‘Longlegs’ and The Evolution of FBI Horror
The standout supporting performance in Oz Perkins’ Longlegs, which lived up to its title with a record-breaking box office run, is by President Bill Clinton. His official presidential portrait hangs, sometimes in the center of frame, in the dim office of FBI Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) any time he and Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) are discussing the decades-spanning crimes of the coded killer “Longlegs” (Nicolas Cage).
It’s an amusing piece of production design not because it’s anachronistic—Longlegs takes place during his 90s administration and most government institutions display the portrait of the current President—but because it’s so intentional. Clinton’s face often matches the size of actors’ faces in the foreground, and his beaming, fixed smile comes across as unnerving in a film of such concentrated dread. It also has a symbolic quality. Clinton’s administration was riddled with scandal, historic impeachment, and a legacy of concealed vice in government. It’s a cherry on top of Longlegs’ interest in American spaces being violated and corrupted—which makes us question how safe they actually make us.
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The use of the FBI in Longlegs ultimately becomes a supporting theme as the film ramps up the horror in the second half, turning its gaze to the conservative nuclear family and the failure of God-fearing ideology in keeping it together. But as Harker pours over crime scene evidence, 911 dispatcher calls, and red-eye affected family photos, the sheer impossibility of Longlegs crimes— thirty years of identical MOs, coded messages, and algorithmically calendarized murders—and the stunted reach of the FBI agents in their pursuit of clarity and justice becomes apparent.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations is usually utilized in horror and thriller films because of narrative utility. The Bureau gives agents the greatest possible access and resources to solve the type of threats that interest movie audiences, like serial murder or domestic terror. But beyond this, the FBI has a media characterization that lends itself to genre storytelling – it can be secretive and bureaucratic to the point of obscuration and disorientation, and its opaque vastness triggers a sense of thalassophobia. The FBI on-screen has evolved a long way from Hoover-approved copaganda like The FBI Story, G Men, or The F.B.I, giving the horror genre ample room to confront its murkiness and inadequacies.
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In both Twin Peaks and The X-Files, which bookended the 90s with surreal small-screen looks at American Horror hiding in plain sight, the ridiculously good-looking FBI agents are aware of, but not equally convinced of, the need to investigate the paranormal. In both shows, agents belong to sequestered departments that deal with strange, supernatural happenings: Dale Cooper (Kyle Maclachlan) is a decisive, charming agent whose investigation into local girl Laura Palmer’s death unearths the stranglehold that evil has on the town of Twin Peaks. Then, it’s revealed in Twin Peaks: The Return that the FBI and US Military co-founded a secret task force to deal with threats like the Black Lodge.
Twin Peaks—envisioned first as a soap opera pastiche—showcases a winking hokeyness through its original run that extends to how it treats cops and feds. Characters like Cooper fulfill a 50s-esque smiling-but-stern lawman role that everyone in the small town gravitates towards, which becomes seeded with atmospheric, morose dread when the show was revived in the 21st century. Cooper is a genial man who minds his P’s and Q’s. But as evidenced by his kooky colleagues Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrier) and Gordon Cole (David Lynch himself), agent personalities will differ but a sense of unity and calibration connects them all. It’s as if working for the FBI in Twin Peaks involves a certain spiritual rigor and transformation—the work changes them, or at least requires a special type of candidate to do the work.
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Twin Peaks avoids a full-bodied valorization of the feds through its heightened tone and dreamlike atmosphere, and The Return goes a long way to point at the failures and corruptions that infest these divisions. The more noir-tinged The X-Files consistently greets the Bureau and its government oversight with skepticism. Yes, the show is about the doubtful Scully (Gillian Anderson) and alien-pilled Mulder (Duchovny) treading an ambiguous zone between implausible (but tantalizing) paranormal phenomenon, but also the extended conspiracies to conceal the missing pieces supporting alien contact. There are hints at 70s conspiracy thrillers, shadowy figures, and a fluctuating disillusion with the way agents are used as pawns for their faceless superiors.
Tarsem Singh’s The Cell has a good deal of connective tissue with Longlegs, as both are genre films building off conventional procedural archetypes for a more visceral and fantastical experience. Here, child psychologist Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) and FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) enter the psyche and fantasies of a serial killer, witnessing in dazzling detail the physical abuse and distorted perspective that threatens to overtake their institutional powers. Like Longlegs, the rigid hierarchy and power of the Bureau have little hope of fighting such an intimate evil, one that can overpower your senses and behavior from the inside.
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After the success of The Silence of the Lambs, FBI agents hunting horror villains, nearly all serial killers, became second nature to Hollywood. Often they’re not used too thoughtfully, but rather out of necessity for the large scope of the killer’s crimes. The Saw series may effectively mix aesthetic with a human hunger for barbarity, but they’re less concerned with demythologizing the blindspots of the Bureau. In the 2000s, FBI imagery bled into gaming, such as the sinister, suited interdimensional figure “the G-Man” in the Half-Life series, or the titular agency in Delta Green, a contemporary-era setting for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game.
But adaptations of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter series still remain the gold standard for critical looks at the FBI in horror. In both The Silence of the Lambs and Manhunter, the lines between an agent’s personal hang-ups and their ability to carry out the Bureau’s remit. The films follow agents alienated by their work in the Bureau, with Clarice Starling as a young trainee burdened with the FBI’s gendered expectations, and Will Graham burned out from his profiling work giving him disturbing empathy for serial killers.
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The respective directors Jonathan Demme and Michael Mann frame the characters’ journey as horror stories: Clarice cautiously enters uncharted territory up against an alarming unknown; Will solves his case as if he is haunted by stepping back into this debilitating work. In both films, the characters find themselves ensnared in the orbit of Hannibal Lecter (or in Manhunter, “Lecktor”) whose sensitive, mannered speech and intimate knowledge of murder connects him with the agents in unsettling, electric ways. When Clarice and Will solve their cases, you feel that it wouldn’t have been possible without their perspective being slightly tilted away from the regular routine and order of the Bureau and towards something dark and reprehensible, but perceptive.
This is the tradition Longlegs most explicitly continues: into the secrecy and rigidity of the FBI is poured an unorthodox and disquieting darkness that undermines its authority, and makes steadfast agents feel that bit more vulnerable.
Categorized:Editorials
