*SPOILER ALERT*
(1981. dir: Oliver Stone) This is an early work of Stone's, not a good one, but I suspect a labor of, if not love, then some kind of obsession, in which he muses upon the questions, "Wouldn't the world be nicer if women would just stay in their designated positions and stop making trouble for us? Why won't they stop making us punish and kill them?"
Jonathan Lansdale (Michael Caine) is a thriving comics artist whose main character is a Conan-like warrior whose queen has been stolen from him and his quest is to retrieve her. In an early scene, the family cat (a vicious black She-Cat called Sheba) is brutalizing a lizard and Lansdale's little daughter shows him how the disengaged tail twitches whenever she pokes a stick anywhere near it, as if it is still alive, still somehow attached to the beast itself. In the fomenting scene, Lansdale's selfish, emasculating, She-Wolf wife (Andrea Marcovicci) drives him down a two-lane country road while simultaneously telling him she wants to leave him. As they quarrel, she tries to pass a truck and barely avoids an oncoming car, but -- you guessed it -- Lansdale's drawing hand is sheared off in the incident. Although the wife and the cops comb the field, they cannot find it. (She probably wasn't looking very hard, as she was busy secretly gloating at her successful emasculation.) Lansdale himself, however, sees The Hand in dreams and visions, molding and eaten by spiders and bugs.
He tries vainly to teach his left hand to draw, and his comic is given over (by his emasculating She-Publisher) to a different artist. ("You've weakened him," Lansdale accuses the new guy, "by making him look too deeply inside himself. All he wants is his queen back.") When the offending storyboards turn out to be ruined, scrawled across in ink, Lansdale's career is finished. On his way out of the building, he is accosted by a drunken bum, also one-handed, a great cameo by Stone himself, and he becomes The Hand's first human victim.
Folks are harsh about this film. Yes, it is not just rife with misogyny, misogyny is the foundation-stone upon which the piece is built. Also, it sports its cheese. There's a climactic scene in which Lansdale is fighting The Hand, and, yes, here is cheese to spare; you can't help but laugh. Still, the metaphor is deeply felt, so much so you wonder if Stone wasn't going through a humiliating divorce at the time himself. Although Platoon is still five years up the road, he's already making the kinds of bold choices that will set him apart from the rank and file. When Lansdale fades into his fugue states, the color drains from the screen into shades of grey, preparing us for what will come. Once he's moved to a Californian forest to teach cartooning at a community college, we watch him demonstrate to his class how the emotion of rage can be simply suggested with a few basic strokes to the face; during one of Landsdale's many moments of humiliation (always, always with a woman as root-cause), Stone lets us linger on Caine's face as it hardens into the rage-mask.
Although the artist is forced, eventually, to take responsibility for the works of his own hand, Stone doesn't let the ladies (ie: the Emasculating Bitches) off so easily. The final scene has Lansdale in a mental institution, being worked over by a powerful She-Shrink, played by the marvellous Viveca Lindfors. She patronizes him, insists she knows better than he does, claims she wants to help him to mend, and, boy howdy, does SHE get her comeuppance. Then the credits roll over a self-satisfied smirk on the wronged psychopath's face.
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