But where Victor utilizes the Monster to reject society’s expectations of him (including a traditional, heterosexual union with his adopted sister, Elizabeth), ‘High Tension’s Marie creates le tueur because her desires do not fit within the normative world of the film.
This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.
Tensions are high between Alex and Marie, the two college-age women at the center of Alexandre Aja’s 2003 film, High Tension.
Violent women in films are seen mostly in two ways: the crazy villainess, characterized as an uncontrollable and unreasonable bitch who wreaks heaps of havoc on unsuspecting (if not always undeserving) folks in her path, and the strong, take-no-prisoners heroine who populates some action and science-fiction genre films, and who—as in the classic case of the Alien franchise’s leading lady, Ellen Ripley—reclaims the roles of motherhood and femininity, showing that it is completely possible for those qualities to exist in the same person.
High Tension is a confusing film when contextualized in these terms. Marie, with whom the viewer spends the most time, seems heroic and smart. Her friend Alex, on the other hand, is more traditional and mostly submissive: she retreats to the bosom of her family in rural France to study for exams with Marie, adores her younger brother and seems at ease with the unexciting pace of country living. Later, she appears to capitulate completely to the psycho-killer who invades her family’s home, while resourceful Marie searches for misplaced cordless telephones and succeeds in eluding the killer completely. Viewers see Marie as the Ripley-esque heroine as she endeavors throughout this brisk 90-minute film to save her friend from the clutches of a sadistic sexual predator, one who is shown early in the film to enjoy getting “head” from women’s decapitated heads. Nice pun, writers.
At least, that’s what you think until you get to the end. In the final few minutes, viewers learn that Marie is, in fact, the killer, who has butchered Alex’s family and abducted her due to a frighteningly intense girl crush. Alas. Marie’s close-cropped hair, healthy attitude toward masturbation, and ingenious strategies are now corrupted, since it’s clear that the filmmakers intended for her to be the villain. Not just a violent woman, but a woman who so deeply represses her desires that they literally manifest themselves as an ugly, dirty, stocky man in mechanic’s overalls, who is capable of brutally murdering an entire family to eliminate any signifiers of the world in which she feels…well, not herself.
This story has been told before. Aja and co-writer Gregory Levasseur riff heavily on another case of repression leading to violence: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In High Tension, we have le tueur—the Killer—in place of the Monster, who in Shelley’s novel can be read as Victor Frankenstein’s doppelganger, that most famous of psychological devices used to illustrate the violence with which the repressed returns, doing all of the things the typical, well-socialized individual could never dream of doing. But where Victor utilizes the Monster to reject society’s expectations of him (including a traditional, heterosexual union with his adopted sister, Elizabeth), High Tension’s Marie creates le tueur because her desires do not fit within the normative world of the film.
The film’s tagline, “Hearts will bleed,” is a clear nod to this idea. This horror film is, at its core, a love story. Marie is somewhat of a party girl, encouraging her academically talented friend Alex to have a good time, but who also seems consistently left in the dust in favor of Alex’s male sexual conquests. Furthermore, Alex chastises Marie for “acting that way every time a guy tries to talk to you,” and suggesting that Marie will “end up alone” if she does not conform to stereotypical sexual and gender norms. The surroundings in which Alex hurls these ideas at Marie are also stridently traditional: the house in the country, where viewers see Mom hanging up laundry and Dad toiling in an at-home office opposite a glimmering computer screen. The farmhouse is pastoral Southern France in a microcosm—“like a doll’s house,” Marie asserts. Overtly perfect and totally unreal, at least in Marie’s experience.
The terribly hyperbolic rape van that le tueur pilots, and into which Alex is stashed after Marie/Le tueur murders Alex’s family is equally unrealistic, however. It’s laughable that Marie describes it only as “an old rusty truck” when she notifies the police about le tueur’s actions—before she and le tueur are explicitly linked—because it’s so much more. It’s clearly a murder-house on wheels, a Gothicized antique of a vehicle, a faded logo peeling off the side, and an ironic “head” trailer hitch blatantly displayed for all to see. Inside, le tueur has seemingly stashed many a female victim, whose pictures are pasted to the rearview mirror and whose blood cakes the walls and ceiling of the van’s rear compartment. “But those girls were alone,” Marie says as she tries to convince Alex they can escape the van. “There are two of us.” Indeed.
Though at the time of the film’s release, viewers might have been able to see some redeeming aspect in the pure fact of Marie’s true sexuality being represented (at least in the end) on screen, it’s impossible to see this film as progressive. While there’s no explicit representation of heteronormative desire on screen, Alex’s parents, her discussion of her own male partners, and her ultimate rejection of Marie serve this purpose. As such, the family’s dispatch at Marie’s hands illustrates the film’s destructive take on non-normative sexual preference. They literally can’t exist in the same space, even at the rural margins of society. Marie is in the end found to be monstrous, confined to an institution in handcuffs.
And yet. In those last moments, can viewers experience some sympathy for Marie? Imprisoned in an asylum and whispering “I won’t let anyone come between us anymore” over and over, Marie senses Alex on the other side of a two-way mirror and reaches for her. But rather than being tender, this movement is treated as the final, frightening jump-scare of the movie. Marie and her monstrous desire: condemned. Is this a cautionary tale, then? A warning, detailing just how deeply wrong it is for society to impose and police strict ideals of sexuality?
And those Frankensteinian scars on Marie’s face in those final shots, from her “rough with love” ordeal? Coincidence? I think not.
Rebecca L. Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodramas, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania.
It certainly isn’t a feminist world she lives in, but she does her level best to undermine her husband in an enclosed space. As Noah himself veers away from his family tradition of life-supporting environmental husbandry, Naameh continues to practice what he (used to) preach, preserving her daughter-in-law, the animals, and the land once they find it again.
Russell Crow as Noah
This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.
I’ve written before about a Darren Aronofsky film that I liked tremendously, Black Swan. I was a fan of The Wrestler and The Fountain. So when news of the director’s intent to tackle a Biblical epic in Noah was revealed, my reaction was a cautious excitement, but also: “Huh?” After seeing it, the “Huh?” response is pretty much still there.
But I was fascinated by Noah as a representation of dystopia, and, by its conclusion, of a supposed utopia. Its thinly veiled save-the-earth message seemed to simultaneously re-tell the Bible story with a new twist, and reinterpret it for non-believers (see also the “updated” environmental message of Scott Derrickson’s 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still). It was rather a strange experience, however, that for much of the film I had no idea what was going to happen next. That is not how I expected to experience a semi-familiar Bible story I heard many times as a child. These “inaccuracies” comprised the bulk of the negative reviews of the film, like this one from The Guardian.
It was easier then, perhaps, to see its story as a cautionary tale about our own time and place, removed from specifically Christian ideologies (except maybe for the Rock-Biter-esque Nephilim). So while it was clear enough how the film addressed environmental issues such as sustainable growing practices and the exploitation of natural resources, what did it say about other resources, like people? Human capital? Gender roles? Well, these topics were also disintegrating in the dystopic mess.
How dystopian is Noah’s opening act? Well, after a brief VFX sequence summarizing Creation, we fast-forward right to the murder of Noah’s dad at the hands of a young Tubal-Cain (sorry, spoilers…also something I didn’t expect to say in an essay about a Biblical story). Quite frankly, after sitting through the two hour and 20-minute movie, the plot points of the Bible story and the film have blurred a bit. What viewers know for sure is that Adam and Eve have been dispelled from the Garden, murder is a thing (thanks to Cain), and there are two factions of humans. One is the followers of Tubal-Cain, Biblical forger of bronze and iron, who are aggressively industrial, environmentally exploitative, and eat meat (sometimes human, sometimes CGI, pre-flood fantasy animals). Their existence is shown to be difficult, dirty, warrior-like, and (of course) patriarchal. It is only by accident, for instance, that a raiding party of these denizens leaves young Ila (Emma Watson) alive, and their violence has left her barren, though Noah’s wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) is able to save her life. This interaction, specifically, highlights differences between the two groups: essentially, one carries death, the other life.
The tribe of Noah are the descendants of Seth (brother of Cain and Abel, for those following along in the Genesis story), who possess a particular set of skills when it comes to the Earth. Members of their line appear to be caretakers of the land and perhaps the first environmentalists. They’re also vegetarians, in case you were wondering. Their existence is also seen to be difficult, and yet because of their family dynamic, close relationships, and respect for all living things, viewers understand that their ethos is preferable. Their costumes are softer, natural fabrics rather than metal armor and leather; they have names and distinct personalities as opposed to a mob-like, metalwork-blackened horde. The film goes a pretty long way to ingratiate these characters to us, most likely because later Noah himself will come close to tearing them all apart. But throughout most of the film, we see two clearly demarcated factions with clearly defined ideological beliefs in direct opposition to each other. Pretty divisive, and therefore pretty dystopian.
Of course we know that the story goes further than just setting up a conflict on the human scale. Noah’s main internal conflict lies in his troubling dreams and visions. His confusion creates tension not only within Noah’s own mind, but also within his family, as he tries to discern what exactly the Creator wants him to do, and to what end. Much of this conflict has to do with reproduction. Throughout the film, he successfully alienates almost everyone dear to him when he comes to believe that the Creator is so distressed with the human state of affairs that He wishes humanity to completely die out. He refuses his sons’ wives, and threatens to kill his grandchildren. His narrative becomes one of punishment for the variety of ills humankind has visited upon the Creator’s Earth, of which he comes to see himself and his family as equally guilty members in spite of their life-focused ethos.
Charting Noah’s emphasis on life and reproduction may illuminate the film’s dystopian arc. Early in the film, Noah experiences a vision of seeing a flower sprout spontaneously from a drop of water. Disturbed by this vision and his frequent dreams of a destructive flood, he seeks out his grandfather, Methuselah (incredibly, Anthony Hopkins). Methuselah gives Noah a seed, which, when planted, sprouts an entire forest full of trees from which to build the ark. While this seed is certainly a sign of life, and gives life to all of this lush CG greenery, it is a resource grown to be exploited in a way not unlike Tubal-cain’s mining operation. Is this permissible because it’s in the service of the Creator?
While the ark-building is happening, Noah’s children are growing up. Including Ila, who has become an adopted daughter, beloved of Noah’s eldest son, Shem. Because she is barren as a result of her childhood encounter with those violent raiders, Noah goes looking for wives for his two younger sons (after all, they have to repopulate the Earth after the flood). But when he arrives at a neighboring encampment, he sees chaos, violence, fire, and animals being ripped apart for food. It isn’t pretty, and we can understand why this vision seems to support Noah’s new interpretation of the Creator’s plan: his family’s purpose is only to save innocent animals, and when that task is done, humans will die off as the last of his family perishes. It is Naameh who cannot reconcile this plan, and she visits Methuselah to ask him to intercede. Here, we have the restrictions of a patriarchal society functioning within the life-driven Noah clan, where the potential for the continuation of the human race seems to rest not with the women who might bear the children, but with the aging male progenitor: his word may sway Noah and save humanity.
Meanwhile, Noah’s son Ham refuses to abide by his father’s wishes (rejection of the patriarchy) and goes to find his own wife. When he’s captured and imprisoned by Tubal-Cain’s league, he meets Na’al, a female captive. As the flood rains begin, the two escape, and Ham leads Na’al toward the ark to save her. But Noah has waded into the forest to find Ham, and as they run from the Cainian hordes, Na’al’s foot is caught in an animal trap and Noah forces Ham to leave her behind (re-establishment of the patriarchal law). They barely make it to the ark in time to be saved from numerous crazy CG geysers contributing to the rain and rising floodwaters.
And, in a surreal but somehow predictable turn of events, Ila encounters Methuselah in the forest and he magically cures her infertility. With his supernatural blessing, she seeks out Shem and they have a passionate moment in the forest just before boarding the ark. We can see where this is going—Ila will become pregnant and bear Noah’s grandchildren—but it’s significant that her ability to reproduce is granted her by the patriarch of Noah’s family.
All the while, Naameh maintains her role as an herbalist and a midwife and maybe the first organic farmer. Though she’s continually shot down, she does consistently object to Noah’s rule; I can’t quite reconcile this review’s characterization of her as a “drip.” And because representation matters, it’s worth noting that I think Connelly is channeling Linda Hamilton’s arms in Terminator 2even as she participates in traditionally feminine activities like midwifing and healing. It certainly isn’t a feminist world she lives in, but she does her level best to undermine her husband in an enclosed space. As Noah himself veers away from his family tradition of life-supporting environmental husbandry, Naameh continues to practice what he (used to) preach, preserving her daughter-in-law, the animals, and the land once they find it again.
The end of the film predictably sews things back up between Naameh and Noah, especially after he is moved to mercifully spare his twin granddaughters’ lives after feeling only “love” when about to kill them. The patriarchy is duly restored. Yet there are cracks. In an epic case of middle-child syndrome, Ham quells his rebellious attitude but strikes out on his own just as the rainbow covenant moment glows through the denoument. Additionally, I couldn’t help but notice that there STILL isn’t a wife for Japheth, the youngest son. And who’s going to marry/mate with Ila’s daughters? In its final adherence to the Biblical source, Aronofsky’s film leaves some troubling questions even as its narrative may—through its departures from that source— subvert ancient patriarchal structures that are still part of the female dystopia.
Rebecca L. Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodramas, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
These repeated conflicts make for a number of scenes in the film that, as Basinger has also asserted, are painful to watch. Our emotions are in conflict: Stella’s aims are noble, her execution hopelessly flawed. It’s hard to like her when she’s so inept, impossible not to sympathize because her purpose is so noble.
This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women.
Melodrama is a film genre that can get a bad reputation: overblown emotions, sweeping musical scores, a lot of “drama.” In its heyday in the 1950s, these films were primarily marketed to women, and (perhaps disparagingly) known as “weepies.” But melodrama is also an island in old Hollywood—an island full of complex, flawed women, the kinds of characters viewers can simultaneously love and hate, dynamic creatures who inspire and who are also cringe-worthy.
For me, one of the best examples of this is King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937). IMDb gives this one-line summary of the film: “A low class woman is willing to do whatever it takes to give her daughter a socially promising future.” Film scholar Jeanine Basinger, author of A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960, takes a more sympathetic tone, calling Stella Dallas a “portrait of a poor girl who marries out of her class,” and notes that film icon Barbara Stanwyck’s performance as Stella is one of “great depth.” I would tend to agree with Basinger, but I must point out that the audience’s relationship to the eponymous woman is a complicated one.
Rather than an elegant, wealthy, and charismatic, Stella is a shameless social climber with no real “taste.” She comes from a ramshackle, cracker-box house and a factory-worker family, where Father and Brother both work at the local mill. Her only obvious female role model is her sallow-faced mother, who seems at once endlessly, admirably sacrificing and a woman who has had the life completely sucked out of her. Stella resists being anything like her mother. She puts little effort into making her brother’s lunch every day, and is instead invested in her looks, her clothes, and her culture (this last illustrated superficially by her enactment of reading a book—India’s Love Lyrics— as mill workers pass by her house). Eventually, Stella identifies down-on-his-luck former millionaire Stephen Dallas (John Boles) as her romantic conquest, and does everything in her power to land him for a husband who will take her away from her humble origins.
But class differences run deep. Though Stephen falls for Stella, perhaps because of her innocence and earthiness, she is unambiguous about wanting to make herself “better,” a cloudy idea she has that includes knowing the “right” people, going to the “real” places, as well as learning how to “talk like” those aforementioned people. The film makes it clear that Stella and Stephen are mismatched from the start—after their wedding and the subsequent birth of their daughter, Laurel, Stella can’t wait to get back to the River Club, and dance the night away with some high-class friends. Starting at this point, Omar Kiam’s costumes do their best to visually identify Stella as a gaudy parody of all things well-bred—she appears in all manner of spangle and print, usually together, and Barbara Stanwyck’s padded physique seems to be literally bursting at the seams of each ensemble. She is excess personified. Embarrassed by her flashiness and uncouth behavior, Stephen recoils from the relationship, finally taking a promotion that keeps him in New York City. Stella welcomes the separation, and yet one of the consequences of this move seems to be that Stella transfers her desire for upward mobility onto Laurel.
So why don’t we like her? What’s wrong with a mother wanting her daughter to have all of the best? Part of what makes Stella unlikeable is her effect on Laurel (played as a young woman by Anne Shirley). On the occasion of Laurel’s 16th birthday (for which Stella has made her daughter a beautiful, appropriate dress—why can’t she apply this savvy to her own clothes??) Stella takes a train to the city to obtain fancy party favors and table settings. She makes this trip in the company of good-hearted but loud, brash Ed Munn (Alan Hale, Sr.), who has lost some of his own formerly respectable class status through gambling disasters; as one country club attendee says, “He’s involved in horse racing.” He’s also clearly infatuated with Stella, though she rebuffs his affections and says, “I don’t think there’s a man living could get me going anymore.” Instead, she intones, all her energy is bound up in raising Laurel—both in the traditional sense of her upbringing, and in “raising” her social status above Stella’s.
Munn and Stella’s antics on the train are then observed by Laurel’s upright teacher and the mother of another girl invited to Laurel’s birthday party. Both of whom immediately pass judgment on the household, and by extension, Laurel, because of Stella’s behavior. The result is that no one attends Laurel’s party, which ends up being just the first in a series of unfortunate events, documented by Basinger in her writing on Stella Dallas, that occur when Stella’s class clashes with the class of those she strives to emulate. These repeated conflicts make for a number of scenes in the film that, as Basinger has also asserted, are painful to watch. Our emotions are in conflict: Stella’s aims are noble, her execution hopelessly flawed. It’s hard to like her when she’s so inept, impossible not to sympathize because her purpose is so noble. Class culture is indicted when viewers are asked to identify with Laurel, even when Laurel herself isn’t on screen—we understand the gap between the young woman’s intrinsic conservatism (which is deployed as a marker of upper-class behavior) and Stella’s inescapable and tragic inability to embody this value. This gap has a profound effect on how Laurel is perceived by the rest of the world, further inciting our sympathy for both women. Stella also articulates her own selfishness in several of these scenes, desiring to dance, shop, and be seen among these “right” people, before she realizes the she is not a blessing for Laurel, but a curse.
There’s a turning point in Stella Dallas that may or may not redeem Stella in the eyes of the audience. After Laurel has narrowly avoided an awkward scene with her mother in an ice-cream parlor, the two take a sleeper back to their home. As each of them pretends to sleep, they overhear other passengers talking about Stella’s larger-than-life appearance at the country club they’ve just left. The gossipy biddies agree that Laurel’s boyfriend will never continue their relationship when he’s made aware of Laurel’s lineage, and Stella slowly becomes aware that she’s a detriment to everything she has ever wanted for Laurel.
For the rest of the film, Stella forgets about her own desires and moves heaven and Earth to get Laurel away from her. This is simultaneously the best thing she could do to achieve her goal of propelling Laurel into the upper-class, and depicted as tremendously cruel for Laurel herself—another reason that, even in her glory as a “sacrificial mother,” there can exist a complicated seed of dislike for Stella. Though she eventually succeeds, it’s at the cost of sabotaging her relationship with Laurel forever, and never seeing her again. In the final scenes, we understand Stella’s plan has been both successful and monumentally hurtful for her daughter, who continues to love her mother in spite of Stella’s rough rejection of Laurel and disappearance from her life.
It’s only in the final scene of the film that we are given the green light on Stella, when we’re finally allowed to wholeheartedly admire her for what she’s done. Stella stands outside a fancy private club where Laurel is about to wed her sweetheart, gathered with other urchin-like onlookers, gawking at the beautiful couple just inside a large picture window. She begs a policeman to remain as he shoos these others away; “I just want to see her face when she kisses him,” she pleads. As the vows are solemnized, Stella’s eyes fill with tears, and she performs a signature act that has punctuated Stanwyck’s performance throughout the film—at moments when she is most conflicted, uncomfortable, and troubled, she reaches for her mouth, worrying her fingers, chipping at her front teeth with a fingernail. Here, she twists a handkerchief with her teeth as she looks on, her now much sleeker-looking physique still bursting, this time with pride. We want to applaud and weep at the same time—Stella’s sacrifice is so terrible, its goals so lofty. Finally, we can like her. But only after relinquishing nearly everything that gave her purpose.
Audiences are hard on women like Stella Dallas. Culture’s ideas of motherly perfection, class values, and models of “acceptable” behavior force them into molds they were not meant to fit in. If anything, Stella Dallas points out the most exacting of those ideals in us, the viewer, and criticizes our potential dislike of Stella. The film’s saving grace is that it allows us, and Stella herself, to leave the film not broken, but stronger for the fight.
Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
These abstract symbols not only frighten, but link events in the real world to Samara’s cursed tape: this particular creature recalls the “spiders, snails, and puppy-dog tails” that little girls are decidedly not supposed to be made of. When Rachel engages this videotape, notably created by the patriarchal forces that might be seen to repress Samara, she sees Samara in a sparse hospital room in fast motion, staring at the clock as its hands whirl around and around.
This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.
If horror films with little girls at their centers express anxieties about puberty, female potential, or the morphing of charming young women into screeching harpies, then The Ring is probably one of the best examples. Its little girl, Samara Morgan, seems to be just plain inexplicably evil.
If recounted chronologically, her “real world” back story goes something like this: Samara was adopted by Richard and Anna Morgan when Anna failed (repeatedly) to conceive. I should note that I’m not talking about the sequels, which to me are clearly made not because we necessarily want to know more about the story and the characters, but because the first film enjoyed some financial success. Anyway, after the adoption, strange things begin to happen at the Morgan’s horse ranch, including the animals going crazy and drowning themselves. Anna begins seeing things, and believes the terrifying images are generated by Samara. The Morgans decide to seek psychiatric treatment for Anna and for Samara; at some point both are released, but Anna is still disturbed. Believing Samara to be the source of her visions, Anna suffocates her daughter and throws her into a well, then leaps off a cliff near their home.
But Samara isn’t dead, and spends seven days expiring at the bottom of said well. Afterward, well, even if she wasn’t evil before, she certainly has an axe to grind. Samara’s supernatural obsession becomes “showing” people terrible “things,” through her strange psychic ability, which gives her the power to create media—this special talent eventually takes the form of a cursed videotape that kills the viewer seven days after watching. Usually this process involves a very waterlogged and very scary-looking Samara crawling out of a leaky television set and looking at the victim with her very angry eye, whereupon that victim also suddenly becomes very scary-looking and waterlogged, but also totally dead.
When I saw the film on its release, I slept with the lights on for seven days. Yes, me: horror film aficionista, one who has seen some pretty intense stuff in the service of her dissertation research. Right. While at the time I was kind of obsessed with figuring out just why the film scared me so much, now I am kind of obsessed with one scene—hell, just a few shots—and one line of dialogue from the movie.
It’s probably not the scene that immediately springs to the mind of most folks who have seen the film. It’s not the last terrifying moments in Noah’s (Martin Henderson) life where a slimy Samara (Daveigh Chase) slithers out of a television screen and stalks him across his studio apartment to fulfill her awful curse. It’s not even the first of many interruptions of the linear narrative with shocking or weird images: where in the midst of Rachel’s (Naomi Watts) conversation with her bereaved sister Ruth (Lindsay Frost), we’re treated to a brief shot of poor Katie (Amber Tamlyn), the film’s first victim, crouched in a closet with a horrifying look on her dead face. It’s the scene when Rachel, previously rebuffed by Mr. Morgan in her search to discover who Anna Morgan and her daughter were, returns to his farm at night (brilliant move in a horror film) and stumbles upon a videotape of Samara Morgan’s psychotherapy.
We know that something significant is about to happen because—aside from the usual horror film suspense buildup—Rachel is surprised by a centipede as she rifles through a box of the Morgan’s belongings. She’s seen this centipede before in the fabled videotape that kills you, and throughout the film images from the tape seem to intrude little by little onto the real world. These abstract symbols not only frighten, but link events in the real world to Samara’s cursed tape: this particular creature recalls the “spiders, snails, and puppy-dog tails” that little girls are decidedly not supposed to be made of. When Rachel engages this videotape, notably created by the patriarchal forces that might be seen to repress Samara, she sees Samara in a sparse hospital room in fast motion, staring at the clock as its hands whirl around and around. An off-camera doctor indicates that they are in hour 14 of therapy–a therapy where Samara is wired with electrodes, plugged into a wall, and asked a variety of questions. The doctor makes several inquiries before she responds. But the most disturbing and important moment occurs when, just after Samara asserts that she loves her mommy, the Doc indicates that Samara is hurting her. When he says, “You don’t want to hurt anyone,” Samara responds: “But I do, and I’m sorry. It won’t stop.”
A revelation! A young girl supposedly given up by her family, subsequently adopted, and then poked and prodded by medical science and creepy male psychologists admits to having feelings other than love, maternity, and joy? Amazing! So although as a society we might locate a lot of anxiety in the maturation of young girls, this film—at least for a moment—doesn’t repress the idea that young girls might have feelings other than the ones society tells them to have. What’s problematic, of course, is that the film sees this admission as evidence of Samara’s evil. While the film overall may not be very progressive in terms of its depiction of women, and young girls in particular, it does have this ONE MOMENT of openness, like a valve releasing some of the pressure of repression.
In addition to admitting that she wants to hurt people, Samara is plagued by the idea that her adopted father is going to leave her in the institution, that he doesn’t love her. Eventually, her mother kills her, ostensibly because her idealization of what it means to be a mother didn’t come true exactly as she envisioned it. Because her adopted daughter isn’t “sugar and spice and everything nice” all the time. The expectations that society doles out for young girls and for mothers is far from realistic. Is this disconnect the real horror?
I’d like to take a moment to point out that Aiden (David Dorfman), Rachel’s young son, is far from a normal kid. He’s able to channel that creepy-but-probably-our-hero vibe that was perhaps first perfected by Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense just a few years before The Ring. Rachel is also probably not up for a Mom-of-the-Year Award; like Anna and Richard Morgan, she and Noah haven’t been the best parents in the world. Ruth Goldberg has written insightfully about the mirroring present in The Ring between Anna and Richard Morgan and Rachel and Noah with Aiden in Barry Keith Grant’s book on horror film, The Planks of Reason. It’s very clear that while Aiden is a model kid—picking out not only his clothes for Katie’s funeral, but Rachel’s as well, and being extraordinarily self-sufficient because Rachel is working all the time—Rachel and Noah are far from model parents. While she certainly doesn’t seem to share Anna Morgan’s homicidal ideas, Rachel’s life is not exactly constructed to be conducive to having a young child; she relies on Aiden’s capable nature to take up the slack. So really, part of the “terror” of little girls has to do with their mothers—the expectations that society heaps upon them for a “perfect” child, and that they must always, under all circumstances (including unrelenting evil) love their offspring. Certainly reality is far more complicated, and motherhood and childhood much more complex. If The Ring is expressing THAT anxiety, then the film’s success should be evidence that this is a conversation society needs to have.
On that note, one final word on sequels. I might have tipped my hand in the paragraphs above about my general feelings for them, but I do at the end of the day have a hard time believing that any film project is mounted for purely financial or business-oriented reasons. I have to think that there’s just too much work involved in an endeavor like filmmaking to justify it with solely materialistic motives. Therefore, if there are sequels to The Ring (which there are, but which I judge to be inferior in many ways to the style of the original—which was not even an “original,” but that’s another essay), then it’s because there’s some deeper driving force behind the need to express the anxieties at their center. So, I’ll tentatively say: onward to The Ring 3! Perhaps the most frightening things about this film in the end are its telling links to some of the more frightening aspects of our own society. If it takes sequels to work those issues out, bring them on.
Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
In the film a young girl, Emily Rose, perishes following a protracted period of “attack” by demons while under the protective care of Father Moore, a Catholic priest. Female attorney Erin Bruner is chosen to defend Moore against charges of negligent homicide in Emily’s death. Through the two’s connection to the girl throughout the film, each undergoes what I’ve called here a “conversion experience,” as they learn more about the possibility that demons really do exist—demons that can be read to correspond to the challenges that women face in culture every day. Even before the advent of #YesAllWomen, a film like ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’ shows us how to overcome skepticism and create a connected community of individuals committed to sharing troublesome experiences in the service of awareness and activism.
Emily possessed
This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Demon and Spirit Possession.
Elliot Rodger’s killing spree in Isla Vista, California in May of 2014, incited much controversy, as did the Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen, which subsequently emerged as a forum for women to share experiences of sexism and misogyny in everyday life. Yet, attitudes of skepticism persisted: many Twitter users seemed resistant to the idea that ALL women, at one time or another, experienced circumstances and situations that made life difficult, if not downright annoying or even unbearable.
What’s frightening is that some of the most prevalent types of experiences women reported using the hashtag could be considered normal, everyday occurrences. But female Twitter users describe these moments as uncomfortable, and sometimes terrifying. Perhaps this is why it seems useful to examine the hashtag within the context of the horror film, particularly possession films, which tend to emphasize women’s bodies being acted upon by external forces. The use of the supernatural—specifically, the presence of demons— in Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose(2005) can be illustrative of the horror of #YesAllWomen’s sexist experiences, and the skepticism with which they are sometimes met. The film’s unique combination of courtroom drama and horror film emphasizes its investment in skepticism and seems to allow the film to ask: how can we, as viewers, ever really believe this might be “based on a true story”?
In the film a young girl, Emily Rose, perishes following a protracted period of “attack” by demons while under the protective care of Father Moore, a Catholic priest. Female attorney Erin Bruner is chosen to defend Moore against charges of negligent homicide in Emily’s death. Through the two’s connection to the girl throughout the film, each undergoes what I’ve called here a “conversion experience,” as they learn more about the possibility that demons really do exist—demons that can be read to correspond to the challenges that women face in culture every day. Even before the advent of #YesAllWomen, a film like The Exorcism of Emily Rose shows us how to overcome skepticism and create a connected community of individuals committed to sharing troublesome experiences in the service of awareness and activism.
Skepticism in possession films, or films about [usually female] mental instability certainly isn’t unusual. One of the best examples may come from classical Hollywood, in the form of George Cukor’s 1944 classic, Gaslight, wherein the heroine is convinced by her con-artist husband that she is going crazy, when in fact he is manipulating her environment. Bitch Flicks guest writer Elizabeth Brooks usefully points out that possession films, specifically, often make a point of “gas lighting” female protagonists. While audience members may begin to share the heroine’s perceptions and doubts about her reality, often other characters in possession films are skeptical: the parish priest, the victim’s family, boyfriend, sister, you name it. Emily Rose and Erin Bruner exemplify an oppressive truth: that violence, misogyny, and sexism experienced by one woman—represented in the film as demonic attacks on Emily—initially divides these two women from any sort of communication concerning those issues. In fact, in the film the two never meet. By the end of the movie, however, Erin’s own trials have linked her physically and emotionally with Emily via several terrifying incidents.
Emily’s long walk
The first occurrence of otherworldly forces and their attack on Emily look a lot like a rape. Emily is alone in her dorm room at night, smells something burning, and goes to check it out. We see Emily alone at the end of the long hallway, and we’re startled along with her when a door slams at the end of the corridor; she latches it and returns to her room. She gets back into bed, and suddenly her blankets begin to slip off. Indentations appear in her mattress on either side of her body, and she is forced down onto her back. Her night-shirt is slowly lifted up toward her midriff. As she tries to force it back down, she grapples with an invisible assailant, but her hands are forced to her sides. Then, suddenly the weight is lifted, and she vaults out of bed and onto the floor, screaming. It reads like a rape to me, even if a spiritually-coded one. Weirdly, no one on screen involved with Emily’s case voices this opinion as a possibility. Instead, the lawyers, doctors, and other professionals involved in Emily’s case collectively move right from superstition and spiritual attacks to illegal drugs to epilepsy and psychosis.
The film vacillates between having viewers believe that Emily’s trials are the machinations of the spirit world, and entertaining the possibility that Emily may be psychotic and epileptic. This balance alone, along with the combination of horror film tropes with courtroom drama, makes the film unusual. Additionally, a wide range of female types populate the margins of this film, leaving viewers with perhaps an atypically rich tapestry of female experience. We see a female judge, and a madam fore-woman of the jury. We see Emily’s traditional, devout housewife mom, her encouraging and faithful sister, the female family doctor, and a female anthropologist expert witness. Professional women and homemakers; average citizens and hopeful youth, even with a reasonable range of representation of racial and ethnic backgrounds. In other words, the population of #YesAllWomen in a microcosm, all represented in a world with flaws Emily’s possession calls stark attention to.
Dr. Briggs, a medical expert witness for the prosecution, provides a glaring example. While under cross-examination, he asserts that he would have tranquilized Emily, force-fed her, and administered electro-shock treatment (against her will if necessary) to save her life. Certainly such a course of action would have completely deprived Emily of dominion over her own body—as the “demons” do. “Possession” in this film is not only a spiritual, but physical term: Emily’s welfare and control over her own treatment is repeatedly assaulted by the prosecution and the (usually male) representatives of the medical community. Though Emily aims to become an educated, professional woman herself, her choices are frequently disparaged, and anyone who supports them—her father and Father Moore specifically, are—forgive the pun—demonized.
Father Moore allows Emily to reject the traditional, patriarchal view that medical illness must be treated with drugs and doctors. Additionally, he chronicles her resistance to these oppressions in the form of a tape of the exorcism, which eventually finds its way to Erin. This archive serves as evidence of Emily’s experience that can be shared with a wider community, making it more difficult to refute. Like Twitter archives, Father Moore attempts to preserve and disseminate proof of Emily’s attacks, just as #YesAllWomen serves as proof of the multitude of challenges women face in everyday existence.
Erin’s talisman
To rebut the over-zealous doctor witness and his extreme stance on Emily’s treatment, Erin locates an anthropologist studying contemporary cases of demon possession in the third world. Erin believes this woman may “see possession for what it really is. Maybe we’ve taught ourselves not to see it. Maybe we should try to validate the alternative.” This alternative is learning to see Emily’s plight as what Dr. Sadhira Adani calls a “basic human experience,” which we might read as the situations and circumstances of #YesAllWomen.
Sadhira Adani believes Emily is “hypersensitive,” which we may see as a positive framing of Emily’s resistance or sensitivity to the flaws of patriarchal culture. In other words, Emily’s “problem” is NOT hysteria, psychosis, or epilepsy, but rather clear vision. Further, while it’s certainly a production decision not to use extensive special effects in the film, a lack of effects may also indicate that what happens to Emily is all the more “realistic.” Without what reviewer Liese Spencer calls “Linda Blair fright makeup” Emily’s plight is more relatable to the average audience member—especially female audience members who might more readily pick up on the alignment of Emily’s possession with a more universal women’s issue.
Two sequences from the film tie Erin to Emily through their experiences of fear. After learning that a man Erin previously helped to acquit has killed again, she rushes into a restaurant ladies’ room to compose herself. Visual parallels to Emily’s rape scene abound: the doors of the stalls echo the dormitory doors lining Emily’s hallway, and square mirrors mimic the hallway’s bulletin boards. As Erin splashes her face with water, we hear another door slam—a woman emerges from a stall to check her makeup.
At Erin’s home, the clocks stop, she smells something burning, lights go out when she tries to investigate, she breaks a glass, and finally the door to her apartment seems to open on its own. The significance of the open door should not be missed: like the unlatched door in Emily’s first attack—which this scene also closely mimics—it could mean an intruder has entered Erin’s apartment, intending her harm. She is alone, as Emily was.
Finally, as Erin recounts her experience of finding a locket to Father Moore, she describes a moment after these events which seems to push her to the realization that she and Emily may be more connected than Erin initially imagines.
We see Erin in flashback as she recounts the experience of finding the locket. She considers what it might mean if “demons really do exist.” But just then she finds the locket on the sidewalk, coincidentally inscribed with her own initials. At this moment, she does not feel alone. Instead, she says, it made her feel as if “no matter what mistakes I’d made in the past, at that moment, I was exactly where I was meant to be; like I was on the right path.” This is the purpose of female community, of which #YesAllWomen is a prime example. Erin’s conversion experience is underway after she’s been made to feel some of the same fears as Emily, to be made to feel lost, alone, and even under “attack,” and also after finding this talisman that acknowledges these feelings and knits her to something larger than herself.
Visiting Emily
However, Erin’s conversion is not so simple; her privilege and ambition run deep. Soon she is back to her power-hungry and results-oriented self, speaking in purely legal terms and seeming to ignore the communicative experience she’s just recalled. One last frightening experience seems to be what is needed to get Erin fully on board with the female community Emily signifies.
Erin awakes late at night, alone in her bedroom. We hear whispering, which quickly turns into a distant-sounding scream. When she gets out of bed to investigate, she finds that the tape of Emily’s exorcism is in her living room playing, having turned on by itself. She turns it off, mouthing Emily’s name. Emily’s story has now become her focus.
Emily’s final vision of the Blessed Virgin (the ultimate female symbol of sacrifice) is recounted in a letter that Father Moore gives to Erin once he’s sure her conversion is complete. In it, Emily tells of a dream she has the day after her exorcism. In another flashback, an unseen force leads Emily through a mist. Viewers see Emily have an out-of-body experience. As she leaves her physical body behind, THIS Emily looks beautiful and healthy, not battered, twisted, and weak. Yet the Virgin gives her two avenues of action: she can relinquish her body and die, achieving peace; or stay in her body and suffer. It seems a simple choice, but the Virgin assures Emily that if she stays, her suffering will mean something; her story will help others.
It is for this reason that Father Moore has risked his freedom, for this reason that Erin jeopardizes her powerful position to help in sharing Emily’s experiences—but only after she’s had frightening experiences of her own. Their exposure to Emily’s case initiates a conversion experience by which they are both then unable to deny the pitfalls of women in patriarchy, even from their privileged positions.
In the final scenes of the film, Erin and Father Moore appear vulnerable and displaced, if satisfied. He says he cannot go back to his parish, and Erin has refused her law firm’s offer of partnership. Where will they go now? What will they do? They appear at Emily’s grave, as if on a pilgrimage, observing her epitaph, which reads “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”
Ostensibly the goal of any horror film is for the viewer to experience some fear and trembling; the combination of these goals with the framework of logic and justice found in the courtroom drama allows The Exorcism of Emily Rose to achieve a broader aim. We can read Emily’s “hypersensitivity” as vulnerability, a vulnerability that she must summon the courage to share in order to communicate a broader, societal concern that would otherwise remain in the shadows. Spiritual trials aside, Emily’s plight is indeed the plight of all women. Father Moore and Erin Bruner may be the first who achieve symbolic salvation through describing and disseminating Emily’s fear and trembling to others. The Exorcism of Emily Rose and #YesAllWomen illustrates that communication, supportive community, conversation, and awareness are often the first step to activism.
Rebecca Willoughbyholds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is currently a lecturer in Film/Media Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
Julie Taymor’s contemporary approach to creating a film of ‘Titus Andronicus,’ then, has to address a variety of factors: 1) she has set up for herself the challenge of filming a Shakespeare play that has been called both an “early masterpiece” and an “Elizabethan pot-boiler”; 2) she’s a female director approaching a play that has, at its center, a ritual killing, a rape, and revenge cannibalism; and 3) she’s creating this piece of art during a historical moment during which entertainment media is rife with violence and there much alleged desensitization, as well as within a culture full of complex and problematic attitudes about rape.
This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.
It might seem a bit archaic to look to a Shakespearean text for an answer to any question about rape/revenge fantasies—that is, unless you’re a student of Shakespeare. As Leigh Kolb has already usefully pointed out, it seems the Bard knew a thing or two about the deeply affecting rage felt by survivors of sexual abuse, and how patriarchy perpetuates that rage by blocking their ability to feel that justice is served in their honor. He knew about it so well, in fact, that even during the time of performances of Titus Andronicus, a play penned relatively early in Will’s career that revolves around rape and revenge, stage productions included a strange conglomeration of historical periods, all of which were oppressive to women in varying degrees. Witness the Peacham drawing,an early-modern representation of the costuming and staging of Titus Andronicus, and you’ll see a combination of classical Roman and Elizabethan garb, where Titus Andronicus, the play’s titular general, appears in traditional Roman costume, and his soldiers appear in armor worn in Shakespeare’s day. Both the classical Roman and Elizabethan periods were two moments in time when women (with the possible exception of the Queen) were literally the property of their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and had little recourse of their own if they were misused in any way, except through these societally approved male allies.
So it’s not truly surprising that the raped woman in this play, Titus’s daughter Lavinia, has to rely on her male relatives to enact revenge for her violation. After all, this isn’t I Spit on Your Grave. It’s more like The Last House on the Left, which—like Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring—is after all based on a 13th century balladabout a girl raped by ruffians who then arrive for a respite at her family’s home. When her parents find out about her rape, they torture and kill her rapists in retaliation. If this origin story tells us anything (at least initially) about rape revenge narratives, it’s the unfortunate fact that sexual violence has been around for a long, long time.
Julie Taymor’s contemporary approach to creating a film of Titus Andronicus, then, has to address a variety of factors: 1) she has set up for herself the challenge of filming a Shakespeare play that has been called both an “early masterpiece” and an “Elizabethan pot-boiler”; 2) she’s a female director approaching a play that has, at its center, a ritual killing, a rape, and revenge cannibalism; and 3) she’s creating this piece of art during a historical moment during which entertainment media is rife with violence and there much alleged desensitization, as well as within a culture full of complex and problematic attitudes about rape.
Taymor’s answer to these challenges is to mimic the pastiche represented in the Peacham drawing, with a bit of updating: her film, Titus (1999), is a lush visual mash-up of classical Roman architecture, iconography that vaguely recalls both Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany, avant-garde symbolism, Fellini-esque mise-en-scene, and even Degas ballerinas. The influence of the Peacham sketch draws attention to the fact that the classical setting of Titus Andronicus reflects the violence of the Elizabethan period of the play’s production, as well as bringing to mind the violence of classical Rome, the coliseum as a theatre of violence, and the excessive, often despotic rulers of the classical period. The overall look of Taymor’s film, with its naturalistic color palette, its blending and layering of historical periods and iconic imagery, and its direction and photography lends itself to a mode in which the grotesque is presented with utmost beauty, unsettling the viewer and increasing the tension between what the audience knows to be real and fiction. Each of these symbols, referents, and cultural touchstones emphasize the powerlessness of women in those cultures (and, by extension, our own), and the fragility and repression that can characterize the feminine experience. But perhaps most importantly, this approach destabilizes any complicity the audience might bring to these representations of violence. Taymor wants her viewers to FEEL these wrongs, and feel them deeply.
Enter what Taymor calls the “Penny Arcade Nightmares.” Although the film is brimming with gorgeously realized but horrifying images happening in the play proper—such as Marcus’s discovery of Lavinia that has been much discussed—these sequences are the most obviously symbolic, and are meant to illustrate the intense emotions surrounding the events that drive the revenge plot: the supposed honor-killing of Goth Queen Tamora’s eldest son; her younger sons’ subsequent rape of Lavinia in retaliation; Titus’s murder of Chiron and Demetrius in vengeance; and finally the epically terrifying final scenes, where Titus has ground the boys’ bones “to dust” and baked them into pies, which he’s fed to their mother Tamora, whose enraged husband slaughters Titus (but not before Titus kills his own daughter to save her from “surviv[ing] her shame”)… yeah. Pile of bodies on the stage at the end of the play: check. Taymor takes these remarkable cruelties, mingles them with horror’s libidinal audience reactions, and controls those reactions through unexpectedly stunning imagery to produce an increase of empathy. In Taymor’s adaptation, each act of violence is an image that is hauntingly beautiful and still highly disturbing. The Penny Arcade Nightmares illustrate not only acts of torture, dismemberment and cannibalism, but also their internal consequences, their effects on those who execute them, and how victims and those close to them are changed by such extreme violence.
Lavinia’s rape, though it occurs “off-stage,” is represented in one of these stylized vignettes. Bathed in icy hues of blue, white, and grey, Lavinia appears at once as a sort of Old-Hollywood female icon, a suitable eye-rest for the male gaze, but also as a wounded deer, with a deer head placed atop her head, and deer hooves replacing her dismembered hands. Twisting and cowering on a pedestal as if she’s trapped within a snow globe, she dodges the sharpened claws of Chiron and Demetrius, represented as man-tigers bent on consuming their herbivore prey. Chaotic rock music and fast-paced editing underscores the brief scene, highlighting the jagged edges of Lavinia’s memory of her trauma, evoking her anger and her frustrating helplessness. It’s also significant that this moment appears in the film as her male allies encourage her to write the names of her rapists in the sand, revealing their heretofore elusive identities in order to facilitate vengeance—by performing an act that will lead to justice for the violated girl, she is violated again by her own memory of the event.
But what can this film teach us about rape culture? The film and its source material are chock full of horrible acts of violence, including rape. The problem is not that Lavinia doesn’t get justice—she does. The problem is that this justice is achieved through additional violence, a fact that Taymor emphasizes by placing the final bloodbath in the setting of an arena, populated with viewers. They signify us, those watching at home, and implicate this violent justice through their blank faces and silent stares. They do not cheer. Lavinia’s plight is finished, but the cycle of violence has claimed nearly everyone on “stage.” Taymor’s revision leaves the children to potentially clean up the massacre. Taymor’s insistence on unmooring our expectations of representational violence through her painterly compositions, and her use of the audience suggest that she not only wants to change our ideas about rape culture and revenge, but about violence in general. The very construction of the term “rape culture” includes that word, “culture”—a concept that is all-inclusive, encompassing all people, regardless of your place on the sexual spectrum.
Lavinia’s attack and subsequent mutilation is a horrifying, physical manifestation of how broken we are as a society in regards to rape and other forms of sexual violence, and Titus’s attempt at justice—however well intentioned—doesn’t really solve the problem. The problem is not only rape culture. In Shakespeare’s text Lavinia is our center of empathy, the character through which we experience tragedy on a grand and grotesque scale. But Titus himself is guilty of perpetuating the cycle of revenge that ends with that pile of (albeit mostly despicable) bodies on stage, and the layered representation of various historical moments in original performance and the contemporary film speaks to the agonizing continuation of these flawed approaches to healing. Extreme? Sure. But this text seems to ask audiences through the centuries: is more violence really how we want to handle terrible, soul-crushing, self-negating violence? With everyone dead, does anyone really learn a lesson? In her modern re-vision, Taymor’s use of the coliseum audience seems to refute the idea that rage unleashed in additional violence is any kind of cure for deeply felt pain. Their silence, and perhaps ours, is a thoughtful one, one that might include some consideration of alternatives to perpetuating the cycle of violence that leads down a deep rabbit-hole to oblivion.
Rebecca Willoughbyholds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is currently a lecturer in Film/Media Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
The vision of Eddie/Dirk’s home life at the beginning of the film shows us that no family is without its failures, and that true family and community bolsters individuals while forgiving and healing these flaws. The film is progressive in its inclusivity (of male, female, and queer characters), and specifically in its treatment of Amber as she constructs her own version of motherhood and family, for better or worse.
This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Sex Workers.
In Brian McNair’s recent book, Porno? Chic!: How Pornography Changed the World and Made it a Better Place(Routledge), he notes that navigating what he calls the “pornosphere” of contemporary culture is made more difficult by the fact that porn is still, in spite of all kinds of liberating cultural changes, a bit of a taboo. One of McNair’s laments is that we can’t all just admit that porn exists, that we might have even seen or used it in our own lives/sex lives, and why we can’t talk openly about it as we would any other cultural issue. Boogie Nights (1997) pushes at the boundaries of this taboo by exposing the lives of sex workers—they refer to themselves as actors—within the porno-film industry in the late 1970s and early 80s. It does so, at least on the surface, without making many judgments about the characters, lending the narrative a layer of realism that helps to dispel any ideas of glamour we might have about being “porn-stars,” and attempting to depict the “real life” of these sex workers in their natural habitat.
While the main body of the narrative is primarily concerned with the story of Eddie Adams, a.k.a. Dirk Diggler (come up with your own porno name here), there’s another story being told here: that of motherhood and family functioning within the context of the porn industry. Our perception of sex workers is typically fraught with concerns about the circumstances that bring about sex work: is this work voluntary? Is it fair? Safe? But add to those concerns the idea of mothers, parents, and children in sex work, and a whole different set of concerns surface. Parent-child relationships in Boogie Nights are varied, but none of them initially seem to be entirely positive or negative. Just what is this film attempting to say about family, and, about families that work in sex?
Our first encounter with the sex-worker family is a Goodfellas or Fight Club-esque shot that follows porno film director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) and his… co-worker? live-in? girlfriend? Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) as they navigate through a nightclub. It might be worth noting that these other films also depict non-traditional, somewhat subversive, somewhat familial groups: the mob, and an underground boxing ring, respectively. It might also be worth noting that both of these groups are almost entirely comprised of men, while the underground or subversive element in Boogie Nights contains men and women, and some variety in sexual orientation as well. The nature of Jack and Amber’s relationship is foggy: she lives in his sprawling house, he calls her “honey tits,” and she is the star of most of his films, but we never see much more intimacy between them than a peck on the cheek. We get a much clearer view of Amber and Jack’s archetypal roles once Eddie (Mark Wahlberg) enters the “scene.”
Eddie is an economically disadvantaged sort, not too bright, and suffering in a home life that features a submissive father and an alcoholic mother. In one of the film’s most painful scenes, Eddie’s mom (Joanna Gleason) tells him he’s stupid, that his girlfriend is a slut, and that he’ll never amount to anything—all in a hyper-aggressive, booze-filled rage when he comes home late one night. Clearly this is not stellar parenting, but it’s also Eddie’s mother viewers are encouraged to dislike, whereas Dad gets our sympathy. Eddie’s is very clearly a broken family. His mom ignores and even vehemently derides his vague ambition to be “a bright, shining star,” effectively driving him from his home and into Jack’s palatial porn-estate, where he is valued—albeit at least partially for the material gain he will bring to Jack’s films. Whether Eddie’s mom’s anger at her son is fueled by her drinking, or by his seemingly casual disregard for advancing himself in some traditional way (such as education rather than low-wage employment in his two jobs) is unclear.
What Eddie’s mother doesn’t know, however, is that his sex work is far more lucrative than his traditional work, even at the early stages of the film: he’s likely earning more each night in various sexual postures (“if you want to see me jack off, it’s ten [dollars], but if you just want to look at it, it’s five,” he tells Jack on their first meeting) than he is from his dishwasher or car-wash gig. He’s ostensibly taken a job far from his home in order to make this extra money in a more metropolitan place where he is not as well-known, rather than in his hometown. This means Eddie is already participating in the obfuscation of his sex work, acting as if it is something to be ashamed of. He’s already been conditioned by cultural mores, in spite of his assertion to his girlfriend that “everyone is given one special thing,” and he knows his “special thing” to be his large penis and his skill at sex. Jack tells Eddie that there is “gold” in Eddie’s jeans, and this jives with Eddie’s view of himself, a dynamic which casts Jack as the supportive and strong father that has been missing from Eddie’s life thus far.
To further facilitate Eddie’s transition into the world of adult film, the mother who will accept Eddie/Dirk as a whole person appears in Amber Waves. Even early on, the camera singles out Amber as she gazes on Dirk, a replacement (we later learn) for her own lost son, whom viewers never see. This original son is lost seemingly because of Amber’s “choice” to work in pornographic films, though viewers are never privy to her reasons for choosing this profession (or whether it was a choice at all). Her husband’s refusal to allow her to see her son because of the “environment” he might be exposed to is emblematic of the broad cultural attitudes toward Amber’s work. Amber’s strong maternal drive is therefore shifted from her own child, taken from her, to the younger actors in her company: Dirk and Rollergirl (Heather Graham). Later in the film, Rollergirl begs Amber in a cocaine-induced frenzy: “say you’ll be my mom.” She, too, is a lost child. Amber is portrayed as a sort of lost mother, and she willingly pledges to act as Rollergirl’s surrogate parent. But oh yeah… all these parents and children and subsequent by-proxy siblings have sex with each other while “father-figure” Jack runs the cameras. Not your typical family, for sure.
Amber, gazing on her “lonely boy”
Language in consumer reviews of the film graphically illustrate the mainstream response to Amber’s work and lifestyle, calling her (among other things) a “coked-up porn queen.” Such labels fail to take into account that drug use is perhaps not expressly part of the work but rather an occupational hazard linked to the porno subculture depicted in the film. These epithets also function to support the normative view of sex work as either forced labor or poor decision-making, perhaps the result of impaired judgment. What is erased in these generalizations is that Amber’s career is just that: a career. She makes money, as does Dirk and pretty much everyone depicted living and working in the porno world. Sex is their job, and if viewers are to draw any conclusions from what they see, they are successful. They may not make the best decisions about what to do with that success (a lot of it goes up their noses), but the film also shows us that characters who DO try to make good decisions are stymied by a culture that vilifies their work. Buck, another actor in Jack’s pornographic films, is denied a loan he clearly qualifies for, intended to help him to open his own business and leave the porno life to build a more traditional life with his more traditional family. The reason for this denial is identified as Buck’s status (according to the bank officials) as a “pornographer.” So while Amber, Dirk, and other characters move freely within the world of adult film, Boogie Nights makes it clear that mainstream society has passed judgment.
Perhaps to their credit, Jack and Dirk never attempt to be anything other than a porno director and a porno actor. Both men are good at their jobs, so why try to change? The film shows Dirk traversing the difficult landscape of addiction and emerging on the other side to return to sex work; the work he’s found success in. Jack supports not only actors by continuing his business, but also a cache of film crew folks. It’s not immediately evident how many families his work provides for. More significantly, the end of the film finds Amber continuing to act as mother to Dirk and Rollergirl, thereby embodying BOTH the sex worker role that brings her material success, as well as satisfying her maternal instincts. In spite of how mainstream culture may view sex work, Amber is treated fairly, and her physical AND emotional needs are being met. Her family—this group of people not directly related to her, but who care about her and support her goals—has sustained her.
Dirk, Amber, and family
The grace of Boogie Nights is that it allows viewers to be aware of the tribulations of sex work as WORK—these workers navigate particular pitfalls of their employment and industry, just as other workers do. The film illustrates the hazards of working in porn, just as another narrative might illustrate the hazards of working in management or finance or data entry (see, perhaps, Office Space(1999)? Doing a job well does not always guarantee happiness. Life does not always treat workers fairly. Even with success, people want things that they can’t have. But in Boogie Nights, sex workers are shown to have their own community, as flawed as that family structure might be. The vision of Eddie/Dirk’s home life at the beginning of the film shows us that no family is without its failures, and that true family and community bolsters individuals while forgiving and healing these flaws. The film is progressive in its inclusivity (of male, female, and queer characters), and specifically in its treatment of Amber as she constructs her own version of motherhood and family, for better or worse. Boogie Nights ends with another tracking shot to bookend the first, this time following Jack through his house as he interacts with his “family”: bantering with Maurice, a club owner, who is cooking in the kitchen; telling Rollergirl to clean her room; visiting with former porn actor Jessie and her baby, who are poolside. It’s difficult to ignore the domesticity in this sequence. This family has supported each other through some very tough times over the course of the film. Whether viewers accept or reject working in pornography as a career in Boogie Nights seems beside the point—these characters are on a journey, and they are surrounded by the ones they love.
Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is currently a lecturer in Film/Media Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
What disappointed me most, I think, was that Black Swan could easily have been a progressive film with a positive, young woman-centered journey out of repression at its center. It could have recouped that gender-centric childhood ballerina dream of so many little girls into a message about determination, hard work, personal strength, and emotional growth. Instead, Darren Aronofsy has produced an Oscar-winning horror film. That’s right: I said HORROR. While that might seem like a stretch, it seems clear to me that the horror I refer to is the possibility of changing an age-old story. The horror of Black Swan is the absolutely terrifying idea that a young woman might make it through the difficult process of maturation, develop a healthy, multi-faceted sexuality, and be successful at her chosen career at the same time.
Natalie Portman in Black Swan
This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.
I don’t know what I was expecting when I settled in to watch Black Swan, long after its theatrical release and subsequent meteoric rise to Oscar stardom. I knew there would be ballet (that quintessential representation of femininity and near-unattainable physical characteristics), and there had been much talk about a lesbian scene. Plus, it wasn’t as if I didn’t know that Swan Lake ends in a suicide; there’s quite a lot of that in ballet, opera, or virtually any other artistic, dramatic work produced over a wide range of historical periods. In the words of Tomas, the pretentious (male) genius ballet company director in the film (Vincent Cassel): “in death she finds freedom.” Yep, I can see where this is going.
So I saw the tragic ending of Swan Lake coming, but the tragic ending of the film was kind of a surprise. Or, maybe not so much a surprise as a disappointment. What disappointed me most, I think, was that Black Swan could easily have been a progressive film with a positive, young woman-centered journey out of repression at its center. It could have recouped that gender-centric childhood ballerina dream of so many little girls into a message about determination, hard work, personal strength, and emotional growth. Instead, Darren Aronofsky has produced an Oscar-winning horror film. That’s right: I said HORROR. While that might seem like a stretch, it seems clear to me that the horror I refer to is the possibility of changing an age-old story. The horror of Black Swan is the absolutely terrifying idea that a young woman might make it through the difficult process of maturation, develop a healthy, multi-faceted sexuality, and be successful at her chosen career at the same time.
Natalie Portman is no stranger to this maturation process, and she’s done most of it in the spotlight. She has been acting since age 13, and in her first starring role she portrayed an orphan captured by a hit man in Leon: The Professional (1994). It might also be worth noting that this first role, even, was a strange one in terms of sexuality: Mathilda is quite a precocious young girl, and in a fit of Stockholm syndrome does, weirdly, “fall in love” with her much older (though admittedly endearing) kidnapper, played by French actor Jean Reno. Older man, French accent, I can understand. We might say that she “rocketed” to stardom, however, due to her casting in the Star Wars prequels as Queen Amidala, a role encompassing conventions of action, romance, and motherhood. While those films were slowly driving sci-fi fans mad, Portman was working on a Bachelor’s degree in psychology at Harvard, and it’s impossible to ignore the historic links between psychology, madness, and horror when watching Black Swan. We also need to remember, however, that Portman’s character Nina’s journey is viewed through the cinematic lens of a male director, and that seems to only lead… well, nowhere new.
Portman does not portray a young girl in this film, as much as she portrays a woman who has left her sexuality at the door in pursuit of being “perfect” at ballet. When the film opens, she is “getting older,” which, in the world of ballet, means you’re about 25 with no body fat, which makes you look like a young girl. But you certainly don’t feel like a young girl: you are a woman. Nina seems to have missed that memo. She is arguably already imbalanced when the film begins (not to mention frighteningly infantilized by her mother), but when she is cast as the Swan Queen in her company’s production of Swan Lake–a role that must embody both the “beautiful, fearful, and fragile” nature of the White Swan alongside the “dark impulse” of the Black Swan–her delicately constructed vision of herself begins to disintegrate. She sees herself—clad in a pink coat and white scarf— stroll past herself—wearing a black coat and heels— in an alley. Her reflection in the dance studio mirror stops mirroring and takes on a life of its own. These are just some of many moments throughout the film where Nina is faced with her shadowy double. Sometimes that double takes on horror-film qualities, as when she imagines herself as Beth, the ballerina whose place she has taken in the company, stabbing herself in the face with a nail file while screaming, “I’m nothing!” At these moments, things get a little harried in the genre department.
Power play
Even given Nina’s sometimes horrifying hallucinations, it might be a hard sell to classify Black Swan as a horror film. When we discuss films as horror, we’re usually talking about narratives chock-full of gore, jump-scares, suspenseful music, shadows, violence, and “stupid girls running up the stairs when they should be running out the front door.”* We get some of those conventions in Black Swan, but only because, in her stressed mental state, Nina imagines them. Horror films also typically give us a heaping helping of misogynistic, male-gaze visuals, though that might be changing, albeit slowly. I suppose we could say that there are a lot of female bodies to be looked at in a variety of ranges of sexual objectification in this film. Dancers are, after all, performing. The intent is that someone watches.
But these aren’t the real reasons I think it’s a horror film. It’s a horror film not because Nina slowly descends into madness from the pressure of portraying the starring role in Swan Lake. It’s not even because Aronofsy makes use of this madness in amazing visuals that leap over the bounds of realism into the realm of the surreal with scenes where Nina appears to literally be transforming into a swan. It’s because at the very moment when it seems that Nina might recover from this nightmare and become a whole, happy person, the film kills her off in a twist of tragedy that is narratively as old as the hills. Isn’t there any other female story to be told?
All the cracks in Nina’s psyche, which are brought to visual life by the film’s surreal images as well as real-world physical disintegrations—she constantly scratches at herself, picks at hang-nails, bandages her abused feet— viewers can see sympathetically as Nina struggles to find balance between the two sides of her leading role. Some of these struggles manifest themselves in her relationship with fellow dancer Lily, with whom she forms a tenuous bond. When she leaves her house to go “out” with Lily (Mila Kunis), her foray into social nightlife is encouraging— yes, I know she does drugs in this scene, and that we generally want to frown on potentially destructive behavior. But I was happy that in this scene Nina is, in some small way, controlling her own destiny for once, even if it means recognizing that she can use a bit of chemical assistance to escape the many forms of repression and oppression of which she finds herself a victim. Though the drugs could be said to promote a few more slips between Nina’s reality and her fantasy world—where she has a satisfying sexual encounter with Lily, but where she also begins to sprout black swan feathers from her back—I would argue that those fantasies allow Nina to explore her budding sexuality.
It doesn’t help that Nina’s mother (Barbara Hershey) is the ultimate helicopter parent and, it seems, Nina’s only friend until she begins her relationship with Lily. I cheered Nina as she literally bars her mother from her life (read: bedroom) so she can have enough privacy to even fantasize effectively. The mother/daughter relationship in this film reminded me of Brian DePalma’s Carrie (1976)—another horror film about a young girl becoming a woman. Nina’s mother not only lives vicariously through her daughter’s success in the ballet, but also tries to control her and prevent her from being a success, a competition stemming from the fact that Nina’s mother was never cast in a starring role. These realities, as well as the creepy portraits her mom paints of her, and that bedroom decorated for a ten-year-old show that the maternal relationship does nothing but stifle Nina, and compound her problem with coming to terms with any type of sexual desire.
For Portman, this role is a mix of childlike body type and pubescent girl growing pains. The casting choice brings to mind the warped sense of ageism experienced by dancers, as well as the stunted emotional development often suffered by young performers transitioning into adulthood. Portman would ostensibly know the latter well. It’s a character that is both stuck in girlhood and desperately coveting the transformation that signifies becoming a woman. That transformation is made flesh in the visual shifts that equate Nina with the swans she tries to portray through dance.
Nina’s dark double
On the opening night of the ballet, Nina apparently kills Lily, her understudy, in a jealous rage after almost being replaced. As Nina chokes Lily (and then stabs her with a bit of shattered mirror), she exclaims, “It’s MY turn!” and partially transforms into a swan. Surreal and horrifying: check. A few moments later, she thrillingly dances the Black Swan, and comes completely out of the repressive shell she’s been trapped in for the whole movie. As she moves, she “loses herself” in the dance, her arms transforming into wings, freed from her oppressive prison. These scenes are the climax of the film, employing dizzying 360 shots, dazzling lighting effects, close-ups on Nina’s face, and stunning CG. When she leaves the stage exhilarated, a good few moments are devoted to Nina’s ecstatic face and heavy breathing—it is an emotional orgasm. So imagine my horror when she realizes that rather than stabbing Lily in the dressing room before the performance, she has actually stabbed herself, significantly with that piece of mirror. She becomes not a whole, realized being, but her own fragmented, shattered worst enemy. When she returns to the stage to dance the finale of Swan Lake, she is dancing to her own death. While Swan Lake’s narrative is already known to include a suicide, slowly we learn that Black Swan also requires one. For each to be “perfect,” Nina can live just long enough to complete one perfect performance.
Just for the record, there is a part of me that digs the catharsis and frustration in this ending. I get it. Really. But I am classifying this film as horror for a few reasons: the disturbing imagery, the dark implications of Nina’s downward spiral, her obsession, her crazy mom, and the fact that the poor girl isn’t allowed to have a sexual awakening without dying. Or, more accurately, it’s because she actually HAS that moment of fulfillment and is able to embrace her sexual nature for even an instant, the film punishes her. Aronofsky’s narrative seems, therefore, to argue that women—especially those temperamental dancer-types—are perennially unbalanced, unable to maintain a healthy equilibrium between the Black and White Swans; the virgin and the whore. Once Nina has felt the power of the Black Swan, her signifier for sexual assurance and agency, she can’t escape it; can’t return to the innocence and fragility that society prefers, so she has to be eliminated. She is too dangerous, because she wants to tell another story: the story of a whole woman. You could argue that it’s the classical tragic form I’m railing against, and you’d be right. But this form has repressed and oppressed female characters for hundreds of years. The very use of Swan Lake (circa 1875, people!) as a narrative to tell the story of a contemporary woman points to the fact that we’re revisiting a problem we can’t escape, rehashing the same gendered issues. I hoped maybe this film could move beyond that. Or, we could give it an Academy Award.
*A phenomenon pointed out by another female horror heroine, Sidney Prescott of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996).
Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is currently a lecturer in Film/Media Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
