Bleeding through borders: The horrific imagination, melodramatic traditions and marginal positions

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Content BLEEDING THROUGH BORDERS: THE HORRIFIC IMAGINATION, MELODRAMATIC TRADITIONS AND MARGINAL POSITIONS by H arm ony H. W u A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CINEMA-TELEVISION, CRITICAL STUDIES) May 2003 Copyright 2003 Harmony H. Wu R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. UMI Number: 3103980 Copyright 2003 by Wu, Harmony H. All rights reserved. ® UMI UMI Microform 3103980 Copyright 2003 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-1695 This dissertation, written by H&rmonq H- Wu under the direction o f h t r dissertation committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by the Director of Graduate and Professional Programs, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Director Date May 16, 2003 Dissertation Committee Chair R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. A cknow ledgm ents I w ish to thank Marsha Kinder for her irreproachable example as a scholar, her incisive and insightful skills of reading, always comprehensive and thoughtful commentary and her intolerance of anything half-baked. Michael Renov has provided me with just the right kind of encouragement, intellectual and otherwise, exactly when needed. Leo Braudy entered into my project at a time when his perspective really helped to focus my thinking and has been consistently generous with his insights and support. These and my other professors at USC provided an exciting atmosphere of intellectual discovery, and I have learned so much from them— Lynn Spigel, Jeffrey Sconce, Todd Boyd, Rick Jewell, and Drew Casper and Dana Polan, who helped get this dissertation off the ground in its early stages. My USC friends and colleagues from both the MA and PhD program helped me through the overwhelming days of coursework, teaching and quals. My "Dissertation Group" — Rob Wilton, Julie Absey and Jason Hornick—kept telling me I could do it and provided needed humorous perspective and good food. Being a Northeasterner in Los Angeles for several years, I was m ade to feel at home by the dear grandparents I inherited through marriage, w ho took two starving students out to dinners and brunches, and who iii R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. provided us with a true family setting that was difficult to leave w hen we moved to Boston. Toby Unger, Lisa "Bailey" Walker and Michael C aulder gave me unwavering support, friendship, and humor, and their emails and company have helped pull me through. Matt Severson generously offered his extensive knowledge and enthusiasm about horror, beautiful images from the Academy, keen and enjoyable insight on films past and present, and unconditional friendship. My parents and siblings, in the W u and Hornick families, are ahvays there, for anything and everything, from patience and encouragement to Fed Ex accounts and hot meals, and they (mostly) respected the "don't ask" rule. I owe thanks to Arlette McNeil, Kris Britt and Jayne Karolow for their research assistance. Jim M araniss and Helen Von Schmidt started me down this path in the first place, for w hich I am utterly grateful. During the long period of planning and w riting m y dissertation, we lost four amazing, strong women, whom I loved and admired very much. I wish Beryle-Gay Hornick, Jordana Hornick, Florence Lawton and "Ama" Sing Wu were here so I could thank them for their courage, beauty, humor and love. Finally, Jason Hornick is not only the m ost careful editor, who has read almost every word of this project m ore than once, but also my partner in all things, w ithout w h o m I am lost. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii Abstract vi Chapter 1 — Bleeding through Borders: Horrific and Melodramatic Imaginations 1 Chapter 2 — Tangled Roots: Gothic, M elodrama, H orror 37 Chapter 3 — Generic Pleasures, Shaken and Stirred: Pedro Almodovar's jAtame! and Perverse Pleasures of Patriarchy 81 Chapter 4 — Trading in Horror and Cult Cinema: New Zealand's Bad Taste, Art-house Cachet and Cult Fandom 128 Chapter 5 — Horrific Fictions: H eavenly Creatures and the Cinematic Construction of National Identity 164 Conclusion 231 Bibliography 244 v R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Abstract A comprehensive understanding of the horror genre and its textual mutations must be framed by a consideration of the melodramatic mode in film, particularly as m anifested in the w om an's melodrama. Chapter 1 re evaluates genre theory's norm ative focus on textual and categorical coherence, proposing new avenues of conceptualizing horror, offering the trope of the "horrific imagination" to study horrific diffusion. Chapter 2 examines the historical convergence of m elodram a and horror, outlining 18th-century theatrical m elodram a and the literary Gothic's influence on each other. In cinema studies, they converge in the term "gothic," which has appeared as both "horror" and "m elodram a." Subsequent chapters consider how the horrific interacts with politics of identity, arguing that w hen genres bleed across borders, genres' embedded gender, sexual and national politics can be radically transformed. Chapter 3 examines how Pedro A lm odovar's jAtame! combines generic desires, contributing to the controversy surrounding its US release, as well as how its mixing up of genres' desiring patterns provokes interrogation of those desires. jAtame!'s "queered" genres also trouble conventional notions of femininity, masculinity and sado/m asochistic terms of erotic desire. vi R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Chapter 4 examines the migration of horrific terms across borders of taste, aesthetic hierarchies and modes of fan practices. New Zealand director Peter Jackson's films aggressively exhibit both "bad" and later, "good" taste; taste discourses and problematics of national cinema merge in Jackson's films, producing a New Zealand national image steeped in "bad taste." I also explore different versions of cult fan practice surrounding his films, paying particular attention to how "high" and "low" determines modes of fan discourse. Chapter 5 looks m ore closely at Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, which derives its emotive charge from intertwining the melodramatic and horrific. Investigating m elodram a and horror's particular resonance in New Zealand's post-/colonial relationship with Great Britain, I assert the cross- cultural oedipal narrative of identity has been impressed with nationally specific thematics em phasizing a powerful mother both loved and feared, grounding my argum ent in an account of New Zealand's 1990s national identity crisis. Furtherm ore, cinema has become a crucial means by which nations articulate identity, and horror and melodrama are privileged forms for doing so. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Chapter 1 — B leed in g through Borders: Horrific and Melodramatic Imaginations Genre, it seems, is back. Under the sway of various posts- and -ism s, and a storm y affair w ith spectator-screen relations, the serious rigorous study of genres (which had emerged out of film studies' earlier marriage with structuralism ) had seemingly fallen out of favor by the mid-1990s. But academ ia's renewed and reinvigorated interest in questions of genre can be read in the appearance of a crop of recent titles centrally focused on genre: R efiguring American Film Genres (1998); Film/Genre (1999); Genre and H ollywood (2000); Film Genre 2000 (2000). If genre criticism and theory have made som ething of a comeback in media studies, the study of the horror genre — like the repressed demons, monsters and neuroses of its subject m atter—is back w ith a vengeance. Consider the near-simultaneous emergence of several horror anthologies and overviews, which seek to organize the critical field: The Horror Reader (2000); The Horror Genre (2001); The Horror Film Reader (2001); Horror, The Film Reader (2001). One might say, however, that genre studies never went away. Genre form s one of the central— and arguably, the most popular— organizing 1 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. concepts of undergraduate film courses; genre grounds m uch of the flurry of study in fan and audience discourses; genre has become possibly an even more important consideration in production, marketing and consum ption of media texts. So if genre really never went away, what has clearly changed in this renaissance of generic engagement is the terms under which "genre" is considered, a refining of the terms of genre under the influence of "posts-" perspectives. My investigation here into the horrific and melodramatic and their intertwining proceeds from an assumption that "meaning" is produced from specific and contingent intersections of context (time, place), politics, and textually organized systems of desire. While this dissertation is centrally concerned with two enduring genres in cinema and other visual media, horror and m elodrama, this is not a standard genre study. I am not seeking to evoke and articulate the genres7 essential attributes and core meanings, to develop an aesthetic history or uncover forgotten key texts. Rather, it is a central contention of my dissertation that horror and melodrama are remarkably sympathetic forms, in their aesthetic and thematic shapes, and their adaptability to different con/texts. Indeed, I wish to destabilize some central tendencies in genre studies — those which seek precisely stability and organization in genre — through close engagement not with "central" texts of a genre, but rather w ith exceptional texts, texts that exceed and disrupt generic norms, and texts w hich 2 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. come from non-dominant (non-Hollywood, non-m ainstream ) production contexts— though the dominating paradigm s of Hollywood rem ain a structuring principle. By examining texts at the m argins of horror and melodrama generic discourses, an underlying goal is to reveal a fundamental elusiveness of at the heart of both forms. The choice of pairing horror with m elodram a requires some justification, as the two genres on the face of it could not be m ore opposed. Yet, a more distanced perspective reveals that their defining attributes settle into vectors that are definitely similar. While the genres' presum ed audiences' tastes in the outer trapping and narrative patterns have little in common on the surface, both genres are significantly noted for their gendered addresses. Indeed, horror and m elodram a are so exclusively aligned with polarized audiences along gender lines, that they can be called paradigmatically "gendered" genres. Carol Clover has persuasively illustrated how the slasher horror film caters to male adolescent fantasies,1 and Linda Williams has shown how the patterns of gazing in horror conspire to marginalize women from positions of mastery (though offering avenues of subversion).2 And so aligned is "melodrama" w ith w om en viewers, that the "melodrama" is often presumed to be a synonym w ith " w o m en 's pictures" or "women's weepies." 3 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Horror and m elodrama can be further qualified as "gendered genres" in that their representations of gender are remarkably "reproducible" across texts, with fixed, static across the various iterations of the form —individual films within the genre generally conform to a standard pattern of how gender is figured. As Linda Williams has argued, both genres — though through different means — repeatedly figure spectacles of the victimization of women. In horror, women, often drenched in blood, are the objects of violence or/and the embodiments of abject terror; in melodrama, women are subjected to an endless parade of emotionally wringing scenarios, as they wallow in self-sacrificial pathos, bathed in tears.3 Also binding horror and m elodram a together are a variety of vectors related to reception. Both genres have suffered from cultural dismissal as "low" forms— horror is the disdained genre that stoops to the lowest forms of representation for its cheap thrills, m aking up in shock value what is often missing in production value; m elodram a is akin to the reviled "soap opera," taking unsuspecting (women) view ers on a m anipulative ride of unrealistic acting and outrageous plot. In m edia critical studies, both genres have benefited from explicit psychoanalytic approaches, proving much more amenable to psychoanalytic theories of desire, repression and spectator identification than genres such as the W estern, gangster film or biopic. Critics have also been similarly concerned about audiences' motivations in 4 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the genres: w hy w ould view ers want to be scared (in horror)?; why would they w ant to be m oved to tears (in melodrama)? Stylistically, both genres are noted for their ample allowance of divergences from the m ore rigid requirements of "realist representation" found in other genres, giving way to spectacular exercises of cinematic flourishes. M elodram a is loved for its luscious mise-en-scenes (such as in Vincente Minnelli m elodram as) and exquisite costuming (as seen in Joan Crawford vehicles), providing a decidedly consumerist and bourgeois visual pleasure to w om en consumers. Horror exercises its stylistic muscles in its infamous kill and fright sequences, where all production design and cinematic effects are poured into constructing a thrilling and scary effect (for example, the cam eraw ork of Halloween's [1979] opening sequence; the unsettling w orld of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1919]). Also related, melodrama and horror are also both remarkably "plastic" forms, adaptable and changeable, and have been practiced in a variety of different national/cultural cinema contexts. Finally, w hat the significant body of critical writing on melodrama and horror has revealed w ithout question is that there are intense cultural, and d ecid ed ly g en d ered (and "sexed"), politics at play underneath their apparent surfaces. H orror has been read as sadistic and misogynistic exercises of m ale m astery over w om en—as well as a ritualized arena in 5 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. which w om en characters are regularly allowed considerably more activity and agency than in other kinds of films. Melodrama has been examined critically for its conventional visions of femininity (anchored to the home, identity circumscribed by children and family, economically dependent), which at a systemic level seem to offer a rigidly narrow prescription for how wom en should view their place in society. But melodrama has also been seen as a privileged space in which women's issues and desires are examined and dw elled upon, an alternate space celebrating the many nuances of the feminine continuum. Read variously as "conservative" and "progressive," but reliably with problems of gender at their center, both melodrama and horror clearly have much at stake in exploring the features of gendered and other difference. There are other similarities, and many nuances to the issues I raise above, in the intersections of melodrama/horror. But these meetings of form, figures, politics suggests that an investigation into w here/how m elodram a and horror might come together (in this dissertation— within specific texts and historical forms) can yield important insights into the nature of genre, gendered desires, and vexed problems of identity. For these and other points of convergence of the genres which I w ill explore in m ore detail in the chapters that follow, I am positioning horror in relation to m elodram a. In my dissertation, "horror" is the privileged object of attention 6 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. over "melodrama." This is not because melodrama is unim portant to my study. Rather, in some senses— which I hope to make clear in this introduction and demonstrate throughout the dissertation—m elodram a is constitutive of the horrific. Furthermore, the high caliber of m elodram a studies offers much to horror criticism, and melodrama as the larger "m ode" (discussed below) means that there is, as a general rule, more of m elodram a in horror than horror in melodrama. That is, as I will discuss in detail below, horror is in important ways a specific articulation of melodrama, and thus I will explore melodrama through its intersections with horror. The remainder of this introduction seeks to map out certain tendencies in genre studies, and offers alternatives to conceiving of horror through an appeal to melodrama. GENRE CRITICISM: TRENDS AND ALTERNATIVES One way of thinking about the idea of "genre" is to situate the developm ent of genres historically and economically within their specific, generative context of the Hollywood studio system, particularly of the 1930s-50s. As Thomas Schatz notes in Hollywood Genres, driven by the practical economic considerations of standardizing their product, studios encouraged the developments of genres.4 This model allows for conceiving of genre along m aterial/ economic lines — in the re-use of costumes, props and sets (the 7 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Saloon set of a Western, for example, or the gothic m ansion of horror), which standardizes production and minimizes the need for new investments. Schatz does not limit his insights to the material means of production. The peculiar structure of Hollywood in the classical era uniquely incorporated viewing audiences into the authoring of film texts, in effect asserting, Schatz argues, a measure of control over Hollywood product w ith their box office dollars. Genres hence develop, according to this theory, through a pattern of repetition and difference punctuated by the audience's reception or rejection of the different forms produced by the studios, a pattern w hich is inextricably linked to a flow of capital. The cinema industry quite literally trades on this definition of genre, perhaps m ost visibly in its m arketing strategies for films: genre puts into place a shorthand th at allows Hollywood to sell and advertise a film w ithout having to say too m uch about it, yet audiences still know what to expect. Steve Neale's view of Hollywood genre shares m any similarities with Schatz's presumptions, though with a decidedly more m arxist slant. Like Schatz, Neale is concerned with de-emphasizing the "ideology of subjectivity" (individual artists and transcendental view ers w ith presum ed stable identities) in favor of a systemic economic view of genres. Neale argues that genres within a Hollywood business paradigm function to both ensure difference in product (providing audiences w ith a variety of film titles 8 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. on which to spend box office dollars) as well as to regulate the degree of difference, within a smoothly operating business model. Ultimately, the standardizing of the narrative product for business interests serves the continued operation of dom inant ideology.5 In these views, genres are actually highly regulated comm odity entities, as much a tangible product, at least in the studio system, as stars produced from the star system. The study of genres in this model, then, is part of a larger investigation into the mode of production of cinema at specific historical junctures. Beyond the economic models, there is the more traditional aesthetic approach: that of finding, tracing and cataloguing the aesthetic formations that together form a coherent body of w ork called a "genre." Critics such as Noel Carroll and S. S. Prawer discuss horror in term s of its principal characters and basic underlying themes. Such w ork seeks to find, trace and catalogue aesthetic configurations that converge into a coherent formation called "genre." In horror, this kind of aesthetic analysis has shown that there are stock characters in the horror narrative — the fearsome monster, the overreaching monster-maker, the wise old man, the grotesque assistant, the beautiful heroine, the faithful swain w ho protects her.6 This kind of genre study also seeks subtler them atic featu res o f the genre's construction — the "monster" that makes a narrative a horror text violently disrupts prevailing 9 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. systems of o rd e r/ so that one of horror's underlying chords is an uncertainty and flux of cultural norm s of conduct. As revealing and insightful as this mode of inquiry can be, my own sense is that it is sorely lim ited due to its inherent presumption that there is in fact a consolidated legibility of "genre" as a whole in the first place. This focused drive to discover generic integrity can become an exercise in imposing it, as the genre critic resorts to increasingly obsessive measures to account for variations from a dom inant pattern, resulting in impressively lengthy genealogical m aps of genre sub-types and cycles, or extended elaborations on a genre "rule," to the point of stretching credulity and straining any use value the rule had to begin with.8 Such criticism often becomes so mired in the complex web of its own dogmatic and inflexible logic, that it becomes quite out of step w ith practical application. If, as two horror theorists have argued, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) is not a horror film,9 then the theoretical view point that leads to this conclusion is clearly at several removes both from audiences (everyone "knows" Psycho is a horror film) and from other horror critics, who have argued quite persuasively that Psycho is the "m other" of that m ost dom inant form of horror in recent times, the slasher film.1 0 The trouble w ith rules and lists and maps and diagrams of generic genealogies and typologies is that such theoretical perspectives inevitably come to a point of having to monitor the discursive borders of the 10 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. genre and its critics — policing unruly texts that wander outside the theoretical grid, reprimanding theorists whose practice deviates from its logic. "List" criticism seems to perform as guardian to a perceived "purity" of genre that, for all of the work required to define and exclude certain texts in the face of common understanding, seems to not actually exist.1 1 Some genres are perhaps more readily amenable to a list-and- taxonom y approach—the Western and the gangster film, for example, with their bounded production cycles and reliably lucid thematics. Perhaps because these genres are tied to fixed historical moments and specific settings (the post Civil War and the Western frontier; Prohibition or Italian Mafiosi culture), their generic traces, for the most part, do not wander into any other sort of film text— to a high degree, a film either is a gangster film or it isn't. Still, even for such exquisitely coherent genres like the Western and the gangster, the list approach to genre analysis is only productive up to the precise point of texts' adherence/coherence to the form; textual exceptions and transgression have neither a function nor constitutive place in its paradigm . This essential theoretical insensibility to textual transgressions except as generic v io la tio n is especially problematic in relation to horror, w hich has developed as a less definable and more amorphous genre than (in the simplest formulation) "films with a 'monster' in them." Unlike the Western 11 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. or the gangster film, horror, like its casts of monsters, beasts and serial killers, has had multiple regenerations and resurgences; "horror" does not only mean 1930s Universal horror, the way "Western" means alm ost exclusively classic studio system horse and cowboy pictures. Lists of conventions, menus of iconography, and enumerations of themes only w ork in horror for what hindsight reveals to be a (relatively) contained aesthetic and production cycle (again, 1930s Universal horror is emblematic). But lists generated here begin to rapidly decompose as we move further aw ay from that specific cycle— a consideration of themes and conventions of 1940s Val Lewton/RKO horror would not correspond to 30s Universal horror (the same would be true of Hammer horror, 1970s horror, the literary Gothic and so on). Yet, it would fly in the face of logic to argue, essentially, that if a text does not act like a Universal horror film of the 1930s, then it is not horror at all. Clearly there are relations between the broad kinds of horror I refer to above, but they are not the same. Furthermore, the "residue" of horror can be palpably felt in a surprising variety of narratives, emerging in the most unlikely texts and in unexpected contexts. Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation (1995) makes pointed use of horror gore and folds slasher film logic into its road movie template. lAtame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) was such a lightning rod of debate in the US in 1990 in part because it intertwined horror thematics into 12 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. what seemed to be a romantic comedy. H eavenly Creatures, (1994) w ith its Mario Lanza soundtrack and prosaic 1950s setting, is the furthest thing from usual expressions of horror, yet in two crucial passages of the film, director Peter Jackson (who, before this "legitimate" Academy A w ard-nom inated film, had been known for low-brow gross-out cult horror flicks), appeals most powerfully to iconographies and emotional registers of fear and panic more familiar from the splatter horror film. The Cell (Tarsem Singh, 2000) divided critics, confused audiences and courted Senatorial controversy in its melding of customary slasher horror suspense w ith horrific imagery culled from more marginal and modernist traditions, such as sadom asochist pornography and surrealist art. David Lynch's Lost H ighzvay (1997) took film noir obsessions down the rabbit hole of dreamlike horrific violence, exploring the enduring gothic theme of doubling. W hat is of note here is that horrific elements appear in these examples as central m eaning-m aking devices even though in apparently "non-horror" film texts. While such films w ould not be called "horror" films, genre theory fails us by not even adm itting consideration of this peripatetic nature of the horrific and how such decontextualized semantics in turn generate meanings at once connected to and altered from their original contexts. Rick Altman's work on genre has focused on developing a theory of genre change and process, trying to move beyond w hat he sees as the 13 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. simplistic explanation of genre form ation that moves from business interest to the development of genre. In his study, Film/Genre, he develops a communication model of generic change, building off his earlier insights in the influential article "A Sem antic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre."1 2 Altman argues against a perspective that sees genres as timeless, static and unchanging, and instead offers a paradigm for how genres are transformed by various discursive communities — com m unities of reception, criticism and production. While Altman's attention to the processes of change allows for a more dynamic model of genre and represents an im portant new avenue of investigation into genres at large, his attem pt to account for all genres' patterns of change in the end proves less w ieldy for application and insight into the specific pathways of individual genres and their transformation. And, Altman's paradigm offers few conceptual tools for considering how particular generic transformations signify w ithin their contexts of transformation. I share with Altman the desire to dism antle the rigid taxonomic approaches that have plagued genre criticism, and in particular, horror criticism, which I have suggested is especially hobbled by the constraints of taxonomic genre criticism. However, I seek to limit my query to horror and melodrama and their relations, grounding m y investigation into the 14 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. processes of generic transform ation and boundary-crossing through specific case studies. We need a m ore flexible theory, a different way of looking, a new mode of conceiving of horror. We need a way of approaching horror that attends to its subtleties and nuances, its movement between and across different texts, and its ability to emerge, seemingly out of nowhere, in a narrative that did not seem at all to be horror before. We need a setting for understanding how horror's patterns of envisioning violence and fear can emerge unexpectedly, in m utated forms, and how the remarkably protean substance of horror offers a highly charged and usefully pliable framework for articulating diffuse, intangible and various anxieties that is seemingly endlessly adaptable to different contexts. As a step toward conceiving of this more supple m anner of regarding horror, and in keeping with its intertextual intentions, I propose some unabashed theoretical poaching from other genre studies. M elodram a studies in particular provides provocative insights into potential lines of inquiry for talking about genre differently. POACHING THEORY Peter Brooks's foundational study of melodrama, The Melodramatic Imagination, offers particularly suggestive propositions as to how to go about engaging with genre. In tracing how patterns established in late eighteenth- 15 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. century m elodram a migrated into nineteenth-century realist novels, Brooks makes the strategic critical distinction between "melodrama" (the noun) and " m elodram atic" (the adjective), a rhetorical move that allows for a productive double-visioning.1 3 For him, "melodrama" refers to a historically bounded generic formation, with specific, iterable characteristics and conventions (the use of music, pantomime and spectacle) arising at a specific historical and geographical location (first appearing in Revolutionary France, petering out at the end of the nineteenth century). "Melodramatic," the adjective, is a function of melodrama conceived as operating as a mode, at once suggesting a connection to the historically specific melodrama, as well as m ovem ents away and transformations of the original generic manifestation. For his purposes, this rhetorical division allows him to discuss both melodram a (bounded in a particular historical moment, definable and recognizable by an established set of conventions) and how a m elodram atic way of perceiving— the "melodramatic imagination" — jumped from the stage and has traveled beyond its original, historically and generically bounded frame. This way of looking at the genre implicitly allows for attention to how the original formation is itself changed by new con texts, n e w p rocesses, and collisions w ith other aesthetic means and modes of thought. 1 6 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Applying this melodrama/melodramatic, genre/m ode m odel of studying genre to horror allows us to think about both historical form ations of the genre (such as 1930s Universal Horror or the Italian giallo) and the movement and transformation of generic traces across texts, beyond their original contexts. This dialogism builds bridges across list/ genealogy criticism and that which would seek to examine horror in its more diffuse manifestations. "Horror" would refer then to "known" articulations of the horror genre (such as German Expressionist horror of the silent era, slasher- horror of the 1980s— with concomitant enumerations of themes, conventions, iconographies), encompassing the totality of the grand variety of the features embodied in these texts. The "horrific," for its part, would signify a m igration of elements of horror (in its vastness, in its multiple, historical, bounded manifestations), whether in new configurations that constitute their ow n horrific sub-genre, or more subtle horrific appropriations in otherwise "non-horror" texts. Appealing to Peter Brooks thus illustrates one avenue by which melodrama theory provides productively different means of looking at genre, opening up new areas of inquiry and theorizations into how genre (both in discrete and m ore diffuse manifestations) and generically specific modes of perceiving, operate in contained systems and travel to (and are altered by) different contexts. Melodrama offers even more textually specific 17 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. insights into horror, however, apart from Brooks's useful meta-critical paradigm I have focused on here. Linda Williams, also building off Peter Brooks, has recently forwarded the persuasive argum ent that a melodramatic mode undergirds the logic of all popular narrative film —not just the sub-set of films conventionally called "m elodram as."1 4 Extrapolating from Brooks's argument that stage melodrama filled the epistemological gap left by the decline of the Sacred by taking on the burden (previously the domain of the Church and Monarchy) of expressing a secularized moral order,1 5 Williams suggests that popular cinema has similarly, in contemporary terms, functioned to reveal "hidden m oral legibility."1 6 She asserts that the "melodramatic mode" is not only present in "w om en's weepies" and "domestic melodramas" (the conventionally presum ed object of the term "melodrama"), but in film texts as various as the critically- lauded, social-consciousness pictures Malcolm X (1992) and Philadelphia (1993), as well as the action-packed and muscle-bound Rambo (1987). One critical advantage of viewing m elodram a as the com m on deep structure of many kinds of narrative film is that it offers a new perspective into fundamental linkages across diverse texts — a beginning fram ew ork for understanding the kinds of textual m igrations an d generic tran sgression s and exceptions that muck up list genre criticism. This focus on eliciting the constitutive elements of the underlying foundation of the m elodram atic 18 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. mode— she seeks deeply em bedded broad patterns, across an entire tradition of popular narrative filmmaking—means, however, that Williams is not concerned here with developing an agenda as to how to perform the particulars of genre criticism in the wake of this radically reconstituted field. Williams's only comment on the consequences of the underlying "melodramatic mode" theory on genres at large is a call for the rejection of current norms of genre criticism in favor of greater attention to "the deeper coherence of melodrama"1 7 on which genres are built.1 8 But in the context of my own interest in horror and search for a more fluid, intertextual method of genre criticism, I w ould assert that careful considerations of how an underlying m elodram atic mode manifests in specific genres represent one of the m ore provocative new fields of inquiry opened up by her melodramatic overhaul of the discourse. That is, while we would do well to acknowledge and investigate the melodramatic basis of Westerns, the gangster film, the musical and so on, we do not want to go so far as to say that the specific genres of the W estern, the gangster, the musical do not in fact exist (to invert her terms: lose the genre "trees" for the melodrama "forest"1 9 ). Rather, in my view, w hat her lucid and cogent argument suggests for genre studies is that we need to pay greater, informed attention to how specific genres seize and differently act up o n —how they inflect— the basic melodramatic mode. 19 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Acknowledgement of the melodramatic mode's operation in sub-set genres, then, like Brooks's "m elodram a/m elodram atic" dialogism, offers another means of integrating textual stability (the melodramatic in and across genres) and variation (inflections and mutations of the melodramatic within different genres). The m elodram atic base is particularly strong and surprisingly evident in horror — a look at the melodramatics of horror and the horrifies of m elodram a thus has the potential for illuminating both. APPROACHING THE HORRIFIC The center of melodram a, W illiams argues, lies exactly in its quest to reveal moral legibility. The articulation of a moral universe is the organizing logic of the form —its reliance on narratives of "virtue" beset by "villainy," manichean characters, and them atic returns to a space of "innocence" are harmoniously orchestrated to express melodrama's version of a moral system, a secular form of a now degraded moral occult once associated with the grandeur of the Sacred. In the horror film's adaptation of the melodramatic m ode, this em bedded effort to reveal moral legibility takes on a particularly heightened resonance. The revelation of moral systems— an operation which in other films is buried (though not less present) under narrative cause-effect logics and pretensions toward character 20 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. developm ent2 0 —in horror becomes startling naked, its processes rendered exceedingly visible. H orror's manifest (not hidden or masked) interests lie in dramatizing struggles betw een suffering victims (be they medieval villagers, teens at a sum m er cam p, w ayw ard filmmakers lost in the woods) and powerful villainy (w hether monsters and creatures of various ilk, agents of the devil or the devil himself, spirits, ghosts or serial killers, supernatural and otherwise). Extended scenes of suffering are indeed constitutive of the horrific, and they take on a m uch more primal, elemental cast than the melodramatic "suffering" of other genres. To illustrate via contrasting scenarios, in W illiams's exam ple of D. W. Griffith's W ay Doum East (1920), the virtuous heroine A nna (Lillian Gish) is victimized by society's double standards, ostracized for being an unwed mother, or in Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia, A ndrew (Tom Hanks) — fired from his job after revealing he has AIDS— suffers because of society's homophobia. In both, the hero/ine's bodies are the surfaces on which these social afflictions are visibly written: Hanks's m elodram atic revelation of his sore-covered torso and his wasting-away frame; Gish's harrow ing passage down the river, her shivering limp body d r a p e d a c r o ss a n ice f lo e .2 1 T hese scenes express u p on the physical b o d y the abstracted torm ents visited on them by social injustices.2 2 21 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. In horror, this appeal to the textual mechanics of displays of bodily suffering is monstrously amplified. The horrific frequently deploys extended scenes of terrorization, condemning the characters' bodies (and viewers'2 3 ) to protracted performances of fright— for example, the w om en in The H aunting (1963) trembling and shrieking as they helplessly listen to the supernatural sounds threatening them from beyond the door. Even more literally, some films stage explicit scenarios of bodily punishment and violation—Marion's sliced body in Psycho's shower, Barbara Steele's haunting face punctured with ragged bloody holes in Black Sunday (1960), teenagers flayed open by the avenging Jason in the Friday the Thirteenth (1980-2003) series. Bodies are attacked, opened, ground and chopped up, eaten, sliced, shredded, decapitated, dismembered. Victims in horror are victims indeed, with their suffering taken to the outer extremes of possible ways to embody physical pain. In this way, the horrific collapses the space of m etaphor between the melodramatic mode's underlying purpose for appealing to suffering (to render moral legibility) and its means of doing so (inscriptions of pain and suffering on the body itself). The melodramatic mode's manicheism is another feature that horror performs w ith unusual directness. Again, in contrast to other more outwardly realist films, such as W ay Down East or Philadelphia, which tend to modulate basic manicheism of characterization with facades of psychological 22 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. complexity and narratively-dictated motivations, the horrific is on the whole quite uninterested in even the appearance of multi-faceted characterization or narrative causality. Characters in horror are gripped w ith a singularity of function that is often also accompanied with strong visual coding, signifying the manichean machinery at work. Carol Clover has identified the character type of the "Final Girl" in slasher films, for example, w ho is visually distinct from the other victims (the ones who, unlike the Final Girl, die) w ho tend to be beautiful sexually active teenaged women.2 4 Even m ore to the point, horror has a long tradition with spectacular make-up and costum ing effects to signify the manichean otherness of its monsters and villains. This comparative obviousness of horror characters' manicheism translates into even greater perspicuity of the melodramatic manichean architecture that supports the horrific. The final point I want to take up is horror's m odulation of the melodramatic mode's construction of the "space of innocence," w ith which "melodrama begins, and wants to end."2 5 In this m atter of innocence interrupted and the narrative's drive toward its eventual restoration, the horrific consistently departs from the norms of m elodram a's larger template. A s W illiam s claim s for m elodram a at large, sp a c e s o f id y ll a n d in n o c e n c e are also in horror regularly transgressed; Robin W ood's horror form ulation, wherein "normality is threatened by the monster,"2 6 seems readily adaptable 23 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. to Williams's formula for melodrama. And, m any horror texts do return to the innocence with which they began—Frankenstein's m onster is dispatched; Dracula is vanquished. But there is a notable sense in horrific texts that the innocent space, normality, is only superficially reinstated. The specter of another violent disruption of normality, of innocence, lingers ominously on a near horizon. The horrific's inexorable descents into extremes of chaos and usurpations of order intimate an essential untenability of the presumed foundation of moral justness and victories of goodness and virtue. This can be as elusive as the ambivalent ending of Rosemary's Baby (1968) where the waifish Catholic mother learns to love her devil child, or as crudely operative as in series such as the Halloween films (1978-2002), where the bogeyman killer is himself seemingly killed at film 's end —but then manages to rise again, in time for the next installment. The unusual violence and abruptness w ith which innocence and normality are regularly trespassed in horror, combined w ith both the lingering sense of uncertainty that ends m any horrific narratives and the baldness with which melodramatic m achinery (the manicheism, the displays of suffering) operates in horror—together w ork to underm ine the faith in the inevitability and justness of a moral system that asserts that virtue will always prevail. That is, in horror's m odulation of melodrama, the very heart of the melodramatic m ode—its efforts to re-constitute and reveal a moral 24 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. system where virtue is rew arded and villainy punished— is strained to its breaking point. This w eakening of m elodram a's core purpose reverberates all the more strongly because it is horror's extreme faithfulness to melodrama's outer form that destabilizes the inner essence. I have been using the term "horrific" throughout this discussion, in a conscious appropriation of Brooks's genre/m ode dialogism and its sensitivity to the coherences of historical boundedness and textual diffusion, a more elastic and useful m ethod of conceiving of generic texts and effects. I want to expressly burgle one final conceptual paradigm and rhetorical flourish from m elodram a criticism to apply to a study of horror. Brooks and others have argued that beyond a theatrical and aesthetic formation, melodrama has suffused W estern cultural thought since the late eighteenth century,2 7 forming a recognizable "melodramatic imagination," a manner of conceptualizing and engaging w ith the flow of modern life such that it is organized into m anichean polarities, bent in a concerted desire to articulate embedded truths of "m oral legibility" buried beneath the limitations of social status quo and the "ideologically permissible."2 8 While I w ould not m ake such extensive claims for horror, I would like to propose here the presence of a m ore modestly conceived "horrific imagination," as a m eans of accounting for and tracking the mobile semantics of horror, in its m anifold formations, diffused across 25 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. heterogeneous generic, cultural and textual registers. Changeable and by nature diffuse, the horrific imagination is operative in narrative systems w hen appeals are m ade to starkly drawn imagery and themes of violence, fear, blood, shadows, monsters, killers, supernatural effects, and when visions of the w orld are pessimistically imaged in terms that render a universe subject to cataclysmic disruptions in normal modes of life. The horrific im agination is at work when boundaries are violently transgressed, w hen the body is trespassed, and when the psyche becomes the playing field for m adness and paranoia. The horrific imagination is at play when the moral fram ew ork reveals itself as much inclined toward evil and villainy as to goodness and virtue. Indeed one of its fundamental points of distinction from its parent fram ework is that the horrific's transgressions well exceed the limits of the social order, whereas melodrama's essential tendency is to operate w ithin the limits of the "permissible" (or, to articulate social violations only in order to resolutely re-contain them and to reassert the validity of the social order). The adoption of the figure of a "horrific imagination" to account for a particular expressive mode has dual advantages of discursive utility and descriptive value, both in genre studies and more generally in culture at large. We can observe, for instance, the horrific imagination at work in the US in the tone and shape of conjectured scenarios of threats to safety post- 26 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. September 11,2001, where specters of social disintegration and further cataclysmic catastrophe painfully gripped the national consciousness, and m onstrous forms of manichean characterization were quite sadly projected onto crudely defined "Middle Eastern" otherness. The construct of a "horrific imagination" works, too, with the generic paradigms laid out by other scholars: it can enfold horror as modification and modulation of a melodramatic mode (per Williams), but it can also acknowledge and accommodate horrific systems and moments of expression outside of a W estern Judeo-Christian infrastructure (and its secularization) from which the larger melodramatic framework emerged. This final point of the cross-cultural flexibility offered by conceptualizing a horrific imagination bears further elaboration. One of the problems with talking about horror as a bounded aesthetic production is not only the m any historical moments of its reemergence referred to earlier, but also its appearance in multiple cultural contexts. Speaking of "horror" has too frequently presumed a Western/Hollywood object, undercutting sensitivity to cultural variations. A "horrific imagination," on the other hand, can float across cultural differences and national boundaries, can be sh a p e d a n d ch an ged b y the specific circum stances — narratives o f h isto r y a n d folklore, for example, or norms of gender, sexual and generational politics, to name broad strains that have marked critical interest in the 27 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Hollywood/Western horror film. Cross-cultural connections are also facilitated more easily by this conception of the horrific imagination, w ith its degree of flexibility allowing for expressions of the features of "horror" that are not necessarily tied to a discrete, iterable genre formation. CHAPTER OVERVIEW This dissertation is in many ways driven by fundam ental questions about the fact and nature of the striking consilience between m elodram a and horror, and how these two gendered genres can be m arshaled to articulate notions of, and anxieties about, gender, sexuality and national identity. Both genres' embedded focus on problems of gender and sexuality (a thematic tendency that is part and parcel of the genres' cultural marginalization) creates a semiotic field of significance immediately accessible to individual texts; in border-crossing films this allows for potentially radical critiques of normative conceptions about gender, sexuality and identity. In chapter 2 ,1 extend these introductory rem arks about horror and melodrama and examine the historical convergence of m elodram a and horror through the deep histories of the forms — theatrical m elodram a and the literary Gothic. I examine the concurrent historical emergence of Gothic as a literary genre with stage melodrama's proliferation as an entrenched cultural form, exploring their similar responses to shared contexts of 28 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Revolution and Enlightenment. Also under discussion are their similar means — though in different media — of organizing their signature "melodramatic" and "Gothic" effects. From there, I explore how the terms "melodrama" and "horror" in cinema studies have intersected along the film "gothic"— which in its various guises has appeared as "horror" or "melodrama." I test the validity of these discursive confluences through analyses of two recent horror successes, The O thers (2002) and The Sixth Sense (1999), exploring how horror and m elodram a thematics work in tandem. The mainstream box office success of both films (emerging from a Hollywood tradition, though The Others was produced in Spain by a Spanish director) testifies to the validity (and entrenched nature) of horror and melodrama intersections. In chapter 3 ,1 look at an extreme case of generic border crossing and intermingling, Pedro Almodovar's jAtame! (1990), in order to explore how the combination of generic desires contributed to the controversy surrounding the film on its release in the US, as well as how the mixing up of genres and their desiring patterns provokes a self-conscious interrogation of those very desires. Furthermore, by posing generic patterns of address against each other, A lm o d o v a r's film in d ica te s c e rta in lim ita tio n s to existin g psychoanalytic interpretations of m elodram a and horror. This chapter brings in a third generic term — pornography. The film m ust be situated within the 29 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. context of the feminist "porn w ars" and the larger cultural debates on pornography in the US, to underscore the political nature of generic desires. In examining the sexual politics at w ork within the text and outside it in the MPA A controversy, this chapter also considers how "queering" genres troubles conventional notions of femininity, masculinity and the sado/masochistic term s of erotic desire. Chapter 4 looks at a different sort of migration of horrific terms— across borders of taste and aesthetic hierarchies. Here, I examine the work of New Zealand director Peter Jackson, whose work spans the taste spectrum from low bad taste in gross-out horror, mainstream blockbuster and middlebrow aesthetics, and art cinema deployment of good taste. Central to this travelling of taste and aesthetics in Jackson's work is the mode of the horrific. I explore how taste discourses and problematics of national cinema merge for Jackson and New Zealand national cinema, exploring controversies surrounding Jackson's entrenchment in the horrific and its concomitant reflection of a "bad taste" New Zealand national image in the global circulation of tropes of national identity. Central to this exploration is a consideration of cult fan practices and how they differently manifest at high and low ends of the taste spectrum , and how they are in part determined by modes of genre. 30 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. C hapter 5 extends concerns from the previous chapter about national cinema and genre by taking a closer examination of Jackson's 1994 film, H eavenly Creatures, as a text that derives its emotive charge precisely from its intertw ining of the melodramatic and the horrific. I explore how the generic forms of m elodram a and horror have particular resonance for New Zealand's national history, where its colonial and post-colonial relationship w ith Great Britain has impressed certain nationally specific tendencies onto the cross-cultural oedipal narrative of identity. I seek to ground my analysis of the film through an account of New Zealand's acute post-colonial national identity crisis in the mid-1990s, and further consider how cinema has become a crucial m eans by which nations articulate identity, a dynamic that is particularly pronounced in New Zealand. Throughout my dissertation I am explicitly interested in exploring the problem s m apped across the melodramatic and horrific field from the perspective of the margins, iterated in the texts I discuss in a number of forms. H orror and m elodram a themselves are marginalized genres, historically dism issed as the crudest form of manipulation of audience by movie text. N ew Zealand and Spain are not, historically, international cen ters of c in e m a tic v isib ility . T h e directors I look at these contexts have exploited the m argins—horror, melodrama, bad taste — to "center" their national cinemas in a global context. And, it is marginal generic modes that 31 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. seem to facilitate the most powerful envoicements of marginalized identities, particularly along the lines of gender and sexuality. Genre theories are too often too entrenched in a Hollywood paradigm . While Hollywood's generic models are highly influential, I am m ore interested in how these paradigms are adapted to and differently positioned against other genres and in new and different cinematic/historical contexts. Horror and melodrama, I argue, are ideally suited for processes of what Marsha Kinder calls "transcultural reinscription,"2 9 where imagery and tropes from one context (often the dom inant Hollywood paradigm) travel to and are changed by new cultural contexts. However, just as it is an error to only consider genres from their m ainstream / dominant manifestations, it would be wrong-headed to argue that generic formations spoken "elsewhere" (Spain; New Zealand) do so in aesthetic vacuums. Indeed, the films that most actively deconstruct the generic paradigm s of horror and melodrama are those that are most insistently interrogating and reconfiguring Hollywood's generic versions. Their deconstruction of horror/melodrama (or the knowing "use" of the expectations embedded in horror/melodrama) emerges precisely out of a dialogue with Hollywood norms of generic patterns. The central position of this dissertation is that it is imperative to engage in the act of looking at horror from the perspective of movements and 32 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. margins. I focus on horror's movement across genre borders, across inter/ national borders, across taste hierarchies, across fan practices — and consider how all of these are implicated in wider networks of politics, particularly as related to gender, sexuality, and problematics of national cinema/national identity. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. ENDNOTES 1 Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the M odern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 2 Linda Williams, "When the W oman Looks," The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) 15-34. 3 Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995) 140-158. 4 Thomas Schatz, Hollyxoood Genres (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 9. 5 Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980) 54-55. 6 S. S. Prawer, Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale o f Terror (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980) 38-9. 7 Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes o f the H eart (New York: Routledge, 1990) 30,16. 8 For example, Noel Carroll attempts to elucidate the narrative structure of horror, in an attempt to argue that the structure itself is linked to anxieties about knowledge which he sees as a central thematic of the genre. What results is a bizarre elaboration on the variations of w hat he calls the onset- discovery-confirmation-confrontation plot. All horror plots, he asserts, conform to one of the following structures: onset-discovery-confirmation- confrontation; onset-discovery-confrontation; onset-discovery-confirmation; onset-confirmation-confrontation; onset-confrontation; onset-discovery; onset-confirmation; discovery-confrontation; discovery-confirmation; confirmation-confrontation; onset; discovery; confirmation; confrontation (109-111). 9 Carroll, 38-9; James B. Twitchell, Dreadful Pleasures: A n A natom y of Modern Horror (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 290. 1 0 Linda Williams, "When the W oman Looks," The Dread o f Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) 15-34; Carol J. Clover, "Her Body, Himself," M en, W omen and Chain Saxos: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 21-64. 34 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 1 1 David J. Russell sees a similar problem in list theories as I am pointing out here, however his w ay out of the list impasse is to argue for the need for a better teratology and provides a new list of the various kinds of monsters. ("Monster Roundup: Reintegrating the H orror Genre," Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and H istory, Nick Browne, ed. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998] 233-254). 1 2 Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: BFI Publishing, 1999). A revised version of a "A Semantic/Syntactic A pproach to Film Genre" appears in this volume. The original version is reprinted in Film Genre Reader II (Barry K. Grant, ed. [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995] 26-40). 1 3 Peter Brooks, The M elodram atic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976 [reprint edition 1995]) xv-xvii. 1 4 For example, Im itation of Life (1934) or Steel Magnolias or The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002). 1 5 Brooks, 5,14-17,20. 1 6 Linda Williams, "M elodram a Revised," Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, Nick Browne, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 52. 4 7 Ibid., 62 1 8 Williams's silence on the im pact of the "melodramatic mode" on genre criticism results from the advancem ent of her more polemical positions that are intertwined w ith her major argum ent, which include a call for the degendering of the associations of "m elodram a" in film studies and a reintegration of a notion of "excess" into a narrative norm ("Melodrama Revised"). 1 9 She writes, "Critics and historians of m oving images have often been blind to the forest of melodram a because of their attention to the trees of genre" (Ibid., 60). 2 0 Ibid., 56-62. Here, Williams is w orking from the insights of Rick Altman in his essay "Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today," Classical H ollyum d Narrative: The Paradigm Wars, Jane Gaines, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992) 9-47. 35 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 2 1 Williams, "M elodram a Revised," 54, 67. 2 2 Thomas Elsaesser discusses this use of the body as vessel for expressing abstractions in relation to melodrama (conceived as a Hollywood genre) in "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," Home is Where the H eart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, Christine Gledhill, ed. (London: BFI Publishing, 1987) 43-69. 2 3 As Linda Williams brilliantly discusses in the essay, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," cited in note #3 above. 2 4 Clover, "H er Body, Himself," 21-64. 2 5 Williams, "M elodram a Revised," 65. 2 6 Robin W ood, "The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s," Hollyxoood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 78. 2 7 See also for example Christine Gledhill, "The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation," Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the W oman's Film, Christine Gledhill, ed. (London: BFI Publishing, 1987) 5-39, and Linda Williams, "M elodrama Revised." Gledhill calls melodrama a "pervasive aesthetic m ode" that "became a central cultural paradigm" (19). 2 8 Gledhill, 38. 2 9 Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 3 6 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Chapter 2 - T angled Roots: Gothic, Melodrama, Horror Some of the most interesting debates in cinema studies on questions of identification and ideology, loosely spiraling outward from Laura M ulvey's provocations about the gendered gaze and the entrapping pleasures of narrative cinema, have emerged from feminist-informed analyses of two genres that on the surface seem diametrically opposed — the horror film and the "melodrama," Hollywood's women's pictures of the 1930s and 1940s and the domestic melodramas of the 1950s. That feminist film criticism should settle upon these two genres, in spite of (or because of) their low status on the totem pole of cultural value, is no accident. Both genres are, as this criticism has persuasively illustrated, fundamentally about gendered difference. The melodrama, a cinematic world where narratives were constructed for women, has alternatively offered feminist critics opportunities to find subversive feminist pleasures within a patriarchal dom inant ideology, or case studies in the ways in which patriarchal culture, through processes of identification with virtuously suffering women on screen, makes women spectators complicit with their own victimization. 37 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. The horror film, on the other hand, is a semantic field w herein w om en are regularly violently punished and figured as objects of fear and m onstrosity. Feminist investigation of horror thus has taken similar shape as fem inist criticism on the melodrama, only from the opposite direction: horror critics and theorists have demonstrated how the horror genre — im agined to be directed toward male spectators— articulates profound masculine anxieties, catalogued the genre's stifling and nefarious imagery of women, and worked "ways out" of the misogynist impasses. These points of continuity between horror and m elodram a as well as the similarities I outlined in the introductory chapter, provide a solid basis for examining film horror and melodrama together. So divergent are the two genres in their exterior trappings, however, that these similarities at first seem surprising, and one might be tempted to dismiss the similarities as coincidence. In order to more firmly establish the inherent linkages betw een cinematic women's melodrama and horror film, this chapter will tu rn to the roots of both forms, the theatrical melodrama and the literary Gothic, which were both fomented in and found their most revolutionary expressions in tumultuous Europe of the 1790s. T his account is necessary, for w h ile theater sch o la rs g e n e r a lly acknowledge that "melodrama" and "gothic" have tightly interw ound histories and shared aesthetic contours, the point is missing from cinema 38 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. histories (perhaps because few have turned their attention to the interrelation of horror and melodrama). Furtherm ore, while treatises on the literary and theatrical melodrama m ight acknowledge the gothic/melodrama interrelation, it is rarely the m ajor focus of those studies. I argue that there is value in sifting through the precise nature of this relationship. A recognition of melodrama and gothic's shared histories affords a deeper understanding of the essential sym pathies between the forms — even in iterations so far rem oved in time from their origins, film "melodrama" (conceived as a genre) and "horror." For even as these cinematic legacies of stage melodrama and literary gothic have taken rather different paths from each other in the process of their cinematic trajectories (film melodrama's focus on feminine space; horror's focus on monsters and blood), their corresponding features, previously noted, are still strikingly visible. As discussed in the previous chapter, Linda Williams has argued that the melodramatic mode is the basis for all popular narrative cinema,1 but the particular empathy between horror and m elodram a m ust be further examined, with their intimate deep histories as the starting point. MELODRAMA AND GOTHIC The influential theatrical form, melodrama, and the influential novelistic genre, Gothic, were born almost simultaneously in Europe in the late 39 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. eighteenth century, and as each m atured separately, each also had lasting influences on the other. The exchanges betw een the theatrical and literary formations are visible in their com parable underlying narrative architecture as well as the nature of some of the more superficial trappings of the individual works. Their histories are necessarily shared, and the stories of their aesthetic and thematic developm ents are tales of inter-media and generic cross-fertilization. Melodrama first originated in France and very shortly afterward in England in the last decade of the eighteenth century, developing its populist outlook, and characteristic narrative patterns and signifying strategies from the unique conditions of the theaters in w hich the melodrame played— non licensed theaters where poetry and speech were banned. Whereas licensed or patent theaters played "legitim ate" dram a, implicitly upholding the traditional cultural values of the ruling class that also comprised their patrons,2 the non-licensed theaters w ere frequented by the lower classes and reflected more populist and ultim ately m ore democratic sensibilities that became central to the form. The prohibition on the use of spoken words engendered the play's reliance upon music (melos) and pantomime.3 A d ditionally, the p h y sic a l s h a p e of th e th e a te r s also h a d a determ in ing effect on the aesthetic conventions of the m elodram a — playing in the recently constructed large theaters m eant the spoken word would have been lost to 40 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the back row s anyhow; w hat was more effective in commanding these spaces was an em phasis on broad gesture and spectacular effects that appealed immediately to the eye, w ithout the aid of verbal explanation. The Gothic novel emerged in England, growing out of a renewed interest in the m edieval era, which included a fascination with its artifacts and a new taste for the adventurous spirits seen to reside in the era's romances.4 Gothic Revival influenced visual arts and poetry, notably culminating the G raveyard School, and in 1764, Horace Walpole wrote The Castle o f O tranto, the first Gothic novel. Besides the settings and flavors provided by the M iddle Ages, the characteristic gothic effects were gathered from m any origins, from Elizabethan dramas, German tales of bandits and ghosts, and new ways of appreciating landscapes associated with the sublime. Like m elodram a, the Gothic novel reached its fullest expression in the 1790s. Both Gothic and m elodram a in their historic forms are noted for their amazing degree of consistency in shape and content. Gothic novels tend to be set in feudal pasts, feature crumbling gloomy castles, imperious convents and spooky graveyards. The virtuous heroine is persecuted by brooding aristocratic v illa in s , w h o m a n u fa ctu re nefarious plots to stu n her into relinquishing her m odest fortune through false marriages or yielding her virgin virtue through magic potions and poisons. There are intricate 41 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. subplots of bleeding nuns and secret love affairs, mad dashes through horrifying subterranean tunnels or glowering, banditti-infested woods. Comic relief can appear in the form of cowardly servants or vain and preening aged aunts. There is a reliance on mysterious and supernatural incidents, the appearance of ghosts, demons and other terrible visions. Death lingers over all; corpses abound, characters die and skeletons rattle. M elodram a's plots have more variety, especially by way of settings, w hich can be nautical, domestic, oriental— but even in their variety, m elodram as can be described in structurally identical terms. Frank Rahill argues the genre is reducible to the following: M elodrama is a form of dramatic composition in prose partaking of the nature of tragedy, comedy, pantomime, and spectacle, and intended for a popular audience. Primarily concerned with situation and plot, it calls upon mimed action extensively and employs a more or less fixed complement of stock characters, the most important of which are a suffering heroine or hero, a persecuting villain, and a benevolent comic. It is conventionally moral and humanitarian in point of view and sentimental and optimistic in temper, concluding its fable happily w ith virtue rewarded after many trials and vice punished. Characteristically it offers elaborate scenic accessories and miscellaneous divertissements and introduces music freely, typically to underscore dramatic effect.5 To this basic structure might be added "shootings, stranglings, hangings, p o is o n in g s , d r o w n in g s, stabbings, suicides, explosions, conflagrations, avalanches, earthquakes, eruptions, shipwrecks, train wrecks,"6 among m any other spectacular incidents. 42 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Having schematized the outward features and narrative m atrices of gothic and melodrama, it is worthwhile to point out areas of sim ilarity between these literary and theatrical genres. W hat is m ost apparent is melodrama's and Gothic's use of "stock" characters— that is, the gothic and melodramatic worlds are inhabited by personality types, not psychologically nuanced, that are driven by single characteristic features (virtue/ villainy). The heroine is always good, in both melodrama and Gothic, and her conflict comes from the concertedly evil machinations of her thoroughly villainous foe. For the most part, Gothic characters also fit Robert H eilm an's description of melodramatic characters, having "an absence of the basic inner conflict" so that the individual is pictured as "essentially 'w hole.'"7 These "whole" characters are moved through the cogs of the story in a play of external forces set in motion by the villains (a maiden deprived of her modest fortune, whisked away to an ancient castle or pirate ship), indicating the second major way in which Gothic and melodrama converge —the structuring of exciting incident in narrative and plot to elicit the form s' signature sensational effects. Both the melodrama play and the Gothic novel are noted for their introduction and heavy reliance on the new mechanism of suspense. Gothic whips up narrative suspense with astonishing arrays of supernatural and horrible events, so that the reader "with quickened pulse breathlessly 43 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. anticipates a startling development."8 Like Gothic's narrative structure which is "based on a principle of contrast/'9 m elodram a has also been described as "the art of mystery, suspense, and unexpected peripeties delivered at the swiftest possible tempo."1 0 Consider D evendra Varma's description of a genre that is chiefly concerned with the primitive excitement born of danger, battle, pursuit, the supernatural, fearful events, and visions, and love, appeals to the w idest circle and gratifies the desire...for something greater than reality, som ething they may admire and in their dreams would emulate.1 1 Varma's portrayal of the Gothic aptly crystallizes its m otor forces, but the description could be applied just as accurately to the thrilling w orld of melodrama. Both the Gothic and melodrama utilized new narrative techniques in producing suspense by the rapid succession of dram atic incidents noted above and by highlighting key scenes of excitement as focal points of the narratives. Melodrama's "sensation scene" was the apotheosis of the dramatic exhilarations produced by its structure of rapidly alternating scenes of violence and pathos.1 2 Similarly, the Radcliffe school of the Gothic's stress on a few key scenes that are written to linger in the reader's m ind represent narrative crucibles in w hich the overarching sen ses o f m ystery and aching suspense are crystallized.1 3 It is suggestive to my larger point of the compatibility of the two genres that critics of m elodram a and the Gothic 44 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. separately have claimed that the narrational structures of both melodrama and the Gothic have had larger pervasive influence on later realist genres, which ultimately undergird the narrational repertoire of popular cinema today.1 4 Violence, action, blood and m onsters are the stock in trade of both melodrama and the Gothic, and while the Gothic chase would not feature an avalanche, as might be found in m elodram a, the melodrama often ransacked the Gothic's arsenal of excitement. In addition to "men-o'-war exploding] magnificently and [sinking] in seas of real water, forests and castles bursting] into flames, walls totter[ing] and [falling] before the onslaught of besiegers, bridges collapsing] carrying scoundrels to their doom, avalanches and inundations transform ing] the stage into scenes of desolation," melodrama also featured ghosts and corpses reviving at climactic moments, bleeding nuns and doppelgangers — that is, the very stuff of Gothic.1 5 Many Gothic romances were, in fact, translated into melodramas and performed with great success; in the m elodram a, the Gothic tale found a comfortable and familiar second home in which it flourished, because their narrative rhythms were in synch, and m elodram a's vibrant visual language gave physical shape to the G o th ic 's p r e v io u s ly o n ly im a g in e d horrors and marvels. 45 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. In their appeals to fright and excitement through their depictions of fantastic events, both the Gothic and melodrama were eliciting viewers' or readers' visceral responses and triggering emotions, rather than petitioning "higher" registers of aesthetic or intellectual contemplation. Combining this exploitation of exhilaration and sensation with Gothic's and melodrama's popularity brings us to root causes for why the guardians of traditional culture disdained, or perhaps even feared, the two genres. In addition to their underm ining of legitimate culture through their direct appeals to the embodied senses, detractors saw melodrama and the Gothic as combining different genres and inappropriately blending the natural world with the supernatural,1 6 thus further corrupting standards of traditional values and taste.1 7 It is indeed interesting to note that generic blending and preoccupation w ith genres' relation to cultural legitimacy— issues I will explore w ith some detail in relation to horror and melodrama and national cinemas —were present in the beginnings of the forms. This brief exam ination of the Gothic novel and the melodrama has revealed that they share structural blueprints of exciting incidents, a coterie of familiar characters, and similarly ambivalent cultural positions of extreme p o p u la r ity p a ir ed w ith critical ap p reh en sion . E ven m ore intriguingly, however, is Gothic and m elodram a's kinship based on their relationships to their shared historical context, the tumultuous last decade of the eighteenth 46 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. century. The Gothic's popular zenith and melodrama's rise in the 1790s m ust be understood in relation to the seismic social and economic upheavals precipitated by the French Revolution. Critics and historians have interpreted both melodrama and the Gothic as responding to the era's confusion: There is an unconscious indefinable relationship between the Terrors of the French Revolution and the Novel of Terror in England. The excitement and insecurity engendered by the French Revolution did quicken the nerves of literature, and the Gothic novelists were not immune from these tremors. M ontague Summers shrewdly notes: "Readers, it is presumed, delighted in imaginary terrors whilst the horrors of the French Revolution were being enacted all about them."1 8 W hile scholars disagree over whether the genres actively embodied the "m orality of the Revolution"1 9 itself or treated its liberal ideals with trepidation, melodrama and the Gothic are widely understood as resonating w ith the political tumult of revolution. The influence of the Revolution on melodrama and Gothic manifested, broadly speaking, in two ways. On the one hand, the Gothic and m elodram atic narratives espoused the new principles of populism and liberal democracy. The nefarious villains in both genres were overw helm ingly figured as aristocrats, suggesting "resentment at the insolence of authority and the heartlessness of greedy wealth."2 0 Gothic's crum bling castles suggest the decay of an outmoded system of noble power 47 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. and privilege. Furthermore, the heroes and heroines, even w hen set in the feudal pasts as in Gothic, embody "bourgeois values of virtue, merit, propriety and, within reason, individualism," promoting growing m iddle class values.2 1 Melodrama in particular had recognized propagandistic qualities, but in adopting attitudes and ideals that correspond to the new social structures and ways of thinking, both melodrama and the Gothic can be read as sponsoring the values of the Revolution.2 2 However, Gothic novels and melodramas could be read as channeling the energies of the Revolution in less optimistic ways. M elodram a's obsession with the victimization of virtuous innocents reflected deep anxieties about the justice of the political and social structures of the new order.2 3 The Gothic's recourse to scenes of horror suggested a sense of pessimism about the future: while the writers were conscious of the decadence of the old order, the future seemed to offer them no hope. Bewildered and desperate, caught in the vortex of an evolving social structure, their individual frustration emerged in scenes of violence and horror.2 4 And while Gothic's medieval pasts often incorporated contemporary bourgeois attitudes, the genre's fixation on these worlds, rom anticized w ith excitem en t and m ystery, su ggests an am bivalent n ostalgia for a p a st w h e n the social order was understood and, precisely, ordered.2 5 48 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Working from the genres' apparent sensitivity to the ideological and social tremors of the era, some of the most intriguing scholarship on both Gothic and melodrama has suggested that the rise of the genres in the 1790s was not only a matter of the outer forms reflecting current issues and problems. Rather, the literary genre and the theatrical genre responded in a more fundamental manner to the breakdown of monarchic, religious and social institutions. The Revolution was the moment that symbolically, and really, m arks the final liquidation of the traditional Sacred and its representative institutions (Church and Monarch), the shattering of the m yth of Christendom, the dissolution of an organic and hierarchically cohesive society, and the invalidation of literary forms — tragedy, comedy of manners — that depend on such a society.2 6 Gothic and melodrama each responded to these conditions, through their fantastic and exciting narratives and their appeal to emotions and senses, accessing the troubled psychological landscape of W estern Europe at the close of the eighteenth century.2 7 Peter Brooks argues that the m elodrama em erged, then, as a response to the epistemological vacuum provoked by the Revolution. W hen the traditional sense-making institutions crumbled, there rem ained "a realm of m ean ing an d value,"28 projected, p erh ap s, b y a d e s ir e for s o m e fix e d an ch or to philosophic and moral questions. Brooks calls this realm the "moral occult," where the residue of the sense-making systems, form erly imbricated 49 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. in the church, monarchy and social system, settled and remained. Melodrama, he argues, takes on the secularized mantle to express this moral occult: "We may legitimately claim that m elodram a becomes the principal mode for uncovering, dem onstrating, and m aking operative the essential moral universe in a post-sacred era."2 9 Its straining efforts to precipitate morals in a context where the edifices of m oral systems have been undermined is in fact central to the form: Melodrama is indeed, typically, not only a moralistic drama but the drama of morality: it strives to find, to articulate, to demonstrate, to "prove" the existence of a moral universe which, though put into question, m asked by villainy and perversions of judgm ent, does exist and can be made to assert its presence and its categorical force among m en.3 0 Melodrama and the "m oral occult" have received the attention of several scholars who have produced a convincing body of arguments extrapolating and expanding the idea of m elodram a seizing the reins of moral legibility. But the Gothic too has been interpreted in a similar vein in relation to the decline of prior sense-m aking institutions. J. M. S. Tompkins asserts that Gothic writing sought "the recovery of the vision of the spiritual world behind material appearances,"3 1 w hich resonates strongly with Brooks's formulation that melodrama "put[s] us in touch with the conflict of good and evil played out under the surface o f things."32 Varma, like Brooks vis-a-vis melodrama, connects the Gothic to the decline of religious institutions.3 3 50 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Like m elodram a, the Gothic alludes to a desire for recovering a sense of greater, grander, m ore spiritual realms; the Gothic thus is a form continually "unveiling or recovering some unm ediated absolute that stands outside the boundaries of the natural and social orders."3 4 To a greater degree than melodrama, the Gothic also responds directly to the dom inant precepts of the Enlightenment and reacts to the deflation of m eaning implicit in the degraded notion of the "watchmaker" God as rational designer of the universe: The Gothic novels arose out of a quest for the numinous. They are characterized by an awe-struck apprehension of Divine immanence penetrating diurnal reality...The Gothic quest was not merely after h orror.. .but after other-worldly gratification. These novelists w ere seeking a 'frisson nouveau/ a 'frisson' of the supernatural. They were moving away from the arid glare of rationalism tow ards the beckoning shadows of a more intimate and mystical interpretation of life... [They] created a world of imaginative conjurings in which the Divine was not a theorem but a m ystery filled w ith dread. The phantoms that prowl along the corridors of the haunted castle would have no more power to awe than the rats behind fluttering tapestries, did they not bear the token of a realm that is revealed only to man's mystical apperception, his source of all absolute spiritual values. Supernatural manifestations.. .touch the secret springs of m ortal apprehension which connects our earthly with our spiritual being.3 5 Both m elodram a and the Gothic — drawing from the same well of r ev o lu tio n a ry ferv o r, fear, a n x ie ty a n d d esire for a sen se of deeper consequence — intim ated tow ard something more meaningful beyond the surfaces of daily reality. Brooks names this the "moral occult;" Varma calls it 51 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. a realm of "all absolute spiritual values/' only accessible via "mystical apperception." Thus both can be seen as popular forms, theatrical and literary, that fill a profound epistemological and spiritual gap left by the tum ultuous times of the transition from the 1790s and Revolution to the next century. Finally, we m ust note that the Gothic's and melodrama's functions as the repositories of deeper values in part determine their distinctive outer form s discussed earlier— their stock characters, their distinct narrative rhythm s, their reliance on emotion and sensation as modes of address. The stock, stereotyped characterization typical of both melodrama and Gothic serve the overall delineation of a moral universe of black and white, good and evil. As Brooks asserts, "Good and evil can be named as persons are nam ed."3 6 The villain on one side and the hero and heroine on the other depict a hum an shape to the metaphysical forces of "good" and "evil," and this deflation of the metaphysical play of forces of good and evil into earthly hum an term s — the mustachioed villain in a cape, or the sweet-faced innocent m aiden—both arises from and is a function of desacralization. Regarding the narrative cadences, Gothic's contrast between scenes of horror and the supernatural suggests the unpredictability and the supremacy of an organizing force under the surface play of natural life, forces incom prehensible by and awesome to human rationality. Melodrama's 52 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. distinctive rhythms between excitement and emotionality similarly orchestrate the expression of the moral occult. Linda Williams has argued that melodrama's extremes between pathos and action and their dizzying alternation are engineered as part of melodrama's operation to return to the original "space of innocence/' its moral center, with which the m elodram atic narratives begin.3 7 Finally, the genres' appeals to emotion, whether feelings of fear or sadness, and sensation, whether blood-curdling horror or breath-taking excitement, express the ineffable but keenly felt significances residing in the moral occult. That is, the meanings, the truths embedded in the secularized moral systems are not iterable in words and must be expressed through alternate signifying practices: emotions, sensations experienced directly through the viewers' and readers' body. This is Varma's frisson of terror and Brooks's metaphor of the melodrama as hystericized body — expressing non verbally, both through spectacles directed at the eye and excitement and emotion aimed at the bloodstream, "messages that cannot be w ritten elsewhere, and cannot be articulated verbally."3 8 53 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. TWENTIETH-CENTURY OFFSPRING: CINEMATIC HORROR AND MELODRAMA AND GOTHIC DETOURS What I have illustrated above is the enmeshed aesthetics and m eaning- making enterprises of the historical Gothic and m elodram a at their beginnings. Not only were the contemporaneous genres pollinating each other with themes, characters, structures and effects, but they both tapped into the same substrata of psychological experience, throw n into chaos by the era's rapidly changing social and economic structures. Thus, in the roots of film horror and film melodrama, the literary Gothic and the theatrical melodrama of the 1790s, we have a matrix for understanding and building on cinematic horror and melodrama's convergences in more recent texts. Before proceeding further, it is im portant to concede that while the contemporary cinematic genres are traceable to the historical Gothic and melodrama, "horror" and "melodrama" in film are beasts that are quite distinct from their forebears. One might see a major gulf betw een the bourgeois heroines of Warner Bros, film m elodram as and the besieged lasses cruelly treated by fortune in theatrical melodrama, or betw een the haunting noises of the literary Gothic's castle and the gruesome sw ing of Leatherface's chainsaw blade in film horror. H o w ev er, it is not m y aim to a r g u e for their lineage here, as there is little reason to dispute it—the transform ations are part of the inevitable change in genre over two centuries. Rather I wish to 54 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. begin with this acknowledgement of the distinction between the historical genres and the contemporary cinematic forms in order to pinpoint an additional intersection in twentieth- and twenty-first century horror and melodrama, which has bearing on the historical intersections overviewed in the last section. While I have m ade an original attem pt to weave together the histories of these forms' interrelation—the combined nature of "melodrama" and "horror" (the cinematic genres that evolved out of theatrical melodrama and the literary gothic) has been intimated in film studies' treatment of, precisely, film "gothic." In critical discourses on film genres, "gothic" has emerged as a changeable semiotic sign that has been treated as part of both "female m elodram a" or "horror film" genre traditions. The purpose here is not to m arvel at the imprecision of terms, or sort out by what paths the semiotics of "gothic" and "melodrama" mutated from their original contexts into their current forms, or simply to point out another area of intersection. Instead, this discursive confluence is an entry point to the particulars of horror/m elodram a fusions provoking new ways of thinking about the genres and the poetics and politics of their interrelations. As I have been implying throughout m y discussion, "gothic" in cinema carries distinct connotations of w hat is more often referred to as the "horror genre." In particular, film "gothic" suggests the "classic" monsters 55 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. of the first cycles of film horror — particularly Universal Studio's sound film versions of nineteenth-century gothic novels, Frankenstein (1931) and Dracula (1931), with the classic triptych of gothic monsters rounded out with Param ount's adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and M r. Hyde (1931). This cinematic "gothic" suggests a visual w orld inherited from German Expressionism of the 1920s, w ith its vam pires and monsters, as in Nosferatu (1922), Der Golem (1920), and The Cabinet o f Dr. Caligari (1919). Thus, "gothic" on screen connotes m enacing or unnerving mise-en-scenes, with deep dark shadows obscuring vision, flickering candlelight, cobwebs, graveyards, bats, full moons. "Gothic" in a cinema context suggests supernatural events, monsters, and an overarching and foreboding sense of uneasiness and fear. In many instances, cinematic "gothic" and "horror" are virtually interchangeable, veritable synonyms. The term "gothic" has also been used for cycles in film melodramas, particularly in relation to specifically "feminine" melodramas, the women's picture or the female m elodram a. "Gothic" in the realm of women's pictures, however, usually is accompanied by the adjective "female;" the "female gothic" thus has appeared in critical studies of cinema genres as a distin ct a n d se p a r a te c y c le w ith in th e gen re of the w o m en 's p ictu re/fem ale melodrama. In critical discourse, the "female gothic" usually refers to films especially of the 1940s w hich often narrate a tale of an inexperienced woman 56 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. finding herself married to a man whom she begins to suspect is conspiring against her life, such as in Gaslight (1944) and Rebecca (1940). Trapped in her m arried hom e, as often as not a stately mansion in which she often feels "out-classed," the domestic space itself becomes oppressive, becoming a geography of her feminine condition of entrapment and powerlessness.3 9 M ary Ann Doane, though herself terming such films the "paranoid woman's film," has offered a useful definition of the "female gothic," and sim ultaneously articulates the cycle's connections with the historical literary Gothic, whence the label came: These films appropriate many of the elements of the gothic novel in its numerous variations from Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe to Daphne du Maurier and beyond: the large and forbidding house, mansion, or castle; a secret, often related to a family history, which the heroine must work to disclose; storms incarnating physical torment; portraits; and locked doors.4 0 Doane — w hose treatm ent of these films can be located as the originating point of the discursive emergence of the sub-genre— notes that this "female gothic" or "paranoid woman's film" cycle is the site of multiple generic energies, citing film noir and the horror film. But she goes on to argue that the films properly belong in the sphere of the woman's film 4 1 I am arguing instead that such generic hair-splitting is not only counterproductive, but also, as I have illustrated in the intertwined histories of theatrical m elodram a and the literary Gothic (the progenitors of 57 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Hollywood genres), there is convincing evidence to consider horror and melodrama in interlinked terms. And, the very word "gothic," in tw entieth- century use of the term in critical discourse on cinema, becomes the very site of the untenability of separating "horror" from "melodrama." Gothic, we have seen, can mean either— or both. The productivity of engaging w ith film and prior traditions of "horror" and "melodrama" symbiotically thus can be examined and exemplified through recent films, The Others (2001) and The Sixth Sense (1999), which are contemporary expressions of the interlocking semantics and histories of horror, gothic and melodrama. I select these films here not to make any particular claim to their achievement as cinema nor to assert that they are privileged texts. Rather, as two recent and successful films that were sold and consumed as "horror" films, they are representative of the continued interrelation of "horror" and "melodrama," and illustrate the advantages of considering the genres from such a perspective. Analyzing these films will also help to pinpoint m ore precisely the areas where film melodrama and film horror thematically and aesthetically converge, through the nebulous area of a diffuse "gothic" w hich has links with both. While I read these films as making a clear case for the sim u lta n eo u s consid eration of horror and m elodram a, I c o n ten d th e films also illustrate the appositeness of proceeding in a horror/m elodram a dual track for horror studies in a broader context. 58 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. MANIFOLD GOTHICS: HORROR, MELODRAMA. HOME AND FAMILY One might argue that melodrama's "female gothic" treats certain select themes inherited from the literary Gothic, that gothic conceived as synonym of "horror" takes other themes and subjects, and that this parceling out of subjects and themes is the line of their division. For example, gothic-as- horror would include the supernatural, monsters and blood; gothic-as- melodrama would take the tenuousness of w om en's position w ithin patriarchal society, particularly as refracted through hasty m arriages with brooding mysterious husbands. However, I assert that "gothic" as the linking term between horror/melodrama helps us see that m elodram a and horror thematics are the crucial site of intersection, not line of division. Significant traditions of both horror and m elodrama specifically explore the home, the family and women's place in these structures. In standard critical accountings of Hollywood genres, the domestic space and familial relations are conventionally conceived as the thematic terrain of melodramas. This is discursively figured in the nom enclature of the major sub-types of melodrama— the "domestic m elodram a" and the "maternal melodrama."4 2 "Home" and "family" are the assum ed natural domain of melodrama and much significant w ork has been done in this area. Critics such as E. Ann Kaplan, Linda Williams, Tania M odleski, Geoffrey 5 9 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Nowell-Smith and many others have contem plated the ways in which melodrama constructs and represents w om an and domesticity.4 3 But in spite of m elodram a's seeming sovereignty over thematics of domestic issues of mothers and homes in popular film narratives, the horror genre also has been the object of an influential body of critical study which explores family, mothers and domestic space. Chief am ong this body of literature is Robin Wood's now classic essay on horror, "American Nightmare," in which he suggests that horror is a privileged genre (from a marxist perspective) precisely w hen it focuses — as it often does — its bloody gaze on the family (Texas Chain Saw M assacre; The H ills Have Eyes).44 Carol Clover's excellent study of slashers suggests that the oedipal minefield of the family is one of the central narratives of horror.4 5 As for film texts, there is a brood of horrifying offspring directly descendant from the dysfunctional Bates family of Psycho — the m other of the m odern horror film —which riffs off the troubled family dynamic betw een N orm an and his mother. It is possible to explain away these points of similarity as simply different takes of the same subject—arguing, for example, that melodrama takes family, mothers, hearth and home and constructs them as narratively and ideologically palatable spaces, while horror, presumably, exposes these same elements as oppressive and m onstrous. W hat complicates this view which would see horror and m elodram a as offering dichotomous visions of 60 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. similar topics is the dovetailing of the energies of the domestic/maternal melodrama and the horror in the imprecise space of "gothic" in cinema. The m elodram atic and horrific's different (sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory) organization of home, family and women's place in these institutions can be read in two recent films that were popular with American audiences: The Sixth Sense (a surprisingly popular hit of 1999) and The Others (another h it—though on a smaller scale— of 2001). Their thematic similarities together m ake a case for the consistency of intersecting narrative registers of horror/m elodram a, and the films' healthy box office successes suggest the contem porary relevancy of mapping such horror and melodrama convergences. The Sixth Sense is about a child psychologist (played by Bruce Willis) who seeks to help a poorly adjusted but bright child who lives with his working class single m other. As Dr. Crowe reaches out to the boy, Cole, he discovers the boy suffers from w hat seem to be paranoid delusions of people harassing him, scaring him, and generally turning him into a nervous wreck. There are also strange and unexplained phenomena that seem to follow Cole— cold spots in houses, m ysterious cuts and bruises on his body, drawers and cupboards flying open, and the like. We come to learn, like Dr. Crowe, that Cole is not persecuted by demonic hallucinations, but rather by ghosts. 61 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. The O thers is set in a lonely mansion in the Channel Islands, just after W orld W ar II. Grace (played by Nicole Kidman) is a religious woman who m ust bear up as single mother as she awaits the return of her husband from the front. H er tw o children, Ann and Nicolas, have a rare photosensitivity — they are allergic to light, and the house must be kept shrouded in darkness through complicated rituals of locking doors and drawing heavy curtains. Because of the fog that surrounds the house, because of their location on the islands, Grace and her children are cut off from contact with the rest of the w orld — except for three servants who mysteriously appear to apply for em ploym ent, precisely when they are needed. Furthermore, the house has been disconnected from electricity and telephone service since the war. Things start to get hairy when it appears that there may be "others" in the house — the children, especially the daughter who claims to communicate w ith the "others," believe the house is haunted, while Grace seeks a more rational explanation. The debate over the presence of the supernatural in their hom e pits the mother against the daughter in a test of wills. A central question of the narrative is Grace's increasingly frayed sanity and grip on reality — her headaches, the noises she hears that are seemingly without source, and her sexual repression and humiliation position her as a familiar type of the "fem ale gothic" strain of melodramas, the woman as hysterical sym ptom. 62 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Stylistically, The Sixth Sense, set in contemporary Philadelphia, primarily unfolds with recognizable codes consistent with dom inant (non horror) aesthetics. This realism is tempered, though, by the notes of childish perspective (colors are bright and crisp), and spookiness and scares are rendered through offscreen suggestion and sudden aural and musical cues. The Others, alternatively, more explicitly aligns itself with the conventions of the old dark house horror tradition (the strain most directly connected to the literary Gothic tradition). The conceit of photophobia translates into a visual world of shadows and half-light, and renders light itself as an agent of horror and threat. Thus what is seen and not seen (the mysterious "others"/ghosts) are equally sources of terror. But in spite of their very different stylistic sensibilities, The Sixth Sense and The Others have more than a passing resemblance in their narrative conceits— children who communicate w ith ghosts. There are deeper structural similarities organizing their narrative and thematic development. While the films were primarily—at least at first— m arketed in the vernacular of horror and on the promise of the thrills and chills the genre would provide the intrepid viewer, the films also significantly, and m eticu lo u sly , situate the dram as in taut dom estic spaces, p o s in g cen tral questions about the breakdown of the patriarchal family. Strained familial bonds are as much the subject of the narrative as the more showy frights of 63 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the horror elements. And ultimately, both films posit the role of the mother as playing an essential role in both the breakdown and reconstitution of the family unit. The Others especially specifically aligns itself w ith the strong tradition of Hollywood female melodramas. W ith its narrative conceits of flickering lights and the central question of whether the w om an protagonist is going mad, The Others is a direct descendant of Gaslight (1944), one of the key texts of the "female gothic" Hollywood melodrama. But also, as the film is set in World War II, telling a tale of wom an's pressures in w artim e and her need to keep the home fires burning during male soldiers' absence, the film channels the wartime female melodramas of the 1940s, such as Since You W ent A w ay (1944). Indeed, Grace can be read as Mrs. M iniver on the verge of a nervous breakdown, the antithesis of stalwart w ifely/ m aternal femininity as represented in Mrs. Miniver (1942). The staging of the broken family unit in both films is related to the absence of fathers, tension between mother and children, and considerable individual dysfunction. The Sixth Sense takes significant time and care to establish the child, Cole, as coming from a "broken" — fatherless — home, with a caring mother who struggles to provide for her son economically and em otionally. C ole's social ostracization from o th er c h ild r e n a n d h is stra n g e behaviors (automatic writing filled with curses, seemingly prescient knowledge about long-past events) are symptoms of the strain inherent in 64 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. their family unit. A key scene shows Cole's m other confronting him about a piece of jewelry, formally belonging to her dead mother, which she found squirreled away in her son's room. At this point in the film, we are not certain whether Cole's denials are evidence of psychotic delusions or if we are to believe in his explanations that the ghosts of dead people for some reason continually interfere w ith his m aterial existence — including moving his grandmother's jewelry from his m other's jewelry box. Further driving home the theme of broken families in need of m ending is the parallel story of Dr. Crowe's communication impasses w ith his wife; after the first reel of the film, husband and wife never engage in conversation for the rest of the film. His worried involvement in Cole's case is the reason, Dr. Crowe believes, that he is becoming so distanced from his wife. Solving the problems of Cole's ghosts and hauntings, then, becomes a problem of healing two families. After the film's prelude of a m aternal voice reading a children's tale of Creation,4 6 The Others opens w ith a close-up of Grace, sleeping, who then awakes screaming in terror. The biblical parable of generative patriarchal power coupled with the figure of a w om an afflicted w ith psychological torm ent thus fram e the rest of th e sto ry . T h e fath er, w h o h as g o n e to fight the war, is also absent from this old English mansion, and his absence is continually the subject of conversation. The children ask, "When is daddy 65 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. going to be home?" The servants ask, "Where is the master of the house?" The constant rem inders of the insufficiency of her household without a dominant masculine figure m anifest in Grace's recurrent painful migraines. Grace attempts to occupy the position of the missing patriarch— she is strict and domineering, particularly tow ard her daughter, and relentlessly and obsessively invokes the w ords of a Christian patriarchal God to underwrite her claims to patriarchal authority in the house. Thus she fulfills the description of the oppressive patriarchal mother in melodramas, who runs "a home ruled, in the Nam e of the Father, by an intensely neurotic widowed woman whose oppression of the [daughter] is traced by the work to her own self-oppression."4 7 Grace, however, is unable to adequately fill the patriarchal absence. The house itself begins to exert pressure on her, oppressing her in its darkness, enclosing and lim iting her world to a domestic space in which she has few options. As the ghost "others" begin to make their presence known, it is as if the house itself w ere bearing down upon her, its floorboards and doors straining and creaking, exacerbating her migraine—the classically freudian "feminine" sym ptom of nervous breakdown— and applying increasing pressure to her fragile psyche. The house's effect on Grace resonates w ith Thomas Elsaesser's discussion of signifying structures of 6 6 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. domestic m elodram as and their saturated mise-en-scenes, overstuffed with excessive meanings: The m ore the setting fills with objects to which the plot gives symbolic significance, the more the characters are enclosed in seem ingly ineluctable situations. Pressure is generated by things crow ding in on them and life becoming increasingly com plicated because cluttered with obstacles and objects that invade their personalities, take them over, stand for them, become m ore real than the human relations or emotions they w ere intended to symbolise.4 8 Consider the scene when the ghosts have removed all of the light-blocking curtains from the home, exposing the children to deadly sunlight. Grace frantically searches the house, going into a hysterical tirade about her missing curtains. The servants look on, bemused by her obsession with household dressing. Like the characters in 50s domestic melodramas, compelled to surround themselves with consumer goods and bourgeois trappings, Grace is overtaken by the house itself, and her obsession with the curtains becomes a hystericized parody of woman's entrapment and concom itant overinvestment in domestic space. The motif of woman's domestic oppression is driven home by a shot of Grace filmed through the iron gates of her estate, looking longingly out, unable to loose herself from her entrapm ent in the home with the children. After establishing the fissures in the family structure, both The Sixth Sense and The Others figure mothers as central to reconfiguring the family 67 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. unit, though the outcome of such maternally-authored reconfigurations is rendered rather ambivalent. While mothers are crucial to the family's reconstitution, as I will discuss below, mothers in both films are guilty of the crime of infanticide, ultimately reflecting the uncertainty and untenability of the family unit. In The Others, the final denouement reveals that Grace and the children are not plagued by ghosts haunting their house — rather, they in fact are the ghosts, haunting the mortal inhabitants.4 9 It was the ruckus of the living that seemed to haunt Grace and the children's space. It is they w ho are stuck in purgatory as ghosts, haunting their earthly home, paying for Grace's sin of smothering her children to death then shooting herself. In The Sixth Sense, the infanticide is structurally one of the narratively pivotal scenes of Cole's new attitude towards the ghosts that plague him. Instead of fearing them and trying to run away from them, he has learned to listen to them, for they harass him only because they want Cole — as a member of the living who can hear and see them — to help them. After her ghost has come to him, Cole goes to the funeral service of a little girl w ho has died. Following her instruction, he gives the girl's father a videotape, w hich captures evidence of the mother poisoning the girl's food, slowly killing her. T he m o m e n t of revelation of the m other's role in her d au gh ter's death is staged as a privileged scene of suspense and dramatic revelation. The scene ends with a tracking in shot of the mother, inappropriately dressed in red, 68 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. who before was the object of pity and sympathy and is now the center of accusation, scorn and horror. Thus, in both films, m others are figured as potentially deadly, capable of violently severing w hat culture figures as the most sacred bond, that between mother and child. However, mothers are also figured as the salvation and the central figure of the reconstituted family unit, fundamentally rew riting the domestic and familial face as autonomous without the Father, self-sufficient and nurturing. The Others ends after the family's discovery of their ontological status as ghosts. They swear to stick together and keep the house to themselves, chanting in ghostly whisper that perm eates every corner of the house, "This house is ours.. .this house is ours." Here, the hom e, once oppressing, now becomes a site suffused with quiet contentm ent. Once the house is reconfigured to accept the absent father—to accept the self-sufficient dyadism of mother/ children— it no longer oppresses, but acts as physical manifestation of their mother/child bond into eternity. A m other's love for her children, and children's love for their mother will resonate in the haunted house forever. In The Sixth Sense, the reparation of the family structure similarly figures the mother/child bond as central and privileged. Cole m ust tell his mother that his strange behavior, which has stressed their relationship, is caused by his ability to see ghosts. He convinces her of his sincerity by 69 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. narrating a tale about his mother as a young girl, told to him by his dead grandmother, who visits him as a ghost. Through his narration, he firstly repairs his mother's relationship to her m other — healing a rift between them by communicating a secret message of m o th er/ daughter love. As his mother weeps, Cole's gift to her of unearthly m aternal comfort in turn mends the gulf between them. Cole and his m other embrace in a wash of tears; haunting ghosts have repaired tw o generations of m other/child relations from beyond the grave. Thus, both films end with the reconstitutions of the family, with the mother/ child bond inscribed as central —w ith the father essentially written out. This familiarly "melodramatic" end —w ith the reconstitution of families and the centering of m otherhood typical of domestic melodramas — is effected by the mechanisms of horror, ghosts, infanticide, violence and hauntings. This utopic vision of m other-child unity m ight be somewhat ambivalent, given that in The Others, the price of this blissful intimacy was suicide and infanticide. And, the otherw orldly machinations required to engender mother/child reconciliations in The Sixth Sense alternately might be read as pessimistic (there is no hope for familial reunion w ithout ghostly aid) or optim istic (one can m ake a m e n d s w ith a n e str a n g e d p aren t e v e n after death). What is important to note, however, is that through the mechanics of haunting and ghosts and harrowing tales of m urder and treachery, the 70 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. horror and m elodrama them atics operate in unison to articulate the dynamics of loss, familial breakdow n and reconstitution. One of the central m echanism s by which both melodrama and horror operate in tandem to illum inate their shared familial and domestic thematics is through the genres' constituent preoccupation with the forces of repression and attem pts to break free of it. Peter Brooks has persuasively argued that m elodram a's fundam ental intent to wrest meaning free from repression, to express the inexpressible, finds its complement in purpose and means in psychoanalysis: The dynamics of repression and the return of the repressed figure the plot of m elodram a. Enactment is necessarily excessive: the relation of sym bol to symbolized (in hysteria, for instance) is not controllable or justifiable.. .We have already noted the resemblance of m elodram a's text of muteness to the rhetoric of dream s. Psychoanalysis as the "talking cure" further reveals its affinity w ith melodrama, the drama of articulation: cure and resolution in both cases come as the result of articulation w hich is clarification. For psychoanalysis, like melodrama, is the dram a of recognition...The signs of the world are sym ptom s, never interpretable in themselves, but only in term s of a behind. If m elodram a can reach through to this abyss behind, bring its overt irruption into existence, it has accomplished part of the w ork of psychoanalysis... Melodrama and psychoanalysis represent the ambitious, Promethean sense-making systems which man has elaborated to recuperate m eanings in the world.5 0 Sim ilarly, the m o d e l o f p s y c h o a n a ly s is h as b e e n u sed to describe horror, with the horror film m anifesting repressed desires of culture. Horror's fantastic and nightm arish im agery also links it to dream logic and the 71 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. unconscious. Robin W ood has even likened horror to the unconscious of cultural im agination, characterizing the genre itself as "the return of the repressed."5 1 The interlinked structural logics of horror and melodrama — their proclivity to m editating on repression and obsession with releasing the repressed into the conscious, iterable world — manifests in these films not only in their deep content, but also on the level of plot and narration. In both The Sixth Sense and The Others, there are past secrets, denied and buried, that m ust be uncovered and brought to light. For example, Dr. Crowe tries to get Cole to tell him his secret, which the child is terrified to share. In The Others, the daughter Ann tries to get her younger brother Nicolas to verbalize w hat happened on the day "Mummy went mad" — which Nicolas continues to vehem ently resist and repress. The narratives drive toward the articulation of a story that is too difficult to be told. But w hat is even more interesting is that in both films, the ghosts and hauntings that m ake up the "stuff' of the films' horror, operating as m etaphors for the exposure of deep repressed content. Ghosts haunt and linger on earth because they have unfinished business and secrets to tell. T h ey are, th e n , lite r a liz a tio n s of rep ressio n —buried secrets com e to hum an form. The ghosts harbor secrets, messages that cannot be spoken, yet must be, or they are doom ed to perpetual haunting. The horror ends when the 72 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. ghosts can speak — when their tales can be told. In The Others, the w hole story circles around the question of "what happened" on the day "M um m y w ent mad." The characters refer to the day, then trail off—no one can articulate "what happened," it is never spoken— the infanticide it refers to is too traumatic, too unmediated to be spoken, and yet, unacknowledged, it rots the family, doomed to purgatory, from within. The whole film builds to the daughter, Ann, finally finding the courage to both defy her m other's censoring and tell the tale, to whisper into the ear of the psychic m edium w hat happened on the day her mother "went mad." Only when this repressed truth is told, finally spoken, do the somatic sym ptoms—ghosts — settle, normalize, and cease to be a threat to daily life. The same is true in The Sixth Sense. The ghosts that haunt Cole are plagued by their unfinished business, their unhappy stories untold. Only when Cole can act as their agent in the earthly world do the ghosts stop their haunting and return to rest. Ghost in these films acts as a trope, motifs of repression itself, as well as sym ptoms of repression. "W omen's melodramas" in film are notable for their subject m atter (home, hearth, family) and their pathos, their desire to move viewers to tears. Linda Williams has described the endings of melodrama, the crying scenes, as expressing a feeling of "too late!"— we cry because we recognize the characters have lost something irrevocably.5 2 Ghosts, then, seem to 73 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. operate as the perfect vehicle for articulating the sense of profound loss that is the heart of melodramas. Ghosts themselves are built on loss; they are a paradox, the materialization— whether in cold spots of air in a haunted house, ghostly whisperings or spectral visions — of absence; ghosts are a presence based ultimately on absence. The reunions of m other and children at the end of the two films are marked with both fulfillment and the profound sense of loss familiar from melodrama — the loss of a unity betw een m other/child revived for the spectators in these horror/m elodram as, but which can only be maintained in childhood, or inadequately sustained in a ghostly afterlife. An exploration of these two recent films illustrates that a dual perspective — both horror and melodrama—is necessary to fully grasp horror's organizing logic and its structures of fear, loss and desire. The sympathies and interlocking strategies of signification in film horror and melodrama can be traced back to their eighteenth-century roots, even while the filmic iterations of "melodrama" and "horror" have changed in several fundamental ways from their theatrical and literary forebears (for example, increasing emphasis on graphic displays of violence and m onsters in film horror, an d the "fem inizing" of the m elod ram atic u n iv e r se in film melodrama). Still, the two film genres' otherwise curious sharing of the term "gothic" indicates their common features and underlying interests. 74 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Finally, I wish to briefly indicate one last issue in relation to The Others. The film was the first Hollywood outing by Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar, who previously had directed horror thrillers, which were popular in Spain and ultimately garnered international viewership for his sleek takes on the genre. By developing a niche in horror genre filmmaking, Amenabar made the move from w orking in the Spanish national cinema to making a Hollywood film, The Others, with a much greater international profile, and the film is very m uch m arked as a "Hollywood" film, in spite of being directed and produced in Spain by a Spaniard.5 3 This dynamic of exchanges and interchanges of inter/national imagery and identity, genre, horror and Hollywood w ill be explored at length in the chapters that follow. 75 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. ENDNOTES 1 Linda Williams, "M elodram a Revised," ," Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and H istory, Nick Browne, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 42-88. 2 Jeffrey Cox, ed. Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992) 11. 3 Frank Rahill, The W orld o f M elodram a (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967) xiii-xviii; Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, H enry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Michael Booth, English Melodrama (London: H erbert Jenkins, 1965). 4 Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a H istory of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966) 23-5. 5 Rahill, xiv. 6 Booth, 15. 7 Robert Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (Seattle and London: University of W ashington Press, 1968) 79. 8 Varma, 145. 9 Ibid., 146. 1 0 Lea Jacobs, "The W om an's Picture and the Poetics of Melodrama," Camera Obscura 31 (Jan.-May 1993) 125. 1 1 Varma, 226. 1 2 Booth, 35. 1 3 Varma, 109. 1 4 Linda Williams, "M elodram a Revised," (see chapter 1 of this dissertation); Varma, 110,214. 1 5 Rahill, 59; Booth, 113. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 1 6 Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996) 27-28; Cox, 37-38. 1 7 Cox, 11. 1 8 Varma, 217. 1 9 Charles N odier, qtd. in John Franceschina, Franceschina, Sisters of Gore: Seven Gothic M elodram as By British Women, 1790-1843 (New York and London: G arland Publishing, Inc., 1997) 4. 2 0 Rahill, 223. 2 1 Botting, 6. 2 2 Jeffrey Cox argues that the essential political valence of the Gothic drama (he does not refer to the Gothic novel) is more radical than melodrama, which he says inevitably reasserts the "ordinary morality" (42). 2 3 Ben Singer, M elodram a and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001) 10-11. 2 4 Varma, 218. 2 5 Botting, 5. 2 6 Brooks, 14-5. 2 7 J. M. S. Tompkins, "Introduction," The Gothic Flame, xiii. 2 8 Brooks, 5. 2 9 Ibid., 15. 3 0 Ibid., 20. 3 1 J. M. S. Tompkins, xii. My emphasis. 3 2 Brooks, 5. My emphasis. 3 3 Varma, 210. 3 4 Cox, 7. 3 5 Varma, 211-212. 77 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 3 6 Brooks, 17. 3 7 Williams, 70-77. 3 8 Brooks, xi. 3 9 O r in films like Suspicion (1941) and The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), it is the husband whose lower class status denaturalizes the home and converts it to a dangerous space. 4 0 M ary Ann Doane, "Paranoia and the Specular," The Desire to Desire: The W om an's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) 124. 4 1 Doane, 125. 4 2 Of course, Linda Williams's essay "Melodrama Revised" and the w ork of scholars such as Steve Neale ("Melo Talk: on the Meaning and Use of the Term 'M elodrama' in the American Trade Press," The Velvet Light Trap 323 (Fall 1993) 66-89) and Ben Singer among others have shown how "m elodram a" is a wider aesthetic mode that is not confined to the domestic and familial and feminine. Williams in particular has keen insight into the politics of "mis-gendering" the whole genre. Since my project is particularly concerned with the "feminine" forms of melodrama (i.e. the presumed object of major feminist film criticism of the 1980s, for example as gathered in the im portant anthology, Home is Where the Heart Is), and for the sake of as m uch discursive streamlining as possible, I am using the slightly "wrong" sense of the w ord "melodrama" here, i.e., using it to connote "women's pictures" w rit large, and in various places, specific sub-types such as the domestic and m aternal melodrama. 4 3 In particular, see the essays in Home Is Where the Heart Is: E. Ann Kaplan, "M othering, Feminism and Representation: The Maternal in Melodrama and the W oman's Film 1910-40" (113-137); Linda Williams, "'Something Else Besides a Mother:' Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama" (299-325); Tania Modleski, "Time and Desire in the Women's Film" (326-338); Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "Minnelli and Melodrama" (70-74). 4 4 Robin Wood, "The Return of the Repressed," Film Comment 14:4 (July- August 1978) 25-32. 4 5 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saivs: Gender in the M odem Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). This argument is especially laid out in "Her Body, Himself." 78 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 4 6 This focus on narration, telling a story, is a central thematic and part of the essential structure of the film. The need and impossibility of telling stories, articulating and verbalizing is both the work of psychoanalysis and the w ork of melodrama (Brooks, 201-2), which will be discussed below. Here, w e see also that similar interests are also at the heart of the horror vein of the film. 4 7 Andrew Britton, "A New Servitude: Bette Davis, N ow, Voyager, and the Radicalism of the Woman's Film," Cineaction 26:27 (1992) 42. 4 8 Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in M elodrama and the W om an's Film, Christine Gledhill, ed. (London: BFI Publishing, 1987 [reprint edition 1992]) 62. 4 9 This is of course a further similarity with The Sixth Sense, w ith that film's narrative trick ending, where we learn that Dr. Crowe is a ghost w ho does not know he is a ghost. so Brooks, 201-202. 5 1 Wood, "Return of the Repressed." 5 2 Linda Williams, "Melodrama Revised," 69-70. 5 3 The transnationality of The Others and Amenabar as a director can be further marked in the presence of the Hollywood-identified — but Australian—star of the film, Nicole Kidman, and the fact that A m enabar's film was produced and released in the same time frame as w hen his international horror thriller, Abre los ojos, was being re-m ade by H ollyw ood as Vanilla Sky, starring iconic Hollywood star, Tom Cruise —w ho was married to Kidman at the time. The timing of the two productions suggests the possibility that Amenabar's Hollywood ticket (The O thers) m ight have been paid for by his willingness to let his earlier film be rem ade. The fluid trans/nationality evident in Amenabar's cinema is also crudely illustrated in Cruise's current public relationship with Spaniard Penelope C ruz (who starred in both Abre los ojos and Vanilla Sky). Cruise's association w ith Cruz by extension brings further attention to Spanish cinema, via C ruz/A m enabar and Cruz's work with Almodovar (in the popular Todo sobre m i madre [1999]). In this way, one can argue that Cruise/Cruz are the m ore recent manifestation of the same dynamic in the early 1990s, w hen A lm odovar was first making a scene on US consciousness via his international hits (W omen on the Verge, etc., the subject of the next chapter) and perhaps even more 79 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. significantly, through Madonna's vocal adm iration of Antonio Banderas as sex object in her popular feature docum entary, M adonna: Truth or Dare (1991), a dynamic which Marsha Kinder discusses in her introduction to Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Chapter 3 — Generic Pleasures, Shaken and Stirred: Pedro Alm odovar's jA tam e! and Perverse Pleasures of Patriarchy M as que una historia de horor, parece una historia de amor. Rather than a horror story, it seem s more like a lo v e story. — d ialogue from jAtam e! INTRODUCTION Following from previous chapters' observations on the interrelations of melodrama and horror, both in the family resemblances of their current cinematic forms and in their "ancient" histories as new popular forms of eighteenth-century Europe, this chapter looks at how a specific text, jAtame!, intermixes/confuses the specifically filmic histories of women's melodrama, horror, and a third generic term, pornography. Almodovar's mixed up use of genres raises provocative questions about the gendered interests underlying the genres — specifically how gendered/sexed desires, related to issues of pow er/pow erlessness, are mobilized by the thematic and aesthetic patterns of genre. I will explore especially problematics of sadism and masochism embedded in the insistent dynamics of horror, porn and melodrama. W hat happens w hen sadistic and masochistic energies 81 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. intermingle, as they do in jAtame!, and what are the implications for representations of gender/sexuality and, when coming out of a national cinema context, for the image of the nation? TERMS OF CONTROVERSY: iATAM E!, c e n s o r s h i p a n d t h e p o r n w a r s In 1990, Pedro A lm odovar was on his way to becoming internationally famous, a household name w ith the arthouse-/foreign-film-going smart set. Such respectable film patrons had made Almodovar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) the highest grossing foreign film in the US ever,1 and such box office traffic was rewarded with an Academy Award nom ination for Best Foreign Film (though Women on the Verge lost to Pelle the Conqueror). For all its style and buoyancy, Women on the Verge's lightweight story and screwball twists threatened to obscure Almodovar's former profile as the queer iconoclast, who exploded on the post-Franco Spanish scene with overtly gay-them ed films filled with sexually raw images, unapologetic drug use and gender-bending performances, putting him at the vanguard of the post-Franco m ovida. Two years before Women on the Verge, Marsha Kinder wrote of A lm odovar and his remarkable presence on the world cinema stage: A lm odovar's films have a curious way of resisting m arginalization. Never limiting himself to a single protagonist, he chooses an ensemble of homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, doper, punk, terrorist characters who refuse to be ghettoized into divisive subcultures because they are figured as part of the 82 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. "new Spanish mentality" — a fast-paced revolt that relentlessly pursues pleasure rather than power, and a postmodern erasure of all repressive boundaries and taboos associated with Spain's medieval, fascist, and modernist heritage.2 W hile W omen on the Verge bears the mark of a camp aesthetic in its color- saturated over-the-top style and a "gay" sensibility in its sensitivity tow ards w om en and unashamed indulgence in women's melodrama, the film has only the briefest cameo of a transsexual. True or not, Almodovar's image was in danger of being mainstreamed, susceptible to accusations of selling out, cashing in, toning down and cleaning up. As if trying to prove to world markets he had not "gone Hollywood" and w as still intent on shaking up the status quo, Almodovar's follow-up to his sugary smash was the thematically dicey and provocative jAtame! (Tie M e Up! Tie M e Down!, 1990). The film generated controversy in spades — citing two sexually explicit scenes, the MPAA rated jAtame! "X," dooming the film either to be associated with pornography, or to be released unrated — both avenues deadly to any film's commercial aspirations. Distributor Miramax first appealed the Rating, seeking an "R." Almodovar and Miramax refused to re-cut the film and lost their appeal; in an unprecedented move, they took the case to the New York Supreme Court, arguing that the rating was "arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable" as well as an attempt by the MPAA 83 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. to use its censorship power as a political and financial tool, trying to protect the US market from such worthy foreign competitors as A lm odovar.3 The film's censorship controversy also sparked debates that appeared in the pages of not only the Hollywood trades but also the N ew York Times and news and film magazines, questioning the purpose of Ratings (parental guide or cut-throat censorship or savvy marketing ploy?), the rationale for certain Ratings over others (why is sex punished w ith R ratings while brutal violence often merits a PG?), and not least of all, the perceived justification or lack thereof of jAtame!'s X. Ultimately, Justice Charles Ramos of the New York State courts ruled against the plaintiff — jAtame! w ould have to bear its X or no Rating at all— but railed against the MPAA, calling the Ratings system outright censorship at odds with American values of free speech and warning that the system either ought to be revised or discarded altogether.4 Miramax chose to circumvent the system and release the film w ithout a Rating, which, similar to if the film had retained the X, lim ited the num ber of screens on which jAtame! could play, but avoided (somewhat unsuccessfully, as we will see) the stigma of pornography the X w ould have carried. The discourse on censorship continued while jAtame! disappointed at the box office; eventually, the Ratings controversy engendered by jA tam e!, its court case and other inappropriately X-ed films of that year (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) led to the 84 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. MPAA's adoption of the new rating, NC-17, in Septem ber 1990. The ghosts of Almodovar and jAtame! continue to be sum m oned from time to time in the American press as commentators question w hether NC-17 has really solved any of the Ratings problems that clustered around the X. jAtame! commanded more attention w ith its Ratings run-in than Almodovar or Miramax ever could have hoped for otherwise, w ith the further advantage of renewing Alm odovar's movida credentials, re positioning the director as a sexual outlaw pushing the buttons and boundaries of straight-laced American puritans. But the censorship ballyhoo, the questions of sex at the heart of it, and the specter of pornography haunting the film set out the term s under which jAtame! would be judged by American audiences. In retrospect, jAtam e!'s release at the tail end of frenzied sexual house-cleaning in the US, w here obsessions with the deviancies indulged by the smut of the sex trade and pornography, predestined the Spanish film to be received in w ays that now seem to be inevitable. The 1980s had seen reformer interest in problem s of sexual impropriety and danger, seen to be caused by the scourge of pornography and other elements of the sex trade. The Meese Com mission set about researching the ill effects of pornography on society and culture, w ith much of the debate focused on pornography's debasem ent of women, curiously 85 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. aligning its conservative "family values" perspective with the stridently "equal rights" position of anti-porn feminists, led by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. The Dworkin-M acKinnon anti-porn argument suggested that it was not only straightforw ard images of violence against women (for example, hard core and sadomasochistic porn with brutal scenes of rape) that were dangerous — any narrative and thematic implication of women submitting to m en and enjoying it spills down the slippery slope that leads ultimately to the harm ful m yths that w om en are merely the playthings served up for men's sexual w him s and that all women want to be dominated and raped. Pornography from this perspective was understood not as offering doorways to sexual gratification but rather guides to how to degrade, subjugate and m aster w om en through sexual humiliation and violence. Fantasy images thus carried real life dangers, which became the justification for attem pts to eradicate pornography altogether, ironically throwing (some) radical feminists and conservative ideologues in bed together in a crusade to stam p out porn. The predom inant conviction, popularized in frequent headlines in the mid-1980s, that the textual politics of porn filters into real world sexual and gender politics, n e c e ssa r ily in v o lv e d a n e w , cru d e attu n em en t to the surface operation of narratives and images of wom en's degradation and devaluation. An anti-porn position that depended upon the one-to-one 86 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. m ovem ent of reel-to-real, then, inevitably bled into condemnations of other, not pornographic film texts: by the Dworkin-MacKinnon logic, a narrative that does anything but represent a woman in power and just saying no to any hint of m ale dom ination leads inexorably to gender discrimination and sexual violence in the real world. In this context, jAtame! and its complex horror-rom ance-porn story of a woman who learns to love her captor was doom ed from the start. jAtame! tells the story of Ricki (played by a young, pre-Hollywood Antonio Banderas), a m ental patient recently released from a lifetime of institutionalization in orphanages and psychiatric hospitals, who upon release im m ediately tries to find the ex-porn star and ex-junkie named M arina (sensitively played by Victoria Abril) with whom he had had a sexual encounter during one of his escapes from the hospital. Marina is currently in the m iddle of shooting a horror film called Fantasma del medianoche (M idnight Phantom) directed by the famous Maximo Espejo (a star turn by Spanish film star Francisco Rabal, whose presence channels the earlier rule-breaking Spanish director, Luis Bunuel), whose recent paralyzing stroke confines him to an electric wheelchair. Ricki forces his way into Marina's apartment, g r a b b in g her v io le n tly a n d k n o c k in g her out w ith a viciou s punch to the jaw that breaks her tooth. U pon coming to, Marina learns from an earnest Ricki that he is alone in the world, has 50,000 pesetas to his name and intends to be 87 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. a good husband to her and a good father to their children. Ricki informs her that his plan is to keep her tied and locked up until she learns to fall in love w ith him. Slowly Ricki wins Marina over with his affectionate and domestic ways (he fixes the sink, chooses her gag tape with care and lovingly finds her some heroin to help her toothache). One night, after he is sorely beaten up trying to score drugs for her, Marina has a change of heart and begins to kiss Ricki while dressing his bloody wounds. In the height of passion, recognizing his lovemaking style, Marina proclaims she finally remembers Ricki from their previous sexual encounter. The next time Ricki leaves the flat, he asks if he needs to tie her up still. Marina replies that she cannot be certain that she will not run away, and asks him to tie her up one last time, to ensure that she does not flee and that their love affair can continue. But during Ricki's absence, Marina's sister Lola finds Marina, and the two escape. M arina professes to her incredulous sister that she has fallen in love w ith her kidnapper. The sisters drive out to Ricki's abandoned pueblo, where they find him dejectedly contemplating the loss of his lover and the ruined scene of his nearly-forgotten childhood memories of his mother and father. The lo v e r s reu n ite, and Lola exacts a prom ise from Ricki to n ever steal again or tell their mother about the kidnapping. Marina tells Ricki he will come live w ith her and her mother, and the three drive back to Madrid, singing. 88 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Marina smiles through her tears, and the film ends with the image of their car driving off in the distance. There were those who condemned the film outright, in explicitly gendered and political terms: People magazine's reviewer called it "sexist claptrap," saying Almodovar "deserves the worst feminists can throw at him."5 One reviewer opined that the "treatment of women is inexcusably rough" and called the ending "surprisingly reactionary,"6 echoing another critic who found "the sexual ideas stale and reactionary."7 Then there were those who seemed to enjoy the film on some level but were compelled to critique its politics and ultimately take an ambivalent stance: "Pedro Almodovar's bright comic slug fest...is either a blatant insult to w om en or...a sophisticated battle of the sexes."8 Even Molly Haskell, the fem inist critic who never wavered in her condemnation of films' veiled abuse of w om en in her landmark 1973 book of essays on Hollywood film, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, is not quite sure w hether to denounce or celebrate jAtame!.9 The pornography controversies of the 1980s and early 1990s clearly illustrate that genre politics are gender politics. In what follows, I will exp lore how the logics of genre in this film, which combines horror, melodrama and pornography (which are all, in turn, shot through w ith typically almodovariano comedy), negotiates a complicated gender politics 89 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. that troubles the very idea, inherent in the predom inant anti-porn positions, that pleasure and ideology can be neatly aligned. In trying to more fully unpack the troubling sexual politics of Pedro A lm odovar's jAtame!, at the same time I wish to query the limits of "pleasure" in contem porary feminist film theory, through a consideration of the film's critical reception and an examination of its textual strategies. Ultimately, the film 's subject m atter combined with Almodovar's unconventional "use" of genre and generic pleasure, question how we understand the gendering of cinematic sex and horror, and raise crucial questions about cinem atic/spectatorial pleasure. The hysteria around the film seems to center ultim ately on a political assessment of the kinds of pleasure the film produced. In my view, one of the important questions jAtame! asks the feminist film theorist is, w hat are the theoretical pitfalls in trying to line up one's pleasures w ith one's politics? GENERIC COCKTAIL/NARRATIVES OF DESIRE I argue that jAtame!'s peculiar offensiveness to its contem porary viewers and reviewers stems not simply from being tainted w ith the stigma of pornography (though this is clearly operative) but also from its intertwining of the opposed desiring systems of m elodram a (in the rom antic story between Ricki and Marina) and horror (in the stalker story of aggression and terror). jAtame! thus brings together three of the m ost scorned genres on the 90 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. cinematic landscape, and in so doing intensifies the sharply gendered narrative strategies endemic to each. W hile Almodovar's savvy interweaving of generic styles and its relation to gender mobility has produced excellent analyses (notably in M arsha Kinder and Paul Julian Smith's work), in what follows I will seek to explore how the hybridizing of three "body genres"— horror, m elodram a and pornography—in jAtame! leads to the provocative interrogation of the ideology of pleasure. Linda Williams, in an essay that explores the ways in which the genres share similarities in their address to viewers, calls melodrama, horror and pornography "body genres," pointing out that each genre is fundamentally aimed at "m oving" the spectator's body toward a decidedly corporeal— that is, rather than purely emotional or intellectual — response. Melodrama is successful w hen it pushes emotionality to the point of tears; horror is successful w hen the heart races and hairs stand on end; pornography is successful w hen the view er is sexually aroused and climaxes. The viewer's body is the focus of the genres' address, and each genre focuses particularly on the w om an's body on screen to represent the responses the genre is meant to elicit. W ith images of w om en's bodies on screen moaning w ith pleasure (p o rn o g ra p h y ), sh r ie k in g in fear (horror) or cryin g w ith sadness (melodrama), in these genres, w om en's bodies act as primary embodiments of pleasure, pain, and pathos.1 0 91 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. This generic convention of reading the filmed woman's body as a way of determining one's response as a viewer is consistently stymied in jAtame!. Within the diegesis, M arina's recent career as a porn star offers the promise of erotic payoff. But while seeming to ask the audience to read jAtame! through a pornographic sensibility, Almodovar withholds the generic dividends — in pornography, sexual arousal and orgasm. In the scene where director Maximo watches one of Marina's porn videos, the potentially arousing responses to the porn-within-the-film are not only displaced by the scene's comedy (Max's wife tries to distract him with an offer to play cards or chat), but the m eticulous arrangem ent of the porn video's mise-en-scene is precisely organized so that the act of coitus is wholly invisible, blocked by some item of furniture. Though we are able to see Marina's orgasmic facial expressions, the full prom ise of the visual display of her body wracked with pleasure, im plied by her expression and orgasmic moans, is literally kept out of sight, her body under w raps. Williams's point about the mimicry by the viewer of the screen w om an's body is made metaphorically clear in this scene. Like the real audience titillated with the promise of specific generic pleasures, even film character M ax can't satisfy his genre desires: excited b ey o n d belief, he is paralyzed from the w aist d o w n and d oom ed to play out his sexual desires only in his head. 92 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. This comic example of thwarted generic payoffs is consistent with larger generic logics of the film. For example, the film's title, both in Spanish and English, seems to promise sado-masochistic pornography. This play w ith generic titling, coupled with the film's frank depictions of nudity and sexuality (quite different from Hollywood standards), allowed the MPAA to see the film only as pornographic, "justifying," by convoluted logic, the pornographic X — a judgment which in turn only reinforced public opinion about the film's generic intentions. That jAtame! did not live up to pornographic expectations did not go unnoticed by the critics. Almost across the board, reviewers echoed Vincent Canby's assessment that jAtame! is "surprisingly tam e,"1 1 a qualification of the film's material which must necessarily be read against the "pornographic" expectations that the title engendered (and the X rating exacerbated). In addition to its pornographic cues, jAtame! abounds with signifiers asking that the film be read through the frame of horror— even though it unfolds in a realist space and Ricki lacks the fundamental creepiness of horror's non-supernatural serial killers such as Hannibal Lecter. A shot of Ricki through a store window frames him precisely as in an iconic shot from Fritz Lang's M (1931), in which sexual psychopath Peter Lorre terrorizes a village, m urdering young children. The soundtrack associated with Ricki stalking M arina reworks Bernard Herrmann's Psycho score, with its stabbing 93 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. and insistent strings.1 2 Almodovar even references classics of the horror genre within the diegesis: there is a poster of Don Siegel's Invasion o f the Body Snatchers (1956) and Marina watches the opening sequence of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) on television. The most obvious petition to read the film through the thematic patterns of the horrific is well-entrenched within the narrative itself: the production of Max's directorial comeback, Fantasma del medianoche, which stars Marina and which Max calls a second-rate horror film. Channeling the aesthetics of Mexican horror-wrestling films, the plot line of Fantasma concerns a Herculean muscle-man, in fetishistic leather, a billowing red cape and a mask to hide his disfigured face, who falls in love w ith a beautiful young woman, played by Marina, who seems to be simultaneously attracted to and repelled by her monstrous lover. In the final scene of the movie- within-the-movie, the Phantom comes to Marina's apartment, prom ising her a life of love— which is only possible, because of his abnormality, if they run away to a secluded location together. He comes to M arina's horror film character, then, to kidnap her to erotic bliss, like in Phantom o f the Opera. Through its deployment of horror references and conventions, it should be clear that reading jAtarne! requires the viewer to engage the film against and through the larger framework of the horror genre, and the placement of the scene of filming Fantasma in the opening scenes of jAtam e! 94 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. provides a reflexive passage against which the main narrative — Ricki and Marina's relationship— will be read. This cross-textual and cross-generic reading strategy is not exclusive to the viewers of jAtam e!, however: the characters themselves employ generic knowledge in charting/ planning their actions. It is through Fantasma del medianoche that the m ale subjects in jAtame!, Ricki and Maximo, will try to narrativize their respective desires for Marina. For Maximo, Fantasma is a personal tale of rescue/redem ption in which Marina is the object, and he is the hero. After deciding in the last minute to change the script so that Marina's character does not get stabbed, Maximo shouts triumphantly, "Marina, you aren't going to die — I will save you!"1 3 Maximo uses his directorial/patriarchal authority to script Marina's dependence upon him, an authority he has already utilized by casting her in Fantasma, by imagining himself in a hero role of "saving" her. By casting her, Maximo attempts, in an exercise of benevolent and horny patriarchal power, to mold Marina's identity, as her form er status as porn star and heroin addict marginalized her from "legitimate" movie stardom. Yet, Max's vehicle for Marina is a horror film, and a second-rate one at that, which in the hierarchy of genres has only marginally more respectability than porn. In other words, Max "saves" Marina from the porn industry by giving her a certain degree of fame and legitimacy as an actress in a "real" movie, but he 95 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. only allows her just enough (it is explicitly a second-rate horror movie) to command gratitude to him and not enough for her to be famous or legitimate on her own terms. Her career is dependent upon his "generosity" and lustfulness in casting her. Like Scottie dressing up working class Judy in Vertigo (1958), Max tries to use the generic logic of horror to shape Marina into the image of his desire. Ricki, for his part, appropriates M ax's patriarchal vision as his own narrative. A close shot of a smiling Ricki spying on the set as the latter part of a shot/reverse shot indicates that he imagines Marina's Fantasma dialogue ("Of course I idolize you!"1 4 ) to be directed at him. Ricki also finds in Fantasma a possible course for his desire: the monster-phantom (a pumped- up cross between the M inotaur and Rocky H orror—yet another genre hybrid of classic mythology and camp) tells M arina he will carry her off to a place without distractions where they can be happy. This sounds suspiciously similar to what will soon occur betw een Ricki and Marina, thus providing a generic framework through which the audience m ust understand their story. But as we saw earlier w ith the pornographic cues in the film, at the same time that Almodovar actively insists on the horror film grammar of jAtame!, the vocabulary of the horror "language" is systematically undermined and re-coded. For one thing, Antonio Banderas as Ricki is the captor, the monster, the predator of generic convention; he is the one who 96 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. endangers and threatens the heroine. However, Banderas as Norman Bates does not quite fit, partly because of Banderas's movie star good looks as well as the childish innocence w ith which he plays Ricki. He may be the psychotic outsider rejected by society, but he is no Leatherface. At the same time the horror conventions encourage our fear of him and concern for Marina's safety, w e are also sympathetic to his desires for the conventionalized vision of "norm al life" he believes his love for Marina can bring him. Ricki's appropriation of the Fantasma story transforms the narrative logic of the horror genre into a love plot. What we have here, then, is a generic as w ell as ideological mess: the horror story (the capture/tying up) is complicated by the love story (Ricki and Marina's movement toward coupledom) — w hich is complicated even further by the frequent eruptions of unexpected comedy, as well as by the bright and luscious colors and the set design and sudden swerves into musical dance numbers. GENERIC COMPLEMENTS: MASOCHISM DEMANDS A SADIST The complication of the "horror story" (Ricky's abduction and victimization of Marina) w ith the "love story" (Ricky's emotional pursuit of Marina and her path tow ard eventual discovery that she does indeed love Ricky) requires an exam ination of the desiring templates of each of these genres. In jAtame!, the them atic drives tow ard resolution of both the horror and the 97 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. rom antic m elodram a become implicated in one another. Where horror and m elodram a have been theorized in terms of, respectively, sadism and masochism, when the genres are brought together in jAtame!, such strict division of erotics becomes untenable, resulting in significant implications for representations and politics of gender. The sadistic bent of horror, particularly the slasher horror strain w hich jAtame! most clearly channels, has been widely acknowledged, with fem inist critics paying particular attention to how gender and female sexuality organizes the frenzied explosions of violence.1 5 In slasher horror, the psychopath killer pursues female victims with special intensity and violence, and the orgies of blood that punctuate such films are clearly sublim ated and monstrous eruptions of sexual energy: "The killer's phallic purpose, as he thrusts his drill or knife into the trembling bodies of young wom en, is unmistakable."1 6 Furthermore, the violent slashing of women's bodies enacts to an extreme the kind of sadistic punishment that Laura M ulvey argued is operative in narrative cinema at large— woman is scrutinized and punished, as in Vertigo and film noir, for her body with its frightening "lack." The narrative and processes of the gaze thus collude so th a t " w o m a n 's d esire is subjected to her im age as bearer of the b leed in g w ound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it."1 7 Slasher horror's ritual mutilations of female bodies suggests a frighteningly 98 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. embodied (that is, not limited to metaphorical processes of narrative) enactment of castration— transforming the female body into a literal bleeding wound to simultaneously evoke and disavow the male subject's castration anxiety. The women's melodrama, of which the romance m elodram a or love story is a subset,1 8 on the other hand, is characterized by masochism. Women spectators who identify with the screen characters are subjected to roller coasters of emotion, particularly marked by frequent plum bing of the depths of pathos, abject scenes of sadness and emotional pain. Just as slasher horror enables the vicarious mastery of domination and the infliction of physical pain, melodrama is a journey into the extremes of emotional lows. Whereas the violence of sadism in horror necessitates aggressive activity, the keynote condition of melodrama is passivity, characterized especially in the love story melodrama as endless waiting. Cohering predictably in horror and melodrama, sadism and masochism in cinematic genres are insistently gendered, with sadism aligning with masculine fantasies and m asochism with feminine fantasies. In jAtame!, the melodramatic love story is locked into the dynam ics of the horror story, w h ich has im plications for the gen d ered d y n a m ic s of sadism and masochism embedded in the two genres. The unusual interlacing of horror with melodrama romance in jAtame! underscores the 99 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. sadist/masochist regimes of pleasure basic to each, by pairing the elements of masochism in romantic melodrama with its "com plem ent" sadism in horror. Melodrama's masochism is associated also w ith passivity — the heroine, awash and overwhelmed with "feeling," is powerless to effect any change on the forces that conspire against her emotions. M ary Ann Doane has asserted that the central action of love story m elodram as involves the female protagonist making a single, im portant decision on w hich all other actions in her life will depend. This choice, which answ ers the question, "Whom will the heroine love?", is different from how series of choices operate in other genres, where decisions and choices tend to propel action. In the love story, the woman's choice is the endpoint of the narrative, not a motor for the plot: In the love story, choice does not determine or control the narrative trajectory. Instead, the narrative culm inates in a choice, indicating that the act of choosing is of m onum ental and climactic significance for the woman and, furtherm ore, that it is the endpoint of a long and arduous struggle. This tendency induces a sense of stagnancy and nonprogression w hich is evidenced in the temporal structure of the films — dom inated by duration and repetition.1 9 This "cyclical or repetitive relation to tim e"2 0 com ponent of the melodramatic love story is emphasized in jAtame! by its pairing with Ricki's stalker/slasher horror motives. Marina, tied up and confined to a single 100 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. room, is condemned to endless w aiting—the physical presence of constraints in the form of ropes and gags literalizes the (forced) passivity of her situation in this love story. Furthermore, because Ricki forces her into the choice of either remaining his tied-up captive or falling in love w ith him, the actual speciousness of the structure of "choice" in the love story is made apparent, further compromising the "love story" w ith the horror story. Thus, woman's culturally defined role of m asochism as seen in the romantic melodrama, mapped across extended sequences of passive waiting and extreme loss of autonomy (love as captivity), and the hollowness of her romantic choice are monstrously amplified in jAtame! by the conditions of Marina's imprisonment. And — the sadism of the patriarchal system that puts her there is simultaneously underscored, for the m ale "side" of the love story is inextricably linked to the very logic of the horror film. The romantic drive of the "love story" for the male and female to "come together" is explicitly paired with the male aggressor's violent desire in the "horror story" to dominate and victimize the female: Ricki's violence and capture of Marina are all in the name of love. W hen A lm odovar frames Ricki in the image quoting Lang's M, the iconic com ponents of Lang's killer mise-en-scCne have been tellingly re-coded, re-writing the serial killer with signs of romance. In M, Peter Lorre looks through the store w indow at the tools of his sexually 101 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. driven violence — his face is ringed w ith multiple knives, a monstrous projection of his homicidal intentions and tortured psyche. In jAtame!, when Ricki looks through the store window (framed to recall M), he also sees a "tool" for his romantically-sexually driven violence: a box of chocolates— which he will later leave for M arina as an ominous sign of his affections—in the shape of a heart, w ith sparkly stars decorating the cover. The specter of physical violence im plied by the knives in M is reinterpreted in terms of romantic coercion. But the sadistic and violent edge of the original context, horror's violent and m urderous pursuit, infiltrates the new context, Ricki's romantic pursuit. M irroring horror sadism with romance masochism thus reveals the unequal power relations inherent in dominant cultural paradigms of heterosexual coupling. This interpretation of jAtame! as a critique of the ideologies of heterosexual rom ance is further underscored when we continue with comparisons betw een Ricki and his less attractive counterparts in the slasher horror film. Carol Clover has detailed how the killers of slasher horror are plagued by their failures in the process of oedipalization, such that their sexuality is rooted in a m onstrous short-circuiting of sex into the pathways of violence: th e y are k ille rs b e c a u se th ey fa ile d to b ecom e "proper" m asculine subjects, m isdirecting their sexual energy into the deviance of murderous rage. Their com prom ised gender and sexual identities manifest as 102 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. m onstrosity, with the killer marked by visual difference— disfigurement (Friday the Thirteenth, Nightmare on Elm Street) or distorting masks (Texas Chain Saxo Massacre, Halloween) or transvestitism (Psycho, Silence of the Lambs).21 Their monstrosity comes from their failure to conform to hetero- patriarchal norm s of gender and sexuality. But where slasher killers in horror are plagued by "deviancy," Ricki's movement down the path of horror — terrorizing M arina—explicitly comes from sexual "normalcy." His violence and m onstrous intensity bent on getting Marina to submit to his will comes expressly from his desire to have a "normal" life, which he quite carefully defines along terms of bourgeois heterosexuality: having a wife and kids and being a good provider for them. Whereas in slashers, monsters are the failure of the normal, in jAtame!'s version of slasher horror, it is "norm al" desires that produce monstrous violence. MULTIPLE MASOCHISMS However, the m ale/ sadism, female/masochism pairing is deceptively simple, and ghettoizing masochism "only" to female melodramas, and by implications, only to women, falsely gives the impression that femininity is the only subject position that has a stake in seeking pleasure out of pain. Carol C lover's groundbreaking work has shown that even the trenchantly sadistic exercises of slasher horror mask a complementary masochistic drive, 103 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. which is as hard at work in the genre as the more apparently evident sadism. She argues .. .that the masochist aesthetic is and has always been the dominant one in horror cinema and is in fact one of the genre's defining characteristics; that the experience horror m oviegoers seek is likewise rooted in a pain/ pleasure sensibility; that the fantasies in which horror cinema trades are particularly (though not exclusively) tailored to male forms of masochistic experience (accounting for the disproportionate maleness of the audience).2 2 The sadism performed by the slasher on the women, then, stages a series of scenarios wherein the (male) spectator can identify w ith— masochistically experience — pain. Linda Williams suggests that following Clover, one m ight argue that pornography and melodrama, the other "body genres" in addition to horror,2 3 also oscillate between the pleasures of both sadism and masochism. One might be tempted to read these more flexible accounts of spectatorial pleasure and identification as resolving some of the vexing issues of the unequal division of gendered power in genres. That is, it m ight seem like a liberating point of view to assert that it is not only w om en w ho revel in masochism (through weepie melodramas of various kinds), for m en do too (through identification with the female character in slasher horror films who is terrorized). And indeed, Clover's influential argum ent about male viewers' cross-gender identification with the androgynous female lead 104 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. (discussed further below) is often misconstrued as a paradigm of progressive, liberating gender-blending.2 4 Yet Clover is careful to insist that horror's male masochism is always figured as a fem inizing and thus essentially a debasing, abject experience.2 5 And while W illiams finds masochistic elements at play in horror and pornography, she is harder pressed to find complementary sadism in m elodram a.2 6 In horror and melodrama, things sadistic and masochistic are not "equally" gendered — even if they are more complex than they might at first seem. Further analysis of jAtame! shows that in addition to exposing the sadism of the male perspective in the romantic m elodram a by linking it with horror, jAtame!'s twinning of melodrama and horror also underscores the less familiar masochistic component of horror. O n the set of the self-reflexive filming of Fantasma del medianocke, Marina is perform ing the final act, in which her Fantasma character emerges as the "Final Girl" of slasher horror convention, where the female character who has been m ost terrorized by the monster throughout the narrative finally empowers herself and vanquishes the monster.2 7 As discussed previously, Ricki is seen identifying w ith the Fantasma story of erotic abduction. But additionally, as a male spectator of the horror film unfolding before him , Ricki also id e n tifie s w ith M arina, as th e "Final Girl."2 8 105 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. The "Final Girl" is Carol Clover's term for the female character in slasher films who is most persistently pursued by the slasher and put into the most prolonged harrowing scenarios of terror. Yet, the Final Girl not only survives the violent onslaught of the slasher, after first cowering and screaming in abject terror, she eventually m usters the courage to take up a phallic weapon herself and vanquish her attacker. Various critics have celebrated the Final Girl as a m odel of screen femininity taking action. However, such focus on the Final Girl's em pow erm ent in her movement toward action has tended to obscure one of the m ore significant aspects of Clover's discussion, which also has bearing on the gender and pleasure dynamics of jAtame!: the Final Girl's role in taking the male viewer on a journey through masochism. According to Clover, the real significance is not the cross-gender identification that is operative in slasher film s—w here male spectators identify with the Final Girl's final assaults against the m onster— but rather the reasons why she is a Final Girl at all (why not a Final Boy?), that is, the underlying conditions that m ake such a surprising cross-gender identification both possible and necessary in the first place. If the "central investment" in horror is masochism, the Final Girl acts as a stand-in for the male viewer, his proxy in pain. To identify w ith the experiences of pain enacted on a "Final Boy" or another male figure w ould be too directly 106 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. feminizing for the male viewer. In one of Clover's provocative assertions, she raises the possibility that the extraordinary sadism of horror might just be an elaborate ruse, by w hich the male spectator can better witness, experience, identify with the fem inizing experiences of masochism and pain.2 9 Clover's discussion brings new issues to a consideration of Ricki's appropriation of the horror m ovie template as a course for his romantic pursuits when w atching Fantasma del medianoche. Ricki's identification with Marina's character circumscribes a complicated topography of desiring positions. She is the object of his desire, but also as a performer in the movie playing out his fantasy of abduction, she is also the subject of his desire.3 0 She will be the object of his sadism, in his violence and attempts to dominate her. But pursuing Clover's argum ent about masochism and the Final Girl, Ricki — as the spectator of the horror film Fantasma, in which Marina is the beleaguered Final Girl —has a crucial stake in identifying with her experience of pain. Thus, in addition to being the recipient of sadistic violence, she is also Ricki's vessel for experiencing masochism. Marina's a priori position of masochism in the m elodram a, then, is woven together with Ricki's masochism, experienced through her and activated by the logics of horror.3 1 Following L in d a W illia m s's d e sc r ip tio n of th e uses an d functions of the woman's body in body genres, M arina's body is a multiply coded vessel for melodramatic pathos and receptor for horrific violence. 107 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. The interchangeability of the positions of sexual power and desire are m ade m ore complicated still by Ricki's own past as the object of sexual m anipulation. As a mental patient, his sexual liaisons with the woman director of the institution granted him special favors. The institution director — like Ricki later with Marina — takes advantage of his "locked up" position and his forced complicity with her rules of the game (which are the rules of his incarceration/institutionalization) — pleasurable for him as they may be. This scenario again complicates and undermines an easy reading that w ould read Ricki only as a sadistic patriarchal aggressor— even if he assum es that role in the theater of his bizarre courtship of Marina. The dynamics of pleasure in violence and pain are further shuffled with the diegetic introduction of the third "body genre." When the film goes into its (soft) porn mode during Marina and Ricki's love scene, the terms of pleasure/pain are reversed. As Marina takes over in bed, her body is the spectacle and scene of orgasmic pleasure (consistent with Williams's description of the wom an's body in porn). On the other hand, Ricki's body— w hich has been beaten up sorely by drug dealers— is the site of pain: every sexual position makes him wince in pain, combined with sexual pleasure. M arina seems to take pleasure in manipulating his body, regardless of the pain. Thus here in the porn component, it would appear to be M arina who also is the sadist and Ricki the willing masochist. By pitching 108 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the different terms of masochism and sadism, as organized by the different genres along differently gendered bodies, against each other, the uneasy politics of pain and pleasure are unraveled and recombined in new configurations. Clearly, it is in this cross-breeding of generic pleasures, w hich reveals w ith uncharacteristic baldness the sadistic and masochistic fantasies through generic bait and switch, that critics of the film found and find so difficult to reconcile. The ideological "incorrectness" of baldly showing a w om an w ho learns to accept her masochistic place in this pairing is ultimately, of course, w hat has driven the criticism of the film by the conservative MPAA (which would prefer such gender inequalities to be packaged in less stark terms, as in Pretty Woman [1990]) as well as by anti-porn feminists. Similarly, the sadistic violence familiar from horror films became repugnant w hen explicitly framed in terms of romantic male/female relations, rather than standard low budget horror bloodbaths. Finally, the components of pleasure that Almodovar's characters eke out of the reconfigurations of the desiring mechanics of horror, melodrama and porn are additional trouble spots w ith viewers who would prefer their gender politics and ideology to be safely w ith in th e accep ted b ou n d s of generic convention. A consideration of the means and extremes by which the few critics who have written on jAtame! have engaged the film illustrates a 109 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. fundamental — and ultimately radical — sticking point in A lm odovar's combination of genres. In going through the analyses of Paul Julian Smith, Victor Fuentes and Martha Nandorfy, I wish to explore the politics of pleasure— both within the story and between the story and spectators — and the problems posed by the body genres at w ork in jAtam e I. W hen the terms of desire inherent in jAtame!'s textual deployment of horror, m elodram a and porn are subverted and reconfigured, what are the implications for ideology, politics and pleasure? FROM GENRE TROUBLE TO GENDER TROUBLE In the years after jAtame!'s disastrous run-in w ith the MPAA and the US porn wars, a handful of film scholars have attem pted to reassess jAtame! and its gender politics. This time around, however, there is a general attem pt to salvage jAtame!—to remove from it the "anti-feminist" label w hich was its legacy from its initial release and re-align the film's m essage w ith liberal feminist ideals. Though each of these analyses takes a different route toward squaring the film in pro-feminist terms, each has in com m on w ith the others the central focus of the film's violence against M arina — and her final acceptance/submission to Ricki as her romantic destiny. An engagem ent with these efforts to recuperate jAtame! reveals a critical flaw in their 110 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. argumentation, centered exactly on the politics of pleasure and the problems of sadism and masochism. In "Almodovar's Postmodern Cinem a,"3 2 Victor Fuentes tries to counter the film's "offensive edge"3 3 —its problematic suggestion of violence toward women— by appealing to literary m etaphor. Extrapolating from Marla Zombrano's examination of the heart as trope, Fuentes suggests that the symbolism of the heart images in jA tam e! dem ands that the film not be read literally, concluding that "pain and suffering, not violence, is what joins the couple in love."3 4 Fuentes thus seeks to evacuate the violent connotations from the head butt, punches, ropes and gags that Ricki bestows upon Marina. While the effort to re-align jAtam e! with a reading in line with feminist perspectives is certainly w orthw hile, Fuentes's argum ent in the end is not convincing. In the words of one reviewer, "we haven't forgotten the force of the kidnapper's slap."3 5 The instances of violence in the film demand to be read in a way that m ore fully accounts for their meaning. Paul Julian Smith's essay on jAtame! appeals to theories of cinematic spectatorship to try to recover the film from wholesale condemnation on account of its violence toward women. Smith also recognizes the horrific elem ent at w ork in jAtame!, an d r e a d s th e film a s an e x p lo ra tio n of C lover's cross-gender identification mobilized through M arina as Final Girl. Smith concludes that "as a survivor (in M aximo's film, in Almodovar's film) 111 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Marina will disable male m astery, and secure the spectator's identification."3 6 Thus salvaging the film from its anti-feminist designation, Smith proceeds to caution that "Alm odovar's house of horror may be more aesthetically designed than those featured in Friday the Thirteenth or Slumber Party Massacre; the problem s it raises are equally disturbing."3 7 It is important to point out that, unlike Fuentes, Smith is careful to preserve the contentious nature of Ricki's violence; the film is "liberal" and "feminist," then, in its representation of the female's overthrowing of that violence and its patriarchal sources. An interesting counterpoint to Smith's argument is Martha Nandorfy's in "Tie M e Up! Tie M e Down!: Subverting the Glazed Gaze of American M elodram a and Film Theory." She also explicitly seeks to correct what she sees as "m isguided" feminist condemnations of the film, and like Smith, she suggests spectatorship as a way of theorizing and understanding the complexities of jAtam e!'s violent content. Unlike Smith, however, Nandorfy suggests that there is in fact no identification with either Marina or Ricki; the subversiveness of the film, she argues, must be understood through its denial of any identification, and its play of different gazes.3 8 Where Smith finds the critique of patriarchy in our identification with Marina, Nandorfy argues that we can only engage in that critique because we are not sutured into identification w ith any of the characters. She wants 112 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. to abandon the dom inant models/theories of cinematic spectatorship offered by M ulvey and Gaylyn Studlar in favor of one that allows for a greater critical agency on the part of the audience, rescuing spectators from the "idiotic passivity"3 9 that she argues Mulvey7 s and Studlar's models imply. Nandorfy offers another model of spectatorial agency which she argues is at w ork in jAtame!. The film, Nandorfy asserts, asks us to view the violence as one of the dangerous byproducts of the patriarchal power structures. The violence of M arina's objectification implied by her submission and acceptance of the role Ricky has scripted for her, then, is designed to raise our critically engaged outrage, made possible by our non-sutured relationship to the characters. Most women, she says, find Marina's re/actions "outrageous and offensive."4 0 W hile I find myself aligned with these authors in their attempts to recuperate jAtame! into a progressive, "pro-feminist" discourse where it was condem ned as retrograde before, their analyses are fundamentally hobbled by an inability to acknowledge an important component to the function of violence and bondage, real and implied, in the film. Though extraordinarily divergent in their tactics, Smith, Fuentes and Nandorfy all share the assum ption that the representations of bondage and violence are jAtame! is ideologically "bad" and m ust be explained away in some "larger" construct in order to recuperate Almodovar and the film into an ideologically 113 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. progressive and intellectually acceptable framework. This takes the form of Fuentes's evacuation of all readings of violence, Smith's reading of M arina's ultim ate victory over the bonds of patriarchy, and Nandorfy's insistence that M arina's plight necessarily incites outrage in "most" women. W hat these authors (and, indeed, the reviewers who wrote on jAtame! on its initial release) have difficulty maneuvering around is the very fact that the representation of violence and its use to make another submit to her bonds can be read in jAtame! as pleasurable — or at least, leading to pleasurable outcomes. Marina falls in love with Ricki, both in spite of and because of the ropes, punches and threats. It is this troublesome fact, at once obvious and yet confusing, that simultaneously underwrites those wholesale critiques of the film's politics and problematizes those analyses that seek to recuperate the movie within a (familiarly) "feminist" discourse. It is characteristic of the film as a whole, with its genre fluidity, that its ideological positioning is neither clear nor stable, but simultaneously invokes and resists contradictory ideological discourses. PATRIARCHAL PLEASURES jAtame! does not explicitly exploit the sado-masochistic overtones of the scenario of a woman held captive, bound and gagged on her bed; indeed, Pedro Almodovar in interviews has repeatedly resisted characterizations of 114 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. jAtame! as either sadistic or masochistic.4 1 Still, the fact that M arina ultimately submits to her bonds suggests that the erotic seductiveness of the circulation of power articulated along the gendered lines of sadism and masochism is in fact operative in this horror-love story. The moment at which Ricki asks Marina if he can trust her not to run away is the moment in which Marina accepts the rules of the game w ith her answer, "Tie me up."4 2 Nandorfy finds this scene the m ost disturbing of the whole film because it is here when Ricki's plan of forcing M arina to love him seems to work— but concludes it is representative of society's deeply entrenched patriarchy, not a misogyny on the part of Alm odovar.4 3 However, she misses the implication that Marina, in asking for the ropes, paradoxically asserts her power in the hermetic loop of Ricki's offer of patriarchal love. In questioning why Marina does not lie and then seize the opportunity to run away, Nandorfy refuses to recognize the possibility of the pleasurable circulation of eroticized pow er—and pow erlessness—w ithin this patriarchal scheme. The pleasurable byproducts of heterosexual/patriarchal gender relations (put into sharp relief by the pairing of horror and rom antic m elodram a) are revealed b y the m o v em en t in to " p o rn o g ra p h y ," w it h th e infamous sex scene. It is an extended sequence of realistically portrayed sex (that is, not idealized or stylized), which shows M arina taking over in bed, 115 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. subjecting Ricki to her sexual dem ands and exacting w hat is cinematically indicated as grand pleasure (the couple is show n m irrored eight times in the sky-light above). Marina's pleasure is unem barrassed and extraordinary; her command of the sexual performance is total (she tells him not to climax and then, once he has, not to withdraw until her ow n long-take orgasm), while Ricki's pleasure is almost afterthought, a by-product of her own.4 4 But does the fact that Marina finds erotic pleasure in submitting to her lover's ropes mean that Almodovar is advocating the patriarchal system of bondage? Does this suggest to wom en that we should uncritically accept the rules of the game? These questions are at the dead center of the messy and confused history of debate surrounding the film. And it is the ultimate ambivalence of the film's stance that has so confounded commentators ("...either a blatant insult to women...or a sophisticated battle of the sexes;" "how can Marina's conversion be explained?...it offers no answer."4 5 ). Clearly, jAtame! is engaging in a highly complex play of meanings, categories and their slippages. In its continual disavowal of its own terms, on the level of genre and gender and signification, jAtame! actively resists being pinned down to one single coherent agenda. Almodovar seems to be contradicting him self at ev e ry o th er tu rn , a n d o n e fin d s o n e se lf in the position of either uncritically condem ning ("sexist claptrap") or embracing ("bright, comic slug fest") the film, or in the position of trying to negotiate a 116 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. stance, like Smith and Nandorfy, from which the "offensive" elements are put into the service of an overarching sophisticated condemnation of repugnant sexual systems. Feminist m en and w om en like Smith and Nandorfy m ust rationalize their own enjoyment of the film (and they m ust have liked the film to have written in defense of it) by reasoning out a justification for the violence— but in so doing, they reason away their own pleasure because it is too problematic. N andorfy's com plete disavowal of any identification is indicative of the extremes to w hich they m ust go to perform this intellectual contortion, in order to avoid the dangerous problem of a spectator potentially enjoying the bound and gagged seduction of Marina by Ricki. Nandorfy seems to suggest that jAtame! is a rigorous and meticulous deconstruction of heterosexual patriarchy that is highly serious in its endeavors; this is not the m ovie that I know and enjoy. This policing of the political implications of pleasure severely curtails an adequate investigation into the mechanisms of pow er, erotics, violence, sadism and masochism, inherent in the gendered genres at play here. There is m ost definitely space for pleasure in watching Ricki's and Marina's horror-love story develop, a pleasure that unfolds along various trajectories: the pleasure of w atching the highly sexy Victoria Abril and Antonio Banderas (a cross-gender and omni-sexual pleasure), the narrative 117 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. desire to see them eventually couple slowly takes over our initial fear for M arina's safety, the pleasure of watching the consummation of their coupledom in the extraordinary sex scene, the pleasure in the production- design and cinem atography and generic play. There is pleasure in the text; it is possible to identify with Marina or Ricki, or even both. What is truly subversive about jAtame! is that while laying bare the power dynamics of patriarchal heterosexual coupling through his often highly comic metaphor of literal ropes,4 6 Almodovar at the same time shows us the very pleasures offered by that system of repression, the "perpetual spirals of power and pleasure."47 It is this basic opposition that ultimately cannot be reconciled that troubles so m any writers on jAtame!. This is perhaps why critics and reviewers have expressed such intense dissatisfaction w ith the so-called happy ending, when Ricki, Marina, and Lola drive off into the Spanish countryside with Lola and Ricki singing a Spanish song w ith the refrain "I will survive" (Ricki has learned the song from listening to the tape on Lola's stolen Walkman), as Marina— like so m any heroines of w om en's melodramas, beatified by suffering—smiles through her tears. The ending is often criticized as tacked-on, false and u n sa tisfy in g : th at is, it d o e s n o t reconcile the issues o f violence, pleasure, patriarchy, sadism and masochism "sensically." 1 1 8 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. One might read the conclusion as definitively shutting down narrative meaning, asking the film to be read as a hetero-patriarchal happily ever after. But sensitivity to the jumbled genres of jAtame! proves instructive at the finale, too. The image of the car driving away is not simply an easy way to end a movie; it specifically recalls another image from earlier in the film —the opening sequence of Night of the Lii’ing Dead seen on Marina's TV in which a car appears on a country road. So once again, the happy ending of one genre (the successful coupling of lovers in the romantic melodrama) is troubled by the re-emergence — at the point of the melodrama's generic fulfillment—of the grimmer horror genre.4 8 Yet even here, the scene is shot through w ith a strong element of comedy (seen throughout the film), which works to underm ine all of the complicated desiring, sexual and political positions implied by horror, melodrama and pornography. The comedic element of the three characters singing along to "I Will Survive" presents a paradigm different from the tacked on happy endings familiar from some melodramas; its comic twist is much more deeply subversive, putting us in the position of laughing at what we want to find outrageously offensive (a strategy Almodovar has revisited many times, notably in the Kika [1993] rape scene). I w o u ld argue that the falseness of the en d sequence is the effect o f a final contradiction that Almodovar orchestrates; the sense of inadequacy of the end to explain what has preceded it demands that the viewer measure 119 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. her/his reactions and responses to jAtame! — to the pleasures and horrors experienced in the course of watching. Instead of constructing an iron-clad and simple-minded ideological platform for his film, A lm odovar poses conflicting provocative scenarios, leaving us with questions and contradictions, letting us alone to try to tie up our own tangled and confused ideological loose ends. Foregrounding both the problems and pleasures of patriarchy, jAtame! is an example of Teresa de Lauretis's "narrative w ith a vengeance" — stories that stress the duplicity of w om an's place in patriarchal narratives, foregrounding contradictions but not foregoing pleasure.4 9 In addition to conceiving of jAtame! as stressing its patriarchal constructs "with a vengeance," Alexander Doty's sense of "queer" also proves useful in considering Almodovar's work and, particularly in the case of jAtame!, Almodovar's approach to genres. "Queer," in D oty's sense, marks "a flexible space for the expression of all aspects of non- (anti-, contra- ) straight cultural production and reception," recognizing "the possibility that various and fluctuating queer positions might be occupied w henever anyone produces or responds to culture."5 0 Almodovar is a queer director and jAtame! a queer horror-melodrama-porn film. And engaging w ith the queered genres of jAtame! engenders a series of "queered" outcom es and implications for gender, genre, our manners of conceptualizing genre, and the nation/ national image. 120 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. jAtame! is not so simple a m atter of an easy, wholesale critique of patriarchy or a condemnation of male aggression and sadism. Neither is it simply a case of naively retrograde gender politics. Alm odovar's savvy film skillfully queers and manipulates the assum ptions and desiring architecture of seemingly opposite genres — slasher horror and romantic melodrama — and in so doing emphasizes and draw s attention to their sympathies: in masochism, in their reliance on a passive w om an figure subjected to male activity/control. Yet even within these terms, the queering of the genres also reveals potent channels of subversive desire — charting a course for finding pleasure in pain and pleasure in patriarchal paradigm s.5 1 jAtame! also illustrates that the while genres m anipulate desire differently along courses of sadism and masochism, skillful interplay and exchange between and across genres troubles static notions of spectator m astery and passivity. When the female masochism of m elodram a slips into the female sadism of soft porn sadomasochism, the rigidity of our conceptions of generically- inflected paradigms of viewing pleasure are destabilized. Almodovar's frequent mining of m elodram a and (less frequently) horror is a case study in the ways in w hich m arginalized genres can be leveraged to center the profile of m a rg in a l id e n titie s. A s M arsh a K inder has persuasively argued, Almodovar's over-the-top stories, w ith their neurotics, psychopaths, porn stars, homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, punks and 121 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. terrorists5 2 have sim ultaneously centered Spanish cinema on the world stage, and centered those same outcast identities as the representatives of the nation.5 3 By now, in 2002, the gay iconoclast Almodovar is the most internationally visible Spanish filmmaker; his cinema has successfully "queered" the Spanish identity, m oving Spanish melodramatics to the center stage, without conceding to cooptive Hollywood interests in any form (as Amenabar and Peter Jackson, w orking in another marginalized national cinema, New Zealand, the subject of the next chapters, have done). The ability of m arginalized genres to travel across cultural and national borders will be exam ined in m ore detail in the following chapters. Chapter 4 will examine how the m ateriality of very marginalized gross- horror imagery and the m arginal view ing practices of cult audiences in a New Zealand context has translated into capital — cultural and financial — which is then invested into building a national cinema. Chapter 5 explores the culturally specific inflection of the thematics of horror and the maternal melodrama in relation to N ew Zealand national and cultural identity. 122 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. ENDNOTES 1 Later to be surpassed by Like W ater for Chocolate (1992) and II Postino (1994). 2 M arsha Kinder, "Pleasure and the New Spanish Mentality: A Conversation with Pedro Alm odovar," Film Quarterly 41:1 (Fall 1987) 34. 3 A ndrew L. Yarrow, "Almodovar Film's X Rating is Challenged in Lawsuit," N ew York Times (May 24,1990). See also Richard Huff, "Shackles on Tie Me Up?: Kunstler calls X rating arbitrary," Variety (June 27,1990) 10. 4 Will Tusher, "U p Loses Fight; Judge Comes Down on MPA A," Variety (July 25.1990). 5 Ralph N ovak, Rev. of Tie M e Up! Tie Me Douml, dir. by Pedro Almodovar, People W eekly (May 7,1990). 6 David Sterrit, Rev. of Tie M e Up! Tie Me Down!, dir. by Pedro Almodovar, The Christian Science M onitor (September 17,1990). 7 David Denby, Rev. of Tie M e Up! Tie M e Down!, dir. by Pedro Almodovar, N ew York (May 14,1990). 8 Bruce W illiamson, Rev. of Tie M e Up! Tie Me Down!, dir. by Pedro Alm odovar, Playboy (July 1990). 9 Molly Flaskell, Rev. of Tie M e Up! Tie M e Down!, dir. by Pedro Almodovar, Video R eview (January 1991). 1 0 Linda W illiams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995) 142-144. 1 1 Vincent Canby, "W hen Love's Ties are Real Ropes," New York Times (May 4.1990). 1 2 Almodovar has a history of Psycho references, notably in his reconstruction of the show er scene in Matador. AlmodOvar's obsession with Psycho and w ith recontextualizing touchstone moments of Hollywood cinema demands a reading that is sensitive both to the original referents (Hollywood norms of narration, H ollyw ood genres) and their breakdown and reassembly in A lm odovar's hands. 123 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 1 3 "M arina, no te vas a morir - /yo te salvare!" 1 4 "Claro que te idolatw." 1 5 See, for example, Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks," The Dread o f Difference: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Barry K. Grant, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) 27-33. 1 6 Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 47. 1 7 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1992) 22. 1 8 M ary Ann Doane perceptively notes how the "gendering" of horror and m elodram a are reflected in male and female viewers' different gazes. Noting first Linda Williams's observation that women tend to shut their eyes or look away from the horrors on screen, Doane goes on to remark that the sign of masculine fortitude is to look away at romance films (The Desire to Desire: The W oman's Film of the 1940s [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987] 96). 1 9 Ibid., 106. 2 0 Ibid. 2 1 The "masking" feature of slasher killers in horror is also referenced and recodified in jAtame!, with Ricki's frequent donning of various disguises —a wig, a fake moustache —as he masquerades as Marina's lover and husband. 2 2 Clover, 222. 2 3 See previous section, "Generic Cocktail/Narratives of Desire." 2 4 See, for example, Paul Julian Smith's use of the Final Girl paradigm in jAtame!, in Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodovar (London: Verso Books, 1994). I further discuss this below. 25 C lo v er, 61-63. 2 6 Williams, 149-150. 2 7 Clover develops this argument in her chapter "Her Body, Himself," which appears in M en, Women and Chain Saws. 124 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 2 8 Paul Julian Smith also discusses the Fantasma sequence in term s of the "Final Girl," but he is more interested in exploring the Final Girl paradigm vis-a-vis the gendered dynamics of identification outside of the fram e — i.e., the Final Girl destabilizes the norms of gendered identification, altering with whom we identify as spectators. I am more interested in pursuing how the generic pattern functions within the narrative, and then in turn how the hybrid generic formats affect gendered spectatorship and identification. 2 9 Clover, 176. She writes that saying so definitively w ould be "going too far," however, the strength of her argument suggests that such a dynam ic is indeed operative, even if submerged under multiple and effective ruses to disguise it. 3 0 This cross-identification suggests a sexual mobility in his character, complicating the heterosexist performance of marriage after the kidnapping. Gaylyn Studlar suggests that this kind of simultaneous identification with subject and object is characteristic of the masochistic aesthetic, w hich counters the rigidity of reading Ricki as "only" the sadistic captor, and again indicates the fluid nature of power/desire in the sado-masochistic scheme ("Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema," Film Theory and Criticism, Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy, eds. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992] 785). 3 1 Their alliance-in-masochism is not the only way in w hich Ricki and Marina are figured in sympathy with each other. Linda Williams suggests that in the classic horror film, there is a surprising and subversive affinity betw een monster and woman in the mutual recognition of their similar status in patriarchal structures ("When the Woman Looks," Film Theory and Criticism, 564). In jAtame!, the monster is Ricki; he is the predator, the menace. The "flash of sympathetic identification" between monster and w om an that Williams talks about occurs after Ricki is beaten up in the plaza and returns to Marina battered and bruised (looking, perhaps, most like a m onster at this point). Stripped of what little claims to legitimate patriarchal pow er he had (his 50,000 pesetas and his boots were stolen), Marina finally sees Ricki for what he is: a lost victim of the same patriarchal system that m arginalized her, that keeps her swinging from patriarch to patriarch (nicely represented in the Fantasma image of her dangling by a telephone cord, a shot to which impotent patriarch Maximo compulsively returns). 3 2 Victor Fuentes, "Almodovar's Postmodern Cinema: A W ork in Progress...", Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodovar, Kathleen M. Vernon and Barbara Morris, eds. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995) 155-170. 125 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 3 3 Ibid., 165. 3 4 Ibid. 3 5 Terrence Rafferty, Rev. of Tie Me Up! Tie M e Down!, dir. by Pedro Almodovar, The Neiv Yorker (May 7,1990). 3 6 Smith, 112. 3 7 Ibid., 113. 3 8 Martha J. Nandorfy, "Tie M e Up! Tie M e Down!: Subverting the Glazed Gaze of American Melodrama and Film Theory," Cineaction 31 (1993) 50-61. 3 9 ibid., 54. 4 0 Ibid., 56. 4 1 See Marcia Pally, "The Politics of Passion: Pedro Alm odovar and the Camp Esthetic," Cineaste 18:1 (1990) 38. 42 "Atame." 4 3 Nandorfy, 55. 4 4 It is in fact Marina's unabashed pleasure that I w ould suggest the MPAA found most irredeemably offensive; such exuberant portrayals of feminine ecstasy simply are not found in Hollywood narratives. This would imply that what offends is the feminine appropriation of erotic power, a dimension that has been largely unexplored in discourse surrounding this film. 4 5 Ibid., 56. 4 6 When Ricki carries Marina over the threshold like a bride, her ropes, not a wedding gown train, trail behind her, and a gag, not a veil, obscures her face. 4 7 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: A n Introduction, vol. I. Robert Hurley, translator. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 45. 4 8 And, specifically, a horror film in w hich the past insistently and inexorably returns. 4 9 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 157. Of course, de Lauretis's 126 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. position is explicitly in contrast to Laura Mulvey's call for the destruction of the pleasures of narrative. 5 0 Alexander Doty, M aking Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting M ass Culture (Minneapolis: University of M innesota Press, 1993) 3. 5 1 Ironic that queering genre allows for acknowledging the contentious pleasures of "straight" patriarchal heterosexuality. 5 2 Here, I am recapitulating and elaborating on Marsha Kinder's list of almodovariano characters, quoted above and referenced in note #2. 5 3 For a discussion of this dynam ic, see Kinder's discussion of Tacones Lejanos (High Heels) in Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and her introduction to the anthology Refiguring Spain: Cinema/M edia/Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 1 2 7 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Chapter 4 — Trading in Horror and Cult Cinema: N ew Zealand's Bad Taste, Art-house Cachet and Cult Fandom This chapter will examine the feature films of New Zealand director Peter Jackson and consider how "horror" and a "cult" aesthetic travel not only betw een generic forms, but also across national boundaries and hierarchies of taste. I will also consider how in the specific case of Peter Jackson horror becomes em bedded at the center of cinematic constructions of New Zealand nationality, both symbolically as well as industrially. I select Peter Jackson as the focus for this study, because not only has his work been rooted in genres of horror and fantasy, but he has worked in the upper and lower registers of the taste spectrum . Peter Jackson has been tremendously successful in parlaying genre and cult "capital" into international success and using generic and cult idioms to formulate texts of national identity. Finally and m ost im portantly, in all of Peter Jackson's films, the horrific appears in dialogue w ith nation, gender and sexuality. 1 2 8 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. ONCE AND FUTURE CULTS In term s of Hollywood-style blockbuster "event" pictures, some of the m ost anticipated films of the early years of the millennium are being directed by N ew Zealander Peter Jackson.1 J. R. R. Tolkien's beloved fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings is being translated to the big screen, the first rendering of the tales in live action, and the first time in three parts (two prior animated versions dealt with only sections of the trilogy). Even just as principal photography for the films wrapped (22 December 2000), and the first film's release, The Fellowship of the Ring, was still one year away (19 December 2001), there was more buzz around these films than any other on the horizon. The Internet release of the "teaser" film trailer (showing glimpses of sets, behind the scenes technology, and featuring commentary by Jackson and actor Elijah Wood, who plays Frodo) on 7 April 2000, generated 1.7 million hits in one day,2 beating out the number of downloads (1 million) garnered by the only other comparable mega-cinematic event in recent mem ory, George Lucas's Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), the "pre-quel" to the Star W ars trilogy (which itself can be read as a sci-fi meditation on them es and structures elaborated in Tolkien's trilogy). The first official theatrical trailer for The Fellozoship of the Rings (January 2001) was accompanied by a print ad campaign (one of the few times a "coming attraction" advertisement is itself advertised), and multitude Tolkien fans in 129 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the US slipped in and out of the coming attractions previews before Thirteen Days, the New Line release exclusively featuring the Lord o f the R ings trailer, simply for a first glimpse of live-action Middle-earth on celluloid.3 This intense level of studio-produced hype, where visions of cinematic Middle-earth and its elves, hobbits and goblins, are carefully titrated to the ever-eager fan base and media, is matched in all other aspects of the films' production. The fan excitement is immense: during the production of the films, there were reportedly four-hundred web sites devoted to the m aking of The Lord of the Rings,4 many of which are updated daily, reporting every whiff of rumor, posting every scrap of news, and debating every perceived deviation of the films' faithfulness to the fiercely beloved books. The production was immense— there were an estimated 3,000 people on the crew, the three films were shot simultaneously over 18 m onths, and post production took another full year (and, in 2002, Jackson is still tw eaking the final chapters). The financial stakes are immense: from early reports in Variety of a New Line Cinema budget of US$130 million,5 the rum ored numbers have climbed to US$270 million for all three films. For N ew Line, backing The Lord of the Rings represented a huge sum of capital bundled in a project w h o se full risks or rew ards w o u ld be u n k n o w n for several years, a considerable gamble at a time when New Line was suffering major box office failures (such as the Adam Sandler devil pic Little Nicky) and pow er 130 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. restructuring, most notably the mega-merger of N ew Line's parent company Time-Warner with AOL (which may have precipitated the January 2001 resignation of CEO Mike DeLuca, who greenlighted The Lord o f the Rings in the first place). The national expectations continue to be immense: for New Zealand, the production promises unimaginable attention, a myriad of cultural spin-offs, a needed injection of capital and the potential to "brand" a national film industry— at one point, there was a Lord o f the Rings museum exhibition in the works, talk of a Rings theme park and a thriving tourism campaign dovetailing with each film's release. In so small a film industry as New Zealand's, the individual influence of a single filmmaker takes on much m ore significance than in the behemoth structures of Hollywood or other, more established national film industries. At the risk of falling into the limitations inherent in Great M an theories, I want to propose that Peter Jackson is the person m ost responsible for landing The Lord of the Rings on New Zealand shores. Such an accomplishment and burden from a director who self-taught film m aking on a Super8 camera, who made his own space alien special effects in his m um 's kitchen and completed his first feature over the course of 4 years of w eekends w ith his pals, and whose most high-profile production was the Michael J. Fox feature The Frighteners—a moderate failure from Universal in 1996. So how was it Jackson was able to command such influence over the N ew Zealand national 131 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. industry and gain access to a series of films that contain the promise of Hollywood-style global blockbusters? I want to begin by looking at the arc of Peter Jackson's 15-year career and consider how a director w ho w orks in the globally minor and relatively low profile New Zealand film industry, and whose specialty seemed to be in trafficking in cult, horror and low brow aesthetics, came to helm a project of such global prominence. In considering Peter Jackson's body of films, I will attempt to trace the currency of cinema, genre, horror, and cult aesthetics and reception across international borders, and examine how this currency trades in tropes of gender, sexuality and nation. Central to these discussions are the politics of "taste," which have recently received im portant critical attention in media and film studies. Questions of "high" and "low" taste registers and how such categorizations interrelate with power, politics and the body (both the represented and the viewing body) have been concerns, w ith varying degrees of explicitness, of Jeffrey Sconce, Linda Williams, and W illiam Paul, whose work provides useful critical tools for approaching Peter Jackson's films. THE POLITICS OF TASTE AND THE BODY Jeffrey Sconce's essay "'Trashing' the Academy" is a foundational text in this "taste" literature, usefully dem arcating the terms of the issue and exploring 132 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the political im plications of notions of "good taste" in cinema.6 Sconce's essay identifies a loose sub-cultural community, comprised of 'zine authors, graduate students and counter-culturists, among others, that focuses its sophisticated interpretative skills on film texts that seem not to warrant the attention: teen beach pictures, B movies, sword and sandal films, splatter films, Ed W ood m ovies, exploitation cinema, and so on. He terms both this sub-culture and the films it values "paracinema," a designation intended to indicate the reciprocal relationship between the films in question and those of the official, m ainstream culture. On the surface the features of "paracinema" texts can be quite dissimilar: take, for example, a Frankie Avalon/ Annette Funicello beach picture and a Herschel Gordon Lewis gore flick. But what these films all have in com m on is, first, the obsessive attention given them by the paracinema reading com m unity (they are paracinema because they are engaged w ith paracinematically). Secondly (and more importantly for the current discussion), paracinema texts indulge in transgressions of "good taste." Either through lack of skills, dearth of talent, limited technology, low budgets or the passage of time which makes the thematics and aesthetics p a in fu lly anachronistic, p aracin em a rejects m ainstream H o lly w o o d glosses of "quality." Paracinem a is always squarely separate from official film culture; it resists the impositions of conventional standards of "good taste" 133 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. and privileges, even celebrates, taste and aesthetics that are unabashedly bad. Appealing to Pierre Bourdieu's insights in "The Aristocracy of C ulture" on "good" and "bad" taste's connection to "class," Sconce persuasively argues that the appropriation of such aesthetically "unworthy" texts is not only an act of resistance to received taste categories but also ultim ately a political challenge to social structures of class and power. Paracinem a's political undercurrent is clearly apparent in the work of RE/search publications, whose volume of essays and filmographies of paracinematic texts and auteurs, Incredibly Strange Films, is proffered explicitly as a confrontation against the hegemonized and homogenized blandness of Hollywood's films-by-corporation and its power to mesmerize citizens into blind conformity. RE/Search editors V. Vale and Andrea Juno write: The concepts of "good taste" are intricately woven into society's control process and class structure. Aesthetics are not an objective body of laws suspended above us.. .they are rooted in the fundamental mechanics of how to control the population and m aintain the status quo. Our sophisticated, "democratic" W estern civilization regulates the population's access to information, as well as its innermost attitudes, through media — particularly film and video...reaching] deep into the back b rain , ren d erin g m ore brutal, physical control tactics obsolete.7 1 3 4 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. As conceived by RE/Search, the potential political charge of paracinematically engaging the low brow, seemingly aesthetically bereft films of such cult directors as Doris Wishman or Larry Cohen— the subversion of the status quo — is manifestly evident. Linda Williams and William Paul's approach to the taste problem atics focuses less on specific reading strategies and more on generically specific strategies that provoke the disdainful epithet "low brow."8 Williams is concerned with melodrama, porn and horror; Paul with "gross-out" comedy and horror. While the specific aims and conclusions of their respective projects are distinctive (and each is useful and insightful on their ow n terms), what is striking is that both Williams and Paul read the question of "taste" as an issue of proximity to the body. That is, in these genres that have not enjoyed sanction from official culture (they are all marked w ith varying degrees of "disreputability," to use Paul's term9 ), each communicates its intended aesthetic aims and effects directly through physical response in the spectator— chortles of laughter, shrieks of fear, shudders of pleasure, gags of disgust, sobs of sadness. "Low" film genres, then, are low because of their enactments on the body. As Paul points out, "higher" forms require processes of interpretation—the thing represented is obscured by the gauze of m etaphor and "extra signification."1 0 Alternatively, in "low" forms the bodily 135 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. response is the point itself; such films specifically seek spectatorial responses that bypass intellectual abstraction and aesthetic reflection in favor of more unmitigated bodily responses. In this m anner, the classification of "low" and "high-brow" genres replicates the larger cultural split of m ind/body that privileges intellectual processes over physical response. "Good taste," then, in a basic way is a regulation of bodily affect—the m anipulation of corporeal responses into "appropriate" manifestations — mim icking again larger cultural pressures to corral hum an energy in socially productive enterprises (e.g., sexuality channeled into marriage for the purposes of procreation, as opposed to pleasure). The aims of "low" genres, on the other hand, are more akin to the primal expressions of pleasure and displeasure of polymorphously perverse childhood, before bodily functions are socialized into conformity with the demands of the culture. Williams's and Paul's articulation of taste as an issue of the body resonates with Pierre Bourdieu's formulation of "taste" as prim arily an issue of physical rejection of someone else's taste proclivities. Asserting that one's values of "taste" are largely defined by w hat one finds distasteful, Bourdieu explains the dynamic in terms of corporeal sensations of revulsion: "Tastes are perhaps first and forem ost d istastes, d is g u s t p r o v o k e d b y horror or visceral intolerance ('sick-making') of the tastes of others."1 1 This passage is particularly illuminating and suggestive about the interrelation of genre and 136 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. taste, for bad taste, distaste, here is expressed specifically in terms of "horror." It would seem then that the "horror" genre —which takes its name from the bodily affect—has an especially intim ate relationship to the substance of "bad taste," for its generic imperatives are to produce precisely the kind of "visceral intolerance" in which reviled "distaste" is firmly rooted. It would also seem that horrific form s thus are intractably stuck at the bottom, the "low brow" end, of the hierarchy of genres. The intimate connection betw een distaste/bad taste/ low brow and the horror genre is further illum inated through Barbara Creed's psychoanalytic exploration of horror and gender in The Monstrous-Feminine12 Creed, working through Julia Kristeva's The Powers o f H orror1 3 notes that the logic by which we find certain things distasteful (or "abject") is always in a primal sense gendered. The "abject" — that w hich produces horror, that in which we locate "distaste" — is always, ultim ately associated with the woman and mother. Creed, elaborating on Kristeva, argues that much of horror genre cinema's semiotics are rooted in the forms of "abjection" that always reconnect to the m other/the feminine. We can note two points of importance for our current discussion on "taste" from this brief engagement with Kristeva and Creed: horror is a privileged site for the traffic in abjection or "distaste," and structures of good and bad taste, in addition to a process of 1 3 7 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. legitimating hierarchies of social power, are also at some level a mechanism for the hierarchizing of m ale/fem ale, masculine/feminine. While the goal of "paracinematic" reading of "low" texts has at heart a political challenge to the class status quo, the matter of "paracinema" texts — or cult texts (more generally speaking) — is more reliant on the reviled "mainstream" than m ight first be apparent. Good taste is good because it is not bad. Good taste and bad, legitimate and illegitimate culture, good film and bad film, m ainstream and cult aesthetics, center and margin are all mutually constitutive — each defines the other; each is dependent on the other, even while — especially w hile—passionately disavowing and resolutely dem arcating itself from the other. This exploration of the politics of taste and the body illustrates that aesthetics, rooted in conceptions of good and bad taste, are not politically neutral but w ork to m aintain structures of class and power. The political in "low horror" and cult films plays out in the texts themselves, in certain reading practices and over the (gendered) body. The next section explores the tensions of the dialectics of taste inherent in bad taste and horror in Peter Jackson's early films and explores how questions of taste are projected onto other discourses of nation and auteur, and have an uncertain relationship to the mainstream. 138 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. CULT I: THE INTERNATIONAL CURRENCY OF BAD TASTE Peter Jackson's first features Bad Taste (1987), Meet the Peebles (1989) and Braindead (a.k.a. Dead Alive, 1992), illustrated a particular obsession with the absurd, the comically grotesque and the "splatter" and "gore" strains of the horrific in cinema. Bad Taste is an alien/zombie film; Meet the Peebles, a backstage musical with X-rated (not NC-17) puppets; Braindead, a zombie film w ith a staggeringly high body count. All share a comedic sensibility, and all are obsessed with pushing the limits of the body, probing the meaty and fluid excesses of corporeal form with a combination of palpable fear and delight. These films, which I call the "gross-out trilogy," were all eventually picked up for international distribution, and though none played in m ainstream venues, the gross-out films generated a dedicated, cult audience of gore and splatter fans who were impressed by the extremes to which Jackson decimated, erupted, destroyed and drained bodies of various forms (puppets, zombies, aliens). Each of the films has become video and midnight m ovie "cult" favorites. In Bad Taste, aliens vomit copious amounts of chunky blue spew, w hich then m ust be drunk by one of the humans. In a running gag that escalates in grossness, Derek, played by Peter Jackson himself, attempts to literally hold his head together, sticking squishy bits of his brain back into his 139 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. skull. Meet the Feebles features a fly tabloid reporter, who gets the scoop on the sexual shenanigans of the celebrity rabbit (who hosts the variety TV program "Meet the Feebles") by rooting around in a fetid toilet and snacking on the contents. The same rabbit, who has a raunchy sex scene w ith two bunnies, contracts a fast-acting venereal disease, and his body starts to rapidly decompose in dripping wounds of leaking pus. Braindead also features pus and rotting flesh, and takes the destructive body logic of Bad Taste to extremes. The film depicts a hundred ways of dispatching a zombie and abusing the human form— legs are ripped off, a hum an head is pureed in a blender, a zombie baby burrows through a woman's face from the back of her head. Braindead's piece de resistance is the 30 minute non-stop parade of zombie dismemberment, finally ending with the spectacle of the hero, Lionel, strapping on a lawnmower to pulverize a host on oncoming zombies, until nothing but pulpy bloody flesh remains. Braindead, Feebles and Bad Taste obviously exhibit the features of "bad taste" as elaborated in the last section. Through the degradation of the screen bodies, the films explicitly engage in "sick-making," deliberately seeking responses of "visceral intolerance" from viewers.1 4 These films w ere n o t cou rtin g the sam e audiences that w o u ld see M erchant Iv o r y 's The Remains of the Day [1993]; rather, they cultivate the very specific, non- 140 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. mainstream cult horror viewing aesthetic, specializing in extremes defined specifically in contrast to mainstream aesthetics and good taste. But even while cult, paracinematic and horror texts, loved only by a narrow group of fans, are generally debased for their "bad taste," these marginalized texts can also simultaneously translate into very material audiences and financial substance. Variety acknowledged bad taste's potential for transformation into capital in its review of Braindead: This is one of the bloodiest horror comedies ever made, and that will be enough to ensure cult success in cinemas and especially on video. Kiwi gore specialist Peter Jackson goes for broke with an orgy of bad taste and splatter hum or. Some will recoil, but 'Braindead' wasn't m ade for them.1 5 Thus, though maligned by arbiters of cultural value, bad taste films are at the same time potentially valuable to producers, distributors and exhibitors for their niche dollars, especially as cult fans of bad taste/h o rro r are given to serial viewings.1 6 This places paracinematic texts and audiences in the possibly conflicted space of being, on the one hand, vilified by the cultural mainstream and, on the other, financially exploitable by the corporations that produce and distribute the dominant m edia com prising the m ainstream shunning bad taste texts in the first place. These ironic circum stances of the p o te n tia l m a rk et v a lu e o f b ad taste films have implications in a larger matrix of cultural "value," which are expressed specifically along terms of national identity w hen the films in 141 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. question are made outside of the dom inant U S/ Hollywood production context. Variety's treatment of Braindead is indicative of larger critical and industrial trends in approaching Jackson: "Kiwi gore-specialist Peter Jackson goes for broke with an orgy of bad taste and splatter humor."1 7 The squarely Hollywood-centric trade paper explicitly labels Jackson as "kiwi," a gesture that brands not only the director but also New Zealand itself as "gore- meisters" in the imaginations of trade publications, critics and consumers. Other examples of the elision of an entire national identity with vocabulary of cinema, cult aesthetics and genre can be found across a variety of publication contexts: Spin m agazine called Jackson a "Kiwi sicko"1 8 and the British Modern Review claimed that in term s of grossness and coarseness, "nobody does it better than the antipodeans."1 9 And, a cult film web site asserts, Peter Jackson has put N ew Zealand firmly on the map as far as Cult cinema is concerned... [Braindead is] the best thing that has come from New Zealand since good oT kiwi lamb chops.2 0 The signifiers of horror and bad taste are collapsed with, become inseparable from New Zealand. The nation itself becomes packaged, commodified, genrified. This sim ultaneous inscription of Jackson and N ew Zealand as purveyors of horror, splatter, bad taste and gore both develops out of and reinforces an international perception of N ew Zealand as a off-kilter land 142 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. with strange and dark obsessions. This perception, which crystallized in the 1990s, is built on a bricolage of texts, including the lyrical and off-beat feminist musings of N ew Zealander Jane Campion and the gay excesses of Australian cinema, as seen in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and Muriel's W edding (1994), w here "N ew Zealand" is lumped together with its undifferentiated "Australasian" neighbor. The 1995 documentary on New Zealand cinema, Cinema o f Unease, written and directed by Sam Neill and Judy Rymer, takes the "off kilter Kiwi" point of view as its primary thesis.2 1 Genre, taste and a strange world-view become "nation" — New Zealand itself is figured as cult object, a site w here kooky perspectives and horrific bad taste can be reliably found. In the case of non-dominant, non-Hollywood cinema industries, "cult" success ultimately can become a question of how the nation is represented on the international stage. So far in each of the dialectics that circumscribe the gross-out trilogy (good/bad taste, h ig h /lo w culture, mainstream/cult audiences, H ollyw ood/national cinema), Jackson's films have always been situated in the marginal, subordinate position. The national ramifications of occupying the marginal position are illustrated in an incident surrounding Braindead's receipt of the "Best Film" aw ard at the New Zealand Film & Television Awards in 1993. After the awards, juror John Cranna, author of short stories and then budding screen writer, publicized his opposition to the selection of 143 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Jackson's film, criticizing Braindead as "a crude horror that makes a mockery of serious film making in New Zealand."2 2 In Cranna's reading of Braindead, the discourses of taste, genre and nation are implicated in one another (reproducing the critical conflation in the US of New Zealand with horror and bad taste). The "bad taste" of Braindead's "crude" execution of the horror genre, then, reflected New Zealand's own "bad taste," and reaffirmed N ew Zealand's status as second-tier filmmakers on the world stage, underm ining any pretenses to cultural legitimacy. Cranna's objections expose the stakes involved in the national celebration and promotion of horrific bad taste: too much reveling in bad taste might condemn New Zealand culture industries to perpetual performance of its marginality. In this view, bad taste/horror are intractably stuck in subordinate positions of power. However, Cranna's is not the only way of looking at the intersection of these hierarchies of taste, power and cinemas. "Borders" can be less a rigid wall and more of a permeable membrane, a model which allows for greater m om ents of exchange between the two sides of a binary. Jackson's gross-out horror can be seen, as in Cranna's view, as ritual exercises in bad taste, repeatedly performing its status as marginalized in a gesture that only reaffirms the immutability of "good taste's" position as "center." But the films' unapologetic entrenchment in "gross-out" can also be seen as an 144 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. exploration of the boundaries of taste in a more active manner, m uch as paracinema reading practices purposely explore bad taste as a protest against repressive power structures filtered through aesthetic hierarchies of taste. Instead of conceiving of the hierarchies as fixed, we m ight look at the repeated exercises of "sick-making" in splatter and gore films as an activity that systematically deconstructs the demarcations of "good taste." The border thus is not so much a hegemonic barrier as it is a site of renegotiation, a site of potentially re-drafting new relationships of center and m argin. And insofar as discourses of national/international cinema are implicated in the discourse of taste, these aggressively horrific cult films from N ew Zealand and their transgressions of good taste can be read as laying bare, and possibly reconstituting, the center/margin dialectic that holds other national cinemas —New Zealand national cinema — perpetually subordinate to US/Hollywood hegemony. When a national cinema producing specialized niche titles claims the allegiance of audiences and becomes branded as a reliable source of a particular kind of film, Hollywood's fiercely protected position as center becomes somewhat denaturalized and the inevitability of H o lly w o o d 's dom inance less certain. That Cranna's dismal view of Jackson's horrific bad taste w as not widely shared by members of the New Zealand film industry m ight have as 145 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. much to do with the attention Braindead was receiving from international cult fans as it had to do with the film's cinematic merits, which indicates yet another way of understanding the m argin/center dialectic vis-a-vis genre, national cinema and taste. In doggedly pursuing the niche cult m arket by pushing the limits of taste and working squarely w ithin the realm of genre, Peter Jackson's gross-out films, it might be argued, afforded him the capital (both economic and cinematic) to be able to transcend the lim itations of working in an "other" national cinema in the shadow of Hollywood and reap success that would be otherwise unavailable; Jackson's current role as celebrated director of the blockbuster The Lord o f the Rings trilogy suggests that this is indeed the case. This alternate paradigm of first reveling in bad taste to court the marginal audiences and exploit the niche dollars of cult cinema, then using that cult success to vault into "legitimacy" w ith big b u d g et/ good taste projects, however, in the end also reaffirms the pow er dynam ics inherent in the good/bad taste discourse. After Braindead, Jackson claimed that he would not abandon the horror genre, saying I'm definitely not one of those guys who says they w ant to stop making horror movies to become a serious filmmaker. I fully intend to rem ain w o rk in g in the g e n r e .23 His claims to generic fealty and his assertion that "serious" filmmaking is the opposite of horror filmmaking preserves the binary polarizing 146 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. horror/serious films, echoing John C ranna's criticism that Braindead "makes a mockery of serious film m aking in N ew Zealand." All of this suggests that while Jackson has made an impressive shift from poverty auteurism in horror to Hollywood-style epic film m aking w ith staggering budgets, the dialectic of good/bad taste, h ig h /lo w culture and Hollywood/national cinema is, while not entirely stable, stubbornly resistant to change. And as far as taste and the national discourses are intertwined, Jackson's trading in of low brow horror for m ainstream big budget spectacle reiterates a dynamic where the Hollywood model of film m aking (and its good taste, aesthetics and ideologies) remains on top. In exploring the various w ays of seeing the dialectics of genre, taste and national cinema, I do not hope to suggest that Jackson has sold out, in the pejorative sense, to bigger H ollyw ood budgets. Indeed, Jackson, ostensibly abandoning horror genre filmmaking, at the same time has remained decidedly committed to the prom otion of New Zealand national cinema. Peter Jackson's next film after Braindead was Heavenly Creatures, his film that is most engaged w ith issues of N ew Zealand-ness and is at first glance the furthest from the hallm arks of horror, gore, splatter and bad taste that marked Jackson's first films. The next section takes up Heavenly Creatures and explores its connection to Jackson's gross-out films vis-a-vis the mobilization of a cult dynamic that still surrounds that film years after its 147 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. initial release, and begins to examine the competing discourses surrounding "cinematic N ew Zealand" (which will be examined in further detail in the next chapter). The discourses of horror and art, cult and mainstream, auteur and genre, national and international cinema, usually conceived in contradiction, are inextricably entangled in Peter Jackson's films. Thus it is inadequate to consider any one of these paradigms individually; each problematizes the others and m ust be considered dialogically. II: THE "ART" OF CULT In 1994, H eavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson's follow-up to Braindead, was released in the US. The operatic film relates the real-life story of the murder in 1954 Christchurch N ew Zealand of Honora Parker, whose life was bludgeoned out of her by 47 blows to the head, neck, face and shoulders with a half brick in a stocking w ielded by her teen daughter, Pauline, and her friend, Juliet Hulme. But despite the grisly nature of its subject, the movie Heavenly Creatures is no grim and gritty "true crime" flick. Bookended with the murder, the film is m ore concerned with the girls' personalities and their particularly intense adolescent friendship before the crime. The film is a virtuosic, cinematic tour de force, exhibiting a visual power and irrepressible kineticism (gliding cam erawork, impeccable production design and imaginative use of CG technology) and a conviction of feeling (conveyed by 148 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. then newcom er Kate Winslet and the sadly still relatively unknown Melanie Lynskey) that set it apart from contemporaneous films. It is clearly one of Jackson's m ost important films so far. Released internationally by Miramax, the film played in the US on independent and art house screens, accumulating ever increasing positive w ord of m outh and critical praise. Heavenly Creatures even garnered an Academy A w ard nomination for "Best Screenplay," that category that seems specifically reserved for those non-Hollywood films that clearly warrant attention, yet somehow do not conform to a broader commercial standard set by the Academ y (Heavenly Creatures lost to Pulp Fiction —w hich itself was m arginalized out of any awards in the "big" categories). In contrast to the marginalized cult audience's perception of New Zealand as the site of gross-out horror and gore, New Zealand cinema in 1994 was causing a ripple in US cinematic consciousness as a site of provocative fare associated with the "art" film, and Heavenly Creatures must be contextualized in this mainstream perception. New Zealander Jane C am pion's international reputation as "art house" feminist filmmaker had firmly jelled w ith The Piano's release the year before, with the film's moody evocations of a wom an's patriarchal repression and sexual reawakening. And, because of The Piano's colonial New Zealand setting and the exoticized presence of Maori, Campion was at this time still associated with national 149 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. specificity (whereas in future films, Campion would become m ore internationalized, abandoning New Zealand locations and subject m atter2 4 ). Additionally, another New Zealand film Once Were Warriors, directed by Lee Tamahori, was also released to critical acclaim in 1994. The adaptation of Alan Duff's tremendously well-received novel explored racialized domestic abuse and urban poverty in New Zealand through a portrait of a Maori family, focusing particularly on the point of view of the adolescent daughter. At this moment, then, as far as it did register on the "legitim ate" US "art-house" film-going consciousness (as opposed to the m arginal, cult/ gross-out audience), New Zealand signified smart, challenging, edgy and beautiful "art" films committed to exploring feminine perspectives. Miramax promoted and audiences received Heavenly Creatures in the vernacular of "art film," sold as a prestige production and a cinematic achievement— a marketing strategy that was then becoming M iramax's signature in distributing and marketing "foreign" films (where "foreign" itself w as/is enough to signify "arty" difference from Hollywood product).2 5 Peter Jackson's cult success through gross-out films was suppressed; m ost film-goers had no idea that the director of this "quality" art film was know n to cu lt a u d ien ces as the "Orson W elles of gore." W hen critics acknowledged Jackson's earlier films, it was only to remark with surprise how m uch the director had matured, implicitly shunning the gross-out trilogy as aberrantly 150 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. "other" than Jacksons newfound artistry in H eavenly Creatures, re- articulating the perceived diametric opposition between the disdained "low brow" of the gross-out films and the "legitimate" status of H eavenly Creatures. At first glance and in matter of production value, H eavenly Creatures is a radical departure from Jackson's previous films. It has a sophisticated narrative, in structure and content, fully realized character developm ent with first-rate performances, and a highly developed visual and aural sensibility. While these accomplishments were not absent in Jackson's earlier films (and are perhaps most notable in Braindead), the overw helm ing presence of "bad taste" in the other films left less space for developing the more conventionally lauded achievements of plot, character, story, mise-en- scene and sound design in favor of spectacles of ruined bodies. But one of the interesting facets of the film's reception in light of Peter Jackson's previous gross-out and Lord of the Rings films is that H eavenly Creatures's success in art-house venues and nods from "legitimate" critics and institutions like the Academy eventually m orphed, like the CG images in the film itself, into an Internet-based fan community w ith cult-like devotion. An important difference, however, is that the fan com m unities around The Lord of the Rings and the "bad taste" films fit into pre-existing categories of "cultism" — fandom for both the horror genre and Tolkien's M iddle-earth 151 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. fantasies precedes and exceeds Peter Jackson's films. Heavenly Creatures's cult fan base is interesting in com parison because it seems to have grown, like Titanic's surprisingly rabid cult fandom later, out of ardent love for the film itself. In other words, H eavenly Creatures fandom is not part of a larger "cult" community — one does not come to a cult appreciation of Heavenly Creatures because one is a fan of the coming-of-age melodrama, for example. At the same time, Heavenly Creatures's cultism does fit some discernible features of "cult" fandom in general, as described by Jeffrey Sconce who delineates two distinct kinds of cult cinephilia, the archeological and the diegetic.2 6 Where the archeological cinephile is obsessed with "collection" and "artefacts" of cinema, the diegetic cinephile is invested in a particular universe, an encompassing mise-en-scene offered by a genre (such as the rainslicked urban landscapes of film noir), or in some cases, a single cinematic text (such as Titanic [1997] or The W izard o fO z [1939]). Heavenly Creatures seems to inspire this latter "diegetic" form of cult cinephilia, wherein fans seek aesthetic delight in the beautiful worlds that Jackson has constructed around Pauline and Juliet's friendship and the fantasy-scapes of their books and play-acting. The diegetic cinephile's effort to relive and extend the story u n iv e r se c a n ta k e e x p r e ssio n as original art work and creative writing "inspired" by the film, whereby through the act of creating, the film's story is integrated into the fan /artist's life.2 7 An example 152 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. of fan imbrication in the diegetic space of the film is found on the "Way Through the Clouds" fansite. Here, the author describes how much Heavenly Creatures's exploration of Juliet and Pauline's friendship mirrors her own life and relationship w ith her close friend Lill: All day I have been thinking about how my best friend Lill and m yself.. .are sim ilar to Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme in the film "H eavenly C reatures".. .We are remarkably similar in so many ways. An obvious starting point is appearance. Of course we're not exact clones of the girls but we do have sim ilarities.. .1 have a very short temper like Juliet that quite often takes me over, and I become easily annoyed...I need constant reassurance that Lill will not leave me and I become very jealous very quickly, as Juliet did when Pauline told her about John. Pauline had to reassure Juliet immediately...Lill recognises this and does her best to reassure me, as does Pauline.. .W hen the girls are apart they become incredibly depressed and w ith d raw n —Pauline cannot eat when Juliet goes into hospital. This is all too familiar! The awful thought that Juliet m ight die m ust have been hell for Pauline, and being alone in the hospital w ithout Pauline must have nearly killed her anyway. Juliet writes to Pauline saying "I miss you and adore you in equal am ounts." How very true.2 8 In this excerpt, the lines of fiction and reality are entangled in such a way that it is unclear w hether the author is reading the film through her life, or her life through the film, illustrating a striking degree of diegetic immersion. Cult allegiance to Jackson's gross-out films, on the other hand, seems to cleave to the archeological impulse. In this paradigm, fans of gore and splatter seek to "collect" and add to their viewing repertoire (Sconce's "mental checklist") as m any severed body parts and buckets of blood as 1 5 3 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. possible: the film s and their fetishized body spectacles are part of a larger corpus of related films that the cinephile inexorably works through towards the elusive goal of "seeing everything." An expression of the imperatives of w hat m ight be called "checklist logic" is found on web pages for Peter Jackson's gross-out films, where filmographies of other horror, splatter and gore films are frequently posted. These lists are odes to horrific bad taste, following the algebra of "if you liked Braindead, then you'll love..." Conversely, even though the Heavenly Creatures universe inhabited by fans is in its ow n right deeply intertextual (as I will discuss shortly), the cult object of H eavenly Creatures fans ultimately is bounded by the extent of the lives, fictionalized and real, of Juliet and Pauline; there is no readily iterable film ography th at can be generated from Heavenly Creatures.29 The gross-out films are a part of a much more expansive cinematic topos, one that includes the horror and splatter cult universe and can extend into questions of production and special effects, other films and auteurs of gore, super specialized sub-genres and the unpredictable and often strange vagaries of personal predilections. Consistent with the larger discourses on taste and respectability that surround the differences between the films, the differences between "diegetic" and "archeological" cult cinephilia seem to be a matter of form that once again circles around questions of "taste." In other words, it is the 154 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. very bad taste of Braindead, Bad Taste and Meet the heebies — their gore, their splatter, their scatology — that is valued and fetishized in cult appreciation of these earlier Jackson films. On the other hand, fans of Heavenly Creatures, like the girls in the film itself, immerse themselves in the fictional universes offered by the film (from the production-designed settings of Christchurch, the spectacular views of Port Levy to the fantasy worlds of romantic poetry, epic medieval chivalric adventures, the mythology of saints that Juliet and Pauline create) prized for their pleasing character, complexity and hermetic completeness— features of classical aesthetic beauty, which is to say, aesthetics valued by "good taste." In order to emphasize the differences in cult fandom of H eavenly Creatures and the gross-out trilogy and to better dramatize the latter's intertextuality, I have perhaps overstated the closed nature of the H eavenly Creatures text. Though its cinematic intertextuality is decidedly narrow er than the other films', the diegesis proper of Heavenly Creatures, its story world, does bleed beyond the border of the frame. That Heavenly Creatures is an arresting, beautiful film is obvious. But it is also based on a terrible, fascinating real story, and diehard fans of the film seem compelled to reckon w ith th e historical m atter on w h ich it is based. "D iegetic immersion" in Heavenly Creatures, then, is not only a matter of subsuming oneself in Jackson's attractive mise-en-scene or reveling in Winslet and Lynskey's 155 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. riveting performances; it is also inevitably immersion in the real m urder which is the film's referent. Most Heavenly Creatures fan websites, in addition to loving description of the film itself, offer background information on the historical m urder and trial. "The Fourth World" site, run by Adam Abrams, features an exhaustive 500-page dossier assembled by John Porter on the details of the "case," such as the social climate of 1950s Christchurch, the professional lives of the girls' parents, the girls' relationships to other teenagers and boyfriends, the arguments for the defense and the prosecution in the trial, an d so on.3 0 There is considerable attention paid to the film's faithfulness to the historical events, which in one section produces a list of details the film got wrong, from timeline aberrations to errors in the num ber of guests at a family dinner that comprises a scene in the movie. This engagement with the "diegesis" of the historical m urder can reach obsessive heights. One fan of the film, A ndrew Conway, became interested in the history of the murder after seeing H eavenly Creatures, and upon discovering that there was little information know n about the murdered woman (Honora Parker), set off to research her life. This project manifested itself in "The 'Norasearch' Diary," a detective-like web journal detailing the author's pursuit of the spotty paper trails that could/w ould lead to a better picture of the woman who was killed. The journal unfolds 156 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. over the course of a year, and is presum ably still expanding, as Conway explores Honora Parker's family history and genealogy. An excerpt: I spend Friday evening in the Green Room w ith a group of friends: my favourite bar and third home. It used to be my second home, till this Norasearch began. I'm starting to feel a slight unease with the usual acquaintances, bored of the common topics of conversation, half of my m ind ruminating on events of ninety years ago, events that are nothing to do with me or my life but which encroach on everything I do, think and feel. I end up talking to Danny because he's the only one present who knows about all of this, the only one there I can tell it to. I update him on everything I've uncovered on the Parkers, which is a huge am ount now because the last he heard was our trip to locate 12 Alcester Road.3 1 As seen earlier with the fan who read her ow n life and relationships reflected in Heavenly Creatures, the author here is also deeply immersed in the story — only this time the filmic diegesis has m utated into the diegesis of history.3 2 What is clear is that H eavenly Creatures's cult following on the web is not sustained simply by adm iration for an excellent film, but rather develops out of the complex and dense textual layering of the fictionalized representation of Juliet and Pauline, combined w ith the real life narrative and history of the murder. In other words, fans of H eavenly Creatures are just as much absorbed in the facts of the real m urder and participants as in the film's representation of those real events and persons. Indeed, devoted fans seem specifically caught up in the thrall of the blurred space between fiction 1 5 7 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. and history— reading the history of the m urder through fiction, and the fiction of the m urder through its history. One m ight argue that it is precisely in the extreme reading practices of various forms of "cult" cinephilia that boundaries of high and low are, by turns, most visibly transgressed and insistently reinforced. The cult of Heavenly Creatures and the cult of the gross-out films take distinct forms, with differences boiling dow n to "art" as opposed to "splatter," "quality" in place of "trash," "high culture" instead of "low" and "good" taste not "bad." A simultaneously "high" and "low" cult director, Jackson uniquely embodies the construct of the "cult auteur," revealing how the high modernist conceit of the "author" is em braced both by high and low taste communities. While the idea of "low auteurs" is not new, what is different here is that Jackson is one director engaging, at different times, both ends of the high/low spectrum, putting into sharper relief the distinctions, as well as the similarities, betw een the distinct iterations of "cult" and how these divergent cult practices cling to or jettison accepted notions of high and low culture and "taste." Yet for all of the criss-crossing of high and low in Jackson's work, it is also telling that while the two cult communities of the gross-out trilogy an d of Heavenly Creatures b o th rally arou n d the work of one director, cult admiration for one of Jackson's films does not translate into cult fascination w ith his other films — w ith few exceptions Heavenly Creatures fans 158 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. do not become fans of the gross-out films and vice versa.3 3 This in particular illustrates that while high and low do intermingle in the figure of Peter Jackson, in cult practice, there remain divisions between high and low, good taste and bad. C hapter 5 continues with investigations into the generic, gendered and national politics of Heavenly Creatures. The cult fascination with the story discussed above is not new and was not borne exclusively out of the cinematic rendering of the story. Rather, the Parker-Hulme murder has had a history of obsession by the New Zealand nation since its occurrence in 1954. H eavenly Creatures is only the latest— and most widely international — iteration of this enduring interest in the story. In the following chapter, I will attem pt to tease out how the Parker-Hulme narrative has a privileged place in the N ew Zealand national imaginary and try to resituate Heavenly Creatures in context with the history of representations of Parker-Hulme. I will attem pt to unw ind the different threads of the film's cinematic narration of New Zealand nation, seek to re-situate Heavenly Creatures in relation to the "horrific" that haunts all of Peter Jackson's work, and consider the horrific's role in engendering both nation and national cinema. 159 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. ENDNOTES 1 E!, the television and Internet network that tracks the daily changes in the contours of pop culture, listed The Lord of the Rings as #3 on its list of "m ost anticipated" pop culture events of 2001. (Lia Haberman, "2001: A U ser's Guide," <http://umno.eonline.com/Featurs/Featurs/Guide2001/index6.html>, accessed 31 January 2001). 2 New Line Press Release (10 April, 2000) <http://ioww.neioline.com>, accessed 3 January 2001. 3 The phenomenon of Tolkien fans spending the night at theaters to be first in line to pay $9.50 to see the trailer was reported by Nezosieeek the following week. See David Gates and Devin Gordon, "One Ring to Lure Them All," Newszoeek (January 29,2001) 60-61. 4 M ark Feeney, "Three-'Rings' Circus," Boston Globe (December 19, 2000) D5. 5 Peter Calder, "'Lord' Leads Biz," Variety (October 19,1998) <http://zozozo.findarticles.com/ml312/nl0_v372/21235261/pl/article.jhtml> (11 November 2000). 6 Jeffrey Sconce, "'Trashing' the Academy: Taste, Excess and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style," Screen 36:4 (Winter 1995) 371-393. 7 V. Vale and Andrea Juno, "Introduction," Incredibly Strange Films; RE/Search #10, (San Francisco: V/Search Publications, 1986) 4. 8 Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," in Film Genre Reader II, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995) 140- 158; William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollyzoood Horror & Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 9 Paul, 26-27. 1 0 Ibid., 32. 1 1 Pierre Bourdieu, "The Aristocracy of Culture," in Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, Richard Collins, James Curran, Nicholas Garnham , Paddy Scannell, Philip Schlesinger and Colin Sparks, eds. (London: Sage Publications, 1986) 164-193. 160 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 1 2 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: A n Imaginary Abjection (London: Routledge, 1993). 1 3 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: A n Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 1 4 Whenever I show these films or clips from them, the invariable response is delighted revulsion from the audiences. 1 5 Rev. of Braindead, dir. by Peter Jackson, Variety (May 25,1992) 51. 1 6 The movie Jackass's (2002) recent immense opening w eekend box office similarly suggests the lucrative possibilities of bad taste cinema. 1 7 Ibid. 1 8 Qtd. in Kerry Doole, "Canada crits Kiwis" Onfilm (April 1993) 4. 1 9 Qtd. in "BFI praise for NZ comedy" NZFilm (May 1994) 12. 2 0 Rev. of Dead Aline, from The Hot Spot, Hollywood M ovie R eviews <http://wwxo.thehotspotonline.eom/moviespot/holly/d/deadliv.htm>, Accessed 22 February 2001. 2 1 For a challenge of this view, see Roger Horrocks, "New Zealand Cinema: Cultures, Policies, Films" (in Twin Peeks: Australian and N ew Zealand Feature Films, Deb Verhoeven, ed. [Melbourne: Damned Publishing, 1999] 129-137). 2 2 Qtd. in Editorial, "Integrity and the b. o." Onfilm (April 1993) 8. 2 3 Qtd. in Michael Helms, "Action Jackson," Fangoria (April 1993) 33. 2 4 Though, with Campion's 1999 film Holy Smoke, which takes place in Australia (which traditionally has competed with New Zealand for bragging rights to Campion, who went to film school there), the presence of Kate Winslet as the star activates a chain of associations back to N ew Zealand and Heavenly Creatures, Winslet's first film role. 2 5 In promoting Heavenly Creatures, Miramax engaged in its tradem ark controversial ballyhoo (as with jAtame! and the Ratings controversy, discussed in the previous chapter) by "outing" the popular m ystery writer, Anne Perry, as the "real" Juliet Hulme depicted in the film. Ads ru n in newspapers were emblazoned with "secret identity revealed"-them ed 161 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. headlines, with an erotically posed W inslet gazing provocatively at the reader. By seeking to push the boundaries of decorum and court controversy, as seen with jAtame! and H eavenly Creatures, Miramax has much in common with exploitation filmmakers, w hich is another way in which "high" and "low" collapse. 2 6 Jeffrey Sconce, "Programming the 'Fringe:' All-Night Television and 'Psychotronic' Cinephilia," paper presented at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, 1992. 2 7 For another example, a poem titled "Ilam " (after the Hulm e's Christchurch estate) appears on the W ay Through the Clouds website (http://heavenlycreatures.cjb.net/, accessed February 27, 2001). 2 8 Bonnie Gough, "Just Heavenly," The W ay through the Clouds <http://heavenlycreatures.cjb.net/> Accessed February 26, 2001. 2 9 Of course, the features one is attracted to in the film will suggest a film list. For example, a viewer might have been interested in the "true crime" aspect of the story, or the lesbianism, or the 1950s setting. This then suggests a "generic" grouping that one can trace. I m ust also note that Kate Winslet herself comprises her own "genre" and view ing imperatives. When I started becoming interested in fan activity on the w eb around Heavenly Creatures, Adam Abrams's "The Fourth W orld" site w as the only major presence. After Titanic—in which Winslet also starred — H eavenly Creatures activity has increased and many (young, female) fans state that they came to Heavenly Creatures after Titanic, as they were w orking through Winslet's filmography. 3 0 "The Fourth World: The Heavenly Creatures Web Site," <http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Studio/2194/> (Accessed 29 January 2001) 3 1 Andrew Conway, "The 'Norasearch' Diaries," 21 M ay 1999 <http://www.geocities.com/Hollyivood/Studio/2194/faq2/norasearch/nora_99-05- 21.html> (Accessed 2 February 2001). 3 2 In the historical manifestations of diegetic cinephilia surrounding Heavenly Creatures, there is an interesting conflation of the diegetic impulse with the archeological. In these instances, H eavenly Creatures fans such as Conway and Porter seek to construct precisely an "archeology" of the Parker-Hulme narrative, fetishizing the artefacts (birth certificates, old photos, hospital records) and dimensions (time lines) of history. W hile I do not have the space to explore this more fully here, there seems to be a sense in which the 162 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. diegetic and archeological forms of cinephilia correspond to how gendered patterns of "looking" have been theorized in the cinema. Diegetic cinephilia depends on immersion, envelopm ent in the text, bespeaking what can be read as emotional "overinvestm ent" in the narrative, much akin to how women's relationship to classical Hollywood women's pictures has been theorized. On the other hand, the archeological depends on the construction of fetishes and the investigative scrutiny that characterizes the fetishistic and sadistic forms of voyeurism theorized by Mulvey as the male viewer's relationship to the screen. The degree to which Heavenly Creatures collapses or conflates these im pulses and how this interacts with theories of gendered spectatorship clearly w arrants m ore attention. 3 3 It is sometimes true that fans of the gross-out are also fans of Heavenly Creatures; it is rarely true that H eavenly Creatures fans (at least the ones on the web) are also fans of Bad Taste, M eet the Feebles or Braindead. A fan on the House of Horrors website w rites he became a fan of Jackson's after Braindead, then lists all of Jackson's films except the "good taste" films, Heavenly Creatures and Forgotten Silver. W hile most sites/pages for any of Jackson's films will respectfully include a complete filmography, fandom for the two "kinds" of film in Jackson's oeuvre remains rather neatly separate. 1 6 3 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Chapter 5 — Horrific Fictions: Heavenly Creatures and the Cinematic Construction of N ational Identity T hey'd be the pride of any nation — Pauline Parker's diary BLOODY BEGINNINGS H eavenly Creatures opens w ith blood-curdling screams bleeding into sprightly music that accompanies a pleasant 1950s documentary extolling the urbane and idealized virtues of Christchurch, New Zealand. From a shot of the scenic gardens w hich are the pride of Christchurch, there is a cut, marked w ith a loud bang, to a tracking camera swiftly moving down a wooded path. There are m ore screams, the sound of feet running, branches breaking. A sw ooping long shot shows two adolescent girls, Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet) and Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) running, cutting a horizontal and frantic line, left to right, across the widescreen expanse of trees and greenery. A fast, lateral tracking close-up of their running legs reveals the muddy path, their m uddied skirt hems, and blood streaking their bare legs. A series of cross-cuts takes us from this confusing and frightening space into another mise-en-scene, w ith a m atch cut to another lateral tracking shot of two pairs 164 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. of legs running, left to right, in nostalgic sepia-toned black and white, accompanied not by screams but romantic, dreamy music. These two spaces are intercut with matching shots, connecting the manic dash through the w oods w ith the carefree running across the deck of a cruise ship in black and white. One space is crazed and confused, and the two girls are screaming, hysterical; the other space is poetic and romantic, and they are smiling, happy. In the lyrical, black and white dream-space, the blonde, Juliet calls "M ummy!" Pauline, the dark-haired girl, echoes, "Mummy!" The camera dollies in swiftly on the object of their calls, an adult man and wom an w ith their backs to the camera. Another cry of "Mummy!" is heard as the adult pair begins to turn around, sunlight streaming through the space betw een them. W ith an unsettling cut that arrests their action of turning around completely, before we can fully view "Mummy and Father's" faces, w e are throw n back into the other, frightening and chaotic mise-en-scene. Shot w ith a shaky hand-held camera, in stark contrast to the smooth and controlled camera movement of the black and white sequence, Juliet and Pauline break through a solid line of manicured hedges. Juliet runs into a big c lo se -u p , scream ing, her face m anic and spattered w ith b lood . Pauline runs into the shot, on the left. The camera shifts to her close-up; her face is 165 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. absolutely covered in streaks of blood. She screams, "It's Mummy! She's terribly hurt!" This opening sequence of Heavenly Creatures (1994) hauntingly encapsulates the particular blend of excess — of cinematic style, em otion and narrative complexity — with which the film will unfold. Four m ain thematic axes around which we must understand the narrative to follow are decisively established here: the nation (an official "version" of New Zealandness expressed in the documentary), mothers (repeated cries of "Mummy!"), lesbianism (alluded to in the idealized girlish affection betw een Juliet and Pauline and their resolutely feminine POVs w ith w hich this sequence unfolds) and horrific violence (the iconic screams and blood), which from the codes of cinematic language, we almost instinctively understand to be matricide. In a heady two minutes, the film illustrates the degree to which mothers and matricide are implicated in N ew Zealand nation-ness, and establishes a matrix of questions on the particular knotting of mothers, nation, horror, and lesbianism that this narrative of Pauline and Juliet encompasses. This chapter argues that, through its representation of the real, historical m urder of H onora Parker by her d a u g h ter P a u lin e a n d frie n d Juliet (hereafter, I will use "Parker-Hulme" to refer to the historical persons, murder and contemporaneous discourses surrounding it), Peter Jackson's 166 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Heavenly Creatures is explicitly involved in the cinematic exploration and re construction of New Zealand national identity, a project that ultimately has horror as a central organizing principle. The Parker-H ulm e narrative has been obsessively re-visited since the m urder in 1954, a repetition compulsion which suggests the Parker-Hulme story is a kind of foundational, generative story for the modern New Zealand nation, a historical primal scene which is an embedded component of the national N ew Zealand imaginary. The discourses around the narrative of the Parker-Hulm e m urder are steeped in culturally specific concerns about national m oral character, particularly as formulated in relation to female sexuality (and its regulation) and New Zealand constructions of motherhood. W eaving in and out of these larger, national discourses is the question of cinematic horror, cultural specificity, and how larger patterns of the genre are filtered through the distinctive issues of the New Zealand cultural context. In dealing with the Parker-Hulme m urder, the historical context and murder will be introduced through the extensive and im portant research by Julie Glamuzina and Alison Laurie, w ho have chronicled and analyzed the cultural resonance of the Christchurch m urder in Parker & Hulme: A Lesbian View. I also want to consider issues regarding Peter Jackson's larger cinematic oeuvre as laid out in the previous chapter, using those discussions (of taste, horror, reception) to re-center the horrific in H eavenly Creatures, an 167 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. element of the film that has been under-acknowledged. In so doing, I hope to illustrate the degree to which Peter Jackson's specific inflection of "horror" taps into mythic cultural them es of N ew Zealandness and specifically underwrites cinematic constructions of New Zealand national identity. By contextualizing H eavenly Creatures's release in the mid-1990s, a period of particularly acute self-interrogation of New Zealand's national identity and its relationship to the global stage — I intend to extend my assertion from last chapter that Peter Jackson's particular m odulations of the "horrific" have been vitally im portant to both the construction of a post-colonial national identity in the context of globalism and the international centering of a marginal national cinema. An implicit theme throughout my discussion is how these various discourses (of national identity, national cinema, horror) play out across questions of gender and sexuality. NATIONAL OBSESSIONS: THE DISCOURSES OF THE PARKER-HULME MURDER The murder of Honora Parker took place in June of 1954, and shortly afterwards, the deceased's daughter, Pauline, and her friend, Juliet Hulme, were arrested for com m itting the gruesome crime. Police searches of their personal belongings revealed that Pauline had written about plans of the murder in her diary, w hich was later used as key evidence for their 168 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. prosecution. Juliet and Pauline had become close friends when Juliet entered Pauline's class in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1952. Though their families were of differing socio-economic backgrounds (Juliet's father came to Christchurch as rector of Canterbury College and the family lived on the college's beautiful estate Ilam, which was known for its lovely gardens; in contrast, Pauline's father worked as the manager of a fish shop and the family took in boarders), their shared interest in art and their common histories of childhood sickness laid the groundwork for a close friendship. The rum ored lesbian/ sexual relationship between the girls was fodder for their guilt of the crime in the court of public opinion; they were referred to as "dirty-m inded girls" by the prosecution. In addition to the extraordinary nature of the crime itself (the brutality of the murder, the fact that it was a matricide, the youth of the murderesses who were 15 and 16 years old at the time), clearly the exoticism and deviance, from the point of view of conservative 1950s society, of "lesbianism" contributed to public fascination w ith the crime and trial. Interest in the Parker-Hulme murder has never waned since its occurrence alm ost 50 years ago. Parker and Hulme's tale has been retold in the c o u rt p r o c e e d in g s , n e w sp a p e r accounts and anniversary retrospectives. The m urder has been anthologized in crime annals and psychological tracts by the psychiatrist w ho attended to the girls after the murder on behalf of the 169 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. court. Scholars have turned to the murder and the discourses surrounding it to investigate what it reveals about sexual mores and national ideology.1 The story was fictionalized in Obsession (1958), a novelization which perpetuated lurid fascination with the crime with its moralistic and sensational language, made into a play Daughters of Heaven (1991) that was staged successfully in New Zealand,2 and before Jackson made Heavenly Creatures (the first cinematic rendering of the story), reportedly there were up to ten other Parker-Hulme projects in development, and even Hollywood expressed interest in filming the Parker-Hulme story.3 The tale survived in less official, textual ways too, becoming the subject of anecdotal re-tellings, taking on a macabre, mythic quality, like the stories of parricidal Lizzie Borden or "queer killers" Leopold and Loeb in the United States.4 The case received international press attention, but nowhere was the macabre interest in the m urder more pronounced than in New Zealand itself. As H eavenly Creatures director Peter Jackson himself reportedly said, the Parker-Hulme narrative has "universal themes...but is unique to New Zealand."5 In an attempt to uncover why the murder has been so time-resistant as the object of popular New Zealand imagination, historians Julie G la m u z in a an d A liso n Laurie in their book-length study of P ark er-H u lm e, Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View, examine the discourses on and surrounding the murder through the decades. Their crucial argument, 170 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. which informs my engagement with Heavenly Creatures, is that the story of Parker and Hulme has become, in effect, a New Zealand ideological teaching tool, a national cautionary tale specifically rooted in questions of national moral character, especially in relation to female sexuality and sex roles. They write that the 1950s New Zealand discourses of the Parker-H ulm e m urder presumed an audience that: either was, or ought to be, white, heterosexual, anti- Communist, and firm supporters of fixed gender roles and the nuclear family. In our view, the Parker-Hulme case became a cautionary tale for this audience. It was selected by the m edia as newsworthy, given top priority as front page news, w ritten about extensively at the time and has been resurrected regularly throughout the years. We think the stories contained clear warnings to readers about the possible consequences of lesbian relationships and of "permissive" family life.6 Glamuzina and Laurie's thesis, supported by meticulous historical research, suggests that the story of Parker and Hulme has become mythic in structure and impact in New Zealand, tapping into cultural anxieties that speak to culturally specific concerns of national moral character — and especially a tool for regulating female sexuality. Glamuzina and Laurie effectively illustrate the pedagogical national function of the Parker-Hulme story in their interviews w ith N ew Zealand lesbians about h o w the story o f Juliet H u lm e and P a u lin e P ark er im p a c te d their lives. These interviews represent one of the more fascinating and original of Glamuzina and Laurie's contributions to an understanding of 171 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Parker-Hulme. In summarizing the reflections by the interviewed lesbians regarding the Parker-Hulme case, the authors write: Noteworthy in the experiences related here, are the responses of the adult [figures who were in the lives of the interviewed lesbians at the time of the Parker-Hulm e m urder]. There was a lack of any informed support for the girls and the associations of lesbianism with murder and insanity seemed to have been accepted unquestioningly by these ad u lts.. .The case was used as a tool by these adults to police girls in their relationships. In some instances they blatantly broke up lesbian relationships, with the Parker-Hulme case as justification.7 The power of the Parker-Hulme m urder to regulate and m aintain a heteronormative national "ideal" could filter dow n to individual lives in very tangible and personally terrifying ways. As one of the interviewed women recalls: Between 1957 and 19581 was at a girls' boarding school. I was involved in an intense and im portant sexual relationship with another boarder. We used to take walks together to a deserted part of the grounds and make love. I distinctly rem ember sitting at the table at home during the holidays and reading a newspaper report of the Parker-Hulm e case. I felt sick and horrified because I realised that the relationship I was involved in was like theirs. I finished my relationship w ith my friend and never saw her again. I went on to University and got involved with men as soon as I could. I had sex w ith a m an in order to prove that I w asn't abnorm al.. .1 finally came out as a lesbian at the age of forty-one, in 1982. W hen I came out, I remember talking and crying about my first lover and about the Parker-Hulme case to a friend. It was really traum atic for m e...I have blocked off so m e p arts o f th is m e m o r y fro m myself, obviously. It is a very frightening m em ory.. .One thing that made me frightened was that I hated my m other and wanted to kill her. The other thing w as that I realised from the 172 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. newspaper that there was som ething very wrong and insane about lesbianism.8 Glamuzina and Laurie's historical w ork with the real-life Parker- Hulme murder illustrates the degree to which the New Zealand cultural imaginary latched onto this story of two sexually involved teen girls who committed a violent m urder. Ritually repeated throughout the years, the story of Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker became integrated into a dominant conservative ideology that used Juliet and Pauline as negative examples of the "deviance" of lesbianism. Alternately, as Glamuzina and Laurie's research shows, Parker and H ulm e's notoriety also provided a covert message of hope or rebellion to young lesbians who felt alone in the sexually repressive New Zealand society of the 1950s and 1960s. Glamuzina and Laurie's exploration of the ideological uses of Parker- Hulme marks a significant and useful explanation as to why this particular story has endured throughout the decades. But as important and significant as the hetero-normalizing and anti-lesbian function of the narrative has been (as Glamuzina and Laurie have persuasively illustrated), the component of "motherhood" and the symbolic w eight of "matricide" have also contributed to the archetypal quality of the Parker-H ulm e for New Zealand. I want to use the film version of Parker-H ulm e, H eavenly Creatures, to examine its 173 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. constructions of "m others" and the matricide to begin to sort out just what this larger symbolic m eaning is in the New Zealand context. MELODRAMAS AND HORRORS OF MOTHERHOOD I noted in the last chapter, in regards to its taste category and fan practice, that H eavenly Creatures m arked a departure for Jackson. It is a shift for Jackson's body of works in other ways, too— for it is his first "serious" film. "Serious" not in the evaluative sense of cultural legitimacy or production values (the term s of the discussion in the last chapter), but rather Heavenly Creatures is the first of Jackson's films to proceed in (for the most part) a realist space and in a non-comedic mode. In short, Heavenly Creatures appears in the "dram a" section of the video rental store. From the standpoint of the history of narrative film genres, however, more accurate descriptors of H eavenly Creatures's narrative modes are the melodramatic and horrific. H eavenly Creatures takes up the Parker-Hulme case from the time of Juliet and Pauline's m eeting up until the murder (in this respect it is different from the novel and the play which narrativize the trial proceedings). Jackson focuses in on their girlish playfulness, their expansive creativity and their make-believe w orlds. Juliet and Pauline in Heavenly Creatures are shown as intelligent, creative and likable high school girls who are bored by the 174 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. m undaneness of everyday life and seek more romantic worlds in their ow n fictions and in the constellation of popular culture stars. Juliet and Pauline especially adore 1950s MGM tenor Mario Lanza, whose music is used several times on the soundtrack. Aiding in the expression of the adolescent highs, lows and dramas, the camerawork, editing and soundtrack of Heavenly Creatures are all fluid, highly mobile and jaunty. The film uses CG technology to realize a variety of fantasy-scapes, most notably in Juliet and Pauline's edenic vision of the "Fourth World," which they conceive of as an alternate world to daily reality; and the visualization of their "Borovnia," the setting of their medieval romances populated by beautiful courtesans and rogue princes, who are portrayed in the CG scenes as life-sized Plasticine figures. CG is also used to conjure up Orson Welles from the Third M an chasing the girls through the streets of Christchurch, and figures as the m edium through which they consummate their first sexual experience w ith each other, as they act out how Orson Welles and their other idols and fictional characters would make love. Narratively, the film explores how the girls first relate to each other due to their shared exclusion from gym activities due to poor health. They become fast and intimate friends, but begin to cut out other people from their lives w hen Juliet goes to the sanatorium to treat her tuberculosis. W riting to each other in the voices of their Borovnian characters, they become 175 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. increasingly convinced of the preferability of each other's com pany to anyone else's in the world, including a would-be suitor of Pauline's. Alarmed at their increasing withdrawal, the parents intervene — Dr. H ulm e suggests Pauline see a psychiatrist for homosexuality; Honora m onitors Pauline more closely and makes her get a job. Familial relations in both homes become more and more strained— Juliet catches her m other in bed with another man, at which Hilda reveals she is seeking a divorce; H onora's "nagging" and monitoring of Pauline causes her daughter to stop speaking to her altogether. The impending Hulme divorce precipitates plans to m ove Juliet to South Africa, effectively putting a date on the final separation of the two friends, over which they are inconsolable. Pauline and Juliet conspire to ru n away together to Hollywood, but when that falls through, Pauline, who sees her mother as the sole obstacle to her desire to join up w ith the H ulm es as a surrogate daughter, conceives of the plan to murder H onora Parker, her mother. The film ends with a scene of the murder, where the girls in a fit of screams and sobs bludgeon the bewildered, moaning and frightened H onora to death with a brick in a stocking. The scene, like the opening sequence, is intercut w ith fantasy scenes of the black and w h ite sp a c e on th e s h ip deck, only the fantasy of the idealized family has degenerated: no longer are both Juliet and Pauline running carefree towards "Mummy;" now Juliet and her 176 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. family are on the ship, sailing away, as Pauline is left sobbing hysterically behind. Heavenly Creatures adheres to the classic H ollyw ood female melodrama paradigm in a number of the genre's m ost salient features. Stylistically, Heavenly Creatures conforms to the formal flourishes characteristic of the Hollywood genre. The film greatly emphasizes the "melos" portion of "melodrama" — relying heavily on the musicality in the swelling score and the Mario Lanza operas to convey thematic and emotional significance. Furthermore, H eavenly Creatures's carefully constructed mise-en-scene and performances, realized in excess of what is dramatically required to plot story and character, are also characteristics frequently associated with the American m elodram as of the 1940s and 50s. There are strong thematic points of continuity as well. As in Hollywood's melodramas, Jackson's film is concerned w ith the domestic space of the family, the emotional terrain of female protagonists, and the problematics of social class entwined in the romantic and m aternal melodramatics. And, like many classic Hollywood maternal melodramas, H eavenly Creatures is a story of mothers and daughters. But one of the m ost im portant ways in which Heavenly Creatures proceeds along the generic lines of the (maternal) melodrama is in its pointed presentation of different versions of mothers and mothering, and the narrative work with w hich one kind of m other is set 177 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. against the other, resulting in a sense of "m otherhood" as a social category with contradictory, ambivalent and vexed significance. Heavenly Creatures pointedly indicates the various ways in which the two "mummies" of the story —Hilda Hulm e and Honora Parker— are distinct from each other, constructing a shaky ladder of logic on which the murder's rationale, from the girls' point of view, will be supported. Most clearly, this maternal distinction operates on the level of class and socio economics. In comparable introductory scenes of the respective households, Honora is seen in house-aprons, w ith drab hair-dos and hard at work cooking and cleaning to run her boarding house, while in her introduction Hilda, dressed, coifed and m ade-up elegantly, is standing about her estate home, not busily fussing over boarders, but casually reading a book while her husband studies sedately nearby. Pointedly, Honora is never seen navigating non-domestic space unless on domestic business, and she is never outside the home on her own,9 w hereas Hilda is figured as a worldly woman with important obligations beyond her role as mother. We see scenes of Hilda in her M arriage Guidance Council sessions (where she counsels failing married couples w ith such success that she should, in Juliet's estimation, work for the UN), at Dr. H ulm e's side at Canterbury College pomp and ceremony, and w e hear m ention of Hilda's work on the national 178 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. radio airwaves. H onora is domestic, unrefined and working class; Hilda is worldly, tasteful and upper class. This image of m other as embodying bourgeois style, sophistication and social influence clearly stuns Pauline, who on her first visit hesitates at the threshold of the Hulm e household. But Pauline learns to desire the ideal of the bourgeois family the Hulmes seem to inhabit, almost as much as she comes to desire Juliet herself, intermingled desires that are illustrated by the opening ship deck fantasy sequence where Juliet and Pauline gaily are running along together and, just as significantly, running towards a mother and father, both calling out happily for "Mummy!" In matching dinner scenes, w hen Juliet dines at the Rieper household, Pauline is visibly pained at every rem inder of her family's economic status (when a prospective boarder interrupts the meal, w hen Mr. Rieper talks of his job at the fish shop). In contrast, w hen Pauline dines at the Hulmes, she carefully watches Hilda and mimics her genteel m anners, daubing her own mouth at the corners with her napkin, just as H ilda has done. This distinction between mothers is underscored cinematically as well. Unlike Juliet's meal with the Riepers, the scene of Pauline's dinner at the Hulmes is part of a buoyant montage sequence set to a M ario Lanza song (the girls' privileged signifier of all that is romantic and idealized), endowing the scenario with overdetermined significance (along w ith the other scenes in the montage of Pauline and 179 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Juliet's growing friendship). And while Pauline spends what seems to be a lot of time w ith the Hulmes, even going on holiday with them to Port Levy, Juliet seldom spends time with the Riepers. When she does enter the Rieper home, her presence is always marked with a certain stiffness, provoked by Juliet's, Pauline's and Honora's heightened sense of Juliet's elevated social status. Pauline desires Juliet's refined bourgeois trappings and mode of being, even while the girls' self-styling as romantic artists rejects those same bourgeois effects: through their artistic endeavors and imaginary worlds, they picture themselves pitched against a mundane world that cannot accommodate their Byronic postures (Pauline writes in her diary: "We have decided how sad it is for other people that they cannot appreciate our genius"). Still, the Hulmes, at least, have the cultural capital enough to encourage Pauline and Juliet's creative flights of fancy, validating for Pauline those artistic impulses her own working class mother does not have the time to appreciate or the sensibility to understand. When Juliet tells Hilda of their plans for the fictional characters in their novels, Hilda responds with a supportive, "Well aren't you clever!" as she brushes Pauline's hair in an ^ in tim ate m atern al gesture. In contrast, during a fight w ith Pauline, Honora calls their writing silly and dismisses their dreams of fame and fortune 180 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. through their creativity as far-fetched and fanciful, to w hich Pauline replies, "How would you know— you're the most ignorant person I've ever met!" The depiction of different kinds of m others/m othering and the need to choose one at the expense of the others is one of the central them es of the Hollywood maternal melodrama, which obsessively seeks to differentiate between "good" and "bad" mothers. But "good" and "bad" are not so easily determined. Heavenly Creatures, like Hollywood's maternal m elodram as, confronts us with a variety of points of view from which to evaluate the appropriateness of Paul's rejection of one m other/fam ily for the other. H ilda may be cosmopolitan, independent, affectionate and supportive, but she also leaves Juliet alone to convalesce in a tuberculosis hospital for four m onths while she and Dr. Hulme travel (recapitulating Juliet's childhood illness, shown in flashback, which she also suffered through alone), and it is H ilda who punctures the romanticized idealization of the Hulm e family life by having an affair with her counseling client, Bill Perry. Honora lacks tools to grasp the girls' artwork, and the finances and leisure time to cultivate sophisticated cultural wherewithal, but she does supply reliably consistent parental support. Honora and her husband stayed by Pauline's side (shown in flashback) during her childhood illnesses (maternal concern, again, recapitulated in the film's present, when Honora worriedly asks if Pauline's 181 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. leg is hurting), and when Juliet is in the hospital, H onora and Pauline go to visit, while Juliet's parents are absent, vacationing for the duration.1 0 The girls' conflicted relations with the parents insistently recalls the patterns of the "oedipal narrative," the m aster narrative of identity and subject formation. The images of a good and bad m other in H eavenly Creatures clearly resonate with various psychoanalytic narratives of identity formation and the mother's role in this complex and anguishing process. Pauline and Juliet's fluctuations of extreme love for the m aternal figure and then aggressive, punishing hatred suggests the "good" breast and "bad" breast dichotomy described by Melanie Klein, recalls Freud's fort-da game in which the child theatricalizes through his play w ith the cotton reel the punishing mother who leaves him and the loving m other w ho returns, and reminds of the dueling images of, first, m aternal plenitude and then, distressing "lack" that characterize the child's m ovem ent through Lacan's mirror phase, the metaphoric process of separating from the mother. These psychoanalytic and thematic confluences in H eavenly Creatures are consistent with the generic interests of the maternal m elodram a, w hich I am arguing is one of the central narrative templates from which the film generates m eaning. G eoffrey N o w ell-S m ith asserts th a t th e n a rra tiv e su b sta n c e of melodrama is precisely the oedipal drama, an enactm ent of the "family romance" set to the gendered beat of bourgeois ideology.1 1 E. Ann Kaplan 182 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. and Linda Williams see the m aternal m elodram a and the woman's film as privileged narrative vessels to explore the contradictions of the oedipal relationship between m others and daughters, within which they find the potential for subversion of patriarchal ideology.1 2 But even while the tortuous path of the "oedipal" is a mainstay of the maternal melodrama, it is precisely here in the crucial denouement of the oedipal that Heavenly Creatures departs from the genre that so clearly informs so much of its narrative and thematic progression. In melodrama, the oedipal narrative is played out in sym bolic terms: both the desire and aggression for the parent that m ark the trajectory of subject formation are enacted through m etaphorized narrative processes, where the oedipal triangle of aggression/desire m oves inexorably toward acceptable resolution — that is, avoidance of O edipus's actual m urder and incest— via culturally sanctioned avenues or deflection aw ay from the originary object of love/aggression. Stella severs the m aternal bond so that her daughter may marry well (Stella Dallas [1937]); M ildred's daughter's hatred toward her mother is channeled into first rom antic competition (having an affair with Mildred's husband) and then the violence m eant for Mildred is deflected onto the oedipal su b stitu te of her lo v e r (M ildred Pierce [1945]). O ed ip u s's murderous and incestuous designs on his father and mother, in the Hollywood melodrama, too shocking for unm ediated representation, must 183 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. go through the circuitous processes of displacement and sublimation, and are quite rarely directly played out. In H eavenly Creatures, however, the latent content of the oedipal master plot becomes frighteningly manifest— the aggression toward the parent takes bodily form; there is a real, physically enacted matricide. And it is precisely here that we m ove out of the melodrama— dealing in latent content clandestinely m asquerading in emotional and social terms— and into the horrific — trading in the latent m ade manifest. The generic disruption at the m om ent of the m atricide plays out in the signifying logics marking the different narrative/generic trajectories of the film. The murder sequences are saturated in the assaultive signifying conventions of splatter horror — frantic camera m ovem ent, terrified shrieks and screams, and streaks of dripping blood. The opening shot that marks the murder "space" of the narrative at the beginning of the film even directly quotes the quintessential shot of the stalker horror film —the forward tracking I-camera/first-person POV shot m oving inexorably through the claustrophobic forest— like Jason in Friday the Thirteenth tracking his victims in the wooded space of the cursed summer camp. Fear, panic, horror m ark these visual and aural spaces su r ro u n d in g the m u rd er. H eavenly Creatures's journey into where maternal melodrama leaves off—the depiction of actual matricide — helps to illuminate a critical point of 184 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. convergence between the two genres. Both horror and melodrama explicitly mine the fraught oedipal tale, explicitly exploring the trajectory of identity, and the conflicted positionalities of, in particular, mothers in relation to the child.1 3 W here melodrama marshals the oedipal for the formations of gendered identity an d /o r explorations of mother/child (dis)unity/ desire, horror picks up the oedipal at the point of the horror of castration and the m onstrosity of failed oedipalization.1 4 Melodrama insists on the necessity of successful navigation of the oedipal (even while characters struggle in accomplishing this); horror meditates exclusively on what happens when oedipalization goes wrong. What is important to note here is that in both genres, w hich stage the oedipal process in different ways, mothers are so central to both the films and their representations of the oedipal narrative. In the signal maternal melodramas, the narratives turn on the characters' realization of an ideal/ idea of maternal attitude —one of self- sacrifice and absorption in the function of motherhood. The women may struggle w ith attaining that ideal— for a while playing the bad mother (e.g. "neglectful" Lana Turner in Imitation of Life [1959]), but in the end the narrative positions the woman to discover fulfillment precisely in her role of m aternal self-effacement. For example, Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) in Now, Voyager (1942) resolves her own issues with her oppressive, cold ("bad") m other and achieves erotic fulfillment with her "lover," Tina's father (Paul 185 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Henreid), by "becoming" Tina's wholly devoted surrogate m other (displacing Tina's own "bad" mother). Significantly, Charlotte's transformation into the ideal mother can only take place after Charlotte's own mother's death, for which (important to my reading of the oedipal process being metaphorized in melodrama) Charlotte feels guilty, having argued with her mother and "causing" the heart attack that precipitated her mother's death. As far as awkward Tina represents Charlotte by recapitulating Charlotte's own unhappy ugly duckling childhood dom inated by a "bad" mother, through loving Tina, Charlotte achieves the idyllic, lost maternal plenitude of the pre-oedipal phase ivithin herself: she has become her own loving mother— constructing by the end of the film a hermetic circuitry of desire, where she and Tina are the only actors required to play the dramas of family romance, dyadic union between m other/daughter, and sexual eroticism. In becoming Tina's mother, Charlotte becomes everything that Charlotte herself ever needed/ desired from both her m other and her unavailable lover. In horror, the "mother" text for the genre's take on the oedipal is of course Psycho. "Mother" — Mrs. Bates— haunts the narrative, even/especially in death. As in the maternal melodrama, Norman seeks an intim ate union w ith his m other— but the achievement of this union requires him to kill h er—to perform the matricidal act— so they may be forever locked in their 186 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. oedipal bond in the Victorian house on the hill and in N orm an's psyche, which has been overwhelmed by the presence of M other w ithin him. Here, the oedipal imperative to parricide is literalized: N orm an poisons his mother in a fit of sexual jealousy, after finding her in bed w ith another man. The two genres, represented here through paradigm atic examples, swivel on the privileged role of the mother in an oedipal scenario. Maternal melodrama takes up the part of the story before the traum a of child/ mother differentiation— it revels in the interlocking desires of m o th er/ child (Charlotte/Tina). The horror film picks up the story after the traum a of differentiation— and actual matricide takes place. We have then two stages of the oedipal trajectory and two different narrative m eans of depicting the oedipal drama in these two genres. There are clear differences in the genres' engagement with mothers and the oedipal, and the psycho-sexual aims of the respective genres are distinctive. Additionally, in m elodram a, narrative sympathy lies with the mother, whereas in horror, the m other is m ost frequently the object of hatred and fury (there has been m uch critical work on the relative misogyny and the roles of w om en in these genres). But what is significant is that each genre represents and performs a specific portion of the tale of subject form ation in relation to th e m oth er. T h e tw o g e n r e s offer two kinds of mothers and narratively orchestrate (broadly speaking) two 187 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. types of responses by the child tow ard the mother: idealization/ adoration and aggression/hatred. I have noted that in the m atricide in H eavenly Creatures, the generic logic shifts away from the m elodram atic, which characterizes most of the film, and swerves aggressively into the horrific. The blood, the screams, the violence that mark the m urder also underscore the underlying thematic of mother-hate — in contrast to the " mother-1 ove" thematic that underwrites the maternal melodrama. This shift, how ever, into the horrific — in terms of signifying conventions as well as them atics — is not so clean as a wholesale change from one genre to the other. W hat makes the m urder sequences so horrible, powerful and emotionally w renching1 5 is that the impulses of both the horrific and the melodramatic come together precisely at the nexus of the matricide. As I described at the start of this chapter, the opening scenes of murder are rigorously edited together w ith dream y black and white footage of Pauline and Juliet running on the deck of a festively adorned ship. Shrieks and screams fill the soundtrack of the m urder space; happy and girlish cries of "Mummy!" punctuate the soothing soundtrack of the other space. The collision of tone b e tw e e n th e sp a c e s p r o d u c e s a se n se of d islocation — w e are not yet situated in the narrative, we do not know how to relate the two spaces together—though it is clear through the meticulous cinematic 188 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. construction of the scene that there is a strong link between the events in each narrative space. An abstracted presence of "mother" (or in the lexicon of Pauline and Juliet, "M um m y") overwhelms this narrative passage, a presence associated w ith both romantic lyricism (the ship deck) and fear and horror ("It's M um m y —she's terribly hurt!"). Given that so m uch of the narrative, as I have described above, seeks to differentiate H ilda from H onora —one mother from another—it is absolutely crucial to note that in this opening sequence, the competing constructions of "m other"/"m um m y" are here conflated and undifferentiated. In the black and white sequence, the adult pair that the children call to are Dr. and Mrs. Hulme —but this narrative information is not available to the viewer, w ho has not been introduced to the different characters yet. And, as I have noted earlier, the parents' faces are insistently hidden from full view, suggesting that w hat is being romanticized in this scene is not the specific character of Hilda, but rather an abstracted idea of "mother." Just as H ilda's introductory portrait is visually incomplete, Honora in the same opening sequence is also referred to through incomplete visual traces and aural references. The blood streaking the girls' faces v isu a lly sig n ifie s H o n o r a a n d h er brutal d e a th —but w h en Pauline cries "It's Mummy! She's terribly hurt!," the film has been structured carefully such that the viewer, by cinematic logic, associates the dreamy black and white 189 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. vision of "M um m y" on the ship with the Mummy who has been, offscreen, terribly hurt. In this sequence, hatred and desire for "mother" are, firstly, not tethered to a specific w om an/ m other— demanding that we try to understand the confusing and painful matricide on a more metaphorical level — and, secondly, both this hatred and desire for the mother are here irrevocably interlocked. "Mother" embodies conflicted energies and deeply am bivalent meanings, articulated in the different oedipal fantasies underlying the generic traces of the melodrama and the horror templates from which this opening sequence is assembled. M others and matricide loom large in this film narrative — the insistent presences of "m others" and matricide birth the narrative to follow, they punctuate the story by marking the beginning and end of the film, and they are cinematically privileged by its markedly shifted terms of signification. The conflation in this opening sequence of the two mothers—and the conflicted energies of idealization/violence that saturate the term "Mummy" in this sequence — suggest that there is a larger matrix of meaning, specific to a N ew Zealand national context, from which Heavenly Creatures emerges. This idea of a larger set of metaphorical values to "mother" offers a way, a lso , o f e x p la in in g th e n ation al ob session w ith Parker-Hulme; the fact that the Parker-Hulm e narrative has taken such strong root suggests that the linkage of an archetypally structured mother with the nation pre-exists the 190 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Parker-Hulme twinning of mother/nation discussed earlier. This very duality of maternal love/hatred, so meticulously crafted cinematically at the beginning and end of Heavenly Creatures, is precisely where the N ew Zealand national specificity of the narrative resides, and is that which m akes the film such a potent metaphor for narration of the nation and for articulating profound issues of national identity. But before I can make that claim, I m ust examine the consistency and coherency of the problematic figure of m others throughout Jackson's films, and from there explore the significance of the mother in the larger frame of national identity. JACKSON'S OTHER MOTHERS If we move from the observation, afforded by a look at the history of New Zealand fascination with the Parker-Hulme murder, that the issue of "mothers" is particularly resonant in New Zealand, a return to Peter Jackson's films shows that Jackson has his own cinematic preoccupation w ith "mothers," and that it extends beyond the specifics of Parker-Hulme. A retrospective glance at Jackson's films before and since H eavenly Creatures (a film where "mothering" is explicitly the subject) reveals a startling degree of consistency vis-a-vis an engagement with "the maternal." In his films, the mother figure is the agent of repression, a site of abjection or source of 191 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. anxiety. She is a threatening figure to be feared, and her presence often provokes violence. Both of Jackson's films immediately preceding and following Heavenly Creatures, like the Parker-Hulme narrative, have "m others" as central thematic loci. Braindead (1992), the film prior to H eavenly Creatures, concerns the meek Lionel, who is trapped in an emasculating and infantilized role of servile care-giver to his ageing, widowed, repressive m other who, like Mrs. Bates in Psycho, jealously limits Lionel's interaction w ith the rest of society, particularly young women. When "Mum" is bitten by an infected "rat monkey" (which she encountered while spying on Lionel on a date at the zoo) and becomes a zombie, Lionel must balance his m other-love and sense of guilt at having caused her "illness" (which manifests the m orning after Lionel's first sexual experience, the erotic glimpses of w hich are tellingly intercut with images of Mum's pus-squirting sores) w ith the increasingly extreme efforts he must make to keep the zombie "infection" from spreading. This leads to comic and grotesque situations w here Lionel looks after a growing "family" of zombies living, id-like, cloistered in the basement. Lionel's unhealthy psychological attachm ent to M um is given literal expression in the finale of Braindead, when the zombie "M um " returns, giant sized, with a monstrous maw and immense drooping breasts, to re- 192 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. assimilate— literally—Lionel into her womb. As she stuffs him into her belly, which has opened up like a giant m outh, she growls, "No one will ever love you like your mother!" Lionel m anages to cut his way out of his mother's body from the inside, spilling out in a torrent of blood and viscera, presumably reborn unfettered at last from the manacles of mother-love. Unsuccessful in retaining the finally self-actualized Lionel in her womb, Mum meets her end, dying as the hom e — original site of her suffocating and deadly love— goes up in flames. In the special effects-driven ghost horror film The Frighteners (1996), which followed Heavenly Creatures and was Jackson's first Hollywood outing, a central plot line involves a repressive m other whose infantilization of her daughter (like Piper Laurie as the m other in Carrie [1976]), seems to provoke supernatural chaos in their home. In both The Frighteners and Braindead, the adult child is locked in a claustrophobic, hermetic space of overwhelming, infantilizing (s)mothering, symbolically articulated in the domestic architecture of their anachronistic Victorian houses (specifically recalling the Bates house on the hill in Psycho) w hich are geographically removed from other society. This exclusive m other/child dyad (in both cases, maternally authored) retards the a d u lt c h ild s e x u a lly , le a d in g to m o n stro u s eru p tion s of that repressed energy (in Braindead, zombies w ith insatiable appetites for 193 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. flesh; in The Frighteners, house hauntings, demonic possession, and the emergence in the living w orld of the angel of death and homicidal ghosts). Clearly, The Frighteners and Braindead's plots resonate with Heavenly Creatures, w here "m othering" is (at least from Pauline's point of view regarding her m other) figured as an obstacle to social and sexual alliances outside of the home. And, the crucial denouement of Braindead, like Heavenly Creatures, is a matricide. But if we cast a slightly wider net to include, in addition to representations of the monstrous "maternal," images of the threatening character of "the feminine," we find even greater consistency in Jackson's thematic oeuvre. For it is indeed images of femininity, rendered by turns grotesque a n d /o r menacing, that produces much of the horror and "sick-making" in Jackson's films. The alien-hunter Derek (played by Peter Jackson himself) performs one of Bad Taste's (1987) m ost spectacular gross-out spectacles, slicing the head off the m ain alien, knifing his way through the body cavity, and burrowing out the other end, covered in slime and blood, announcing, "I'm born again!" in an intergalactic simulacrum of male vaginal birth (and prefiguring the Braindead finale of Lionel's "rebirth" from his zombie mother). The parody here, played for laughs, simultaneously underscores an anxiety around the female body, which in the real world is the body that births, and its messy biological byproducts. The back-stage puppet show 194 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. film M eet the Peebles (1989) presents the hyperbolic femininity of Heidi the Hippo, the gigantic chanteuse (played by an actor in a hippopotamus costume, in contrast with most of the other characters, which are puppets that are m uch smaller in size than Heidi, emphasizing her exaggerated proportions). Her swinging, pendulous breasts, hefty belly and enormous flirty eyelashes are a comedic version of feminine monstrosity (and again, presaging the imagery Jackson later used for the giant zombie "Mum" in Braindead). Heidi the Hippo is positioned as an object of ridicule, her overly indulgent revelry in her femaleness and her excessive femininity producing revulsion. Even in Forgotten Silver (1996), the mockumentary about recovering the lost history of the early New Zealand filmmaker Colin MacKenzie, the heart of the (fictional) "history" is MacKenzie's lost DeMille- esque production of Salome, with its central thematic of the capricious deadly power of w om an and her sexual allure. While parodic, these visions of femininity and the female body at the core are not comforting ones—these depictions that rely on the signifiers of "femaleness" are in the service of "sick-making," gross-out, and horror; they are to inspire fear, a shrinking away, and often, violence. W h ile th e se rep resen tation s in Bad Taste, Meet the Peebles, and Forgotten Silver are not "about" mothers per se, Barbara Creed has argued that depictions of monstrosity in horror ultimately return the viewer to primal 195 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. fears of the devouring, powerful mother (a description that precisely recalls "Mum" in the final scene of Braindead), with whom the child is in fear, love and fascination.1 6 In her argument, images of monstrosity are always, in a primal sense, a meditation on "mothers" and the awesome fear that her power, rendered monstrous, inspires. This connection between images that horrify and the maternal can only be interpreted as even stronger in representations, such as in Jackson's films, that are of specifically feminine bodies. The abject and/or frighteningly powerful "mother," then, haunts all of these Jackson films. Having located, a particular preoccupation with "mothers," both in Peter Jackson's cinema and in the larger cultural framework of New Zealand's fascination with the Parker-Hulme story, we m ust ask: w hat does this New Zealand preoccupation with mothers mean? Creed's argum ent for the generic specificity of mothers in horror is only a partial explanation. The generic proclivity of horror to dwell on monstrous mothers provides a narrative platform, but leaves the particulars of context unexplained. That is, we need to address why Peter Jackson should turn to the logics of horror with its meditations on mother so frequently, and why horror should have been so nationally and internationally successful for New Zealand. H ow are we to more fully account for this generalized anxiety around the figure of the feminine, an anxiety which seems to crystallize specifically around the 196 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. mother? Layered with the generic and auteurist specificity of these themes of mothering and matricide, what is the N ew Zealand cultural specificity to this deployment of frightening females? The key, I think, to unlocking what these maternal/feminine images are working to express on a larger cultural plane lies in a closer reckoning of the third distinct category, to w hich I have not yet alluded, in Jackson's recurring figurations of femininity — and maternity — on screen: the Queen. Queen Elizabeth II makes small but significant cameos in both Bad Taste and Braindead. Bad Taste's very first shot is a close-up of a portrait of the Queen, while the recording of an emergency phone call plays in the background. As a shadowy figure reaches out to telephone the special team of alien hunters, a close up of the phone shows the speed dial list: labelled are "Queen," "Mum" and "The Boys" (the alien extermination task force). Braindead's New Zealand release opens with, first, a shot of the N ew Zealand flag, and then a young Queen Elizabeth, riding horseback at Buckingham Palace, with the national anthem playing in the background. Both are pre credit expositions: these symbols of nationality and royal allegiance initiate each film. And in both films, the appearance of the Q ueen has absolutely no narrative bearing on the d iegesis to follow. In fact, the bits w ith the Queen in Braindead are so narratively marginal, they w ere edited out of the US release of the film and remain missing on US home video releases. 197 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. While apparently narratively superfluous, these prefatory images of symbols of the Commonwealth squarely situate (in however comic a form) the following gore/horror narratives w ithin the hereafter diegetically unspoken matrix of a New Zealand national identity as inscribed in the British empire. In the context of Jackson's particular obsession with mothers, charted across the body of film texts, the image of the Queen is mapped onto a maternal semiotic field. So, w ith the exception of The Lord of the Rings (Jackson's only literary adaptation),1 7 in each and every Jackson film to date, there is significant narrative anxiety clustered around questions of "the feminine," and a specific subset of the feminine, the maternal. The insistent presence of the Queen as m other in Bad Taste and Braindead (and, as we shall see, allusions to imperial royalty in H eavenly Creatures) projects new nuances of meaning onto the more generalized figure of the "mother" in Jackson's cinema. These seemingly throw aw ay images and comic detours into monstrous mothers (Elizabeth W indsor included) bespeaks larger cultural preoccupations — specifically anxieties about national identity, New Zealand's relation to its imperial m other, and its place in a globalizing world. For this argument to be m ade clearer requires a turn to New Zealand's history from European settlement to the end of the twentieth century, where we find that in the over a century and a half of relationship between Britain and New Zealand are the major them es of, on the one hand, protection on 198 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the part of the m otherland and, on the other, movements in the colonial nation to discover and assert its own national identity.1 8 CONFLICTING DESIRES: NEW ZEALAND'S IN/DEPENDENCE AND PROBLEMATIC IDENTITIES A historically "young" nation (construed here in the Eurocentric sense),1 9 New Zealand was officially colonized by the British Crown in 1840 with the Treaty of Waitangi. N ew Zealand's small size and population has meant secure commercial relations and ideological alliances with other nations have always been m ore im portant than in larger nations with more resources and more self-sufficient economies. Further, for the first several decades, its geographic isolation offered no "natural," economically developed markets. From the beginning of British settlement, the Crown was New Zealand's implicitly reliable trading partner, and guaranteed provider of necessary capital and services, m aking Great Britain the cornerstone of New Zealand's economic stability. New Zealand has also turned to Britain as an ideological and cultural model. W hen w e speak of "nation" and "New Zealand," it almost goes without saying that we are speaking of the "Pakeha" (the Maori term for white European N ew Zealanders) history and Pakeha formulation of nation. The bloody land w ars w ith the Maori in the 1860s precipitated not only the 199 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. British settlers' acquisition of the land, but the "right" to fashion New Z ealand's m ovem ent into the modern era according to Anglo/European patterns and ideals. Even as New Zealand's autonomy developed by steady but gradual changes2 0 such that New Zealand was effectively self-governing by the tu rn of the century, the ideological ties to Britain (and continued necessity of economic ties) remained strong. It is significant that the Statute of W estm inster of 1931, which granted Commonwealth status to Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, was not officially ratified by New Zealand for another 16 years, an act of historic hesitation with symbolic resonance: "We effectively turned down the opportunity of constitutional independence earlier this century because we weren't sure what else we could possibly be other than British."2 1 Ideology and imagery of New Zealand's national "becoming" was always, from settlement through most of the 20th century, crafted in the image of the motherland, and Britishness has been w oven into the texture of everyday life, through social institutions fashioned after the model of the idealized motherland: N ew Zealand and New Zealanders maintained strong institutional, sentimental, trade and military ties with Britain. The legislative and legal system... folio wed British precedent alm ost slavishly. If New Zealanders travelled or settled o v e r se a s it w a s lik ely to be "hom e," as m any still called Britain.. .This determined Britishness both reinforced ethnic and cultural homogeneity within New Zealand and perpetuated the colonial mentality, an inclination towards dependency.2 2 200 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Christchurch, for example, (the setting of Parker-Hulme) until recently has proudly flourished its reputation as the "most British city" in N ew Zealand as its most significant point of identification.2 3 The implicit belief in the superiority of Britishness and the reflected glow cast on the young nation by proud association with the Empire have been the underlying claims to legitimation of New Zealand's sense of nation-ness. But New Zealand was not only a small piece of Britain in the South Pacific. A s with any narrative of identity, the proximity of "Britishness" to New Zealand national identity is not a matter of simply mimicking the values of the motherland. For one thing, the very movement of "settling" affected the "home" culture internalized by the men and w om en w ho emigrated from Britain; the modes of culture, as performed and im agined by the pioneer subjects, inevitably were transformed in the very process of relocation to the "new world." In a very basic sense, Pakeha pioneers in New Zealand found themselves in a wholly alien landscape, w hich was to be the canvas on which this new satellite of Britain was fashioned.2 4 And (more problematically), the transplanted British subjects found their "hom e culture" very much in conflict— literally (wars) and figuratively (ways of s e e in g /b e in g ) —w ith the culture of the Maori peoples w h o se tenure on the land exceeded theirs by a millenium of western time. In spite of efforts to model New Zealand as much as possible after Britain, new hybrid (though 201 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. always uncertain) identities inevitably emerged, shaped by the peculiarities of settler life, through encounters with the Maori and in their engagem ent with the landscape. The very use of the term "Pakeha" to describe Anglo settlers in New Zealand reflects this movement away from som ething "simply" British toward something more locally specific. A sense of "New Zealandness" as something that w as sim ultaneously incorporated by and also departed from British culture grew as the new colonial culture became more established, and this emerging sense of distinctive identity was given more tangible expression by N ew Zealand's actions in global events. New Zealand's battle scars in the Boer W ars, World War I and its forays into international diplomacy in W orld W ar II both reflected New Zealand's growing psychological distinction from G reat Britain and were signal events in creating a discrete international profile for New Zealand; significantly, New Zealand's combat in these w ars is often referred to in terms of the country's "rites of passage" and "com ing of age." But even this tentative movement into its own distinct identity is m odulated by the fact that New Zealand fighting was underw ritten by pro-Em pire feeling: Im perialism —both in the sen se of se n tim en ta l a n d m ilita r y support for empire and territorial expansion in the islands — was playing a major role in the emergence of a N ew Zealand nationalism...New Zealand's adherence to its great pow er protector and mother country could be seen as fostering the "national interest." Imperialism was, as Sinclair suggests, a 202 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. form of nationalism... [I]n the very act of dem onstrating solidarity with Britain, New Zealand could be found asserting its individual identity in various ways.2 5 So we have, then, related to national identity, two movements in conflict with each other. On the one hand, there is the instinct to preserve the protective cloak of European "Britishness," to lay claim to those legitimating cultural aspects of Empire and the desire to benefit from the economic security of Imperial capital. On the other hand, alongside this desire for the power and authority of economic and cultural Britishness has also developed a contradictory national desire for a distinctive national New Zealand identity — an articulation of national personality not spoken in the same breath as "the British Empire." These two desires are at heart at odds w ith each other, throwing the certainty of any New Zealand national identity into doubt. And, insofar as Pakeha identity is modeled on an always idealized and elusive "Britishness," there is simultaneously an inevitable sense of unease surrounding the authenticity of "New Zealandness" — the colonial "cultural cringe" fear that in trying to become a "British facsimile,"2 6 the result instead will be a lesser version, a poor copy, of someone else's m ore powerful identity—like feeling like a child dressed u p in m o th er's to o la rg e c lo th e s .27 T h is m an ifests in w h at might be called a national inferiority complex: We instinctively knew that anything English was superior to what we had here.. .The Q ueen had a very strong English accent, 203 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. we thought: the ultim ate example of perfect speech...We understood that ours was an inferior, parochial sort [of language], I well rem em ber some of the girls at high school going to elocution lessons, their parents anxious to help rid them of their New Zealand accents... .The first television productions m ade here suffered from this attitude to local speech. "Proper" television programmes (those imported from overseas) did not include people with voices like these. Local dram a program m es looked am ateur at least in part because they sounded local.2 8 New Zealand has a history of seeking external validation. For years there was a joke about asking newcomers the minute they arrived here, "W hat do you think of New Zealand?" In 1972 Austin Mitchell described this as "a major preoccupation...the rest of the w orld ignores it, so it compensates by more and more frantic exercises of national belly-button studying.. .It is a request for reassurance, encouragement, admiration..."2 9 While practically speaking, w ith the wane of the British Empire and the rise of the United States as super power, the US became a more important ally for New Zealand in the postwar,3 0 and in the last decades New Zealand has newly turned to Australia as strong cross-Tasman ally, Britain still has rem ained the idealized motherland for New Zealand cultural identity. Even so, as has historically been the case in many national contexts, US popular culture in particular has saturated New Zealand since the 1950s. In this way, New Zealand culture has been multiply colonized and the Pakeha sense of national self always seems to be threatened to be overwhelmed by its more dom inant—bigger, richer, older— models. And, the Maori face of the nation always threatened to be obscured by "official" 204 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. white culture (narrated alternately by the UK and Hollywood popular culture). The question continually re-emerges (and is not settled but rather vexed further by the shifting alliances that required New Zealand to move its dependency increasingly away from Britain and toward the United States and then tow ard Australia)—from w here/ what does New Zealand identity come? W here does Britishness (or American-ness, or Australian-ness) end and N ew Zealandness begin? This history of conflicting desires and foundational anxieties is the underlying current of the uncertain New Zealand national identity.3 1 W hile this tenuousness and contingency of New Zealand national identity has been a fundamental condition of "New Zealandness" since British colonization, there have been particular moments of more acute and manifest interrogations of national identity— moments when presumed "givens" w ere first articulated as such, or underwent radical transformation, forcing re-evaluation of the always-already uncertain terms under which "New Zealandness" was so named. In these moments, the always underlying tensions/questions vis-a-vis identity were, because of external shifts, raised to the surface; core issues seemed to crystallize, become s u d d e n ly a p p a r e n t, a n d e v e n em erge in overt national discourse. Two such periods of m ore manifest and intensive national self-awareness and self 205 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. interrogation, which are also of particular interest to an account of H eavenly Creatures, occurred in the 1950s and the 1990s. The 1950s were the first decade where the more independent New Zealand (having asserted a degree of autonomy through world w ars and foreign diplomacy) was apparent, without any of the distractions of w ar and depression. It is also the decade in which central features of New Zealand's national character for the next decades— what Colin James calls the "prosperity consensus"32— were consolidated: the idea of a friendly State that provided for its citizens from cradle-to-grave with a variety of welfare program s, of an egalitarian society where everyone could have "a fair go," and of a cultural character of "the New Zealander" as modeled on British ideals and imagery. These underwrote the construct of New Zealand national identity through the 1970s. The 1950s are thus the "classic," so to speak, image of New Zealand nation-ness — the sequence in time which became the ideological font from which post-pioneer national self-imagining flowed, relatively without interruption, for decades.3 3 Dire economic crisis in the 1970s led to drastic economic reforms in 1984 and the dismantling of the cradle-to-grave welfare state in 1991. The v a lid ity of th e 1950s id eal of nation-ness w a s radically u n d erm in ed . A se a change of reforms exposed the heavily protected economy to the competitive, and seemingly cruel, global market. New Zealand felt 206 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. abandoned by world powers— the bill of Britain's joining the European Economic Community in the 1970s, and concomitant de-em phasis of New Zealand as guaranteed trade partner, was finally coming due, and the costs were becoming painfully apparent. All the givens of N ew Zealand society were thrown into doubt by the government actions of 1984 and the 1991 razing of the welfare state. This meant privatization of governm ent-run institution and offices, this meant a new emphasis on competitiveness, this meant a re-definition of international alliances, in particular re-locating the national self in relation to the geographic neighbors (though historically, cultural strangers) in the Pacific and new Asian economic pow ers and cultural matrices. On top of all of this cultural and economic re-organization, Maori and women's movements since the 1970s had been challenging the patriarchal, Anglo versions of official culture.3 4 In these m ultiple ways, the 1990s are the decade when the cornerstones of national identity w ere bulldozed and made no longer tenable. The tectonic shifts in New Zealand culture and society of the 1980s and 1990s — triggered by but not exclusively due to economic im peratives — has been likened to a revolution. New Zealand history is divided, now, b etw een pre- and post-1984. O ne fin d s the h isto ria n s and cultural commentators struggling with finding the appropriate m etaphors to capture the enormity of the change: 207 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. The comprehensive social, economic and political changes which occurred in New Zealand in the 1980s had the magnitude of what an observer of natural cataclysms might call a fifty- or even a hundred-year event.3 5 Colin James appeals to Miltonian term s to characterize the transformation, calling the distant memory of pre-1984 N ew Zealand "Godzone lost/'3 6 and Chris Laidlaw wrote in 1999, "W e are not the sam e people w e were even a decade ago. The national personality has changed."3 7 The 1990s were a time of re-evaluating past markers and constructs of national identity, and of re negotiating an identity in the brave new post-colonial, globalizing world. Produced in the early 1990s and released in 1994, Heavenly Creatures must be resituated in the context of this fundam ental re-organization of national identity, and this overview of the history of New Zealand's relations with outside powers also sheds a great deal of light on the question of "mothers," with which this historical detour began. New Zealand/British relations and New Zealand vacillation betw een in / dependence is so often discussed in explicitly familial terms —w ith "E ngland"/"em pire" cast in a maternal role, and New Z ealand/"colony" figured as dependent child, and often with the figure of the Queen standing in as the personification of England-as-mother: In 1909, The School Journal had explained that "we keep up Empire Day just as we m ight keep up our m other's birthday in the family, to show that we are still her loving children." (School Journal, 1,1909, 55.).. .W hen w ar broke out the Journal 208 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. printed a poem w ith Britain as "the grey, old, weary mother" calling her sons back to fight (School Journal, III, 1915,14).3 8 It is extraordinary the extent to which we have equivocated when it comes to cutting the apron strings with Britain.3 9 The Q ueen.. .seemed m otherly.. .She always talked about empire as her "family." The connection between us.. .and "Mother England" appeared perfectly correct.4 0 Mrs. W indsor.. .may not be the m ost successful mother but then m othering w asn't in her original job description.4 1 "Mother" bears discursive traces of national identity and the New Zealand history of colonial settlement. The larger construct of mother-as-Britain, the conceptualization in te r/ national and in/dependence relations in terms of familial m other/child relations inflects the insistent maternal discourses of Jackson's cinema (already shot through with thematics of horror) with the thorny and ambivalent problem atics of national identity. THE OEDIPAL AS NATIONAL DRAMA The m other m u st realize that the baby is n ot actually her p ossession , and that, though h e is so sm all and utterly dependent on her help, h e is a separate entity and o u gh t to b e treated as an individual human being; sh e m u st not tie him too m uch to herself, but assist him to grow up to in d ep en d en ce. — M elanie Klein, "Weaning" The liberation o f an individual, as he grows u p , from the authority of his parents is one o f the m ost necessary though one of the m ost pain fu l results brought about by the course of h is d evelopm ent. It is quite essential that that liberation should occur and it m ay be presu m ed that it has been to 209 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. som e extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition betw een successive generations. O n the other hand, there is a class of neurotics w h ose conditions is recognizably determ ined by their having failed in this task. — Sigm und Freud, "Family Romances" N e w nations share... a need to separate them selves off from the neo-colonial parent culture. — Kay Schaffer, W omen and the Bush M arsha Kinder has argued that the master plot of the oedipal narrative is adaptable to different cultural circumstances and bears nationally specific transform ations in grammar.4 2 She has persuasively argued that the lines of desire of the oedipal family romance are not, then, irrevocably tied to the son's incestuous longing for the mother and murderous intention toward the father: there can be different versions of the story. My accounting of New Zealand's historical relations w ith its mother country and a survey of the m othering tropes in Jackson's films suggests that there is a strong tendency in New Z ealand's oedipal narrative to focus on the mother, who receives the full w eight of the parricidal rage. New Zealand's status as young nation, as a historically recent settler colony of England, has inflected basic oedipal m yths of identity such that the parental figure that is most emphasized is the mother. That is, in the drama of the formation of an autonomous national identity, the colonial trope of "Mother England" overlays the oedipal drama 210 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. of identity. Because of New Zealand's historical relations with its colonizing parent culture, the oedipal trajectory becomes not one of killing the father, but of negotiating a position in relation to the omnipresent and powerful M other—for whom the child/nation has profoundly ambivalent feelings. In the context of the narrative importance of mothers and m othering in Jackson's cinema, the centrality of generically-informed discourses of the m aternal in Heavenly Creatures and historical maternally-inflected thematics of New Zealand's relationship with its imperial "mother" England, w hat I am asserting here is that through the "maternalized" discourses in Jackson's film s—and most especially in Heavenly Creatures — these films are inextricably intertw ined with examinations of national identity, an endeavor w hich is firmly interwoven with the grammar of horror (and in Heavenly Creatures, melodrama). The oedipal plot of New Zealand's national becoming is m apped onto the generically-inflected oedipal scenarios of both m elodram a and horror. Thus there are multiple contingencies to the oedipal plot to consider: the national context and, cinematically, the generic conjugations of Oedipus —made more complicated still by Heavenly Creatures's reliance on tw o generic trajectories for its affective and meaning-making logics. T he m atricide in Heavenly Creatures sign ifies not only the specific m urder of Honora Parker, not only the tragic end to Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker's relationship, but also the metaphorical weight of 211 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. problematics of a complicated national identity that has been perpetually anchored to the "mother." Dominated by (the idea of) this pow erful, desirable, loved and feared mother, the 1990s saw the legitimacy of its prior claims to identity, largely authored from England, erode and w ash away. The matricide of Heavenly Creatures expresses the bew ilderm ent of this state of affairs — it is not a clarion call for the building of a national im age on the violence of matricide (the complexity of the conflicting m aternal discourses in Heavenly Creatures obviates so easy a reading), but rather a m anifestation of the sense of loss, panic, confusion as to how to proceed. The dread mother of horror and the idealized mother of melodrama both apply, and as rendered in the brilliant cinematic construction of Jackson's film, it becomes impossible to determine where melodramatic mother-love and horrific mother-hate begin and end. By taking the already overcoded story of Parker-Hulme, harnessing the affective power of both m elodram a and horror, hitching it to the New Zealand cultural specificity of the oedipal plot, Heavenly Creatures articulates meanings and feelings (horror, confusion, conflict) about New Zealand national identity inexpressible the lim ited linguistic metaphors clumsily wielded by more official discourses. By the en d o f the film , the non-verbal scream s, inarticulate cries and s o b s that m ark the maternal melodrama/ ship-deck fantasy scenes (Pauline sobbing as Juliet and the idealized family/Mummy sail away) and the m urder (Honora 212 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. moaning, Pauline and Juliet screaming) capture more fully and completely the bewildering state of instability of New Zealand identity in the 1990s. BUILDING A NATIONAL CINEMA ON FANTASY ISLANDS Fantasy, even on its o w n psychic term s, is never only inward-turning; it alw ays contains a historical reference in so far as it involves, alongside the attem pt to arrest the present, a journey through the past. — Jacqueline Rose, S tates o f Fantasy Peter Jackson is obsessed with the past. The past bleeds into the present in his films, bubbling up from repressed m emories, dem anding to be acknowledged. Heavenly Creatures, a rendering of a real historical event, is only the most direct example of this tendency to rum inate on the past. The Frighteners and Braindead feature repeated sequences of long ago traumas — Lionel in Braindead remembers in snippets and half images his mother drowning his father; in The Frighteners, the diegetic present is periodically interrupted by glimpses of a long ago m urder spree by young lovers and its haunting and murderous eruption in the present. Even the puppets of M eet the Peebles are weighed down by history — the drug-addicted frog has tortured flashbacks to his tour in Vietnam (sequences that are among the more cinematically accomplished of the film!). Forgotten S ih er is explicitly about searching through the fragm ented debris of history, in search of a forgotten past, looking for the kiwi cinema pioneer w ho with his New 213 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Zealander can-do spirit invented everything (celluloid, the tracking shot, the close-up, the biblical epic...) before D. W. Griffith or C. B. DeMille or anyone anywhere else even thought of it. The joke, of course, is that while (fictional4 3 ) New Zealanders w ere doing Great Things, the rest of the world neither noticed nor cared. Jackson's preoccupation with the past, with characters trapped by reliving the past, suggests an anxiety about the stability, the authenticity and reliability of that history, but it also suggests an awareness of the productive capacity of historical memory. Primal scenes are remembered only in scraps and fragm ents, but contain incredible power to generate narratives and m onstrous events in the present. This obsession w ith "past-ness" in Jackson's films resonates on a wider, cross-textual level w ith the anxieties of nation-ness that I have attempted to excavate through an engagement with Heavenly Creatures. The construct of "nation" itself is implicitly the imagination a long historical collective past, a history that is the source of narratives of mythic, glorious origins. In his foundational study of nations, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson points out the disjuncture betw een this imagined deep past and the actual newness of nation as a concept itself.4 4 New Zealand's short (European) h istory (le ss th a n 200 y e a r s o f settlem en t) m akes g lossin g over the actual lack of "past-ness" of nations an even more specious project and emphasizes this rupture betw een im agined and actual history of nations, a 214 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. disconnect m ade even more complicated still by the enduring presence of the deep history of the Maoris, whose cultural presence always threatens to destabilize the tenuous coherence of the European sense of national identity. For m uch of its (European) national history, this problem of the disjuncture between im agined deep history and shallow historical reality could be solved by appealing to Britain's proud history;4 5 now that the foundations for New Zealand identity in British historical mythology have worn away, national cinem a has become a particularly significant wellspring for the creation of a shared national imagery and library of self-narratives. The new need to craft this national library of images and narratives to fill the vacuum of "identity" once so unproblematically filled by "Britishness" converged with, first, the incremental development of a feature film industry in the 1970s (where before there were almost no feature films m ade in N ew Zealand), and shortly thereafter the national adoption of free m arket economic ideology and practice in 1984. Formed in this crucible of m arket pressures and identity crisis, New Zealand cinema and its concomitant, "N ew Zealand national identity," were overdetermined to be fashioned as a commodity in a nation desperately trying to figure itself out as w e ll as s im u lta n e o u s ly p o sitio n itself in the global free market. These conflicting pressures are evident in the concurrent pep squad and marketing 215 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. executive undertones in these remarks by New Zealand Film Commission chair, Ruth Harley: Film is important not just as a potent advertising medium for New Zealand; not just as a way of creating and personifying our country as a brand in all its diversity.. .It is all of these, but it is also a statement to ourselves.. .a central ingredient in constructing our identity for ourselves, as a lever to help New Zealanders get the confidence and boldness to foot it aggressively on the international stages.4 6 In this context, Jackson's inter/national success as a filmmaker is nothing short of a dream come true for both the national film industry and the governm ent will to the aggressive pursuit of international marketability of New Zealand goods and services. His Fellowship of the Rings (2001) — backed by Hollywood dollars but made in New Zealand with New Zealand talent (at least behind the camera)— has to date grossed over US$860 million worldwide,4 7 an unqualified blockbuster success by the standards of any Hollywood product, but a mind-boggling fantasy for a New Zealand(-m ade) film, w ith tremendous implications for the future of New Zealand filmmaking. After The Fellowship of the Rings won four Oscars at the 2002 Academy Awards, the spokesperson for the New Zealand Film Commission said, "Rings says you can't overlook New Zealand" and notes that The Lord o f the Rings h a s sparked interest in Peter Jackson's earlier film s, w h ic h in tu rn "w ould help other Kiwi filmmakers make better and more successful pictures."4 8 Because of the centrality of Jackson's films in the construction of a 216 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. cinematic national identity (The Lord of the Rings being traceable in a direct line back to Heavenly Creatures, his "taste crossover" film, and from H eavenly Creatures a direct line back to Bad Taste), it thus is even m ore im perative to consider how the films marshal an exportable and saleable image of New Zealand-ness. How is the development of an "authentic" New Zealand national self-image affected when it is hitched to the wheels of commerce? What sort of national identity has been fashioned by Jackson's phenom enal success as a New Zealand filmmaker? All of Jackson's films have centered on the creative use of either physical (kitchen-made aliens of Bad Taste, zombies of Braindead, puppets of Meet the Peebles) or digital special effects (Borovnia and the Fourth W orld in Heavenly Creatures, ghosts in The Frighteners, the digitally "aged" archival footage of Forgotten Silver, the wizardry and magical landscapes of The Lord of the Rings) which creatively extend and transcend the possible lim its of the physical world. A large part of New Zealand's Jackson-led success in carving a commercial filmmaking niche emerges from the strength of the CG/ special effects infrastructure of equipment and talent that Jackson, his production company and special effects studio have m ethodically, craftily and strategically d evelop ed (he has claim ed that he only m ade H eavenly Creatures in order to buy the CGI equipment4 9 ). As m ass-m arket H ollyw ood product comes to rely more and more on computer-generated special effects 217 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. spectacles, driving up production costs, New Zealand's ability to produce quality CG effects at cut rates (with N ew Zealand's favorable exchange rate, lack of unions, lauded kiwi ability to stretch resources), positions New Zealand as a viable and appealing alternative to m ore expensive Hollywood special effects boutiques. Indeed Jackson landed The Lord o f the Rings partly because of the persuasiveness of the argum ent for New Zealand runaway production. From here we can suggest that the success of a New Zealand commercial film industry has been grounded in the construction of New Zealand as "fantasy islands" in a double sense: the islands as the site where film fantasies are produced, but also the islands themselves — their physical topography— as the raw material from w hich fantastic landscapes are digitally fashioned/reimagined. The landscape of New Zealand — already historically colonized by the imperial and touristic gazes as an exotic playland laid out for the tourist's/colonizer's consum ption50—undergo another layer/process of transformation. This transform ative power of an other's desiring gaze on the landscape is dram atized in H eavenly Creatures— when Juliet transforms the hills into the "Fourth W orld," w ith its fountains and topiaries of an E nglish garden, but th is d y n a m ic is a lso at work in a larger, more direct fashion. New Zealand sites served as the locations for The Lord of the Rings shooting. In The Lord o f the Rings, the New Zealand 218 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. landscape is m orphed into a topography imagined by Tolkien (who drew on Anglo tropes), this tim e for the international consumers of popular culture. For a nation like New Zealand th at draw s so much of its national identity from relation to the land, this new eagerness to use the land as Hollywood backlot, mutable by digital effects into any cartographic mise-en-scene imaginable, represents an uneasy m ovem ent into an area where stable ground (in a double sense) for anchoring New Zealand identity becomes harder to discover. In this view, w e find that "N ew Zealand" is continually reproduced as an imaginary/fantastic projection, shaped into the "exotic" as structured by Hollywood and British fantasies. As an Australian entertainment reporter writes, The Lord of the Rings is m ore than a mere film project, at least as far as New Zealand is concerned.. J. R. R. Tolkien may have intended The Lord of the R ings to provide a mythology for England, but it is clear from walking and driving around Wellington and its environs that its province now extends deep into the psyche of every N ew Zealander you talk to...[Fans at the Wellington prem iere of The Fellozvship of the Rings] greeted him not so m uch as Peter Jackson, film maker, but as Peter Jackson, saviour of the national psyche. It was as though the nation's pride w as riding on his shoulders5 1 Tolkien's imperial-colonialist narrative (with its racist undertones, romantic yearnings for the "return of the king") is re-mapped onto the physical land, which is transformed again, this tim e not by settlers' labor, but rather by 2 1 9 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. digital "magic." Pointedly, this revamping of the land is in the interest of selling a (re)exoticized im age/ry to international consumers. This dynamic suggests a re-colonization of New Zealand imagery— a whitewashing, where the European face and narratives of New Zealand is marketed around the world, and others are (still/again) marginalized (though Maori filmmaking is encouraged by the NZFC, these films are predestined to remain in the very narrow domestic m arkets, not participating in the marketplace movement of constructions of N ew Zealand identity marketed across international borders). The very real elision between fantasy and the real for New Zealand is actually actively promoted by civic and national organizations: W ellington (Jackson's hom e city that headquartered the Lord of the Rings production) actually changed its name to "Middle-earth" for the New Zealand prem iere of The Fellowship of the Rings, images of the characters from the film were adopted for postage stamps, the tourism board is aggressively seeking to dovetail tourism advertising with the films, and recent press has detailed the "com petition" between England and New Zealand to claim its soil as the "real" landscape of Tolkien's fantastic visions. Perhaps m ore troubling still is the specter of misogyny that u n d e r w r ite s th e n a tio n a l cin em a an d its o n g o in g construction of national identity. While N ew Zealand's first feature films posited a masculine national image, H eavenly Creatures, with its focus on feminine characters and 220 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. them es and its critical/commercial success might be seen as an improvement. Yet, the central characters are lesbian killers who commit m atricide/m urder. And I have outlined how Jackson's films rely on m onstrous femininity as central sources of fear, horror and gross-out sick- making. If we look at Braindead and Heavenly Creatures as foundational texts for the post-Rings flowering of commercial filmmaking in New Zealand, their success suggests New Zealand's matricides have captured the international imagination— matricidal logic has become a marketable feature and a foundational stone in internationally consumed/recognized national cinem a/identity. It is the matricidal, bloody, gore and trash logic, the horrific — that enables the construction of New Zealand identity and now underw rites all future filmmaking in New Zealand that uses the talent and the infrastructure developed by Peter Jackson's horrific/fantastic fictions. O n the other hand, we might look at New Zealand as "fantasy island," Jackson's matricidal cinema and the implication of these in the constructions of national identity, in a less dismal light. Fantasy and the primal scene, in a psychoanalytic sense, can be destabilizing frameworks of desire.5 2 M apping psychoanalytic constructs of the primal scene (originary fantasies) onto Jackson's/zZra fan tasies, w h ere the characters w h o are lock ed in to e n d le ss repetitions of historical memory theatricalize larger/national historical anxieties of identity, it might be argued that the perpetual replaying of the 221 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. primal scene—entrapping scene of traum a—allows for the possibility of undoing the trauma, opportunities to unwind the mechanisms of its "inevitable" repetition. In short, fantasy allows for a space for re imagination. Heavenly Creatures's fantasy sequences indeed are governed by the laws of transmutability and exchange between different registers (of desire, of reality). Just as Juliet and Pauline adopt their Borovnian character names (Gina and Deborah) in real life, just as Juliet does a school history report on the Borovnian royal family instead of the Windsors, just as a fantasy projection of Orson Welles mediates their homoerotic sexual encounter, the material of fantasy and the (historical) realities on which it is based exist in a space of tension and flux that is potentially endlessly adaptable. Thus the "whitewash" of New Zealand commercial cinema m ight not be so effacing as it might appear. There can be a fluidity to identity (sexual, cultural, national) that destabilizes the national re-adoption (through pretenses tow ard a Hollywood style model of filmmaking, with its bourgeois values, aesthetic codes and production values) of a colonizing whiteness and patriarchal fears/constructions of feminine bodies and desires. I have argued that Heavenly Creatures, n arrativizin g o n e o f th e flashpoint social events of the 1950s, must be read as an effort of rew riting central national myths, located in the 1950s, from the conflicted perspective 222 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. of the mid-1990s— with a New Zealand in the throes of national self- examination and social and cultural reconfiguration. The collision of melodramatic and horrific templates in H eavenly Creatures w ith their contradictorily charged oedipal subtexts are particularly apt m etaphors for articulating New Zealand's peculiar conditions of identity vis-a-vis its motherland, its history of in/dependency and its place in the new world order. Whatever the terms of historical/cinem atic pow er and dependency, as cinema takes on new importance, particularly for New Zealand, in constructing national identity, it has become clear that Jackson's horrific and melodramatic matricidal fictions are w ritten into the very center of a potentially new cinematically rendered New Zealand identity. Peter Jackson's rehearsal of historical anxieties through m aternalized figures in Heavenly Creatures and other horrific narratives of nation m ight suggest a condition of perpetual entrapment in paralyzing mise-en-scenes of New Zealand dependency and identity uncertainty and even re-codify the terms of dependency into a history/ national cinema context. However, Parker- Hulme—and Heavenly Creatures's rehearsal of the story— as national primal scene, the story of (metaphorically (post)colonial) m other-love and mother- hate contains w ithin it the seed s of its o w n su b v e r sio n . 223 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. ENDNOTES 1 The longest is Glamuzina and Laurie's Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian Vieiv— which I will be dealing w ith at some length below. See also Maureen Molloy, "Science, Myth and the Adolescent Female: The Mazengarb Report, the Parker-Hulme Trial, and the A doption Act of 1955," Women's Studies Journal 9:1 (March 1993) 1-25. 2 For analysis of the thematics of the play, see Christina Stachurski, "Scenes of the Crime: Returning to the Past," M odern Drama 40 (1997) 111-122. 3 "Peter Makes His Bid; Dustin M akes a Call," Onfilm (October 1992) 5. 4 A resident of Christchurch told me he grew up in a house down the street from Pauline's family's house, and that walking or passing by the house would elicit dark references to the gruesom e event. One thinks of the film Halloween (1978) and how the neighborhood children fearfully avoid the Meyer's house because of the m urder that happened there long ago. 5 Qtd. in "Peter Makes His Bid; D ustin Makes a Call" Onfilm (October 1992) 5. 6 Julie Glamuzina and Alison Laurie, Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1991) 111. 7 Ibid., 181. 3 Ibid., 170-1. 9 Honora has three scenes outside of the Rieper household. First, when she visits Juliet at the sanatorium w ith Pauline, and second, when she takes Pauline to see Dr. Bennett. In both of these cases, she is attending to the children's "needs," not her own. H onora then is related to "motherhood" as associated with domestic drudgery and the wearying labor of putting someone else's needs before her ow n desires or ambitions. The third scene outside the home is the only time H onora is out of the house for her own pleasure— when she and the girls take a trip to the park— which will be the setting of her death. 1 0 Glamuzina and Laurie do point out that a discourse of "the good mother" (Honora) vs. "the bad m other" (Hilda) circulated during the time of the trial. They link this to a kind of m isogyny engendered by the narrow roles 224 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. assigned to w om en that disallowed women a position outside of the m other/w ife function (57). My aim is to deconstruct "Mother" itself, while acknowledging the relevance and importance of their point vis-a-vis constructs "good" and "bad" mothers. While Jackson has been taken to task by Alison Laurie ("Heavenly Lesbians? Murder Revisited," Paper presented to the Visiting Scholar Colloquium, Institute for Research on Women, 28 November 1995) and B. Ruby Rich (in the U.S. introduction to Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View) for replicating these restrictive constructs, I would rather view the positioning of good/bad mother in a larger symbolic frame, and consider how the "good"/"bad" mother roles function — in generic ways (in melodram a, in horror) and in narratives of national identity. 1 1 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "Minnelli and Melodrama," Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in M elodrama and the Woman's Film, Christine Gledhill, ed. (London: BFI Publishing, 1987) 73. 1 2 E. Ann Kaplan, "M othering, Feminism and Representation: The Maternal in M elodrama and the W oman's Film 1910-40" (113-137) and Linda Williams, "Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama" (299-325), Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the W oman's Film, Christine Gledhill, ed. (London: BFI Publishing, 1987). 1 3 Linda W illiams poses a related argument in "Film Bodies" when she asserts that pornography, horror and women's melodrama conform to the three prim al fantasies of origin m apped by Laplanche and Pontalis ("Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Film Genre Reader II, Barry Keith Grant, ed. [Austin: U niversity of Texas Press, 1995] 140-158). My argument rather sees "m elodram a" as not only a fantasy of pre-oedipal union with the mother but also the difficult process of separation from the mother— that is, the portion of the oedipal tale up to and sometimes including the activation of m urderous aggression against the parents. However, as I assert above, that "aggression" is never, in the women's melodrama, directly enacted — the aggression is always shunted off to a more palatable substitute, like M ildred's daughter's shooting of Mildred's husband (or more recently, as Marsha Kinder has pointed out, Rebecca's killing of her mother Becky's husband in Tacones Lejanos) [Rev. of High Heels, dir. by Pedro Almodovar, Film Q uarterly 45:3 (Spring 1992) 39-44]). Where Kinder and Williams are primarily interested in articulating the narrative desires for m other/ daughter u n ity in these melodramas, I am looking at the aspects of m other/daughter dis-unity/ separation, along with the pleasures of m other/daughter unity. 225 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 1 4 See Carol Clover, "Her Body, Himself," Men, Women and Chain Saws: G ender and the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993). 151 have seen the film multiple times, and I am still powerfully moved every tim e I watch the opening and closing sequences. When I have shown clips of the m urder scenes at conferences and in classes, audiences are inevitably also horrified and emotionally affected. This is true not just for viewers new to the film, but also for viewers in the audience who have seen the film before. 1 6 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993). 1 7 Even in The Lord of the Rings, there is a monstrous female, the giant spider Shelob w ho features prominently in the third book as a devouring, specifically female presence (underscored by her name and made more prom inent by the books' overall absence of feminine roles). At the time of this writing, the second film, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) has only just been released, and Shelob has not yet appeared in the cinematically. She prom ises to be one of the set pieces of the third and final film, scheduled for release in December, 2003. It will be interesting to see if Jackson's representation of Shelob will conform to some of the patterns of feminine m onstrosity seen in his previous work. 1 8 A nation-building drive that masks even deeper anxieties about racial identity and conflicted disputes about land ownership and the landscape's relation to identity. 1 9 A t this juncture, I am only referring to specifically European sense of "nation." The Maori, of course, had lived in Aotearoa/New Zealand over a m illenium before Anglo settlement. This question of competing ideological and racial claims to "nation" will be discussed further below. 2 0 New Zealand authority over domestic affairs in 1840, separation from the N ew South Wales colony in 1851, Dominion status within the British Empire in 1907, a d m is s io n to th e L eague o f N ations as a separate nation, in c lu sio n in the Statute of Westminster in 1931 (ratification in 1947). 2 1 Chris Laidlaw, Rights of Passage: Beyond the Neio Zealand Identity Crisis (Auckland: H odder Moa Beckett Publishers, 1999) 14. 226 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 2 2 Colin James, N ew Territory: Transformation of New Zealand, 1984-92 (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books Limited, 1992) 10-11. 2 3 Andrea Schollmann, Harvey C. Perkins, Kevin Moore, "Intersecting Global and Local Influences in Urban Place Promotion: The Case of Christchurch, New Zealand" Environment and Planning A 32 (2000) 55-76. 2 4 Claudia Bell (Inventing New Zealand: Everyday M yths ofPakeha Iden tity [Auckland: Penguin Books, 1996]) argues that the relation to land in part compensated for the settlers' lack of a history and kinship netw orks in the new environment, and that this early settler association w ith environm ent and national character "has had an enduring affect [szc] on national im agery in New Zealand" (5). 2 5 W. David McIntyre, "Imperialism and Nationalism," in The O xford H istory ofNezo Zealand 2nd Edition, Geoffrey W. Rice, ed. (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1992) 342. 2 6 Laidlaw, 28. 2 7 Or as Laidlaw writes, "little Englanders dressed in sheeps' clothing" (65). 2 8 Bell, 22. 2 9 Ibid., 19. 3 0 New Zealand signed the ANZUS pact in 1951, a security alliance w ith Australia and the USA, fashioned in the model of NATO for the Pacific. However, one of the prices of inclusion in ANZUS was New Zealand participation in the US's conflict in Vietnam, to which the citizens w ere largely opposed, and later, a confrontation between the US and N ew Zealand over differing stances on nuclear weapons. W hen New Zealand refused to allow a US carrier approach its shore because the US governm ent would neither "confirm nor deny" whether it carried nuclear w eapons or power, the US effectively suspended New Zealand from ANZUS. The National party in the 1990s sought to re-establish closer ties w ith the US. 3 1 Chris Laidlaw's book takes the psychopathology of New Zealand's "identity" as its organizing principle, incorporating it into the very title of his collection of essays on New Zealand, Rights of Passage: Beyond the N ew Zealand Identity Crisis. The book is a polemical articulation of precisely the gaps and discontinuities of "New Zealand-ness," perpetually im agined in 227 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. the shadow of more dominant and powerful national identities — especially Great Britain and the United States. 3 2 See Colin James, '"A Modest Affluence for AH'" (9-35) in N ew Territory. 3 3 Author Claudia Bell describes her 1950s childhood to articulate the "Pakeha myth of identity" and its subsequent revisions that are the subject of her book. 3 4 So with the growing realization of New Zealand's heritage of cultural colonization by Britain/USA, which suppressed an em ergent and autonomous New Zealand identity on its own term s, European New Zealanders were coming to the painful process of realizing their own role as colonizers of Maori culture (see, for instance, Peter Simpson, 572-573). 3 5 Peter Simpson, "The Recognition of Difference," The Oxford H istory o f New Zealand 2nd Edition. Geoffrey W. Rice, ed. (Auckland: Oxford University Press) 571. 3 6 James, 5-8. 3 7 Laidlaw, 214. 3 8 Jock Phillips, "Mummy's Boys: Pakeha Men and Male C ulture in New Zealand," Women in New Zealand Society, Phillida Bunkle and Beryl Hughes, eds. (Auckland: George Allen & Unwin, 1980) 238. The author comes close to mapping the Imperial mother onto the am orphous category of mother, but ultimately his interest lies elsewhere, in the prevalence of m aternal discourses and its emasculating effect on New Zealand boys. 3 9 Laidlaw, 14. 4 0 Bell, 22. 4 1 Laidlaw, 71. 4 2 Marsha Kinder, "The Spanish Oedipal N arrative and Its Subversion," Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 197-277. 4 3 Cinema visionary Colin MacKenzie, w ho is portrayed as a lost innovator of New Zealand history, is a fictional character; Richard Pearse, however, who in Forgotten Silver is filmed by MacKenzie m aking the first airplane 228 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. flight, is a real historical figure, whose achievements in flying may have in fact preceded the W right Brothers, but w hose exploits have been, like fictional MacKenzie's, forgotten in the glare of American and British innovators. The use of MacKenzie's "lost-now-found" footage documenting Pearse's first flight as historical "evidence" further articulates the importance of cinema in constructions of national historical "pastness" and memory, which I take up below. So strong is the national desire to definitively grasp claims to historical legitimacy that w hen Forgotten Silver was first aired on New Zealand televisions, some historians and members of the viewing public alike were duped into believing that the mockumentary was historical fact, not fiction. 4 4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Com m unities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition (New York: Verso, 1991). 4 5 Though of course British nation-ness is also "shallow," per Anderson's observation about the recent invention of nations in the eighteenth century, it is at least reassuringly deeper than New Zealand's. 4 6 Ruth Harley, "Cultural Capital and the Knowledge Economy," Weaving the Future: Looking Out, Looking In, Looking Forward (Public Service Senior Management Conference), 30 September 1999 <http://pssm.ssc.governm ent.nz/previous/l 999/papers/rharley.asp> (Accessed 2 January 2001). 4 7 According to Variety.com, Fellowship o f the Rings has grossed $860,325,611 worldwide (Accessed 16 October 2002). 4 8 Kathleen Drumm, qtd. in "Rings O pen U p NZ to the World," <http://www.stuff.co.nz/index/0,1008,1146392a2202,FF.html> Posted 25 March 2002 (Accessed 29 March 2002). 4 9 Jackson is quoted in Fangoria as saying, "A round the time we were writing Heavenly Creatures, which was actually only an excuse to buy the gear, I really wanted to get into computers. I like special effects. Braindead could have been amazing if w e'd had com puters." (Qtd. in Michael Helms, "Who's Scared of The Frighteners?" Fangoria 154 [July 1996] 36). 5 0 Laurence Simmons, "Distance Looks O ur Way: Imagining New Zealand on Film," Twin Peeks: A ustralian and N ew Zealand Feature Films, Deb Verhoeven, ed. (Melbourne: Dam ned Publishing, 1999) 39-49. 229 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. 5 1 Jim Schembri, "A W ord from the Ring Leader," <http://umnv.theage.com.au/entertainment/2001/12/28/FFXCM Y04VVC.html> 28 December 2001 (Accessed 29 March 2002). 5 2 John Fletcher, "Prim al Scenes and the Female Gothic: Rebecca and Gaslight," Screen 36:4 (W inter 1995) 343-4. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. C onclusion This dissertation began with the presumption that considering horror in relation to melodrama, conceived as both a genre and a larger pervasive m ode, is both necessary, given recent arguments about the melodramatic basis of narrative cinema, and revealing about the gendered desires and politics inherent in horror and women's melodramas. I have further proposed that that the genres of women's melodrama and horror are two rem arkably protean forms that can be adapted to multiple different contexts and be used to articulate a variety of subject positions. Their marginalized status as genres, in fact, makes them ideal for forwarding points of view that are usually crowded out by more dominant perspectives. For this reason, the horrific and melodramatic are privileged means of representing problem atics of identities that are positioned on the borders rather than at the center. I have sought to justify the pairing of horror and melodrama, generally, and women's melodrama specifically by exploring their shared historical roots, their shared thematic concerns, and their intersecting psychoanalytic preoccupations. Horror takes the melodramatic mode's fixation w ith moral legibility and its means of effecting that legibility — 231 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. through stark polarities of virtue/ villainy, obsession with scenes of suffering and so on— to extraordinary and startlingly direct extremes, translating the melodramatic's concerns with surprising literalness. I have show n how this simpatico between the forms can be traced all the way back to the roots of both melodrama and horror, in late eighteenth-century Europe, w here melodrama first appeared on the stage and "horror" emerged in the form of Gothic novels. Not only were there exchanges of themes and formal narrative strategies between the two media, both the historical forms of melodrama and Gothic responded to the hopes as well as anxieties instigated by seismic shifts in cultural life caused by the Revolution and the Enlightenment— the decline of religion, monarchy and aristocracy, the rise of the middle class and democracy. In cinema, I have shown how the horror film and the w om en's picture have converged in the space of the indistinct area of film "gothic," w hich has connotations of both horror and women's melodrama. Furtherm ore, horror and women's melodrama share preoccupations with problematics of home, hearth and family; indeed films such as The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Others (2001) use their horror mechanics to drive plots usually associated w ith w o m e n 's and dom estic m elodram as. A nd, I have focused on both horror and melodrama's particular interest in the mother and the child's 2 3 2 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. relationship to the mother, representing two m utually exclusive perspectives that collide in Heavenly Creatures (1994). The desiring patterns that support horror and w om en's m elodram a are arguably more irreducibly distinct than some of their thematic and formal sympathies — sadism is such a strong impulse in horror, and masochism the prevailing characteristic of w om en's pictures. Yet, pressing the surface of horror reveals a pulsating vein of masochism, which, as Carol Clover has argued, is predominantly male in its appeal, but is resolutely rendered through female bodies. The film jAtame! (1990), through combining and reconfiguring the generic patterns of horror and m elodrama (as well as pornography and comedy), disassembles the standard unfolding of gendered sadistic and masochistic pleasures of horror and m elodrama, mapping new routes for exploring, exploiting and dism antling traditional frameworks of gender and sexuality by exposing their inherent contradictions. To argue that horror and melodrama are privileged vehicles for "border crossing" of multiple forms, in addition to closely examining texts where horror and melodrama thematically converge, I have also explored the genres' own positions at the very borders of respectability and legitimacy. This marginal status for one thing allows the occasional emergence of truly radical points of view that one can find in both horror 233 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. and melodrama (one thinks of Douglas Sirk's melodramas and David Cronenberg's later horror films). It also enables the powerful envoicements of subject positions also situated at m argins. We have seen how the women's melodrama format and the horror tem plates have allowed meditations on issues concerning women and their conflicted position within the domestic space (The Others), their difficult position trying to negotiate home and economics (The Sixth Sense), their contradictory relationships to their experiences of pleasure and social roles (jAtam e!). Melodramatics and the horrific have also facilitated the exploration of children's complicated relationships to their mothers (The Others, The Sixth Sense, Heavenly Creatures), lesbian desire (H eavenly Creatures) and "queered" cultural sensibility (jAtameI). W hat is of note here is that all of these perspectives are not those of the patriarchal male subject—but rather those of subjectivities not frequently served by the engines of popular culture, except precisely in genres situated on the margins. Thus the "ghettoization" of marginal perspectives to the horror and m elodram a suggests that these genres house a potent capacity to query, destabilize and reconfigure the norms of the dominant culture. The cultural m a rg in a lity o f h orror, in p articular, translates into marginalized viewing practices — cult fandom . Surprisingly, however, I found that the non-dominant activity of "cult" fandom also exhibited border- 234 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. crossing mobility. As dem onstrated in the case study of fan engagement with Peter Jackson's films, cult reception is entrenched in the "low brow," bad taste fringes of filmmaking, with its horrific spectacles of gross and graphic bodily explosions, decompositions and eruptions of various kinds. But cult reception is also operative in reception of the "high brow" melodrama H eavenly Creatures, where the aesthetics and valuation of "good taste" predom inate. C ult view ing practices' fluid exchange across different registers of taste is another component of the transgressive border-crossing of horror and m elodram a. By exploring the contours of reception related to Peter Jackson's early horror w ork and later "legitim ate" art-house and blockbuster films, I have illustrated how the discourses of reception (manifested in reviews, fan websites) literally m aterialize in the form of box office currency. This financial capital and a particularly loved film's "buzz" in turn translate into the more intangible, but ultim ately crucial "cultural capital."1 In Peter Jackson's horror cult cinemas, the marginal reception practices paved the way tow ard centering the national film industry with the blockbuster Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003), which has significant economic ramifications for n o t o n ly th e n a tio n a l film in d u stry b u t also the nation as a w h ole. A sim ilar dynam ic of translating horrific and melodramatic capital into material rew ards for the national industry is at work in the Spanish 235 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. cases exam ined in this dissertation. Alejandro Amenabar's exercises in horror thrillers, like w ith Jackson's case, seeded Hollywood production on Spanish soil, thus channeling needed currency into the industry and economy. And, Almodovar's melodramas have been relatively reliable box office perform ers since Women on the Verge (1989)— with the controversial exceptions of jAtame! and Kika (1993), and possibly the upcoming Hable con ella (2002), which p u sh /ed the limits of political/sexual representations. This dynamic wherein the material factors of national cinema production—capital and box office —are stimulated by the exploitation of the m arginal aesthetics of the horrific and melodramatic is mirrored in the related, though ultimately more significant, process of constructing national identity. It is perhaps too early to see what impact Amenabar's work will have on Spanish national identity (especially given that he has chosen, unlike A lm odovar and Jackson, to contract out to Hollywood productions). But as M arsha Kinder has convincingly argued, Almodovar's films have been integral to the reconstruction of the international perception of post-Franco Spanish identity in terms of hedonism, sexual liberation, flowing from decidedly anti-macho points of view that celebrate women and non-straight se x u a l id e n titie s .2 P eter Jackson's w ork has also defined a trajectory of "N ew Zealand nation-ness," in terms of global perception of the small country, from quirky land of excessive gore and offbeat perspectives to the 236 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Rings fantasy-scapes of adventure and wonderment. Furthermore, as my analysis has attempted to illustrate, Heavenly Creatures is a complex exploration of the problematics of national identity, m arshaling the contradictorily charged oedipal plots from horror and m aternal m elodram a to reframe the peculiar conditions of New Zealand national identity in the 1990s. Marginalized horror and melodrama in these situations take an active role in centering of "marginal" national identities. NATION, HORROR AND MELODRAMA An underlying central theme of my dissertation has been the interrelation between horror, melodrama and issues of the nation. Indeed, the genres seem to have a special affinity with the problematics of nation and national identity. While my own study has focused on specific cases that mobilize imagery and identities of the nation through the meaning-making logics of the horrific and melodramatic, the site of the intersection of these three term s is clearly a provocative area for further inquiry. By way of charting new future pathways, I offer some preliminary thoughts here. The foundational text in thinking about nations and national identity is Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. Turning to this text, it is possible to map a number of correspondences between the construct of "nation" and horror and melodrama. The nation, Anderson argues, is a 237 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. cultural construct, rather than a "natural" entity, that has extraordinary modularity — it is transferable and adaptable to m ultiple different contexts. And within different contexts, the nation can be integrated w ith a variety of political perspectives and systems: Once created, [nations] became "m odular," capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be m erged w ith a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations.3 This "transportability" of nation corresponds w ith horror and m elodram a's remarkable cross-cultural diffusion, appearing w ith rich variety in many different cultural contexts, with changeable ideological valences. Much work has been done on the cross-cultural diffusion of m elodram a, but consider also the horrific veins from Indonesian cinema, Japanese cinema, Spanish cinema, Mexican cinema, as well as the more familiar Hollywood, British, and Italian horror traditions. The appearance of horror in these other contexts often adapts to contingencies of political-historical reality (such as Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba [1964] as allegory of Hiroshim a4) or is infused with local folklore and traditions (such as in the vam pire-ghost tradition of Indonesian folklore and cinema5 ). Additionally, like horror and melodrama, nations appeal viscerally to the emotions, using their profound "emotional legitim acy"6 to claim the fervent allegiance of a nation's citizenry. This direct address to the affective 238 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. register is clearly also one of the key m echanism s of horror and melodrama; like nation, they can short-circuit less direct, and less persuasive, forms of coercion, acting directly on the emotions of the spectator. Related to this appeal to emotions is nations' implicit call for self-sacrifice and the related specter of suffering that lies beneath it. Self-sacrifice, of course, is one of the predominant themes of w om en's m elodram as, where (often) the mother is called upon to sacrifice her ow n desires in order to better fulfill her function in the "higher" office of m otherhood. A nd the bodily suffering implied by sacrifice— which in nations, is m ost (melo)dramatically figured by physical injury or loss of life in wars — is some of the essential stuff of the horrific, which often privileges the body as a surface on which to inscribe pain. The nation instills a sense of a deep historical past—the construct of nation is implicitly a m editation on the long history of the nation (shot through with the concomitant self-delusion necessary because of the actual newness of the concept of nation itself, as discussed in Chapter 5). The importance of the role of the past is another coincidence between nation, horror and melodrama, where the "past" is carefully constructed in each form as an explicit explanation for conditions in the present. Whether manifested as familial conflicts in m elodram a, m onstrous repression in horror, or historic glorious sacrifice in nations, the past is seen as playing a constitutive role in contemporary realities — for example, a daughter's 239 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. awkward fem ininity in the m aternal melodrama (Now, Voyager [1942]), horrifying events and m onstrosities in horror (The Shining [1980], The Ring [2002]), the greatness of the character of the nation today (the shot heard around the w orld, the Alamo, Normandy).7 And finally, a related component of this obsession w ith the past, is nations' reliance— like the signifying practices of horror and m elodram a—on the semiotics of the family (fatherland, m other country), giving a primal psychic structure to its organization of em otions and ideology. While these coincidences themselves require further analysis, one area of inquiry that m ight shed light on their interrelation is a turn to the origin of nations. A nderson's history of the nation as a concept/construct locates the origins of the nation at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe— which, as discussed at length in C hapter 2, was also the period of the Gothic and melodrama's developm ent and rise. In the context of my interest in how the genres of horror and m elodram a participate in building nation-ness, the nation's historical appearance m ust be dialogically contextualized with these two other new influential forms of ordering experience. Of particular note here in Anderson's history of the nation is the construct's r e s p o n s e to th e d e m a n d s of the day: In W estern Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the daw n of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought. The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought w ith it its own modern darkness. With the 240 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part com posed did not disappear... What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation.8 A nderson locates the rise of the nation as emerging out of a complex web of social and political crucibles, specifically the decline of religion in the face of science and rationality of the Enlightenment and the decline of the dynastic realms, galvanized by the French Revolution. Nations, Anderson argues, fill the epistemological gap left by the breakdown of monarchic and religious certainty. "Few things were (are) better suited" to the "secular transform ation" of dynastic and religious values than nations — "few things" except the historical melodrama and Gothic, which we have already noted were direct secularizing responses to the epistemological shifts of Revolution and Enlightenm ent. All responding to the same conditions and all seeking to take over in secularized fashions the former functions of the monarchy and religion, we can begin to form ulate a framework for understanding how horror, m elodram a and nation might come together, sharing larger ideological intentions of constructing knowledge, spirituality and morality in a post- sacred, post-monarchic era. I would even go so far as to suggest that in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first century popular culture, the horrific and m elodram atic might indeed at times be constitutive of nation—a 241 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. perspective which the cases of Peter Jackson and Pedro Almodovar seem to suggest. Examining precisely how the functions of genre and nation interrelate in the increasingly globalized and commercialized popular cultures of the last century clearly represents an exciting avenue of further investigation. The particular work of the horrific and melodramatic are curiously attuned to the problematics of the nation, as we can see in their shared histories. What I have tried to explore in this dissertation is the dynamic, mobile and at times surprising movements of genre across the borders of genre itself, gender, sexuality, reception practices, taste, class and nation. The horrific and the melodramatic open a range of speaking positions, giving compelling voice to subject positions that have been traditionally marginalized, offering all of their power of emotions and pain to lend force to their points of view. In the imagination of conflicted identities, the horrific and the m elodram atic often can be found haunting the margins. 2 4 2 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. ENDNOTES 1 This "what's hot or not" sense of cultural capital is different from Bourdieu's formulation of an individual's "cultural capital" as the equation of one's education crossed with one's father's profession. 2 Marsha Kinder, "Refiguring Socialist Spain: An Introduction," Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) 3- 8. 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the O rigin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition (New York: Verso, 1991) 4. 4 Adam Lowenstein, "Hiroshima and the Horror Film: Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba as Trauma Text," paper presented at the Society for Cinem a Studies Conference, Chicago, Illinois, March 9-12,2000. 5 See Sophie Siddique, "Haunting Visions of the Sundelbolong: Vampire Ghosts and the Indonesian National Imaginary," A xes to Grind: Re-Imagining the Horrific in Visual Media and Culture, Harmony H. W u, ed., Special issue of Spectator 22:2 (Fall 2002) 24-33. 6 Anderson, 4. 7 In fact, Anderson even invokes a haunting m etaphor from the language of horror, saying that the phenomena of the "tomb of the unknow n soldier" is "saturated with ghostly national imaginings" (original em phasis) (9). 8 Ibid., 11. 2 4 3 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Bibliography Accinelli, Laura, "New Zealand M aking a Pitch to Filmmakers," <http://ximmKcalendarlive.com/calenderlive/moines/20000315/t000024696.ht ml>, March 15,2000 (Accessed M arch 15, 2000). "Almodovar Appeals X Given to his N ew Film," N ew York Times (April 23, 1990) C12. Altman, Rick, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999). ."Reusable Packaging: Generic Products and the Recycling Process," Refiguring American Film Genre: Theory and H istory, Nick Browne, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 1-41. ."A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre," Film Genre Reader II, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995) 26-40. . "Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today," Classical Hollyxoood Narrative: The Paradigm W ars, Jane Gaines, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992) 9-47. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Comm unities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition (New York: Verso, 1991). Ansen, David, "Let Us Loose!" Rev. of Tie M e Up! Tie M e Doxim!, dir. by Pedro Almodovar, Newsweek (May 7,1990) 65-66. Auerbach, Nina, Our Vampires, O urselves (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). "Australians Enjoy Jackson's H um our," N ZF ilm (October 1993) 10. Ballaster, Ros, "Wild Nights and Buried Letters: The Gothic 'Unconscious' of Feminist Criticism," M odern Gothic: A Reader, Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, eds. (Manchester: M anchester University Press, 1996) 58-70. 2 4 4 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Barefoot, Guy, G aslight M elodrama: From Victorian London to 1940s Hollywood (New York & London: Continuum , 2001). ."East Lynne to Gas Light: Hollywood, Melodrama and Twentieth- Century Notions of the Victorian," Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, Christine Gledhill, eds. (London: BFI Publishing, 1994) 94-105. Barker, Clive, "O n H orror and Subversion," Gothic Horror: A Reader's Guide from Poe to K ing and Beyond, Clive Bloom, ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998) 99-100. Bathrick, Serafina Kent, "Ragtime: The Horror of Growing up Female (on Carrie)," Jump C u t 14 (M arch 30,1977) 9-14. Becker, Susanne, "Postm odern Feminine Horror Fictions," Modern Gothic: A Reader, Victor Sage and A llan Lloyd Smith, eds. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) 71-80. Bell, Claudia, Inventing Nezo Zealand: Everyday M yths ofPakeha Identity (Auckland: Penguin Books, 1996). Benshoff, H arry, M onsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: M anchester University Press, 1997). Berenstein, Rhona, "M ommie Dearest: Aliens, Rosemary's Baby and Mothering," Journal o f Popular Culture 24:2 (Fall 1990) 55-73. Berman, Marc, "M iram ax to Reopen 'Tie Me Up' with NC-17," Variety (October 15,1990) 40. Bersani, Leo, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and A rt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). "BFI praise for NZ comedy," N Z F ilm (May 1994) 12. Booth, Michael R., English M elodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965). B otting, Fred, Gothic (L on d on : R o u tle d g e , 1996). Bourdieu, Pierre "The Aristocracy of Culture," in Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, Richard Collins, James Curran, Nicholas Garnham, Paddy Scannell, Philip Schlesinger and Colin Sparks, eds. (London: Sage Publications, 1986) 164-193. 2 4 5 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Bourget, Jean Loup, "Social Implications in the Hollywood Genres," Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995) 50-58. "Box Office Success for Jackson's Fifth Feature," NZFilm (May 1997) 57. Braudy, Leo, "The Genre of Nature: Ceremonies of Innocence," Refiguring A m erican Film Genre: Theory and History, Nick Browne, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 278-309. . N atw e Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Brauerhoch, Annette, "Mixed Emotions: Mommie Dearest: Between M elodram a and Horror," Cinema Journal 35:1 (Fall 1995) 53-64. Brennan, Teresa, The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity (London: Routledge, 1992). "British Praise for Jackson's Fourth Feature," NZFilm (October 1995) 12. Britton, A ndrew , "A New Servitude: Bette Davis, Now, Voyager, and the Radicalism of the W oman's Film," Cineaction! 26:27 (1992) 32-59. Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the M ode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Brophy, Philip, "Horrality: The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films," Screen 27:1 (1986) 2-13. Browne, Nick, "Preface," Refiguring American Film Genre: Theory and History, Nick Browne, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) Xi- xiv. . "A m erican Narrative Studies of Film: Between Formalism and Postm odernism ," Quarterly Review of Film Studies 10 (1989) 341-346 Bruzzi, Stella, Rev. of Heavenly Creatures, dir. by Peter Jackson, Sight and Sound (February 1995) 45-46. Bunnell, Charlene, "The Gothic: A Literary Genre's Transition to Film," Planks o f Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1984) 79-100. 2 4 6 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Buscombe, Edward, "The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema," Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995) 11-25. Buscombe, Edward, Christine Gledhill, Alan Lovell, Christopher Williams, "Psychoanalysis and Film," The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, John Caughie and Annette Kuhn, eds. (London: Routledge, 1992) 35-46. Byars, Jackie, A ll That Hollywood Allows: Re-Reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). . "Gazes/Voice/Power: Expanding Psychoanalysis for Feminist Film and Television Theory," Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Teleinsion, E. Deidre Pribram, ed. (New York: Verso, 1988) 110-131. Calder, Peter "'Lord' Leads Biz," Variety (October 19,1998) <http://unnw.findarticles.com/ml312/nl0_v372/21235261/pl/article.jhtml> (Accessed 11 November 2000). Campbell, Russell, "Dismembering the Kiwi Bloke: Representations of Masculinity in Braindead, Desperate Remedies and The Piano" Illusions 24 (Spring 1995) 2-9. Canby, Vincent, "Violence? In the Beholder's Eye," New York Times (May 13, 1990) 21. _."When Love's Ties are Real Ropes," New York Times (May 4,1990) C14. Carroll, Noel, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990). Cartmell, Deborah and I. Q. Hunter, et al, eds. Essays from Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience (London: Pluto Press, 1997). Clarke, Jeremy, "Talent Force: The Remarkable Story of Peter Jackson's Bad Taste," Films and Filming (September 1989) 6-7. Clover, C arol}., Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton U niversity Press, 1992). Coates, Paul, Film at the Intersection of High and Mass Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 2 4 7 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. . The Gorgon's Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image o f Horror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Cohen, Ralph, "Do Postmodern Genres Exist?," Postmodern Genres, Marjorie Perloff, ed. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988) 11-27. Colie, Rosalie Littell, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Collins, Glenn, "Judge Upholds X Rating for Alm odovar Film," Nezo York Times (July 20,1990) C12. . "Judge to Rule in July on X Rating for T ie Me U p!/" Nezo York Times (June 22,1990) C4. Collins, Jim, "Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity," Film Theory Goes to the M ovies, Jim Collins, H ilary Radner, Ava Preacher Collins, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1993) 242-263. Conway, Andrew, "The 'Norasearch' Diaries," <http://zvzvzv.geocities.com/Hollyzoood/Studio/2194/faq2/norasearch/nora_99 -05-21.html> (Accessed 2 February 2001) Corliss, Richard, "A Heavenly Trip Toward Hell," Time (November 21,1994) 110. . "Berating Ratings," Film Comment 25:5 (September-October 1990) 3-13. Corrigan, Timothy, A Cinema Without Walls: M ovies and C ulture after Vietnam (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991). Cowie, Elizabeth, Representing The Woman: Cinema A n d Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Cox, Jeffrey N., ed. Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992). Crane, Jonathan Lake, Terror and Everyday Life: Singular M om ents in the History of the Horror Film (T housand O aks: S a g e P u b lic a tio n s, 1994). "Creatures Sells to More than 40 Countries," N ZFilm (October 1995) 12. 2 4 8 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Creed, Barbara, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993). . "Dark Desires: Male Masochism in the H orror Film," Screening the Male: Exploring M asculinities in H ollyw ood Cinema, Steven Cohan, Ina Rae Hark, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1993) 118-133. . "From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism," Screen 28:2 (Spring 1987) 47-67. Dale, Martin, The M ovie Game: The Film Business in Britain, Europe, and America (Herndon, VA: Cassell, 1997). De Lauretis, Teresa, "Desire in N arrative," A lice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 103-157. Deleuze, Gilles, Masochism: Coldness and C ruelty (New York: Zone Books, 1994). Denby, David, Rev. of Tie M e Up! Tie M e Down!, dir. by Pedro Almodovar, New York (May 14,1990) 106. Dickstein, Morris, "The Aesthetics of Fright," Planks o f Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1984) 65-78. Dika, Vera, Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle, (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990). "'Divinely wicked' Film Wins N ew Yorkers," Onfilm (December 1994) 7. Dixon, Wheeler Winston, ed. Film Genre 2000 (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000). Doane, Mary Ann, "Film and the M asquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator," The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, John Caughie and Annette Kuhn, eds. (London: Routledge, 1992) 227-243. . Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis (N e w York: Routledge, 1991). 2 4 9 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. . "The 'W om an's Film': Possession and Address/' Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in M elodram a and the Woman's Film, Christine Gledhill, ed. (London: BFI Publishing, 1987) 283-298. . The Desire to Desire: The W om an's Film o f the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Doherty, Thomas, "Genre, Gender, and the Aliens Trilogy," The Dread of Difference: Gender in the M odern Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) 181-199. Doole, Kerry, "Canada Crits Kiwis," Onfilm (April 1993) 4. Doty, Alexander, M aking Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Edelstein, David, "Eastern H aunts" Film Comment 24 (May-June 1988) 48-52. Eisner, Lotte H., The H aunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence o f M ax Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Elleray, Michelle, "H eavenly Creatures in Godzone" Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, Ellis Hanson, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) 223-240. Elsaesser, Thomas, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," Home is W here the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, Christine Gledhill, ed. (London: BFI Publishing, 1987 [reprint edition 1992]) 43-69. . "Desire Denied, Deferred or Squared?," Screen 29:3 (Summer 1988) 106- 115. Evans, Walter, "M onster Movies: A Sexual Theory," Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1984) 53-64. Fea, Sue, " M ovie b rin g s $ 1 5 m illio n to Q u een stow n ," <http://umno.stuff co.n z/in l/prm t/0,1103,46871 Oat 640, FF.html> November 3, 2000 (Novem ber 11, 2000). Feeney, Mark, "Three-'Rings' Circus," Boston Globe (December 19,2000) D1+. 250 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Fernandez-Santos, Angel, "Atada y bien atada," El Pais (January 23,1990). "Film Extras are Being Exploited," <http://w w w .stuff.co.nz/inl/print/0,1103,432351a2202,FF.html> October 15, 2000 (Accessed November 11,2000). Fischer, Lucy, CineM atem ihj: Film, Motherhood, Genre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Fletcher, John, "Primal Scenes and the Female Gothic: Rebecca and Gaslight," Screen 36:4 (Winter 1995) 341-370. . "M elodram a," Screen 29:3 (Summer 1988) 2-12. Foucault, Michel, The H istory of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, Robert H urley, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). Fourth W orld, The: The Heavenly Creatures Web Site, <http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Studio/2194/> (Accessed 29 January 2001). Fowler, Alastair, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and M odes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). Franceschina, John, "Introduction," Sisters of Gore: Seven Gothic Melodramas by British Women, 1790-1843 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997) 1-13. Freeland, Cynthia, "Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films," Post-Theory: R econstructing Film Studies, David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, eds. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) 195-218. Friedberg, Anne, "A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification," Psychoanalysis & Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1990) 36-45. Fuentes, Victor, "Alm odovar's Postmodern Cinema: A Work in Progress..." Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodovar, Kathleen M. V e r n o n a n d Barbara M orris, eds. (W estport: G reenw ood Press, 1995) 155-170. "Full Steam Ahead for Michael J. Fox," Onfilm (June 1995) 15. 2 5 1 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Gallafent, Ed, "Black Satin: Fantasy, Murder and the Couple in G aslight and Rebecca," Screen 29:3 (Summer 1988) 84-103. Gates, David and Devin Gordon, "One Ring to Lure Them All," N ewsweek (29 January 2001) 60-61. Gelder, Ken, ed. The Horror Reader (London: Routledge, 2000). Gerhart, Mary, Genre Choices, Gender Questions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). Gerstner, David and Sarah Greenlees, "Cinema by Fits and Starts: New Zealand Film Practices in the Twentieth Century," CineAction! 51 (February 2000) 36-47. Gianvito, John, "An Inconsolable Darkness: The Reappearance and Redefinition of Gothic in Contemporary Cinema," Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Tiventieth Century A rt, Christoph Grunenberg, ed. (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997) 37-50. Giles, Dennis, "Conditions of Pleasure in Horror Cinema," Planks o f Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1984) 38-52. Glamuzina, Julie and Alison Laurie, Parker & Hulme: A Lesbian View (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1991). Gledhill, Christine, "Rethinking Genre," Reinventing Film Studies, C. Gledhill, Linda Williams, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 221- 243. . "Pleasurable Negotiations," Female Spectators: Looking A t Film and Television, E. Deidre Pribram, ed. (New York: Verso, 1988) 64-89. . "The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation," Home is Where the H eart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, Christine Gledhill, ed. (London: BFI Publishing, 1987) 5-39. . "Dialogue," Cinema Journal 25:4 (Summer 1986) 44-48. Goldie, Terry, "Violence," Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Kingston, M ontreal, London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989) 85-106. 2 5 2 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Grant, Barry Keith, ed., Film Genre: Theory and Criticism (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977). Grant, Barry Keith, "Introduction," The Dread o f Difference: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) 1-12. __. "Experience and Meaning in Genre Films," Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995) 114-128. ."Introduction," Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995) xv-xx. Greenberg, Harvey Roy, "King Kong: The Beast in the Boudoir —or, 'You Can't Marry That Girl, You're a Gorilla'," The Dread o f Difference: Gender in the Modem Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) 338-351. . "Reel Significations: An Anatomy of Psychoanalytic Film Criticism," Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 15-37. . "Reimagining the Gargoyle: Psychoanalytic Notes on A lien and the Contemporary 'Cruel' Horror Film," Screen M emories: H ollyw ood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 145-168. Gunning, Tom, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator," Viewing Positions: W ays o f Seeing Film, Linda Williams, ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994) 114- 133. ."The Horror of Opacity: The Melodrama of Sensation in the Plays of Andre de Lorde," Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, Christine Gledhill, eds. (London: BFI Publishing, 1994) 50-61. Guy, Camille, "Feminism and Sexual Abuse: Troubled Thoughts on Some New Zealand Issues" Feminist Review 54 (Spring 1996) 154-198. Haberman, Lia, "2001: A User's Guide," <http://www.eonline.com /> (Accessed 31 January 2001). Haill, Catherine, "Preface," Sisters of Gore: Seven Gothic M elodramas By British Women, 1790-1843 (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997). 2 5 3 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Halberstam, Judith, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology o f Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Hardy, Ann, "Heavenly Creatures and Transcendental Style: A Literal Reading," Illusions 26 (Winter 1997) 2-9. Hardy, Phil, ed., The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Horror (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1995). Harley, Ruth "Cultural Capital and the Knowledge Economy," <http://pssm.ssc.govemm ent.nz/previous/1999/papers/rharley.asp> September 30,1999 (Accessed January 2, 2001). Haskell, Molly, Rev. of Tie M e Up! Tie M e Down!, dir. by Pedro Almodovar, Video Review (January 1991) 60. Hawkins, Joan, Cutting Edge: A rt-H orror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of M innesota Press, 2000). Heath, Stephen, "Difference," The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, John Caughie and Annette Kuhn, eds. (London: Routledge, 1992) 47- 106. Heilman, Robert Bechtold, Tragedy and M elodrama: Versions of Experience (Seattle and London: University of W ashington Press, 1968). Heim, Otto, W riting Along Broken Lines: Violence and E thnicity in Contemporary Maori Fiction (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998). "Heavenly Creatures a 'Global' Creation," O nfilm (February 1993) 8. Heldreth, Leonard, "The Beast Within: Sexuality and Metamorphosis in Horror Films," Eros in the M ind's Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in A rt and Film, Donald Palumbo, ed. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986) 117-125. Heller, Terry, The Delights of Terror: A n A esthetics o f the Tale o f Terror (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). Helms, Michael, "Who's Scared of The Frighteners?," Fangoria 154 (July 1996) 34-40, 79. . "Action Jackson," Fangoria (April 1993). 2 5 4 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Henderson, Jennifer, "Hose Stalking: Heavenly Creatures as Feminist Horror," Canadian Journal o f Film Studies 6:1 (Spring 1997) 43-60. Hogan, David J., Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Com pany, Inc., 1986). Hollinger, Karen, "The M onster as Woman: Two Generations of Cat People," The Dread of Difference: G ender in the Modern Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) 296-308. Horrocks, Roger, "N ew Zealand Cinema: Cultures, Policies, Films," Twin Peeks: A ustralian and N ew Zealand Feature Films, Deb Verhoeven, ed. (Melbourne: D am ned Publishing, 1999) 129-137. Hoskins, Colin, Stuart M cFadyen and Adam Finn, Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics o f the Business (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Huff, Richard, "Shackles on Tie M e Up?: Kunstler calls X rating arbitrary," Variety (June 27,1990) 10. "Huge Release for Jackson's Fifth Release" NZFilm (October 1996) 12. Hughes, Winifred, The M aniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). Hunt, Dennis, "New NC-17 Rating May Give Some Films More Exposure," Los Angeles Times (September 29,1990) F3. Hutchings, Peter, "M asculinity and the Horror Film," You Tarzan: M asculinity, M oines, and M en , Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim, eds. (New York: St. M artin's Press, 1993) 84-94. "Integrity and the b.o.," (editorial) Onfilm (April 1993) 8. "Jackson's Fifth Now Shooting," N ZF ilm (October 1995) 12. Jacobs, Lea, "The W om an's Picture and the Poetics of Melodrama," Camera Obscura 31 (January-May 1993) 121-147. James, Bev & Kay Saville-Smith, Gender Culture, and Power: Challenging New Zealand's Gendered Culture (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1994). 2 5 5 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. James, Colin, “Embarrassm ent of Riches: Can New Zealand's Film Industry Survive Success?," Far Eastern Economic Review (Dec. 28,1995-Jan. 4, 1996) 95-97. . N e w Territory: The Transformation of New Zealand, 1984-92 (Wellington: Bridget W illiams Books, 1992). Jancovich, M ark, ed. Horror, The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2001). Jermyn, Deborah, "Rereading the Bitches from Hell: A Feminist A ppropriation of the Female Psychopath," Screen 37:3 (Autumn 1996) 251-267. Juno, Andrea and V. Vale, Incredibly Strange Films (RE/Search, vol. #10) (San Francisco: V/Search Publications, 1986). Kaplan, E. Ann, "From Plato's Cave to Freud's Screen," Psychoanalysis and Cinema (N ew York: Routledge, 1990) 1-23. . "M othering, Feminism and Representation: The Maternal in M elodram a and the Woman's Film 1910-40," Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, Christine Gledhill, ed. (London: BFI Publishing, 1987) 113-137. Kauffman, Stanley, "Bound for Love," Rev. of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, dir. by Pedro Almodovar, The Neiv Republic (May 14,1990) 30-31. Kendrick, W alter M., The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment (New York: G rove Weidenfeld, 1991). Kinder, M arsha, ed. Refiguring Spain: Cinema/Media/Representation (Durham: Duke U niversity Press, 1997). Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). ."Pleasure and the New Spanish Mentality: A Conversation with Pedro A lm odovar," Film Quarterly 41:1 (Fall 1987) 33-44. Kinder, M arsha and Beverle Houston, "Seeing is Believing: The Exorcist and D on't Eook Noiv," American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film , Gregory A. Waller, ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987) 44-61. 2 5 6 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. "K ing Kong Will Be Next Jackson Movie/' NZFilm (October 1996) 12. King, Stephen, Danse Macabre (New York: Everest House, 1981). Kissinger, "'Tie Me Up' Distrib could have its Hands Tied by Tough New York Rule," Variety (July 4,1990) 7+. Klawans, Stuart, Rev. of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Doam!, dir. by Pedro Almodovar, The Nation (May 28,1990) 754-755. Klinger, Barbara, "'Cinema/Ideology/Criticism' Revisited: The Progressive Genre," Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995) 74-90. Knee, Adam, "Gender, Genre, Argento," The Dread of Difference: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) 213-230. Knee, Adam, "Generic Change in the Cinema," iris 19 (1995) 31-39. Kristeva, Julia, The Towers of Horror: A n Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Laidlaw, Chris, Rights of Passage: Beyond the New Zealand Identity Crisis (Auckland: Hodder Moa Beckett Publishers Limited, 1999). Laplanche, Jean and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality," Formations of Fantasy, Victor Burgin, James Donald, Cora Kaplan, eds. (New York: Methuen and Company, Limited, 1986) 5-34. Lindsey, Shelley Stamp, "Horror, Femininity and Carrie's Monstrous Puberty," The Dread of Difference: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) 279- 295. Lowenstein, Adam, "Hiroshima and the Horror Film: Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba as Trauma Text," paper presented at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Chicago, Illinois, March 9-12, 2000. . "It's Only a Movie: Art and Exploitation in Last House on the Left and Virgin Spring" paper presented at the 18th Biennial Ohio University Film Conference, State of the Fantastic: Horror Films, N ew Interactive Media and the Contemporary Imagination, Athens Ohio, November 6-8, 1997. 2 5 7 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. Lyons, Charles, "Rebels without a Pause: New Line Cinema Corp. Takes Risks in Film Production," Variety (September 11, 2000) <http://ivww.findarticles.com/cf_0/ml312/4_380/65368711/pl/article.jhtml > (Accessed November 12,2000). Mangravite, Andrew, "Once Upon a Time in the Crypt" Film Com m ent 29 (January-February 1993) 50-52, 59-60. Maslin, Janet, "Is NC-17 an X in a Clean Raincoat?" Nezo York Times (October 21,1990) 1+. Mason, Jeffrey D. "The Face of Fear," Melodrama, James Redm ond, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 213-221. Mason, M. S., "Does the NC-17 Rating Equal an X?" Christian Science M onitor (January 29,1991) 13. Masse, Michelle A., In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Mathews, Jack, "What Change in Film Rating System Means," Los Angeles Times (September 27,1990) F1+. . "Both Sides in Suit Over Film Ratings Scored by Judge," Los Angeles Times (July 20,1990) D2. Mayne, Judith, "Paradoxes of Spectatorship," Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993) 77-102. McCarty, John, Splatter Movies: Breaking the Last Taboo o f the Screen (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984). McDonagh, Maitland, Broken Mirrors/Broken M inds: The Dark D ream s o f Dario Argento (New York: Citadel Press Book, 1994). . "The Elegant Brutality of Dario Argento," Film Com m ent 29 (January- February 1993) 55-58. M cD onald, Law rence, "A Critique of the Ju d gem en t o f B ad T a ste or B e y o n d Braindead Criticism: The Films of Peter Jackson," Illusions (Winter 1993) 10-15. 2 5 8 R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission. McLarty, Lianne, "Beyond the Veil of the Flesh: Cronenberg and the Disembodiment of Horror," The D read o f Difference: Gender in the Modem Horror Film, Barry Keith G rant, ed. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Wu, Harmony H. (author)

Core Title Bleeding through borders: The horrific imagination, melodramatic traditions and marginal positions

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television Critical Studies

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest,women's studies

Language English

Advisor Kinder, Marsha (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Renov, Michael (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-286279

Unique identifier UC11334898

Identifier 3103980.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-286279 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3103980.pdf

Dmrecord 286279

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Wu, Harmony H.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA