Overtly metaphoric, intensely violent and sexual, saturated with jarring reds and deep blues, and at times so foul it seems as though it is something which was pulled out of the rotting carcass of a long dead animal, Karim Hussain’s Subconscious Cruelty typifies an underground cinema of emotional and experiential extremes, and the mindset it attempts to generate.

The film begins with shots of urban streets, and a voice-over telling us of the need for films that create an outlet for negative energy, films which help to keep our ‘demons’ at bay. Hussain tries hard to be philosophical, poetic even. The philosophic, the poetic, and the violent are typically mixed in such films as they allow directors to deal with the Big Issues that weigh so heavily upon their minds. Woody Allen might worry endlessly over the fact that one day he will be ‘no more’, and wonders how someone can find meaning in a universe and in a life that has such an endpoint -- but in this kind of underground cinema such an endpoint is accepted, welcomed even, and these films hover somewhat lovingly about death and suffering. If underground cinema owes a debt to Krafft-Ebing, it may also and equally owe one to Heidegger -- what manically graphic movies are made in the name of truth and authenticity...

Straight after the film’s introductory shots, it cuts to the dingy rooms in which its first act unravels, and before long it bares its livid disfigurements. Subconscious Cruelty began to take shape in Hussain’s mind when he was in his late teens, and it is still very much an "angry young man’s" film. It shows Hussain’s youthful interest in the ‘ugly’ and marginal areas of human life and the human psyche. In the first segment we enter the mind of a man who is suffering a breakdown of sorts, (details are not given), who is very clearly lost in a dark cloud of depression, and who seems to be host to a long list of other manias. He feels distant and detached from the world, a condition which sets the tone for much of the film. His detachment leads him to contemplate the world around him and this involves Hussain in the staging of many scenes in which this character stares bleakly at some object or other, and in a bland voice-over relates to us his inmost feelings and thoughts, (such as they are). At one point, for example, having masturbated in the corner he contemplates his semen with a predictable profundity that is almost a universal constant of such films, saying, "I would stare in awe", (they always stare "in awe" -- "awe" being a signifier of numinous experiences ever since the German philosopher of religion Rudolf Otto analyzed the idea of the holy in 1917), "at this slowly coagulating secretion within my palm -- I could be the ultimate creator -- I held the key within my body to the true seed that is the genesis of all creation -- how ironic that without the power that I held no woman would ever be able to give birth". And on and on. In short: without me and my mysterious male body powers, the cosmos would be a cold dark empty miserable place where even the footsteps of death would not be heard. He hasn’t considered that other equally mysterious object, the womb of a woman, without which this "ultimate creator" would be left to play with himself in the corner. One of the ways in which this nameless philosopher, (Hussain never gives him a name or identity -- we could call him, with a nod to Dalí, "the Great Masturbator", or GM for short), tries to understand his predicament is through pain. Put more precisely, he tries to understand his place in the world through inflicting pain on others and studying the results, as if he were a sadistic scientist conducting experiments, and attempting to quantify how much pain a human being can withstand.

This Great Masturbator, this Ultimate Creator, our cruel little scientist, lives with his very pregnant sister, who becomes the only object (apart from himself) towards which he can direct his experiments in pain. The sadistic acts he engages in are, in a way, similar to many of the situations Donatien Alphonse François de Sade describes in The 120 Days of Sodom, written while incarcerated in the Bastille for a host of ‘anti-social’ perversities of a decidedly sexual bent. Even though Hussain’s film and Sade’s novel bear no resemblance to each other in their details, nevertheless, the structure of their character relationships are similar. Describing the relationship between a character and his wife in The 120 Days, Simone de Beauvoir (a Sade apologist) writes, "[he] takes pleasure in caressing his wife at the very moment that he is hatching the blackest plots against her. To inflict enjoyment -- Sade understood this 150 years before psychoanalysts, and his works abound in victims submitted to pleasure before being tortured -- can be a tyrannical violence; and the torturer disguised as lover delights to see the credulous lover, swooning with voluptuousness and gratitude, mistake cruelty for tenderness."(1) In a similar way, Hussain’s protagonist cares for his pregnant sister, lulls her into believing that he is solely concerned with her and her soon-to-be-born child’s welfare, while he is formulating the "blackest plots against her". Hussain is not particularly subtle in alerting the audience to the fact that GM’s outer tenderness is a sham. He makes it painfully clear that GM, to satisfy his peculiar philosophical and scientific interests, is intending to do something genuinely horrible to his sister’s baby once it is born. We know that it will have to happen during the imminent birth scene, we know this because this is the moment when his sister will be most vulnerable, when she won’t be able to get by without her brother’s help, when he’ll be able to wield his power most strongly and most sadistically.

Hussain seems to enjoy provocative scenes that scandalize middle-class values by their very attempt to create a system of oppositional values which tends to make this kind of underground cinema a simple (and somewhat predictable) inversion of mainstream cinema. The relationship between Subconscious Cruelty and mainstream cinema itself has a noticeably sado-masochistic structure. The very fact that the film realizes its identify in opposition to the mainstream -- if the mainstream says "no" it says "yes" and vice versa -- means that even while Subconscious Cruelty is inflicting pain on mainstream values, presumably for its own and its audiences pleasure, it is still always chained and bound to the mainstream which it so despises. It would make Sade proud and have Krafft-Ebbing reaching for his pen.

Endnotes:
(1) Simone de Beauvoir, Must We Burn Sade?, intro to Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom trans.Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (UK: Arrow Books, 1990)

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