Marlana Eck – Bitch Flicks

‘Carnival of Souls’ and the Mysteries of the Insubordinate Woman

What is so terribly “weird and unnatural” … about Mary? While writer/director Herk Harvey and writer John Clifford may not have intended to make Mary a subversive woman, she certainly was in a few ways. … Keep in mind, her actions and her situation are supposed to be terrifying. Only because she was presumed to be dead could she act in ways “unfit” for a woman. Uncoupled, hardhearted, curt, and curious.

This guest post written by Marlana Eck originally appeared at Awaiting Moderation. It is cross-posted with permission. | Spoilers ahead.

I’ve been watching 1962’s Carnival of Souls recurrently with rapt attention since I was a teen. My stepdad had a DVD box set which included Carnival along with The Last Man on Earth and House on Haunted Hill.

Notice the representative art work for both The Last Man on Earth and House on Haunted Hill. The Last Man on Earth, for instance, shows Vincent Price in the background with a decidedly active and intelligent glare. In the fore, we see the negative space of a woman’s spirit with her fully illustrated, sexualized body helplessly laid out on the margin credits.

In the art work for House on Haunted Hill, we see a woman in a yellow dress hanging in a noose situated in the middle of the film advertisement, and in the bottom left corner we see the severed head of a woman held by Vincent Price.

In both posters, Price is the master of his universe.

Now I love me some Vincent Price. However, looking critically, I see the limited agency of the female figures in the representative art work as a snippet of larger culture. Horror calls to mind the repressed, the subconscious. It is fascinating that the art of both of these film posters show sacrificial women. As Pierre Bourdieu sums up in “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction”: structures reproduce themselves, and these posters show us how female bodies are treated within the context of our culture.

There were several promotional film posters used for Carnival of Souls, but the one on the boxed set was the commissioned illustration which showed a woman (Mary Henry as we learn, played by Candace Hilligoss) with the straps of her white top falling off (pretty sure half nipple hanging out) and leg out almost up to her hip, centered. On the left-hand bottom corner there is the “floating head” of “The Man” (as he is billed in the credits) styled after the main terrorizing apparition in Carnival, played by the film’s director, Herk Harvey.

As I go on in my interpretation, I hear a 1989 interview with the film’s writer, John Clifford, echoing in my mind. In an endearing Midwestern twang he said, “We just wanted to make a horror movie with some pizzazz.” Herk Harvey implied people have granted the film more meaning than they originally intended. I am aware, then, that perhaps the subversive tenants of the film were not intentionally engineered and may have been subliminal on the part of the creators.

The film begins with a cryptic portrayal of misogyny: a car full of men challenge a car full of women to a drag race, which was quite popular in our nation’s history post WWII as it emphasized a leisurely freedom loving and equally destructive America.

The men run the women off the road as we fear most of them have plunged to their death.

After the crash, the police question one of the men who challenged the car of women to the drag race. He lies and says “It wasn’t our fault. We were the first ones on the bridge, coming along, following the track, and they wanted to get around us I guess and they lost control and they dropped off…”

A crowd of select townspeople watch as the police fish for the missing car. This scene is riveting, if only for the audience of onlookers being 100% men, young and old.

Yet, hours later as the women’s car is exhumed, there is one woman who just won’t die: Candace Hilligoss’s character, Mary Henry. She famously trudges up from the mud, seemingly unharmed. We are unclear how long she was underwater, how she survived, or if she is even really alive (this is a horror flick, after all). It is this iconic picture that starts us off.

Mary could easily represent a critique of wartime post-traumatic stress disorder; Herk Harvey was a veteran himself opting out of the Navy and going into theater after his service in WWII.

Mary tries to resume her life, but irritates others with her insouciance.

Hilligoss trained with Lee Strasberg (in New York City where her cohort included Marilyn Monroe). Carnival of Souls was one of her only forays into film, she was mainly a stage actress. Hilligoss has a keen sense for the macabre, an edginess that I find so badass. This is part of her supposed supernaturalness.

In one of the first scenes where we learn more about Mary’s life, we observe she is a talented organist who has decided to take a job out in Utah. The priest says goodbye to her and tells her the ole, “If you’re ever in town again, stop by.” Not one for niceties, Mary says, “I don’t know if I’m ever coming back.” After she walks out the priest confides in one of his bros, “I don’t know about that girl [sic]…a few days ago she survived an accident. You’d think she’d feel a little something like humbleness or gratitude.”

A looming thought is: so, Mary is walking about “dead.” What does it mean to be a “living” woman?

What is so terribly “weird and unnatural” (to use the verbiage from one of Carnival of Soul’s promotional taglines) about Mary? The film investigates metaphysical uncertainties in the mind of this young church organist. Does she have a soul? Why doesn’t she connect with others the way she is supposed to?

Partly, I think Mary is simply a byproduct of all that was negative about the boom of consumer culture in the 1950s and 60s. The dissonance Mary displays can be attributed to the confusion of women not being as liberated as they thought they’d be by “going to work.” She is continually haunted by “The Man,” a ghoul who represents all she will become (dead, laborer).

When she spurns the advances of her voyeur housemate, John, (a classic “I’M JUST A NICE GUY!”) who frequently watches her bathing and dressing, she then deals with being “the bitch.” Interestingly, she doesn’t reject John on the basis of religious protestation (as maybe you’d think was her orientation as a church organist). She says, “The church is just a place of business.” This is quintessential Mary Henry. She tells John (essentially), “K, you have to leave now, I want to go shopping.” It is only during this time in the film do we see her look as if she is in love as she swoons. But it’s love for shopping, not John.

There are several scenes in the film where she is in public places and people don’t see her at all. She feels invisible, alienated. The ghouls, her subconscious fears, always see her though, especially “The Man.”

One of these scenes is in a department store. She goes in to try on a dress in a chipper mood. All of a sudden there are dreamy glitch squiggles on the screen and Mary snaps back into her post-accident self. She panics and runs out of the dressing room screaming that no one sees her. No one really sees her. I feel you, Mary.

Mary talks to a male analyst who tells her everything she’s been experiencing has been her imagination. Yes, she may have PTSD, but we know there is something else going on with Mary, and so does she.

The amount of mansplaining Mary has to face in this film is incredible. Candace Hilligoss’s exquisite portrayal of resistance and apathy inspires me to do Mystery Science Theater style voiceovers of key scenes. For instance her supervisor, the priest, says, “But, my dear, you cannot live in isolation from the human race,” to which Mary, in my head, responds, “WATCH ME, G.”

It’s also fun to caption her with postmodern endearments, like “Dafuq?” in the photo below.

While Harvey and Clifford may not have intended to make Mary a subversive woman, she certainly was in a few ways. Much like Jill Lepore does in The Secret History of Wonder Woman, I look at Harvey and Clifford’s work of male gaze through my female gaze. Unlike William Marston’s Wonder Woman, Mary Henry was never meant to be a hero of this story. Keep in mind, her actions and her situation are supposed to be terrifying. Only because she was presumed to be dead could she act in ways “unfit” for a woman.

Uncoupled, hardhearted, curt, and curious. Many have compared the story of Carnival of Souls to Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” where the protagonist, Confederate soldier Farquhar, imagines the noose around his neck at his execution does not kill him and he instead escapes by swimming upstream to find his wife and children. This fantasy of being able to escape pending actions of justice is similar to Mary’s conundrum.

Mary is not able to live out her fantasy of embodying the detachment she feels as a “real life” experience. What traumas may she have faced while alive? We are introduced to a variety of scenarios, all of which many woman deal with regularly: leering, mansplaining, male-based research and psychoanalysis, accusations of “hysteria,” spiritual guilt. In the final shot of the film, we notice the car is exhumed once more, and Mary is still inside of it, dead, unable to work through her traumas as a living, insubordinate woman.

Marlana Eck is a scholar, writer, and educator from Easton, Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Raging Chicken Press,Hybrid Pedagogy, San Diego Free Press, Cultured Vultures, Lehigh Valley Vanguard, and Rag Queen Periodical. At the latter two publications she serves as director. In her free time she enjoys horticulture and overestimating the efficacy of her dance moves in the living room mirror. Follow her on Twitter at @marlanaesquire.

Sofia Coppola as Auteur: Historical Femininity and Agency in ‘Marie Antoinette’

Sofia Coppola’s film conveys, to me, a range of feminist concerns through history. Concerns of how much agency, even in a culture of affluence, women can wield given that so much of women’s lives are dictated by the structures of patriarchy.

This guest post written by Marlana Eck originally appeared at Awaiting Moderation and appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors. Cross-posted with permission.

When it comes to 2006’s Marie Antoinette, some reviewers have ridiculed Sofia Coppola for creating “just another costume drama.” This is simply an attempt to discredit Coppola as a masterful auteur.

In reality, Coppola spent years (starting in 2001) researching the life of Antoinette with support from historian/writer Antonia Fraser, author of Marie Antoinette: A Journey.

Antoinette’s elaborate costuming is much like an ancient grotesque painting, producing both aesthetic endearment and strange sympathetic curiosity at what kind of deficiency the costuming is compensating for. Marie Antoinette herself has become somewhat of a chimera; a piece of the architecture we use to describe decadent aristocracy.

In one of the earliest scenes, Marie Antoinette is investigated to see if her virginity is still intact before being traded from her family in Austria to the French nobility. We see Marie Antoinette as an inmate, not something we would have attributed to her otherwise. Her world is insular and stunted, punctuated by decadent “treats” and passive, objectifying adoration by the court.

What stood out to me as I looked into Marie Antoinette’s life was the politicized severity in her relationships with people who she was supposed to adopt as trusted family. What they had in riches and prestige they lacked in empathy for each other.

As Antoinette approaches Versailles, The Radio Dept. “I Don’t Like It Like This” plays.

Words fail me all the time
I don’t even feel like talking
still I go on and on
I’m dying here and you keep walking

why are you asking me this?
can’t you see I’m trying?
I don’t like it like this
no I think I’m dying

Destined to go on as, more or less, a piece of furniture, this song is a flawless companion to the scene. Coppola’s use of contemporary music to generate a better understanding of Marie Antoinette’s condition is noteworthy. Kirsten Dunst is the perfect Antoinette with her few lines and held-back-ness in affect.

Through costuming, Marie Antoinette was able to attach a feeling of specialness she did not feel otherwise. Surrendered as a bargaining prize by her family at the age of 15, Coppola portrays the intense amount of watchfulness, and little love, she was exposed to.

As much as I am hard on Hillary Clinton, how much of these parallels can be drawn in her life? Here is another woman dedicated to a system of striving which is part of structural and damaging patriarchy. For Marie Antoinette, it was her flamboyance which helped her declare agency. For other women, maybe it’s joining the “boys club” however oppressive that may be (to others and the self).

Coppola shows that Marie Antoinette was merely using the language of power she had available. To delve further, Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was attracted to anything which helped her portray the eminence she felt she lacked in personhood.

Marie Antoinette was truly a prelude to our DeBordian society of spectacle, or, even more contemporarily (and French) Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl. How different is the reluctant Queen’s high profile folly than anyone else we worship in television or magazines? I’d argue even the modern Kim Kardashian’s life is decidedly martyred and politicized while the cultural roots of her decadence are not so easily scrutinized by the public. The Young Girl is a figure that is both revered and despised.

We can learn much about nobility in this film, whether it is historical past or our nobility at present. As much as people feel dehumanized at the level of working class, we also elevate the “elite” to the level of gods, giving them both immense privilege and unreachable humanitarian expectations.

One reviewer said, “Only an American” would depict Antoinette so sympathetically. But that misses the dichotomy of the grotesque. There is culpability in the culture which creates their iconic demons, the ones which attract and repulse us.

Jason Schwartzman as the reticent ruler Louis XVI says, “Lord God, guide us and protect us, for we are too young to rule.” How true is this of our modern media aristocracy? As we scrutinize politicians and the glitterati alike, shouldn’t we be mindful that they don’t much know what they are doing either?

Coppola shows us Marie Antoinette’s range of human qualities: most movingly that giving up to decadence is easy when love or agency is absent.

In discussions with Antonia Fraser, Coppola reportedly asked her if it was alright for her to leave the political bits out. Fraser remarked that Marie Antoinette would have “loved that.” Funny though, because what I see on screen, at times, is a cleverly wrought political drama in the tradition of “the personal is political.” This phrase becomes much clearer and richer in the life of Marie Antoinette as depicted by Coppola. Here was a girl (then woman) whose entire life was used as a political bargaining chip — from birth it was destined, and her death in an unmarked grave could only be so appropriate for someone whose only told purpose was to be a fancy prop to represent aristocracy.

Coppola’s choice not to show Marie Antoinette’s brutal death instead makes us focus on how cultures worship and dehumanize icons. Coppola does a masterful job of showing how this woman (Marie Antoinette) is only praised when she shows a complete lack of agency (being traded off, marrying someone she doesn’t know, obeying the rules she finds “ridiculous”) and scorned when she does the things which allow her to have agency (buying things, having an affair, having a barn built to experience something new).

Coppola leaves me with questions: why was Marie Antoinette asked to answer to a French public who had monarchs for centuries? Only her? How would they have her respond?

Big questions loom after watching Coppola’s film that defy what we believe about nobility.

Coppola’s film conveys, to me, a range of feminist concerns through history. Concerns of how much agency, even in a culture of affluence, women can wield given that so much of women’s lives are dictated by the structures of patriarchy.

Jake Hoffman’s ‘Asthma’ Is Sick of Its Own Shit

The amount of negative reviews of Jake Hoffman’s film ‘Asthma’ shows us how much we are over toxic “lost soul” white male protagonists bent on self-destruction. … Whether Hoffman intended it or not, there’s a sharp critique of rich white male tears in this film.

This guest post written by Marlana Eck previously appeared at Awaiting Moderation and is cross-posted with permission.

[Trigger warning: Discussion of suicide]

The amount of negative reviews of Jake Hoffman’s film Asthma shows us how much we are over toxic “lost soul” white male protagonists bent on self-destruction.

Here’s our archetype: recklessly bored and trigger-shy-suicidal Gus, played by Benedict Samuel, who looks strikingly like Mick Jagger (or any desirable indie rock crooner), is a “disaffected youth” (as other reviewers are quick to spot). The pastiching of Jim Morrison and Charles Bukowski-esque male figures has more to show us than youthful folly.

Gus is first introduced to us re-painting a white wall with a co-worker. He wonders why they have to paint it white. “It’s already white,” he says. His co-worker responds with “because they’re paying us to paint it again.” This isn’t enough clarification for Gus, so after he fails to turn the work dynamic into goofing off, he gives up resisting and the next thing we see is him wandering the streets, dopey, smoking a cigarette, eventually making his way back to his apartment. When he gets there, the white paint resurfaces and he gives a brief monologue about being “born in the wrong time” before he defaces his prominent Jim Morrison poster along with everything else in the apartment. A shot cuts to his room completely whited out, and next thing we know he’s standing on a chair in his underwear and hipster boots pouring white paint all over his head with a noose around his neck.

Artistically, Hoffman’s commentary, in this scene in particular, speaks to a post-progress aesthetic reaching the ultimate conclusion of nothingness.

Since this is only in the film’s first 10 minutes, it’s not surprising that Gus is not suicided. Instead he hacks loud and hard (hence Asthma) for an agonizingly long amount of screen time and then returns to his wandering, sporting his, now, super rad post-suicide shoes splattered with white paint.

The film’s mantra, which is stated in the very beginning, seems to be this:

“I miss the old New York in like the ’70s and ’80s: CBGBs, The Ramones, Mean Streets, SAMO doing graffiti and Andy [Warhol] going to parties, the birth of hip hop. Just look at Times Square. It used to be cool…all cracked up. And now it’s like fuckin’ Disneyland. The fuck happened here. Shit.”

The New York Gus misses was at the dawn of neoliberalism. He somehow misses the confusion at the precipice of our current social relations. He’s not dissimilar from figures his character would have grown up with like Kurt Cobain who rallied against the “machine” as much as they were a part of its conservation.

At the start, Hoffman places us in late capitalism’s concourse: our postmodern New York City. If it weren’t for this short monologue, I may have hated the rest of the film. Instead I became more engaged with Hoffman’s thesis, which was partially the disorientation Frederic Jameson describes in “Future City”:

It is the old world that deserves the bile and the satire, this new one is merely its own self-effacement, and its slippage into what Dick called kipple or gubble, what LeGuin once described as the buildings ‘melting. They were getting soggy and shaky, like jello left out in the sun. The corners had already run down the sides, leaving great creamy smears.’ Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

Gus sees life as a mixture of “hey rad bro” highs and self-aggrandized lows. He says he has nothing to lose, steals a car and starts to cruise the city, first stopping off at his drug dealer’s place seeking a heroin fix.

Gus develops a love interest, Ruby.

Some of the funniest scenes in the film are when Gus comes at Ruby (Krysten Ritter) with dialogue that screams a common sentiment of, “Fuck me, I’m a NICE GUY, YOU BITCH!” Because all women are supposed to get aroused by a man who shoots up to experience an infantile state as a nod to all his favorite art gods (who he doesn’t realize were also deeply disturbed by patriarchy). Ruby is hopelessly seen through a male lens with scarcely much depth.

As they drive to Connecticut in the stolen Rolls Royce, they come across a dead deer. Entertained, they pull off to the side with an, “Aw.” Ruby gets out her hip vintage camera and says “Is this disrespectful?” Without skipping a beat she takes the picture anyway as Gus puts deer blood on his fingers and puts it on as eye black (allegedly an homage to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man).

There’s a scene where she first catches Gus shooting up (we know it’s the first time because she says “Are you shooting up heroin?!” ). She is initially repulsed, quickly turns maternal, then, in a mystical foggy upshot, she is a seductress. She’s so devilishly seductive, when she asks if Gus if he has a condom, he says “like I knew this would happen.” (Because, Gus, you didn’t just spend half the film telling Ruby she was beautiful, that you wanted her, you’d win her, and take her to Connecticut, but you couldn’t have planned for a condom. Had nothing to do with you being lazy or anything.) So in the steamy heat of the moment Ruby does what she’s “supposed to,” which translates to her being all like “OKAY!” and doing whatever Gus wants.

She is a tattoo artist with many tattoos of her own, but when Gus asks what her tattoo means she says, “I don’t like talking about the meaning or whatever,” then saying it’s, “like a guard dog or whatever.” This matches some of the films aesthetic and philosophical indifference.

When they end up at their destination they come upon a commune-style mansion belonging to a semi-famous musician-friend of Ruby. The behaviors of the people at the commune (psychedelics, pot, yoga, qigong) speak to the overall depthlessness; there is a lack of authenticity and a superficial searching behavior.

Ruby does eventually abscond, but stays true to her one-dimensional portrayal. Her depthlessness borders on the kitsch as she tells Gus he has no aspirations, holding the same amount of vagueness as the film’s premise. We also learn Gus is a trust fund kid, adding even more “well what the hell” to the narrative.

At the film’s ending, Ruby tells Gus she has to stop getting hung up on these immature losers and get herself a real job (Gotta LEAN IN!).

Whether Hoffman intended it or not, there’s a sharp critique of rich white male tears in this film. Gus is ultimately sad nobody finds his aimless whining cute. Yet his grumbling seems to even annoy him at the end. In the final scene when Gus walks down the dark alley, I feel like he is sick of his own shit.

Throughout, Hoffman employs his irreproachable taste in music with the panache of Sofia Coppola. Also characteristic of some heirs of Hollywood film, despite his good taste, there seems to be a “why” lacking in this film. Perhaps for Hoffman that serves to underscore an ill of our time, or, maybe (more likely), the film is simply a product of it.

Asthma had the potential to explode some of the Bukowskian phantasmagoria perpetuated by narcissistic youth who are increasingly plagued with the possibilities of recognition or celebrity. Instead, it leaves us unfulfilled and struggling to understand the existing power structures which produce the depthlessness many claim to loathe. Much like the lives of the trumped up, romanticized nihilists Gus idolizes, he is an anomie positioned to inherit the same ends.

Marlana Eck is a scholar, writer, and educator from Easton, Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Raging Chicken Press, Hybrid Pedagogy, San Diego Free Press, Cultured Vultures, Lehigh Valley Vanguard, and Rag Queen Periodical. At the latter two publications she serves as director. In her free time she enjoys horticulture and overestimating the efficacy of her dance moves in the living room mirror. Follow her on Twitter at @marlanaesquire.