The title of Derek Hayes and Phil Austin's 1985 animation The Victor is all about contradictions. Within context, it is explained in an acronym that is revealed in three separate stages across the narrative, as the action cuts intermittently to a computer screen indicating the successive phases of a sinister experimental procedure - "Violence Induced", "Control Terminated" and finally "Operative Reaction". The last of these phases is followed by a question mark, not present in the title, which plays a vital role in how we are prompted to make sense of the film's macabre developments. The operative reaction is the unknown being tested by the experiment, but the question ultimately raised has to do with who really wins in the end. Is there a victor to be had at all in this scenario?
Mixed in with this bitter irony is an incongruous dash of loving affection, for the title is also a reference to a British comic from Hayes and Austin's youth, renowned for its "boys' own adventure" type narratives, the art style of which their film was intended to evoke. The Victor is suffused with a warm undercurrent of boyhood nostalgia, which feels paradoxical, given the dystopian forces that prove as prevalent, lingering on the sidelines and pulling the strings from above.
The protagonist of The Victor is identified, via a montage of computer images shown in the opening sequence, as Jimmy Mullen, a pacifist who resisted conscription into the military and attempted to go AWOL. Now, he finds himself undertaking a mind-bending journey, from the shadows of a seedy bar-room to a distorted mirror version of the promenade at Brighton, guided by a mysterious rectangular light and bombarded with a flurry of nightmarish stimuli that repeatedly challenge his inclination toward non-violence. When his resistances are shut down, Jimmy discovers that he's capable of unleashing a quite devastating rage upon anybody who threatens him. By the end, it's revealed that Jimmy was the subject of a horrifying military program designed to convert the pacifistic into brutally efficient killing machines, by loading them up with doses of violence-inducing drugs. The rectangular light he's been responding to all this while was the window from which his captors were observing as he made his way around the testing field. The adversaries he's been fighting and destroying one by one were none other than his fellow soldiers, including his best friend Vince, who meets a bloody demise when Jimmy momentarily fails to recognise him and hurls a pool ball at his temple.
The Victor was the second film created by Hayes and Austin's company Animation City (the first being the wordless fantasy short Skywhales). Commissioned by Channel 4 as part of its early commitment to giving the UK animation industry a much-needed shot in the arm, the film took inspiration from a 1970s World In Action documentary about the testing of the drug BZ on US soldiers (in that regard it has thematic parallels with the 1990 Tim Robbins thriller Jacob's Ladder), but also a personal anecdote concerning a friend's recent experiences in combining two lots of prescription drugs, which resulted in hallucinations. The prescribing doctor's response - "I wondered if that might happen...I haven't used those two drugs together before" - became dialogue inserted verbatim into the mouths of one of the characters, revealing as it does authority at its most offhandedly slapdash. At just shy of 15 minutes in length, the project was an ambitious one and faced some budgetary hurdles, but paid off handsomely when the completed film proved popular in the festival circuit and received a theatrical run at the Scala cinema in London, attached to the comic horror feature The Return of The Living Dead. Its Channel 4 debut was highly belated (Clare Kitson, in her 2008 book British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor, speculates that the film was initially withheld on account of its theatrical release, after which it simply had trouble securing a suitable timeslot), but finally saw the light of day - or, more accurately, the dimness of night - in 1989, going out at a 23:30 airing when few children were likely to be watching.
Jimmy's backstory is laid out in the beginning through a series of predominantly still images, offering glimpses into his life pre-conscription and establishing not only his ordinarily peaceful nature (he is seen sporting a shirt with the peace symbol and bearing an anti-war placard) but also that he was a highly sociable being, constantly surrounded by companions. Close scrutiny of these images is required to appreciate that the friends from his past are the same figures who'll be turned against him in his drug-induced nightmares; in the meantime, the synthesising of Jimmy's likeness with computer data foreshadows his impending degradation to the status of a machine. The blurring of fantasy and reality brings an uncanny element of déjà vu to the proceedings, a memory that feels ready-made and ready-distorted, and is as troubling for us to pin down as it is for Jimmy. In the film's strangest running gag, Jimmy is harassed by a figure who seems oddly familiar in more ways than one - he bears a striking resemblance to public schoolboy Billy Bunter, a character created for weekly boys' story paper The Magnet in 1908 (his ability to morph into a mutant bat is a total liberty on Hayes and Austin's part), but if we're attentive we'll see that he's actually a monstrous parody of one of Jimmy's former schoolfriends. In spite of the bleak subject matter, there's a playful, anything-goes quality to the fantasy sequences, in which references to British popular culture are abundant (eagle-eyed viewers will notice that Jimmy walks past the TARDIS on the promenade at Brighton, the Fourth Doctor having paid a then-recent visit to the town in the episode "The Leisure Hive"). These references, along with the funfair amusement-style scenarios navigated by Jimmy (a camp haunted house in which the perils become all-too hairy, a dizzying helter skelter and a dodgems track that transforms into a missile-heavy war zone) are suggestive of innocent diversion gone feverishly wrong. The action sequences, meanwhile, are staged with a boldness that evokes the frenetic escapisms of contemporary arcade games (at multiple points, Jimmy decries the inducement to fight as participating in a stupid game), with the consequences proving painfully real even as the details are illusory.
The surreal visuals and action set-piece might be the most immediately striking things about The Victor, although for my money its most impactful moments are to be found in its quieter intervals, which convey a sadder and more subdued sense of how Jimmy's once-earnest world has been corrupted and turned against him. The significance of Brighton to Jimmy is not made totally explicit, but we might notice that the steps on which he stands while surveying the deceptively peaceful promenade are the same ones he was glimpsed upon in one of the opening images, where he was seen palling around with Vince and friends in what was evidently a more carefree juncture in their lives. A balloon bearing the RAF roundel floats silently overhead, a signal of the military surveillance that is already omnipresent, as Jimmy muses on the likelihood that Vince (already brutally dispatched) will be in his usual spot, chatting up the waitresses at the local cafe. This was the ground on which he forged his community. It seems as solid as ever, but is only a few movements away from collapsing into a pit of hallucinatory carnage, where his erstwhile allies are recast at best as leering bystanders or, at worst, as direct assailants. Jimmy is plunged into his nightmare with the expressed warning that he is now on his own; the experiment plays out by not merely heightening his inclination to attack, but by eroding his notions of belonging, prompting him to destroy the very people he would, under more auspicious circumstances, have greeted as his own.
Hayes has shared that he approached the film with an interest in exploring what was the more innate human characteristic - aggression or cooperation? Is Jimmy to be seen a fundamentally peaceful individual whose nature has been forcibly inverted by external forces, or was his pacifism solidified by his sense of social connection, something that breaks down the instant he loses that camaraderie and has only his primal urges to fall back on? The obliterated of Jimmy's social identity is cited as a necessary factor in transforming him into an ultra-efficient killer, through the joking observations of one of his captors' lackeys that he couldn't expect to find much affinity with the protestors in CND after unleashing such a violent display. Jimmy's repeated howls of disbelief make it plain that he is having difficulty consolidating these conflicting impulses, much to the perturbation of the army general overseeing the procedure. For as futile as Jimmy's objections might seem while he's fastened to a gurney and barely lucid, they represent a spanner of unpredictability within the works that his captors have been unable to weed out, troubling to the general because it indicates a battle not yet won.
The Victor makes its final point by turning the viewer's perception of violence back on them, with the startling climactic development where Jimmy breaks free of his restraints and his drug-induced demons become solid and real. It amounts to a thorough rejection of the calmer interlude following the experiment, in which rationality appeared to have taken a hold and we were offered a logical explanation for everything Jimmy had been through. Not only do Jimmy's fantasies spill over inexplicably into the external world, but his captors' own reality becomes fluid and unstable, with the gun that fails to protect them from Jimmy transforming into what looks like a clew of little pink worms. The barrier between reality and hallucination has been eviscerated, leaving the whole world to make its inevitable descent into the realm of full-blown nightmares. Given Jimmy's implied destruction of his captors, it might be tempting to read the outcome through a redemptive lens, with Jimmy rising up against the oppressive forces that had manipulated him into killing his allies - it does, however, come at the expense of his pacifistic nature, which has by now been completely annihilated, to the extent that he no longer expresses resistance or disbelief over his actions. Jimmy has surrendered to his violent impulses and become the ultimate killing machine, so potent that it cannot be contained, with the black abyss that consumes the screen pointing not to triumphant rebellion, but to the coming oblivion. Jimmy's is a battle lost, and it is through an unseen side effect that he takes out everything else along with him. The victor? This is a game that was always fated to have no winners. Jimmy was right to not want to play.
