Question: The Brood could be a called a “psychodrama” as much as a “body horror” film. How is horror cinema like psychoplasmics? Is Cronenberg – like Raglan – encouraging us to express rage? If so, at what?
Response: Horror films should serve the same purpose as Raglan’s therapy in that they should help us to turn our inner feelings into an outward expression.
I think there is some connection between this emotional catharsis that takes place and a physical response that we experience. When we find ourselves horrified, our bodies react: we get goosebumps, we jump, etc. Still, there are more obvious symptoms of our fear. We might scream, for instance, and more extreme situations might “scare the shit out of” us, literally.
I’m interested in these instances where the reaction to something horrific can be linked to the movement of something from the body and outward. Creed says that although these moments in film where the body rids itself of waste might initially disgust us, they also provide pleasure for us, as we are excited by “breaking the taboo on filth – sometimes described as a pleasure in perversity.” This pleasure in seeing images of blood, shit, and vomit might provoke memories of the early stages of development, when the child is still playing with its body and its wastes, not yet restricted by the laws and order of a world that regulates a clean, pure self.
(Dr. Arnzen: I remember you telling me about an article you read on The Tingler, which made some connections between one’s reaction to horror films and, well… shitting. Would you happen to still have that article?)
If you accept the idea that on a subconscious level, we take pleasure in breaking the “taboo of filth,” then perhaps Cronenberg’s film does provoke rage… a rage that he suggests should be directed toward mothers, who correct children during potty training until they learn to control their bodies.
Posted by Kate Cielinski at September 26, 2004 7:28 PMAnother thoughtful entry on the significance of the grotesque and abject. I like your final thought about rage against potty training, but I think you can go much deeper into the movie. Think about the power struggle between patriarchy and matriarchy played out in this movie -- and the "rage" against all members of the family (who in my view are framed as "abusers" in one way or another throughout)...perhaps it's rage against parenting in general, or a challenge to the necessity of punishment in the name of civilization.
It seems to me that the big "gross out" scene is the climax of the film -- which usually gets the most vocal reaction of disgust out of the audience (the stuff with the little gnomes usually generates a frisson coupled with laughter, I think...we see ourselves in the hooded androgynous children, perhaps, but not so much in the embryonic sac that mother licks... something about the organic moment there is the very definition of the abject: that which is a part of ourselves, yet which we must deny in order to be "civilized". Oh, it's all so complex -- we need to talk about this theory further next time we meet!
I liked the links you provided to Kristeva sources online. You might find Mary Douglas' book Purity and Danger of interest, but it's difficult to track down.
I do have that Tingler article somewhere in my files and I'll see if I can dig it up for you this morning. I'd be happy to pass a copy to you along with a loan of The Tingler DVD (if you haven't seen it yet)...in that somewhat campy film, the connection to the monstrous-feminine isn't readily apparent to me...but it's probably all the more submerged and repressed. In fact, the more that I think about the characters in the movie, the more I realize that yes, the abject nature of the little wriggler in that film is connected to the female body (which it is literally taken from) and the film portrays the abject, not just in terms of the "fecal horror" but also in the bathtub full of blood and...well, I'll leave the rest to you.
Posted by: Mike Arnzen at September 27, 2004 9:17 AMOh, and I forgot to say that just as Raglan has Michael "go through it to the end" in The Brood, so too does The Tingler literally encourage the audience of the film to "scream for your lives!" So there is an interesting connection here in the way that horror films -- like Raglan -- provide a psychological function of catharsis to the audience.
Posted by: Mike Arnzen at September 27, 2004 9:20 AM