Paul Newman once called snuff films the future of cinema: “That’s what lies at the end of the pike”
It’s been almost two decades since Paul Newman passed away, and his spirit must be breathing constant sighs of relief that snuff films have yet to be prioritised as the future of cinema, as he once feared.
At the time, he didn’t think it seemed too far-fetched. He didn’t voice his concerns in the distant past, either, having explained why Hollywood was in danger of turning real-life murders into mass-marketed entertainment as recently as 2002, when he was promoting Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition.
The atmospheric gangster thriller marked the final live-action movie role of Newman’s legendary career, and he wondered what came next. For him, it was a voice-only performance in Pixar’s Cars and an award-winning return to television in HBO’s Empire Falls, but he still issued a dire prognostication.
The ‘New Hollywood’ icon and Academy Award winner didn’t have anything to worry about, though, with streaming and superheroes taking their respective places as the industry’s newest obsessions. That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s sure as shit better than audiences lining up around the block watching someone get their clogs popped for real.
Blockbusters were already mindless enough by the turn of the millennium, leaving Newman to wonder when they would run out of road. “Each time, you have to bombard the senses with something bigger and larger than what came before,” he informed The Guardian. “And it has to be more grotesque and shocking and, boy, it has to end someplace.”
Newman was adamant there was “something finite” about empty-headed spectacle, and while he’s yet to be proven right, he only saw one way for how it could end: “I hope the terminal escalation of this isn’t going to be snuff films, because that’s what lies at the end of the pike here,” he intoned. “I mean, at some point, you’re going to run out of ways to top yourself.”
Mercifully, snuff films haven’t cracked the mainstream, but the counterargument is that things like The Emoji Movie exist, there have been seven Transformers movies with more to come, and Vin Diesel constantly ranks as one of the highest-paid actors in the business. It’s not quite as bad as nonfiction deaths being filmed, packaged, and sold as entertainment, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dire in its own way.
Newman became one of Tinseltown’s most enduring figures by being very good at his job and starring in a lot of good films, and the only time he took the money and ran in The Towering Inferno and When Time Ran Out, the former earned an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Picture’ and the latter was so shite he scrubbed it entirely from his memory banks, but those days are pretty much over.
The veteran was trepidatious about “this present climate of escalating, constantly escalating everything” and “the endless appeal to the sense that movies have become,” and as accurate as he was to a certain extent, the snuff era has yet to begin. It might eventually, and that’s when we’ll know we’re well and truly fucked, but that’s a long way away.
