Landscape Suicide (1986, James Benning)

63/100

Looking up where I could watch Landscape Suicide (Tubi, surprisingly, but see Anal-Retentive Title Corner below), I inadvertently glimpsed the first few lines of a description, which read: "Benning continues his examination of Americana in this film through the stories of two murderers. Ed Gein was a Wisco..." It cut off there, but Gein's name alone was enough to bring me up short, based on my previous Benning experience (One Way Boogie Woogie, 13 Lakes and Ten Skies). "He made a true-crime doc? About the most notorious 20th-century case in which the killer's identity is known? Benning tackled the inspiration for Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill and Leatherface? Sure, it was nearly 40 years ago, but still."

Then the film opened with a young woman on a tennis court practicing her serve, hitting one ball after another, 38 freakin' serves in a row (with jump cuts removing her retrieval of new balls from a basket beside her, so that it's constant swing/grunt swing/grunt swing/grunt swing/grunt swing/grunt), and I relaxed. It was a James Benning film after all.

As I suspected, this prologue has no direct connection to the twin murder accounts that follow. Like many avant-garde films, Landscape Suicide invites (nay, requires) you to make connections, to intuit why seemingly disparate things have been juxtaposed. Same's very much true of the murders themselves, which at a glance have virtually nothing in common. Gein, of course, was a grave robber (and likely a cannibal) who spent the last 26 years of his life in a mental asylum, having been found legally insane at trial. Whereas the film's other subject, Bernadette Protti, stabbed a classmate to death in what was either an impulsive act of anger and panic (as she claimed) or a premeditated revenge killing (per the victim's parents, who didn't buy that Protti's sister kept a huge kitchen knife in the car for slicing tomatoes). What correspondence did Benning see? If I had a better answer to that question, my rating would be significantly higher; while I liked each element of this film in a vacuum, its gestalt eludes me.

First clue's clearly the title, which directs our eye toward environment...and even if it didn't, the film itself does, via mirrored lengthy driving sequences through Orinda, CA and Plainfield, WI, each aurally accompanied by a male voice preaching about sin and damnation. No complaints regarding the sequences themselves, which are evocative verging on hypnotic. I likewise very much appreciated the (again, mirrored) montages of fixed-camera images from both locations—Benning's eye for that sort of thing is unmatched (he even managed to get me enthralled by lengthy shots of lakes), and there's unquestionably a cumulative plaintive quality to the selection. But if we're meant to perceive these landscapes as somehow congruous in their receptivity to inexplicable violence (which seems to be what's intended)...no, I just didn't see it. Maybe that's in part because Orinda's suburbs, as depicted here, look utterly unremarkable to me, a lot like where I myself grew up. (San Jose and Orinda are maybe an hour's drive apart; one of my siblings now lives in Walnut Creek, which is right next door to Orinda.) Nothing about them struck me as similar to what we're shown of Plainfield, and the nature of the crimes—one so bizarre it's permanently seared into the public imagination, the other almost banal—reflects, to my mind, the dramatically different environments in which they occurred. Maybe that's what Benning meant to convey, but if so, it's a tad underwhelming, implicit-thesis-wise. Like observing that a white-collar crime happened in a ritzy neighborhood and a blue-collar crime in a slum.

Then there are the (mirrored) re-created interviews. Now, I know what Ed Gein looked like, and would immediately have recognized that he's being played here by an actor—all the more so because Elion Sucher appears to be reading his lines from cue cards, delivering them in a rushed monotone that never once varies. Gein comes second, however, and I'd never previously even heard of Bernadette Protti, hence had no reason to assume that wasn't actually her. Rhonda Bell has only two other IMDb acting credits (one of them in an earlier Benning film, Him and Me), but her performance here is extraordinary, so utterly devoid of self-consciousness that I never once doubted its veracity (though whoever's asking the questions sounded unnatural to me; speaking of which, I went nuts trying to figure out how I knew the other offscreen interviewer's voice—turns out it was Ron Vawter, three years before he played Andie MacDowell's shrink in sex, lies). Benning has edited court transcripts (I assume) in a way that captures the killers' essence: Protti takes responsibility but strives to provide emotional context for what she did, while Gein essentially stonewalls, claiming not to recall anything of importance and suggesting that he shot Bernice Worden accidentally. Again, though, these interviews function for me only as expectedly stark contrast, not as counter-intuitive comparison. And only the latter would really be interesting vis-à-vis the film entire. Benning twins absolutely everything here—I haven't mentioned shots of a letter Bernadette wrote to her parents and of another Gein interview transcript, both of which are aurally accompanied by commercials (consumerism!), or the two musical interludes (one set to Cats' "Memory," the other to "Tennessee Waltz")—but after nearly 48 hours' reflection, plus some reading of other reviews, I still don't have a clear sense of what Benning thought these cases jointly say about America or about geography as destiny or indeed about anything else. To be honest, I don't get why he opens with 38 tennis serves, either.

And yet I liked that opening anyway, if only for its cussedness and for the eventual reverse shot of all those tennis balls strewn across the other side of the net. Do I need to understand how it relates to everything else? Yes and no, both. Landscape Suicide ultimately frustrated me, as avant-garde works tend to, but there's no part of it that I wouldn't happily watch again, even if said parts don't remotely form a satisfying whole for me.

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Weirdest source of (brief) uncertainty ever. I watched Landscape Suicide on Tubi, and here's the title card.

Huh? Spent the entire film awaiting, in vain, some sort of narrative inversion that would make sense of the inverted title. My initial thought that maybe it was a Fables of the Reconstruction of the Fables of the Reconstruction of the... sorta deal didn't pan out, either. So I asked Michael Sicinski, knowing this film to be a longtime favorite of his, why the onscreen title's distinct from the title used everywhere else. To which his horrified response was, Uh, those words aren't supposed to be there. For some reason, Red Rocket Media (whatever that entity may be) removed Benning's title card, which precedes any image and looks kinda Woody Allen-ish...

...and substituted their own incorrect version, placing it over one of the opening tennis-serve shots. To which one can only ask: Why? Truly bizarre.

(As far as I can tell from a fairly thorough spot-check, no other part of the film was altered. Virtually identical running time. End credits are Benning's own. Music's all the same. Etc.)