By Matt Harries
An abstruse and oft-overlooked final statement from the auteur Donald Cammell, White Of The Eye tells the tale of Paul and Joan White, a couple who live in Globe, a wealthy desert community near Tucson, Arizona. Paul (David Keith) makes a living as an expert installer of high-end stereo equipment. Joan (Cathy Moriarty) looks after their young daughter, Danielle. After a series of grisly murders, detective Charles Mendoza (Art Evans) comes to suspect Paul. The film goes on to recount the tale of how Joan came to Globe and met Paul, and how she comes to discover the hidden truth about her husband of ten years.
White Of The Eye was the first film which could be truly said to have been directed by Cammell since the legendary 1970 art-house gangster flick Performance, the work which became his career’s defining work. Since Performance, Cammell had directed the strange sci-fi horror Demon Seed in 1977. However, in keeping with the fragmentary nature of his career, the story here is not so straightforward. Demon Seed was apparently intended originally to be much lighter in tone, but the ‘studio’ (a bane of Cammell’s throughout much of his career) turned it into a occasionally unsettling and frequently oddball science fiction tale about a sentient computer which attempts to breed with its deceased creator’s wife. Subsequently, 1995’s Christopher Walken vehicle Wild Side was also subject to the same battle for dominance between studio and director, a battle which the studio eventually won. Cammell was removed from directorial duties after the studio ordered a complete re-cut, performed by themselves and credited finally to one ‘Franklin Brauner’ (who did not exist). Thus, White Of The Eye is really Cammell’s only genuine piece of major direction other than Performance, and as such is a fascinating document of a man who’s talent was perhaps never fully realised.
White Of The Eye sees Cammell explore his lifelong obsessions of death, sex and identity. Set against the arid backdrop of the desert, the community of Globe contains plenty of wealth, derived from the mining and quarrying industries which dramatically shape the landscape. This wealth collects in the form of expensive, ultra modern desert homes, dotted around the otherwise barren, scarred landscape like dew in desert flowers. In one of these homes the film begins, with a wealthy woman freshly returned from an up-market department store, speaking on the phone in her conspicuously modern kitchen. The gloved hand of an intruder begins to arrange kitchen objects to some design. After putting the phone down, the woman sees her goldfish flapping and splashing in a bowl of marinating meat, and there then ensues a typically Cammell-esque scene of murder as art.
To Cammell, a talented and classically trained painter, the perfectly ordered reality of the luxurious kitchen is a blank canvas with which to paint the killing act with the kinetic abandon of a Bacon painting; the stark juxtaposition of the fish dying in a pool of meat juices; blood red wines and sauces arcing across pristine tablecloth and stone tiles. Glasses explode with balletic grace. Tulips fall to the floor in slow motion as if strewn by an appreciative audience – this is unmistakably not just a killing but an act. Cammell seems to be saying that this is not just a killer at work, but also a performer of sorts.
We soon become better acquainted with Paul White himself, first glimpsing him as he drives through the artificial ‘mountains’ of the quarrying industry, singing along to Pavarotti, almost as an affront to man’s crude approximation of nature’s landscape. Later, in another of the film’s more striking moments, we see Paul, eyes closed and poised like a conductor, producing a strange hum that resonates through his skull and throughout the room, thus enabling him to ascertain the optimal position for the speaker systems he installs. As he flashes his hands to the corners of the room where each component will go, he is pure Elvis, pure showman. Later, Mendoza discusses Paul with another detective, and much is made of Paul’s intelligence, his non-conformity. It becomes evident that Paul has somewhat of a chequered history as a troubled youth. When Mendoza’s colleague asks “what’s the matter Charles, you don’t believe in genes?”, and Mendoza himself hints at a ritual element to the killings, we begin to see that there may be external forces (the occult, genetic predestination) which may be involved with the killings, beyond the ken of man. Still, it is difficult to connect Paul to the murders, when we see him as a warm, approachable family man. A husband and devoted father. A man who has friends in the community, who runs his own business. Someone who has overcome a difficult youth. Yet are these trappings of normality merely another facet of the performance?
In many respects, White Of The Eye is an exploration of layers of reality and the forces that ultimately underpin them all. Mankind extracts wealth from the harsh terrain of the desert. He denies his true nature with the pursuit of the material, attempting to reflect the pacification of his own animal lust with the constructs of family, and of identity within the framework of community. Paul White seems, on the surface, to be a man who has conquered his demons. Yet we learn through flashback of how he came to win the hand of Joan some ten years earlier. Drifting through Globe on their way to California, Joan travelled with Mike, a brash Bronx-Italian, whose urban braggadocio seems faintly ridiculous out of its home environment. Mike, the quintessentially modern tough, is emasculated and usurped by the ferocious and predatory alpha male Paul. This exposes the emptiness behind Mike’s posturing and at the same time reveals Paul to be much more in tune with the ‘true’ nature of the world, rather than the reality humankind has interposed between itself and its origins.
The narrative strands of the film converge on a literally explosive grand finale which takes place within the arena-like setting of the copper mine. Resplendent in the finery of a warrior-hunter, and utterly unrepentant Paul hints that what drove him were the great forces of nature – destiny, black holes – but in the end he left his own mark. As the final major artistic statement of Donald Cammell’s career, White Of The Eye is a film of surprising depth, of savagery, madness and even tenderness. Cammell seems to treat the character of Paul with a fairly high degree of sympathy, and it is difficult not to see much of the auteur himself reflected in the film’s protagonist. An outsider, driven by a sense of his own destiny and with a fascination for performance, Cammell expressed through Paul that part of him which he later referred to in interview as the “uncensored Don” – that which, to borrow from Performance, crosses the line into true madness. For a man who had always envisioned his own suicide and who finally ended his life in 1996, White Of The Eye is a fitting tribute to one of cinema’s most visionary talents.
White of the Eye is available now on DVD, Blu-ray and steelbook from Arrow Video.