American Monsters (18 page)

Julia Kristeva, in her
Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection
, discusses the idea of the abject: the space where the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the body are transgressed. Wounds, bleeding, infection, excrement and other bodily secretions are seen as abject and polluting. This fear of the abject, again, is related to the monstrous female body which emits all kinds of substances the male body is never in contact with. The fear of the abject further supports Creed’s arguments of the vagina dentata and a pervasive fear of women in male-dominated societies. Kristeva writes “...a true ‘ab-ject’ where man, frightened, crosses over the horrors of maternal bowels and, in an immersion that enables him to avoid coming face to face with an other, spares himself the risk of castration.”

This sentiment is echoed in Rosi Braidotti’s “Mothers, Monsters and Machines” as she discusses the idea of motherhood as monstrous to men who never have to go through the process:

“The woman’s body can change shape in pregnancy and childbearing; it is therefore capable of defeating the notion of fixed bodily form, of visible, recognizable, clear, and distinct shapes as that which marks the contour of the body...The fact that the female body can change shape so drastically is troublesome in the eyes of the logocentric economy within which to see is the primary act of knowledge and the gaze the basis of epistemic awareness. “ (p. 64).

Many times this idea of monstrous births presents itself within the role of haunted houses in the horror genre. For example, in Stephen King’s
The Shining
or the film
The Amityville Horror
, both haunted houses bleed, scream, produce monstrous beings, and attempt to hurt those present within what becomes a monstrous womb. This idea of the mother as monster is extremely prevalent in Stephen King’s fiction, especially in such novels as
It
,
Carrie
, and
Misery
.

The act of bleeding is very different for women and for men. In a paper presented to Professor Thomas Burkdall’s freshman class on “What Horror Means” one of the (male) students commented that when things bleed there is an immediate association with pain. I brought up the point to him that women have a very different experience of blood than do men. When men bleed it is most likely because they have been injured. When women bleed, sometimes they have been injured. But once a month, every woman bleeds while menstruating. Karen Houpert in her study of menstruation,
The Curse
, discusses the culture of silence surrounding menstruation and the male mediations that have Othered women’s bodily experiences. Menstruation feeds into the fear of the vagina dentata, as there is a popular saying: Never trust anything that bleeds for four days without dying. For men the expulsion of blood could mean death. For women, the loss of blood is the cycle of life. We see here that blood has different cultural meanings for men than for women.

Andrea Dworkin’s insightful
Intercourse
follows in this same vein of perceived cultural differences between men and women with regards to sexual intercourse. As a culmination of these few theories of the body, I would like to present Dworkin’s view that because of the unequal power relations between men and women, all sex that takes place in the society would be considered a rape of the woman. Her book follows up on Catherine McKinnon’s “Rape: On Coercion and Consent”, which proposes a very bleak (though accurate) portrayal of sex in America. This book struck a particular chord with me as I reflected on the abusive relationship I was in during my time as a raver. My experiences along with experiences of many other women, from raves and outside of them, are what make up most of American Monsters. As Dworkin writes “Sadism and death, under male supremacy, converge at the vagina: to open the woman up, go inside her, penis or knife. The poor little penis kills before it dies.”( p. 190). “Fucking,” as Dworkin puts it, erases the humanity of women, making them sexualized objects, readily available for exploitation. Men, the rapists, are considered individuals. Women, the violated and debased, remain voiceless and exist to be fucked.

Dominance and submission are also made evident through theories of the gaze. Dworkin explains that subsequent to the demeaning “fuck,” the woman’s body is fetishized by the male gaze which further allows him to possess and rape her body. Laura Mulvey discusses this to some length in her article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” while discussing the role of women as recipients of the gaze, never the gazer, in narrative films. I will discuss the idea of the gaze and anthropology a little bit later on in this paper.

Stephen King’s early representations of women are incredibly misogynistic. Though there are feminist scholars, myself included, that see much of value in Stephen King’s writings, most feminists agree that the homosocial uses of his women along with their monstrous presentations leave much to be desired in terms of women’s representations in American pop culture. These themes say something about how women are perceived as a threat and detail how to eliminate the threat from society. In support of Stephen King’s more recent fictions, I would like to say that his feminist sensibilities are definitely improving as his characters are no longer as monstrously two-dimensional, and there is more of a sense that men are the monsters to women, not the other way around. It took King long enough to become more progressive with his female characters, but the shift is present and has made his writing much stronger for his millions of mostly female readers.

It was on being inspired by Stephen King’s
Rose Madder
and
Bag of Bones
that I began thinking about who the monsters would be in my paper, and what it would mean as a woman writing about these silently controversial issues. So, how do women begin to write horror? If the genre is inherently woman-hating, how does a woman go about writing her own horror?

Though these theories were evident in Stephen King’s written fiction, I then turned to film to see if these feminist theories were at all representative of the horror film. The general trends in horror films consist of the Bakhtinian carnivalization that Barbara Creed discusses in her “Horror and the Carnivalesque: The Body-monstrous.” Though there is a carnivalesque inversion within the status quo of horror films, there is always a return to the previous state of male dominance whereby the feminized monster is eliminated by the hand of a hero figure, usually male. In this section I will relate some of the above theories of women and horror to specific examples from the horror film canon in order to explicate the parallels between female representations in horror and female treatment in real life situations.

The genre of the “slasher” film is one of the more popular trends in horror. Slasher films consist of a “monster,” feminized in treatment though usually male, whose weapon of choice is a sharp and long kitchen blade. Gender in the slasher film is notable because there is usually a masculinized young woman who battles against the feminized male slasher figure. In the Halloween series by John Carpenter, Jamie Lee Curtis’ character is sister to Michael Meyers, the slasher. His pathology develops as he sees his older sister (not Jamie Lee) about to have sex with her boyfriend. Disturbed by this sight, young Michael stabs his sister to death and subsequently is taken away to a mental hospital. The deaths of sexually active women are prevalent in the slasher sub-genre and relates to Creed’s theories of the vagina dentata and fears of female sexuality. Michael Meyers, like Freddy Krueger and the other slashers of this genre, is killed and returns numerous times to stalk his younger sister who knows too much. In the final episode of Halloween,
Halloween: H20
, Jamie Lee Curtis returns twenty years later, again to eliminate her brother, the slasher. In films such as these, the gory details that receive the gaze are always the mutilated bodies of young women; if men are killed their bodies are not displayed in the same manner as the murdered women.

I would like to jump, now, to the recent
Scream
trilogy which should be classified as a slasher film, but definitely reflects changing views of femininity within mass media culture. The main character of Scream, played by Neve Campbell, loses her virginity in the first Scream film and actually survives all the way through the third and final film. One of the “rules” of horror posited by the self-reflexive Scream trilogy is that once someone loses their virginity, they will be the next prey for the monster. Jamie Lee Curtis remained “virginal” throughout the Halloween films, with the exception of the last one where it is known she has children.

The tendency to murder women who express an interest in sex within horror films demonstrates an archaic and sexist view of women and their desires. Because male desires are coded as normal and because the female body is made monstrous by these male desires, the object of these tensions must be eliminated in some way. The final Scream film did not do well in the box office, though it is the best of the Scream films. I will discuss this a bit more later when I talk more about
Twin Peaks
, but I would like to mention how films that expose the exploitation and rape of young women are not accepted by mass culture. Scream 3 explains one woman’s promiscuity which then led to her death as the result of a horrible and brutal rape she suffered as a teenager. As I have discovered, talk of rape is incredibly taboo, especially in terms of how masculinities are constructed in violent opposition to femininities. The fact that Scream 3 admits one of the characters was raped is a very progressive move, but one that made the film suffer at the box offices. The fact, also, that the heroine of the film remains sexually active and alive is also a cause for some celebration.

Another incredible series of films is the
Alien
quartet, which relates to Rosi Braidotti’s theories of monstrous motherhood. The architecture of the ships in each of the films detail vaginal tunnels, uterine hallways, the presence of eggs, and even the very act by which the aliens reproduce themselves. The oral rapes that take place in the Alien films unsettle gender relationships and further make monstrous the female body. When the alien lays an egg in a human, it inserts a tentacle into the throat of the victim, and when the alien is ready to hatch, it emerges from the abdominal area. The vagina is displaced not only into the stomach, but also the mouth, whereby unwanted penetration allows for the aliens to monstrously birth themselves through the humans. Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, became an icon of the feminist movement. She is a strong and capable woman, and again manages to survive for hundreds of years during the course of the series. Though, there are critiques of Weaver’s character, the most notable being Barbara Creed’s in discussing Ellen Ripley as a “phallic mother,” as she totes huge machine guns but still protects and nurtures those around her who need protection and care.

The genre from which I drew the most inspiration is the rape-revenge genre of horror. Though it’s sub-genre speaks for itself, these films consist of horrible rapes, usually performed with groups of men and one woman, from which the woman emerges pissed off and thirsty for vengeance. The rape-revenge film is the most valued sub-genre of horror in terms of women’s issues as the brutalized character hunts down her attackers and kills them. Though the women end up masculinized by following the vein of violence the men brought to them, the rape-revenge could be seen as the female version of machismo: feminismo, whereby women stop taking shit and get even with those who have abused them. These themes are extremely prevalent in the stories of American Monsters.

Though the television series
Twin Peaks
and its prequel film
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
are not traditionally considered horror, I would like to pose the series as an addition to the horror canon. The series deals with the abuse of Laura Palmer by the hand of her father, who before the series even begins, has “slashed” her. The different women portrayed in Twin Peaks are affected by varying degrees of abuse and exploitation by the men around them. Clifford Geertz in his “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” discusses the idea of “deep play” as “...play in which the stakes are so high that it is, from his utilitarian standpoint, irrational for men to engage in it at all.” (p. 432). It appears to me, not just in Geertz’s cockfight, but in general, women who live within a male-dominated society are already performing much deeper cultural play than their male counterparts. Using the fantastic of Twin Peaks as a metaphor, many of the women within Twin Peaks are in relationships with horribly violent and abusive men, though the women remain in these very relationships. As I discussed with Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, if sex(ual) roles are determined by the male “fucking” the woman into submission, then Twin Peaks can be used to detail specific events that will lead to a woman’s demise in her own culture.

For example, Laura Palmer, the perfect girl, loved and adored by the town. However, secretly since she was nine years old, her father has been coming to her bedroom at night. He threatens to kill her if she ever speaks of the rapes, and he has already broken his wife into submitting to the will of the father. Laura’s relationship with her father leads her to become extremely promiscuous and heavily involved in drugs. Her incestuous relationship with her father is impossible to avoid in terms of how masculinities are constructed. For the father, his daughter is his property and he can do with her, and his wife, as he pleases. Laura knew that her father was going to kill her, eventually. Yet she remained in Twin Peaks, as do most women in this same situation.