What follows is an edited version of my dissertation that I wrote around 10 years ago aged 21. It’s a reflection of my thoughts at the time… though I’ve edited out some parts which are heavily conjectured!
Truth be told I haven’t changed much. Please comment with your thoughts 🙂
“Film, even from it’s silent days… has proven to be a medium peculiarly suitable for handling intimate psychological subjects… Through the subtleties of editing and the juxtaposition of sound and image, the film can dovetail the sensations and observations arising out of a character’s relationship to illusions, hallucinations and nightmares.”1
The 1970s is arguably the decade of the horror film. Horror films of every imaginable kind were released one after the other, with the horrors ranging from a chainsaw wielding psychopath, to a young woman convinced Satanists are looking to kill her unborn child. Women at the time were coming into their own, with the advent of the pill in the 1960s a new sexual independence had been found. While initially it was only available to married women with the permission of their husbands, into the 1970s it was increasingly available to single women, finally giving them some control over their own bodies.
The film industry itself was, and still is mainly populated by men, and so the best horror films of this era focus on the new control women had over their bodies, and the fear that invoked. I shall look at in particular the films Carrie (1976), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and The Exorcist (1973)
Abjection
“Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is not I who expel. ‘I’ is expelled.”2
Many people writing on this subject reference the French contemporary theorist Julia Kristeva, and her writings on “Abjection” which means “the state of being cast off”3. She examines why many people for example fear blood, yet it is a vital part of our own bodies. We know that it was once part of ourselves and so we are confronted with the fact that it is now lost and dead, perhaps reminding us of our mortality and rather than confronting that reality we avoid looking at the thing itself, feeling a repulsion towards it even though there is essentially nothing to fear or dislike. Perhaps in the same way when our bodies go through a change during puberty or pregnancy we feel as though our bodies are no longer part of ourselves or controlled by ourselves and so feel invaded by a foreign entity. We have forever lost the state we were in before, be it childhood, virginity, or having never been pregnant. In women particularly after this point we are constantly confronted with substances that used to be parts of ourselves, for example in menstrual blood and breast milk. In childbirth itself we have to force life from our bodies, separating us from something that was once part of us, the baby must abject itself from us so as to create it’s own life and identity and will eventually itself see it’s mother, whom it was once a part of and who gave it life, grow old and die.
“Regan stands in a long line of female portals, from the equally gullible Eve through the professional portals-sibyls and prophetesses-of classical and medieval times to the majority of psychic and New Age chanellers of our own day.”4
The three films I’m looking at either lack, or only have a very weak willed father figure, in Rosemary’s Baby it is the protagonists husband who sells her soul to further his own career, in The Exorcist, Regan’s father isn’t seen throughout the film as her parents are divorced and he lives far away, it is implied that he is not even aware of what is happening to his daughter during the film and that he shows little regard for her or her wellbeing as he does not call on her birthday. In Carrie, her father left when she was a baby to be with another woman, probably contributing to her mother’s spiral into madness. So we are forced to focus more on the relationship between child and mother and the bond that comes from having once inhabited the same space. In some ways the child is not entirely abjected from the mother until he or she gains their own independence, something which starts when the child hits puberty and becomes capable of having children themselves. The changes happening in the girl’s bodies in The Exorcist and Carrie are allegorised again in the supernatural changes they go through, and it is their mother who receives the backlash of these changes.
Regan in The Exorcist repeatedly attacks her mother and shocks her with her foul language and crude references to sex, Carrie actually murders her mother as revenge for the years of emotional torture and for not warning her of the changes she would go through, and for her mothers screams that these changes are due to Carrie being sinful, as opposed to the natural progression of life.
Carrie changes drastically throughout the progress of the film finally standing up to her mother and embracing her body by wearing a dress that shows off her “dirty pillows” as her mother calls them. It is the realisation that her daughter has gained independence, is no longer dependent on her, and has abjected herself from her way of thinking that sends her mother over the edge into complete madness. This realisation kills both of them. After Carrie has killed her mother, the remorse hits her. She has lost her safety net, her security. In spite of the abuse she has suffered the love and connection she feels with her mother isn’t ready to be broken. She feels this so strongly that she cannot control her powers and brings the house down on the both of them. So it is this abjection and death of the connection between them that leads to their deaths.
In Rosemary’s Baby, the same wanting to cling to a child is seen through Rosemary’s fear that there are Satanists or witches wanting to steal her baby. She is seen eating raw liver which is like a perversion of the abjection theory, it reflects how she does not want to be abjected from her baby, so by eating the liver she is taking nutrition from something that has already been alive once, and has been abjected once, and has died. So although it is a repulsive thing to watch it is her rebelling against abjection and clinging onto the connection between her and her baby. It also reflects the lack of power women have over their bodies in pregnancy. Pica being a condition in which non food items such as coal and washing powder are craved due to a lack of essential vitamins craved by the baby. She is very young herself in the film and has perhaps only recently stopped being dependent on her own mother and become independent herself, when her role is reversed and she becomes the mother. She embraces her newly found womanhood by cutting her hair, changing it from a very child like bob, to a shorter, more mature, sexy style, something which her husband greatly disapproves of. He wants her to be totally dependent on him, and scolds her for doing something so rash without first consulting him. He sees her as a child and is shocked by her strength and ability to make her own decisions. She starts out wearing short yet loose fitting shift dresses that do not show off her figure, the first time you see her wearing something figure hugging she says it is the first day of her period, and when they arrange “baby night” she wears heavier make-up and a low cut jacket, showing her first step towards independence and strength over her husband Guy. This fits into the stereotype of women using their bodies and looks to exert their power over men, and this is the scene where she is drugged and raped, which although it seems like it’s her husband reshifting the power dynamic in his favour, it is also another step towards her becoming a complete woman as it is when she becomes pregnant. It is before this point that she starts to become less and less endeared of her husband, speaking to their mutual friend about his vanity and selfishness. He obviously holds his own career before her feelings and is quick to abandon her and a planned evening with their friends to spend time with their knowledgeable neighbor who is possibly able bring him success, whatever the cost of it.
1 Michael Fleming and Roger Manvell. Images of Madness: The Portrayal of Insanity in the Feature Film p. 18-19
2 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3-4
4 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, p. 70
Continued in part 2…
Screening Violets 