I read Stephen King’s Carrie this weekend, and it was a fascinating read for me. It was the earliest example of Stephen King’s work that I’ve read so far, and I thought the whole voice of the novel was entirely different from his later works. Of course there are some similarities in style, but I still found it interesting to compare the style of this novel with King’s other work.
Naturally, my main concern while reading Carrie was King’s portrayal of women. I’ve read my fair share of King novels, but now that I’m looking back (after reading several critical essays as well), I see that King has often had female “monsters” in his novels. It’s easy for a Feminist critic to analyze his work, but I think it would be interesting if there was more work done from a psychoanalytic perspective, focusing specifically on male sexual anxieties. I’m truly beginning to think that his female characters (which often share similar horrifying traits) speak to some kind of preoccupation with or fear he has of the opposite sex. The very fact that he wrote an entire book about menstruation – and the doom it brings – speaks largely of these fears.
In Carrie, menstruation is so closely connected to feelings of horror and disgust. In the shower, when Carrie first receives her period, she is pelted with tampons and sanitary napkins from the girls who are horrified by the display. They scream at Carrie “clean yourself up” and “plug it up,” and they’re mystified about how a 17-year-old girl could not have known about menstruation (King 7). What I find so alarming about this account is not just that the author could be expressing disgust at menstruation, but that he shows women themselves being horrified by their own biology.
Then, the horror of menstruation is reinforced by Carrie’s mother, Margaret White, a religious fanatic who believes that the start of menstruation represents “the Curse of Blood” originally set upon Eve by God (56). Margaret is so convinced that women are evil because of their reproductive capacities that she refrained from having sex with her husband, and once pregnant, almost killed her newborn daughter (218).
And of course, there’s the prank that provokes Carrie’s rage. Chris Hargensen initially asks her boyfriend, Billy Nolan, to help her put Carrie in her place. Billy takes up Chris’ request, but the idea of a prank goes too far when he obtains pig blood and sets it above the prom stage. When Carrie is crowned queen and the blood pours down on her, one can’t help but think of the shower scene and associate the gruesome crowning with menstruation. In my opinion, this image is even more shocking and disgusting in film, where an image is even more confrontational and immediate than words.
But disgusting as it may be, menstruation is also the source of Carrie’s power. The various researchers whose documentations are cited throughout the novel explain that Carrie’s telekinetic abilities emerged due to her period, or due to the traumatic experience that she endured in the shower as a result of her period. Either way, Carrie ultimately becomes powerful when she enters womanhood and the tables turn. Where once Carrie was the butt of every joke, she is now the one laughing as she destroys the town and those around her.
What does Carrie represent? She is portrayed as a figure of abject horror and utter disgust. Throughout the novel, King describes her as being animal-like (“a frog among swans,” “sacrificial goat,” “a patient ox,” “bovinely,” “an ape,” and “cow”) and she is seen as ugly because she does not have the same looks of the girls around her. She dresses conservatively and her body is hidden underneath her clothes. However, when Carrie attends the prom, she wears a form-fitting dress that calls attention to her breasts and curvy waist. It seems that the night Carrie finally embraces her body (and her sexuality), she loses control and causes the destruction of an entire town.
Why is Carrie so terrifying? Is it because of her body, or because her body is so powerful? Although Carrie is described through derogatory terms throughout the novel, I would argue that she is also admired because she does possess so much power. She becomes more horrifying because she wields total control over everyone, and this power to do whatever she wants is what makes her ultimately terrifying.
Additionally, I was very concerned with the violent sexual encounters between men and women within the novel. Chris and Billy Nolan’s “relationship” (if one can call it that) is based solely on sex and violence. Billy, although disgusted with his “pig” of a girlfriend, remains with her. Chris, for some reason, does not leave him, despite his abuse. There is one instance when King describes Chris as laying “passively” beneath her lovers “until it was over” and then reaching climax later by herself “while viewing the incident as a single closed loop of memory” (133). Chris’ passivity and waiting until sex was over hardly seems to account for enjoyment. Yet King describes Chris in a way that suggests she takes pleasure in painful sexual experiences. Is this why she stays with Billy?
Also, Carrie herself was the product of a rape. When Margaret refused the advances of husband, he left the house. He returned several hours later, apparently drunk, and “took” Margaret White. Margaret called it “dirty fucking,” but because of her previous refusal to have sex with her husband, this appears to be rape. What’s worse is that Margaret “liked it” (217). Gee, Stephen. You write female characters with startling authenticity.
I very rarely go to the theater to see films (because honestly, how many worthwhile films are shown in mainstream theaters?), but I had to see The Grudge as soon as possible. I went to see it Friday afternoon, and although it satisfied my desire for a good scare, I was ultimately disappointed.
I realize that discussing The Grudge in relation to my study is a difficult task, because it is directed by Takashi Shimizu and would require me to account for cultural differences with which I am not too familiar. However, there are some questions I think I can raise without stepping too far into unfamiliar territory.
[Some spoilers…]
The plot unfolds through a non-linear arrangement of scenes, but the general plot is that Karen, an American student studying abroad in Japan, is sent to replace a student who has not shown up at the house where she is supposed to act as a caregiver. As Karen approaches the house, she senses something is wrong, and she makes several alarming discoveries when she enters the house.
Hours later, cops arrive at the house after the death of Karen’s patient, and no one can say exactly what has happened.
Through the course of the movie, we discover that the house is “haunted” by members of a family that lived there before. Apparently, the dead bodies of the wife and husband were found in the attic, and it was believed that the husband killed his wife and then himself. Their young boy was also found dead.
By the end of the movie, we learn that the husband killed his wife, Kayako, in an act of rage when he discovered a shrine dedicated to a professor with whom she’d fallen in love. The professor, unaware of her fascination, comes to the house after tracking down the sender of love letters. At the house, he discovers the shrine and zillions of photographs, and then finds Kayako’s bloodied corpse.
And due to the passion and fury of the circumstances, the house is “cursed” with the anger and sorrow of the ruined family. And one would expect the husband’s spirit to be the one continuing “the grudge,” right? He was, afterall, the character who murdered his loved ones and suffered such humiliation and disappointment.
However, it is Kayako who seems the biggest threat to anyone who enters the household. Her spirit hovers in the corners of rooms, looming over terrified spectators, upon whom she will later inflict pain. Even when people escape the house, she follows them. She tracks down the sister of the new house residents in her office building, and later follows the woman to her apartment. The spirit then sucks the terrified woman away from the safety of her own bed. And when gutsy mystery-hunters like Karen, her boyfriend, and the detective working the case enter the house, they are hunted down not by the ghost of the husband, but by the vengeful wife.
I was disappointed in The Grudge primarily because the plot just didn’t seem to add up; why was Kayako the spirit who was wreaking havoc? Shouldn’t it have been the husband? Granted, she was a terrifying figure, but the only reason I can offer for her horror is the fact that she was an obsessive person. She committed her energies to stalking a person she did not even know, and it led to her death. Her life was consumed with the hunt for a person she desired, and it could be possible that this obsessive behavior translated into the afterlife. Instead of love, she sought other things like pain and murder.
I don’t even buy this, though. The husband remains such a small figure; we only see him in photographs (on maybe just three occasions?) and in a short flashback relaying the discovery of his wife’s shrine and her murder. To me, it feels like there was a deliberate attempt to portray Kayako as the terrifying creature, and the reasons behind that decision are never made apparent to me.
The words of so many male horror directors keep popping up in my mind. Argento said he’d prefer to watch the murder of a pretty woman to that of an ugly man. De Palma claimed that the reason why female victims work better than male victims is because “you fear more for her than you would for a husky man.” And then Hitchcock: “Torture the women!” Obviously, women lend themselves to being ideal victims, but do they also make for the best monsters? Carol Clover argues that the Final Girl in slasher films is often masculinized, and that the serial killers are feminized men. I realize that The Grudge is not a slasher film, but I find myself wondering if there is actually something masculine in Kayako’s character, which allows her to be so terrifying in the film. The husband’s spirit is weak in comparison with her, and he is the one we would really expect to be vengeful. What is suggested by the fact that the woman is the source of terror and agony when she seemingly has no grudge to hold?
I’ve started reading Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, and the first chapter focuses on slasher films, movies in which “a psychokiller slashes to death a string of mostly female victims” (21). Clover analyzes several slasher films (including Psycho, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and identifies the source of the killer’s psychotic behavior as some form of sexual frustration or dysfunction, normally developed in childhood.
Although I have been a fan of horror films since I was a child, I’ve always avoided these slasher films – to this day, I haven’t seen many of those which are discussed in the texts I’ve been reading. However, there is a more recent slasher film that I have seen, May, which stands out in my mind because it seems to contradict a lot of Clover says about gender in slasher films.
May (the debut film by director Lucky McKee) is about a young woman who is a bit of a social misfit. She lives on her own, and it’s never really made clear where her parents are or what happened to them, and her only companion is a doll she keeps locked in a glass box. May works as a veterinarian’s assistant, which has allowed her to perfect her sewing skills, but other than her job, her life is uneventful…
Until she meets Adam, an aspiring filmmaker who appreciates May’s eccentricities. May falls for him (and for his hands, which she finds especially appealing), but when the two share a kiss, their budding relationship dies. May bites a bit too hard for Adam’s liking, and he gets freaked out by her behavior.
This rejection seems to set a trigger off inside of May. For the rest of the film, we witness May luring victims to her house where she butchers them, saving her favorite parts to use later in assembling a life-size doll that she can later cuddle and adore. The best things about this doll are that it will embody every beautiful thing May has seen in her victims, and it will never reject her. Rejection, which May has received from her parents and her peers, will never be an option for the doll – it’s not alive.
I think May is an interesting film to view in contrast to Clover’s ideas of slasher films. While Clover says something interesting about the male fury in the slasher film’s psychotic characters, I think it’s ultimately one-sided. To Clover, psychotic tendencies are the result of male sexual dysfunction and anger toward the opposite sex (the mother figure, specifically), but if she (and the rest of us) has unfortunately forgotten that women can be crazy, too?
Sexual dysfunction occurs (or is discovered) less frequently in women, and I think that’s one of the reasons why we see women portrayed less often as serial killers or psychotics. However, I think it’s interesting when we do see women portrayed as killers… especially when their rage is as passionate as May’s.
I think May tries to say something about psychological development. The absence of parental figures haunts the viewer’s mind; throughout the film, one questions where May’s parents are and how they could let their daughter grow into this troubled person. Not having parents has caused May’s to act differently than her peers. Although she is forced to grow up and care for herself by getting a job and supporting herself financially, she is also emotionally needy and immature. She clings to her doll for love, and on the rare occasions when people talk to her, she frightens them away with her all-too-sudden, obsessive devotion.
Because May has not integrated herself fully into society, she isn’t aware of how to interact with others. May just doesn’t play well with others (a form of rule-breaking and abjection?), and when she frightens people, she does the only thing she can do to keep them in her life: she kills them. The doll that May makes will represent the companion she’s never had, and will never have due to her failure to adjust to social order.
I’m particularly interested in Kristeva’s idea of the abject, and when I asked Dr. Arnzen for a film he thought might have elements of abjection, he recommended John Carpenter’s The Thing.
I spent the first forty-five minutes trying to find something abject about the film, and then it hit me.
In a nutshell, the story is about a team of researchers living on a base in Antarctica. Then, a shape-changing alien begins to stalk them. Once I realized that this plot was primarily concerned with BODIES, it wasn’t hard to find examples of the abject at all.
“The thing” moves from one host to another. When it inhabits a body, it remains hidden inside while it tries to merge itself with the physical appearance of the host. The two bodies coexist, and the alien uses the human body for a disguise while it continues its covert attacks.
But, as one member of the research crew states, “this thing doesn’t want to show itself,” and if it does, it’s vulnerable. For the moment “the thing” emerges from the human body, it’s exposed. When the crew can pinpoint the infected members, they can stop the alien from moving to another body.
When “the thing” does emerge, it’s a nasty sight. It’s gross and gory and bloody. It has tentacles and strange clawed legs. What makes it even more horrifying is the fact that it preserves some of its host’s physical characteristics – so the crew members may end up looking at a freakish alien with the head of one of their friends. The alien becomes an extension of the human.
Maybe I’m a bit off in my analysis, but this human/alien hybrid sounds a bit like our own bodies and their abject extensions. We are humans, but there are things inside of us, things that freak us out, and when they emerge, we’re horrified… disgusted.
These “things” are bodily wastes – urine, feces, vomit, blood – things that were once part of us, in a strange way, but once they are expelled, we want to distance ourselves and deny their existence. The fact that these things, as gross as they may be, came from our bodies, is truly horrifying to us.
Throughout the film, the characters remark on “the thing” and how it changes a person. “I think it rips through your clothes when it takes over you,” one says. The inability to control “the thing” reminds me of the anal stage of development, when mommy teaches the child how to control his or her bowel movements. Failure to control the expulsion of the body’s wastes make one “horrifying” in the eyes of most people, who expect this behavior and control to be learned.
Another point of interest: the film is constructed in a way that draws attention to the characters’ movements as they move from inside of the base and outside, and back in. They attempt to bar the “infected” by either locking them in isolation (keeping them in), or preventing them from re-entry once they’ve already gone outside. One scientist, who has been expelled from the base, pleads with MacReady, the crew’s leader: “I want to come back inside!” It’s no fun being an outcast, and this scientist is rejected by his crew members as if he were… well, shit.
I definitely think that this film warrants multiple viewings, but I wanted to post some initial thoughts here.
In The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Creed outlines the forms the monstrous feminine can take in film. After reading about “the archaic mother” and “the monstrous womb,” and after watching the films Creed uses to illustrate these forms (Alien and The Brood), I have to conclude that there is a more encompassing (even if more general) form of the monstrous-feminine: the evil mother.
According to Creed, “the archaic mother is the parthenogentic mother, the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end.” The mother alien in Alien fits this description. Her reproductive capacity is unlimited; she spawns an innumerable amount of offspring throughout the series without the aid of a male counterpart. The set design (the twisted, dark caverns of the spaceships and the large vaginal entrances to the foreign spaceship) echoes the female body and reproductive system. The internal structure of the spaceship appears dark, mysterious, and threatening, suggesting that there is something sinister about the female body.
And while Alien constantly refers to this dark image of woman’s reproductive role, it is not so different from what we see in other horror films where “mothers” are concerned. Mothers, regardless of the form they take, whether it is as an archaic being or as a monstrous womb, are inherently bad. And if the mother is not bad, then her offspring surely will be (Rosemary’s Baby), and she is to be blamed for her child’s monstrosity.
In The Brood, Nola is depicted as inheriting her neurosis from her mother and father. At the end of the film, Cronenberg suggests that Candy has inherited this same behavior from her mother; like Nola, she is beginning to develop strange sores on her body, a possible sign that her rage is beginning to surface. I also think that the mother alien and Nola are similar characters because both are capable of spawning children by relying on their own devices. And in The Exorcist, Regan MacNeil is possessed by the devil. It’s hinted that the devil invades the MacNeil household because it lacks a father figure, which suggests that women like Chris MacNeil are threats to the patriarchy. Women in both their reproductive and maternal roles are threats to the patriarchy, and I think this accounts for the portrayal of mothers as destructive beings.
Considering Freud, there are a number of threats that mothers pose to their children. They are objects of desire and sexual frustration (Oedipal complex). They are either castrated, or capable of castrating (the lack/Little Hans). They enforce the law about physical cleanliness and purity during the psychosexual stages of development, and they possess magical reproductive powers (babies grow inside of them! Egads!).
In this sense, mothers are threatening figures, period. I don’t see any need to subdivide mothers into different sub-types of the monstrous-feminine, because the source of their power stems from their reproductive abilities. Whether the mother is giving birth to disfigured, evil children (The Brood) or spawning legions of alien offspring (Alien
I wanted to return to this quote that I posted at the beginning of my study:
"I like women. If they are pretty and have a good figure, I'd rather watch them be murdered than a fat ugly man."-Dario Argento
When I first found this quote, I thought it was amusing, but couldn’t find any deeper meaning. I assumed it said something of masochistic behavior and voyeurism, but as I was reading Creed, this idea jumped out at me:
“[In Carol Clover’s view] women are chosen more often as victims because they are permitted a greater range of emotional expression. ‘Angry displays of force may belong to the male, but crying, cowering, screaming, fainting, trembling, begging for mercy belong to the female. Abject terror, in short, is gendered feminine” (125).
I buy this, and I think Argento would too. Screaming and shrieking make for good horror cinema, don't they?
But I don’t think it’s safe to restrict the reasoning for female victims to their ability to deliver theatrical displays. I think that women are victims because men fear them – and I agree with Creed that this fear is rooted in the belief that women (and their vaginas) are capable of castration.
It’s not coincidental that so many slasher films (and horror films in general) juxtapose moments of sexual intimacy with murder and death. According to Royal Brown (as cited in Creed 125), this stems from “‘anti-female aspects of a very American brand of the Judeo-Christian mythology’ in which woman, because of her sexual appetites, is held responsible for man’s fall from innocence.” It’s a story as old as that of Adam and Eve, folks, and it’s told over and over again. For instance, consider Stephen King’s Thinner, where a man runs over a person while driving and receiving a sexual favor from his wife, and later becomes the recipient of a terrible curse. The sexualized woman is the root of all evil (so says Mrs. White in Carrie.
I think it’s interesting to consider this supposed insatiable appetite in women alongside the numerous cultural myths that portray vaginas as devouring mouths. There are stories of toothed vaginas from populations in all areas of the world, and these speak to male fears of castration. This treat of castration or of being devoured is often accompanied by some sort of sexual promise, though. The Sirens lured men with their beautiful bodies and signing, but when the men swam too close to the Sirens on shore, they were ripped apart by the jagged rocks underneath the surf. We also see the threat of castration paired with sexual fulfillment when we analyze vampire films. The bloodied mouth and its apparent fangs are often parted in pleasure. And when those fangs pierce the neck of the vampire’s prey, it seems the mood is usually erotic, and not so horrifying at all.
To me, this seems to suggest that there is something pleasurable about the fear of castration. I now recall Creed’s discussion of fetishism as man’s way of “phallusizing” woman. The fetish object is a substitute for woman’s missing phallus, and the fetishist develops his fetish as a way to “believe that woman is like himself.” I’m not sure I understand why there exists in man a desire to see woman as himself. Is this because it masculinizes the woman and therefore eliminates fear of her being “other” or different? And if she does possess a phallus, does she then lose the terrifying vagina that is capable of castration?
And now, after considering all of this, I'd like to ask Argento why he really likes women.