#AlexOLoughlin – Playing cat and mouse with Pac-Man

Thank you very much for watching FEED. I hope you were thoroughly disgusted and disturbed.

– Brett Leonard, DVD Audio commentary from Director.

My biggest regret about this movies, is that the first time I saw it, it was through the eyes of an Alex fangirl. By the time I saw it, I was far gone under the spell of Mr O’Loughlin and his charms. I was more or less watching the movie to see him and not the story.

On the other hand, if Alex was not in it, I most probably would never have seen the movie, unless I somehow stumbled upon it by accident. But I do not really believe in regrets, so here I am writing my thoughts about the whole movie and not only Alex’s performance 😀

Although I am not Brett Leonard’s biggest fan, I decided to listen to his commentary when I re-watched it this time. I enjoyed it a lot, but it did not really change any of the perceptions I had about the movie, or alter any of my thoughts on what was good or bad about it. It however opened my eyes a bit about all the performances in the movie. Half the success of a movie comes from casting the right people and I think the characters were very well cast.

He [Alex] is a very talented young actor and he is definitely going places. He’s a real movie star and definitely gives a very courageous performance in this. Apart from getting nude several times, as the part called for, he really went there, to a kind of very dark place.

– Brett Leonard, DVD commentary from the Director

‘You are my Jelly Baby’

The only scene where I think the actors and the director or who ever choreographed it, missed an opportunity, was at the first meeting between the main characters. On the lawn in front of Michael’s house, their conversation and acting abilities are lost in the unnecessary physical movement. By showing the cat and mouse game physically, it distracts from the message………

In my opinion, Brett should also be listed as the writer of the story. I know the lines between, writing and directing can sometimes be blurry, but if most of what is in the movie, is your own comment on social society, then I feel it is written by you. In his commentary he also said that Alex, Patrick and himself worked on a 30 page treatment together to create the concepts and structure of the key storylines and dialogue in the movie, before they gave it to the writer to finish.

Brett’s own religious background and thoughts or commentary about organised religions and the fanaticism surrounding it, can be seen throughout the film. And together with it his judgement of the fascination of modern society to worship the bodies of women looking like young boys on the one hand, but the over indulgence of everything we can find to consume on the other hand – he calls it rampant consumerism.

What did he [Brett ] say, “It is his ‘love letter’ to America”

– Alex O’Loughlin, Q’s and A’s at premiere in Philadelphia

The Director sees the movie as a Black Comedy with an ironic stance, with no real good guys playing hero’s or bad guys being villains. This is about psychosexual reality. He says it is not meant to be an easy film to watch, it is meant to be extreme.

My short summary of the story:

The story involves a cyber cop (Det. Phillip Jackson) hunting sexual predators on the internet. He stumbles upon a site that sparks his interest because of all the protective layers the site owner have around it. On the surface the site appears to be for people with an interest in ‘Feeders and Gainers‘, but some things on there seem suspicious and he decides to investigate further.

Phillip is under a lot of stress from the disturbing encounters at work and at home his personal life is also not the best. His live in girlfriend has a narcissistic free-spirited attitude. For her there is no problem in having multiple sex partners from both sexes, while feeling that by just sticking around, it shows her commitment to him. Their relationship is filled with violence and with that coming to an abrupt end and some leads on the whereabouts of the site owner in the USA, Phillip decides to use his holiday (which his boss forced on him) to investigate the case further without having any jurisdiction.

Michael Carter is the site owner of Feederx.com.  He lives what looks like a pretty normal life, driving his Mercedes, living in the suburbs with his lovely wife. His religious wife who choose to believe her husband is somebody who looks after the needs of large women and running an internet site for them as models. In her perfect comfortable life there is no place for her to see behind the pretty picture her husband is painting around their life, to the dark truth underneath.

Feed me!

The truth is that Michael is a disturbed man, who got his life bent in the wrong way by his early history with his mom. His mom was a large bedridden woman who needed her small boy to feed her. She was manipulating him into being her enabler, playing on his emotions.  At around the age of 9 he cracked and smothered her to death with a pillow. He carved away her fat to make her “pretty” again. His teenage years are blurry, but he was adopted by a priest when he was 15 years old, who also had a younger daughter. Michael saw his stepsister’s “potential” as a gainer, but when the priest discovers the distorted nature of their relationship, he forced Michael out of their lives – or so he thought.

On the surface Michael’s site looks like just another one of the 4000 sites for people with an interest in Feeders and Gainers. The truth is that he produces information about all the Gainers vital signs and statistics and with it provides gamblers with a chance to bet on the odds of at what time they predict the Gainer will die. A number of the women from his site have gone missing and it seems that he is in fact a serial killer, killing his Gainer Pets  for financial gain by force feeding them with liquid fat.

The fact is, they are willing participants because they do it all for the “love” he gives them. Is he really committing a crime?

In a cat and mouse game, but without the blessing of his bosses, Phillip tracks down Michael. He kidnaps Michael’s wife and with her bound and gagged in the back of his car, he finds the house where Michael keeps the girls, to rescue Deirdre (Michael’s latest “victim”). Much to his surprise he is not received as a big hero by her. Even when he exposes all Michael’s deceit (the fact that he killed is own mother and that he is a married man with a thin wife at home), she still prefers to be with her “love“.

After being beaten and tortured by Michael, Phillip overpowers him and even while holding the gun, he is still powerless in the eyes of Michael and Deirdre. Michael taunts him and Deirdre curses him until he snaps. With one shot he silences her nagging and he takes Michael’s power and ridicule away.

Phillips’ “revenge” – he takes over Michael’s ‘perfect‘ life, while starving him to death……..

Michael’s pathology:

For me the most dangerous fanatics in the world, are those who take the truth and things that looks pure and righteous as their philosophy and use it as a mask for what evil they might have festering underneath and need to hide.

If we look at the tattoo specially made for Michael, what do we see – we see a compass and a cross. For most part those images are seen in society as good symbols – the compass as a guide for morality and good direction and the cross as a sign of redemption from sin and protection against evil. But have you ever looked deeper, past the obvious? There you find the cross is made of two Femur bones  and bones are mostly being seen as signs of death and sometimes even evil.

With what Michael say, we see how he uses the truths about and judgements of the evils of society, as the pretty pictures in the front of him hiding his “sins” and destructive behaviour underneath.

Michael: Put the cuffs on me. I gave my women too many calories and made them fat. Come to think of it, they were always fat, but I happen to love that about them.

I like to think of myself as a facilitator, an enabler. I enable my women to be free of the social pressure to conform to a body norm which is based on abstract base metabolic rates and body mass indexes. I let them be whatever they want and I love them just the way they are.

Michael: I don’t think you fully comprehend what I am doing here. I have a deep appreciation of beauty. True beauty isn’t about anorexic women who would crack their pelvises if they ever try to give birth to a baby. Fashion, culture and Madison Ave have usurped true beauty. Models are skinny and androgynous women with small breasts. They are more like boys. They have no curves, no hips, small bony butts and no body hair.

Fashion has reduced their physical femininity to something defined by clothes and hair, rather than the body itself. The women I nurture are free of the artificial pursuit of vanity. They no longer have to go under the surgeon’s knife and have their breast reduced or their bellies tugged. I liberate them. I endorse their desire for gratification and I allow them to be beautiful. The truth is that men like their women big and soft, not constipated, waifish and with halitosis  from malnourishment.

Nourishing a woman, honouring her, caring for her, accepting her the way she is, that is what it means to love a woman. Don’t you see Phil; it is about respecting my queen and putting her needs before anything else. The price is offset by the perfection. They eat to please.

Michael: Consumption is evolution. Something is always eating something else. And the best eaters, the ones at the top of the food chain, are the most highly evolved. There are over 600 billion people on this earth, Phil.

We are literally eating her alive. We consume, because we are programmed to consume. Why do you think people are getting fatter Phil? [laughs] Because those who consume, survive. And those who don’t, get eaten. These days we even consume our dead.

For me the real genius of this movie is the ability of Alex’s acting skills to dash between a ‘normal‘ person having very intelligent and rational thoughts and arguments and that of a disturbed person rationalizing with those ideas his pathology. The three of them (Michael, Phillip and Deirdre) in the big show-down scene is brilliant. Michael’s face when he loses his power and his “love”, is pure perfection.

Just a bit of trivial trivia – After Deirdre’s death, we hear two more shots when the screen goes dark. Those two shots were Phillip shooting a hole through each of Michael’s feet. Some sort of symbolism of the wounds from the nails through Christ’s feet.

(BTW, this is not Alex’s feet, but they belong to the stand in, thin man, they used for these shots)

For me, in the end, these questions remain:

• Is it really possible for a guy who became an officer of the law and has made it his job to track down people who exploit and harm other people (in this case via the internet), to be pushed so far that he becomes a murderer and someone taking pleasure in another’s torture?
• Is there a point where someone who hunts justice, will decide to become judge, jury and executioner?
• At what stage is it society’s duty to protect us from ourselves?
• How far should we as individuals go, to try to “save” someone else, when they are willingly participating in something that we can see in the end will destroy them?
• When does one become an enabler of another? Is there a point of no return, where you just help them with what they are doing and not try to change their behavior any more?
• How far will people go for love, attention and acceptance?

FEED ME!

It is really difficult to let go of you own vision, but there is no “I” in team. There is a little bit of all of us in this picture. I hope you enjoy it.

– Alex O’Loughlin, Feed interview

Maybe there were just too many ideas that needed to be told on a limited budget. The unusual practices of the relationship between ‘Feeders and Gainers‘, told within a thriller is definitely a unique concept. The original idea and concept was mostly to shine light on the subculture and the love and affection between the parties and also the reaction we as an audiences might have to the sight of something that  shock our ideas of what is ‘normal’ – in this case a fit young beautiful man and a grossly obese woman getting off on each other.

The intention of the movie makers was never to either promote or on the other hand pass judgement on anything, but to give people something to think and talk about …….. and maybe they succeeded, because here we are talking and thinking about it. 🙂

There are a very few likeable characters in this film.This is about a bunch of people being fucked up in different ways.

– Brett Leonard, DVD audio commentary from the Director