The Top-10 Self-Mutilations in Pop Culture
In keeping with my recent article on the most disgusting movies ever made, I wanted to continue on the theme of movies (and, in this case, one video game and one play) that still have the ability to weird out even the most stalwart and gore-desensitized soul. Talking to friends, I have learned that while barfing and oozing and bleeding are par for the course scenes of self-mutilation are always sure-fire ways to get the teeth chattering. A man can hack the limb off of a zombie with a pane of glass, and people yawn, but if the same man slices his own hand with the same pane of glass, people tend to avert their eyes.
There’s something about scenes of self-slaughter that are decidedly more visceral than other scenes of violence. Not many of us can relate to the experience of pulling a trigger, and killing a bad guy. But we can all imagine, all too vividly, just what it might feel like to have to pull out a fingernail.
So steel yourself, as I’m going to go into some pretty dark territory, as I recount the ten greatest self-mutilation scenes in popular culture. Some will make you wince visibly. Others may make you exclaim. All of which will have a huge impact.
10) Mark “Chopper” Read severs his own ear
in “Chopper” (2000)
Eric Bana had not yet become a recognizable movie star in America in 2000, but he was already a darling of the Aussie circuit (and of some of the better-versed American indie aficionados) thanks to his raw and rambunctiously violent performance in “Chopper,” the true story of Australian supercriminal Mark Read. Read was one of those celebrity criminals, as well-known for his outsize personality and outspoken media appearances as he was for his litany of crimes.
In one scene, Read had to prove that, by staying in prison, he was in mortal danger. His mind jumped to the logical, if not completely icky, conclusion that if he were horribly mutilated in some way, he would show how much danger he is in. Of course, his own decision to simply and easily slice off an ear only threw a light, ironically, onto how mad he was, and how much danger he was in from himself.
This is an excellent crime flick, worth seeking out, if only for Bana’s stellar and near-unrecognizable performance. That one ear-slicing scene, well…
9) Nina pulls on a hangnail
in “Black Swan” (2010)
“Black Swan” has, perhaps, more trauma to the fingers than any other film. It may feature a scene of a woman stabbing herself in the face, but it’s the fingertips we remember. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman, in her Oscar-winning role) already has a problem with scratching herself, and her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey) insists on trimming her fingernails to the very quick, sometime resulting in bleeding and bandages. We’ve all accidentally cut or fingernails too closely at one time or another, so we know the sharp pain it can bring.
But in a scene that is perhaps hallucination brought on by the dark, sticky inner caves of madness, we see Nina, away from her mother, retiring to a bathroom to escape the party she has been attending. She looks at her sore, reddened fingertips, and begins to pick at them. She sees a hangnail, and pulls at it. And, in what is probably the most painful scene in a movie full of painful scenes, she yanks so hard, she essentially shucks the skin off of the entire length of her finger.
We cut back and see that it did not really happen, but everyone in the audience groaned a little at that scene. That’s a pain we can, perhaps, all to easily visualize.
8) Peter Winter yanks off a fingernail
in “Clean, Shaven” (1993)
Peter Winter (Peter Greene) is on a potentially futile quest to regain custody of his daughter from the Foster family that has been looking after her. Peter is a legitimate schizophrenic, whose world is full of strange hallucinations, paranoia and unseen violence. He sleeps in his darkened car, and breaks mirrors. In terms of psychological accuracy, Lodge Kerrigan’s 1993 film is first rate. In terms of its disturbing portrayal of a man crumbling beneath his own mind, it’s harrowing and gut-wrenching.
The one scene most everyone remembers, though, is an unexpected scene in which Peter cleans his fingernails with a knife an then, perhaps as a trifle, perhaps to fulfill some paranoid fantasy, he stabs the knife into his fingertip, digs under his nail, and wrenches it up from his hand. There is no screaming, and there is no blood, but the audience will still shift very, very uncomfortably in their seats.
It turns out, of course, that the fingernail removal was only a hallucination, but its impact will never be forgotten, and the sickness and madness conveyed in the scene will leave you marked. I implore the strong to seek out “Clean, Shaven.”
7) Aron Ralston frees himself
in “127 Hours” (2010)
Aron Ralston (James Franco) is a free-wheeling outdoorsy type who loves to trek through deserts on his bike, climb rocks, and take to the natural world all by his lonesome. He is a bit reckless, and perhaps a bit too solitary, but he is energized all the time, and loves his life. His need for solitude let to an unfortunate accident where he found himself at the bottom of a canyon, his arm pinned between a fallen boulder and the cliff face. You wanted solitude? You got it.
What he does to free himself is well-known by now, and comedians have been referring to Danny Boyle’s terse film as “I Cut My Arm Off!” But what “127 Hours” truly does, aside from giving us a taut drama and endlessly creative storytelling conceits, is a tactile experience of sawing an arm off. We don’t necessarily see the blood, but when Aron begins chipping away at his forelock, using nothing but a dull Leatherman’s tool and gumption, we can almost see ourselves doing it.
When he hit’s his nerve, we hear a noise. It’s a shrill, grating electric buzzing sound, like a game of Operation crying out in torturous horror. If pain could make a noise, I’m pretty sure that’s what it would sound like.
6) Ethan cuts off his own finger
in “Heavy Rain”
The story of “Heavy Rain” is so involved and complicated, that there are entire websites devoted to it. The makers of the game intended the game to be many, many hours long, so the gameplay is stretched over scene after scene of plot twists and strange pseudo-supernatural noir conceits that would leave even fans of Tolkein a little baffled.
At one point, though, near the end of the game, a cackling serial killer forces the character you control, a fellow named Ethan, who is looking for his missing son, to slice off a finger. The usual idea of hitting buttons and causing mayhem is turned on ear as the target becomes a human hand, and you get to see the slicing all close-up and in explicit detail. More than playfully and suicidally throwing yourself into a bottomless pit, as just about every frustrated game player has done at some point, “Heavy Rain” seems to be dragging the player way too close to the action than is ordinarily comfortable. Video game mayhem has, for a brief moment, something wrenching and visceral about it.
I don’t put too much stock in the stories of the games I play, but I don’t think I could remain uninvolved in a scene where I had to do harm to a real-looking human hand.
5) Titus Adronicus cuts off his own hand
in “Titus Andronicus” (c. 1590)
Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” was one of his early plays, and is considered to be one of the more obscure plays by today’s standards. In its time, though, the play was actually Shakespeare’s biggest hit as it was, by today’s parlance, a proper slasher, and a crowd-pleasing pot-boiler, full of sex and violence and revenge. That it resembled a lot of the other ultra-violent revenge plays of the time (“The Jew of Malta” and “The Revenger’s Tragedy” are spiritual cousins) probably helped. The play is essentially a shopping list of horrible things that characters do to one another. There is murder, orchestrated rape, the severing of a tongue, and a notorious finale involving cannibalism.
In the middle of the play, the wicked Moor, Aaron has convinced Titus, a shamed general, that he can free his wrongly accused sons from prison if he severs his own hand. Titus, driven slightly mad by the rape of his daughter and some other horrible crap that happened to him (all at the hands of the wicked queen Tamora), decides rather quickly to free his hand from his body, and chops it off right on stage.
Violence on stage is always more shocking than violence in movies, but imagine standing there amongst the Groundlings, back in the 1590s, watching actors strut and fret about the Globe stage, talking about chopping and bleeding. It would be thrilling and gut-wrenching all at once. And then, if simulated well enough, you’d see your title character cut off a limb, and bleed real blood onstage (and they would have used real blood). Holy dang, how horrible.
4) Esther locks herself in her hotel room
in “In My Skin” (2002)
Marina de Van’s body examination of addictive behavior is one of the best horror films of the last decade, as it’s one of the hardest to watch, and one of the most viscerally icky. De Van plays the lead role of Esther, a woman who is successful at work, but doesn’t seem to socialize that well. At a party, she wanders into the darkened back yard where she trips and cuts her leg. Rather than let the cut heal, she find herself sneaking off into back corridors to cut it open, and keep the wound bleeding. She seems objectively fascinated with the machinations of her own body.
She does not behave like a typical depressed cutter, though. She behaves like an addict. And her addiction is slicing her own skin. As the film’s finale, Esther rents a hotel room with nothing more than a short skirt and a long knife. The ensuing orgy of self-violence is bad enough, but it’s made all the more harrowing by the character’s unknowable drives, leading her to do these horrible things to herself.
“In My Skin” is not just an icky reactionary polemic, inviting the audience to gross out over gross images. This is a Buñuel-like examination of the stranger corners of the human mind.
3) Max lets the numbers out
in “π” (1997)
I could have included more films by Darren Aronofsky, but I think I have him covered, what with this one and “Black Swan.” Aronofsky’s films all seem to be about the parallels between inner and outer decay. As desperation and madness increase, so do the bodily horrors, and we have a series of films about athletes and drug addicts and obsessives, all becomes lost in their own personal vortexes and addiction, and losing their bodies as a part of it.
His first feature film, the indie darling “π,” is about an obsessive, reclusive mathematician named Max (Sean Gullette), who has become coldly attached to the idea that numbers can be used everywhere, and that patterns exist everywhere in nature. No mere numerologist, Max has complicated formulae that seem to be getting closer and closer to something big. As he gets closer, though, the decay begins to set in. Ants invade his apartment. Mysterious figures begins tracking him down on the street, ans, most notably, a weird lump appears on the side of his head.
By the film’s end, Max has begun to see what his madness is, and how close he is to finding a Unified Field Theorem that is, very literally, destroying his brain. Thanks to a fit of horror and a cordless drill, though, Max lets the numbers out. It’s a moment of mad cathartic violence not seen since the early days of Cronenberg.
2) Lajoska makes a monument of himself
In “Taxidermia” (2006)
György Pálfi’s recent horror film is very obscure, and could have easily been included on my list of The Most Disgusting Movies Ever Made. If you’re into bodily horror, I don’t think they get more visceral than this one. It follows three generations of men, and their various bodily drives that enhance them, and then ultimately destroy them. Big, greasy, fleshy closeups to genitals, stomachs, and quivering organs are the word of the day here.
The scene in question involves the third and final generation, represented by Lajoka Balatony (Marc Bischoff), who has taken to looking after his horrid 800-pound father (Trócsányi Gergõ) in the basement of his taxidermy shop. His father used to be a competitive eater, and now eats food by the kilogram. Lajoska, by contrast, is thin and sickly, and resents his father’s large, bilious body. I don’t want to say what happens between these two, but it leads to the following climax in an explosive fashion.
Lajoska, you see, has become horrified with his body, and becomes madly fond of his art of taxidermy. The climax involves a large, complex machine, full of tubes and blades, which allows Lajoska to stay alive while she slowly removes each one of his organs and stuffs his own body. The scene takes a logn time, and features closeups of the human body you never thought you’d ever see in a movie. In terms of self-mutilation, bodily horror, and human appetites, “Taxidermia” is operatic.
1) All seven “Saw” movies.
(2004-2010)
I prefer my horror movies to remain somewhere in the psychological, bothering to examine real human fears, and allowing us to exorcize our demons by facing them within the safety of a theater. There has to be something said, though, the the successful stripe of popularly-known “torture porn” movies that came out over the last decade. Throwing all semblance of psychology to the wind, the torture movies went straight for the gut, creating a series of ugly movies of people being cut up and discarded in orgies of blood and nihilism.
Whether you love them or hate them, the “Saw” movies are the visceral and gory frat parties that live at the forefront of this movement. And while they are often cited as having little character, and no real fear, they did do something notable, and that was to take the doer of violence away from the victim, and force the victim to do violence unto themselves. This made for some weird (and increasingly protracted) moral games, and increasingly violent (and creative) ways of hurting yourself. The series was more than people hacking off limbs. Soon they had to dig keys out of still-warm eye sockets, and weigh body parts on scales.
In terms of drama, there is plenty to criticize. In terms of raw, horrific reactions, and sense-heavy, gut-wrenching, creative self-mutilation, the “Saw” series is, at the very least, a notable footnote in the evolution of the horror film.
Witney Seibold is a comepletely in-tact human being living in Los Angeles. When he is not writing dark articles about people hurting themselves, he is writing peaceful and insightful movie reviews over on his ‘blog, Three Cheers for Darkened Years! where he has published over 800 articles to date. He also is the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast over at Crave Online with William Bibbiani.
