I wonder if these two murder scenes — one utterly brutal and ruthless, another an emotional impulse that abruptly spills over — have ever been compared side by side? In fact they belong together as temperamental opposites.
HAL’s killing of Frank Poole is one of the spookiest and most chilling murder scenes in movie history (hat tip to the recently departed Douglas Trumbull!). It’s all the more provocative and unnerving in the way Kubrick doesn’t show HAL attacking (or even making contact with) Frank and instead starts suddenly jump-cutting into the HAL eye, suggesting the killing of Frank the way Hitchcock suggested the stabbing of Marion Crane without showing Norman Bates‘ knife actually doing anything. And then to show the oxygen-deprived Poole desperately struggling as his body tumbles through space while the pod follows suit on its own crazy trajectory, hurtling and somersaulting into the abyss.
Whereas Matt Fowler‘s shooting of Richard Strout in Todd Field‘s In The Bedroom…well, what other audience emotion can there be except “finally!”? All killings are cold in one way or another, but this is surely one of the most understandable, just a natural and necessary thing…shoot that malevolent cousin of Tom Cruise….and again! And again! Thank you. If any character in a 21st Century movie “needed killing,” as the old western cliche goes, it was Richard Strout. Perhaps you wouldn’t want to congratulate the grief-stricken Fowler for putting three bullets into this creep, but you certainly want to reach out and say “we understand, Tom…of course we do.”