Puberty, Pregnancy and the D-E-V-I-L in Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist: Part II

Editor’s Note: This is part II in a series  of posts on The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby.  For part I of the series, scroll down or click here.  As mentioned before the first post: I reveal many plot points from these films, so please watch them before reading.

Regan MacNeil’s bodyin The Exorcist and Rosemary Woodhouse’s body in Rosemary’s Baby are commandeered by male entities who exploit these female bodies for their own self-benefit. (If nothing else, these films prove that the devil is indeed a Republican. As if this were in question.) Regan and her mother find themselves abandoned by the male-dominated team of doctors who further abuse Regan’s body through a serious of invasive testing. Chris MacNeil must then turn to the Catholic Church, which although having a history and a present of oppressing women, sends priests to their home: men who are removed from the traditional male-as-sexual-predator-toward-women role. These men are supposed to exist asexually, and therefore are perhaps the only ones who can save Regan from her plight. Yes, I understand that Catholic priests have a habit of sexually preying upon young non-women, but we’ll leave that aside for now.

In Rosemary’s Baby, young, early-20s Rosemary Woodhouse realizes that her husband and the neighbors around her are conspiring to exploit her fertile body and maternal drives for their own ends. When she begins to piece together the puzzle, she runs to her original obstetrician, Dr. Hill, for safety. She does this at the behest of her girlfriends, who console her in the kitchen during a party. Rosemary’s doctor, Dr. Sapirstein, who comes recommended by her nosy and invasive elderly neighbors, has advised Rosemary to ignore the intense abdominal pain that she has been experiencing for weeks. When one of her girlfriends pleads with Rosemary to see a new doctor, another friend chimes in: “Yeah, some doctor besides that… that… nut!”

This kitchen scene comes as a welcome reprieve to the creepiness that completely saturates most of the film. Rosemary’s girlfriends are concerned for their friend’s well-being, are not dismissive of Rosemary’s complaints and ultimately are among the few benevolent figures in Rosemary’s life. But alas, the kitchen scene is a set-up. After this scene, Rosemary begins to exert some agency within her situation, and runs away from her husband, the neighbors and Dr. Sapirstein. She makes it to Dr. Hill, and in maybe the most harrowing scene in the film, Dr. Hill reveals himself to be more aligned with the male-dominated power structure than with the needs and concerns of his female patient. Once again, the creepiness of this film comes from the focus upon already existent aspects of our day-to-day lives.

Rosemary’s husband’s name is Guy, a name which points to the fact that this man is not an anomalous and horrible person. He is just your average “guy”, an unthinking man who, if given the chance, would sign away his wife’s body for his own selfish gains. At the end of the film, Guy offers these words in the form of an apology after it has been revealed that Guy allowed his Satan-worshipping neighbors access to Rosemary’s body so that Satan could impregnate Rosemary with the anti-Christ fetus (you know, your average marriage snafus): “They promised me you wouldn’t be hurt and you haven’t been…really. I mean, supposing you had the baby and you lost it? Wouldn’t that be the same? And we’re getting so much in return, Ro.” Guy’s flippancy toward his wife is truly terrifying and the viewer, at this point, has seen many signs of it. Even before we begin to piece-together the scenario along with Rosemary, we see Guy give his wife dismissive pats on the ass, pooh-pooh her suspicions as resulting from the “pre-partum crazies”, and most scarily, admit to fornicating with Rosemary’s unconscious body — an admission that we discover is a cover-up for what really happened.  After the otherwise lovely night when Rosemary is raped by the devil (something Rosemary doesn’t realize until much later in the film), Rosemary wakes up and this back-and-forth with her husband ensues:

Rosemary: I dreamed someone was raping me, I think it was someone inhuman.
Guy: Thanks a lot. Whatsa matter?
Rosemary: Nothing.
Guy: I didn’t want to miss the night.
Rosemary: We could have done it this morning or tonight. Last night wasn’t the only split-second.
Guy: I was a little bit loaded myself, you know.
Rosemary: You… you had me while I was out?
Guy: It was kinda fun in a necrophile sort of way.

Rosemary shrugs off Guy’s excuse for allegedly having sex with her lifeless body, which is a very scary thought in itself — even without the devil business.  This is to me is the scariest aspect of Rosemary’s Baby — the utter helplessness that Rosemary experiences in relation to the whims of men.

When Dr. Hill opens the door and lets in Guy and Dr. Sapirstein, Dr. Sapirstein has this to say, with Guy standing sheepishly at his side: “Come with us quietly, Rosemary. Don’t argue or make a scene. Because if you say anything more about witches or witchcraft, we’re gonna be forced to take you to a mental hospital. You don’t want that, do you?”  In many modern works of fiction, the mental hospital becomes the last viable option for men in dealing with women who are for whatever reason not fitting into their system.  In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood is given shock treatment and forced to spend much of her time in mental facilities because of her inability to behave “appropriately” for a young woman in her time and place.  Lisbeth Salander in the Steig Larsson’s Millenium series is institutionalized because of the threat she poses to the patriarchal powers that be (indeed, the Swedish title of Larsson’s first book translates as Men Who Hate Women).

In The Exorcist as well, the team of doctors strongly encourage Chris MacNeil to have their daughter institulationalized because of her strange disorder and their inability to properly label and deal with her problem.  While The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby utilize demonic possession in their films as a means of eliciting terror, it is through showcasing the status of women in society outside of the movie theatre that really makes these chills hit home.

Stay tuned for more on The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby! In the meantime, don’t forget to say your prayers.

Puberty, Pregnancy and the D-E-V-I-L in Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist: Part I

Editor’s Note: this blog post assumes that you have seen the films The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and therefore we reveal central elements of their plots. If you haven’t seen them, please:  1) Netflix them, 2) watch them, 3) make me a pulled-pork sandwich and then, 4) return to this post.

A woman becomes pregnant.  A human stranger grows inside of her.  This creature exists in darkness, feeding off of its host, affecting her diet, her mood and many of her bodily functions.

A young woman goes through puberty: an unfamiliar body develops, a strange voice emerges and a new personality is born.  Her desires, thoughts and behavior become very different than those of her prepubescent self.

When viewed from such vantage points, natural human events and processes can appear very odd.  Uncanny, as Freud would have it.  For Freud, the uncanny feeling results when concepts or things feel familiar yet strange; what was once comforting and affirming is now hostile and threatening.  Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher is perhaps the quintessential piece of uncanny fiction.  In the beginning of Usher, the unnamed narrator confronts the house of his former friend Roderick Usher.  Poe’s narrator compares the feeling of looking upon this house as the same feeling he gets when coming down from opium – “the hideous dropping off of the veil” as he describes it.

It is by utilizing the uncanny and a “hideous dropping of the veil” that two of the 20^th century’s greatest American horror films gain their respective effects of terror.  Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973) deftly craft feelings of the uncanny by using young women as their respective focal points.

Both of these films involve demonic invasions as experienced by two young women during points of biological unrest: puberty and pregnancy, respectively.   Both of these women experience bodily invasion by male demonic entities who take control of their bodies as a means of furthering their own, literally devilish, schemes.  Both of these films utilize bodily orifices and bodily fluid in order to play upon our fears regarding our own bodies.  They also play upon the natural helplessness of women in a patriarchal society in order to cultivate terror, but more on this later.  The point is that although both films involve major aspects of the supernatural, the real terror is cultivated through enhancing and riffing upon elements of terror already found in our lives.

In the first third of Rosemary’s Baby, the viewer witnesses the intimate moments of a young couple checking out and then moving into a NYC apartment.  The actors, Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, deftly portray young lovers who, although clearly not in the most loving and supportive relationship, are in a relationship that one can relate to.  It’s a relationship that rings true: we can imagine being friends with the Woodhouses.  This verisimilitude is very important, for the feelings conjured by this seemingly real and run-of-the-mill relationship will compose the veil which the remainder of the film works to drop – inch by painstaking inch.

In the first third of The Exorcist, the viewer witnesses the intimate moments of a mother and a daughter as they settle into their new Georgetown home.  Once again, the actors portraying this duo, Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair, bring a certain aura of realness to their roles that will come in handy later in the film when we are meant to empathize with them completely as their lives fall apart via demonic invasion.  Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil is a woman who is flawed and vulnerable, just like us.  Her life is messy, but the viewer gets the sense that, even when we can judge her for how she treats her servants, this woman works hard for herself and her family and fights for what she believes is hers.  Just like us.  Except for the servants part.

In both films, and this is the crucial element that many horror and thriller filmmakers don’t seem to understand, the veil is gradually and surreptitiously placed before our eyes.  Lesser modern horror films will dance bloody corpses and fantastical monsters before our eyes as if that were all it took.  Such films amount to B-grade horror porn (horrporn?).  The better modern horror films will put as much craft into the non-scary aspects of their film as the payoff fright scenes.  You have to work just as hard weaving the rug as you do pulling it out from underneath our feet.

What the Exorcist team of director William Friedkin and writer William Peter Blatty and the writer/director of Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski, understand is that very basic aspects of life are frightening, fundamentally, to the human consciousness.  What they realize is that in order to scare the shit out of people, one only needs to zero in on aspects of life that are already scary and then embellish.  Puberty and pregnancy are scary.  Puberty, with its unseen chemical surges and transactions and its utterly transformative effects on the human personality and body, is at the very least creepy for the child as well as his or her parents and siblings.  Pregnancy, with its parasitic invasion of the female body featuring an unseen life form growing and feeding within another human, along with its bloody and screeching arrival, is enough to put anybody on edge – including the baby.

Stay tuned for part II of this post, where I will further explore the sources of terror in these two films, including men in power, the soul/body binary and antagonistic furniture.

Nosferatu stalks Vancouver: Halloween 2009

Tonight I was lucky enough to attend a screening of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Horror classic Nosferatu at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, BC.  Full disclosure: I have previously blogged about this film here and here.

If you haven’t been, the Orpheum is a large theatre fashioned in the grand old style of Vaudeville.  It opened in 1927, which may not seem old to you Europeans out there, but by Vancouver-standards, 1927 is practically prehistoric.  It was the perfect setting for a couple thousand costumed-Vancouverites to fly their fright flags.

The best part: this screening happened to be accompanied by a live performance of the film’s score courtesy of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.  And, breaking a few stereotypes in the process, many of the musicians in the orchestra joined in the costumed mayhem.  Some highlights: a violinist in full lobster costume, two oboists in full Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle attire, a rainbow-afroed violinist and cellos featuring grim reaper scythes sprouting from the ends of their stems.

Also: the conductor of this performance happened to be named Gillian Anderson, which is hilarious if you were an American tv-watching child/young adult in the 90s.  No, it was not Agent Scully conducting the orchestra, but I think Ms. Anderson missed a huge chance at hilarity by not dressing up as such.  You can’t tell me she hasn’t seen the X-Files.  As if she had anything better to do for the show’s ten-year run.

Really though, Gillian and the VSO did an incredible job.  I found myself as mesmerized by sight and sound of their instrumentation as by the titular vampire on the screen.  I particularly enjoyed the man operating the giant bass drums, because you could tell something frightening was about to happen whenever he assumed the ready position.

There was a costume-contest as well, which was deservedly won by a couple dressed as “Van Gogh painting Sunflowers”.  The dude was Van Gogh (with a bloody ear, duh) and the girl was the painting.  She had a canvas strapped to her with a hole cut out for her face, which was painted to blend in with the painting.  It was pretty good.  My date and I went as Linda Blair and Max von Sydow from the Exorcist, but we weren’t even among the finalists.  I can only conclude that our costumes were so realistic and terrifying that the judges couldn’t bring themselves to taint our mastery with a silly costume contest.

Sunset Boulevard, Noir Fiction and the Wicked American Dream: Part IV

Editor’s Note: This post is Part IV in a series of posts on Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard.  For part I, scroll down or click here.  For part II, scroll down or click here.  For part III, scroll down or click here.

In the opening scenes of Sunset Boulevard, the viewer is clued into the fact that we are getting a noir narrative, (albeit an unconventional one) and not a murder mystery in the classical detective vein.  In the opening scene, the viewer follows the police toward a murder scene, and our first view of the corpse is the view that the police adopt: above the corpse and at a distance.  The next shot of the film – a shot that bookends Joe Gillis’ flashback narrative – is a shot from below the corpse, indicating that we are not going to experience this murder from an objective, detached, Sherlock Holmesian perspective, but from the vantage point of noir – a vantage point that will show you the corpse, but from an angle  and a proximity that will not allow you or the detective a safe distance.

While Phillip Marlowe clearly identifies with the corpses that he encounters – especially the still barely living corpse of General Sternwood in The Big Sleep, and Walter Neff tells us that he is walking the “walk of a dead man” in Double Indemnity, it is Joe Gillis’ narration that takes this identification with the dead a step further, and along its natural trajectory; for he is actually a corpse, narrating for the viewer the circumstances surrounding his demise.  Joe Gillis’ ghostly narration refers to himself in the third person: “The poor dope – he always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool”.  The swimming pool becomes a recurring emblem of the Hollywood-version of the American Dream throughout the film, and while Joe Gillis is able to attain his dreams of wealth and the glitzy Hollywood lifestyle, he must sell his soul and sacrifice his life in the process.  Just like Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, Gillis ends up dead at the end of the film without the money or the girl(s).

It is Norma Desmond’s pool that Joe Gillis dies in, just as it is Norma Desmond’s delusional sense of reality that consumes Gillis’ life.  Norma’s existence is based on the storyline that she and Max, her faithful servant, continually repeat.  Says Max: “Madame is the Greatest Star in the World”.    Norma’s adoption of this narrative is so complete that she has ceased to exist in any meaningful way in the world outside  – she leads the existence of a ghost, and it is only through the constant reiteration of her narrative that she remains in existent at all.  In fact, Norma must claim the death of the film industry in order to give herself life, for on some level, she understands that her superstardom and the contemporary film industry cannot exist simultaneously.  “They’re dead!  They’re finished!”  She screams at Joe Gillis, describing the current, 1950s film industry.

Norma, like the noir detectives we’ve dealt with this term, is attempting to bring coherence to a world that she doesn’t understand anymore.  Norma has assumed permanently the role of her screen persona, for it is through this form of existence that she can remain meaningful, even if it is only she and Max deriving meaning.  It is appropriate to philospher Noël Carroll’s understanding of the allure of film that Norma Desmond attempts to exist in a dreamworld inspired by her movie roles and fictional narratives, for it is the ability of film to install order and coherence to the otherwise chaotic experience of everyday that accounts for the wide popularity of movies, particularly mainstream, Hollywood movies.  Caroll writes:

Movie action, given the way it can be organized through camera positioning, is also far more intelligible than the unstaged events we witness in everyday life.  This is an important feature that helps account for the way in which movies grip us…Movie actions evince visible order and identity to a degree not found in everyday experience.  This quality of uncluttered clarity gratifies the mind’s quest for order, thereby intensifying our engagement with the screen” (87).

Norma maintains her self-identity by existing in a dreamworld, as Joe tells us, she is a “sleepwalker obsessed with her celluloid self”.  She surrounds herself with pictures of her young self in order to stave off the encroachment of her real age, appearance and standing in Hollywood, the mass-producer of dreamworlds of “uncluttered clarity”.

Sunset Boulevard, however, is not an uncluttered and guiltfree Hollywood film.  The viewer of this film is continually implicated in the creation of a monster such as Norma Desmond.  We are “the wonderful people out there in the dark” who passively watch these external narratives.  These stories do, however, have consequences, as Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond can attest.  We use these stories to bring coherence to our lives.  Sometimes, as with Marlowe, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and sometimes, as with Gillis and Walter Neff, the stories we tell kill us in the end.

As far as Hollywood is concerned, there is no narrative more pervasive and lasting than the American Dream.  It is no accident that a title card we see in Sunset Boulevard from one of Norma Desmond’s silent films, which she forces Gillis to watch with her (which is an actual film that Gloria Swanson actually starred in during her silent film heydey, which was actually directed by Erich von Stroheim, the actor who plays Max), reads: “Cast out this wicked dream which has seized my heart.”  Norma and Joe, like so many noir denizens before them, have tried to make sense of the world through stories, only to have the stories swallow them in the end like the water in Norma’s pool.  Poor dopes.

Sunset Boulevard, Noir Fiction and the Wicked American Dream: Part III

Editor’s Note: This post is Part III in a series of posts on Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard.  For part I, scroll down or click here.  For part II, scroll down or click here.

While Walter Neff in Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce in Mildred Pierce attempt to inject a new brand of meaning into their lives by rewriting the bourgeois narratives their life stories have followed, many noir detectives, such as Phillip Marlowe, seem to desire the acquisition of a certain amount of coherence not only regarding the cases for which they are hired, but regarding their own modern, urban existences as well.

Often times, Marlowe, when he’s not provoking various underground Los Angeles personalities, slips into moments of deadening boredom and is engulfed by feelings of meaninglessness.  In Raymond Chandler’s 1943 novel The Lady in the Lake, Marlowe describes such an onset of ennui: “I looked at the dust on my finger and wiped that off.  I looked at my watch.  I looked at the wall.  I looked at nothing” (155).

When Marlowe is alone, he doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself.  He spends his freetime fidgeting and going over the case he’s working on, as in this seen from Chandler’s 1939 novel, The Big Sleep:

I lay down on the bed with my coat off and stared at the ceiling and listened to the traffic sounds on the street outside and watched the sun move slowly across a corner of the ceiling.  I tried to go to sleep, but sleep didn’t come.  I got up and took a drink, although it was the wrong time of day, and lay down again.  I still couldn’t go to sleep.  My brain ticked like a clock.  I sat up on the side of the bed and stuffed a pipe and said out loud: “That old buzzard knows something.”  The pipe tasted bitter as lye.  I put it aside and lay down again.  My mind drifted through waves of false memory, in which I seemed to do the same thing over and over again, go to the same places, meet the same people, say the same words to them, over and over again, and yet each time it seemed real, like something actually happening, and for the first time.  (207)

And back to The Lady in the Lake, the reader gets a hint, maybe, of the origin of Marlowe’s crisis, as he contrasts his life to what he imagines is that of a “normal” white, middle-class citizen in Los Angeles:

I looked at my watch.  Nine fifty-four.  Time to go home and get your slippers on and play a game of chess.  Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe.  Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing.  Time to start yawning over your magazine.  Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.  (174)

I read Phillip Marlowe’s investigations into the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles as the attempt of a man to come to terms with his own modern existence.   Žižek explains that the noir detective, unlike a detective such as Sherlock Holmes, is unable to enjoy a distance between himself and the suspects, clients and victims of his cases, and I would argue that his placement within, as immersed in this aspect of the city and its inhabitants, is intentional – it is an attempt by a man to narrativize, to order, an existence that seems to lack meaning.

Just as Joe Gillis attempts to organize Norma Desmond’s “wild hallucinations” into a semblance of coherence, Marlowe and the noir detectives attempt to glean a certain amount of coherence from their urban and deadly world.  The attempts at coherence in the modern, American world, for Marlowe, Gillis, Mildred Pierce and Walter Neff, are as effective as Norma Desmond’s monkey poking at the fire with a stick and ultimately as meaningful as the wind wheezing through the organs in Norma Desmond’s mansion.

Even if life is as meaningless as Marlowe suspects, this post is TO BE CONTINUED…

Sunset Boulevard, Noir Fiction and the Wicked American Dream: Part II

Editor’s Note: This post is Part II in a series of posts on Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard.  For part I, scroll down or click here.

Joe Gillis’ voiceover begins Sunset Boulevard by letting the viewer know that we are about to enter a narrative retelling that will give us the “true” events of his murder, a truth that will take us beneath the false narratives of the Hollywood press.  We get a similar disclaimer at the beginning of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, as Walter Neff lets us know that his narrative is going to deal with the true events of the “Death House” that we, the news-consumer, have been hearing and reading so much about.  As we find out, Joe Gillis’ story involves its own Death House — a mansion secluded from the world and from the steady-beat of time, a house that has continued forth with its own narrative even though the story changed for the outside world many years ago.

When Joe Gillis arrives at Norma Desmond’ mansion, he is mistaken for an undertaker and shown the corpse of Desmond’s deceased and beloved monkey.  The viewer soon discovers that Joe Gillis is the intended replacement for the monkey, a creature who Desmond explains enjoyed “poking at the fire with a stick”.  This image, coupled with the wind wheezing through the organ periodically (“You oughtta teach it a better tune” says Joe Gillis) I read as not only a comment on the third-rate position of screenwriters in Hollywood, and of Joe Gillis’ helpless situation in general, but also as a commentary on the futile act of narrativizing a life.  Joe Gillis settles into this new unsettling environment and attempts to organize Norma Desmond’s “wild hallucinations”, but these wild hallucinations are not limited to the pages of “childish scrawl” – they are surrounding Gillis and consuming his life in the same way they have already consumed Norma’s.

While Joe believes he has “devised a plot” in order to get some money out of this crazy has-been, his plot creation is seen as futile, for there is already a more powerful narrative in place – a narrative that cannot be changed nor made sense of.  Gillis has reached a similar impasse that many noir detectives and characters reach as well – an impasse created by their inability to pull life’s details together into a neat, meaningful package.

Slavoj Žižek, in Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire, explains that difference between the classic detective and the noir detective is in their respective proximities between themselves and the suspects/murderer/victims that populate each case.  While the classic detective is able to maintain a certain amount of symbolic distance between himself and this group, the noir detective does not enjoy such a detachment.

It is this proximity that prevents the noir detective from fully “wrapping up” his cases with a cohesive narrative.  The classic detective, on the other hand, can nicely identify the moment where the natural flow is disrupted and the reinstate meaning to the lives, and the life-narratives, of the affected.

Like a persistent monkey poking at the fire, this post is TO BE CONTINUED…

Sunset Boulevard, Noir Fiction and the Wicked American Dream: Part I

“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work out here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent” (Didion 131).

Joan Didion’s  notion of California as the last bastion for the American Dream must have been true for the German Expressionists who fled Germany in the 1920s as it was for the Americans from places like Iowa and Ohio who migrated West in order to find their place amongst the stars, sunshine and palm trees.  California is seen as a community of immigrants and transplants, all trying to become a part of the most pervasive and, as we have discovered, deadly American narrative: the American Dream.  In Double Indemnity, Walter Neff states cheekily, “I thought all native Californians came from Iowa”, a thought that has an interesting parallel in Sunset Boulevard, for the protagonist and narrator Joe Gillis is an Ohioan transplant trying to make it in Hollywood as a screenwriter.

The alternative to making it in Hollywood for Joe Gillis, is a “$35 a week job behind a copy desk in Ohio”, an existence he would like to sidestep, if only to avoid the “smirking delight of the whole office”, a group of middle-Americans apparently eager for the opportunity to chastise Joe Gillis and his grand ambitions of Hollywood success.

In his book A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Dream, Gerd Gemünden writes: “The debunking of the American Dream is an important subtext for noir”, and one can verify his claim by picking up any given noir novel or film.  Characters like Joe Gillis, Walter Neff and Mildred Pierce are punished in their respective narratives for their attempts to transcend their situations either by “devising plots” (in Sunset) , “crooking the system” (in Double Indemnity) or by attempting to fulfill a self-imposed concept of personal and familial superiority (in Mildred Pierce).  In all of these cases, these characters attempt to impose a narrative that diverges from the script that their lives have followed up to the point that they begin to dream up an alternate reality.

In Sunset Boulevard, Joe Gillis attempts to re-write his own life-story after wallowing in the gutter of Hollywood for years, never quite able to get the break he desires.  However, Joe Gillis isn’t the only character in this film telling stories.  Norma Desmond, Betty Schaeffer, and the film producer Sheldrake all pitch stories at various points in the film.  Sunset Boulevard is a film that is consumed with the blurring of the barriers that separates fictional narrative from life story.  Norma Desmond and Max von Mayerling become so immersed in their own fictional story that they are unable to engage with the world outside of their secluded mansion in any meaningful way.  Even the murder scene at the end of the film must be narrativized by the famed Hollywood gossip, Hedda Hopper.  Events do not occur in Hollywood without the mediation of a storyline, especially when the item is as juicy as a murder scene involving a one-time Hollywood superstar.

Like our neverending pursuit of the American Dream, this post is TO BE CONTINUED…

Neff’s Exhilaration: Phyllis Nirdlinger as the Exposed Corpse of the Real in James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity

In her book-length study of Lacanian theory and desire, Read my Desire, Joan Copjec points out that the advent of a “passion for counting” the flourished in the years 1830 – 1848 was crucial to the emergence of the detective novel in this very time period. Copjec writes that “this new numberlust, was an immediate response to the various democratic revolutions demanding that people be counted” (166). This counting allocated individuals into categories and these “categories of people invented in the nineteenth century are supposed to subsume the actual people who came to be numbered in them” (168). Individuals citizens therefore become “logically identical” to one another, and as such, members of a modern nation do not fall under the concept of ‘citizens of X’ but under the category “identical to the concept of ‘citizens of X’” (172).

In James Cain’s 1943 novel Double Indemnity, Phyllis initially appears to Agent Huff as fitting under the category of “identical to the concept of ‘citizen of California”, but he soon discovers that this is not the case, and he finds this realization scintillating. In their second meeting, Huff relates: “She was standing there in a raincoat and a little rubber swimming cap, with the raindrops shining over her freckles. When I got her peeled off she was in sweater and slacks, just a dumb Hollywood outfit, but it looked different on her” (378). The “dumb Hollywood outfit” indicates the “performative” that Copjec deems in her essay as being necessary to the existence of an individual within the category “identical to the concept of ‘citizens of X’, however, Huff sees Phyllis’ performance for what it is, and as he peers through the façade he is able to glimpse the Real from which he has been blocked in his years as an insurance man. Just as Phyllis’ position as a “logical object” disintegrates into a direct confrontation with Death, Phyllis’ home, which at first seems to be “Like all the rest of them in California”, eventually becomes known as “The House of Death”.

Agent Huff, as an insurance man, engages with individual citizens as people-as-numbers, with the real of death subsumed by the statistics that represent a citizen’s interpolation into various categories. According to Huff, the insurance business is “biggest gambling wheel in the world” (387) as it turns the odds of death into a numbers game. Huff writes:

If that seems funny to you, that I would kill a man just to pick up a stack of chips, it might not seem so funny if you were back of that wheel, instead of out front. I had seen so many houses burned down, so many cars wrecked, so many corpses with blue holes in their temples, so many awful things that people had pulled to crook the wheel, that that stuff didn’t seem real to me any more. (387)

Huff is desensitized to the real of death, for it is only indirectly and abstractly confronted through his profession and through a society that attempts to subsume its individuals into categorizable objects. Phyllis becomes Huff’s chance to confront the Real as she becomes Death itself. Phyllis confesses to Huff:

I know it’s not true. I tell myself it’s not true. But there’s something in me, I don’t know what. Maybe I’m crazy. But there’s something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes. In a scarlet shroud, floating through the night. I’m so beautiful, then. And sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy, by taking them out where I am, into the night, away from the trouble, all unhappiness…Walter, this is the awful part. I know this is terrible. I tell myself it’s terrible. But to me, it doesn’t seem terrible. It seems as though I’m doing something – that’s really best for him, if he only knew it. Do you understand me, Walter?” No, but we’re going to do it. Straight down the line. (Cain 383)

Walter doesn’t understand Phyllis’ perspective because it lies outside the categories through which he usually views life and death. Phyllis isn’t a statistic of death, but Death itself. In this vein, Huff claims as regarding his interactions with Phyllis:

I was standing right on the deep end, looking over the edge, and I kept telling myself to get out of there, and get quick, and never come back. But that was what I kept telling myself. What I was doing was peeping over that edge, and all the time I was trying to pull away from it, there was something in me that kept edging a little closer, trying to get a better look. (Cain 378)

Through Phyllis, Huff is allowed a glimpse at the Real of death, which makes the logical objects subsumed in the numbers he encounters as an insurance man exist. As in Copjec’s Hitchcock anecdote, she is the corpse that falls out of the car, always on the surface, always Real. Through Phyllis, Huff believes he is able to see the corpse of the Real in full view and he finds it exhilarating.

“Enclosed and Protected”: Saving the Children in the Turn of the Screw

Editor’s Note: This post can be read in conjunction with a previous 4-part posting on KuddelSaus, which starts here.  These posts were to focus on The Turn of the Screw and The Others, however, The Others received more wordage.  This posts takes some time to flesh out the ideas from the earlier post series in regard to The Turn of the Screw exclusively, and quotes liberally from the text.  As with the other post series, I assume you have read Henry James’ 1898 novella — you really should read it yourself before reading this post, for I reveal certain plot elements that will be much more satisfying to read firsthand in James’ work than to have revealed by me.

The governess’ narrative in The Turn of the Screw can be read as a young woman’s descent into delusional madness. There is evidence in her narrative to suggest that the governess is using the insular world that she shares with the children at Bly as a means of distancing herself from her previous life and the outside world in general. The governess admits to being enraptured with the children, and puts her enchanted state at direct odds with disturbing letters from home:

Of course I was under the spell [she admits] and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days of disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well. But with my children, what things in the world mattered? That was the question I used to put to my scrappy retirements. I was dazzled by their loveliness (315).

The insular world that the governess shares with the children becomes a sort of bubble for the governess to live in that is not tainted by what she sees as the impure outside world from which she comes and from which she is still receiving “disturbing” letters. The ghosts that the governess sees can be read as a manifestation of the fears of the outside world that will eventually corrupt the pure, gentle children of which she is in charge. The governess begins to believe that it is her role as governess to become a barrier around the children, protecting them from outside forces. The governess says:

I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one’s own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I – well I had them. It was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me in an image richly material. I was a screen—I was to stand before them. The more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too long, have turned to something like madness. (325-326)

It is a couple pages after mentioning this potential madness that the governess begins to suspect that the children are lying to her and in cahoots with the spirits.

The governess again alludes to her vulnerable frame of mind and the immense power that the children have over her:

Oh, it was a trap – not designed, but deep – to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture it all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so little trouble – they were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to speculate – but even this with a dim disconnectedness – as to how the rough future (for all futures are rough!) would handle them and might bruise them. They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet, as if I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and protected, the only form that, in my fancy, the afteryears could take for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park (309).

For “everything to be right” the governess says, these children would “have to be enclosed and protected”. It is notable that when the governess sees ghosts at their most formidable, the ghosts appear on the other side of the children, indicating that she is in no position to protect them. She as well mentions in the above passage that she believes the children will have “rough futures”, “for all futures are rough!)”, a sentiment which, along with the disturbing letters from home, may also hint at a less-than-ideal past for the governess. The ghosts that appear to the governess may be a manifestation of her repressed fears and anxieties regarding the inevitable corruption of the innocence of youth, a corruption which has already occurred in her life before her arrival at Bly. The pure innocence and “extraordinary gentleness” of the Bly children may be forcing the governess to revisit some past trauma, a trauma that occurred when her own childhood was interrupted by an intrusion from the “horrid” and “unclean” outside world.

Children and their “Rough Futures” in The Turn of the Screw and The Others: Part IV

Editor’s Note: This blog post assumes that you’ve read Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and watched Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others.  Both contain surprising plot points and endings which are discussed throughout the post.  I would suggest experiencing these narratives before reading this post.  Consider yourself fairly warned.

This is Part IV of a IV part series.

For Part I, please scroll down or click here.
For Part II, please scroll down or click here.
For Part III, please scroll down or click here.

Grace will not tolerate Anne and Nicolas’ unorthodox, albeit logical, interpretation of the Justus and Pastor story, for it signifies that the children are not completely on board with a Catholic belief system.  For the children to deny Christ, even if only to save their lives from hypothetical Roman persecutors, would be to deny Grace the foundation from which she is reinforcing her repression.  Anne in particular, due to her position as a contact with the living, and her faith in her own interpretation of events, rebels against her mother’s Biblical teachings.

Anne’s contact with the old woman and Victor and his family puts her experience at odds with Grace’s teachings.  When Anne scares her brother by talking to Victor in the room, Grace punishes her by making her read the Bible out loud.  Grace tells Anne that she must ask the Virgin for forgiveness as well because she “told [Nicolas] that there was someone else in the room”.  Anne insists that there was somebody else in the room and Grace yells: “You’re lying!”  “Anne, do you remember the story about Justus and Pastor?” she asks, “Children who don’t tell the truth end up in Limbo”.

Anne replies, “That’s what you say.  But I read the other day…that Limbo is only for children who haven’t been baptized.  And I have.”  This exchange is immediately followed by Anne reading another section of the Bible, this time an apropos passage dealing with Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac.

Nicole Burkholder-Mosco and Wendy Carse note that it is because Anne “ask[s] questions, pusu[es] answers, and keep[s] herself open to what her control-obsessed mother insists is irrational and sacrilegious” that the family, and especially Grace, are finally able to “recognize the key pieces of knowledge” regarding “Grace’s murder and subsequent suicide” (214).   Although Grace fervently tries to limit outside influences coming into contact with her children, it is ultimately Anne’s ability to remain open to her own sense of reality and her openness to certain outside influence that allows the family to transcend the state of false recognition which pervades their existence upon their deaths.

Grace’s resistance to Anne’s acquisition of these “key pieces of knowledge” is due to part to a fear of losing control – a fear which led to Grace’s murder-suicide act in the first place.  Grace committed this act in response to the corruption of her home life in the aftermath of World War II.  Her murders of the children and herself can be read of acts of desperation resulting from this loss of control.  The murder-suicide is her extreme attempt at regaining control of the lives of herself and her children; for she is deciding once and for all who and what will have influence over their lives.  Or so she thinks.

Once in her new position as a member of the living-dead, Grace tries her best to again maintain control over unwanted influence.  The home must be protected from outside infiltration, just as her children’s minds, and her own mind, must be protected from outside and potentially destructive evidence and ideas.  The movie ends with Anne asking her mother: “If we’re dead, then where’s Limbo?”  To which Grace replies: “I don’t know if there even is a Limbo.  I’m no wiser than you are”.  This realization coincides with the lifting of the fog from around the house, as well as the end of the children’s photosensitivity, or as I suggested above, perhaps their realization that they were never photosensitive to begin with.

After her admission that her children know just as much as she does, Grace states: “But I do know that I love you.  And I always have.  And this house is ours.”  Unfortunately, as the governess in The Turn of the Screw finds out, there are no safe havens from outside influence.  One can never be truly protected and enclosed — not even in childhood, and as Grace learns, not even when you’re dead.  As Mrs. Mills warns, and as the “For Sale” sign in front of Grace’s mansion signifies as a closing shot for the film: There will always be others.  “…sometimes [you'll] sense them, and other times [you] won’t”.