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.