Made over thirty years ago, Man Bites Dog (C’est Arrivé Près De Chez Vous, or It Happened in Your Neighborhood) (1992, Belgium) seemed like a grisly goofball provocation, with the insolence and audacity of a young John Waters or George Romero. It was not for the faint of heart, nor is it now. But it was alarmingly prescient, presenting a charismatic smart-assed psychopath gleefully committing robberies, murders and various other Class A and B felonies while being filmed for a documentary devised by Ben, the unrepentant serial killer (Benoît Poelvoorde), a producer/reporter and participant (Rémy Belvaux), and their cameraman (André Bonzel). Sadly, they lose a few sound-people along the way, but they are undeterred.
Ben acts as the master of ceremonies, giving us ongoing commentary on his methods and personal preferences. He introduces the audience to his family – Mom runs a successful bakery and seems to be supporting Ben’s chatty grandparents as well. They all fawn over memories of young happy Benoit, seemingly unaware of his cold-blooded occupational pursuits nowadays. He strangles a random woman on a commuter train to demonstrate how he wraps his dead victims up before throwing them into a nearby river, meticulously explaining how he calculates their weight and figures how much other material he’ll need to add to keep them submerged after the body starts bloating. Next up, he beats a postman to death; he tries to do this early each month in order to make off with pension checks.
The atrocities keep escalating, with breaks in-between to introduce his old friend Valerie (Valérie Parent) from school, the professional flautist he used to accompany on piano, or treating the film crew to cocktails at his usual bar with his favorite bartender Malou. Like Valerie and Malou, the two filmmakers strike a balance with staying on Ben’s good side while not doing anything to upset him. Ben insists Rémy and André accompany him to a fancy restaurant for mussels (moules marinières) and drinks, and proceeds to make himself sick, making an overindulgent scene, a common dilemma for Malou as well.
As train-wreck / car crash fascinating as Ben can be (he recites improvised poetry about pigeons while chasing and firing at a rival killer through a factory), the complicity of the two documenting crew members starts to escalate as well. Watching Ben work both sides of the narrative, with his charm and consistency slowly softening the effects of his violent psychosis, Rémy and André continue to normalize Ben on film until all three participate in an especially horrific rape and murder. Now add the revelation that an Italian assassin with a grudge is pursuing Ben, and all three of their futures look bleak and inevitable.
We all have a penchant for true stories and colorful villains, whether Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer or Jeffrey Epstein or Henry Kissinger or Roger Stone. These three young filmmakers had some very forward-thinking ideas about how media can soften, distort and normalize villains and atrocities that we nonetheless see and hear about every single day, until they just become part of the wallpaper in our lives. The film lures us, early on, into thinking this is all pretty interesting, yet challenging. But the filmmakers are very smart about not glamorizing the violence, towards others or for its own sake, while warning us about its effects in a patronizing or hypocritical way. A great deal of it is pretty hard-to-watch, and alpha-preener Ben most definitely wears out his welcome, as he should. I referred to George Romero earlier – the director’s admired, by me and others, for his unerring moral sense of showing us very bad things without luring us into that amygdala-driven identification with them.
Man Bites Dog, an honest trip-through-the-mill, isn’t interested in convincing you of anything other than how despicable man’s inhumanity to man genuinely is, and how its seeming eternal presence wears down our better selves. Its black humor is only there to help the medicine go down.
“Man Bites Dog” will be screened on Sunday, March 3rd at 1:30 pm.
Periscope In The Bathtub 