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Broken (film)
Encyclopedia
Broken is a 1993 horror
musical
short film/long form music video
filmed and directed by Peter Christopherson
, based on a scenario by Trent Reznor
, the founder of the industrial rock
band Nine Inch Nails
. The film is a companion piece to the band's 1992 EP
Broken, featuring its songs and music and compiling its music videos (the exception being "Last" and the two hidden tracks). The movie, roughly 20 minutes in length, weaves Brokens four music videos together via a violent "snuff film
" framing sequence
, concluding with an otherwise unreleased video for the EP's final song "Gave Up," setting the conclusion of the film's frame story to the song. Due to its extremely graphic content, the Broken movie was never officially released, but was leaked as a bootleg which became heavily traded on VHS in the 1990s, and more recently via the Internet.
Trent Reznor
once said that the Broken movie "...makes 'Happiness in Slavery' look like a Disney movie." and while his comments about the movie have been cryptic at best, he makes no secret of the film's existence.
. The trap door opens and the person drops with a maniacal smile on his face.
The movie then cuts to footage of an amateur video, taken from inside a car going through various parts of a city (the backwards "n" from the Broken album cover and the title "broken" is shown superimposed as a glass overlay). The car goes from the middle-class suburbs to, literally, the other side of the tracks, into a shoddy industrial area, with a brief shot of a "Meat District" sign. The car approaches a young man on the sidewalk. Almost immediately, the young man is suddenly in a basement, tied with a seat belt to a chair and cleave gagged, while being forced to watch a television. The first video, "Pinion," begins to play.
The music video for "Pinion" begins in a bathroom. The camera zooms in on a toilet flushing, and a network of pipes is shown leading to a contraption with a large gear system and a pressure gauge on it. As the camera zooms out, a tight, plastic bodybag-like suit suspended in a padded cell
with six rods by the side is shown, with the end of the pipes attached to the mouth portion with water gushing in, presumably to drown the person inside. An alternative interpretation that the person bound inside is being fed the "waste of the world" coming through the pipes.
Cutting back to the amateur video, the killer, wearing some sort of leather mask, drags the victim's head back and forces him to drink some sort of liquid from a jerrycan
. The middle of the video for "Wish" is interrupted by amateur footage again with the victim chained to a table with a large wad of dark substance on his face. As the killer is immediately followed to be seen putting his pants on, it could be assumed that it is feces
. After the video ends, the killer repeatedly rewinds to the part of the video where Reznor screams "fist fuck" and begins to rub his fist.
The video for "Help Me I Am in Hell" shows a middle-age bald man in a room filled with flies. He ignores them while eating some sort of steak and drinking wine. On one occasion it is clearly shown that flies also enter his mouth when he eats. The video cuts away several times to show the same man in bondage gear.
This video was blacked out in the most prominent leak; it is now generally believed (although not definitively proven) that this sequence is part of the complete film but was blacked out by Reznor in the bootlegged copy. Reznor is rumored to have distributed copies of Broken to his friends, each with a different part of the video blacked out, so that if it were bootlegged, he would be able to identify the source of the leak
.
Following the video, the victim is shown still tied to a table as the killer proceeds to rip his teeth out. The video for "Happiness in Slavery
" shows up, which was banned by music video
channels worldwide.
The film ends with a video for "Gave Up" - this is different from the one on Closure
, as it is not an actual Nine Inch Nails video, but the music of NIN dubbed over the storyline of the movie. At this point, the victim is suspended from the ceiling, and is repeatedly attacked by the perpetrator first with a blade, then a blowtorch, after which the killer slices off the victim's penis with a straight razor
. The camera-work here closely resembles that of an amateur snuff film, while there is interspersed footage of the police searching through the basement, and finding remains of previous victims. (At one point, a sign saying "TRESPASSERS WILL BE EATEN" is shown.) Finally, the film cuts back to the victim strapped on a table, as the murderer hacks his limbs off with a chainsaw, proceeds to presumably rape him, and finally slices his chest open to eat his heart.
The movie then cuts back to the execution scene, showing as the killer is dropped through the trap door, with a crazed smile on his face, falling through a seemingly immensely long tunnel, until the rope suddenly tightens. The movie ends with the inverted version of the Broken album cover, with the background black, and a mirrored "n" character filled with the original orange background texture. The severed head of the killer flying across the screen is also shown after 30 seconds of no audio and a black screen.
In versions of the tape labeled as "Techno-necrophilia", the movie is followed by a segment of Robert "Budd" Dwyer's televised suicide. It does not appear on the "leaked" DVD version - it is possible that it was merely added by a third party while the tape was circulating.
in "Happiness in Slavery", and the band itself in "Wish", is unknown. The film is generally credited to be directed by Peter Christopherson
, although the music videos themselves were directed by various other people: "Pinion" and "Help Me I Am in Hell" is credited to Eric Goode
and Serge Becker, while "Happiness in Slavery" is credited to Jon Reiss
.
. The original hand-dubbed tapes were distributed by Reznor to various friends with dropouts at certain points so he could know
who distributed any copies that might surface. Reznor, commenting in the "Access" section of the NIN website, implied that Gibby Haynes
was responsible for the most prominent leak. This copy was traded on VHS tapes for years (resulting in many poor-quality, high-generation copies), and was later encoded in MPEG
and AVI
formats and distributed extensively through peer-to-peer
networks and Nine Inch Nails fan websites. These are generally not of the highest quality, as they are not first-generation copies.
The Movie can also be found on the "R" DVD release, a bootleg that has popped up on ebay in recent years.
The music videos (without the interstitial footage between songs) for "Pinion", "Wish", "Help Me I Am in Hell", and "Happiness in Slavery" were made officially available on Closure and on the official Nine Inch Nails website.
On Fixed (the remix CD for the Broken EP), remixers employed a heavily processed sample of Flanagan's screaming from the "Happiness in Slavery" video as part of the rhythm in the tracks "Screaming Slave" and a remix of the "Happiness in Slavery" song (although the sample is very obscure on the latter).
On the Collected
DVD that was sent out in promotion of the album With Teeth
, portions of the movie are shown for a few seconds in crystal-clear quality.
In August 2005, a new copy of the movie was distributed via BitTorrent as a remastered DVD
image. The remaster, titled "Broken 2.0," was primarily sourced from a low-generation copy of the tape that was anonymously sent to a long-time member of the online NIN community; however, much of the music video content was replaced with higher-resolution footage sourced from the VHS release of Closure. Like all of the copies that existed online prior to that point, this version does not have video footage during "Help Me I Am in Hell", but a blank screen instead. Menu screens, a chapter index and the option to listen to the audio tracks from the CD (without added sound effects) are all distinct features of "Broken 2.0."
On December 30, 2006, an unofficial version of the film was released on a DVD disc image and distributed via BitTorrent at The Pirate Bay
by the same anonymous user called "seed0" who uploaded the leaked DVD version of Closure. The DVD image represents a significant upgrade in visual and audio quality from "Broken 2.0.", and includes the oft-missing video for "Help Me I Am in Hell." Fans have speculated that this version of the film has been sourced directly from the master tapes, and that Reznor himself may have been the source of this leak along with the Closure DVD leak, as implied by a post on his official blog: "12/21/06 : Happy Holidays! This one is a guilt-free download. (shhhh - I didn't say that out loud). If you know what I'm talking about, cool."
Horror film
Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...
musical
Musical film
The musical film is a film genre in which songs sung by the characters are interwoven into the narrative, sometimes accompanied by dancing. The songs usually advance the plot or develop the film's characters, though in some cases they serve merely as breaks in the storyline, often as elaborate...
short film/long form music video
Music video
A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings...
filmed and directed by Peter Christopherson
Peter Christopherson
Peter Martin Christopherson, a.k.a. Sleazy was a musician, video director and designer, and former member of the influential British design agency Hipgnosis....
, based on a scenario by Trent Reznor
Trent Reznor
Michael Trent Reznor is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, record producer, and leader of industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. Reznor is also a member of How to Destroy Angels alongside his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, and Atticus Ross. He was previously associated with bands Option 30,...
, the founder of the industrial rock
Industrial rock
Industrial rock is a musical genre that fuses industrial music and specific rock subgenres. Industrial rock spawned industrial metal, with which it is often confused...
band Nine Inch Nails
Nine Inch Nails
Nine Inch Nails is an American industrial rock project, founded in 1988 by Trent Reznor in Cleveland, Ohio. As its main producer, singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist, Reznor is the only official member of Nine Inch Nails and remains solely responsible for its direction...
. The film is a companion piece to the band's 1992 EP
Extended play
An EP is a musical recording which contains more music than a single, but is too short to qualify as a full album or LP. The term EP originally referred only to specific types of vinyl records other than 78 rpm standard play records and LP records, but it is now applied to mid-length Compact...
Broken, featuring its songs and music and compiling its music videos (the exception being "Last" and the two hidden tracks). The movie, roughly 20 minutes in length, weaves Brokens four music videos together via a violent "snuff film
Snuff film
A snuff film is a motion picture genre that depicts the actual death or murder of a person or people, without the aid of special effects, for the express purpose of distribution and entertainment or financial exploitation. For-profit snuff films are generally regarded as an urban legend, whose...
" framing sequence
Frame story
A frame story is a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories...
, concluding with an otherwise unreleased video for the EP's final song "Gave Up," setting the conclusion of the film's frame story to the song. Due to its extremely graphic content, the Broken movie was never officially released, but was leaked as a bootleg which became heavily traded on VHS in the 1990s, and more recently via the Internet.
Trent Reznor
Trent Reznor
Michael Trent Reznor is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, record producer, and leader of industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. Reznor is also a member of How to Destroy Angels alongside his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, and Atticus Ross. He was previously associated with bands Option 30,...
once said that the Broken movie "...makes 'Happiness in Slavery' look like a Disney movie." and while his comments about the movie have been cryptic at best, he makes no secret of the film's existence.
Synopsis
The film intercuts among multiple distinct visual styles to create a contrast between different timeframes and levels of reality: The "past," shot as a low-quality amateur film, documenting the crimes of a sadistic murderer; the "present," shot entirely in black and white, showing the police investigation of the murderer's crimes and the repercussions of his actions; and the "fiction," being the Nine Inch Nails videos the killer plays for his captive, which have a more polished, high-budget look.Plot
The film begins with a scene of a person being executed by hangingHanging
Hanging is the lethal suspension of a person by a ligature. The Oxford English Dictionary states that hanging in this sense is "specifically to put to death by suspension by the neck", though it formerly also referred to crucifixion and death by impalement in which the body would remain...
. The trap door opens and the person drops with a maniacal smile on his face.
The movie then cuts to footage of an amateur video, taken from inside a car going through various parts of a city (the backwards "n" from the Broken album cover and the title "broken" is shown superimposed as a glass overlay). The car goes from the middle-class suburbs to, literally, the other side of the tracks, into a shoddy industrial area, with a brief shot of a "Meat District" sign. The car approaches a young man on the sidewalk. Almost immediately, the young man is suddenly in a basement, tied with a seat belt to a chair and cleave gagged, while being forced to watch a television. The first video, "Pinion," begins to play.
The music video for "Pinion" begins in a bathroom. The camera zooms in on a toilet flushing, and a network of pipes is shown leading to a contraption with a large gear system and a pressure gauge on it. As the camera zooms out, a tight, plastic bodybag-like suit suspended in a padded cell
Padded cell
A padded cell is a cell in a mental hospital with cushions lining the walls. The padding is an attempt to prevent a patient from hurting him/herself by hitting his/her head on the hard surface of the walls...
with six rods by the side is shown, with the end of the pipes attached to the mouth portion with water gushing in, presumably to drown the person inside. An alternative interpretation that the person bound inside is being fed the "waste of the world" coming through the pipes.
Cutting back to the amateur video, the killer, wearing some sort of leather mask, drags the victim's head back and forces him to drink some sort of liquid from a jerrycan
Jerrycan
A jerrycan is a robust fuel container originally made from pressed steel. It was designed in Germany in the 1930s for military use to hold 20 litres of fuel. The development of the Jerrycan was a huge improvement on earlier designs, which required tools and funnels to use.-Uses:Today similar...
. The middle of the video for "Wish" is interrupted by amateur footage again with the victim chained to a table with a large wad of dark substance on his face. As the killer is immediately followed to be seen putting his pants on, it could be assumed that it is feces
Feces
Feces, faeces, or fæces is a waste product from an animal's digestive tract expelled through the anus or cloaca during defecation.-Etymology:...
. After the video ends, the killer repeatedly rewinds to the part of the video where Reznor screams "fist fuck" and begins to rub his fist.
The video for "Help Me I Am in Hell" shows a middle-age bald man in a room filled with flies. He ignores them while eating some sort of steak and drinking wine. On one occasion it is clearly shown that flies also enter his mouth when he eats. The video cuts away several times to show the same man in bondage gear.
This video was blacked out in the most prominent leak; it is now generally believed (although not definitively proven) that this sequence is part of the complete film but was blacked out by Reznor in the bootlegged copy. Reznor is rumored to have distributed copies of Broken to his friends, each with a different part of the video blacked out, so that if it were bootlegged, he would be able to identify the source of the leak
Canary trap
A canary trap is a method for exposing an information leak, which involves giving different versions of a sensitive document to each of several suspects and seeing which version gets leaked....
.
Happiness in Slavery
"Happiness in Slavery" is a song by the American act Nine Inch Nails. The song takes its title and refrain from Jean Paulhan's preface to Story of O. It is available on the Broken EP and was also released as a 12" promotional single in November 1992. The song peaked at number 13 on the U.S...
" shows up, which was banned by music video
Music video
A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings...
channels worldwide.
The film ends with a video for "Gave Up" - this is different from the one on Closure
Closure (Nine Inch Nails VHS)
Closure is a double VHS set by Nine Inch Nails released in 1997. Closure is the 12th official Nine Inch Nails release. It consists of one tape of live concert and behind-the-scenes footage from the Self-Destruct tour and one tape of music videos....
, as it is not an actual Nine Inch Nails video, but the music of NIN dubbed over the storyline of the movie. At this point, the victim is suspended from the ceiling, and is repeatedly attacked by the perpetrator first with a blade, then a blowtorch, after which the killer slices off the victim's penis with a straight razor
Straight razor
A straight razor is a razor with a blade that can fold into its handle. They are also called open razors and cut-throat razors.Although straight razors were once the principal method of manual shaving, they have been largely overshadowed by the safety razor, incorporating a disposable blade...
. The camera-work here closely resembles that of an amateur snuff film, while there is interspersed footage of the police searching through the basement, and finding remains of previous victims. (At one point, a sign saying "TRESPASSERS WILL BE EATEN" is shown.) Finally, the film cuts back to the victim strapped on a table, as the murderer hacks his limbs off with a chainsaw, proceeds to presumably rape him, and finally slices his chest open to eat his heart.
The movie then cuts back to the execution scene, showing as the killer is dropped through the trap door, with a crazed smile on his face, falling through a seemingly immensely long tunnel, until the rope suddenly tightens. The movie ends with the inverted version of the Broken album cover, with the background black, and a mirrored "n" character filled with the original orange background texture. The severed head of the killer flying across the screen is also shown after 30 seconds of no audio and a black screen.
In versions of the tape labeled as "Techno-necrophilia", the movie is followed by a segment of Robert "Budd" Dwyer's televised suicide. It does not appear on the "leaked" DVD version - it is possible that it was merely added by a third party while the tape was circulating.
Motifs
- All of the killer's actions are in relation to the music video before it:
- "Pinion" shows a man drowned by a pipe - the killer forces the victim to drink from a petrol can.
- In "Wish", Trent Reznor screams "fist fuck" - the killer rewinds the video to that line several times, and begins to rub his fist.
- In "Help Me I Am In Hell", a person is shown eating - the killer tears the victim's teeth out.
- In "Happiness In Slavery", a person is tortured and killed.
- In "Gave Up", the victim is tortured and dismembered.
Cast
Much of the cast, aside from Bob FlanaganBob Flanagan
Bob Flanagan was an American performance artist, comic, writer, poet, and musician.-Early life:...
in "Happiness in Slavery", and the band itself in "Wish", is unknown. The film is generally credited to be directed by Peter Christopherson
Peter Christopherson
Peter Martin Christopherson, a.k.a. Sleazy was a musician, video director and designer, and former member of the influential British design agency Hipgnosis....
, although the music videos themselves were directed by various other people: "Pinion" and "Help Me I Am in Hell" is credited to Eric Goode
Eric Goode
Eric Goode is an American hotelier, restaurateur, artist, filmmaker, and conservationist. He is best known as the creator of the nightclub Area and B Bar in New York City, and more recently of the Bowery Hotel.-Biography:...
and Serge Becker, while "Happiness in Slavery" is credited to Jon Reiss
Jon Reiss
Jon Reiss is an award-winning producer and director, named one of "10 Digital Directors to Watch" by Daily Variety. His work has screened at prestigious film festivals around the world, including Sundance, Toronto, Berlin, Tribeca, Los Angeles, Rotterdam, Seattle, New Directors/New Films, and Sao...
.
Availability
The movie has not been given an official commercial release (according to Reznor, because they wanted to avoid the film overshadowing the prominence of the music ), thus adding to its mythological status in alternative cultureAlternative culture
Alternative culture is a type of culture that exists outside or on the fringes of mainstream or popular culture, usually under the domain of one or more subcultures...
. The original hand-dubbed tapes were distributed by Reznor to various friends with dropouts at certain points so he could know
Canary trap
A canary trap is a method for exposing an information leak, which involves giving different versions of a sensitive document to each of several suspects and seeing which version gets leaked....
who distributed any copies that might surface. Reznor, commenting in the "Access" section of the NIN website, implied that Gibby Haynes
Gibby Haynes
Gibson Jerome "Gibby" Haynes is an American musician, radio personality, and painter, and the lead singer of the group Butthole Surfers.-Early life and career:...
was responsible for the most prominent leak. This copy was traded on VHS tapes for years (resulting in many poor-quality, high-generation copies), and was later encoded in MPEG
Moving Picture Experts Group
The Moving Picture Experts Group is a working group of experts that was formed by ISO and IEC to set standards for audio and video compression and transmission. It was established in 1988 by the initiative of Hiroshi Yasuda and Leonardo Chiariglione, who has been from the beginning the Chairman...
and AVI
Audio Video Interleave
Audio Video Interleave , known by its acronym AVI, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback...
formats and distributed extensively through peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
networks and Nine Inch Nails fan websites. These are generally not of the highest quality, as they are not first-generation copies.
The Movie can also be found on the "R" DVD release, a bootleg that has popped up on ebay in recent years.
The music videos (without the interstitial footage between songs) for "Pinion", "Wish", "Help Me I Am in Hell", and "Happiness in Slavery" were made officially available on Closure and on the official Nine Inch Nails website.
On Fixed (the remix CD for the Broken EP), remixers employed a heavily processed sample of Flanagan's screaming from the "Happiness in Slavery" video as part of the rhythm in the tracks "Screaming Slave" and a remix of the "Happiness in Slavery" song (although the sample is very obscure on the latter).
On the Collected
Collected (Nine Inch Nails DVD)
Collected is a 2005 promotional DVD, freely distributed in limited supply by Nine Inch Nails. It is a 23-minute collection of clips from various Nine Inch Nails music videos, interview clips, and the complete video for "The Hand That Feeds", as well as an interactive "body of work" discography...
DVD that was sent out in promotion of the album With Teeth
With Teeth
With Teeth is the fourth studio album by American industrial rock act Nine Inch Nails, released on May 3, 2005, by Interscope Records. The album was produced by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and long-time collaborator Alan Moulder. It was Reznor's first original studio album since The...
, portions of the movie are shown for a few seconds in crystal-clear quality.
In August 2005, a new copy of the movie was distributed via BitTorrent as a remastered DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
image. The remaster, titled "Broken 2.0," was primarily sourced from a low-generation copy of the tape that was anonymously sent to a long-time member of the online NIN community; however, much of the music video content was replaced with higher-resolution footage sourced from the VHS release of Closure. Like all of the copies that existed online prior to that point, this version does not have video footage during "Help Me I Am in Hell", but a blank screen instead. Menu screens, a chapter index and the option to listen to the audio tracks from the CD (without added sound effects) are all distinct features of "Broken 2.0."
On December 30, 2006, an unofficial version of the film was released on a DVD disc image and distributed via BitTorrent at The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay
The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website which hosts magnet links and .torrent files, which allow users to share electronic files, including multimedia, computer games and software via BitTorrent...
by the same anonymous user called "seed0" who uploaded the leaked DVD version of Closure. The DVD image represents a significant upgrade in visual and audio quality from "Broken 2.0.", and includes the oft-missing video for "Help Me I Am in Hell." Fans have speculated that this version of the film has been sourced directly from the master tapes, and that Reznor himself may have been the source of this leak along with the Closure DVD leak, as implied by a post on his official blog: "12/21/06 : Happy Holidays! This one is a guilt-free download. (shhhh - I didn't say that out loud). If you know what I'm talking about, cool."