2 March 2020

Why You Should All Take A Look At The Invisible Man

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Set in the 1880's, Fanny By Gaslight might be a classic film about a manipulative partner but it's also terrible advice on where to put your genitals when you're feeling a little chilly. Especially in the 1880s. If porn has taught me anything about history... and I suspect it has... it's that the further back in time you go the more pubic hair a person seems to have. Sticking your fanny by the gaslight back in the 1800s might have caused the hair to go up in flames as though it was made of dry fucking kindling. People think that women shave their pubes now because of the media's creepy fetishisation of extreme youth but the reality is that it's just basic health and safety really. In an alternate reality, the word 'gaslighting' might refer to when a woman's inflamed pubic region accidentally sets the whole neighbourhood on fire after a badly timed fanny fart. But in our world, it's the term we use to describe the act of causing somebody to doubt their own sanity. Presuming they're not insane to begin with, of course. It's not gaslighting to tell The Plainfield Ghoul, Ed Gein, that he's a fucking lunatic for making lampshades out of human fucking face skin. Although you do have to admire his skills as an arts and crafter there. But gaslighting is when a guy does mad shit like secretly hiding his girlfriend's dildo in the freezer to make her think she's going nuts. I imagine it's probably even more confusing for her if she didn't own a dildo in the first place. I wonder how many guys have had to start gaslighting their girlfriend through embarrassment after she just happened to find his dildo? Food for thought I guess.
This new adaptation of The Invisible Man takes this very idea and really runs with it. The idea of gaslighting, I mean, not the guy owning a secret dildo thing I just mentioned. He might have a secret dildo in this movie too but it's not really dealt with here. But it tells the story of a woman, Cecilia, who suddenly discovers that her super-rich but abusive ex-boyfriend can turn himself invisible. This is a very relatable concept for me as I often find the girls that I like are suddenly able to make themselves disappear into thin fucking air. Because they ghost me I mean. Not because I kill them. In the case of Cecilia, her tormentor can hide by wearing a suit made of reflective cameras that he's invented and why not? It's pretty much the same concept that Bond had with his invisible car in Die Another Day but slightly more believable now that we live in the future. Our species invented the flesh-light didn't it? If an idiot can come up with the idea of a tinned-vagina then just imagine what our brightest and best could invent to help with their perving. And don't say that you wouldn't become an instant pervert if you could become invisible either by the way. Perving, thieving, and tormenting people you hate are the only reasons that anybody would ever want to become invisible. Just look at the internet. The anonymity of that is the closest we can currently get to invisibility and all that people do there is watch porn, download shit they haven't paid for, and then troll people they disagree with. It's the latter of which that Cecilia's ex-boyfriend decides to do to her here having gotten pissed off about the fact that she's tried to leave him. I guess people use the internet to send unwanted dick pictures too but I suppose the only way to apply that to an invisible man movie as a metaphor would be if his suit was crotchless and his dick was just flying about on its own as he casually struts about the room. I guess we'd call that a dicky-bird?

Of course, it's the tormenting aspect that this film focuses on with this latest adaptation of H.G Welles' The Invisible Man sadly featuring as few random dicky-birds as all of the previous versions. This invisible ex-boyfriend of Cecilia has also faked his own death by the way. Did I mention that? Since turning thirty accessing my own memory has become like performing a fucking séance for me. If I try to remember who I saw yesterday I end up staring off into the distance and muttering that, “I'm getting the letter S. Was I with a Steve yesterday? A Simon? A Stuart maybe? Ah, that's right. I remember. I was alone as usual”. Gaslighting me would honestly be a piece of piss these days except that I probably wouldn't notice anything is fucking happening. Everybody thinks Cecilia's boyfriend is dead and so when he does start fucking with her and she starts screaming about how he's still plaguing her she really does seem like a crazy person. In honesty, the whole idea of making this a feminist thriller for our new #MeToo era is a slice of fucking genius and its execution is nigh on perfect. As a thriller, this film has moments that were so tense that the suction from my arse-hole had me stuck to the cinema chair like a fucking limpet on a rock. At first, the suspense begins to build as the boyfriend starts to subtly screw with Cecilia by doing small things such as turning the gas up when she's left food to cook on the hob. It's just enough to make you start doubting yourself but not quite enough that you instantly jump to screaming about an invisible boyfriend isn't it? Who hasn't put food on only to come back a few minutes later to find the place on fucking fire? Especially if you were cooking your food by a massive pile of flammable pubes. 

By the time of the third act, things have really escalated to the point that this invisible ex-boyfriend is smacking Cecilia about like he's the ghost of a Stella Artois. Of course, there are a few silly moments in which you'd expect his actions to have been caught on a security camera or you question why Cecilia didn't pick up the gun that was right next to her sooner. But for the most part, the film feels pretty plot-hole free. In fact, the presence of an invisible man might also solve the plot-holes in almost every other film too when you think about it. Maybe all films have an invisible man in them but this is the only one to deal with him directly. If Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear believes he's an actual space-ranger then why does he freeze whenever a human walks into the room? Maybe the invisible man is holding him still. If Superman is indestructible then how can he still shave? Maybe the invisible man is constantly jabbing him in the fucking spine with a tiny piece of kryptonite to weaken him. When Marty McFly returns back to the present day why doesn't his Mum recognise him as that boy that she tried to bang when she was in high-school? I dunno. Maybe she does and she's just slept with so many men that she can't keep track of who might have impregnated her. I guess we can't really blame the behaviour of every erratic woman on the invisible man no matter how horrible he is to Cecilia. Although it is worth mentioning that even her efforts to trap him seem pretty logical here when you consider that she can never be sure if he's already watching. It's just a shame for her that she's not a guy really. If I discovered I'd been watched by an invisible man then knowing how I spend my time alone all I'd need is a U.V torch and that fucker would light up like a jizzy fucking Christmas tree. 

It's worth mentioning too that originally this film was to be part of Universal's ill-fated Dark Universe which would have featured Johnny Depp in the title role. Not that anybody would believe Johnny Depp in a story about domestic abuse and gaslighting of course. But after Tom Cruise's The Mummy dropped like a heavy turd into a shallow puddle of piss, the whole plan was thrown into chaos. The Dark Universe went so dark that it no longer existed and Depp's Invisible Man disappeared without a trace. None of which I'm particularly sad about when the result was to lower the initial budget and make an actual horror movie with genuine scares and some hefty subtext. This new version of the film also includes the producing power of Jason Blum and his production company Blumhouse who you might remember as being behind the actual modern classic and equally layered Get Out. I don't know about you but between Get Out and The Invisible Man, I'm starting to think that white men might not always be the nicest of people. See also almost every horrendous thing to have happened in history for further proof I guess. This film has also been brilliantly written and directed by Saw co-writer and star Leigh Whannel with it being the follow up to his equally impressive directorial debut Upgrade. In case you missed Upgrade then it was a bit like Venom but without being total fucking shit. Both Upgrade and The Invisible Man tell a story of technology and control and I genuinely can't wait to see what he does next. If anything I'll just chain his foot to a metal pipe and give him a laptop to start writing his next script and a rusty saw for when he's fucking finished it. Also for the record, I'd like to inform everybody that like in this movie, I too have a genius, super-rich, girlfriend that's obsessed with me but I also won't be able to prove it to you any time soon because she too is sadly invisible. Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time. 


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