a very creepy Kevin Bacon- who stalks her around the city and leaves voicemails on her phone begging her to come back to him, her student, Cornelius Web, who is obsessed with proving that John Wayne Gacy was innocent, and Detective Malloy's partner, Detective Rodriguez, who was demoted from street cop to desk cop after beating and nearly killing his ex-wife. As the killer strikes again and again, eventually killing her sister, Frannie grows increasingly weary of every small interaction she has with any man she encounters. This fear and simultaneous attraction to that fear pulls her apart, as she wrestles with the fact that she cannot stop herself from being attracted to the opposite gender, no matter how dangerous it is for her. In Jane Campion's film, heterosexuality is a terrifying balancing act to navigate, promising sexual gratification, but at the cost of tearing one's mind apart and risking one's entire life. Campion makes the very act of being a woman attracted to a man feel like a living nightmare where one wrong move can be the end of everything.
This nightmare of heterosexuality is shown to be of a cyclical nature, as Frannie has a reoccurring dream of the day that her father proposed to her mother- which grows increasingly dark and disturbing with each dream. At one point, Frannie tells Pauline this story of how their shared father proposed to her mother, and it sounds too good to be true- like something straight out of a dream. According to Frannie, her mother told her that one day, she was ice skating on a frozen pond, when she met Frannie's father, who was already engaged. He and his fiance got into a fight on the pond that ended with her taking off her engagement ring, throwing it on the ice, and skating away. Supposedly, Frannie's father picked the ring back up, skated over to Frannie's mother, handed her the ring, and proposed to her right there- a fairytale marriage. Neither Frannie nor Pauline really believe this story. They know it's probably some fantasy that Frannie's mother made up as a bedtime story when she was young, and now as time has passed and the story has been passed on from Frannie's mother to Frannie to Pauline, the story has likely changed a little. Just like a dream, it's this hazy memory of a story that has been pieced together again and retold many times, and the more this happens, the further it gets from the truth. Frannie's mother likely looked back on the beginning of her marriage with rose-tinted glasses, and this led to a skewing in her memory. This story, in which a man would be so cruel to immediately leave his fiance for another woman after one fight doesn't sound so nice when you think about what it says about that man, does it? Perhaps women have to rewrite their memories to give themselves the comfort that the men they choose to be with aren't as bad as they really are. Perhaps the malleability of memory is a protective force for the minds of the abused. However, sometimes there are cracks in that memory, and the darkness starts to reveal itself. Toward the end of the film, Frannie once again has visions of her father's proposal, except this time her mother is knocked over on the ice and her legs are split in half as her father glides straight through them with his skates. Crimson red blood spreads over the shiny white ice. The memory is stained, ruined. The nightmare of heterosexuality trickles down from generation to generation, slicing through flesh with its razor-sharp edges, bleeding through dreams and into reality, dooming both women and men to an eternal dance with sex and violence.
As Frannie inches closer to danger over the course of the film, she attempts to take control of her relationship with men through her work as an English teacher, using her fascination with diction and poetry to write her own narrative within this violent story. Each time she rides the subway, she pays close attention to the "subway poetry" banners on the walls. She takes note of quotes like "Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path”, internalizing them to recontextualize her role in her own life as the author, not just the spectator. Disillusioned with the city, unable to escape her sexual and romantic past within the dense landscape of Manhattan, it's in this dreamlike vessel of the subway- this liminal space hurdling through a black void beneath the city- where Frannie takes these quotes to heart as if they are somehow clues to unlocking her freedom, to giving herself agency in this pulpy murder mystery paperback book. In the Cut takes the appearance of one of those genre fiction novels- sleazy, grimy, dark, sexy, and violent; it's a worn-out cheap paperback with creased pages that are frayed on the edges and coming loose from the spine. In one scene where Frannie is teaching the book, "To the Lighthouse" in her class, a student remarks that the book is boring and only one woman dies. Frannie asks how many women have to die for it to be interesting, and the student replies "At least three". And that is exactly how many women die in In the Cut. Campion gives us the violence and sex that we crave as women across the city are murdered with straight razors, and a sexy detective takes interest in Frannie, and within that simple narrative framework you have plenty of opportunity for misogyny, yet Campion shapes that narrative to fit her own mold, allowing the protagonist to write her own story. In that sense, it's almost like a work of metafiction. As Campion makes Frannie the author of her own story, she repurposes the genre of the erotic thriller to serve her own ideas about female desire, giving herself agency in an industry in which men determine the narrative of what is or isn't successful- or what is or isn't sexy. And when this was released in 2003, it certainly was not successful. It effectively ended Meg Ryan's career at the time because as the rom-com "Good Girl" she decided to take a role more bold and provocative, and the mostly male critics couldn't handle it. It was always Jane Campion's most maligned film until its much-deserved reappraisal in recent years. It was simply too ahead of its time- too smart and too sexy for critics and audiences alike.
In the climax of the film, Frannie handcuffs Malloy to a pole in her apartment, straddles him, and rides him, asserting her dominance over not only him, but also her own narrative. He says "I like it in the cut"- or, slang for vagina, calling back to the beginning of the film when Frannie learns for her diction project that "Virginia" is slang for vagina. At this moment, Malloy becomes a part of her study of diction- just a character speaking dialogue in her story. Frannie conquers the danger that plagues her and feeds it back not only into her sexual gratification but also her narrative fulfillment.
After this encounter, Frannie leaves Malloy handcuffed to the poll because she still suspects him to be the killer, then she drunkenly stumbles out onto the busy street where she meets Detective Rodriguez who tells her to get in his car. Without thinking, she does it, and soon enough she is swept away to a lighthouse outside the city. At the lighthouse- a notably phallic structure and also a reference to the book she teaches in her class- Frannie's power is immediately stripped away by Rodriguez, who she realizes is the killer once she finally notices the three of spades tattoo on his wrist. In this ultimate confrontation of her sexuality, she demonstrates the agency she has gained through her last experience with Malloy, taking back her power by not allowing herself to be penetrated by Rodriguez's knife at his phallic lair. She shoots Rodriguez with Malloy's gun and puts an end to her story
And just like that, the story that began with a door opening ends with a door closing. Frannie returns to her apartment in the early morning, where she lies down on the floor next to Malloy who is still handcuffed. Shot through the frame of the door as it slowly closes, Frannie is left alone with her danger and her desire- her aggressor and her protector, everything she ever wanted. A story is finished, destined to become a fragmented memory or a hazy dream, never told quite the same as it happened. Subway poetry, quotes on sticky notes, individual words on small scraps of paper- her pain and her desire all cut up into pieces and lost to the passage of time.
Written by Owen Felton
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