Rewatch/Rewind: Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye
A largely forgotten 80s thriller eerily foreshadowed the rise of toxic masculinity.
(Rewatch/Rewind is a feature in which I revisit a film that once made an impression on me, but I haven’t watched in at least a decade. Spoilers should be expected.)
I’ve been talking so much about the Criterion Channel’s 80s Horror collection in the past couple of weeks that I might as well send them a bill for PR services at this point. Whatever mad genius curated the collection went deep, overlooking a few more obvious choices in favor of overlooked gems like Larry Cohen’s Q: the Winged Serpent, and the Ozploitation classic Next of Kin. What was most surprising to me was the inclusion of Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye (1987), a movie that, up to this point, I was fairly certain I had imagined.
I would have first seen White of the Eye in my late teens, and I can’t imagine I sought it out. It was more likely something I saw when I was in a long period of watching movies and TV shows solely because I was home (which was admittedly often) and they happened to be on. Nothing about the cast would have drawn me in – at the time the only actor in it I was familiar with was David Keith, largely from Firestarter and An Officer and a Gentleman, in which both movies he played nice but doomed young men who die under tragic circumstances. I don’t recall how the film was sold at the time – if it was promoted at all – or if there was anything about it I thought sounded interesting. It was just on cable one day, I watched it, and certain images from it remained burned into my brain well into adulthood. Watching it now, and having a better understanding of what Cammell and wife/co-writer China Cammell1 were trying to do, it’s a deeply unsettling film that seemed to grasp the concept of “toxic masculinity” before such a phrase even existed.
A serial killer is on the loose around suburban Globe, Arizona, targeting wealthy women in their 30s. The gruesome crime scenes all have bizarre clues left behind, such as knives arranged in a pattern resembling an Indigenous hunting compass, and the only thing the police have to go on is some tire tracks. Unconcerned with this is Joan White (Cathy Moriarty), living a dull but mostly content existence with her husband Paul (David Keith), and their young daughter, Danielle. Paul runs a successful stereo installation business, thanks to both his genial personality, and his unique ability to test the acoustics of any room just by humming. He describes the feeling this gives him as like he has “a tuning fork in my sinus cavity,” although we’ll eventually learn that Paul thinks lots of weird things.
In flashbacks we learn that Joan and Paul met a decade earlier, when she was driving from New York City to Malibu with her fast-talking boyfriend, Mike (Alan Rosenberg), who comes off like a minor Scorsese character. Paul just seems to appear out of nowhere, walking out of a burst of sunlight, a hippie hunk in tight jeans and turquoise jewelry, dazzling both Joan and Mike. Paul and Mike engage in an alpha male competition, friendly on the surface, but with a distinct undercurrent of hostility, and the understanding that Joan is the prize. Ultimately it’s the laconic, all American Paul who wins her over the shifty, ethnic looking Mike, who just seems to skulk away, never to be heard from again.
For all appearances, Paul and Joan seem to be madly, passionately in love. He’s a doting husband and father, who never seems to have a bad or even off day. If anything, he’s maybe a little too smiley, oozing salt of the earth working man charm, even when it’s discovered that his van tires match the prints left at the murder scenes. Joan doesn’t know about that initially, but she is bothered by another secret Paul might be hiding: an affair with Ann Mason (Alberta Watson), a rich customer who aggressively pursues him.
Joan is so preoccupied by her hurt and anger over the affair that she barely seems to process the news that Paul is a suspect in several murders. It’s not until she makes a grisly discovery in their home that she realizes that everything she thought she knew about Paul, and their life together, is not just falling apart, but may never have been real in the first place. Meanwhile, Mike, thought to be long gone, has been living not too far away in a scrubby little town, his loud and pushy personality muted by a brain injury, seemingly biding his time until he meets Paul again.
Though most serial killers live the solitary, isolated lives we expect them to, a handful, including Gary Ridgway (the Green River Killer), Dennis Rader (BTK), and Joseph DeAngelo (the Golden State Killer) were all married to women who had no idea what they had done until they were caught. White of the Eye doesn’t spend a lot of time on explaining how it’s possible that Joan couldn’t have known what was happening, only that she didn’t, because Paul has been playing a long game, convincing not just her, but his entire town that he’s a nice guy, and that his violent juvenile criminal record was an aberration. We all love a redemption story, right?
When the truth comes out, Paul isn’t ashamed of what he’s done, or worried that Joan will turn him in. If anything, he’s relieved to finally have the opportunity to talk about the bizarre religious/metaphysical philosophy that drives him, and his belief that he’s been sent by a power even beyond God Himself to destroy women he perceives to be evil. He has no intention of hurting Joan, though, believing her to be “different” from his victims, until he discovers that she plans to have Danielle taken from the house for her own safety. Realizing that Joan has even the slightest bit of doubt in him sends Paul into a rage, and everything he believes about Joan being different from the women he hates so much is immediately forgotten.
There’s a lot to Paul’s “philosophy” (not to mention his white guy mangling of Indigenous culture and the “thrill of the hunt”) that sounds pretty familiar if you’ve spent some time studying the incel community. He believes himself to be a higher being, and that women are creatures to be dominated, deceived and/or destroyed. Joan isn’t special or different because of who she is, but because she belongs to Paul, after he won her away from Mike, the “lesser” man. Her specialness relies solely on how much she’s willing to keep turning a blind eye so that he can continue his holy mission. What a letdown it is when she turns out to just be another demanding bitch who won’t let him do what he was chosen to do.
Mike somehow showing up to rescue Joan should be triumphant, but it ends up rather a bit more pathetic, as it’s still another game of “who’s the bigger man,” just as it was when they first met. After watching him mutilate a dead deer, Mike has known all along what Paul is capable of, but refused to warn Joan because he was angry at her for sleeping with Paul. Instead, he’s bided his time, waiting for this inevitable confrontation so that he can prove himself at least as manly as Paul is. In the end, they both end up dead, blown to bits in a quarry after Paul ignites the dynamite he’s strapped to his body.
Though it could have easily turned into a TV movie “my husband’s a killer!” melodrama, White of the Eye is a weird, discomfiting film, keeping the viewer on their toes with time shifts and scenes that may or may not be in various characters’ imaginations. The mid-70s flashbacks have the 16mm grain of an old movie, leaving one to wonder if they’re even authentic memories. When Joan encounters Mike working at a gas station, she later tells Paul it was only a dream, and the scene is recounted as something entirely different. Everything is too bright to the point of looking blown out, and the sun appears relentlessly hot, even though fireplaces are roaring and everyone is wearing winter clothing. It’s all very disorienting, suggesting that the audience can’t trust what’s happening to be “real,” any more than Joan can trust that anything about her relationship with Paul is “real.”
The characters themselves further add to the sense of everything being off in ways that can’t be easily articulated. Detective Mendoza (Art Evans) is the most cheerful, friendly detective you’ll ever find investigating a serial killer case. Danielle, her hair cut into a tragic mullet, regards everything with the solemnity of someone years older than her. Nobody, not Joan’s friend, not a local police officer who’s known Paul for years, no one, seems even remotely troubled by the fact that Paul is being questioned about a murder. Even when Joan discovers irrefutable proof of his crimes, she doesn’t immediately flee the house with their child, but rather waits hours to confront him, inexplicably dressing up for the occasion like it’s date night. What’s happening here? Is any of this real? It may be generous to describe White of the Eye as a horror movie, but it’s deeply unnerving, in a way that may have you questioning how much you can ever really know someone.
In the end, Joan remains a cipher, and we wonder if maybe she could have continued living with Paul despite knowing what he’s done, if it meant not having to face the idea that she had been fooled. At no point does she ever ask about, let alone express sorrow over, the women Paul murdered. It’s as if she hasn’t quite grasped the enormity of it, too caught up in wondering what she had with Paul meant. She’s a victim too, in that Paul took a part of her life away. He won that, and it can never be returned. But then again, as Detective Mendoza asks, “What’s ten years, when you’re in love?”
It’s worth mentioning that Cammell, who previously worked with Nicholas Roeg, and directed the 70s sci-fi horror Demon Seed, met and began a sexual relationship with China when she was just 14 and he was 40, which casts a queasy shadow over the whole thing.