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| PERSONA - 1966 |
Persona concerns a theater actress, Elisabeth, who suffers a nervous breakdown and stops talking. Her nurse takes care of
her, talking incessantly to fill the void. The Exorcist concerns a budding graffiti sculptress, Regan (Linda Blair), who suffers
a "demonic possession" and becomes a green vomit-spewing invalid. Her mom, who takes care of her--is an actress. The men in
both films are helpless as far as offering any aid or counsel. As representatives of the patriarchal order they may appear
and attempt to do their duty, but none succeed. The "saving" of the possessed Regan hinges on the faith of Father Merrill
and Father Karras--one old and dying, the other doubting and guilt-ridden. Their combined strength is not enough to return
Regan to the social fold. The only way to "win" her heart and mind is via their sacrifice: Merrill’s death drives Karras
to the breaking point where he lets the devil into him and leaps from the window, mirroring Max's "Hail to the New Flesh"
suicide in Videodrome, a noble hari kari of the male authority figure, a removal of the social drain’s blockage. In
Persona a child and a blind man both try to claw their way into the women's hallucinatory world, but are denied.
Persona opens with a montage of disturbing black and white imagery: nails driven into hands, a tarantula, the gushing neck
of a lamb in mid-slaughter, old, withered bodies in a starkly lit morgue; interspersed with these are images of cinema apparatus
in motion: decaying film, a cartoon that slips its sprockets, the ignition of a projector light bulb. Then a young boy wakes
up on a slab in the morgue. A woman's face is projected onto the wall behind him; he traces the outlines of her face. The
projected image changes back and forth from the face of Bibi Anderson to the face of Liv Ullman, the image never comes into
full focus, even when he puts his glasses on. This all happens prior to the credits; once they roll, the dead boy is never
seen again, and the only man who shows up is his (presumable) father, Elisabeth's blind, old husband, and this only in a dream,
maybe.
As a short film standing on its own, the succession of imagery stands that opens Persona stands somewhere between a surrealist
short ala Dali and Bunuel's Un chien andalou and Samara's home made video. All three serve as avant garde punishments to the
eye of the viewer (literally in La chien's famous eyeball-slitting scene), linking the "image" with the death drive, exposing
the big lie behind the conventional narrative progression. The pea soup-spewing, head rotating, extreme performance art of
Regan in The Exorcist fits nicely aside these shock montages as well—fitting Bunuel’s comment on Un chien, that
a film’s “object is to provoke instinctive reactions of revulsion and attraction in the spectator.” (qtd.
Shaviro 55). We are drawn to these images like a moth to the flame that blinds it.
What keeps the cinematic gaze so entranced by the idea of its own blindness? Denied its phallic entry into the presumed paradise
of the image, the post-Oedipal disintegration of the Mulveyan male gaze’s sense of ownership flips to that of the guilty
boy banging his head against the wall in an effort to earn his ambivalent mother’s forgiveness. Thus the paranoia of
modern horror movies like The Exorcist and The Ring operates on the presumed guilt the male gaze feels over its own sacrifice/disintegration,
its reduction to the infantile masochistic gaze. Now that we're paralyzed in our seats instead of out there in the thick of
things we are suddenly needed; girls are being killed by a mysterious guy with a fishing hook because we were never born and
so can’t rush into the screen to save them. All we can do is scream, "Don't go in the house!" from our darkened rows,
but the girl onscreen can't hear us and so gets the chain saw. The man riding to the rescue--if there is one---is ineffectual
in these horror films except as a momentary distraction which allows the heroine the chance to turn the tables on the situation
through her own moxy.
If there is one key film here in which we can imagine the authority of the male gaze irrevocably and permanently destroyed,
it may be The Exorcist. Regan's demonic possession begins as an act of revenge against the Father (he fails to call her on
her birthday) and subsequently broadens its malicious scope to include full spectrum of the gaze, seeking to draw out the
last vestiges of the big Other in order to show it that it is in fact, already dead. The horror films of the 1970s in particular
are about finding that out; ala Freud's case of the hysterical son who has frozen up to act out the role of a dad who doesn't
realize he's dead: Regan comes along to hammer the point home via a one-woman grand guiginol with one message, "Father, wake
up; you're dead."
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| "Wake up! You're dead!" - image vs. father in THE EXORCIST |
Ghosts with Cell Phones
I must detour a bit here to discuss the advent of cellular phone and internet technology, which has, in effect, given Medusa's
statue gallery an avenue by which they can at least interact with one another (anyone who has sat in a theater full of teenagers
with the blue lights of the cell phones blinking as they text each other constantly through the film will know what I mean).
Horror films have toyed with the idea of the dead being reachable via radio signals (doing so opens a channel which is then
traversable by demonic spirits) as early as The Devil Commands (1941) and as recently as White Noise (2005). Part of the Other's
diabolical plan, the phone has joined the screen as an (almost) equal partner in selling the virtual over the real. Where
once angst-ridden adolescents hid in their rooms and dreamt of real escape, now they come and go as they please and why not?
Their parents can always get a hold of them via cell phone, so they are always imprisoned in the web of absentee authority.
(Recall in these "kidnapped kid" movies, the most important thing for the parent is that they hear the child's voice on the
telephone). With the cell phone strapped on in case of emergency, the kid's physical proximity in a geographical sense to
"home" becomes, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. Home is where the phone is, there is no more places to hide, even
after death they can call you up and bug you.
Japanese professor of primate research, Nobuo Masataka, made a thorough study of it, Keitai wo Motta Saru ("Monkeys with
Mobile Phones"), which chronicles the ways the behavior of Japanese youth resembles that of the apes who wander aimlessly
in "out and about" tribes through the jungles, free from concerns of territoriality-- outside of time and geographical space.
"Mobile phones are now performing tasks that minds once did, such as thinking and talking." (Mainichi Daily News, November
15, 2005). All one has to do to get a feel of this phenomenon is watch anyone walk down the street or stand in a grocery store
line on their cell phone, how they seem to tune the world around them completely out, talking far louder than they normally
would about far too personal matters, presuming themselves invulnerable due to the "tele-coccoon." Notice how furious you
get the next time someone does this around you and think of these words from The End of Dissatisfaction: Lacan & the Society
of Enjoyiment:
"The public world is not a substantial world but exists only sofar as subjects believe in its existence--or insofar as they
believe that someone, the big Other, believes in it. If I see others refusing to enter this world, remaining in a private
world, I surmise the big Other no longer believes in the fiction of a neutral public world. And when I can no longer believe
that the bit Other believes, I myself stop believing--and everyone stops believing in a similar way... In this way the breakdown
of the public world gives way to an incessant paranoia: without the prohibition of enjoyment that the public world demands,
I am constantly confronted with the other's enjoyment and must, at the same time, constantly fear that the other may steal
my enjoyment." (161)
A 1970's kid like Regan in the Exorcist is depicted as slipping back from the social order--the public sphere--into the evil
of an obscene private enjoyment. The realization that “the other is dead” sets her free from having to conform
to its desires. Within a few decades, the rest of us would follow suit. Now we can’t even stand in a grocery line without
some Regan spewing pea soup into her cellular.
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| Linda Blair in The Exorcist |
There's a neat riff on Rear Window early on in The Ring: Rachel leaves Noah alone to watch the Samara tape and steps outside
her high rise apartment and onto her rainy balcony. As if for the first time, she looks through the windows across the courtyard
to see her neighbors: each is alone, isolated, glued to their televisions. If not for Samara's disruption with her “art
film,” Rachel never would have stepped out to the balcony to see this. Thus a black & white avant garde video is comparable
to the racetrack accident that puts James Stewart in a wheelchair in Rear Window, an example of violent sorrow seeming a modernist
ecstasy (if one may paraphrase Macbeth). What Stewart witnesses through his 1954 New York window is the death throes of the
public sphere, a sphere which Rachel then sees the absence of from her balcony. Hitchcock saw the writing on the wall: we
were to become a nation of medicated, hypnotized Miss Lonelyhearts, with television for "company" (ala Sirk's All that Heaven
Allows). By the time of The Matrix in 1999 we were safely nestled in our amniotic pods, powering the machines that created
our illusionary reality for us via our own bodily electricity.
The demonic Samara becomes, then, the first interdisciplinary media artist to transcend death, space, and time-- to exist
solely as a ghost in the machine. Like the Marquis de Sade before her, her physical self is peeled away by degrees via a social
order threatened by her obscene enjoyment. When her confinement to an institution doesn't work, they push her down a well,
the most rarified private sphere, where presumably she will have no access to either an audience or the tools of her decency
befouling art. But even that doesn't stop her – the cell phone makes it easy to reach out, wherever you are.
Baudrillard writes, "There was a time -- in movies like The Purple Rose of Cairo--when characters left the screen and came
down to be incarnated into real life... Today, it would be reality that is transfused into the screen to be disincarnated.
Nothing separates them anymore. The osmosis, the telemorphosis is complete." (198) Disincarnation is a very appropriate term
for what befalls the victims of Samara's haunted videotape. In the traditional ghost story, their dissemination would occur
in the symbolic space of the haunted house. In the age of the simulacrum what gets invaded is not our physical space but our
VCR or our hard drive. The actual physical space has become irrelevant. You call America Online, and the voice who answers
may be in New Delhi or New Jersey– there’s no longer any difference. Shaviro on Videodrome again: “The point
at which subjective reality becomes entirely hallucinatory is also the point at which technology becomes ubiquitous, and is
totally melded with and objectified in the human body.” (140) But the hallucinogen-laden milk of the glass teat flows
both ways; the videotape may be in us, but we are in the tape as well. The corrupting properties of Samara’s tape have
their real life counterparts, such as the hysteria surrounding The Exorcist’s original theatrical release, wherein,
Christian pundit Billy Graham "felt this power of evil... buried within the celluloid of the film itself." (119)
The disincarnation-transfusion process can be reversed, however, via the art of research, of media studies and psychoanalysis.
Rachel is able to decipher Samara's videotape and reincarnate the figure of Samara's mother, Anna, via a combination of the
three. She visits old mental institutions, departments of records, musty newspaper morgues, microfiche machines, libraries,
and the internet. From all these dead media formats she is able to piece Anna together, a Bride of Frankenstein version of
the maternal image-- the dark mirror of Rachel herself (her past life?) When Noah first enters a moldy old basement full of
records of past inmates at an asylum he wonders aloud, "Are you in here, Anna?" As a photographer he understands that a life
can exist inside images and symbols. This sort of life horrifies more traditional males like Samara's father, Tom Morgan.
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| Brian Cox as Tom Morgan |
As embodied by heavyweight actor Brian Cox, Tom Morgan is big, alive, menacing fundamentalist, single-handedly covering all
the responsibilities of his vast horse ranch without ever needing to break his pious scowl. For Rachel, leaving the rainy
abstraction of Seattle with its symbolic eunuchs for this big, burly man is akin to pulling back the curtain in The Wizard
of Oz, or taking the red pill in the Matrix and "waking up" into the dream of the real. Later he will confess that he never
loved Samara and that she was a "spreader of sickness," meaning her ability to plant horrific ideas and imagery into people's
heads. This sort of Satanic gift for psychic broadcasting is seen by Mr. Morgan as ultimately no different than Rachel's news
stories.
Tom Morgan’s likening of a demonic child's telepathic sickness to the proliferation of mass media
would have made almost no sense back in, say, 1972, the year of William Friedkin's The Exorcist. Without cellular phone technology
and the internet, the ability of anyone but the Big White Male Other to get its message out to the general public was very
limited. With websites like youtube and myspace, anyone's writing, photography or videos can reach audiences previously accessible
to only an indoctrinated elite. Back in those carefree days one had to make a spectacle of themselves to get that kind of
attention, give them the silent treatment like Elisabeth in Persona, or start rotating your head counterclockwise like Regan.
Nowadays all one has to do is lip synch a pop song and be cute. The problem, as Kenjurilko notes in the Monkeys book, is that
the message may be going out, but it's not saying anything. The message is only "I'm here," an addictive means of reassurance
to the isolated, otherless child that becomes a substitute for human contact and a legit social order. With no direct inhibitor
to enjoyment, the mediated child is unable to mature...they act out more and more aggressively in the forlorn hope their evil
will attract an authority figure strong enough to smack them down into the social order where they can finally have a fixed
identity.
We should also note that no matter how terrified and frustrated they may become, the mothers in most horror films are seldom
perceived to be in any real physical danger; this is a given even if the narrative might suggest otherwise. We know mom won't
die because that's not where the terror lies; her concern for her kid supersedes concern for her own safety, the child's death
is scarier than her own. It is the intervening male protagonists, Father Karras, Tom Morgan, The Sixth Senses' Dr. Crow, Noah,
who are, by contrast, doomed from the start. For them, their concern for the endangered kid is wrapped up in their "role"
in the social order as protector and this social order has already failed them. In identifying with something dead they have
caught deadness like a cold. In the course of saving the kid they discover their own death again and again, for as Zizek notes
"the big Other is always already dead.'" (39, my italics).
The real life version of The Exorcist is enacted all across the land, with fatherless daughters slowly starving, cutting
themselves, killing themselves, shooting drugs and engaging in unprotected sex-- and society all but helpless to stop them.
What's required to save them is the male's sacrifice, in this case his sacrifice of freedom, his symbolic castration and submission
to the social order; his willingness to be "trapped" and suffocated in the bosom of his loving family when he'd rather ride
off into the sunset with a six pack at his side and a remote control tucked neatly in his holster. "Sacrifice is a guarantee
that 'the other exists'; that there is an other who can be appeased by the act of sacrifice." (Zizek, 56) Having shucked and
dodged the bullet for so long, the unwed, college dorm-dwelling, not taking care of ailing mom-guilt ridden Karras pays an
equivalency tax by urging Regan's evil spirit to come into him. On another level, it could be said he adopts her, thereby
ensuring the death of the old Karras-- the fun freewheeling bachelor of the cloth Karras that all the guys down at the Georgetown
pub know and love. It means dad must turn off the TV and take his girl to the mall, and it means if her friends come over
in halter tops and tight jeans, he is not allowed to become attracted to them. He is now and forever de-youngified.
Karras' heroic plunge ("let's take the plunge" is what lovers say when deciding to get married) is three-way mirrored in
The Ring: one sacrifice is the completely ineffectual self-electrocution of Tom Morgan, another is Rachel's fall down the
well and excavation of the skeleton of Samara; the third is Noah's death at the hands of Samara when she crawls out of the
TV in the film's horrific anticlimax. When Rachel sees Noah's hollowed out corpse she flees his apartment, but as she is on
her way down the stairs, she spots Noah's new girlfriend coming out of the elevator. Suddenly her shock changes to a kind
of calm, a transfiguration of emotion from horror to cuckolded vengeance. Thus, his death becomes a benefit to Rachel in that
it causes her an obscene private enjoyment at the expense of her rival, a younger woman.
As for Rachel's fall down the well, at first she is horrified, but when she finds the skeleton of Samara, she overcomes her
revulsion and cradles the bones with the sort of gushing mother love that her own weird son refuses. Samara's father's suicide,
by contrast, has no value as a sacrifice, a bloody initiation into the post-male social order or even as a "reaching out"
to apologize for his never loving her; it's rather an empty gesture of defeat, a surrender to the "images" she is still flooding
his head with. He can't turn around and embrace the horror of the image, to cradle his daughter's corpse with the finesse
of Rachel, and so he dies, with a television set in his arms like a teddy bear. He is the final hold-out, there alone on his
island--against the onslaught of the image, and when he drops the TV, he exits the film, to paraphrase Shakespeare: sans eyes,
sans applause, sans credits, sans everything.
This "beyond the grave waits the audience" factor perhaps originates in The Exorcist's first weeks of release: "Stories were
circulating of fainting, vomiting, heart attacks and miscarriages. In Berkely a man threw himself at the screen in a misguided
attempt to 'get the demon.'" (Kermody, 84) The world of J-Horror, initiated by the global success of The Sixth Sense coincided
with these themes of haunted cellular phones and internet sites, linking the beyond with "what lurks outside the screen" and
thus implicating the audience. Osment’s declaration “I see dead people” has become an instant cultural touchstone
in this regard, the “dead people” includes you, the viewer. It is the children of today who have brains unformed
enough that they can grow around the complexities of cell phone and internet technology, incorporating them into their daily
lives so thoroughly that they are “part of their physical selves. It is thus also children and children alone who can
recognize their role as images within a film on a screen, to assimilate the gaze of the audience, to act as onscreen channels
between the other world (that lies beyond the screen) and the two dimensions of hyper-reality.
The final scene of The Ring, wherein Rachel helps her son duplicate Samara's videotape, ends with a switch to the white noise
filling the screen after Rachel clicks the remote. Of course every "end" of a film is such a moment, always a bit of a disappointment,
as if waking from a botched suicide attempt. In this case, however, it is a fourth wall-crossing expulsion. Like Father Karras
in The Exorcist or Noah in The Ring, the viewer wakes up to their purpose in the diegis of the film; their death, backwards
down the well and either out the door into the cold winter air or back to the beginning of Persona all over again, rubbing
our hands along the surface of the impenetrable screen, dreaming of finding another way back home.
NOTES
Baudrillard, Jean, The Conspiracy of Art. New York: Semiotext(e), 2005.
Baudrillard, Jean, The Ecstacy of Communication, New York: Semiotext(e) 1988.
Baudry, Jean-Louis, 1975. "The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema," Film Theory
& Criticism, Ed. Leo Braudy. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. 207-223
Ellison, Harlan, The Glass Teat. New York: Pyramid Publications, 1975.
Georgakas, Dan, 1997. "The Purple Rose of Keaton," Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. Cambridge Film Handbooks, Ed. Andrew Horton.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 130-139
Kermody, Mark, The Exorcist: BFI Modern Classics. London: British Film Institute, 1997.
McLarty, Lianne, "Beyond the Veil of the Flesh: Cronenberg and the Disembodiment of Horror." The Dread of Difference. Ed.
Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 231-252
McGowan, Todd, The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment. Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press, 2004.
Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminism in Film Theory, Ed. Constance Penley. New York:
Routledge, 1988. 57-68
Shaviro, Steven, The Cinematic Body, Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
Studlar, Gaylyn, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1988.
Zizek, Slavoj, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 2001.
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| The Ring |
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