© 2007 William Ahearn
Susanna Moore’s In The Cut generated a lot of buzz when it was published in 1995. Written as a literary erotic thriller with a surprise and shocking ending, the book is all but forgotten these days. The film – that was to be Jane Campion’s comeback after two box office disasters (“Holy Smoke” and “The Portrait of a Lady”) – also slipped into obscurity and never gained the traction that drove “The Piano” that established Campion as an up-and-coming director.
Looking back on both and having spent a lot of time dealing with novels that become movies, it’s worthwhile noting that even though both failed they seemed to fail for the same reason even though the ending of the film was drastically different than the book.
If anything, Moore’s novel is a cautionary tale for those wishing to transcend the genre. The main character is a writing teacher at what seems to be NYU and Moore weaves literary references into the text on the first page. She’s trying to get her students to read Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and V.S. Naipaul’s Guerillas. Moore’s story will end at the lighthouse beneath the George Washington Bridge and the Naipaul reference seems to allude to the act of anal sex as violence toward women and a precursor to murder.
(While I would love to take a tangential or parenthetical trip investigating sexual acts and their political meaning and literary significance in post-war American literature, it’s too early on a muggy day and I haven’t had enough espresso. While we're not on the subject, it should be pointed out that "in the cut" is a reference to a vagina and that is explained in the book but not the film.)
In The Cut utilizes the same device as Murder on the 31st Floor by Per Wahöö, who penned, along with Sjöwall Maj, The Laughing Police Man and other police procedurals based in Sweden. The books were great fun back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when I read them and I’m pretty sure – but would not swear to it – that Murder on the 31st Floor is the book that used the device where the main character and narrator is murdered and there the narrative ends.
What I appreciated in In The Cut was how it seemed to define the limits of genre and it caused a lot of thought on how writers can approach material that bend the rules and still remain functional thrillers or murder mysteries without becoming pretentious or obscure. The main failure with In The Cut is that it was all dressed up but there was no one in it to go anywhere. One person’s erotica is another’s porn and to dwell on the sex acts is to miss the point as it actually distracts from what’s missing in the book and that’s a character. There are a lot of clues in the book but not one as to who Frannie, the main character, might be.
Nothing. And one can see why: It’s difficult to create a victim. Killers are easy – and in the book, it’s a standard serial killer device – victims are complicated. Did she bring this on herself and was she looking for it are personality qualities that will always present themselves in this type of story and that seems to be why Moore took the situational rather than psychological approach. As a result, the novel becomes a pastiche of sex acts and suspicion and severed heads.
One could see how Jane Campion – the director of “The Piano” – would be attracted to the material of In The Cut if she chose to do an exploration of violence toward women or the culture that sustains it. Campion and Moore wrote the script together and some of the changes they made to the story seemed really odd. For one, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is not Frannie’s (Meg Ryan) friend, as in the book, but her half-sister. That may have been the reason for the totally unnecessary dreams of Frannie’s parents ice-skating as a courtship ritual. And if you want to see Kevin Bacon completely lost at sea for what to do with his part, rent this flick.
What Moore attempted was at least interesting. Take a tired and used device – the serial killer – and twist it to tell it from the point of view of a victim who may or may not be complicit in her own death. Not exactly a feminist political view or even one with much of a factual basis. And it doesn’t seem to be the ending that Jane Campion or the producers would like to see. Not with Meg Ryan in the leading role. Ryan is not one of my favorite performers and for this movie she darkened her hair and left her perkiness in the trailer and made me wonder why she was cast to begin with. Nicole Kidman – who was one of several producers – would have been a much better choice but that’s just my two cents.
The film changed the ending and in effect killed the whole thrust of the novel. There is still no sense of character and that lack of character is evident in Frannie’s response to the murder of her half-sister Pauline. The entire scene is reduced to plot device and disbelief. What’s left is an artsy and pretentious film trying to be sexy and relevant and just spinning its wheels.
As a New Yorker, watching films can sometimes be funny in how scenes jump around the city. There are two scenes in “In The Cut” that really bothered me. One was when Frannie finds out that body parts were found in MacDougal Alley. She lives on Bleecker Street – a good six blocks away – and it was disconcerting to hear the detective ask if she heard anything strange or suspicious that night.
The real kicker was the end. The next-to-last scene takes place at a lighthouse – that actually exists – beneath the George Washington Bridge. Frannie – covered in blood, barefoot and carrying a bloodstained jacket – then walks to her apartment on Bleecker Street. According to Google maps, that’s twelve miles.
Somewhere along that route – especially on the downtown Westside – someone’s going to offer a bloody lady a drink or a ride in a police car.
In The Cut is an excellent source book for mystery or thriller writers to see some of the pitfalls of going too far a field.