By The Pricking of Whose Thumb? The Moral Force of Castration in “Hostel 2″ (Roth 2007) and “Hard Candy” (Slade 2005)

by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Castration has received much attention from feminist film critics in specific relation to the horror film, particularly from the always dominant psychoanalytic school: Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine and Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women and Chain Saws are not only two of the most influential works on gender and horror film, but both launch their critiques with Freud-goggles placed firmly affixed. The strong link between feminism, horror film and psychoanalysis is not particularly surprising, horror playing out in its merry visceral way the literal result of what happens when Freud’s central premise that women, as Gaylyn Studlar so deftly captures, are defined through “difference, nonphallus, lack”(1).

So pervasive are psychoanalytic feminist critiques of horror–particularly in relation to its central area of concern, gendered bodies–that it is far to easy to forget that other critical configurations may be possible. This is certainly not an absolute–Patricia McCormack’s writing on Italian horror in particular is unflinching in its determination to consistently keep the bar raised outside what is now the traditional rubric of psychoanalysis in relation to screen depictions of horror bodies.

Theory aside, however, it may be possible to negotiate an understanding of one of horror’s most privileged actions–castration–to something altogether a little more potboiled. Writing my Masters thesis on rape and the horror film in 2007 (I share MacCormack’s fascination with Italian horror, my thesis focusing on Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome and Lado’s Night Train Murders), I was too damned busy to really express the pure outrage I felt toward the vitriolic review The Age newspaper’s film writer Jim Schembri chose to fling at Eli Roth’s Hostel II.

Says Schembri:

“… Hostel: Part 2 is not a horror film. It’s pornography. In this case, it is an unfathomably vile piece of misogynist, sadistic pornography that features several prolonged sequences where young women are beaten, tortured, sliced up and bled to death. The filmmaker’s intent seems to have been to see how close to a snuff film you can get without getting banned.”

Now in the throes of my PhD — which happens to be on snuff film — Schembri’s review seems designed with the primary intent of irking me senseless. Engaging with this sort of hysteria, we know, is not worth the price of admission when it is displayed in a publication that so clearly panders to this mode of PC thuggery. However, that Schembri opens his review by listing “bloodbath” films that he feels are worthwhile by including Meir Zarchi’s controversial and deeply confrontational 1978 film I Spit on Your Grave (which only received an uncut release in Australia in 2004) displays a mind-boggling degree of hypocrisy. For surely anyone with even an undergraduate grasp of elementary horror knows Roger Ebert’s famous, scathing review that effectively single-handedly ruined not only Zarchi’s career (undeservingly), but also made it a very difficult movie to even view until recently?

Says Ebert:

“A vile bag of garbage named “I Spit on Your Grave” is playing in Chicago theatres this week. It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it’s playing in respectable theatres… This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures, because it is made artlessly, it flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering”.

This, of course, raises the question: is Schembri taking the piss? Is his review a cleverly crafted piece of meta-irony that a mere mortal as me just doesn’t have the smarts to figure out — do I need to go into wink-wink training and watch all those fucking awful Michel Gondry films you keep telling me are so fantastic even though they are as wispy, anaemic and boring as the director himself? Surely this can be the only answer: Schembri’s a genius and I totally missed it. For no one with even an iota of knowledge about the controversy surrounding Zarchi’s film could possibly mimic that very same style of hyperactive, holier-than-thou morality welded so perfectly with the unflinching acceptance of their own right to speak on what women may or may not find offensive, or what may or may not be a danger to them.

I Spit on Your Grave is, of course, a notorious example of the rape-revenge trope, and it is in her exhaustive treatment of on-screen representations of rape in her book Watching Rape (2001) that Sarah Projansky points out that not only is the emperor wearing no clothes, but that instead of rape narratives being “about” sexual violence, rape instead becomes a method of invoking a broad range of discourse “about” things other than rape: “rape narratives are so common in cinema (and elsewhere) that they seem always to be available to address other social issues” (61). Sabine Sielke agrees in her book, Reading Rape (2002), pointing out in her analysis of represented rape that, “where transposed into discourse, rape turns into a rhetorical device, an insistent figure for other social, political and economic concerns and conflicts” (2). The simplicity of this observation becomes awkwardly clear when you start to crudely list off what the most famous rape films of our time are actually “about”: Thelma and Louise and Baise Moi? Female friendship. The Accused, Anatomy of a Murder? The legal system. Birth of a Nation? Race. Straw Dogs and Hitchcock’s Frenzy? Masculinity in crisis. Irreversible is about temporality, form and (again) male relationships. Ms 45 – moral subjectivity. Lipstick–consumerism and femininity… I Spit on Your Grave gets points for being — as Carol J. Clover has pointed out (120) –brave enough to so forcefully bring home to the spectator time after relentless, unforgiving time, that it is about the cruel horror of rape and nothing else.

The question Hostel 2 – and, for that matter, Hard Candy – raise is this: if rape can be utilized as a narrative device with which to engage with broader narrative concerns, then can the same be said of castration?

Hard Candy (Slade, 2005) sets up a curious counterpoint to Roth’s Hostel sequel. Both of these films, it could be argued, contain castration sequences that are required to be placed immediately by the spectator into a moral context specifically dominated by the moral imagination (albeit through a spectacle-intensive use of sexual violence, added perversity stemming from the reversed role of adolescent girls being placed in a position of power and dominance). The first film contains a long scene where the young Hayley is seen to be castrating whom she believes is a paedophile—the audience is shown glimpses of a TV screen that is playing what is assumed to be video footage she is filming of the procedure. It becomes clear at the end of this sequence, however, that she has in fact fooled both Jeff and the spectator — she has been playing back footage from a video tape of a castration, and has attached a bulldog clip to her “patient’s” genitals to inflict extreme (but non-invasive, short term) pain that could mimic the degree of suffering a castration performed without anaesthesia could cause. This twist has purely moral motivations: Hayley cannot castrate Jeff because then her own moral status would be irreversibly tainted, she herself would become guilty of inflicting sexual violence. That she only implies this intent through her ‘fake’ castration permits the moral framework of the film to keep the binaries ultimately apart, although it hints through acts like this that they may be easily blurred.

Close, but no cigar (it’s sometimes just a cigar, you know).

In contrast, Beth in Hostel Part II does castrate—far more graphically than either I Spit on Your Grave or Hard Candy — and she does so to save her own life by fulfilling a business contract. The central genius of Roth’s project is contained in exactly this distinction: her moral choice denies the importance of gender over commerce (she is allowed to pay her captives to escape, but the terms of the agreement for all their clients is that they must take a human life). That she castrates Stuart specifically to kill him (“let him bleed to death” she says in passing as she leaves the torture chamber to organise the transfer of payment to her now-business partners), and has little moral turmoil with this price (the eye-blink speed with which she decides to snip — up until that moment it appeared to be a threat that would most likely remain unfulfilled threat due to her moral delineation as the morally correct by feisty Final Girl of the piece — is perhaps the source of much of the impact of this moment as the act itself) suggests Roth is far more interested in exploring the moral aspects of the film rather than its sexual politics.

If Roth’s intent is to show precisely that gender is secondary to commerce, this would be a radical re-working of both previous moral and gender structures active within the horror genre, and would demand a far lengthier analysis than this post would allow. Gender is well and good, but as many have suggested in their criticism of White-Girl middle-class feminism:  Race matters. Class matters.

So Mr Schembri? When you stated “that Hostel 2 suggests … that the guy (Roth) either has a fetish for brutalising women or believes that audiences who see his films do”, it reflects solely and only upon you and your Ebert-levels of self-righteousness. And I guess that’s why I have no interest in turfing psychoanalysis altogether. Both Ebert and Schembri’s reviews leave me with one overwhelming question: how do you guys feel about your respective mothers?

–

(1) Studlar, Gaylyn. “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of Cinema”. Movies and Methods, Volume 2. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: California UP, 1985. p. 608.

Idle Hands are the Devil’s Tools: Bava, Sculpture, Shock.

by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

With its flimsy veneer of high-school level Freudism, Mario Bava’s final film may on first glance seem like the usual generic stuff: the slightly indulgent meanderings of a one-time champion on his lap of honour. But Shock (1977) – also known as Beyond the Door II, the sequel to Olivio Assonitis’ 1974 mostly unrelated “original” – is if not his finest, then certainly Bava’s most conceptually brazen offering.

Shock is haunted by its own mise-en-scene: it is not simply that the formal and narrative paraphernalia of supernatural eeriness is provided, but that these elements themselves carry a non-diegetic density that far outweighs its internal symbolic function. It is a film more memorable and genuinely haunting than its narrative suggests it should be.

It follows the return of Nora (Daria Nicoladi) and her new husband Bruno (John Steiner) to the house where she once lived with her junkie ex-husband, Carlo. After his apparent suicide – and her own mental collapse – Nora recovers and agrees to try a new life with Bruno in the house with her son by Carlo, the creepy-as-all-get out, googly-eyed freak that is Marco (David Colin Jr., providing the primary connection to the first Beyond the Door despite playing a different character altogether). Things hardly go well – Marco appears to become possessed by the spirit of his dead father and, it is established, has a reason to seek revenge: Nora in fact murdered him in a drug haze after he injects her with heroin. Nora descends further and further into madness until the ultimate tragedy ensues, leaving a smiling, even more bug-eyed Marco to end the film in a tea party with his invisible ghost-dad.

While hardly a synopsis to set imaginations on fire, Shock introduces from its opening moments an aggressive campaign of unmitigated formal distraction. The film itself appears diverted from its own storyline, the camera-eye wandering back and forth, to and from action, in and out of lucidness, captivated by its own nuance. As Nora unpacks her belongings in her new-old house, her attention is drawn toward a gleaming white object jutting out from her Brunswick Street Special orange-and-brown velour 70s corner sofa. In a fascinated trance, she extracts a large white ceramic hand ornament from its crevices like a decayed tooth:

From the first moment its fingertips catch her (and our) attention, this sculpture steals every scene. Nora places it on a fetching glass-and-aluminium modular bookshelf in the living room, and we know its location, where it is in relation to us, at every second – not only when its off screen, but even when we are in a scene in a different room. The hand becomes a unit of measurement, the north to which our spectatorial compass cannot resist but to return to. As Bruno and Nora make whoopee on the couch, the camera pans from the central focus of wiggling torsos as if by a magnetic field toward the hand. The hand takes over the scene, obliterates them – they are covered, shielded, crushed. When it moves slightly on its own volition, it does nothing to break my trance. It takes more than a cheap funhouse trick to distract me from its hypnotic pull:

This hand haunts me. I try to be rational, like a child who is scared of the dark trying to reason themselves out of hysterics - it’s just a random piece of retro Euro-kitsch,  a junkyard relic imbued with overzealous symbolism. It’s probably made of Plaster of Paris. Settle down, Alex. It’s hardly Bernini:

Bernini, Gianlorenzo.
The Rape of Proserpina
(detail: Pluto’s hands).
1621-22 White marble.
Galleria Borghese, Italy.

See? Then again, I’ve never been to Rome. I’ve never seen The Rape of Proserpina outside of the 2-dimensional plane that still photographs or documentary footage allows. My personal relationship with this acclaimed work of classical sculpture and Bava’s film is, in terms of pure spectatorial mechanics, equal to my eye. I look at them the same way, on the same surface. My response to Bernini’s depiction of pinched flesh is visceral, recalling Simon Schama’s commanding observation in The Power of Art:

“His figures break free from the gravity pull of the pedestal to run, twist, whirl, pant, scream, bark or arch themselves in spasms of intense sensation. Bernini could make marble do things it had never done before. His figures charge into hectic action. Most of them are naturally yeasty, on the rise”.

The lure of Bernini is precisely the same thing that I find bewitching in the films of Bava, Lado, Fulci, Martino, Franco, Argento: the moral occult is located not within the narrative, but in form itself. I don’t need to know anything about ancient mythology to have a strong response to The Rape of Proserpina, nor do I need horror or giallo to actually make sense, to create sympathetic characters or situtations, or to be even remotely plausible. These works pivot instead around a central moral spectacle, whether it is contained within the pinching of flesh in marble, or the slashing of a throat and the perfectly framed shot of a giant ceramic hand on film.

It is this frenzy of stylistic excess, the hyperactive morality within the form itself that renders the surface “explanation” of the ghostly Carlo redundant. The film spells out the significance of the ceramic hand to the story clearly, as Nora’s flashback to her first husbands murder shows him literally entwined within the sculpture as he shoots her up:

In case we haven’t yet made the connection between the sculpture and Carlo, the point is emphasised even further: as Nora driftis into hallucinatory, guilt-driven hysteria, she has a violently erotic dream about Carlo. Large, iridescent light-white hands send her into spasms of slow-motion sensual pleasure:

Despite “knowing” what these hands “mean” – we’re offered a clear link to draw between symbol and story on a platter – it ultimately means squat. I not only don’t buy it, I don’t care. It’s not that it’s not possible, and maybe it has little more to do with the fact that the Jim Morrison/Michael Hutchinson cliché I associate with Carlo’s character type is in this instance trapped in the body of a David Spade look-alike.

Or, as I’m more inclined to believe, it’s because it’s deliberately – even forcefully – indifferent. It’s not that I’m not meant to buy it; it’s that whether or not I do or not is ultimately irrelevant. The camera wanders constantly throughout the film, alluding sometimes to Carlo’s point of view, but even that seems inconsistant and uncommited. The camera can’t keep it’s attention focused, so how can I?

No part of me for an instant accepts as coincidence the fact that the actor who played Carlo, Nicola Salerno, was the film’s assistant production designer and (apparently) worked with Bava’s son, Lamberto, as Second Unit Director. It seems only right that the figure of Carlo be somehow directly related to the tangible construction of the text itself.

The naïve romantic in me is drawn to the idea that the giant hand that dominates the film – and my imagination – is Mario Bava himself, but it doesn’t cut the mustard… surely he’d never let us off the hook so easily.

Afterword:

The always insightful Bloody Italiana Blog compares Shock to The Changeling (Medak, 1980) and Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) in a stroke of pure bloody genius.

These three films form a holy trinity of hyperactive moral spectacle, functioning on a plane somewhere quite distinct from the bulk of the already substantially high-pitched supernatural horror subgenre.

The Hill of (dis)content

by Dean Brandum

A bit late with my inaugural post here, but let get things rolling in a style not normally my own.

Late last week, fighting the ravages of the flu and a lousy nightshift, I loaded up the truck and headed down the coast to visit the parents, wife and bubby in tow. With mum bustling about the kitchen preparing more food than we could ever imagine eating (as per usual) dad was kept well occupied by my daughter and her never-ending collection of farm animals that she had loaded into his lap. Meanwhile, my darling wife kept the conversation going as I made the odd muttering from the couch, whenever my fatigue-addled brain could summon the energy to contribute something intelligent (hard and rare enough for me at the best of times).

Anyway, as is always the case, dad and I got to chatting about movies so I took to hunting through his pay-TV guide to check if there was anything there I knew would take his interest. Within seconds I had struck gold. In a couple of days TCM would be hauling out The Hill once again, one of dad’s favourites. Dad was thrilled and he was determined to watch it again. Having always admired the film too I made a promise to myself to also set aside the time for it, if I could squeeze a couple of free hours from a busy weekend schedule.

The process lab must have been told to set The Hill (1965) to ‘highest contrast possible’. Filmed in that grey and white monochrome peculiar to British cinema of the 60s, when the characters do occasionally emerge from the charcoal murky hue it is into white of the burning magnesium variety – there is very little middle tone. A stark, harrowing affair, Sidney Lumet’s film tells of the dehumanising disciplinary practices undertaken at a British military prison in North Africa during the Second World War. The titular hill is a man-made sand and rock construct the fully-kitted prisoners are forced run up and down in the sweltering sun, ostensibly for matters of discipline, but in truth for the pleasure of the sadistic warden and his psychotic staff sergeant. In this film the dialogue is barked rather than delivered by a powerful cast including Sean Connery, Harry Andrews, Ian Hendry, Michael Redgrave and Ian Bannen, along with a number of faces familiar to those fans of 60’s British cinema.

The Hill has always been a firm favourite of mine and I find the drama no less engrossing no matter how often I watch it. Sadly, it is a somewhat neglected flick, usually filed away with the backhanded compliment of an ‘actors piece’. Viewing it this very day I came to wonder why it was that both my father and I shared a fascination for this film and indeed, if such preferences were hereditary, like thinning hair or stalled fashion sense (sadly I’m the recipient of both). The more I think about it, the more I am convinced it may be the case. Now dawdling my way through academia and well-enough conversed in enough film theory to make patter with the wankers at a film fest launch (making the most of a the free grog table) I am, I suppose, what could be termed a ‘cineaste’. Both of my parents would roll their eyes at such an expression, their disdain well-known for pretension. Let’s leave it at a ‘glorified film buff’, if you like. Mum and Dad belonged to a generation who were buffs long before the term was coined. Cinema-going was a weekly ritual – like laundry on a Tuesday and a roast on Sunday. A wide experience of cinema derived from whatever screened at their local for the week. From mum I gained a love of horror films, British cinema and crime thrillers. From dad it was adventure, westerns and stark drama. My preferences have been coloured over time with excursions into other genres, art-house sensibilities and national cinemas and certainly the flavour has been tainted towards to trashier end of town, but overall the foundations are as strong as ever. The apple has not fallen far from my parents’ corner of the orchard.

But back to The Hill, for a minute. Yes, the drama is intense, but what is the hook that kept dad coming back to it? A bit of amateur psychology on my part might provide the answer. Perhaps it was ‘the hill’ itself, of Dad’s unhappy (but never complaining) family life as a young man being forced to scale that metaphorical hill over and over by his miserable father and ungrateful siblings. The distaste of which, I would offer, led to an unwillingness to conform to the expectations for a young bloke in the 1950s. The dux of his school he was forced into an apprenticeship he held little interest in so instead of sticking with it for life – as was the done thing – he spent the decade wandering the country and parts of the world. Sleeping rough and often living the life of an itinerant bum. Odd jobs here and there and mixing with many other escapees of 1950s conformity in outback shitholes on freight trains and aboard Africa-bound oil-tankers. The places of the books and magazines he cherished. Yet even then he refused to conform to the bum’s lot and by avoiding the grog and the blues he did not join them in prisons or early graves but made a late charge to the life of a working class family man. He still hated the rigmarole of knuckling down to a single job but cherished and thrived and being a husband and father. ‘The Hill’ never beat him and although it took time he had great pleasure in serving a big “fuck you” to those that had made him run it.

Thinking back to dad’s movie tastes I can detect a bit of a theme (although I doubt he would ever admit to it). He loved films about men taken from society and having to survive on their wits in unforgiving surrounds. The Naked Prey (1966) was a firm favourite, as were The Omega Man (1971), The Sands of the Kalahari (1965) Planet of the Apes (1968) and The Time Machine (1960) as well as Flight of the Phoenix (1966). In fact he liked all of those tough Robert Aldrich flicks such as Emperor of the North Pole (1973) and Too Late the Hero (1970) and of course The Dirty Dozen and its ilk of all-star epics – The Professionals (1966), The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1963). In regards to that film most fans remember it for the ultra-cool presence of Steve McQueen, but I would reckon that although Dad got a chuckle from the ‘Cooler King’ he would have preferred the quieter methods of the James Coburn character and, faulty Australian accent aside, he is one of the few to get away with it.

That was dad – little fuss and with few noticing he always got away with it in the end. That is why he was never much of a John Wayne fan. Yeah, he could watch some of his films and would probably enjoy them but he couldn’t suffer “all that Duke bullshit” as he called it. For dad, his western heroes were cut from the Randolph Scott saddlecloth, especially the fabulous series he made with Budd Boetticher. Lean, mean tales of somewhat damaged protagonists and their small-scale business, getting by on wits and honed skills rather than bluster, ego and grand-scale Duke-bullshit. Any day of the week he’d take Gary Cooper in High Noon (1952) over Wayne in Rio Bravo (1959). In the same way he preferred Robert Ryan in The Set-Up (1949) over Sly Stallone in Rocky (1976). Yet although he demanded a healthy dose of realism for his ticket price he did love the garlic-infused stylistics of Sergio Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy”. For all those tight close-ups quick cuts and hysterical soundtracks dad found the truth he was looking for – he’d never been to the American west but having survived the Australian outback he knew that such terrains were populated with nothing but the sleaziest and sharpest of gringos and it is every bastard for himself. Django (1966), on the other hand pushed the envelope a little too far – “dragging that bloody gatling gun around in a coffin, you’ve got to be kidding me!”

The closer an American film took place to the border, the more Dad seemed to like it. Especially when there was a racist, sexist sheriff/landowner/patriarch figure involved. Burl Ives, Rod Steiger, James Mason and even Benny Hill in his “Big Daddy” character. Come to think of it, a straight line can be drawn here between Cool Hand Luke (1967) and The Hill. Paul Newman digging then refilling trenches, Sean Connery trudging up and down a mound of sand. Men in harsh environments refusing to let the bastards get the better of them.

I don’t want to give the impression that dad was nothing but a hard and miserable bastard who took pleasure in the bleakest of cinema. That could not be furthest from the truth. Anyone who had the opportunity to sit through an episode of “The Three Stooges” would never forget the laughter that invariably plunged into coughing fits. My poor mum (who hated that particular comedy troupe) would roll her eyes heavenwards and shake her head, bewildered that someone could find such inanities amusing. They did however, share a love for “Carry On” movies and I can think of few more enjoyable occasions than a quiet night in with them both, watching Carry on Abroad (1972) and hearing dad’s guffaws as Spanish hotel owner (Peter Butterworth) would mispronounce pompous tourist Mr. Farquar’s (Kenneth Williams) name as “Mr. Farty-Arse”.

It must be hereditary, as I find that film hysterically funny.

On a similar note I’m reminded of the time I was watching an episode of “Deadwood” and chortling away to a certain phrase. Dad (he loved the show) watched the disc the following week and we shared endless amusement for weeks afterwards with the words “San Francisco Cocksucker”. Ah dad, he loved that Al Swerengen and so did I.

Mate, I have so very much to thank you for and my love of movies is only a tiny, tiny fraction of all you have given me. But you helped fuel a love a cinema in me which is why I am here on this blog today. You hated the habit of modern movies to be longer than they needed to be – “Do directors these days get paid by the bloody foot of film they shoot?” you’d ask after sitting through some flaccid recent opus. On reading this you’d be wondering “Deano, are you getting paid by the word?” So I’ll wind it up there.

Love ya Dad and thanks.

(Although I watched The Hill over the weekend, sadly dad didn’t. A few hours after were left from our visit he died peacefully in his sleep from a heart attack. This post is dedicated to the most wonderful father a bloke could wish for and the most prescient appraiser of a genre flick you could hope to find. If there is a cinema in heaven he’ll be leaning over to the person next to him and whispering “See that bloke there? I betcha a pound to a peanut he’s the undercover cop”. Sorry dad, but that was a bloody infuriating habit. But jeez, I’m going to miss it).

Kevin B 30^th March 1933 – 29^th February 2008.