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