the chutry experiment

The observation that a beloved TV star had a secret life wears off pretty quickly (in fact his penchant for documentation suggests a desire to get caught, and presumably punished for his sins), even though the film takes great pains to emphasize Crane's innocent side early in the film (he attends church with his first wife, "confesses" to his preist, and orders grapefruit juice "straight" when he goes to the bars). The effect is that Crane's sexual explorations end up playing like some form of moral decline, one that is precipitated by the emergence of videotape as a consumer product (which gives Auto Foucs a strange resonance with Boogie Nights). The late 1960s, early 70s atmosphere (after the Pill and Playboy; before AIDS and "Just Say No") is well-captured, with some degree of nostalgia for the era of swinging and hedonism, but strangely tinged with clinical distance, a point I'll address momentarily.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the film is Greg Kinnear's performance. As Roger Ebert points out, Kinnear gives Crane a slightly creepy likability and a complete absence of depth or reflection. The sex scenes are treated with clinical distance and eventually have a numbing effect rather than any kind of erotic charge. This lack of eroticism has the result of making Crane's behavior seem more the product of sexual compulsion rather than anything resembling desire and contributes to my experience of the film as overly moralistic. In fact, the only real chemistry in the film takes place between the depthless Crane and the slickly seductive Carpenter (played by Willem Dafoe); Foucs briefly addresses the homoerotics of their relationship, but fails to do much with it, other than potentially suggest that Crane's rejection of Carpenter might have motivated him to murder the TV star (rehashing the jilted homosexual stereotype).

We are also left on the outside of any female characters' perceptions of sex; Crane's second wife is initially open to his sexual experimentation with multiple partners, but we don't get any sense of how she feels about sex. Part of this is due to Crane's own sexual obsessions, but I think these details should be addressed by the film (even if Crane himself doesn't see or understand them).

The emphasis on Crane's sexual obsessive behavior--and his desire to record his sexual encounters--reads moralistically from my point of view. Schrader's biography complicates this interpretation, but Auto Focus seems concerned to deny pleasure; sexual activity is engaged in comuplsively, habitually, and auto-matically. Ultimately, the film seems engaged in what J. Hoberman calls "relentless sermonizing," and it left me feeling very cold, like I'd been sitting on a hard wooden pew for two hours.