A few thoughts about
Brain Damage.
Brian : No way! It's not gonna happen again!
Aylmer : What isn't?
Brian : Killing people!
Aylmer : Oh. [laughs] I thought you meant getting high!
Brian : We can't keep killing people every time you're hungry!
Aylmer : Oh yes we can. We'll do anything I want us to do. You're mine now, Brian. I *own* you...
I think about this exchange a lot. It's up there in terms of lines from films that pop into my head. Not in terms of substance abuse, something I've never dealt with personally, but in terms of patterns or routines in my life that I can't seem to shake.
The obvious allegory to take from
Brain Damage is one of drug addiction. And in the film Brian is literally addicted to the strange blue fluid that Aylmer (the droll, phallic monster that attaches himself to Brian) injects into his brain. It gets him high, and if he goes without it he suffers painful withdraw symptoms.
But watching the film again Thursday evening, I was struck by the way that the dynamic between Brian and Aylmer feels a lot like an abusive sexual/romantic relationship and how the relationship between Brian's girlfriend and Brian's brother serves as a foil. My thoughts on this are still kind of disorganized, but here we go.
Aylmer finds his way to Brian because his current caretakers (an elderly couple who live in Brian's building) aren't allowing Aylmer enough control. They feed him animal brains, which dulls his abilities. Aylmer seems to have a much easier time controlling Brian. When they are together, and specifically when Brian is under Aylmer's spell, he isn't even aware of what is happening. And he's okay with this ignorance, until one night he finds the bloody evidence of one of Aylmer's murders. It's a very common trope in horror for a main character to transform and have no memory of his/her actions (think . . . every werewolf movie ever), but what's interesting here is that Brian's situation is not one in which his "animal" nature is being unleashed or some subconscious part of him is coming out to do harm. Aylmer is a distinct character from Brian, despite Aylmer's insistence that "I am you". Aylmer, in fact, really seems to insist on that understanding: that he and Brian are a team and not separate. "Us." "We." He works very hard to erase Brian's identity as an individual independent of Aylmer.
Then there's the way that many of the shots of Aylmer injecting Brian are shot. Let's set aside the aspect of penetration, because that goes hand-in-hand just as easily with the idea of intravenous drug use/abuse. This time I was struck by at least two different scenes in which Brian gets dosed by Aylmer as he stands with his face pressed against the wall. As Brian moans and leans into the wall, there's no way around a sexual reading. It just straight up looks like someone is having sex with him from behind.
When it comes to actual sex in the film, I had forgotten about a sequence that I really loved the first time I saw the movie. The "stand out" sex sequence in the film--the one that gets all the loving screencaps and leering comments--is the one in which a woman takes a high Brian into a back alley for some action (and I'd forgotten just how non-consensual this scene is--when Brian begins to pass out she just, like, props him up against a wall. Very uncool, punk club lady!). When she unzips Brian's fly, Aylmer lunges out and into her mouth, eating her brain through her soft palate as she struggles against Brian's body. An oblivious Brian moans in pleasure while she flails in agony, until finally Aylmer retreats back into Brian's pants, trailing a grisly mouthful of the woman's brains. It's easy to see why this scene--which is at once funny, sexually explicit in its imagery, gory, and intensely uncomfortable--is the one that sticks with you. But later in the film there's another sex scene, the one that really caught my attention this time around.
See, as Brian sinks further and further under Aylmer's thrall (growing both more addicted and more distraught about what's happening when he's high), Brian's girlfriend, Barbara, and his brother, Mike, grow closer and closer together. It's an incredibly organic and believable development. It begins with Mike (who clearly already likes Barbara) taking her to a concert when Brian is sick. But Barbara and Mike begin to turn to each other out of mutual concern for Brian. (Two quick side notes: (1) Great casting with Mike, who looks like he could be related to Brian and (2) One of the film's only missteps is in having Barbara assume Brian is cheating on her when he is OBVIOUSLY dealing with either mental health or drug issues). Late in the film, believing Brian to be gone, Mike and Barbara have sex with each other in Mike's room. It's a subdued sex scene--quiet and slow and tender and very different from the loud, passionate, frenzied sex you usually see in horror movies. In the next room, Brian's scrambled imagination turns this into a fantasy that begins with Mike, Brian, and Barbara, and then morphs into just Brian and Barbara . . . and then Brian eats Barbara's brains. The sexual/romantic aspect of Brian's mind has become warped into something violent and destructive. The film gives a lot of time, relatively speaking, to what happens between Mike and Barbara. And their gentle, burgeoning relationship stands in direct contrast to the manipulative dynamic between Aylmer and Brian.
I do still think that the overarching film leans more toward a reading involving substance abuse. I'm not suggesting that there's necessarily an alternate reading--just that this time around I felt like I saw more than just the perils of addiction. This viewing (which I think is my third full viewing) I really noticed the nature of the relationships and, for a movie about a talking penis monster, the sensitivity and nuance used in the development of the Mike/Barbara relationship.
Anyway--this movie continues to grow in my regard for it. Despite the many visual gags, the comedic monster design, and so on, it always strikes me as a deeply tragic movie. At its center, it refuses to reduce any of its main characters to a joke or demean them. I find the movie very funny ("The blood came from the girl whose brains I sucked out." "You sucked out her brains?!" "Yeah, right through her mouth." "Is she dead?" "Of course she's dead. What, are you kidding?"), but I also feel very moved by its final act.
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