Broken (film)

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In 1992, Nine Inch Nails released the Broken EP. It was followed in 1993 by a short film, roughly 20 minutes in length, known as the Broken Movie. Filmed and directed by Peter Christopherson, the movie wove Broken's four music videos together via a violent "snuff film," and included its own video for the song "Gave Up" as its conclusion. Due to its extreme graphic content, the Broken Movie was never officially released (and likely never will be), but was leaked as a bootleg which became heavily traded on VHS in the 1990's, and in recent years via the Internet.

1 Description
2 Availability
3 Footnotes
4 External Links

[edit] Description

The film begins with amateur video taken from inside a car, showing a young man being picked up on the side of the road in a suburban neighborhood. The young man is later shown in interstitials between the main music videos being tied up in a room or basement and tortured by various means while being forced to watch the Nine Inch Nails videos, before receiving his ultimate fate in the "Gave Up" video which concludes the film.

The first video, set to "Pinion," begins in a bathroom. The camera zooms in on a toilet flushing, and a network of pipes is shown leading to a mask. As the camera zooms out, it is shown that a man is strapped into a tight suit, with water coming in through the mask (presumably to drown him).

The video for "Wish" shows Nine Inch Nails (Trent Reznor on vocals, Chris Vrenna on drums, Richard Patrick on guitar and James Woolley on keyboards) playing inside high, caged walls while hordes of angry men assault the exterior of the cage. The band is eventually accosted: Woolley is lifted off his feet by a suspended man and Vrenna, Patrick, and Reznor are grabbed through the sides of the cage. At the end of the video a brief scene shows men storming into the cage with bats and clubs.

The video for "Help Me I Am In Hell" shows a man in a room filled with what appear to be flies. He ignores them whilst eating food and drinking wine (on one occasion it is clearly shown that flies also enter his mouth when he eats). This video was not in the original leak, therefore it is unknown whether this is the version which is meant to be in the film.

The final scene of the "Happiness in Slavery" video clip. The torture machine can be seen in the center, and in front of it, Trent Reznor

The video for "Happiness in Slavery" shows Reznor screaming from inside a prison cell and performance artist Bob Flanagan entering a room and strapping himself into a machine that appears to rape, torture and kill him. After his death, the machine closes up, and the camera pans to a bed of flowers underneath the machine seemingly being fed the man's remains, which have been ground up into a paste-like substance. Reznor then enters the room and begins to perform the same rituals as Flanagan, presumably to be killed by the machine as well. The video was, perhaps inevitably, banned by music video channels worldwide.

The film ends with a video for "Gave Up" (different from the one on Closure), which is even more graphic than "Happiness in Slavery" in its on-screen portrayal of violence: the young man is shown being flogged and attacked with a blowtorch before being castrated with a razor blade and dismembered with a chainsaw. The camera-work closely resembles that of an amateur snuff film.

Reznor once said that the Broken Movie "...makes 'Happiness in Slavery' look like a Disney movie."^[1]

[edit] Availability

The movie has not been given an official commercial release, thus adding to its mythological status in alternative culture. 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.^[2] 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.

In August of 2005, a new copy of the movie was distributed as a remastered DVD image, spread via BitTorrent. 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."

Most of the video (except for "Gave Up" and the interstitial footage between songs) was made officially available on the 1997 VHS release Closure and on the official Nine Inch Nails website.^[3] Reznor's comments about the movie have been cryptic at best, although he makes no secret of the film's existence. On Fixed (the remix CD for Broken), remixers employed a heavily processed sample of Flanagan's screaming from the "Happiness in Slavery" video as part of the rhythm in the track "Screaming Slave." On the Collected promotional 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.

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 an anonymous user, incorporating a significant upgrade in quality from "Broken 2.0." This copy of the film includes the 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."^[4]