The
Body Horrible
First published in Interventions Nos. 21/22, Sydney, 1988
Expanded version delivered as an audio-visual lecture @
The George Paton Gallery, Melbourne, 1990, & Alberta College
of Art, Calgary, Canada, 1990
Some
Notions
Physicality
Height
- 5'10"; weight - 180 lbs; neck - 17"; chest - 47"; biceps
- 17"; forearm - 14"; waist - 32"; thigh 23 & 3/4";
calf - 16 & 1/4". They are/were the 'peak' statistics
of Charles Atlas, probably the most well-known body-builder
of this century. His mythical biography is documented as
part of America's folklore (the Dream personified, etc.)
to such an extent that the above statistics are on file
in the New York Public Library and hermetically sealed in
a vault in Georgia's Oglethorpe University. For sure, Atlas'
notoriety is partly due to his existence as an ideal form
and shape (the aesthetic quest of physical culture, the
culturing of one's body), but his place in cultural history
is more determined by how he objectified his body ; how
- through the help of his buisness partner/ex-ad man Charles
Roman 1
- he sited his body as an ideal in and of itself, as the
(physical) fusion of the means and the end to the desire
to "look good - feel good - be good".
His
chosen monicker "Atlas" proclaims classical aspirations,
but it also reveals the desire to map out one's body as
a terrain, as a place for concentrating energy. Defined
by finite parameters, his life was accordingly statistical
: a progression from one nummerical summation ("I was a
97-pound weakling") to the above set of 'perfect' co-ordinates.
Atlas' self-objectification itself is ideal, able to be
summed up in any form - from its time-capsule essentialism
to its abstract rendering as enlarged benday dots on the
back pages of comics. Strength, vigour, style, vim, health,
composition, power - all are circulated and redistributed
around, within and across the body as a physical place ;
a place of physicality.
Bodily
Contact
As
has been pointed out by Adrian Martin in his BODIES IN QUESTION
2,
most popular and predominant recourses to discovering the
self (and/or its other) through numerous modes of bodily
interaction are suspicious and questionable in their construction
of 'you/your body/the world' homologues. From philosophical
projections to scientific models, the body is a highly problematic
site for theorizing our affects upon and effects from the
world. But what if a different major social drive is posited
- not the centralized quest for truth per se, but the plain
desire to 'touch' physicality ; to locate places of physicality
not as proof of the real, but as instances wherein we can
acknowledge the experience of touching as evidence of our
capacity to be through feeling.
As
this somewhat clumsily yet carefully worded concept implies,
the actuality of a given 'truth', its empirical presentation,
its rational explanation, and its physical impression on
our physical bodies are all secondary to the primary acknowledgement.
The touch, the flesh, the body are then not just cultural
metaphors or experiential facts, but also phenomenal agents
in the realization of our existence through our bodies.
Not only may we pinch ourselves to prove that an experience
is real, but we may also reinterpret that act as a gesture,
a process, an image, a tool for some proof of the act and
state of experiencing, of feeling, of being. Virtually any
form of fiction, hokum or voodoo can grant us this kind
of non-physical experience of 'bodily contact'. Its qualification
can be varied and multiplied - from electronic media saturation,
to social/cultural simulation, to ideological power controls
- but its status as desire indicates not how we might understand
our bodies but how we might use our bodies to understand
; how we might identify body shapes, surfaces, forms, presences
as indicators of physicality, of a 'phantom-tactile' relation
to the world.
If
we view the rampant body-ness of contemporary times (horror
genres, health fads, machine-men toys, dance music, etc.)
in this way , an assimilation of those bodies' meanings
and effects would then be dependent on recognizing a new
use value for and of bodies ; a use value which would constitute
an objectification of the self 'into' the body in the manner
of Charles Atlas. In pragmatic terms, body presences (in
media, art and entertainment) need not be 'about' the Body,
and nor should usages of one's body nesseccarily propose
a dialectic between it and the world.
Body
Principles
The
contemporary horror film (post 1978) has been the major
accentor of such a consciousness of bodily contact, not
simply in how the films work the body as image, object,
sign and symbol through photographic and cinematographic
modes, but how the genre as a whole has recently informed
other areas of the cinema. To give a brief example before
we start detailing effects : if one views Flashdance,
Rambo and Transformers as horror movies (by
their fetishization and manipulation of the body), one can
see that what was presumed to be directed at the body could
perhaps be - either oppositionally or simultaneously - projected
from the body. This is then reversed in The Keep
(1985) where the `monster being' is, simply, a `monstrous
human body'. Such semiotic transferrals - what we could
term `signage in motion' - illustrate how complexly genre
is operating today ; how genres can feed off one another
in those myriadfold cracks which thematic, iconographic
and symbolic readings cannot seal off. Pertinent to our
concerns with the body here, the above brief example of
semiotic transferral or generic mutation leads us to two
dominant ways in which the body is fetishized and manipulated,
and which we can term 'body principles' : Explosion and
Expansion.
 |
Explosion
is the directing of concerns, fears, frustrations
at the image of the body, causing it to splatter under
force, impact, intensity and pressure. More so, it is
the point of eruption, the instant of dematerialization,
that serves as the dead-end-centre for the painful yet
pleasurable build-up of everything being directed at
the body - both material and symbolic. In bluntest terms,
the photographic effect of the exploding body or body-part
is not unlike a cum shot. The Explosion is thus the
theatricalized catharsis of savaging the Self, maligning
the Other, and generally terrorizing all those touted
symbolic codes. [Special-effects for Explosion : charges,
triggers, timers, etc.] |
 |
Expansion
illustrates
similar concerns as coming from the body - seeping,
inflating, enlarging, reforming ; causing it to crack
its surface, shed its skin, reshape itself. The intensification
of Expansion is all that leads up to the Explosion :
all the transmogrification of wholes, all the stretching
of limits, all the mutated erections of recognizable
forms and textures. The body, as such, is kept intact,
kept material, kept corporate, and thus disallowed its
excessive climax. This is not coitus interuptus or masochism,
but evidence of the body as container of all energy,
as mainspring for all desires motivated by those concerns
directed at the body-image in processes of Explosion.
[Special-effects for Expansion : bladders, valves, pumps,
etc.] |
In
terms of genre, we find that whereas Horror movies nearly
have a monopoly on the Explosion principle, many non-Horror
movies employ the Expansion principle. The space between
these two principles - never fixed - is the netherland of
sub-genres; the genetic wasteland of Freudian case-studies.
Sexual organs are de-eroticized (Marilyn Chambers' protruding
phallic injector from her armpit in Rabid, 77) and
tools of violence are eroticized (Sylveter Stallone's humongous
blast-charger in Rambo, 83). The permutations are
endless - signposted as such by the memorable neck-stretch/head-crack
scene from The Thing, 1981. More often than not these
permutations truly are arbitrary configurations and serial
conglomerations which tend to make psycho-analysis of the
resultant images frustrating and even futile. However that
very frustration and futility is the key to understanding
the nature of all this body imagery, in that they are not
manifestations of psychological impulses which await our
individual identification through their implicity, but rather
fictitious possibilities of an unqualified textuality awaiting
our individual consumption of their absurdity. (This does
not suggest that pyscho-analytic frameworks are impotent,
but if they only service wildly convoluted symbolic flows
- or, worse still, predictable readings (like the many performed
on Aliens) - one should perhaps check their appropriateness
for a cinematic production which delights in textual chaos,
symbolic confusion and an overload of what I have elsewhere
termed "possessed signifiers" 3
- where `meaning' is demonically possessed by `effect'.
 |
 |
Disembodiment
The
above principles are presented so as to extend relations
and analogies between technique, image and effect, based
on the notion that (again, like Atlas' body) everything
can be fused in the one place of physicality. In film, that
one place is the cinematic scene where set-up, event and
symbolism come together to simultaneously exploit, understand,
interrogate and comment upon the body. This simultaneity
of measures and concerns is not so confusing when one accepts
the premise of desire here - the desire to experience a
form (phantom, material, physical, symbolic) not of the
body, but of that 'bodily contact'. It is a desire that
finds fascination in being stimulated, repulsed, engaged
and assaulted by representations of body-ness ; a fascination
with dismembodiment.
'Disembodiment'
is intended to signify an emptiness of body : not the finality
of a corpse or the spirited evaporation of 'the soul' to
another dimension, but the presence of emptiness. It is
an emptiness wherein neuroses and psychoses are rendered
immobile and are incapable of providing the motor mechanisms
for all the cathartic releases and Freudian undercurrents
which figure as fuel for classical, gothic and modern horror.
It is an emptiness which connects with our emptiness as
vessels for the contemporary horror film, where pleasure
is generated by a certain detachment from and bemusement
with the saturated effects of the genre's history, and where
knowledge of our own bodies is infused in the unwordly logic
of the body's terrain on the screen. This is, respectively,
how the most vile and savage of films can fully retain their
intended comic effect, and how medical procedeures and observations
can serve as contemporary horror scenarios 4.
Our bursts of laughter at scenes of dismemberment and disembowellment
are tangent to our perception of the screen's non-bodies,
as are our rushes of adrenalin tandem to our imagination
of our own bodies. We are - it is likely - not lost souls
but disembodied selves whose essential relation to the body
(ours/theirs) is empty and void. Surely if we can divide,
mutiply and rearrange our 'selves' could we not do the same
with our 'bodies'?
Some
Points
Erotics
1973.
Somewhere in Hollywood, Los Angeles. A beautiful young woman
is laid on an operating table. A surgeon moves across to
the table and removes a flesh plate from her abdomen area,
exposing a swell of electronic wiring and circuitry. The
film is Westworld. Superficially, we have a titilating,
technological slant on the coitus shockus of both the de-feminised
face in films like Queen Of Outer Space, She Demons,
The Leech Woman, The Wasp Woman, Countess
Dracula, She Freak and I Married A Werewolf,
and the voluptuous but deadly mouth in films like Blood
& Roses, Daughters Of Darkness, Vampyros
Lesbos, The Velvet Vampire, The Vampire Lovers
and Vampyres. That scene from Westworld more
complexly works to clash a set of opposites (human/android,
life/death, fertility/sterility, flesh/metal, body/machine,
present/future, etc.) by engineering an erotic leveled at
the body - its form, its texture, its image. Accordingly,
Westworld's plot centres the body in terms of instigation
(bodily pleasure sought by two men at the technological
utopia), conflict (the mechanical body of the robot-gunslinger
versus the human bodies of the two men) and resolution (the
perfect body delivered by technology is morally condemned).
While Westworld's deliberated themes are skin-deep, its
body scenes carry a more pervading effect - from the carnage
of humans dressed in utopian togas splayed and splattered
across Grecian gardens through which the robot-gunslinger
marches, to the pre-Terminator finale of a burnt
and gutted mechanical corpse which refuses to cease functioning
despite the obliteration of all its required mechanics.
Throughout
the seventies, outer appearances were increasingly eroticized.
In a way, the onslaught of Hammer/Amicus/AIP neo-gothic
horror and the spread of European and American independent
splatter in the early seventies constitute a pubescent period
in the historical development of the body into its current
contemporary form. From buxom lesbian vampires to close-up
anatomical experiments, the body was blooming at the core
of many films' concerns. Through the photographic medium,
the body in horror was posed in a semi-pornographic light,
reflecting our increasing engrossment with our body, showing
us its potential for transformation and stimulation. As
desires and obsessions were exacerbated in line with a consumer
demand for new and novel product, the eroticism of the body
was fractured into multiple pornographic modes - a fracturing
whose widening gaps can be traced from The Vampire Lovers
(70) to The Gore Gore Girls (71) to The Last House
On The Left (72) to The Exorcist (73) to Flesh
For Frankenstein (74) to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(75) to Shivers (76) to Suspiria (77) to The
Incredible Torture Show (aka Blood Sucking Freaks,
78) to Alien (79) and peaking with Friday The
13th (80).
Inner
Presences
The
pivotal horror in Westworld is our confrontation with a
body of human form which is not human. This figure, of course,
is classical. Consider those monsters whose human form belies
inner presences - capable of transformation at will (vampires),
waiting to be awakened (werewolves), totally void (zombies),
or controlled by unwordly forces (possessed persons). What
marks these figures as classical, in a sense, is the mystical
nature of those inner presences. Conjured from a labyrinth
of folklore and legend and re-ritualized on the screen,
they mobilize our conception of our own selves as somehow
mystical, somehow unattainable and unfathomable. Hermeneutics
abound (the beast within us, our moral soul, our lustful
drive, etc.) but the central fascination is with the inexplainable
- particularly of ourselves. The contemporary horror film
focuses on a shift from this mode of identification to one
based on disembodiment, where we are more fascinated with
tactile presences than ethereal ones, and more interested
in the body's exhibition of surfacial form than its disclosure
of spiritual depths. Disembodiment, thus, signifies an absence
of those inner presences. (Of course, some films don't just
absent those inner presences - they massacre them!)
The body laid out in Westworld is transitional.
It presents inner presence as a mass (and mess) of technology.
That inner presence is reconstituted in table-scenes in
films like Day Of The Dead (86), Re-Animator
(85) and Return Of The Living Dead (85)
as a mass (and mess) of biology. Forget the wonders of modern
science and advanced technology - we are more overwhelmed
by our very gizzards! The screen body in contemporary horror
is thus a true place of physicality : a fountain of fascination,
a bounty of bodily contact. If there is any mysticism left
in the genre, it is that our own insides constitute a fifth
dimension ; an unknowable world, an incomprehensible darkness.
Could not most us admit that if suddenly we developed a
gaping vaginal opening where our belly-button was, would
we not explore it with our hand? And - like Max in Videodrome
- if a gun was handy, would we not explore with it, in case
we confronted something horrific in that black hole, that
fifth dimension of physicality?
Gore
I
have singled out the seventies here despite the emergence
of gore movies in the mid sixties, because in gore movies,
the body - as a whole ripe for fragmentation, as a slab
fresh for dissection - is generally subordinate to the intensification
of blood into gore. The most socially acceptable form of
'intense' screen violence is where fresh, bloody fluid signifies
the immediate instant of dramatic action - we could term
it a dramatic mode of 'humorality' in that the drama is
humoral, i.e. coming from the blood. Screen-blood eventually
thickened into gore, into a state beyond liquidification
and the dramatic instant, into a realm of ugly viscosity
and voyeuristic pondering. This intensification - both of
violence and its substance - is central to gore movies,
replacing the shiny veneer of red with unsightly patches,
splatters and blobs of half-recognizable offal ; making
visible and dwelling upon the unseen modus operandi of butchers,
surgeons, morticians, biologists, coroners, slaughtermen,
etc. The body, as such, is essentially the platter for the
gore effect : witness the table-scene in Blood Feast
(63, often cited as the first gore movie) where the woman's
body literally is a platter of parts, cuts, spills and gapes.
My point here is that there is a developmental split between
sixties' gore and seventies' horror in terms of their preoccupation.
It is only because the gore movie was rediscovered in the
latter seventies as a text to be readdressed that the past
23 years appear to have congealed into a single progression
of horror and violence.
Some
examples
Corporeality
How
far can too far go? The state of the art as I write has
to be the scene in Day Of The Dead (86)
5 where a
horde of zombies converge on a man caught on his back in
a corridor. Most of them start ripping apart his abdominal
region, exposing the rib cage and its insides which are
plucked and picked, dripping and oozing, stretched in a
moist explosion of viscosity and elasticity. Meanwhile other
zombies concentrate on the head. Their fingers claw at the
face, digging into his eyeballs for leverage as they slowly
rip his head from his torso. Stringy, sinuous strands desperately
cling onto the neck muscles, eventually snapping under tension.
All throughout this, the man's mouth is open wide, tongue
swollen in an exasperated scream, while his torso's arms
flail, pathetically trying to fend off the barrage of limbs
which methodically tear at their meat. Courtesy of George
Romero's penchant for the visceral metaphor and Tom Savini's
quest for the graphically impossible, this scene strangely
echos the table-scene of Blood Feast (63)
as a gastronomical atrocity performed on the body. The difference,
though, is that Day is not concerned with
corpses, their desecration, emaciation and obliteration
; Day is concerned with - and gives new
meaning to the term - corporeality.
Unlike
the tragic figures of Lewton's zombies from the forties,
Romero's zombies (staggering across his trilogy of films)
are contemporary horrors : they embody our disembodiment.
Like nerve motors whose only sense of reality is the immediate
(in terms of space, time, memory and action), they reflect
our potentiality as drained selves - bodies drained of the
energy and impetus to figure or ponder our status, our nature,
our existence. The zombie's sense of reality is defined
by bodily contact, where the touch activates an acknowlegement
of experiencing something, and where the flesh is the substance
of both toucher and touched. (To put it in more conventional
terms, the zombie "I" is dead flesh seeking a displaced
"self" which is marked as such by being living flesh.) A
new slant on the concept of 'corporeality' thus sums up
a way of defining existence through the body. And this is
the crux of our identification with the contemporary horror
film : like those zombies, we use our bodies to understand.
Material
Transgression
 |
The
above detailed scene from Day Of The Dead
clusters many of our body concerns here. It is a scene
which demonstrates well the relation between the body
principles of Explosion and Expansion
: the body is stretched to its limit, the body climaxes
at that limit - and then the body overrides its limit.
These limits, you see, are superfluous. They are there
solely to define all manner of material transgression
: stretching, severing, slashing, squashing. The body
(incorporate) is the material of these transgressions.
This, for example, is the epicentral horror in The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (75) : the morbid fetishization
of skin (from the decoration of lampshades to the encasing
of sausage-meat) is the vehicle for horrifically flaunting
material transgression ; portraying the remains of the
body as the essential surface of its flesh, as physical
evidence of its monstrous transgression. Thus, the skin
is made as repulsive as the flesh is as repulsive as
the organ is as repulsive as the body, etc. This is
synechdochism in its most extreme form, in that, fantastically,
body parts are just as capable of life, horror, eroticism
and death as the body-whole. This is why The
Evil Dead (82) is so streamlined : those possessed
by demons can only be destroyed "by total bodily dismemberment"
- the perfect solution to the totality of body horror. |
Life
and death? Find another genre for their philosophical reflection,
because in the contemporary horror genre, life is merely
the overture and first couple of movements hastily arriving
at the finale, the operatic event of the act of death -
an event which can be endlessly repeated (reportedly 19
times in the unedited version of Friday The 13th
Part IV : The Final Chapter, 84 - and that doesn't
include the numerous times Jason himself is butchered, only
to miraculously keep living!) 6.
One finds it difficult to proclaim Day's
headless victim as dead. His body remains living, still
retains signs of living flesh - signs of which the zombies
are fully aware. Of course we presume that this 'character'
" dies, but - at the risk of extreme nihilism here - who cares?
Just as the zombie's sensory perception functions through
immediacy, so too does our identification with the death
scene : only its eventfullness is of interest, the after-effects
aren't of much consequence.
Absent
Bodies
If
Friday The 13th (the unexpected start of
a series) is a peak in cataloging bodily fragmentation,
and Day Of The Dead (the long-awaited end
of a trilogy) a peak in stretching bodily limitation, they
germinate from two films which helped state the contemporary
horror genre as a sprawling plain of peaks : Alien
(79) and The Thing (81). While the monsters
of Friday and Day massacre
the body's mystical inner presences contained in the symbolic
flows of traditional genre conventions (intensifying the
trend throughout the early seventies to consciously absent
those inner presences) the monsters of Alien
and Thing massacre inner presences by absenting
their own bodies. This is clearly demonstrated in the exactness
of the films' titles. The Alien-monster massacres by inhabiting
the human body, using it initially as a living incubator,
then feeding from it in order to shape its own body through
a series of biological transmogrifications : the monster
is 'alien' to the human body. The Thing-monster does likewise
by simulating human form, hiding behind the human body and
using it as bait for its sustenance : the monster is a 'thing'
and not a human body. In both cases, the monster 'territorizes'
the human body for terrifyingly pragmatic reasons (survival
and growth) only to disgard the claimed territory of the
body in a spectacle of destruction, invoking the body principles
of Expansion and Explosion.
Absent
visibility of the monster is a strong convention in the
history of the horror genre, deployed as a tease by not
showing the monster fully (its full body, its total presence)
until the climax of the film. Even apparently invisible
monsters are rendered visible for the climax - through electrocution
in The Thing (51), Forbidden Planet
(54) and Five Million Miles To Earth (67)
and by fire in The Prehistoric Sound (64).
(Ironically, similar means force the monster into mobilization
in Alien - flame throwers - and The
Thing - electrical shock.) More oblique visualizations
have been given to non-coporeal monstrous figures through
computer interfaces (Collossus : The Forbin Project,
70); electronic monitoring (The Andromeda Strain,
70); abstract video graphics (Demon Seed,
77); and ectoplasmic charges (The Entity,
82). (Note also, that the computer screen is used to mark
the monster's presence in Alien and its
constitution in The Thing.) In historical
relation to these representational modes, monstrous entities
have also taken primary-order material form as mist, slime,
smog, rays, liquid, crystals, etc. Their existence is founded
on their infection of, subjection to and projection on the
human body, capable of transforming the flesh into stone,
celulose, vapour, ash, etc. (See The Green Slime,
The Smog Monster, The Blob, The Incredible Shrinking Man,
The Monolith Monsters, The 4-D Man, Virus, The Incredible
Melting Man, etc.) All of these imaginings of monsters
point to their objectification as a duality of representation
and embodiment - how should it look and what should its
form be? As such, generic invention lies as much in the
absenting of their bodies as in their presentation.
Internal
Bodies
Interacting
between the symbolic mode of horror films (where inner presences
are symbolized by human forms) and the iconic mode (where
the human form is used as a framework for formal considerations
of how the monstrous should be visualized) is a mode which
internalizes both symbol and icon into the body. A prophetic
movie here is City Of The Living Dead (82)
where victims possessed by a satanic priest literally vomit
their insides out. The literal and the visceral are compounded
into a scene which replays body notions from Europe's Middle
Ages (he possessed by the devil metamorphoses physically)
and ancient China (he possessed by ghosts breaks out in
sores). An even more precise image of how symbol and icon
can be internalized into the body is the scene in The
Fly (86) where a baboon is teleported and thereby
molecularly recontituted inside-out. The sight defies accurate
description : the rough shape of the original creature is
retained, but writhing as a mess of quivering organs. At
this point in history, that scene alone stands as truly
fantastic, virtually negating all other assumptions as to
how the fantastic can be qualified in film today. The very
thought of a still-living body totally turned inside-out
is near unimaginable - but The Fly photographs
it. Perhaps what makes that scene so fantastic is the degree
to which it symbolizes such an impossibility through the
body, rejecting recourses to metamorphosis and synergy,
presenting us with the instant totality of its horror. (In
a sense, we see what Max's hand felt in his vaginal wound
in Videodrome.)
David
Lynch has, like Cronenberg, exhibited an intense interest
in the body, although not with the same consistency. Eraserhead
and Shivers (both 76) both explore the
body, but the former conveys its findings symbolically while
the latter conveys them viscerally; both are motivated by
a desire to discover the inner body, desiring to be transfixed
by their discoveries (Eraserhead) and overwhelmed by them
(Shivers). These relationships are intensified
a decade later with Lynch's Blue Velvet
and Cronenberg's The Fly (both 86) in the
way that they represent the reflective conclusions of their
journeys into the body. Cronenberg's inside-out baboon tells
us what he finds inside us : our organs, total in their
presence. Physiognomically, our outsides reveal our insides
which reveal our outsides, ad nauseum. (As we shall find
out later, The Fly then works the body
according to this premise.) Lynch's discoveries touch on
the repulsive, too, but not without retaining an aura of
mystery.
In
Blue Velvet, like Eraserhead,
the body is transformed into an alien landscape whose unsolved
mysteries instigate the quest of our journey, and as the
human form undergoes a reverse-anthropomorphism, we penetrate
its walls, cavaties, chambers. While both films are rich
in symbolism (whose self-conscious presentation seems deliberate),
those quests somehow don't feel pyschological in their orientation.
It's as though one is recognizing those mysterious, inner
psychological impulses not as solutions or explicatives
(in the pyscho-analytic manner) but as their own symbols,
as icons. One can interpret a mansion full of wombs, sperm,
penes, vaginae in Eraserhead, 7
but one should also consider the 'writing degree' of those
signs. Blue Velvet in a sense rewrites
those signs more clearly as visual icons whose phenomonological
presence (photographically, cinematically, semiologically
and symbolically) is employed as textual atmosphere to the
narrative : from the severed ear found on the ground to
the camera's penetration into the darkness of its inner
world; from the throbbing, dizzying drape of blue velvet
behind the credits to its place in the grotesque display
of a basic Freudian scenario; from the igniting of a candle
- to create the feel of darkness - to the ignition of every
possible dark feeling imaginable. Blue Velvet
transfixes through its complicated and confusing overlays
of fabrics, surfaces and textures both on top of and within
the body. This type of symbolism indicates what could be
termed a 'textual syllepsism', where symbols and icons converge
on one another. The Fly uncovers them as
more organs; Blue Velvet discovers them as more darkness.
Like much contemporary horror, these two films realize that
the most we can ever encounter inside our bodies is more
bodies 8.
Flesh-Bodies
The
Creeping Flesh (72) - like Westworld
- is both transitional and seminal. And like Alien and The
Thing, its title is exact : the Oxford dictionary notes
"horror" as derived from "horripilation", where a feeling
of dread causes the physical reaction of one's skin tightening
and forcing the hairs to stand on end - otherwise known
as "the creeping of the flesh". (Ergo, it would appear that
horror is physical.) As a transition in the development
of the contemporary horror film, The Creeping Flesh
projects the notion of horripilation onto a monstrous body.
A giant, pre-neanderthal skeleton is found in New Guinea
; inexplicably, its material substance still withholds a
life force, so that when water touches the bone tissue,
it mutates into dripping, yellow flesh. This subtext makes
an otherwise pedestrian neo-gothic film of interest here
when one notices that : (a) the hand (which first develops
and is severed for analysis) bears an uncanny resemblance
to the jaundiced 'face-hugger' of Alien's
secondary organic phase plus the initial flesh-mutation
of the remake of The Blob (87); and (b) the bilious tissue
prefigures the suppuration trend in 'melt, crack & splat'
movies like The Devil's Rain (75), The
Incredible Melting Man (77), Phantasm
(79), Demons (85) and Street Trash
(87). The Creeping Flesh, then, features
a body of flesh, a flesh-body : a vehicle for articulating
how tactility itself can be made monstrous, how touching
can be both fearful and pleasurable. The vile and globular
exo-skeleton in Flesh eroticizes the touch
(our desire to feel the liquescence) and de-eroticizes the
flesh (our repulsion in recognizing our body in that putrid
state).
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This notion of a flesh-body exercises the duality its terminology
suggests - a duality that can be made apparent by comparing
The Creeping Flesh (its accent on 'flesh')
with The Hand (81, its accent on the 'body').
Both films site the severed hand as a body of power whose
form symbolizes the motor drive (literally) that can excite
sexual desire - the hand compelled to touch. Consider this
in relation to the erotic symbolism of the severed, dislocated
or displaced hand in films as varied as Un Chien
Andalou (28) Mad Love (35) The
Beast With Five Fingers (46) The 5000 Fingers
Of Dr.T (53) Dr. No (63) and Blood
From The Mummy's Tomb (72) where dread and awe
are instilled through either the manic 'motorized' power
that replaces the once-connected hand (metal contraptions,
leather gloves, etc.) or the hand's ability to move of its
own accord, just as one's own sexual drive and motor impulses
can each appear to have a 'life of its own'. The severed
hand - as both a subject and object of horror - embodies
the titilating potential to touch that which we cannot consciously
bring ourselves to touch ; its nerve endings are not only
severed from the brain, but also from the psyche. This of
course is all fairly evident. The interesting relationship
between The Creeping Flesh and The
Hand is not what is either latent or manifest -
but what is represented and how it is depicted.
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The
Hand plays out its psycho-analytic workings as
a scripted framework, right down to having Michael Caine
(playing a comic-strip artist who looses his right hand
in the midst of a domestic squabble with his wife) dismisses
his consequent neurosis as a "penis complex". The film's
focus is not Caine but his hand (the hand of the film's
title) and how it embodies everything that results from
its severance. This is an important point, because in its
focus on the hand as a flesh-body The Hand is concerned
not with how Caine (as a pyschologically motivated character)
deals with his trauma, but with how Caine (as a textual
seme) discovers that it is his severed hand itself that
contains that trauma. Caine thus has to first chase, catch,
battle and confont the hand before he can start dealing
with the trauma ; his hand (now displaced as "the hand")
becomes a very clear object of desire, an overwhelming manifestation
of all that repulses and excites in the touch : a flesh-body.
While The Creeping Flesh focuses the trauma
of the touch onto a monstrous 'other' (but still retaining
enough signs of 'our-selves' to repulse and excite us) The
Hand characterizes 'us' in Caine. His otherness
is depicted as a monster precisely because it has momentarily
achieved the analyst's dream : to become separate.
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The doublings and multiplications continue in The
Evil Dead. Consider the image of Caine's two hands
(one a mechanical instrument encased in a black leather
glove, the other his organic left hand) stuggling to stop
his severed right hand choking him. This is given an over-the-top
treatment in The Evil Dead where a possesed
girl is stabbed in the hand with a mystical knife - she
then chews off her own hand and proceeds to stab Bruce Campbell
with her severed hand containing the impaled knife. Both
scenes project a vertigo of hand placement and displacement
where it visually doesn't make sense as to what is happening
with all the hands. Just as the severed hand starts to symbolize
psychological separation of the self, that separation is
intensified and escalated like the breeding phallic brooms
of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, negating
or obscuring any single picture of the self that consumes
such hysterical imagery. (A quick foot note : in The
Evil Dead II, 87, Bruce Campbell returns to battle
more posessed friends, and this time to save himself becoming
posessed he chops off his own hand!)
Pornographs
Our
trail from The Creeping Flesh to The
Hand traces the impressions of surrealism upon
this particular terrain of body images. The Hand's black
and white scenes (which narratively describe both the hand's
point-of-view and Caine's sexual supression through blackouts)
strongly evoke the cinematography of Eraserhead,
not just stylistically (Flemmish-industrial-surrealism!?)
but also texturally. The Hand also features
the memorable image of a severed hand moving slightly in
light scrub, covered with assorted bugs and insects. This
image of course reappears - as a severed ear - in another
Lynch film, Blue Velvet. Neither
Blue Velvet nor The Hand, though,
are playing out surrealist effect here ('quoting' Un
Chien Andalou's hand-of-ants or Replusion's
dead-hare-with-flies) because the reason, cause and nature
of such an effect is no longer some weird, mysterious, arty
gesture confined to a surrealist manifesto enshrined by
the museum. This is so much the case that a horror comedy
like Waxwork (86) features a scene where
a kid falls into the dimensional scenario of a waxwork depicting
a scene from what is a loose quote of Romero's black & white
zombie movie Night Of The Living Dead (68).
Everything turns black & white and the kid is grabbed by
a zombie. He hacks the zombie's hand off and runs away with
the hand still attached to his ankle. He stops, grabs the
hand, and then the hand grabs his hand. This gag continues
for a while - hands grabbing hands - until the kid looks
up at a spiked cemetery gate. He jumps up as if to climb
out of the cemetery - but instead slams the hand onto one
of the spikes. Just as this scene is not a reference to
Rod Steiger slamming his hand on an invoice spike in The
Pawnbroker (65), Blue Velvet and
The Hand do not academically induce Surrealism.
Whilst the Surrealists were attracted to the auratic quality
and erotic power of the photograph, films three to four
decades later evidence a more sophisticated play with the
cinema's photographic lexicon of sexual effect through bodily
depiction. In reference to our concerns here : surreality
has been overtaken in the act of cognition as 'coporeality',
while the generality of a photograph has been replaced by
the specificity of what can be termed a 'pornograph'. Body
images and scenes in the contemporary horror film are less
symbols of sex and more signs of sex.
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Pornographs
are those signs. As specific modes of bodily depiction
that signify and/or simulate conventional pornographic
codes, they can be divided into two types : the first
figured through the camera, the second through the photograph.
To cover the first type, we have to recount our steps
back through The Hand to The
Evil Dead (82). In the former, as Michael Caine
finally traps his hand in a barn, an overhead tracking
shot follows his cautious entry into the barn, complete
with rafters slowly passing in front of our point-of-view
of the top of Caine's head. Compare this shot with an
identical set-up accentuating the eerie pause prior
to the grand guignol finale of Bruce Campbell's battle
with his posessed friends in the shack in The
Evil Dead. The slow seductive movement makes
all objects (rafters, walls, etc.) within the frame
cruise past the only fixed object - Caine/Campbell,
who thereby function as objects of not only our identification
but also our focus. Like the giddiness of the Big Dipper
carnival ride, it is not the focused (ie. the head in
front of us) that unsettles the stomach, but rather
the whizzing and whirling visual abstraction that assaults
the cornea, affecting our balance with its unfocused
movement. |
This
connection of camerawork shuttles us back to The
Shining (80) which was the first film to exploit
the Steadicam camera's designed ability to displace point-of-views
more seductively than ever before, enabling our complex
identification to move with the narrative's cinematic construction,
as opposed to being fixed to a scene or arrested by an image
(via the semantic organization of symbols and motifs). In
The Shining's maze of tracks, flows and
rides the erotic of movement with equilibrium (effected
by the Steadicam's fluid balance) conflates the voyeuristic
experience of moving within the narrative - not freeing
us from identification, but snaring our involvement with
deadly precision in a sort of 'suture-on-the-run' where
it is as if we can almost feel the sensation of being sewn
into the text. Interestingly, it took other films to fully
exploit (and in many cases 'fake') the Steadicam and the
similarly principled Louma crane in this respect, the first
clear wave happening in 1982 : The Evil Dead
(with its 'forest rape' scene and the end rush through the
house up to Campbell's face) ; Amityville II
: The Posession (with its floor-to-ceiling-back-to-floor
shot of the posessed teenager) ; and Tenebrae
(with its multiple reconnaissances and surveillances that
lead up to the gruesome slashings). In all these examples,
the camera does something it didn't do in The Shining -
it covers the body ; obsessively lingering, hovering and
floating above its surface, caressing its outline and mapping
its presence. Thus we reach a definition of this proposed
first type of 'pornograph' : a pornographic encoding of
the body and its form through the mechanics and dynamics
of camerawork, focusing and shifting a frame for the body
in a mix of balance and unbalance 9.
The
Creeping Flesh and The Hand -
in their capacity for instancing flesh-bodies - are examples
of a second type of 'pornograph' whose definition would
be : a pornographic encoding of the body and its flesh through
the chemical effects of the photographic process, accenting
and highlighting selected visual elements in a mix of eroticism
and de-eroticism. The symbolic and semiotic performance
of the severed hand in those two films shapes their flesh-bodies,
while their depiction - their graphic rendering - of the
hands' flesh (from dripping yellow to pasty grey, etc.)
hint at the innate abstraction of flesh, that its physical
surfaces are eternal displacements of other identical surfaces
of other possible body realms (from pus to gangrene, etc.).
Conversely, one can read hard-core pornographic imagery
as horrific (i.e. alien, unworldly, non-bodily) in its reconstitution
of the body and its flesh, where organ, muscle, tissue and
secretion convey their effect through a type of 'semiotic
abstraction' : the real photographed as abstract to signify
the real. The photography here accents material surfaces
more than it portrays recognizable parts and wholes. Bodies
(their insides and their outsides) in contemporary horror
films exploit and are exploited by this inherent quality
of the photographic medium, in the act of photography -
in the transposed act of 'pornography'.
Indeed,
rather than condemning the horror genre as pornographic,
10 one should
perhaps be considering whether it is possible to not invoke
an erotic vacillation in the photographic (and hence cinematographic)
act. The notion of a 'pornograph' can in this light correlate
other 'graphs' - photo/cinema/phono/auto/etc. - in its mapping,
co-ordinating and voluming of the body, just as the 'graph'
does with still and moving images, sounds, signatures, etc.
Even though I implicate myself in dismissing the patriarchal
appropriation of language by disregarding the mid-19th century
English derivation of "porno" from the Greek meaning harlot
and prostitute, I still wish to suggest that 'pornograph'
could - at least - connote a mapping of the body. I do not
propose the body as some physical, neutral universal, but
rather intend to demonstrate how any 'graph' deals with
a 'body' of some sort, and that, subsequently, pornography
is inherent (or at least predominant) in many forms of pictorial
and material documentation.
By
following through this proposition on pornography, we can
link up some notions and points raised earlier in this article.
Charles Atlas' objectification of his own body, for example,
constitutes a pornographic act, with himself as pornographer
and his body as pornograph. Furthermore, self-objectification
brings us back or around to a notion of auto-eroticism :
using one's body to arouse one's body like a stimulatory
moebius strip. This is both the profundity underscoring
the casual concept of "look good - feel good - be good",
and a fundamental social drive in the life-style and leisure-activity
of body-building for both sexes. While the muscular body
in its hard-on state 11
can be repulsive and horrifying (through its physical eruption
of desire and eroticism across the body's frame) its quest
for 'beauty' (a formal and ritual consideration in the body-building
arena) reflects the bodily gratification which the body
can grant itself, as a place of physicality, a central zone
for maintaining and servicing desire. The sweaty pulsations
in Flashdance and the tense throbbings
of Rambo plug into this notion of pornography
- teetering between orgasmic beauty and physical repulsion
; moving with the body principles unleashed in the contemporary
horror film, exercised in the body-building phenomenon,
and stroked in hard-core pornography.
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Metallic
Erections
Aliens
(86) literally transforms its body concerns into a plurality
of effects, dealing with the multiplication not only of
its featured monster but also of the monstrosities birthed
by the cinematic text 12.
Aliens talks to Alien,
reflecting, restyling, reforming the intricate mise-en-scene
of the original, shaping it into a secondary narrative that
attaches itself to and grows out from the scenery of the
original. We now learn in their textual dialogue that the
underside of those 'face-huggers' is a vaginal vacuum, a
puddendum turned inside-out and ready to suck the life out
of you ; that Ripley's taut, drained hands - yellow-tanned
and skeletal - resembles the face-hugger's cadaverous digitals
; that the womb is revealed here not as a technological
clinic but as a real, living architecture ; and that Ripley's
own body has been 'retextured' as a lesbian erotic, a genuine
lesbian erotica of sweaty, non-feminine bodies of strength.
Aliens may be summed up as James Cameron's 'Rambofication'
of Ridley Scott's pictorial detail, but it also violently
tugs at Alien's visual subtext, stretching it, squashing
it, fraying it, pulping it.
Perpendicular
to this self-interrogation, Aliens experiments
with the Expansion principle in contrast to Day
Of The Dead's laboratorial scenes of Explosion.
(It should be noted here that the only real scenes of Explosion
in Aliens involve the android whose human form is torn in
half, but whose bionic design continues to function.) Aliens'
bodies (human and alien) are expanded in many ways, and
these ways can be grouped together by their experimental
slant on Expansion : erection . These erections can be of
flesh or metal, and of the penis or the clitoris 13.
The 'queen bitch' alien is a groteque exaggeration of the
drone/soldier aliens in her size, stance and overall dimensional
presence. Her body is her world, expanded into a maze of
alien tissue, into which the humans - as anti-bodies - enter,
recalling the horrific erotic of Raquel Welch swimming in
our plasma stream in Fantastic Voyage. (Remembering our
identification with inner presences, the incubating labyrinth
is our own 'fantastic voyage', our fifth dimension visited
upon us from within.) While the drone/soldier bodies do
not differ all that much in design from the original film,
the human crew certainly do. Backing up the lesbian 'retexturing'
of Ripley and her 'macho-femmandos' is their weaponry -
sci-fi visions of the humongous blast-chargers of Norris,
Stallone and Schwarzenegger. Slung low on their hips, they
protrude like hysterical phalli, sweeping across our eyeballs
as the camera tracks around their rigourous yet balletic
reconnaissance movements. These grey cocks, these metallic
erections do not, however, erupt from the body ; like all
those Stallone/Norris/Schwarzenegger gun poses, they are
material expansions of the body, where metal is the material
substance of their erection, their transgression from flesh
to metal. It is thus the act of Expansion which gives the
impression of their fusion, even though the metal is not
fused with the flesh 14.
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Videodrome's
(81) 'hand-gun' is a fusion and not an expansion (we shall
discuss fusions later), as is its erogenous television screen
and organic video cassette. Furthermore, its Explosions
- smashing screens, splitting bodies - create black holes,
which are possible entrances into our unknowable bodies
(a central thematic to the film). But more relevant here
is the relation between Videodrome and
Alien, based on their production design
and art direction which constructs a mise-en-scene that
polarizes flesh and metal. Technically, Alien's
architectural design relates to Videodrome's
industrial design, locating the former's chambers, corridors,
tunnels and shafts (and the monster's ability to camouflage
itself) with the latter's technological components (and
their transformation from hardware to 'software'). The notion
of metallic erection - as a principle of Expansion - arises
from this discursive networking between Alien
and Videodrome.
The
end battle of Aliens alludes to everything
from the W.W.F.'s 'hyper-wrestling' (they call it "rock'n'wrestling")
to the latter Toho monster movies which were spectacles
of 'gargantuan-wrestling' (the only things missing from
Godzilla Vs. Megalon are the turnbuckles).
In the left corner, the new Mother who wrenched the title
from the super-computer in the original film. In the right
corner, the contending Mother, a fertile and heady mix of
maternal and libidinal desire, desperate to resolve the
two through victory and supremacy. What ensues is an incredible
fight to the death between alien Expansion and human Expansion
; between the Alien's towering inferno of acidic protoplasma,
crustaceous muscle and metallic teeth, and Ripley's agile
encasement of nerve and verve in a mega-exo-skeleton operated
by (remembering the previously listed special effects for
Expansion) hydraulics, pumps and valves. Note, also, how
erect they are in their battle - the alien reeling back
and propped up on her interlocking limbs, and Ripley clanking
around like a bionic automaton ; both stiffened and hardened
by their metal embattlement. (And let's not forget what's
in a name : Ripley as in ripple as in muscle.)
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Ripley
excites a strong body-desire here : not simply that of building
up one's body like Charles Atlas, but of utilizing technology
(the mega-exo-skeletons) to instantly change one's bodily
dimensions and become a bionic machine without recourse
to medical operation. (This is perhaps where our key identification
with The Terminator, 85, lies - especially
considering the scene where the terminator performs a techno-medico
operation upon himself.) Technology can thus allow us to
create and then realize a new bodily potential at will.
The proliferation of mega-men and machine-men is extremely
relevant here : see the films/cartoons/toys of Machine
Men, Transformers, Rock Lords, Ultra Men, Robotechs, Masters
Of The Universe, Thundercats, Voltrons, Centurions, W.W.F.
Wrestling Dolls, etc. and note the semiotics of
their techno-design and the semantics of their techno-jargon
15. This general
'bionic desire' is thus a key motivator of metallic erection.
Fusion
Like
the third and final teleportation which results in the 'Brundle-Fly-Pod'
in The Fly (86), horror/porn/body-building
form a, so to say, molecularly fused triad. The human form
(to call upon the overload of neologisms, metaphors and
general linguistic recontextualization in this article!)
as a flesh-body, as a phenomenal agent, and as a place of
physicality is both whole and parts in that fusion, and
thus the central element in the contemporary horor film's
'textual syllepsism'. That bicep is an image from Fangoria,
Hustler and Muscle & Fitness ; this video cassette is an
animated montage of their pages ; your identification is
an erotic vacillation, hedonistically incapable of or unwilling
to fix the vacillation, to 'understand' your self or your
body.
The
Fly marks a peak not just of this fusion, but of
a dialectic for that fusion. Extending the ambiguity of
the body which both arouses and repulses in previous Cronenberg
films Shivers (76), Rabid
(77) and Videodrome (81), The Fly
displays an adroit and dexterous control of erotic vacillation.
This is executed at varying thematic and narrative levels
: from Goldblum's tragic central character (devouring junk
food with his sperm-like digestive acids) to Goldblum and
Davis' decaying romance (their hugging as a poetic symphitism
of bodies alien to one another) to the mise-en-scene for
their relationship (her cutting the first fly hairs on his
back while he scoops out icecream) to our contemplation
beyond the film's ending (as much as she loves him - is
she really going to conceive the Brundle-Fly larva!?). The
story invokes a whirling mix of textual fragments : the
mourning of a close friend, the legend of Frankenstein's
monster, the pathos of the mad scientist, the intensity
of true love, the fear of bodily control, the thrill of
exploring new dimensions, the quest for knowledge, the inevitability
of scientific progress, the enigma of cancer, the role of
chance - what doesn't this film take on? What doesn't this
film fuse?
In
terms of generic development, we could be witnessing a heady
split here - between Day Of The Dead with
its syncopated, poylphonic play with Expansion and Explosion
(combining their effects), Blue Velvet
and its arrhythmic, subharmonic play with those same bodily
principles (inverting their effects), and The Fly
with its synchronized, monophonic play (fusing their effects).
Where Day expands by exploding and explodes
by expanding the body and its parts, and Blue Velvet
inverts the processes of those effects, The Fly bides its
time with them : delaying, halting, freezing, detaining,
waylaying, witholding the eventfulness of the expected operatic
acts of violence. The Fly's scenes of body
horror are in fact not temporal ; they do not happen- they
appear. Steady in their statement, static in their unfolding,
total in their fusion : from Brundle calmly chewing off
his nails to the accepted growth of his "museum of natural
history" ; from the disconcerting pimples on his face to
the consuming lumps all over his body ; from the sharp computer
image of his fused cells to the steaming compressed sculpture
of his final, re-incorporated body.
Delineating
all the space between the sympathy of characters and the
symbiosis of molecules, The Fly is a story
of intense fusion. No wonder it ends with an almighty bang,
shattering and tearing asunder the incessant binding, congealing,
sealing and hardening of every narrative level, every textual
element, every poetic figure in its telling. Like a glittering
diamond created from incredible pressure applied to black
coal, The Fly releases itself in its suicidal
finale of bright, blasting light - replacing the black hole
which swallows up the boom of Max blowing out his brains
in Videodrome.
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One
wonders where we might go from here. The world of the
unwordly seems equally divided - between Romero's plateau
of infinite eventeration, Lynch's subterrain of feculent
introspection, and Cronenberg's hinterland of visceral
unification. Their territories of terrorization are
encapsulated in a roaming and roving world, inhabited
by bodies beautiful and horrible. Some of them theirs
- most of them ours. |
Notes
1
All information on Atlas here is obtained from The Life
& Times Of Charles Atlas by George Butler and Charles Gaines,
1982.
2
Virgin Press No.19 Nov.1982.
3
Tales Of Terror, Cinema Papers No.49 Dec.1984.
4 See my All
Horror Movies Are Sick : True Or False? in Cinema
Papers No.62, March 1987 for more on the relation between
humour/comedy and horror/terror. See Vile Bodies And Bad
Medicine by Pete Boss, Screen Vol.27 No.1 Jan-Feb 1986 for
an account of how the medical can horrify.
5
George Romero's Day Of The Dead (86) was
"refused classification" (i.e. banned) for a theatrical
release in Australia in November 1986. By December, though,
every key gore scene from this banned film turned up in
a R-rated video release Scream Greats No.1 : Tom
Savini, a projected documentary series produced
by Fangoria magazine.
6
Although it is not the province of this article to note
the function of the body throughout the whole history of
the horror genre (and such a project still needs to be undertaken),
it is worth pointing out a strange connection between the
action and horror genres. Consider the action film as defined
in the early seventies - para-military, absurdly-macho,
oscillating between the urban jungle and the urbanized jungle,
dwelling on the mechanisms of crime, glorifying violence,
etc. Whilst generic specifics will continually change in
this sub-genre, one visual figure always stands : the explosion.
The great, cathartic finale where anything and everything
is dynamited (like a cyclical closure from the atom bomb
to the Bog Bang Theory). This scene (classically defined,
as it were, in a film like The Bridge On The River
Kwai, 57, where the central object is there to
be destroyed) soon gave way to an illogical sequence of
explosions, 'triggered' purely for effect. Through orgiastic
ellipsism, any single explosion then became a real-time
and screen-time fracture, where the one event was shown
from a multiple of angles. These kind of action films could
be typed "Explosion Flicks" in the way that the horror genre
has its "Slasher Flicks" : both replay a figure purely for
effect, and in doing so render the conventional narrative
form not simply as ruptured, but as a thin yet solid sediment
of ruptures clasping all those explosions and slashes. Without
detailing the symbolic history of the explosion (consider
the rich though conventional symbolism of the burning house
in many gothic horror films) it can be indicated that the
erotic of the Explosion principle in the contemporary horror
film had previously worked symbollically in the action film.
7
For an informative reading of Eraserhead
in this psychological mode see K. George Godwin's article
in Film Quarterly, Vol.XXXIX, No.1, Fall 1985. In terms
of auteurist analysis, though, Blue Velvet
now prompts us to reconsider the 'symbolism' of Eraserhead.
A close analysis thus needs to be performed on Blue
Velvet in order to reveal the 'second degree' nature
of its symbolism.
8
Historically, this symbolic and iconic flux between the
body form and the internal body is well demonstrated in
the Creature trilogy, where each installment reveals that
inside the Creature lives a human form. In Revenge
Of The Creature, for example, his scaly covering
is burnt off to reveal a metamorphosing flesh. (The
Creature From The Black Lagoon, 54 ; Revenge
Of The Creature, 55 ; & The Creature Walks
Among Us, 56.)
9
As the networking team of Steve Raimi, Robbert Tappert,
Ethan Cohen and Joel Cohen continue to refine a truly contempoary
cinematic dialectic based on compression (in The
Evil Dead, 82, Blood Simple, 85,
Crime Wave, 86, and Raising Arizona,
87) its worth mentioning some production details of The
Evil Dead II, 87 : Riami (with the aide of Verne Hyde in
charge of mechanical FX) has apparently developed some truly
hysterical camera contraptions that exaggerate the standard
effects of the Steadicam - one of which he has named the
"Torso-Cam". If that's not evidence of a 'pornograph' I
don't what is.
10
The views of The New York Times' film critic Janet Maslin
on the contemporary horror film were syndicated in The San
Francisco Examiner-Chronicle as "The Horror Genre Turns
To 'Violent Pornography'" and sub-headed as "a critic's
disgust over exploitative movies". (Since then - late 1982
- Maslin has been the occasional butt of Joe Bob Briggs'
comments on East Coast liberalism.)
11
Ted Colless and David Kelly quote Alphonso Lingis' description
of the muscle-pumping body as "having a hard on everywhere"
in their The Lost World, Art & Text No.3 Spring 1981. A
brief flick through any body-building magazine will demonstrate
this effect. For more on the spectacles of body-building
and stripping, see my Pop Music Where? Part II : Semiology
In The Flesh, Virgin Press No.21 Dec 1982 ; Demolition Man
by Ted Colless & Paul Foss, and The Strip Laid Bare : Unevenly
by Mick Carter (both in Art & Text No.10, Winter 1983).
12
My account of Aliens here is an indirect response to Barbara
Creed's Horror & The Monstrous-Feminine - An Imaginary Abjection,
Screen Vol.27 No.1 Jan/Feb 1986, which posits a fascinating
reading of Alien, but only when she addresses the film.
(Unfortunately, she seems more concerned with applying Kristeva
than reading Alien.) Her reading, however, should be taken
in conjunction with the invaluable Alien Movie Novel, 1979,
edited by Richard J. Anobile, which - through its photographic
layout - more clearly demonstrates many of the semiotic
and symbolic flows she addresses. (See also Aliens : The
Official Movie Book, 1986, editied by David McDonnell &
Carr D'Angelo for the 'inside' story of Aliens' - the sequel
- creation and production.) Creed's analytic method is suitable
for those who wish to understand their/the body. The analytic
method of this article is suitable for those who wish to
know "not how we might understand our bodies, but how we
might use our bodies to understand."
13
See (only if you really want to) Big Clit Magazine
: "Watch'em get hard and erect like a big cock!" There is
a porn mag for every possible body part and function imaginable.
The problematic mystery is who reads them?
14
Consider the scene in Commando (85) where
Schwarzenegger - the man 'pushed too far' - reverts to means
he had foresaken, i.e. killing people. In preparation for
the execution of those means, he covers his body in an incredible
array of armature, portraying him as a physical image of
armipotence. Dressed in camoflauge gear and make-up, his
costume works more to camoflauge the flesh with metal, rather
than the soldier with his surroundings. He thus tramps off
: a monstrous conglomeration of muscle and metal, a fusion
of 'arms', thickened with murderous desire. This scene of
'dressing-up' and 'thickening' the body occurs in most modern
action-military-revenge films.
15
See especially the 1987 range of Masters Of The
Universe dolls which mechanically perform (in plastic)
the most incredible transformations. More importantly, note
the use of these toys : they are designed for kids to pull
them apart, reshape them, transform them. Kids are playing
with the nature of the contemporary body here, by freely
experiencing the body as open-ended set of constitutions
: from flesh to metal; from body to machine; from image
to object; from inside to outside; from transformation to
restoration. The very design and pleasure of these toys
is that they should not be fixed in terms of form and function.
Accordingly, many kids - and adults, I hope - are more and
more reading culture as unconstituted; as a continually
moving transference between factors and elements which we
had previously interpreted (or rather, used) as fixtures.
END
NOTE
The
wild notions, points and examples in this article may not
be all that applicable elsewhere. They have been inspired
by certain films (mentioned) and have been bashed together
in the way one would play with a Mecano set : connections
are made across, underneath and through sections, partitions
and layers, but their overall interelationship as a fixture
or construct is essentially of a stand-or-fall nature. My
writing, though, (as a continuation of my articles on the
contemporary horror film) is impelled by the idea that some
of the films mentioned here - for good or for bad - can
be more recognized as illustrative of sublime cinematic
invention.
