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POWER,
HORROR AND AMBIVALENCE “It
feels good, Will, because God has power, and Like tragedy, the horror genre generates an ambivalent reaction in its appreciators. Our enjoyment of horror is clearly more problematic than, say, indulging in the pleasures of a good romantic comedy. Monsters, aliens and psychopaths, committing acts of radical and unrelenting violence, should simply disgust and repel us, and to some degree they do. But many of us also take exquisite joy in the horrifying force, in watching its carnage unfold, and in the hunt that usually results in its destruction or expulsion. Explaining the ambivalence at the heart of our enjoyment of horror is crucial to understanding the genre. The problem is to explain how we are both attracted to and repulsed by the monstrous threat that such a force embodies. Various accounts of how we can be of two minds about these phenomena have been offered. Recreational terror theorists claim that it is “fun” to be scared, and that horror generates a particular kind of make-believe fear that is playful because unreal. Freudians describe monsters as embodying “the return of the repressed”, gratifying the dark desires of our Id and attaining a healthy catharsis of surplus repression in the process. Ideologists see monstrous forces spawned either to be destroyed, serving conservative political ends, or to survive and embody indirect social critiques. Formalists account for the pleasure in terms of the narrative structure of discovery, and feminists see the genre as a battleground on which the sex wars are being fought, and often won, by women. All of these are solutions to the ambivalence problem that have something to add to our appreciation of the genre. Since reading “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics”, the landmark 1960’s essay by Morris Weitz, I have been convinced that “real” definitions of aesthetic genres, couched in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct application and interpretation of such terms, will never be forthcoming. “Horror” is what Ludwig Wittgenstein called a “family resemblance concept”; like the term “game”, no particular quality is necessary for a film to be horrific, nor is there any simple set of conditions sufficient to qualify for inclusion in the genre. But that doesn’t mean that genre theory is fruitless. With Weitz, I believe that such theories offer serious recommendations as to what to look for and how to look at particular works of art. One of their greatest values is to highlight features of works that have either fallen out of fashion or have been overlooked by previous theorists. That is my intention here. Horror films are, in my estimation, most fundamentally power struggles between human protagonists and monstrous or psychotic antagonists. Much of the pleasure that we take in them is derived from two sources: 1) Identifying with the horrifying force, and vicariously enjoying the havoc that it wreaks; and 2) Sharing in the triumph that the human protagonists usually achieve over that force. Recent theorizing about horror films has made too little of these facets of our experience. Only feminists (like Cynthia Freeland in The Naked and the Undead) talk about power relations in horror films, but gender considerations are their primary focus. Our ambivalence, in my view, is a response to the moral evil, or blind destructiveness, of that which horrifies, and the pleasure that we take in its terrifying acts. This also leads to our dual identification with the monster and the heroic protagonist. To provide some conceptual content to this gestalt on horror films, I draw on the philosophy of power of Friedrich Nietzsche. My theory takes as its starting point the Nietzschean notion that an increase in the feeling of power is pleasurable (see epigraph), and accounts for horror-pleasure in terms of such power feelings. A more detailed statement of the problem, and critical examination of the major proposed solutions will begin my inquiry. A brief gloss on what Nietzsche meant by power, and his revolutionary account of art as an expression of the Will to Power, is the next task. Finally, I will propose a power-based account of the pleasures of watching horror films, which will then be applied to archetypes of the genre. Robin Wood’s influential 1978 essay in Film Comment called “The Return of the Repressed” marked a crucial turning point in the intellectual discussion of horror movies. Before it, horror was largely thought to be disreputable entertainment, a second-rate genre appealing mainly to teens and children. But Wood’s application of Freudian psychoanalysis to explain the pleasures of horror helped impart intellectual respectability to the genre, triggering decades of discussion. Wood returned to the subject of horror in several chapters of his 1986 book Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, and the following is a synopsis of that work. He sees the monster or psychotic as an embodiment of “the Other”: “Otherness represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with...in one of two ways: either by rejecting and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it, converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself.”(73) Normality comes in conflict with the monstrous, and it is “the relationship between normality and the monster that constitutes the essential subject of the horror film”. From a Freudian perspective, our ambivalent reaction to horror stems from our attitude towards normality: “Central to the effect and fascination of horror films is their fulfillment of our nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us and which our moral conditioning teaches us to revere.”(80) His central thesis is that “in a society built on monogamy and the family there will be an enormous surplus of repressed sexual energy, and what is repressed must always strive to return.” Much of those repressed contents stem from the Oedipus complex. Analyzing John Badham’s version of Dracula, which ended with Dracula (a seductive Frank Langella) killing Van Helsing (Sir Laurence Olivier) and escaping undead, Wood remarks that “the ending is not merely the triumph of Dracula...but of Oedipus, who, having carried off the woman (Lucy), kills the father and flies away.”(111) Wood highlights the frequency with which monstrous children, in The Omen, It’s Alive, Children of the Damned and elsewhere, seek to kill their parents, contending they are carrying out the death wish we all harbor in our ambivalent hearts. Children in general are subject to great oppression, because their polymorphously perverse infantile sexuality must be channeled into monogamous heterosexuality. We, as adults, unconsciously (and consciously) fear unbridled sexuality, and our repressed fears find expression in such films. In Freud’s view, all of us are born inherently bisexual, and Wood (a homosexual who quite prominently came out of the closet in the course of his career) analyzes the demand bourgeois society makes of men to repress their innate femininity, in order to ensure their heterosexuality. In order to do so effectively “on to women men project their own innate, repressed femininity in order to disown it as inferior”.(74) For Wood, women are the main objects of horrific violence (e.g in the films of Brian De Palma) because of their status as the “other” in a chauvinist society. The necessity of repressing this feminine side also explains why so many male psychotic murderers are depicted as having gender identity problems. Norman Bates in Psycho is taken over by his mother’s persona when he is sexually aroused. In DePalma’s Dressed to Kill, Dr Robert Elliott (a chilling Michael Caine) is a transvestite contem- plating a sex change operation, whose “Bobby” female persona murders all the women to whom he is erotically attracted. A more recent example would be Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. The message is clear: confusion of gender identity is linked to monstrous evil. Wood approached horror movies as cinematic nightmares, seeking to uncover the hidden wish fulfillments at work in them. His writings on the genre have become canonical. Freudian discussions of horror are now commonplace, often with a feminist slant. One of the best is Men, Women and Chain Saws (1992) by Carol Clover. Noting a trend in horror films made since the late ‘70s of female protagonists who kill the monster in the end, Clover saw such “Final Girls” as pivotal to the male experience of horror. It is crucial to male pleasure that “Abject fear is still gendered feminine”, because the masochistic enjoyment of being scared is permissible only through identification with a female. But, she continued, “the willingness of one immensely popular current genre to represent the hero as anatomically female would seem to suggest that at least one of the traditional marks of heroism, triumphant self-rescue, is no longer strictly gendered masculine”.(60) Ripley in Alien, Laurie in Halloween, Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street, all serve to empower women and bridge the gap between male viewer and female protagonist. This is all to the good, from Clover’s perspective, for these horror films invite men to identify with the female, and share in her triumph as well as her fear. The Freudian paradigm continues to dominate the analysis of horror, much to the chagrin of the competition. Part of the difficulty is that recent generations of directors, coming out of college film schools, make Freudian references all the time. It also provides a convincing solution to the central problem of our ambivalent reaction to horror, by explaining that our id is gratified by the vicarious wish fulfillments of horror, even as our super-ego is appalled. But its greatest drawback remains the exclusive emphasis on uncovering hidden and unconscious meanings, i.e., the insistence that it be repressed contents that are primarily being expressed, and repressed desires and wishes that are being gratified. Sometimes a big cigar is just a smoke, and the conscious and more obvious goal is what motivates our actions. The hypothesis of the unconscious is powerful because it explains human behavior that is not explicable in conscious terms. But much of our behavior is consciously explicable, and so is our appreciation of horror. Play theorists, focusing on the experience of recreational terror, see Freudians as taking this all too seriously. As William Paul put it in his book Laughing Screaming: “often we make art serious and seemingly of value by downplaying play, by making art something other than fun. But, like play, art may well be an end in itself”.(422) The fun in play is logically unanalyzable and uninterpretable. After all, Hitchcock always claimed he had a great deal of fun making Psycho. That doesn’t mean he was some kind of pervert (though he may have been). The thrills of a film like Aliens have long been analogized to those of riding a roller coaster. They yield the same feelings of accelerating, yet controlled, terror. Isabel Christina Pinedo drew on this analogy to describe the “bounded experience of fear” that gives her book, Recreational Terror, its title. Our experience of horror-terror is bounded by our knowing that we are not really in danger. “Throughout, the element of control, the conviction that there is nothing to be afraid of turns stress/arousal (beating heart, dry mouth, panic grip) into a pleasurable sensation. Fear and pleasure commingle.”(39) If one were really in danger, one would not feel the terror as pleasurable. Both Paul and Pinedo share a preoccupation with this “fun” side of horror. While some of the pleasure of a good horror film does come from such adrenaline- generating “fun”, the same could be said of action films, not to mention older genres such as westerns and war movies. This is not to say that play theorists are wrong in their attribution, but that they are not addressing the pleasures specific to horror. They have answered the ambivalence problem, however, by explaining that feelings of terror that would be painful in response to real situations can be experienced as pleasurable because the viewer (even when he is as young as my seven-year-old son Patrick) always remains aware of their make-believe status. Political ideologists, on the other hand, scan films for their serious sociopolitical import. The horror film performs at least two discrete functions on the ideological level, according to Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner in Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood. Most horror theorists mark a great difference between classical monster movies and the more contemporary (some call them “post- modern”) horror flicks, which have been made since the social upheavals of the late ‘60s. Ryan and Kellner analyze the two ages as follows: “In classical monster films a reassuring social order is restored through the successful operations of conservative institutions.”(179) Our ambivalent reaction to, say, Howard Hawks’ The Thing is hence explained by the fact that, while the terror it causes is unpleasant, the restoration of order is experienced as pleasurable. Furthermore, given the metaphorical links between ‘50s horror movies like The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the perceived Communist menace at the time, the success of conservative institutions in overcoming the monster provided some political solace as well. However, “in most contemporary monster films no reassuring vision of restored order is affirmed.”(179) The function of many of these films is social criticism (a function first recognized by Robin Wood, who interpreted modern horror films as constituting a critique of the bourgeois American family. One of the most important of these “open” texts is Night of the Living Dead, made (not coincidentally) in the pivotal year of 1968. “By depicting normal people becoming monsters, Romero subverts the line demarcating normality from monstrosity and suggests that much of what passes for normal life is in fact quite unseemly.”(179-80) The patriarchal family, white supremacism, consumer capitalism and the police are but a few of the American institutions that come under Romero’s attacks: “And he suggests that conservative order is as monstrous as the Living Dead”.(181) Our ambivalent reaction to such horror films is hence similar to our response to overtly political films like Missing, Salvador, Under Fire and The Parallax View; they provide spectacles that are hard to watch, but that raise our consciousness. One’s political persuasion has a lot to do with whether such consciousness raising is experienced as pleasurable: “left-liberals use the metaphor of American-as-monster to criticize bourgeois normality and to suggest that American life harbors monstrous impulses that conservatives claim are moral and good.”(185) This fundamental difference in attitude explains the virulent reaction against the genre by the political right. While the ideological readings of the political content of horror films are often persuasive, I doubt that this content is the locus of the unique pleasures that the horror genre has to offer. Once again, there is little in the ideologists’ account that distinguishes instances of the genre from other films that deal with political content, but are not overtly political. Ryan and Kellner claim that “the horror metaphor provides a medium for expressing fears culture cannot deal with directly, (and) it also provides a vehicle for social critiques too radical for mainstream Hollywood production.”(169) This latter feature seems to me to be more a function of the independent production of low budget films (which is possible because of the popularity of horror) than of the radical nature of their social critiques. Comedies like M*A*S*H, musicals like Pennies from Heaven, and other genres not usually thought of as political have also expressed such cultural fears in recent decades. Since the ‘90s, the most discussed solution to the ambivalence problem in philosophic circles has been Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror Or Paradoxes of the Heart. Carroll singles out an emotion called “art-horror”, to which good horror films give rise. “Art-horror” is a combination of disgust, revulsion and extreme terror engendered by our encounter with the “impossible beings” that populate horror films. These feelings, while unpleasant in themselves, are transformed into a pleasurable experience by the structure of a well-made narrative. For Carroll “the emotion of art-horror is not our absolutely primary aim in consuming horror fictions...Rather, art-horror is the price we are willing to pay for the revelation of that which is impossible and unknown, of that which violates our conceptual schema.” (186) Our ambivalence about the monster is hence a combination of disgust at its aspect and curiosity as to its bizarre nature. Curiosity is at the heart of most narratives, “However, the horror fiction is a special variation on this general narrative motivation, because it has at the center something which is given as in principle unknowable.”(162) Such possible creatures as Norman Bates in Psycho, Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs and the Mantle Twins in Dead Ringers are therefore ruled out as art-horrific beings. He concludes that “the pleasure derived from the horror fiction and the source of our interest in it resides, first and foremost, in the processes of discovery, proof and confirmation that horror fictions often employ.”(184) His account is modeled on David Hume’s theory of tragedy. In “Of Tragedy”, Hume contended that we do not take pleasure in the suffering of the tragic protagonist, but rather in the aesthetic form of a well-made work. Those aesthetic pleasures predominate over our painful experience of tragic suffering. Utilizing the power of the tragic sentiments, which Hume took to be unmitigatedly unpleasant, the well-wrought tragic narrative creates an overall experience of much greater intensity than if the original emotions were more lukewarm. Although he doesn’t adopt the so-called “conversion” view expressed in the previous sentence, Carroll claims we are not emotionally ambivalent about our disgust at the monsters in horror fiction. We are univocally revulsed by monsters per se, although curious about their strangeness, what Carroll calls their “interstitiality”. When confronted with the insectoid-reptile in Alien, we are disgusted and naturally shrink away: “It is not that we crave disgust, but that disgust is the predictable concommitant of disclosing the unknown.”(185) Our cognitive curiosity about the unknown, and the well-wrought narrative in which the alien ship is discovered, and a living alien is confirmed to exist and successfully confronted, is what makes our global experience of the film pleasurable. This is a convincing solution to the problem of ambivalence, for it is the same qualities in the monster, especially its impossibility, that both emotionally disgust us and cognitively make us curious. But, while here he apparently assumes a dualism between the emotions and cognition, he cites cognitive theories of emotion in his latest work, The Philosophy of Mass Art, in order to collapse such a traditional dualism, and refute Plato’s attack on art as too emotional.(250-261) To my mind, Carroll’s account places too little stock in our pleasure at being horrified. Alex Neill, in a Philosophical Studies article entitled “On a Paradox of the Heart”, puts it well: “So, ‘Why Horror?” Largely because it horrifies; because it gives us a sort of pleasure that other sorts of fiction--fiction that doesn’t horrify--doesn’t ... art-horror is not in itself a painful or distressing emotion.”(63) It is also troubling that Carroll rules out the entire class of what might be called “realistic” horror films, which are peopled by psychos, slashers and sociopaths. Most critics discuss Psycho, for example, as a paradigm of the horror genre, exerting great influence for almost four decades. Excluding it, and such other classics as Repulsion, Peeping Tom and Sisters, is surely problematic. Despite these objections, Carroll is onto something here. Some of the pleasure we take in horror films comes, in the words of Frank Manchel (penned two decades before The Philosophy of Horror), from their “appeal to our curiosity, to our unquenchable thirst to know more about the regions of the unknown where all of us, from crib to coffin, often consider exploring”.(109) But that curiosity goes hand-in-hand with the mysterious pleasure we take in being horrified by the monster or psychotic, and the cognitive pleasures of horror are not required to overcome the emotional displeasure of our disgust at the terrifying creature. Rather, the cognitive and emotional aspects of out experience of horror work hand-in-hand (in those of us who enjoy it) to produce a globally pleasurable experience. So, any adequate account of the ambivalence of our reaction to horror films must recognize that the emotion of art-horror is pleasurable in itself, and that the opposing reaction (which generates the ambivalence) comes from another source. This is why I propose that we see the horrific force as an embodiment of awesome power, attractive and pleasurable in itself, which repels because of the “immorality” of the undeserved deaths which inevitably ensue. Such an account is also sufficiently general to cover both impossible beings and human psychopaths. |