Broken (informally known as The Broken Movie) is a 1993 horror musical short film and long-form music video filmed and directed by Peter Christopherson. It is based on an idea by Trent Reznor, founder of industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, and is a companion piece to the 1992 Nine Inch Nails EP Broken.
The film features songs from Broken and is essentially a compilation of its music videos (the exception being "Last" and the two hidden tracks). The film, just 20 minutes in length, weaves the album's 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" to set the conclusion of the film's frame story to the song.
Due to its extremely graphic content, Broken was never officially released, but was leaked as a bootleg which became heavily traded on VHS in the 1990s and more recently online. Reznor said that Broken makes the music video for "Happiness in Slavery", one of the tracks on the album, "look like a Disney movie".
While Reznor's comments about the film have been cryptic at best, he makes no secret of its existence, and the entire uncensored film is available to view when accessed by a hidden link on the discography page of the official Nine Inch Nails website.
Plot
The film begins with a scene of a person being executed by hanging. The trap door opens and the person drops with a serene 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, from the middle-class suburbs to, literally, the other side of the tracks into a shoddy industrial area. The car approaches a young man on the sidewalk. Almost immediately, he is suddenly seen in a basement, tied with a seatbelt to a chair and cleave-gagged while being forced to watch a television.
The music video for "Pinion" begins to play. It 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 is 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, pulls the victim's head back and forces him to drink some sort of liquid from a jerrycan. The middle of the music video for "Wish" is again interrupted by amateur footage, showing the victim chained to a table with a large wad of a dark substance on his face. As the killer is then seen putting his pants on, it is usually assumed that the substance is feces. After the video ends, the killer repeatedly rewinds to the part of the music video where Trent Reznor screams "fist fuck!" and begins to rub his fist.
The video for "Help Me I Am in Hell" shows a middle-age man in a room filled with flies. He ignores them while eating steak and drinking wine, despite the fact that the flies enter his mouth while 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, and is now generally believed (although not proven) to be part of the complete film, but was blacked out by Reznor in the bootlegged copy. Reznor later admitted to distributing different copies of Broken to his friends, each with a different part of the video blacked out so that he would be able to identify the culprit if it were to be leaked.
Following the music 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", which was banned by music video channels worldwide, begins. The most widely known part of the movie, it features performance artist Bob Flanagan stripping off his clothes and settling down on a machine that tortures, rapes, and kills him before grinding him up to fertilize a patch of soil beneath the machine.
The film ends with the music video for "Gave Up", which is a different video from the one on Closure as it is not an actual Nine Inch Nails video but rather the band's music 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 and then a blowtorch, after which the killer slices off the victim's penis with a straight razor, while footage of police searching through the basement and finding remains of previous victims is shown.
