“You Used to Be a Genius”: White Aesthetics and Thematics in Salinger and Anderson

Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) is implicitly metatextual in its aesthetic presentation. That Anderson chose to present the film as though it were a novel—complete with audiobook narrator, chapter headings, and illustration—immediately situates The Royal Tenenbaums within a literary narrative tradition for which mere cinematic convention is not sufficient. This framing of the fabula also necessarily evokes the intertextuality of the film’s narrative: it borrows liberally, in terms of content, aesthetics, and thematics, from the Glass family short stories by J.D. Salinger. Indeed, it has been theorized that “Wes Anderson might be the closest cinematic heir to J.D. Salinger, both aesthetically and thematically.”[1] But this intertextual “genealogy” is not without its problematic historicity: the ways in which class, whiteness, and privilege function in these diegetic worlds point to how whiteness constructs the cultural canon, and also to how sincere, hermetic recourses against ironic artistic engagements with race and privilege in American society are counterproductive, albeit not lacking in a safe, bourgeois form of emotional depth.

            Much scholarship has already focused on the striking contextual similarities between Salinger’s Glass family and Anderson’s Tenenbaum clan. Morgan (2010) and Browning (2011) particularly delve into the contextual connections between both families. Among these are the uncanny parallels of the Glass and Tenenbaum children described as former child geniuses (or at the very least, “wise,”), Jewish-Irish familial dysfunction, and the tenuousness (indeed, glass-like fragility) of sibling relationships.[2] Anderson and Wilson’s screenplay borrows liberally from Salinger’s world-building. For instance, “[b]oth Zooey and Margot, in their respective narratives, are seen reading and smoking in the bath, and are likewise interrupted by their mothers”; similarly, Franny and Zooey’s relationship, while it does not reach the incestuous heights of that of Margot and Richie, is marked by an emotional intimacy explicitly set in stark contrast to the female figure’s unfulfilled romantic and sexual life (as embodied through the impotent idiosyncrasies of Franny’s boyfriend Lane and Margot’s husband Raleigh).[3] Margot’s characterization thus seems to be the compound personification of both Franny and Zooey’s existential crises. Additionally, Richie Tenenbaum’s suicide attempt is evocative of the successful suicide of Seymour Glass. Both brothers are troubled by an inability to articulate their emotions in a world that cannot condone their psychosexual mores (read: Richie’s incestuous urges, Seymour’s (perhaps) latent pedophilia). In one last uncanny detail that has sealed the deal for many critics and scholars, daughter Boo Boo Glass’ married name is none other than Tannenbaum.[4]

            The Royal Tenenbaums additionally inherits the Salingerian thematic preoccupation with the existential anxieties of familial dysfunction, nostalgia and loss, and the (knowingly frivolous) particularities of upper-class urban culture. Of course, with the visual medium comes a more poignant and sensuous ethic of nostalgia that pervades The Royal Tenenbaums. A lengthy opening flashback sequence, multifarious non-diegetic music, and a retro visual style contribute to this sense of temporal outmodedness if not total ambiguity. Thus the Tenenbaum children’s entire adult lives are necessarily part and parcel of a sense of loss of youth and innocence, which the mise en scène accordingly perpetuates: “Biding their time in a fairy tale New York, the family appears suspended by their own memories, and live in a city that comes to the viewers as a dream, or how we envisioned that particular metropolis as children.”[5] Yet the film’s aforementioned “textuality” implies that, for all the affective power of their aestheticized, filmic milieu, the Tenenbaums are storybook characters, just like the Glasses. Furthermore, Salinger’s and Anderson’s are naturally thrust into conversation because the content of their narratives has a keen impact on the cultural reception of their work. As Morgan writes,

Both [Salinger and Anderson] have been called overly precious, overly privileged and overly adoring of characters living in a vacuum of nostalgia and sweetness, dislocated from reality. Well, yes, and no. In the case of yes, and especially regarding Tenenbaums, like Salinger, their dislocation, their family of pressed butterflies is part of the point. And that’s part of the artists’ inspired, delicate and funny tragedies. Salinger […] found a loving and suitable, though inadvertent protégé in Anderson. Anderson’s nostalgia and inertia and style is the substance, and all of his movies leave one with a bittersweet pain.[6]

To regard both artists’ work as twee or divorced from sociopolitical “reality” is thus at once an admission of the intertextuality and intertwining thematic concerns of their aesthetic projects, and a reductive argument. Morgan’s assertion that Anderson’s “style is the substance” may not speak to Anderson’s status as inheritor of Salinger’s modes of storytelling, but at least points to how the aesthetics of loss or the mere suggestions of emotion are not far off from the mainstream, irrevocably bourgeois, accessible poignancy of Salinger’s body of work.

            But the bourgeois, white-centric imperative on culturally acceptable art forms taints the historicity of both Salinger’s and Anderson’s works. Salinger’s stories necessarily center on upper-middle-class sensibilities and are intended for a postwar white audience. Similarly, most of Anderson’s canon (excluding, perhaps, The Grand Budapest Hotel, with its European flavor and international appeal) both relies on and perpetuates culturally recognizable images of Americana. There is thus a sense that both Salinger and Anderson speak to a wholly American ethos: their stylized portrayals of disenchanted individuals—especially those who exemplify both wealth and intellect—comment on the flimsiness of postwar American structures of success and fulfillment. Dean-Ruzicka (2013) furthermore contends that The Royal Tenenbaums’ production design extends a structural project of exploring identity through whiteness “in terms of how the white characters are cast against a background that explodes with color.”[7] But that the realization of such is repeatedly portrayed through narratives of (white) familial melodrama and aesthetic outrage still reinforces the notion of white failure as a metonym for postmodern cultural breakdown.

            Returning to the ambiguous Franny-Zooey-Margot-Richie paradigm as it pertains to both texts’ convoluted explorations of spirituality points towards the ethical problem in Salinger’s and Anderson’s 2001 portrayals of class privilege and white ignorance. Franny Glass’s internalization of grief and trauma, leading to a crude clashing of the Jesus Prayer and Zen Buddhist enlightenment, is nearly laughable in its bourgeois ignorance and orientalist overtones. (Indeed, Eastern mysticism is actually a major constitutive feature of Salinger’s Glass works, and has roots in Salinger’s own anecdotal experience.) But where is Margot Tenenbaum’s spiritual awakening? The film, like her brothers, mostly treats Margot as an aesthetic object devoid of too much emotional depth; even her languor, in Paltrow’s portrayal, is at times reduced to caricature. Indeed, the uniqueness of her sartorial aesthetic, her deadpan line deliveries, and her idiosyncratic habits are all hallmarks that rob Margot of a fully realized agency: even after a montage of Margot’s various sexual trysts, which are symptomatic of her existential disenchantment, Raleigh can only dwell on the simple, fantasy-shattering fact that “she smokes.”[8]   

Franny’s crisis of identity in Franny and Zooey, meanwhile, is not only more effusively physicalized than Margot’s, but leads to a crude sort of spiritual (re)awakening. Indeed, “[m]ost of Anderson's films are about spirituality,” but where The Darjeeling Limited, for example, employs a distinctly Western gaze towards Eastern modes of faith and redemption, The Royal Tenenbaums’ relationship to spiritual awakening is more secular, if not completely dubious. Of course, in borrowing themes from Salinger, “that postwar bard of adolescent spiritual longing,” Anderson prefigures Darjeeling’s mystic trek to self-fulfillment by still subtly “retracing the couch-bound journey of Franny Glass, who desperately repeats a Christian mantra in the hopes she’ll receive grace and end the spiritual hunger that keeps her lingering on the outer edge of childhood.”[9] Margot and Richie both seem to strongly embody both the essence of Franny’s crisis and the stoicism of her brother Zooey’s ennui. In her lack of agency—Margot’s cool is nothing like Franny’s spasmodic fussiness—the Tenenbaum daughter necessarily emblemizes a flatter, more canonical Judeo-Christian icon. Her status as a fallen Eve, or venerated Madonna, through her characteristic merging of whoredom and aesthetic divinity, is perhaps a sanitized Andersonian response to the more inscrutable mystique of Franny’s manic and convoluted appeals to Easternization.

            What is paramount in this reading is to come to terms with how Anderson secularizes the aesthetics and thematics of Salinger’s postwar radicalism. With its Eisenhower-era aesthetics and conscious invocations of nostalgic images of Americana, The Royal Tenenbaums necessarily hyperrealizes the Salingerian tradition of portraying ostensibly white crises—on the economic, social, personal, and spiritual levels—through sanitized tropes that stave off, in their preciousness, any sense of non-normative subjectivity or globalism. But whereas Salinger’s work—subtly racist, classist, and heteronormative warts and all—has become entered the canon by virtue of its place in literary history, Anderson’s film chooses to appropriate that canonicity, and thus uncritically exemplifies and aestheticizes a literary vocabulary without regard to the concerns to a new millennium. 

            That both Salinger’s and Anderson’s works are often grouped together and collectively classified as canonical texts that smack of a singularly American longing proves problematic, especially when the elements that constitute their intertextuality are the same dynamics that indeed structure normative, elitist, white-centric narratives of cultural and personal disintegration. The only saving grace, here, might be the elements of self-reflexivity that pervade these texts, although the very presence of these is rightfully disputed. Although the characters in Salinger’s stories are arguably more aware of their privilege and are thereby more effusive when it comes to acknowledging the absurdity of their personal calamities, the narrative world they inhabit is largely apolitical; Salinger’s pen resists plummeting into didacticism.[10] Meanwhile, just as Salinger does not reach radical, über-reflexive heights with his postwar prose, Anderson’s films, too, have been classified as emblematic of the New Sincere recourse to postmodern irony.[11] Despite their infamy for intertextuality and pastiche, Anderson’s films remain firmly in a contemporary filmic movement of original creative storytelling that is not explicitly self-ironizing. Thus the tonal dissonances of the typical Andersonian tragicomedy arise not from satirizing the tropes of melodrama, but from their stoic avoidance of engaging with any sort of moral virtue. At the very least, The Royal Tenenbaums lacks a critical engagement with its own status as the inheritor of the Salingerian, white aesthetics of longing, and this blind spot is at once a product of the film’s now-datedness and Anderson’s problematic directorial myopia. One wishes that for all its groundbreaking elements, Anderson’s oeuvre will expand its scope of self-criticism and necessitate a more nuanced discourse on race, class, and privilege. Rather than merely inheriting the Salingerian ethos, perhaps the next of Anderson’s films can stave off the dangers of hermetic narratives in favor of reforming the canon as profoundly as Salinger’s texts once did.

Citations 

Browning, Mark. “Salinger Reloaded: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001),” in Wes Anderson:

            Why His Movies Matter, 33-51. Westport, CT: ABC-CLIO, 2011. Web. 19 Jan.

            2017.

Dean-Ruzicka, Rachel. “Themes of Privilege and Whiteness in the Films of Wes

            Anderson.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 30(1): 25-40. 2013. Web. 21 Jan.

            2017.

MacDowell, James. “The Andersonian, the Quirky, and ‘Innocence,’” in The Films of

            Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, ed. P. Kunze, 153-169.

            New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Morgan, Kim. “Six Stories: Salinger Inspired Cinema.” The Huffington Post.

            TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc., 1 Apr. 2010. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.

Norris, Chris. “Onward and Upward with Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited.” Film

            Comment 43(5): 30-32, 34, Sept./Oct. 2007. Web. 23 Jan. 2017.

The Royal Tenenbaums. Dir. Wes Anderson. Touchstone Pictures, 2001. DVD. Web.

Salinger, J. D. Franny and Zooey. 2010 ed. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1961.

——————. Nine Stories. 2010 ed. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1953.

——————. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.

            2010 ed. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1963.

[1] Morgan.

[2] Browning, 36.

[3] Browning, 35.

[4] Nine Stories.

[5] Morgan.

[6] Morgan.

[7] Dean-Ruzicka, 32.

[8] Tenenbaums.

[9] Norris.

[10] Browning, 38.

[11] MacDowell, 160-165.

Synthesizing Bodies and Images in “The Orphanage”

The unsettling collision of both bodies and phantasms in the contemporary horror film opens up the possibility of thematic ambiguity: Of what should we truly be scared, ourselves or that which haunts us? Yet the terrors of “real” trauma and the culturally familiar scares of the ghost story, in their intersection, can reveal more subtle truths that end up mutually sustaining both types of narratives. This gives way to more nuanced, interpretive exhumations of illness and spirituality. In The Orphanage such complex conclusions are reached through a complex and interweaving thematic exploration of mother-child dynamics and the visual politics of surveillance.

            The film’s treatment of exhumation elucidates how corpses function within the narrative as sites of knowledge. Exhuming bodies in post-Francoist Spain is seen as a means by which “a legalistic framework could be applied to the traumatic past,” following along a legacy of Nuremberg-inspired physical, judicial, and scientific practices. (Renshaw, 10) In the world of The Orphanage, these practices are micro-realized in a more intimate and fantastic context, relocating questions of trauma to the mysterious past of a small, seaside Spanish milieu. The coal shed on the property is, therefore, the orphanage’s own grave, like the one in Priaranza del Bierzo, where “the children always go past running,” because “there are dead people there.” (Silva, qtd. in Renshaw, 18) Similarly, Simón’s alleged “imaginary friends” possess a keen knowledge of their oppressed bodies, and likely try to channel Simón in order to exhume them. In linking the games of children to a profound awareness of death, The Orphanage posits a world in which juvenile or playful vulnerability accesses a deeper understanding of collective and personal trauma. If games can forerun tragedy—as they do in precipitating Tomás’ and the orphans’ death—then they also might provide a template to comprehend and undo the work of cruel and systematic oppression; they are the subversive sites of knowledge production where memory can “irrupt” and reanimate the past. (Wilde, qtd. in Renshaw, 20)

            Simón thus represents a link between the world of bodies and that of ghosts, in both his clairvoyance and having a preternatural sense of danger and death. He is a vessel, however, only insofar as he is himself closer to death than most. In the mystical logic of The Orphanage, Simón’s HIV-positive status imbues him with his clairvoyance; similarly, the ill medium Aurora possesses an intimate sensitization to spirits. Such is an acceptable theme in the horror genre. But the exhumed bodies that Laura eventually uncovers are nearly ground to dust; they are formless and irredeemably dematerialized. (1:14:24 - 55) It is telling that this exhumation is not the film’s climactic moment. Instead, the film’s final act challenges both Laura and the audience to do the tougher work of eking out the phantasms of the past. Indeed, “[t]he systematic investigation of the traumatic past can serve to allay anxieties around memory and forgetting,” charging Laura’s “ghost hunt” with the mores of her anxieties and shame. (Renshaw, 11) Increasingly, the world of The Orphanage becomes a projection of Laura’s psychosis as she delves deeper into the realm of the fantastic. As such, the audience is duped into a sense of false hope at the film’s climax: briefly forgetting Aurora’s invocation that “believing is seeing,” we are convinced Simón has been found alive in the cellar. (1:29:12 ) But the subsequent realization that he has been dead for months jars us back into a rational understanding of the tragedy that has befallen Laura. This moment of world-slippage reaffirms how the film often toggles between bodies and spirits—reality and images—often in cruel interplay. 

            On one level, perhaps Simón and (to a lesser extent) Aurora are the vessels through which the traumas of the past might be redeemed. Yet it has become clear that Laura’s own emotional and psychological journey, though augmented by the conventions of horror, transcends the cause-and-effect clichés intrinsic to literal exhumation. As such, The Orphanage is less concerned with understanding cultural or political history than it is with conceptualizing personal memory and the halos of shame and guilt that can emanate from these more individuated mnemonic practices. For instance, Laura’s anxiety over her failure as a mother thematically intersects with notions of bodily shame and infection. This undercurrent is thematically realized through the HIV subplot; Simón’s illness and how it informs his relationship with Laura ultimately structure the film’s emotional thrust. Though it is never explicitly revealed whether Simón was infected through a late birth mother’s breast milk (or otherwise), the implication is that he, too, is hereby rendered an orphan. In this sense, all of Simón’s short life is informed by maternal failure: infected by the woman who was meant to protect him, Simón will never come to see that this failure will be symbolically reenacted by Laura. The audience will.

            Furthermore, their shared “orphan” status connects son to mother on a level that ultimately sustains and distracts from the trite contours of an otherwise generic haunted-house plot. In confronting Laura about his adoptive status, Simón at once exposes his otherworldly uniqueness and underscores the film’s more visceral explorations of what constitutes “proper” motherhood. The child reveals to Laura that it was indeed his supposedly imaginary friend who told him the truth about his origins. (26:12) In his outrage, Simón is unfulfilled with the image of domesticity that his adoptive parents have cultivated for him. Laura cannot fill the void of the birth mother, for “all attempts to make up for this loss, to find a substitute for the lost thing, intensify the sense of loss, emphasise all the more painfully that the substitute is not the object at all.” (Phillips, 3) It is therefore interpretively important that Simón, in his way, attacks Laura, for by the same logic, “the bad self can easily, in extreme hate or envy or in the glory of an omnipotent rage, just destroy the only hope of survival, the good object on the outside.” (Phillips, 4-5) This moment thus manifests his symbolic lodging in a paranoid-schizoid state. In this sense, Simón’s anger over his adoptive status can viewed as both a juvenile tantrum or as a profound moment of defiance against Laura, who symbolically represents the failings of the biological mother and is unable to be seen as a “single unity” to the obstinate Simón. (Phillips, 5)

            But was Laura ever truly whole? Her initial motivation is to act not only as a mother to Simón, but to a whole slew of “special children” over whom she can exercise benevolent control. (14:08) Yet as we have seen, the movie’s climax hinges on a visceral realization of yet another maternal failure: it was indeed Laura who ensured her son’s death by inadvertently locking him in Tomás’ secret room. Could it be that Laura was too busy deconstructing herself, in a personal state of paranoid-schizoid wishful thinking, in order to protect Simón from harm? In doing so, we have seen how Simón recognizes her overlaps with the failed birth mother, although it comes at the price of the late epiphany that “attacks on the monstrous bad breast are [...] ruinous for the good one too, good and bad now integrated.” (Phillips, 5) Laura thus integrates the bad and good breasts, though by this reading it does not appear that Simón symbolically enters into a “proper” depressive state until he is reunited with her after death and they can forgive one another through their commitment to live with the orphaned children.

            Like the world of A Tale of Two Sisters, the close cohabitation of marred bodies (Laura’s trauma, Simón’s HIV, the children’s corpses) and actual phantasms blurs the distinctions between the real and the fantastic. This coexistence serves to complicate the plot and confound the uneasy viewer, but it also reaffirms a dialectical treatment of sight versus belief. The human body may very well be the “definitive corpus delicti of historical crimes,” but this only resonates, at least for Renshaw, in the context of the “political, juridical,” and affective management of traumatic history. (Renshaw, 15) It is thus no mistake that Benigna’s crimes are documented on video—her cruelty, and the bodies of that cruelty’s victims, are rendered imagistic artifacts that are used by the characters to help deconstruct and understand a theretofore hidden history. Furthermore, as in Aliens, the voyeuristic attention to images and sound during the medium sequence thrust the audience into an intradiegetic awareness of the terrifying pleasure of the image. This inculcation of fear and paranoia through media is not a concept alien to Spanish cultural memory; in the Francoist regime,  “[c]ivilians were subject to psychic violence in the form of print and radio propaganda that consisted of highly elaborated and obscene descriptions of violence.” (Renshaw, 23) If The Orphanage deals alternatively in moods, modes, and worlds, then the universe of trauma and oppression is that which can be seen—and permanently documented and committed to a screen.

            Both ghosts and bodies are thus the objects of the audience’s surveillance, on multiple levels. The putrefying, ill, or irredeemable corpse and the ghost are both iconic images within the horror canon. As such, The Orphanage presents a singular narrative while also imagistically narrating the intertextual elements of its production. Perhaps this is why The Orphanage ultimately possesses a more redeeming ending than the similarly mind-bending A Tale of Two Sisters: the former film does not depict a hermetic narrative, but rather a host of histories that all collaborate to make symbolic claims about motherhood and horror that are suffused with a distinctly Spanish preoccupation with historicity. But the film ultimately moves beyond a realm of logical understanding or mediated perception. Therefore, at the nexus of Simón and Laura’s mutual reconciliation after death is the harmonious regrouping of ill bodies away from the traumas of the corporeal world and, after a while, audience surveillance.

            It is easy to conclude that The Orphanage is in and of itself a mediated text that explores notions of familial trauma. The film achieves this end through at once conforming to and manipulating popular signs of psychological horror. Yet through the application of Renshaw’s (2011) reading, we can see how the distinctly Spanish Republican practice of exhumation, as a mode of knowledge production and post-traumatic reckoning, lends practical thematic overtones to the film’s treatment of illness and family dynamics. As we have seen, Simón’s illness renders him uniquely apart from the imagistic world of the living. That his mother fails to provide protection from that world and can only redeem herself in a more phantasmatic and fantastic realm evinces that a universe of mere bodies cannot offer Laura salvific redemption alone. All shades—bad and good, bodily and spiritual—of mother and son must join together in an uncanny space, where the intrinsic exhumations are largely hidden to the living. All along, the film has shown how “a demand to accord due process to the dead can also function as a demand to accord due care and attention to the survivors or mourners.” (Renshaw, 12) As such, a deeper sense of serenity lies beyond infection, surveillance, and the contentious memory politics of the exhumed body.

Citations

Bayona, J.A. (2007). The Orphanage (El Orfanato). Spain: Warner Brothers Pictures de

            España. Film.

Phillips, J. (n.d.). The Return to Melanie Klein. Print.

Renshaw, L. (2011). Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the

            Spanish Civil War. London: Routledge. Print.

Make Room for Mom: America and Maternal Sadism in “The Manchurian Candidate”

The Manchurian Candidate presents a sort of motherhood that complicates the very term, especially given the film’s unabashed inversions of the idyllic nuclear family. Jackson (2000) posits that the film’s keen “mix of family sexual dynamic with cold-war political ideology” is underexamined. (34) He claims that the film’s focus on the “cultural failure” brought upon by gender-role reversal implies broader cultural reflexivity regarding toxic political culture in America as well as “the dead-end of androcentrism.” (Jackson, 2000:40) In Jackson’s sociohistorical reading, Raymond’s submissiveness to feminine and feminized authority figures (including Gaines and Jordan) could “explain away” his status as a functionary within a Communist conspiracy. Yet something more fundamental regarding his relationship with his mother lurks beneath the surface, without necessarily stripping the film of its political reverberations.

            Raymond’s inability to defy his mother, his milquetoast presentation, and his constant admissions of how “unlovable” he is all collaborate to make an unorthodox male hero. What Raymond lacks in masculine aggression and suave determination, Marco has in spades (or diamonds). On the filmic level, then, The Manchurian Candidate subverts audience expectations in its failure to provide a fully realized male protagonist. Raymond might be the object of pity, but he is an emotionless cipher, whether under hypnosis or not; Marco is the nuanced victim of his own PTSD but ultimately will lack the narrative motivation to foil the conspiracy in which he too is ensnared. This absence of a “proper” leading man (that is, an appropriate and “sexually healthy” male protagonist as understood within the context of normative narrative structures) symbolically reaffirms Mrs. Iselin’s diegetic centrality.

            Similarly, the film’s mise en scène alludes to Mrs. Iselin’s omnipresence and status as controller. During Senator Iselin’s bombastic, McCarthy-esque speech, the unmoving profile of Mrs. Iselin dominates the foreground, implying her mastery over the proceedings. (20:00) But the creeping horror of this moment is not that Mrs. Iselin is truly in control, but that she is the puppet master of a full-fledged political operation that is mediated by screens. Mrs. Iselin’s political ambition must always be displayed through calculated and imagistic manifestations of her power and wealth (her husband’s televised outbursts, her costume party, her plots to assassinate the presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention...) A product of the rise of contemporary mass media, her ambition is a consequence of cold-war grandstanding and distinctly American jingoism that is a far cry from the oft-invoked “party of Lincoln.” (Jackson makes note of these constant visual associations between the Iselins and iconic renderings of Lincoln, that male icon of the GOP. (2000:35) Notice how his portrait is temporarily “blinded” by the foreground lamp when Mrs. Iselin instructs her son to no longer be associated with Josie, “that Communist tart.” (1:12:00))

            Indeed, The Manchurian Candidate posits an America in which Cold War paranoia converges with the rise of mass media. These overlap in one potent theme: control. To have an ambitious woman literally “behind the camera” as such reifies the viewer’s sexist presuppositions of who should and should not have such control over matters of the state. Yet, we, like Raymond, are hypocritical in this revulsion: we, too, should “[n]otice how [we are] always drawn to authority.” (16:15) Therefore, if Raymond is the prototypical masochist—and so are we, caught under the spell of the film’s hypnotic intrigue and subconsciously eager to be dominated—Mrs. Iselin is necessarily the sadist. In the hypermasculine world of warfare and political corruption, this role reversal implies its own sort of gender trouble. But it also presents an uneasy vision of the horrific potential of motherhood and its impact on the psychosis of the son.

            The film’s opening sequence presents Raymond’s uneasy characterization. His distaste for deviant sexuality is typified by his awkward encounter with the two lovers he encounters in the Korean brothel’s entryway and his rejection of a clingy prostitute. (0:55 – 1:19) American flags adorn the entryway to the brothel; one conveniently covers the “Bless” on graffiti that reads “God Bless America,” an image that prefigures Lincoln’s “blindness” in the Iselin parlor. (1:20) “It’s just our Raymond, our lovable Sergeant Shaw,” a sarcastic soldier quips with the cynicism of an unimpressed mother (1:24). Raymond is at once obeyed but also infantilized—the soldiers continue to dub him “our Raymond,” as if he, too, is a body to be shared between them. A prostitute fixates on “Movie Life” magazine as the men file out on Raymond’s orders; in the same frame, more graffiti on the wall spells, “Home Sweet Home.” (1:51) In the thick of war, the soldiers have carved out a space for themselves—a microcosm of capitalist exchange (of female bodies, alcohol, and cigarettes), crude reflections of Hollywood glamour, and homosocial bonding. They perform the social and economic systems of their “home sweet home” and indulge in pleasures of the flesh. Raymond is here to break up the party, and in doing so dismantles the aura of liberated Americanicity the soldiers have built up for themselves.

            Before her introduction, however, Mrs. Iselin’s omnipresence still lingers in this opening sequence. In an environment that is unabashedly sexualized and adorned in the images of (“bless”-less) American imperial ambition—complemented by glitzy Hollywood magazines—Raymond might as well be entering his mother’s bedroom. Like Psycho’s Lila Crane excavating the contours of Mrs. Bates’ boudoir, Raymond could easily turn around and find that the true horror in this room is himself—the manifestations of his fears and desires, implanted in him by a domineering mother. Internalized hatred thus functions as a major element of Raymond’s own sexualized masochism. Mrs. Iselin purports an unawareness that the communists would choose Raymond to be their pawn, yet in this sense, Raymond is the perfect tabula rasa. He is a veritable cipher—psychologically broken and yet integral in what hypnotists would call his “suggestibility.” But how suggestible, too, are the image-obsessed Americans after the formal war has ended? The America in The Manchurian Candidate is nothing more than a collection of signs—Polish caviar made up into an American flag; senators limboing and dressed as Abe Lincoln. Even devastating political rhetoric draws inspiration from bottles of ketchup. The film thus posits an America in which images of patriotism are reduced to mindless consumption and frivolous folly; how does this diverge from the Korean brothel? Where does Mrs. Iselin’s bedroom end?

            Apparently, nowhere, as it pertains to Raymond. The sexualized dynamic between Mrs. Iselin and Raymond comes to a head in her final speech to him; she notes her superiors will be “ground into death for what they did to you.” (1:53:24) The unsubtly sexualized, sadomasochistic domination of Raymond culminates in an awkward kiss from his mother—perhaps a kiss of death, a gesture that soon Raymond will subvert by destroying both his mother and himself. This act of sacrifice is predicated by a false sense of hope and liberation, emblematized by Marco’s reminder to Raymond that “they can’t touch you anymore. You’re free.” (1:39:40) This “they” is dubious. The implication that to be touched by your mother is necessarily to be probed by “the enemy” and countless others constitutes a failure of the maternal that opens Raymond up to a sexualized vulnerability that is not simply “Communist,” but “other.”

            Similarly to Psycho, The Manchurian Candidate establishes a mother-son dynamic that is subtextually structured around “unhealthy” sexual impulse and impotence. Yet unlike the figures of maternal horror in the inter-female relationships of Coraline and Mildred Pierce—which too invoke sexualized imagery—Mrs. Bates and Mrs. Iselin are not self-multiplying hosts or parasites. They are, instead, omnipresent manipulators of their sons, subtly guiding the hands of destiny and mobilizing the destruction of the (male) bodies around them in a manner that is necessarily informed by sexualized self-hatred and mutually assured destruction. That the chilly and demeaning mother figure must mobilize the male bodies—often the male bodies they themselves have produced—to achieve their murderous desires is worth examination. Perhaps this mechanism of control is a comment on the disempowerment of women within 20th-century social politics: Only the men can truly effect change, and in the hubbub of cultural and “family failure,” mothers are those to blame. (Jackson, 2000:34) But I posit that the sexualized dimension of this domination also lends an important qualification to this mechanism. The mother-dominatrix ekes out a kind of pleasure from her submissive son that is at once transgressive and rousing: it channels a desire that the “proper” heterosexual partner cannot provide.

            Yet The Manchurian Candidate strives to say more about the sociopolitical context of its production than it does succeed in simply displaying another reductive stereotype of the monstrous (in this case, incestuous) feminine. What is most frightening about the film’s narrative progression is that until we are certain that Mrs. Iselin does indeed have Communist ties (that she, in turn, manipulates to her own ends), her hold over Raymond might as well be its own type of sexualized hypnosis unrelated to a far-flung political conspiracy. Like the media mogul she is, Mrs. Iselin develops her brand of allure and dominance, thereby ensuring that she fulfills her own nefarious (and possibly apolitical) motivations and subverts the mechanisms of control she has inherited from a male-dominated sociopolitical milieu. The Manchurian Candidate hereby constructs a villain who, barring actual patriotism, is the consummate American: image-conscious, ruthless in pursuit of her desires, and domineering to a fault. Mrs. Iselin mobilizes all of the worst aspects of American social and political culture to advance a necessarily sexualized sense of control over her progeny. By this reading, Jackson’s interpretation is not invalidated, but merely complicated: the film’s degradation of the feminine “brings the androcentrism of Cold War culture to an impasse,” not simply in its paradoxical ramifications for the nuclear family, but also in its indictment of America as a national breeding ground for Mrs. Iselin’s particular brand of maternal horror. (Jackson, 2000:39)

            Consistent with Jackson’s opining, the link between Mrs. Iselin’s villainy and the film’s satire of American politics only makes sense in the context of Cold War handwringing. Perhaps Mrs. Iselin’s alluring (albeit masculinized) femininity does not necessarily inform her distinctive brand of American cruelty, but it does link eerie psychopathologies of motherhood with a critique of unabashed Americanism that informs Cold War paranoia in the first place. Indeed, perhaps “the real danger, the real fear” is made manifest in Mrs. Iselin’s transcendence of both gender and politics (Jackson, 2000:39). But that her insidiousness can be read as a metonym for the evils of American culture confers a deeply disturbing, psychoanalytically informed, new meaning to “home sweet home.” 

Citations 

Frankenheimer, J. (1962). The Manchurian Candidate. United States: United Artists. Film.

Jackson, T. (2000). The Manchurian Candidate and the Gender of the Cold War.

            Literature/Film Quarterly, 28(1):34-40.

“Manageable Parts”: Oriental(ist) Staging, Femininity, and Language in “The Letter”

On the surface, William Wyler’s The Letter (1940) engages in pure and unapologetic oriental minstrelsy. Edward Said’s critical writings on orientalism (1978) might suggest that such mediated portrayals, like the academic field, of orientalism innately “characterize the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage” through generalizing images, tropes, and stereotypes (Said, 71). Conversely, the minstrelsy present in The Letter is not necessarily overt or even mocking, and therefore only perpetuates preexisting racial and ethnic stereotypes as defined by Western mass media. However, ways in which twentieth-century notions of “the Orient” are subverted and challenged in the film give The Letter a thematic and contextual edge, particularly when realized through a feminist lens. Here the Orient is established as a space wherein exoticized forms of Western transactions and interactions—particularly, those that do not involve spoken language—may take place between women, thus undermining the very Western values they crudely reflect.

            In the same way that Said likens the practice of orientalism to a “staging” of Eastern tropes and archetypes by Western thought, so do the characters in The Letter seem to be “staged” to some end. Said claims that the fixity of “images” of the Orient allows them to stand in for larger, “diffuse” ideas that are inscrutable to Western sensibilities; in the same way, the “characters” of the Orient embody different tropes, and thus roles, that satisfy the European’s imagination of the oriental stage (Said, 66). This “insensitive schematization” and archetyping of the Orient both diminishes the nuance and complexity of Eastern cultures while imbuing the idea of them with a sort of staging or performativity (Said, 68). Leslie herself spends a great deal of time performing, establishing herself as one who inhabits different roles within the orientalist paradigm. Leslie’s ability to perform and stage herself according to the situation reinforces the notion of fabrication, which is in turn reflected by her needlepoint work with silk. Such a preoccupation with fabrication and creation is evocative of Said’s claims about the origins of orientalism, which is itself a constructed discipline, a “textual universe” of both books and “mimetic artifacts” (Said, 52). Even more compelling about Leslie’s own constructed existence is that it is easily disguised by her femininity. Matters of role switching in the universe of The Letter belong to women, and Leslie is the epitome of this manipulation of her femininity, to the ignorance of the men around her. (Leslie can even change her outfit as quickly as she changes roles; Joyce merely figures that she could instill such feminine, domestic prowess in his wife by “[teaching] Dorothy how to do it.”) In addition, her silk work is simply considered a feminine pastime, the kind of mundane practice associated with domesticity. However, Leslie is not so trapped in a vicious cycle of performance as she is ensconced in her non-oriental, Western privilege, which allows her to construct an aura that can manipulate her femininity. In the orientalist paradigm of staging and performance, Leslie uses all of the tools she can—her presupposed passivity, her femininity, and her Western advantage—to become any “type” but the oriental.

            Contrastingly, both the minstrelesque oriental aesthetic and Leslie’s performative manipulation are shattered by the characterization of Mrs. Hammond. The widow is not so much the convergence of dual worlds (“West” and “East”) as she is the subversion of both. The film’s portrayal of natives is reinforced by stilted language and positions of subservience: Ong plays jovial lackey to Joyce, Leslie’s servants (albeit one) are unbending in their loyalty, and Chung Hi is a disturbingly uninspired Asian stereotype. Indeed, these characters merely “[speak] through and by virtue of the European imagination” (Said, 56). Most importantly, however, they speak. In contrast, Mrs. Hammond’s formidability comes from her lack of language. Her inability—or her refusal—to speak English is the source of both her power and her obscurity. On the surface, this absence of language is either a reductive or critical allusion to the silencing of women, European or not (or both), in colonial-imperialist contexts. In any case, the stoical Mrs. Hammond’s relative speechlessness imbues her with strength and allure. Mrs. Hammond thus embodies the European’s image of the Orient: “the exotic, the mysterious, the profound, the seminal” (Said, 51). To this end, why is a Eurasian woman the ultimate oriental figure in the film? She is mixed-race and thus challenges any sense of West-versus-East dichotomy. However, on a more profound level, Mrs. Hammond is the “most” oriental figure in that she is the most like—and unlike—Leslie. In this sense, Mrs. Hammond’s characterization possesses more nuances than it may appear; she is not merely Leslie’s “complementary opposite” (Said, 58). If Leslie is the epitome of Western deflection and constructed reality, Mrs. Hammond is both a reflection of Leslie’s feminist self-sufficiency and an actualization of a wholly oriental mystique.

            Two important transactions between Leslie and Mrs. Hammond illustrate the intersections between questions of orientalist staging, femininity, and language. The “Chinese quarter” to which Leslie and Joyce venture to retrieve the letter is portrayed as exotic and mystifying, and a hubbub of economic exchange of “oriental” goods; this is the stage of the first transaction between the film’s two central women. The expressive staging of the women here unsubtly favors Mrs. Hammond, the mistress of this particular domain. She stands above Leslie as if on a pedestal, conspicuously dominating her. This mise en scène both imbues power unto the inscrutable widow, while also visually reinforcing that only she, as both a woman and as an embodiment of the oriental mystique, can see through Leslie’s role-playing. In an assertion of this authority and wisdom, she demands, via a translator, that Leslie take off her veil—her disguise of choice in this latest role-play. Herein, the orientalist paradigm of roles and types is exposed for what it is: a product of the European imagination of the oriental, one that Leslie (usually) can manipulate by using her femininity to set herself apart from it. Here, however, Mrs. Hammond has the power—she is both the feminine and the obscure that, through the conviction of her silence, refuses to subscribe to any construction or paradigm. What would in the West be a benign, capitalistic exchange—a letter for some money—is instead a life-or-death transaction between two women, where wordlessness replaces the language of exchange, undermining the legitimated “vocabulary” of discourse that belongs to Western notions of the Orient (Said, 71).  The second transaction of sorts—Mrs. Hammond’s murder of Leslie—is even more telling. The act is at once violent and supremely intimate: it takes place in the nighttime; Mrs. Hammond’s weapon of choice, the knife, contrasts with Leslie’s phallic gun used to kill her lover. But how this killing is “staged” belongs to the world of the oriental. Leslie almost knowingly walks into her fate, playing her final role as a willing victim, prepared for a final absolution. Her silent foray outside signifies this transition into the oriental world; she retreats from her party, a world of male-dominated social structures and Western notions of justice, to the outdoors, where she seeks a different sort of conclusion to her charade. This passing from the courtroom to the courtyard is an unsubtle dramatization of “the distance and difference” between Leslie’s “Old World” and the new one she is about to enter (Said, 55). The stabbing, performed by Mrs. Hammond, is swift and sacrificial. In a wordless, breathless moment, the two women once again abandon the constraints of Western language to convey another message to one another. The fate that Leslie has spun for herself spins out; oriental-feminist justice, as it were, is served.

            The spatial, social, and economic milieu of The Letter suggests that the oriental stage is one where these feminine, if not feminist, transactions can, and do, occur. Twentieth-century colonialist philosophies were manifested through hegemonic sociopolitical structures dominated by men and reinforced by antediluvian systems of justice (the unsubtle opening sounds of gunshots awakening the natives; the powdered-wig world of the male-dominated courtroom). However, the oriental stage becomes a self-positing entity that crudely reflects but ultimately rejects the Western mind that created it. Women and minorities might control fate here, whereas white men usually exert control through capitalistic exchange and feudal justice finds itself oblivious to and beguiled by Eastern mystique and the opaqueness of both white and “oriental” femininity. Here, too, the power of language is replaced with the inscrutability of performance. That a 1940 Hollywood film might have so progressively (and subversively) treated issues of race, gender, and power in this way is perhaps evidence of a sheer rejection of Western constructions of the Orient. Perhaps the Orient, in this film, is inevitably “orientalized,” but only to the effect that progressive notions are espoused most effectively on a regressive stage.

Surfaces and Significations in “Goodnight Mommy”

In Goodnight Mommy (2014), motherhood sits at a precipice between body and image that ultimately obfuscates and decimates these ideal types. For Halberstam (1995), the layering and amending of skin represents a clash of the body and its image, wherein “[i]dentity and humanity become skin deep” and  “surfaces” might lay “upon the other.” (Halberstam, 1995) The titular mother’s cosmetic surgery is interesting in this regard: it implicates the ambiguities of aesthetic transformation; did the mother mean to hide, tighten, excise, or fortify her skin? Symbolically, did she intend to transform the significations and meanings embedded within her changed appearance? The film compels us to, at first, view the mother as we would Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, whose attempts to make a life-size skin suit evince his identity crisis and the moment where “[d]epth and essence dissolve” into the muddled postmodern image. (Halberstam, 1995) But it becomes increasingly clear that the mother’s attempts to change her outward appearance are the consequences of a need to move on from tragedy and maintain an image of both glamour and domesticity that her professional and personal lives require. As such, the film’s thematic forays into religiosity and Gothic conceptions of identity feed into an aura of hopelessness that reaffirms the impenetrability of the postmodern layered image, wherein the true essence of humanity is kept under wraps.

            Halberstam’s meditations on skin graft well onto the film’s subtextual explorations of faith and religiosity. Halberstam cites flaying regarding the serial killer Buffalo Bill’s torture method of choice. (Halberstam, 1995) Yet as an image, flayed skin is inextricable from its religious evocations. The most famous representation of this is on display in Michelangelo’s religious tableau The Last Judgment: one detail depicts the martyr St. Bartholomew holding his own flayed hide. (See Figure 1) This visual is inherently ironic: it presents the self as replicable, but in the context of Catholicism, it also accurately reaffirms the binary between the earthly body and the heavenly, transcendent soul. Yet most interestingly, it is widely noted that Michelangelo embedded his own visage into the flayed skin. Similarly, we have seen how the film’s mother starts as a layered being—therefore at once polysemous and meaningless—and after her makeshift layers are peeled back, her actual skin is also peeled back by her mistrustful son. During the film’s torture sequences, visual allusions to flaying abound in the burning of a cheek, or the gluing together and cutting apart of lips apart. (1:13:20; 1:20:45; 1:22:45) Finally, the mother dies like a martyr: completely immolated. (1:33:41) From a structuralist standpoint, the torture scenes are both visually and thematically deconstructive moments. Elias’ impulse to peel away her skin is to get to his mother’s fundamental essence: perhaps to find the true “signified” under layers of unsatisfactory signification. It also jolts the viewer into confronting the dimensions of ambiguity with which the film has presented: after all of the doubt, dream logic, and promises of phantasm, what a gruesome wonder that we are now confronted with flesh and viscera.

            Halberstam also explores the ambiguities of modern Gothic horror, noting that a new “technology of monsters” must be posited to explain how Gothic narratives have diverged from their racist and anti-Semitic roots in postmodernity. Monsters, she claims, are ostensibly “meaning machines,” signifying “everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of human,” Gothic narratives thus “make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual.” (Halberstam, 1995) If the Gothic at once subverts and reifies normative understandings of human identity, then it always presents the threat of the Other, or the return of the repressed, to the white male body. A closer examination of Goodnight Mommy crystallizes this formulation and also presents a regressive presentation of the Gothic that also intersects with the specters of temporality. It is suggested that the mother wishes to return to a state of former youth and beauty, the standards of which are culturally set by Western aesthetic values. The mother thus stands in for the monster’s approximation of the ideal human form, marked as uncanny by its failure to conform to such (like the mother’s birthmark drawn on with makeup). The twins also represent a clash of the image and the body, and Lukas’ continued presence within the filmic space warps time to suggest the reversibility of his death. Elias and Lukas are uncanny reflections of each other, but they are also ciphers in their individual indistinctiveness. They are anti-monstrous: they are the white male visions of apparent normalcy that we are meant to trust above the obscured and abject mother figure.

            The film’s treatment of Catholicism is cynical at best, and ultimately nihilistic at worst. This treatment is mostly imagistic and subtextual: a crucifix is displayed on the twins’ bedroom wall; Elias prays to votive candles and a makeshift shrine to his “old” mother, promising to do “anything” to get her back. (48:03; 48:17) If the fractured family is only culturally Catholic—Christian in image—then other hints at the film’s critique of religiosity highlight the ineffectuality of faith and belief. As the twins enter the church in the desolate village, one makes sure to stop at the font of holy water and bless himself. (56:53) It is woefully ambiguous, perhaps intentionally so, as to which one it is—the twins are dressed identically—although the positions of the boys in the proceeding match cut allow the careful viewer to assume that it is Lukas. (56:58 – 57:32) This act calls back to Elias’ suggestion to his twin early in the film, when their mother is presumably ignoring the latter for some ambiguous wrongdoing: “You should apologize.” (9:36) Lukas, the phantasm and the figment, takes time to cleanse himself for his sins, and yet his blessing is all for naught: he is, in Elias’ projection, the veritable devil on the shoulder and wreaker of havoc. That he, not Elias, seeks redemption in this way—even while goading Elias on to eventually torture and kill the mother—highlights the inconsequentiality of spiritual absolution within the film’s narrative world. Indeed, the Catholic priest eventually deceives the children and returns them home rather than to the police; Elias’ attempt to “resurrect” the dead cat through preservation only provides an impetus for further domestic chaos; the Red Cross volunteers, performative in their charitable ministry, are manipulated into deafness and ignorance and fail to help the truly tortured soul in need.

            The Gothic cannot be presented without an implicit appeal to meaning. This does not automatically imply a critique of religiosity, but there is evidence that these are among the meanings and cultural significations the film endeavors to explore. Here the “domestic tableau of family life” exists at the center of the Gothic as genre—“the realistic is buried alive in the gloomy recesses of the Gothic.” (Halberstam, 1995) Perhaps a more nuanced understanding of Austrian cultural identity would augment the film’s treatment of Catholicism as a repository for its larger themes about the Gothic rendering of domesticity. (Does Goodnight Mommy exhume for Austria what The Orphanage might for Spain?) Religious dread thus hangs over the film, but only insofar as it reinforces an obfuscation of images and bodies through ritual practices of domestic space. Elias and Lukas, though uncannily Christian (Aryan?) in their performances of faith and victimization, ultimately develop into sadists, even indulging in slasher-film clichés as they enact violence against a female body. In becoming increasingly inhuman, they also delve further into a Gothic understanding of the ostensibly “human”—they inspect, torture, and prey upon the Othered monster who has seemingly invaded their domestic space, widening the chasm between the mother, in her bundle of ambiguous significations, and their self-collapsing milieu of white, male doubt and aggression. This is why the film’s twist is ultimately not so shocking as the torture and pathos on display in the tense third act. The film challenges us, although not subtly, to consider Lukas’ exhumed body—his phantasmatic presence—as a consequence of his tragic death and Elias’ and his mother’s diverging responses to it. Yet something about this bifurcated response, and how it ultimately ruptures the family for good, might complicate Gothic understandings of humanity in general: we garner sympathy for mother/monster, and not the true monster she has produced, the child rendered uncanny by his constant visual doubling and descent into anti-signification and the horrors of positive, not “negative,” identity. (Halberstam, 1995)

            Horror and horrifying elements aside, this reading suggests that the film might be a twisted love letter to the power of the image. Through the Gothic transformation of the family, the film tackles head-on the problems of representation and visualization in postmodernity. For instance, the film alludes to the glamour and allure of mass-mediated culture (the mother’s Google search results, the chic photographs of her silhouette covering expansive walls of the country estate), which are consistent with the film’s themes of sight and belief. We have also seen how prototypical Catholic indulgence in iconography represents a failure on behalf of spiritual authority to waylay the slurry of significations suffused within the physical body. Furthermore, even more troubling and pleasurable is how Goodnight Mommy presents the mother as image or template, but also as artist. She is both Michelangelo and St. Bartholomew: In her attempts to develop a new image of herself, the mother seeks to be both artist and art, ostensibly at her son’s psychological expense. In her compulsion to change her outward appearance in the service of “[holding] this family together,” the mother seeks to set the aesthetic, personal, and psychic boundaries for what will constitute proper domesticity. (16:36) This does not include indulgence in fantasy—that is, the wrong kind of image-making. Thus the mother represents the threat of the totalizing artist upon both the child and the film viewer. Who’s the sadist now?

            Goodnight Mommy ultimately presents a vision of not an idyllic nuclear family, but indeed a fractured and phantasmatic one. The film’s chilling final image of mother and sons staring into the camera with ghastly studio-portrait smiles mirrors the film’s opening sequence all too well. (1:35:50) Here the archival (or reproduced?) footage of a family (some eerie Von Trapps?) singing a syntagmatically sinister lullaby foreshadows how Elias, Lukas, and mother will be presented to us as a frightening fashion plate—an unsatisfying image of happiness and tranquility that can only exist within the viewer’s imagination. (:30–1:26) This imagistic treatment of the world—reinforced through iconographic allusions to Catholic hegemony, ritual, and redemption—is rendered especially unsettling in the context of the Gothic, what with its fetishistic treatment of bodies. Here Goodnight Mommy presents a vision of motherhood and family that is always toggling between images and bodies, ending in a distasteful transubstantiation from image to body and thereby to no body at all.

Figure 1

Detail from Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment. Public Domain.

Citations

Franz, V. and S. Fiala. (2014). Goodnight Mommy. Austria: Ulrich Seidl Film Produktion

            GmbH. Film.

Halberstam, J. (1995). Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity, in

            Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monstrosity. Durham: Duke

            UP. Print.

Tightrope Walker in Little Italy: Layers of Duality in “The Godfather Part II”

Through expert direction and cinematography, The Godfather Part II (1974, dir. Francis Ford Coppola) conveys complex emotional ideas through deft visual composition. One sequence in particular overtly portrays the oppositional forces that constitute the film’s most potent narrative (and extra-narrative) tensions, namely those between private identity and public influence, European tradition and American opportunism, and organized crime and conformity. The Feast of Saint Rocco parade sequence from The Godfather Part II constitutes a microcosm of the film itself, revealing the dualities and convergences both intrinsic to the movie and its production. Various visual metaphors convey these and other oppositional forces and thus comment on the “dual” nature of the film as a whole.

            The sequence takes place during a Feast of Saint Rocco parade in New York’s Little Italy in 1917. Vito Corleone (Robert de Niro) mobilizes to assassinate Don Fanucci (Gaston Moschin) amidst the outdoor celebration. The sequence, which begins roughly around 1:58:43, begins with an extra long establishing shot of the crowd celebrating on the city street. It is a rich tableau, lit with warm, nostalgic light; the frame is peppered with string lights, Italian flags, and more subtly placed American flags. Already, convergences between cultures are evident; the street is an inherently dualistic milieu.

            The camera’s treatment of Don Fanucci, juxtaposed with Vito’s pursuit of him, is significant in evoking the rising tension of the “chase.” The establishing extra long shot of the city from overhead cuts to a medium long shot of Don Fanucci. He proudly waves to passersby before admiring a vendor’s necklace—he is the social and economic master of this domain. Nevertheless, he comes to be but a speck in Vito’s field of vision. This visual evocation of a “hunt” here highlights the predator-prey dichotomy underscoring the chase. Later in the sequence, the camera shows an overhead wide shot of the street below, looked down upon from the roof by an out-of-focus Vito. Vito is shot from behind and blurred; as of yet, his intentions are just as opaque. A cut to a “street-level” wide shot of the building on which he stands cleverly matches an opposite perspective; wherein the shape of Vito dominated the last frame, the same predatorial man is now nearly unnoticeable as he retreats behind the roof’s edge. This cuts to a long shot of Don Fanucci paying homage by tacking some of his own money to a nearby post as the crowd applauds. The next frame is another long shot, now of Vito, as he slinks from rooftop to rooftop; the camera pans right as Vito follows the Don’s movement. Now Vito’s intentions are clear, as his movement coincides with the Don’s. An eyeline match to a medium long shot of Don Fanucci from above shows him progressing through the crowd as the camera follows. Don Fanucci’s world is beginning to close in on him, and the camera visually reflects this in its steadily confining frame of focus. The “high-low” dichotomy and other perspectival manipulations are exaggerated here to reinforce Vito’s expressive dominance.

            More profoundly, the visual matching of the “predator versus prey” pursuit is informed by undercurrents of classism, represented most overtly by the distinctions between “high” and “low.” As Vito expertly slinks overhead, bounding on rooftops and separating himself from the masses, it becomes clear that Vito is quite literally above the social life of the community, and thereby above the law. Vito’s literal elevation visually alludes to his transcendence of preordained socioeconomic strata in his ascent to power. Regardless of his immigrant status, the viewer knows that this is but Vito’s first major foray into crime, signaling his impending rise to the top of American social and political power by breaking the rules rather than abiding by them. In stalking his prey—the white-frocked, self-proclaimed king of the commoners—from above, Vito foreshadows his impending dominance over the community.

            The building of suspense between Vito and the Don is only exacerbated when this cat-and-mouse visual matching is punctuated by shots of the parade, the expressive significance of which takes on a meaning of its own. Following the first shot of the Don, the camera cleverly cuts to another sort of icon—the effigy of Saint Rocco. This wide shot places the statue at the center of the frame; it is the focus of the shot, as well as the sacred object of veneration of the men carrying it. Their heads occupy the very bottom of the frame; its bearers are subservient to the effigy’s symbolic power. Notably, however, the totem is festooned with paper money, presumed to be donations to the Church. Herein the convergence of two different (or similar?) institutions is made quite overt—those of the Church and the economy, bound together in one cogent symbol. The decking of dollar bills onto the religious effigy signifies an ironic merging of American capitalism and “old-world,” Christian tradition. This merge suitably manifests itself in New York’s immigrant community of Little Italy, a microcosm of tradition within a larger context of metropolitan capitalism and opportunism.

            Soon, however, in classic Coppolan, neorealist fashion, a nearby street stand dominates the frame. Obstructing the view of the statue, the totem is now partitioned; only Saint Rocco’s face is visible. This symbol of the Church seems to be liberated, at once suggesting the primacy of religious reverence over base capitalism. However, the next stand’s roof inverts the previous image: now, only the money at the saint’s lower half can be seen. Both of the visual metaphors get equal “face time,” and their ironic dialectical relationship remains intact. (Additionally, this expressive representation of distraction and obscuration—the lack of a clear view—mirrors the mindless crowd’s lack of knowledge of Vito’s quiet, methodical stalking.) The world of the Americanized festa is not ultimately one of just familiar reverence or newfound capital—it is one where these two concepts sustain each other.

            This cuts to two joining medium long shots of other members of the crowd; in once again interrupting the tense intimacy of Vito’s chase of the Don, the camera reveals a plethora of oppositions within the community itself. The camera follows girls dressed as angels, boys fighting with sticks, men in bowler hats, and women in veils bearing gifts, while panning right as the parade progresses. Herein the world of battle meets that of reverent serenity; American well-to-do fashion converges with the humble textiles of the “old world.” The street below is a cornucopia, at once mixing and obscuring symbolic markers of gender, class, and ethnicity, but remaining an altogether cogent entity—a unified marketplace of difference. If the ground level of Curtiz’s Casablanca is a gritty, deglamorized marketplace exchanging bodies and goods deflected against lofty ideals—the world of spires and heavenly aircraft and escape—then Coppola’s 1917 Little Italy is more complex. It is the combination of the European and the American, the lofty and the base, the sacred and the profane; it is Heaven and Hell.

            More importantly, the social, ritualized marketplace of the ground is a clear divergence from the narrative’s focus. In being above it all, Vito can both reject and embody this oppositional world, constituting a movement of his very own—not unlike a tightrope walker, carefully treading the line between these two worlds to which he now belongs. Later on in the sequence, the camera cuts to a long shot of Vito jumping from one rooftop to another with careful skill; the camera tilts down as he methodically descends, and pans left as it follows his movement towards the edge of a wall. This cuts to a medium panning shot of the parade below: young men carry Italian and American flags (juxtaposed ever so nicely, perhaps to suggest the Corleones in symbolic form). Vito seems to be plunging from his metaphoric tightrope into the convergence of dual worlds—the European and American—and yet remains above them both. In the next medium shot, another crowd-based “interruption,” women bow and bless themselves as clergy passes by. In the most oppositional juxtaposition of frames, the camera cuts back to Vito at the edge of the brick wall, engaging in behavior that is anything but holy: he retrieves a gun, wrapped in a towel, from behind it, and exits to murder the Don.

            The many dichotomies at play in this sequence—predator versus play, Europe versus America, the reverence of religion versus the crassness of capitalism, “high,” meticulous crime versus “low,” distracted ritual—are not at odds, or even in conflict, but dialectically dependent upon each other to produce a jarring effect in the viewer and hint at the ironic nature of the film’s thematic tensions. Additionally, all of these oppositions are encapsulated in the portrayal of dual sequences—the parallel threads of the parade’s progression and Vito’s stalking. In this way, Coppola’s unique brand of filmmaking is on display. Helmed by an American director inspired by European genre, The Godfather Part II is, at its core, a crucible of oppositional influences and themes. Most obviously, it is a commercial and critical hit, piggybacking off the success of its predecessor, a more intimate film with a smaller budget and less “global” narrative arcs. However, The Godfather Part II remains an artistic and personal piece for Coppola, an attempt to “have it both ways” amidst the oppositional poles of European and American aesthetics and artistic and commercial value. This is narratively mirrored in both Vito’s and Michael’s efforts to secure sociopolitical dominance through respecting tradition, origin, and family, whilst assimilating into and subverting modern American structures. Perhaps the parade is just Hollywood, or even America, then—a crude mélange of the religious and the economic, a showy series of rituals that dictate where vision, pleasure, and ideology should go, all to distract its spectators from the violent and unpleasant truths taking place overhead—or at least behind the scenes.

“Let’s Not Be Sticky About It”: Motherhood as Psycho-Intertext in “Mildred Pierce”

The portrayal of motherhood in Mildred Pierce proves complex, and therefore lends itself to a variety of generic themes and influences. As a mélange of film noir, family drama, and horror, the film’s intricate stylistic influences aesthetically reinforce the complicated psychologies behind Mildred’s status as a mother. It is through this lens that Mildred Pierce takes on horror convention—and transmutes it through other intertextual approaches to the notion of motherhood. Most importantly, the psychology of motherhood herein explored lay the foundations for an intertextual social universe in which indecorous economies of bodily exchange cultivate the growth of monsters.

            The film opens with some of the hallmarks of a hard-boiled detective story and film noir. Monte’s murder and Mildred’s subsequent suicide attempt immediately plunge the narrative into mysterious territory. The early dismantling of the idyllic middle-class lifestyle to which the Pierces are accustomed immediately deflates the sense that Mildred’s journey will follow a monomythic narrative convention. Indeed, the moment that Mildred slaps Veda inaugurates a tonal shift in the film: now fully immersed within Mildred’s retrospective account, the viewer is plunged into a social drama that is guided by the persistent mystery of the framing device but nevertheless interrogates the nuances of the Pierce family dynamic. The subtle undoing of logical temporal sequence signifies this thematic seizure. After slapping Veda for her insubordination, Mildred is immediately contrite; she states, “I’m sorry I did that. I’d have rather cut off my hand” (39:51). This phrasing functions doubly. Mildred at once expresses her shame for having violated her role as a proper mother—in very stark terms—and somewhat illogically denounces the act in retroactive terms. This strange use of the conditional perfect tense microrealizes a recurring theme: every act, word, or decision on Mildred’s behalf always comes too late. Soon after the fateful slap, she fibs to Veda about wanting to open her own restaurant before her voiceover reveals, “I didn’t know what to do next. But then suddenly, it hit me: Why not open a restaurant?” (40:19). As we see, at several critical moments of personal juncture, Mildred appears to be subservient to the disruptive contours of time that necessarily govern her existence. In the context of social drama, this makes narrative sense given Mildred’s gender and role as 20th century mother. Yet this forced dynamism also emblematizes the movement that Mildred must keep undergoing to keep up with the swirl of generic influences that omnisciently influence her behavior.

            I hereby maintain that Mildred Pierce is a film that unabashedly leaks its filmic intertextuality into its diegetic universe. There are moments where Mildred indeed reads through her own performativity as “mother”: when told by Bert that Kay is “twice the girl” Veda will ever be, due to her dogged loyalty to her mother, Mildred responds, “Maybe that’s why I keep trying to please Veda” (46:45 – 46:53). Mildred’s understanding of her motherhood is nearly self-reflexive in her need to be externally validated through Veda’s approval (and the wealth and objects the daughter wishes to acquire). But Mildred, of course, is more than just a mother. Mildred must occupy a multiplicity of roles, for a woman of her social position who grows ever more ambitious. Yet the tragedy of her multiplicity is that she must always exhibit the mores of each (filmic?) archetype, which are often in conflict with one another.

            These notions of performance and embodiment have important resonances with the conventions of the horror genre. The film’s melodramatic elements and class critiques inaugurate questions of domestic and social mobility for Mildred. Its foray into subdued psychological horror, however, both hyperextends and localizes these questions in graphic ways. The film borrows from the horror tradition in its treatment of the consequences of excessivity, and how these map onto femaleness and motherhood. The horror of losing both of your children, albeit in different ways, is terrifying enough to depict onscreen. The horror on Mildred’s face as Kay dies before here, shrouded in her private space of siphoned-off inoculation, reveals Mildred’s sense of complicity and culpability. This is later confirmed by an admission of her guilt: “She said ‘Mommy,’ and that was all. Oh, I loved her so much. Please God, don’t ever let anything happen to Veda” (57:10).

The world of Mildred Pierce is one of unending exchange, where both social and economic capital are transferred from body to body—often in exchange for bodies. It is in this sense that the film subtextually dabbles in a certain brand of “body horror.” Monte and Veda are both parasitic and perhaps their mutual compulsion to suck Mildred dry (so to speak) ultimately bonds them in a moment of inevitable (infantile?) sexual and narrative logic. They may as well be the “ravenous spiderlings” that swarm and consume the “mother’s body” and “eat her alive” (Schutt, 4). But the insatiable Veda, who seemingly lives for the express purpose of accruing wealth, is most saliently the monster of Mildred’s creation, as well as an extended appendage of herself. “Veda’s a part of me,” Mildred admits as if clutching to the last vestiges of motherhood after countless betrayals and losses that Veda herself has brought upon (1:26:25). Mildred is herein irrevocably caught up in a stale and dehumanizing system of exchange, all to impress and hold onto that which nourishes and destroys her: the monstrosity, Veda. She even gives up one-third of her business to Monte in exchange for marriage: “Sold. One Beragon” (1:35:45). The revelation of Monte and Veda’s affair truly consummates this theme of horrific melding: cloaked in shadow, their conjoined bodies at the bar seem to transform them into a singular, monstrous shape—the ossification of the financial and emotional threat they always posed for Mildred (1:45:44). This attaching of bodies visually contrasts with Mildred’s primary mode of relation to those around her: she deflects Wally’s advances; remains cold and sterile around her ex-lovers, Bert and Monte; and, most heartbreakingly, she cannot properly mourn Kay, whose suffering body to the end lied separate and apart in inoculation. Mildred is a tragically aloof figure, uninterested in or unable to engage with the monstrosities she breeds by virtue of her physical disengagement from them.

Of course, Mildred’s typical antiseptic treatment of those in her social universe is necessarily the inverse of her emotional overinvestment in cultivating grounds for the monstrosities around her to grow. She spoils Veda into bankruptcy and shame and constantly tries to win her insatiable favor. Furthermore, Mildred’s tryst with Monte results in the death of Kay, as if this brief descent into desire is “responsible [...] for the horror that destroys” a part of her (Williams, 574). Monte himself, a walking manifestation of excess (“I do too much of everything,” he declares) and laziness, is a veritable parasite, leeching Mildred for her finances and then selling his share of the business without her knowledge (51:28). For each kernel of love or empathy Mildred offers, she is greeted only with the demand of more nourishment.

Unmistakably, as a product of a male-dominated environment, Mildred begins to take on some of the harsher aspects of her oppressors: she begins to drink liquor, flat; her business deals and real estate acquisitions become more perfunctory, casual, stoic exchanges. Yet Veda, too, figures into this paradigm of masculinist oppression: as the “false” child, an uncanny “object external to [her] conception,” she fits into the role of the child-monstrosity, both resembling and rejecting her mother (Huet, 86). It so follows that Mildred’s increasing masculinization thus obfuscates the binary of mother-father dynamics and reproduces “strange figures” all around her (Huet, 88). On the level of psychological horror, time is once again undone: Mildred produces the monstrosities that destroy her sense of self (namely, Veda and Monte), but only by virtue that the anxieties and social pressures that led to this production were always already in place. Within the logic of horror, the only remedy would seem to be a psychological breakdown—perhaps a moment of mother-daughter melding that would signify this obscuring of origin. Interestingly, it is Ida, the bizarro-Mildred whose spinsterly ambivalence contrasts with Mildred’s emotional overextension, who inaugurates this idea of consuming one’s children: “Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young” (1:26:48). This is the point at which the film’s underlying sense of dread—reinforced by the viewer’s knowledge of the murder plot as a narrative frame—becomes a suggestion of eerie carnal catharsis.

Class critique and binary notions of sacred versus profane also figure into the psychological horror that Mildred Pierce posits. It is no mistake that Monte and Veda’s shame over their association with Mildred, who “works for a living” and smacks of “grease,” exhibits elements of both bodily shame and class snobbishness. “Grease” is herein metonymically coded as the mire of lower-class capitalist accomplishment, in deference to the spoils of name-dropping, estate-tax leisure. But it also possesses symbolic associations with toil, sweat, and viscera—the stuff of the human form, and the very substance of biological motherhood. Here, “grease” functions as the nexus of class distinction and bodily horror in dialectic, collaborative intertext. Mildred’s internalized shame over her status as a mother, goaded along by Monte and Veda’s elitist disapproval, occupies not just one generic form. Shame over motherhood, and how to inhabit that role, is made manifest in necessary intertext. But these thematic tensions that tug apart the filmic mood—mystery to drama to outright horror—do not necessarily function outside the diegesis. Perhaps the young Veda had it right all along, as if she could begin to see the shifting generic modes the film would take on: “I love you, mother. Really, I do. But let’s not be sticky about it” (33:50).

Mildred is fluid; she bends to the will of those around her in her social universe without losing total agency over her own cohesion. However, she is also a fecund, fertile foundation, and her status as eternal mother to the monsters she breeds ensures their sticking to this breeding ground until her resources are depleted. Mildred is both a solid breeding ground and the adhesive by which Veda, Monte, and even Wally can stick to it. This dual role symbolically reinforces the multifarious generic modes Mildred must occupy in both her lived reality (dutiful wife and mother, independent businesswoman) and in the filmic universe (victim of noirish melodrama, horror-film heroine). Pulled in various directions—indeed, pulled across divergent and interpenetrating genres—Mildred’s pride and shame over her status as mother prove inextricable from each other. Upon exiting the police station with Bert, the disenchantment Mildred feels—no voiceover or dialogue will provide us any more insight—must be a frightening mix of both vindication and horror, not unlike the self-destructive “sacrifice” of the black lace-weaver spider (Schutt, 3). Mildred is at it again: giving parts of herself over, with little benefit or reprieve. Mildred Pierce thus becomes a seminal piece in a larger conversation about the horrors of mother-daughter dynamics (observed previously in the twisted psychodramatics of Coraline) and how these can often lend themselves to a nuanced mix of generic traditions.

Citations

Curtiz, M. (1945). Mildred Pierce. United States: Warner Bros. Film.

Huet, M. H. (1993.) Introduction to Monstrous Imagination, in Gelder, K. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge.

Schutt, B. (2017, January 30). In Many Species, a Family Dinner Means Something Else. The New York Times. Print.

“I Wasn’t Like That”: The Convergence of Ill Bodies in Documentary Film

Documentary films necessarily exploit the human body. Those that deal with ill or afflicted bodies further this process by complicating the relationship between the implied “healthy” viewer and the undesirable “realities” presented on screen. Both Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997, dir. Kirby Dick) and The Crash Reel (2013, dir. Lucy Walker) portray the struggles of ill or afflicted bodies navigating personal pain in the face of the inequities of circumstance. However, they cleverly employ sequences that see these bodies coming into contact with other ill or afflicted bodies, destabilizing a clear sense of narrative trajectory. These vital encounters at once expand and complicate both the subjects’ and the viewers’ conceptions of illness and suffering. Comparative analysis reveals that while these sequences may expand the audience’s empathic concern for the subjects by forcing them to acknowledge the universality of illness and trauma, they also come to reflexively comment on the problematic voyeuristic dimensions of watching sick bodies converge. Simply put, these scenes point to the problems that arise from finding pleasure in pain.

The sequence in Sick where Bob Flanagan meets Sara, who also suffers from cystic fibrosis, at once functions to complicate and expand the viewer’s empathies towards Bob. Sara is established as Bob’s opposite: she is young, optimistic, and presented as a victim of circumstance otherwise living in a stable domestic environment, typified by her supportive mother. Mother and daughter are presented, through a series of close ups and medium close ups, as equals in Sara’s illness journey. Sara, it seems, has come to terms with her illness in a more measured way than the performative extremities of Bob’s art installations and masochism. These differences are immediately acknowledged in Sara’s talking-head introduction; in trying to explain what drew her to Bob, she echoes the incredulity of her loved ones: “What do you see when you look at this man? What do you see?” (51:27-51:31). These concerns reflexively point to the viewer’s questions about her fascination with Bob: what, indeed, will happen when these oppositional bodies, nonetheless stricken by the same illness, converge?

This convergence is presented as a shaky camera, fast motion sequence, favoring rock music to actual conversation (52:25-52:53). The viewer is deprived of actual dialogue, but the effect produced here suggests Sara and Bob’s meeting is a sort of whirlwind that defies simple description. Sara and her mother, here, at once stand in as surrogates for the audience—finally, we can see our own bewilderment with Bob’s lifestyle replicated on screen, as most of the sequence lingers on footage of Sara’s bemused mother toying with one of Bob’s large, black dildos—and also help to expand the frame of reference for how “illness” takes shape within the film’s universe. But despite her differences from Bob, Sara’s sense of empowerment is at once augmented by and distinct from Bob’s: as she asserts to the camera, “You don’t hear about people having diseases being like that” (53:36, emphasis added). Here Sara gives voice to a sort of interpretive motif already occupying the viewer’s mind: how can a sick body possibly act “like that?” In this way, Sara champions Bob’s agency and reasserts the radicalism of his lifestyle, but also legitimizes his approach to his sickness by acknowledging its otherness.

Sara is “like this” to Bob’s “like that;” she is intrigued by but not obsessed with BDSM culture, and at least presents herself as unmoved by thoughts of her impending death. Her measured assertion that “death’s never bothered me, really” is, initially, a relief to hear for the viewer; she is the attractive, uncomplicated type of sick body who will not burden us with her pain, despite the inevitability of her fate (54:18-54:20). However, meeting Bob has nonetheless influenced her outlook. Bob’s inspiring Sara to think more independently about her future renews a sense of empathy and optimism within the viewer regarding both parties and comes to prefigure Sara’s eventual departure away from the safety of domesticity. (For instance, a close up shot of the mother asserting that “it wasn’t the S&M that attracted her” zooms out to a close up of them both. The mother then starts, “Is it...?” but can not complete her thought (53:20- 53:26). For all of the narrative comforts that self-assured Sara and a demure mother provide, Sara’s meeting with Bob has led to a sudden philosophical disconnect.)

The hermetic sense of safety the viewer first felt when Sara graced the screen is shattered when Bob and Sheree accompany Sara as she gets her nipples pierced (1:03:42-1:05:06). Close up shots of the actual piercing formally evoke the too-close-for-comfort footage of Bob’s more severe sadomasochistic play, and suggest that Sara, one year later, has been drawn into Bob’s world of body-positive self-reclamation. As she exclaims with no shortage of irony, “I made a wish, and look what happened!” (1:04:17- 1:04:20). Notable, too, is how Sara’s mother is gone from sight. Whether or not she is standing in the background, monitoring the entire process, the camera portrays Sara as having independently emerged from a cocoon of innocence; she is, even in an innocuous way, symbolically joining the ranks of Bob and Sheree and reclaiming her own body through a practice of pain.

In The Crash Reel, former professional snowboarder and traumatic brain injury survivor Kevin Pierce meets Grant Russum, who has also suffered from a TBI. This encounter, denoted by subtitles as a part of Kevin’s two-year evaluation, comes at a critical time in Kevin’s recovery process. Just as the viewer expects good news or evidence of progress, the film takes a swift, unexpected detour. Over footage of Kevin and his mother entering the hospital, the voice of a doctor says, “This young man was similar to you” (1:03:07-1:03:10). Immediately, Kevin’s meeting with Grant is framed as a meeting of two afflicted bodies bound by mutual experience. The actual encounter, however, is excruciatingly uncomfortable. No extradiegetic music plays to dictate the viewer’s “proper” emotional response; instead, the white noise of the antiseptic space of the hospital stands in place of any affective cues. The camera adopts a mid shot of both Kevin and the wheelchair-bound Grant, while the doctor occupies the middle of the frame. When Kevin awkwardly shakes Grant’s limp hand and asks, “You hanging in there?” it produces further secondhand embarrassment in the viewer—was Kevin really expecting an answer (1:03:18-1:03:20)?

On a formal emotional level, there is a sense that Grant is interrupting a narrative to which he does not belong. Grant’s inability to speak or emote—his eyes merely dart around the hallway—suggests a crude fourth-wall break; he almost appears distressed at the prospect of being inserted into someone else’s filmic narrative. His presence thereby jars the viewer out of the direct-cinema solipsism that they could enjoy up to this point. A close up shot of Grant, who can only grunt due to his recent surgery, emphasizes the inscrutability of his emotional state, not to mention the deep scars on his shaved cranium. Furthermore, Kevin’s imploring Grant to “stay positive” and “keep working hard, and you’ll get better” are almost laughable as the camera once again cuts to a close up of the unresponsive Grant (1:03:50-1:03:53). The pathetic irony of the situation—Kevin’s clumsy encouragement, Grant’s inability to respond—is that the two bodies fail to achieve a connection through their mutual suffering.

Kevin’s swift posturing away from Grant after their encounter is especially telling, as he whispers to his mother, “I wasn’t like that. I wasn’t like that,” which echoes Sara’s assertions about her separateness from Bob in Sick (1:03:55-1:03:58). Like Sara does with Bob (at first), Kevin sees himself as not-that. The visual juxtaposition of the standing, mostly recovered Kevin with the mute, blankly staring, incapacitated Grant only heightens this sense of tragic contrast. This scene’s placement within The Crash Reel’s narrative highlights this disconnect: not until now does the film show Kevin having to interact with a body worse off than his own. It at once jars Kevin and the viewer; both must now contend with a newfound perspective of what it means to be an afflicted body. Ironically, Grant is still in the frame during the final mid shot; the camera lingers on him as if to suggest that the viewer must not forget him—he even captures a glance straight into the camera (1:03:59). The camera’s lingering on Grant jolts the viewer out of Kevin’s narrative—the supposed bravery of his recovery, the quasi- literary evocations of hero’s journey—and into a different, more complicated universe of pain and trauma. Suddenly, the viewer and Kevin realize, that merely one person’s pain might not prove so important in a whole world populated with afflicted bodies. Yet Grant’s story possesses no formula, structure, or teleology. A quick cut to an exterior shot relieves us from any further interaction.

Sara and Grant’s introductions offer more globalizing, although complicating, perspectives on both Bob and Kevin. In Sick, Sara acts as a sort of palate cleanser for the viewer: a sick body that provides a welcome reprieve from footage of Bob’s visceral sex games and art projects. Yet she comes to expand the viewer’s understanding of the forms an ill body can take and therefore acts as a conduit through which to sympathize with Bob. That the film suggests that Sara also enters into Bob and Sheree’s world of bodily reclamation and BDSM kink, as symbolized through her veritable “piercing” into the world of adulthood, also grants her an agency that goes against the viewer’s expectations of how an ill body like Sara’s “should” act. Grant, on the other hand, is a subtler force in destabilizing The Crash Reel’s narrative trajectory. He is a briefly featured yet profoundly impactful presence that acts as a narrative pitfall in Kevin’s journey. Grant, with his stunted development and inability to communicate, reminds the viewer that Kevin’s is but one journey to recovery. Another more seriously afflicted body briefly seizes the hero narrative perpetuated by long, emotional rehabilitation sequences, and the keen sense of Kevin-oriented empathy that has been cultivated throughout the film is immediately thrown off course. In both films, what were once provided as individual struggles come to populate a larger universe of sickness and pain. This is a dangerous game to play with the viewer: it expands the worlds through which the protagonists progress, but consequently complicates the viewers’ capacities for empathy. Why should we care about Bob, or Kevin, when their stories are just two illness narratives among millions?

In a sense, all documentary films must find eke pleasure out of pain. They purport to present the intricacies and blemishes of “real life” through others’ lived experiences but still must remain artful and entertaining. At the center of documentary filmmaking lie not only the consumption of bodies—the same phenomenon is observable across the entire entertainment-industrial complex—but the consumption of “real,” “documented” bodies. Sick does not suggest the essentialities of Bob’s orgasms or visceral performance art; The Crash Reel does not hint at the brutality of Kevin’s chaotic fall. They present them to the viewer as unadorned “reality.” These “meeting” sequences, then, are not easily interpretable or even remotely didactic. They merely portray the convergence of ill bodies that either results in radical union or radical disjunction. Indeed, Sick mobilizes Sara’s innocence into radical art-making of her own. We see her innocent passivity christened into a performance of pain as if to punish the viewer for believing she could possibly act as their surrogate. The Crash Reel produces a more complicated sort of empathy in the viewer: it places Grant at the intersection of Kevin’s recovery and the viewer’s own need for narrative fulfillment. His presence drives a wedge between himself and Kevin and symbolizes the viewer’s need to confront how Kevin’s journey diverges from Grant’s. Where Sara acts as a uniting force that spurns the viewer’s expectations, Grant is a dividing, interruptive force that still manages to implicate the viewer’s voyeurism. For the damage the viewer has done in consuming these ill bodies, Grant does not, and can not, reclaim himself from the viewer’s gaze: he can only, for a split second, meet it directly.

“Most Frightening Ghouls”: Clashes of the Freudian and the Feminist in “Rear Window”

Alfred Hitchcock filmed that which was not meant to be seen, per se; his films deal with the injection of deeply embedded psychological anxieties into quotidian social matrices. Paradoxically, his Rear Window is a film about voyeurism, and as such the perpetuation of its narrative is precipitated upon its employment of the male gaze. On a cinematic level, the film’s preoccupation with “seeing” immediately mirrors the filmgoing experience. But on many levels, the problematic explorations of viewing, sex, and power in the film seem to bring that which “should” be repressed to the narrative’s forefront. Herein the Freudian dimensions of the film are at odds with its feminist assertions. This ambiguity and dissonance evoke notions of the uncanny that in turn give the film a reflexive and sexualized psychological power over the viewer.

            In the film, Jefferies’ frame of vision becomes the audience’s on a quite literal level: the camera’s gaze invokes Jefferies’ viewpoint through wide shots and tracking sequences that follow his gaze across a convenient, compartmentalized tableau of neighborhood windows. This constructed surrogacy is most problematic when the viewer is informed of Jefferies’ psychosexual complexities, and how they might manifest themselves in acts of “seeing” that he shares with the viewer. To that end, his physical confinement and reliance on neighborly voyeurism for entertainment and intrigue is nothing short of masturbatory. A psychoanalytic reading of the film’s first act would suggest this, as his watching begins as a solitary and virtually shameful event. The cynical Stella reinforces this reading—she sees his voyeurism only as “trouble.” But Jefferies’ watching of particular neighbors—the buxom ballerina, the newlyweds consummating their marriage behind the drawn shade—also possesses an overtly sexualized dimension. It is a conscious visual invasion of domestic spaces that is defined by the fantastical and uncanny dimensions of what is not seen. If the “Hitchcockian blot” is a phallic agent that imbues the rest of the narrative with symbolic and multiplicitous meaning, then the tableau of the neighborhood is the blot writ large (Zizek, 90). The cutting off of heads by windowpanes, the closing of shades to hide sexual activity, the drawing of blinds to obscure suicidal acts—all of these acts of partial omission stand out in the once-open frame of vision, and thus lend the entire courtyard an air of uncanniness. The folly of the film’s establishing tableau is revealed—how could things have been so easily seen from one solitary gaze, and what is being omitted now instead? Herein lies the potential for uncertainty and, by extension, the possibility of sexualized stimulation.

            In being forced to identify with Jefferies (the film’s protagonist and, by extension, the film’s primary agent of perspective), the audience is already implicated as well, perhaps by Stella but mostly by the camera itself. What is not shown by the omniscient (and yet perspectivally confining) framing only calls attention to the erotic potential of the scenes from which the viewer is also barred. The viewer is thus artificially conspiring in a literal manifestation of the male gaze. Zizek notes that Jefferies, from the comfort of his social domain, observes “fantasy figurations of what could happen to him and [Lisa],” introducing the sexual dimension to his looking through the impasse but also consciously drawing attention to the imaginary implications of this observance (Zizek, 92). However, only when Jefferies and Lisa can finally both engage in the former’s thinly veiled voyeurism can they make a genuine, sexually charged connection. Wherein Jefferies was once alone in transmuting his sexual impotence into his masturbatory viewing of his neighbors, Lisa also channels her sexual frustration into engaging with Jefferies through the realm of fantasy, suspicion, and the “uncanny” (Zizek, 90). Notably, this continued, albeit mutual, “deflection” of desire still constitutes an indirect relationship between the two lovers. Feminist literary theory suggests that males’ repressed desire for one another is transmuted through shared association with a female figure. In a metaphorical treatment of this concept, Jefferies can channel his sexual impotence towards Lisa through the decidedly phallic (and thus male-oriented) conduit of voyeurism—the realm of desire that only evidences his psychosexual repression.

            In this sense, it is curious to view the characterization of Lisa through a feminist lens, in that this critical exploration might reveal how she both submits to and subverts the psychoanalytic structures in which the film engages. Initially, Lisa is no player in Jefferies’ erotic fantasies, but only a symbol of his repression that—logically enough—always returns. (Note her seemingly self-sufficient resolution after an argument to leave Jefferies forever, stating that he will not see her “for a long time...at least, not until tomorrow night.”) On this level, Lisa’s unwillingness to disengage from Jefferies—despite his distracted gaze—is merely a simplified show of her constancy. It also presents her in conversation with reductive stereotypes of the Hollywood leading lady. Her unabashed romantic pursuit of Jefferies lacks nuance; it paints her as the hyper-beauty who, in a keen disregard for the social or economic incongruity of their coupling, wants nothing more than to marry the schmuck in the wheelchair. Here Grace Kelly’s casting is highly reflexive; her status as Hollywood royalty, the epitome of mediated perfection, almost places her in the realm of the uncanny as the starlet is confusingly placed in the realm of a drab, quotidian apartment. To this end, it appears Lisa is destined to submit or, in her own mocking and euphemistic words, “take out a subscription to [Jefferies’] magazine.” Her initial investment in Thorwald’s behavior, after a period of justifiable doubt, constitutes this submission to Jefferies’ own sexually charged needs. Lisa must accept the fetishization, then, of the “watching” to begin to insert herself into Jefferies’ paradigm of desire. Their aforementioned collaboration in amateur sleuthing is not so much a sexual compromise as it is a feminist failure for Lisa to engage with Jefferies on her terms.

            Rear Window is unique in that its Freudian complications are not inherently concerned with a perceived feminine threat (Lisa) to what Zizek calls the “maternal superego” (97). Thus, Lisa’s role in the film serves to complicate, not simply constitute, its psychoanalytic levels of meaning. Ironically, Lisa’s entrance into Jefferies’ framed, phallic fantasy world—the conduit of desire—seems to undermine her sovereignty, but here she triumphs. Lisa enters Thorwald’s apartment on her own. She at once exercises an impulse that is at once beyond Jefferies’ control and within his world of the uncanny. She climbs the walls of the apartment building, she crawls through Thorwald’s window; her actions are performative, penetrative, and unexpected in that she is now interacting in a realm that was once only fantastical, or the surface-world of the Freudian tableau. Her play-acting in Jefferies’ framed world thrusts her into the realm of the simulacral, which ironically heightens Jefferies’ awareness of the physical harm that might befall her in that her actions are making the world more and more real. Jefferies, here, must disengage from his relatively objective status of observer, and actively participate in the fantasy with Lisa. Her arrest and Thorwald’s entrance into Jefferies’ apartment signifies this seepage of the Freudian realm into empirical reality, to the point where Jefferies’ own life is at stake. Only the self-sufficient actions of a feminist agent could catalyze this overlap; that is, catalyze Thorwald’s gaze matching to that of Jefferies’ (the viewer’s), and thus realize—make real—Jefferies’ desire (Zizek, 92).

            If Lisa’s shattering of Freudian constructs is a feminist assertion of sexual and personal authority, then all of Rear Window must be reinterpreted by virtue of this new “blot” on the film’s once-solid structural and formal foundations. Lisa’s subjugation, in line with Jefferies’ self-doubt and repression, is at odds with her eventual triumph. The ambiguity that arises from these conflicts of meaning evokes the nature of the Hitchcockian blot itself: a “‘pure’ signifier without signified” (Zizek, 88). If these two critical approaches to the film are fundamentally at odds, this clash only reinforces the affective power of the uncanny. The “meaning”—that is, the sexual excitement and the suspenseful terror—of the film is gleaned from the ambiguity and doubt that exists between these critical poles. The literal, perspectival gaze and the critical gazes with which Hitchcock provides his audience is an assertion of his power to objectify his audience. Indeed, he may be the one true authority in that he is the agent outside the film’s varying layers of constructed reality.

            What does it mean, then, to be objectified by Hitchcock himself? In establishing a power dynamic over the viewer, Hitchcock imbues the picture with a psychosexual dimension that transcends the narrative’s Freudian overtones. Is to watch the film to submit to an act of sexual aggression against oneself? The “double mirror play,” the infinitely reflexive structure of the repressed and its return in oblique and symbolically weighty modes, may manifest here in the form of circular, autoerotic impulse (Zizek, 90). If the viewer can transpose the gaze inward, then the horror is not only internal to the Hitchockian hero but also internal to that even further removed voyeuristic agent—the viewer—who cannot escape fulfilling the essence of his or her own declarative, definitive labeling of a voyeur as such. If the blot is on the viewer, then, “hereness” and “thereness” are actualized, realized, and gazed upon in radically new and subversive ways.

Gender Trouble in “Aliens”

Aliens (1986) presents visions of femaleness, and specifically motherhood, in multifarious terms that alternatively reinforce biological understandings of these concepts and hint at, but never truly fulfill their semiotic undoing. The film plays with notions of gender in its explorations of submission and spatiality, thus thrusting its unsettling images and themes back onto the viewer in a visceral manner and failing to deconstruct traditional signs of gender. The film’s inconclusive and often muddled management of gender makes it more like a Freudian fever dream than a definitive dismantling of the mores that define horror’s regressive politics in postmodernity. (See Modleski, 1986)

            Ellen Ripley’s distinctive look and demeanor are not merely androgynous, but agender; her efforts to survive transcend social expectations of how she should carry out her work, and this is reflected in her stark and simple visual presentation. Similarly, among the few women in the military outfit are butch and androgynous figures like Vasquez, whose macho posturing at once threatens and impresses her male peers. Vasquez is Ripley’s foil, stripped of the latter’s maternality (which therein confers onto her the possibilities of nurture and care which are themselves alien to a militaristic milieu). Therefore, Vasquez and Ripley are only subversive figures as long as they engage in male-coded drag. Their otherness (that is, their shades of maleness) is powerful insofar as it is not classically female or feminine; they are the butch mirrors of Reagan-era Rambos rather than existing outside the bounds of gender as binaristically understood.

            Indeed, Ripley’s status as female only begs articulation in expository moments of the power differential between her brand of heroism and the ineffectuality of the men around her—be they meathead grunts or suited corporate types. Men only function to doubt Ripley’s resolve or present barriers that often lead to disaster or further trauma that Ripley herself must experience. In the world of Aliens, men are only indispensable in that they resist Ripley’s own goals. These objectives are not coded as ostensibly female; they are instinctual and survivalist, and yet they are necessarily governed by the aesthetic and narrative logics of a sci-fi action thriller. Further still, to Burke, Ripley is merely “kiddo”; to a bureaucratic board of Weyland-Yutani, she is a manic mess not to be believed. (7:18; 10:49 - 15:11) In this sense, Ripley is only female—that is, not-male—insofar as the film must continue along its generic and aesthetic course.

            Male onslaught hardly ends in the boardroom. The aliens’ phallic shape only further reinforces the film’s subtextual presentation of the male as the vile Other, wherein the intrusiveness of the phallus represents a violation of the pure and good. Yet the male-coded wrath here does not discriminate across genders. The face-huggers, in their unique design that melds both yonic and phallic imagery, present a threat, particularly to the men of the outfit; Burke is taunted for finding “love at first sight” with one of them in the lab. (55:45) Furthermore, the film sets up the homosocial world of the Marine grunts as having its inherent dangers. In particular, Hudson’s swagger serves as the epitome of masculinist ego. He describes his arsenal of weapons, with which he and others will “protect” Ripley, with lusty fervor. (43:41) The arrogance of Hudson’s toxic masculinity foretells his outfit’s failure to eradicate the alien race with their phallic weaponry. Yet some phalluses on display in the film are also presented as the agents of salvation. In particular, the pseudo-“lovemaking” scene between Ripley and Hicks unsubtly portrays a healthier vision of masculinist confidence that is also symbolically generative—the “right” kind of violence, or perhaps mode of reproduction. Hicks “introduces” Ripley his impressive gun, “a personal friend” of his; he teaches her the intricacies of the weapon as she looks on and learns in fascination. (1:43:55) Paradigmatically, this sequence stands in lieu of an actual consummation—once again, the stakes of the plot act out the film’s sexualized impulse to subordinate Ripley and put her in yet another corner, especially in a moment where her female desire confers onto her a sexist sort of vulnerability.

            If Aliens presents Ripley’s brand of gender-bending heroism as the salve to the feminized men who cannot successfully protect themselves from harm, then the film’s moral-aesthetic project only serves to uphold a negatively coded conception of the feminine. This follows along Modleski’s observations that the violation of men in horror can still possess “feminine imagery” and “feminine positioning,” thereby denigrating the female—and the female viewer—in its treatment of violation as both terrifying and pleasurable. (292) Yet in the rare moments when Ripley does not face gender-based oppression, her androgyny still does not preclude her maternal instincts and success at nurturing Newt. Only she can coax the little girl into speaking, and her calm but firm attempts to clean her dirty face are almost resigned and blasé; she says straightforwardly, “It’s hard to believe there’s a little girl under all of this” with a flat affect that at once reflects her composure and her acceptance that she must—on top of everything!—play the role of Mother. (1:01:32) 

            Ripley’s status as a gender-cipher, even more so than the tough-as-nails Vasquez or the feminized Burke, is radical on its own. Yet the film’s parallel treatment of alien and human reproduction once again serves to articulate the salvific properties of Ripley’s femaleness. Newt’s bedside discussion of childbirth with Ripley—where she also voices fears over her dreams—immediately evokes Ripley’s nightmares, where she “delivers” the alien children embedded in her. In terms of the film’s narrative logic, this moment of pseudo-domestic bonding, which seeks to soothe both parties’ bedtime terrors, is almost inevitable: it at once offers a glimpse into the mother Ripley could have been for Amanda and articulates the stakes of the two characters’ survival. Yet the dialogue here also blatantly deflates the symbolic mystique of the aliens themselves. “Isn’t that how babies come? I mean, people babies?” Newt asks, speaking of the chest-bursters. (1:32:50) Discussion of Ripley’s deceased daughter follows. This moment of on-the-nose thematic exposition thus literalizes the sexual and maternal politics that the film had navigated in its subtext at the same moment it conforms to a sentimental narrative logic. Thus, the scene plays out an uneasy duality between potentially subversive reflexivity and a conservative vision of mother-child dynamics. At the same time that Newt accurately points out the film’s obsession with biological motherhood and sexualized imagery, she and Ripley share a moment of familiarity that smacks of military-family mutual reassurance. Perhaps this tonal awkwardness lends itself well to a more fundamental admission on the filmmakers’ behalf: Newt and Ripley share an understanding that is both coded as female and familial; this symbiosis is special because it exists outside of the worlds of warlike terror and, more importantly, encroaching men.

            The film presents Ripley as only ever a mother: her loss of Amanda, on a fundamental level, motivates her resolve to destroy the alien creatures. Aliens thus explicitly, and often effectively, depicts Ripley’s heroism as a stellar performance of post-partum revenge fantasy. The aliens are thus the symbols of the absent father—a gap Hicks will surely fill himself—who in return represents a threat to the social order and the “proper” family in his violation of the female; he is the impregnator of nightmares, not just throats and stomachs, and the root of Ripley’s maternal anguish. Yet the most aggressive alien of all is none other than the queen, who is at the center of a sinister fallopian network. The film does little to suggest that Ripley immediately identifies with this other mother, but it does present the reversal of the tender motherhood that Ripley herself wishes she could have embodied for Amanda: the queen’s egg-laying farm is parasitic, encroaching, unfeeling...it is also what Burke wanted for Ripley and Newt.

            The film’s treatment of spatiality and navigation illustrates how engagement in ostensibly female ways of knowing has its subversive potential. Newt is a master navigatrix of a birth canal-esque system of tubes and vents under the surfaces of everywhere she goes. These labyrinths are the visual counterpoints to Ripley’s forced entry into symbolic corners. The rigidity of spatiality and its relationship to male oppression is outdone by the organicity of the complex and interpenetrating system of vents and entrances. Indeed, the aliens themselves can only come through certain orifices and canals; their and the soldiers’ understanding of space is rational. Newt, Ripley, and the surviving members of the initial onslaught thus begin to understand how the more subversive routing through the ship—along a map as large as the space itself—confounds spatiality and scale in a way that symbolically avoids the determinism of unidirectional penetration. This is the film’s most progressive element: in counterpoint to both the male terror the aliens present and the vile, unnatural, manufactured treatment of motherhood the queen emblematizes, women can ultimately evade penetration-destruction through an intimate knowledge of the organ systems—the spaces among space—in which they are inevitably enmeshed.

            Despite its seemingly progressive presentations of gender, though, Aliens ultimately sets forth a more conservative vision. In amalgamating Ripley’s sometime-motherhood with her sometime-femaleness, and consigning its male characters to the invasive horrors of sexualized penetration, the film presents a denigration of the female (that is, the stereotypical cultural signs with which femaleness is most often associated) in its thematic and symbolic preoccupation with the consequences of submission. But as an unwilling victim to Burke’s sexualized coercion, male-dominated bureaucracy, and militaristic machismo, Ripley must constantly outdo her femaleness in an agender display of faux-progressive badassery. Such is the aesthetic project of the film, but this also complicates the film’s treatment of motherhood, especially considering its emphasis on the maternal as necessarily female. In championing the restoration of the nuclear family (pseudo-mother, -father, and -daughter prevail at the film’s end), the film outdoes its provocative potential in presenting Ripley as a mother by virtue of her biological and social imperative to perform in such a role. Only she can play the role of Mother, only because she only ever was Mother, and only because the film demands that Mother be backed into countless physical and symbolic corners before the contractions and carnage commence.

Citations 

Cameron, J. (1986). Aliens. United States: 20th Century Fox. Film.

Modleski, T. (1986). The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory, in Gelder, K. (ed.) The Horror Reader. London: Routledge.