Shots in the dark: when the stuff dreams are made of turns into nightmares

In 1793, the poet William Blake caustically summed up what men and women "require" in each other as "the lineaments of Gratified Desire"--the appearance of sexual satisfaction. Two new films remind us that gratifying desire often introduces another agenda.

Both movies--one male, the other female in perspective--involve murders of women and draw on film-noir conventions. In Keith Gordon's The Singing Detective, a hospitalized pulp novelist, Dan Dark (Robert Downey Jr.), whose self-loathing is manifested in the psoriatic crust covering his skin, associates sex with betrayal. He writes of it with disgust in his lurid spy thrillers and imagines his loyal wife, Nicola (Robin Wright Penn), is cuckolding him. In Jane Campion's In the Cut, a dowdy Manhattan writing teacher, Frannie (Meg Ryan), is liberated by sex with homicide detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), partially because she suspects him of mutilating women. Sadomasochism, Dan and Frannie find, is bad for their health.

The Singing Detective was adapted by the late Dennis Potter from his 1986 six-part BBC masterpiece starring Michael Gambon. Though the film honors Potter's script, it is arch and never replicates the sinisterness, wit, or emotional resonance of the television series. The musical sequences--in which characters lip-sync to '50s doo-wop and rock 'n' roll as Dan hallucinates--seem appended rather than integrated into the flow of his consciousness.

Adapted by Campion and Susanna Moore from Moore's novel, In the Cut--dreamy, jittery, and dirge-like--is a gynecentric fairy tale about its heroine's conflicted yearning for happy-ever-after romance and annihilation. The more Frannie empowers herself sexually, the more she puts herself at risk; her half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), self-deludingly obsessed with a married doctor, is Frannie's crazy mirror image. Stranding them in threateningly claustrophobic spaces, Campion photographed Ryan, oozing carnality in her finest performance, and Leigh, blowsily sentimental, in unflattering close-ups.

Despite its flaws, The Singing Detective, like In the Cut, gets to the core of its protagonist's neurosis--rooted in parental abandonment in both cases. The most effective of the three interwoven strands in Gordon's film is Dan Dark's childhood. As the timid son of a taciturn man who runs a desert gas station, he watches his unhappy morn fornicate with his dad's partner (Jeremy Northam). Dan goes away with her, nurtures the disease that disfigures and cripples him in adulthood, and is left alone when Morn drowns herself.

As a novelist warped by Oedipal rage, Dan unwittingly incorporates elements of his life in his misogynistic fiction (as did Potter, intentionally, in his plays, films, and novels). In the novel he narrates to himself from a hospital bed, he "recasts" his mother's lover as a pimp and Cold War spy in '50s Chicago and Nicola as a disposable whore. He also imagines Nicola trying to steal his long-buried movie script with the sleazy lover (Northam again) he invents for her.

Only his alter ego, the hard-boiled singing detective, opposes these phantoms--until a kindly psychotherapist (Mel Gibson, balding and bespectacled) helps him assuage his guilt and conquer his illness in a revelatory moment. This is done jokily; I can't imagine the scene would have reduced Potter to tears as did a screening of the miniseries' version of it at the New York Museum of Television and Radio in 1992.

The crucial revelation in In the Cut comes when Frannie--after finding the beheaded corpse of a female intimate--tells Malloy how her father abandoned her in a Geneva hotel for five days when she was 13. That this memory is triggered by a killing and the presence of her lover is more disturbing than the film's graphic scenes: It unleashes the frightened child in Frannie, who will soon enter the killer's phallically shaped lair.

As Dan fantasizes his mother's death, Frannie dreams that her mother was butchered by her father at the ice rink where he wooed her. Shot like a monochrome outtake of a Guy Maddin film, the scene shows him cutting her to pieces as he skates over her. Frannie's mother really died of a broken heart when her husband deserted her, so the dismemberment dream, also associated with abandonment, is Frannie's self-projection.

What do men and women require in each other? The lineaments of gratified desire, and the perverse reassurance that love devour--though, as Dan and Frannie learn, it doesn't have to.

Graham Fuller is Interview's film writer at large.

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