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.