SILVER SCREEN PSYCHO KILLERS

 Responding to remarks about the influence of Hitchcock's 1960 PSYCHO on the history of the psycho-killer subgenre...

I'm only aware of one year-by-year "psychofilmography" of this subgenre, and that's the one compiled by John McCarty in his 1993 MOVIE PSYCHOS AND MADMEN. I don't agree with a number of his inclusions, such as "Jekyll and Hyde" films and "evil mastermind" films like those of Fu Manchu and Doctor Mabuse. But he's generally good about focusing on killers who seem motivated less by gain than by some mad pleasure in killing, usually more than just one victim. His list suggests that, aside from Mister Hyde, supernaturally-endowed psycho-killers barely existed in any quantity before the 1980s, so that most of the malcontents on the list are either uncanny or naturalistic. 

According to McCarty, there's barely anything relevant in cinema's silent years, though Hitchcock's 1926 THE LODGER builds on the legend of Jack the Ripper. I don't consider the original LODGER a true psycho-killer film, though, because the evildoer is mainly important as a catalyst, causing an innocent man to be falsely accused.

Fritz Lang's M heads up the sound era, but it, like most of the other psycho killer films of the thirties, doesn't beget more of its own subgenre kindred. The strongest pattern I see are a series of one-offs on a theme I would call "the mad hobbyist." This means a character who's so obsessed about his hobby that he makes murder integral to his pursuits, thus taking in 1932's MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, 1935's THE RAVEN, and 1936's THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET. 

By contrast, the forties really develop the subgenre as cinema never had before. Many years during this decade can boast (according to McCarty's parameters) as many as four or more psycho-killer films each year. Was there an upsurge in the public's perception of psychology, particularly of the Freudian brand, so that ticket buyers took the subject more seriously as a way to explain deviant behavior? Es posible.

In 1944 we get the first psycho-killer film that spawns, not a sequel or remake, but a wholly different movie in the same idiom. John Brahm's THE LODGER is a wholly different film from Hitchcock's, for the psycho-killer is the focus of the story. The killer's mental makeup is described in much more detail than most thirties parallels, even more than in Lang's M. LODGER was successful enough that the studio got Brahm to do an idiom-sequel for 1945 release, adapting the novel HANGOVER SQUARE in such a way as to duplicate the appeal of LODGER.

A lot of crime-films started using crazed killers, too. Scarface and Little Caesar had their obsessions, but they didn't murder for pleasure like the psycho-crooks of BORN TO KILL, KISS OF DEATH, or Hitchcock's ROPE.

The fifties show roughly roughly the same pattern as the forties, though in this decade we get an idiom-sequel to a "mad hobbyist" flick, when the success of Vincent Price's 1953 remake of MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM leads to his appearance in 1954's THE MAD MAGICIAN. Toward the end of the fifties we're beginning to get a few films like 1958's SCREAMING MIMI and 1959's HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM, which might have encouraged (if not literally influenced) the provenance of not only PSYCHO, but the same-year PEEPING TOM by Michael Powell.

In terms of the history of psycho-killers, PSYCHO's biggest influence was that it provided a pattern that proved easy to follow. Instead of one or two idiom-knockoffs of a successful movie, the "hills" of the 1960s were alive with the sounds of psycho-killings. Going purely by McCarty, year 1966 is the only one that has as few as four such movies, and that's with me eliminating the irrelevant FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN. After 1970, McCarty's list, which concludes with Year 1992, shows almost every year with at least ten such films listed.

And to think-- it all started with a noisy shower.

METAPHENOMENAL MUSINGS PT. 2

The second and last elephant in the room is that even though fans of what I call "the metaphenomenal" often use the term "fantasy-fans" for themselves (unless they're really uncompromising SF-adherents), they often consume a lot of content that would not meet the definition of fantasy I proposed in Part 1, "as violations of what can happen in either time, space, or both." This is particularly true in the world of fantasy-film fans. It's for these audiences that concordances of fantastic film include such items as PSYCHO (serial killer), TARZAN OF THE APES (man raised by animals), and even the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ (extended fantasy dream-sequence).

None of these movies technically break with accepted standards of causation within time and space. Serial killers, feral children and extended dreams are all conceivable in our reality, so they don't break with the perceived rules of time and space. However, the way in which each of these famous movies presents these unusual phenomena may be deemed to *bend* those rules. Serial killers don't commonly have the complicated double identities of a Norman Bates, long dreams are not as structured as those of Dorothy Gale, and there has never been a feral child who turned out as good-looking as Tarzan.

At the same time, it's not impossible to depict parallel versions of these real-world phenomena in which no rule-bending takes place. Carl Jung had many symbolically complex dreams that could be recapitulated in the medium of cinema without making them seem as if they had the structure of fiction, after the fashion of OZ. And there have been cinematic treatments of the real-life deviate Ed Gein, on whom Norman Bates was partly based, and of the real feral child Victor of Aveyron, the basis of Francois Truffaut's THE WILD CHILD.

Following (but not wedded to) some terminology introduced in academic circles, I've called this "rule-bending" category of the metaphenomenal "the uncanny" while the "rule-breaking" category is "the marvelous." In contrast, all those works that simply "follow the rules" I deem "the naturalistic." There are surely concordances that don't follow my categories, that may occasionally include THE WILD CHILD or the 2000 movie ED GEIN. But I believe these are minor exceptions. Most such compendia avoid the strictly naturalistic studies of serial killers like Ted Bundy or the Hillside Stranglers, but serial killers whose fictional careers suggest the bizarre and the extraordinary generally find themselves in such encyclopedias.

I plan to devote a separate essay to some of my recent thoughts about the process by which "works of the uncanny" distinguish themselves from "works of the naturalistic," but to conclude, my idea of the typical fantasy-fan, with an equal appreciation for both forms of the metaphenomenal, is illustrated by this except from the letter of a somewhat famed fantasy-author:

If. in fact, man is unable to create living things out of inorganic matter. to hypnotize the beasts of the forest to do his will, to swing from tree to tree with the apes of the African jungle...or to explore... the deserts of Mars, permit us, at least, in fantasy, to witness these miracles, and to satisfy that craving for the unknown, the weird, and the impossible which exists in every human brain.-- H.P. Lovecraft.

A FINAGLING FOLLOW-UP

About two years ago, in this essay, I rendered this judgment on the A&E series BATES MOTEL:

Not until 2013, with the premiere of the BATES MOTEL teleseries, did some raconteur develop the Norma character. Yet although Norma overrides Norman's character in the story proper, extrinsically Norman is still more important than Norma, even in BATES MOTEL.

At the time I wrote this, I hadn't actually finished the series, though it was wrapped in 2017, the same year I wrote the essay. I wasn't overly enamored of the series, though I respected the performances of the lead actors Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga. However, now that I finally worked my way through all five seasons, I would say that Norman and Norma comprise a two-person ensemble. Indeed, one of the last shots in the fifth season concludes with a dying Norman imagining himself reunited with Norma as if the two of them have passed on to some heavenly reward beyond the ugly toils of life.

Further, though Norman's persona is, as in all other iterations, that of a "monster," Norma Bates is more of a "demihero." She commits a couple of murders, but generally in situations of self-defense, and her crimes are outgrowths of her desire to make a better life for herself in the motel business. She has some strange vibes with Norman, but not as strange as his toward her, and so her nature aligns with the quality of "positive persistence" I described here.

FINAGLING THE FOCAL PRESENCE PT. 3

The other two FINAGLING essays, here and here, have concerned the ways in which focal presences may include illusory phantasms that have been conjured up out of a character's mind, whether for the purpose of deceiving someone else, as with Washington Irving's story SLEEPY HOLLOW, or as a by-product of the character's strong identification with someone else, as with Mario Bava's film THE WHIP AND THE BODY. Some qualifications of this general rule are necessary, though.

In Part Two I mentioned that the character of Nevenka had become subsumed in her idea of her ex-lover Kurt, to the extent that she believed she had become Kurt and was killing as he would have killed people-- though he was already dead by Nevenka's hand before her serial-killing career begins. I also remarked that Nevenka was "no Norman Bates," by which I meant that Norman was a more well-rounded character, both in the novel and the 1960 film. But it also applies to the degree to which Norman's character is subsumed by the character of his mother, Norma Bates. The pattern may be the same, but Norma does not take over the narrative of PSYCHO the way Kurt takes over the narrative of WHIP & BODY. Not until 2013, with the premiere of the BATES MOTEL teleseries, did some raconteur develop the Norma character. Yet although Norma overrides Norman's character in the story proper, extrinsically Norman is still more important than Norma, even in BATES MOTEL.

Something similar to Norman Bates's transcendence of his role model appears in the 1964 film STRAIT-JACKET As I state in the review, this film was a case of scripter Bloch aping his own PSYCHO-success. This time, however, the situation is somewhere between that of SLEEPY HOLLOW and WHIP AND BODY. Years before the main story, Lucy Harbin has committed the axe-murder of her husband and her husband's lover, but though her legend gives her a repute along the lines of Lizzie Borden, Lucy doesn't get away with giving her victims "forty whacks," and she goes away to an asylum for twenty years. The main story opens as Lucy, rehabilitated at last, is released to rejoin normal society, and to re-connect with her daughter Carol. Carol, three years old at the time of the murders, witnessed the killings but now, twenty years later, seems entirely normal-- which ought to suggest to any viewers the most likely suspect when some new axe-murders commence.

Carol commits the new murders to frame her mother, whom she despises, and so in many regards she's doing the same Brom Bones (probably) did in SLEEPY HOLLOW: creating the illusion of a mad killer. At the same time, the film's conclusion suggests that she's more than a little nuts, which allies her more with Nevenka of WHIP AND BODY. Still, the focal presence of STRAIT-JACKET is not the illusion of Lucy Harbin Axe-Murderer. Rather, Carol is the imaginative center of the movie; the new psycho-bitch in town.

Age plays a role in this shift in the film's focal presence, for although Lucy briefly tries to camouflage her true age-- star Joan Crawford was roughly sixty-four at the time-- it's plain to the viewer that she no longer possesses the "mojo" to be an axe-murderer.

And yet, age can also lend a given character greater gravity. The Classic Trek episode "The Conscience of the King" is, like all such episodes, focused on the adventures of Captain Kirk and his ensemble. However, it occurred to me to ask: if the story had focused only upon the opposition-characters, who would have been the focal presence? Like Lucy Harbin, the actor Karidian is guilty of murders committed long ago. However, within the sphere of the existing narrative the persona of the killer, "Kodos the Executioner," has been overwritten by Karidian, the same way Lucy-the-murderer has been usurped by Lucy-the-penitent.. However, although Karidian's daughter Lenore has lost her mind due to finding out about her father's past, and has sought to kill off all witnesses to Kodos' crime, I would say that Lenore, unlike Carol Harbin, never has a shot at being the focal presence. She exists to provide Karidian with yet another torment in his life of regrets, and so a retelling of the story, sans the Trek-regulars, would have been focused upon the tragic figure of the aged criminal.

A MOVABLE HELLFEAST PT. 2

...in his last work, Nietzsche insisted that his point was merely that there was more hope for the man of strong impulses than for the man with no impulses: one should look for 'even a Cesare Borgia rather than a Parsifal.' ...This leaves no doubt that Nietzsche considered Cesare Borgia far from admirable but preferred even him to the Parsifal ideal"-- Daniel Conway, NIETZSCHE: ON MORALITY, p. 125.

In Part 1 I cited Jack the Ripper as an example of a killer who, if he indeed wrote the famed "from hell" letter, was in essence seeking to "theatricalize" his propensity for murder, to portray himself as a virtual demon from hell. Since the Ripper was mentally adept enough to commit his crimes without being caught, I'd assume that he did not expect anyone reading that letter to literally believe that a demon was committing the murders. However, if he wrote the letter, then by that act he made himself more than just a random killer. The murders might have been forgotten a century later-- as indeed the deeds of many other serial killers have faded over time-- but "From Hell" makes the Ripper into a figure of immortal dread.

However, the psycho himself does not necessarily need to announce his dreadfulness to a waiting audience. Ed Gein's "theater of the dreadful" was intended only for his own viewership, but even a partial recitation of his ghoulish alterations of body-parts can bring forth the shivers of dread:

Bowls made from human skulls
A corset made from a female torso skinned from shoulders to waist
Human skin covering several chair seatsSkulls on his bedposts

In the first part of this essay-series, I quoted Virgil's famous line:

'If I cannot bend the will of Heaven, I shall move Hell.'-- Virgil's AENEID.

Interpreting this aphorism purely from a psychological standpoint--as indeed Sigmund Freud did, since he used the same motto to preface THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS-- the "hell" in one's own psyche is the realm of unrestrained desire. Long before Freud elaborated the three-part structure of the psyche as "id, ego, and superego," Nietzsche pursued a parallel line of thought. Nietzsche esteemed the ability of "the superman" to practice "self-overcoming" of his own impulses. Thus Borgia, who allegedly gave into his baser impulses, is no superman, any more than Ed Gein or the Ripper could be. But they were able to "move the hell" of their own desires in such a way that history still remembers their deeds.

Thus do real human beings take on the appearance of something beyond the ordinary, even though we know that they are, in the final analysis, human beings who are much more defined by contingent circumstances than fictional characters. Yet there is a degree of freedom in displaying the ability to "act" as if one is more than one is, and it can be used no less for producing the beneficent affect of *fascination* as for the destructive one associated with *dread.*  It would be interesting-- though beyond the scope of this essay-- to posit what sort of real-world "supermen" go beyond the level of mundane heroics, even as the Ripper acted the part of one beyond the mundane reality of a serial killer.

I said at the end of HELLFEAST PART 1 that I would explore these matters in terms of the question of freedom, but for now I will postpone that discussion to pursue other concerns.

POWER AND POTENCY PT. 2

I've studied various colloquial definitions of the words "power" and "potency," and, as mentioned before, some dictionaries make them virtually identical. The Oxford online reference, though, suggests a discontinuity useful for my purposes:

POWER: The ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a faculty or quality

POTENCY: The power of something to affect the mind or body

These primary definitions show a tendency to speak of "power" in terms of physical action, whereas "potency" can affect "mind or body."

This in turn lines up with my distinctions between the marvelous and the uncanny. I've consistently defined the marvelous as some object, entity or occurrence that breaks with causal law, be it something nominally justified through some new scientific technique-- Verne's Nautilus, obviously-- or something with no justification at all, like a cartoon rabbit who can defy gravity when it happens to be funny to do so.  Not all marvelous entities register as having high dynamicity, as I pointed out here, yet even a character whose marvelous nature gives him no special power of physical action still displays a "power" to flout natural law.

Going by the Oxford definition, though, "potency" can be used to affect both the physical and the mental planes of existence, or, as Octavio Paz put it, "body" and "non-body."  Paz's dichotomy was useful to me in sorting out the three phenomenalities with respect to a bifurcated causality in THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 2:

...both the "naturalistic" and "marvelous" phenomenalities are unitary in terms of what I chose at that time to call the aspects of "body" and "non-body"-- also roughly comparable to Cassirer's "causality" and "efficacy." In contrast, the phenomenenality of "the uncanny" was one in which "body" was at odds with "non-body."

G. Wilson Knight's essay on HAMLET implies this opposition between body and non-body when, as I showed in Part 1, Knight imputed to the moody Prince of Denmark a power that was not a literal power, saying that "the poison of [Hamlet's] mental essence spreads outward among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal."  When he wrote this, Knight was not being at all literal, as his use of the acid simile demonstrates. Hamlet has no more physical power than any other human being, but because he has "held converse with death," he *SEEMS LIKE* he has become something more than human. But the "seeming" takes place purely upon the mental/spiritual/"non-body" plane of being.

Until reading Knight, I had always classified HAMLET and most of its film adaptations as instances of the trope I call "phantasmal figuration." However, Knight's description makes Hamlet sound very much like the type of uncanny-or-naturalistic figure of another trope: "the perilous psycho."  In terms of the play proper, one may argue back and forth whether or not Hamlet, in feigning madness, may have actually gone mad. But whether the Danish prince is mad or merely infected with a pestilential cynicism, his attitude has given him a special "potency," even though he has no special power-- just like all of the "psycho" characters I've studied.

The primary subject of the aforementioned INTELLIGIBITY essay was to survey instances of my ten phenomenality tropes, in both their naturalistic and uncanny manifestations. I demonstrated that even though all of the cited examples fell within the bounds of causal coherence, the "uncanny" examples broke with causal intelligibility while the "naturalistic" ones did not. Now I refine that statement to add that the process of breaking with causal intelligibility is one that also confers a "potency" that is not "power."

The above phrase *SEEMS LIKE* proves applicable to all of the chosen examples, and, I assume, to any other examples that might be provided:

The Moby Dick of Melville's novel is identical in POWER to the Moby Dick of John Huson's 1956 film-adaptation. However, the original White Whale surpasses his naturalistic imitation in POTENCY, precisely because he *SEEMS LIKE* he is more than an ordinary whale.

Tod Slaughter's naturalistic perpetrator of "bizarre crimes" Perceval Glyde has no more POWER than the actor's more famous character Sweeney Todd, but Sweeney exceeds Glyde in POTENCY because he *SEEMS LIKE* more than a common criminal.

Hawk of the Wilderness and Tarzan are equals in POWER-- indeed, Olympic star Bruce Bennett played both-- but Tarzan clearly *SEEMS LIKE* he is more than a mortal man, even though he is not-- and the same applies to the huge horde of animal-skinned jungle-people who have imitated Tarzan.

And finally-- since I need not repeat the formula for all ten-- "perilous psycho" Joanna Eris of EYE OF THE BEHOLDER kills men for the crimes of her father, just as the fellow who popularized the very term "psycho" kills women for the crimes of his mother. But even though Norman Bates isn't a particularly powerful example of a psycho-- as I mentioned here-- he *SEEMS LIKE* he has a far greater ability to dispense death.

In contrast to the Oxford definition above, then, I will use "potency" exclusively to denote this semblance of a "non-body" form of *dynamicity.* However, since in earlier essays I've defined "dynamicity* exclusively in terms of that power that affect physical bodies within a given narrative, at best potency must be interpreted as extrinsic, rather than intrinsic. to that narrative-- which may line it up more properly with my conception of the combinatory-sublime.

HIGHLIGHTING ANXIETY PT. 1

In this essay I provided an example of what I deem "positive compensation," the type of compensation in which "stress enhances function." But what would be a valid example of negative compensation, in which "persistent stress that is not resolved through coping or adaptation" led rather to "anxiety and withdrawal?"




There are any number of factual stories of persons who become so invested in their fantasy-lives that they lose touch with reality. Ed Gein, the model for Robert Bloch's character of Norman Bates in PSYCHO, is said to have become fascinated with the atrocities featured in "death-cult magazines and adventure stories," though obviously his fixation on his mother was the primary motivation in his short career of murder and grave-robbery.  Bloch has stated that he had only marginal knowledge of Gein when he wrote PSYCHO in the late 1950s. Yet for whatever reason, the author cleaved to the well-known trope of the "geek who reads too much." The original Norman, unlike his cinematic incarnation, was a "book-nerd," so losing himself in arcane volumes that he convinces himself that he has raised his mother from the dead, though as in the film the only way Mrs. Bates comes to life is when Norman "plays" her.






What fascinates me, though, is the means by which this trope of negative compensation takes on ideological status. I've remarked in numerous essays about the ways this trope has been invoked by elitist or ultraliberal critics. But on occasion even persons who make their living with popular fiction can and have done so-- as I'll explore in greater depth in Part 2.

GHOSTS, AMERICAN STYLE

At the conclusion of THE PHENOMENALITY OF PSYCHOS I wrote:

At present I have not found a necessary connection between the two forms of the sublime.  It does suggest to me how some figures of comparatively low dynamicity can suggest that they are more powerful than they really are. I conclude that it is because of the effect of the combinatory-sublime, which seems to invest such figures with a larger-than-life "mana."

To toss out a more concrete example, PSYCHO's Norman Bates and the Jason Voorhees who debuts in FRIDAY THE 13TH--PART II are both "perilous psychos" within the category of "the uncanny." They are not equals in terms of their dynamicity-- Norman is at best at the low end of the "x-type" level of dynamicity, while Jason, even when he's supposed to be no more than a deranged human being, clearly occupies the high end. But they may be deemed as equals in terms of their mythicity, a narrative value that has its roots in the affects I have termed the combinatory-sublime. 

I emphasize again that mythicity is not coeval with popularity.  The mad killer from 1983's CURTAINS is probably no more formidable than Norman Bates in terms of dynamicity, but she isn't anything to write home about in mythic terms. However, the psycho-killer in 1971's BLOOD AND LACE is barely known outside the halls of horror-fanatics, but I rated her mythicity as "good" in my review, if not quite as good as that of Norman and Jason.

One thought I'm toying with is that although I still believe that the mode of the combative is determined by the presence of both *dynamicity* (an exceptional level of power is expressed in the combat of at least two opposed entities) and *centricity* (their combat is central to the plot), the aspect of the combinatory-sublime may affect the way in which a given protagonist's *dynamis* is received.

For instance, I wrote in this essay that even though ordinary gangsters are not able to fight the Golden Age version of the Spectre, the author had to throw in complications so that the Spectre would have struggle on some level.  I would add to this observation that criminals in THE SPECTRE represent more than just ordinary crooks: collectively they are the evil that forces the undead avenger to keep up his crusade, rather than going to his eternal rest. On this admittedly limited level, then, even the most mundane crooks assume greater mythicity than they would in a less ambitious story.

A less ambitious story involving another undead avenger appears in the 1941 ghost-comedy film TOPPER RETURNS.

This engaging if simple comedy-- barely a TOPPER film at all, as the titular character has little to do in it-- is really about co-star Joan Blondell's character Gail Richards. While staying at a typical Hollywood "old dark house," Gail is murdered by an unknown assailant.  Gail rises again as a ghost who wants to bring her murderer to justice, and forces the twittery Topper to help her.  To be sure, though, like other ghosts in the TOPPER oeuvre, Gail is able to affect the physical world. In one scene the masked murderer attempts to kill again, and Gail, turning invisible, rains punches down on the confused killer until he flees. At the climax she does manage to ferret out her killer and cause his death too. 

The mere fact that the mystery killer is not exceptional in his dynamicity would keep this from being a "combative" film.  However, would things be different if the killer had a more prepossessing aspect, if he had some sort of bizarre identity like "the Bat?"

Such an added fillip might indeed make a difference, and in future essays I'll discuss some reasons why.

THE PHENOMENALITY OF PSYCHOS

In my last essay I emphasized the essential independence of dynamicity, mythicity, and their respective significant sublimity-values.  However, I also noted that their affects could become "intricately intertangled." Since I've been addressing the phenomenality of the "perilous psycho" intermittently this year, starting with the essay OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS, I'll stick with this theme as a source of examples.

In the aforesaid essay I questioned in part whether or not Sherlock Holmes was always a naturalistic figure in all of his iterations.  In the third essay in this series, I observed an opposing tendency in the villain of the Holmes film A STUDY IN TERROR:

I have yet to encounter a fictionalized Jack the Ripper, however, whose spectre does not suggest either "the uncanny" or "the marvelous."  This is in contrast to many other perilous psychos. 

The character in STUDY is of the "uncanny" type, which means that he does not violate the regularity aspect of causality, but does transgress upon the expectations of intelligibility. Jack the Ripper in STUDY IN TERROR is uncanny because he is "anti-intelligible," because he cannot be reduced to naturalistic causes, even though his real-life model probably was no more than a crazy man.

A STUDY IN TERROR is also a combative film in that its hero and villain engage in a battle of spectacular violence near the film's climax.  Because this Ripper is no more than an ordinary man possessed of uncanny madness, he is also "megadynamic" in the sense I used the term here.

It may be harder, though, to see all such uncanny figures as megadynamic, since not all of them are as combative.  In the 1960 PSYCHO, Norman Bates is a megadynamic figure only while he pretends to be his crazed, axe-murdering mother, and only when he is assaulting women in a relatively helpless position. When this psycho is caught by an ordinary husky man, Norman's appearance of power is stripped from him like his phony white-haired wig.

I suppose that I could solve the dilemma the same way I solved the fluctuation of power-levels in the three dynamicities in DYNAMIC DUOS PT. 2: Norman is merely an "exemplary" psycho, while Jack the Ripper is an "exceptional" one.  But I find it worth noting that Norman, both in his initial prose and film incarnations, is superior in terms of his mythicity to the Ripper-character from STUDY IN TERROR.  This suggests that he is a better conduit for the "combinatory-sublime," even as the Ripper is a better conduit for "the dynamic-sublime."

At present I have not found a necessary connection between the two forms of the sublime.  It does suggest to me how some figures of comparatively low dynamicity can suggest that they are more powerful than they really are. I conclude that it is because of the effect of the combinatory-sublime, which seems to invest such figures with a larger-than-life "mana."

OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS PT. 3

In CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN PT. 2 I wrote:

I'm now asserting that causality in a literary context-- which, contra Todorov, is not homologous with the causality human beings experience in life-- has both a cognitive aspect and an affective aspect, summed up as "regularity" and "intelligibility." 

And in the first installment of OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS I defined the uncanny aspect of the film as inherent in Sherlock Holmes' foe Jack the Ripper:

 ...in what qualities does Jack the Ripper's metaphenomenality inhere?  As his only qualification for the metaphenomenal is his status as a "perilous psycho," that metaphenomenality must inhere in a mental, "non-body" quality.  His madness is his method, and therefore his metaphenomenality.

I then debated whether or not Sherlock Holmes' "polymath" qualities might qualify him for as a "mental metaphenomenality," but decided that I would have to re-view STUDY IN TERROR to see whether or not Holmes showed such uncanny qualities himself.  However, in OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS PT. 2 I acknowledged that the Holmes of the 2009 SHERLOCK HOLMES film definitely did use his special deductive powers in an "uncanny" fashion:

What I did not then note is that in this scene Holmes-- who is obviously less heavily muscled than his opponent-- is utilizing his deductive skills as Doyle never did and probably would not have: to suss out his opponent's weaknesses and to plan his attack with machine-like efficiency.  Thus this film, which I have not yet reviewed, would fit the uncanny version of my trope for "uncanny skills." The film's use of graphics to depict the way Holmes thinks-- projecting words or images onto the screen, to share diegetic space with the actors-- also imparts an aura of "strangeness" to Holmes' computer-like cogitations.

I have no problem in stating that this sort of mental acuity, while it does not violate the regularity aspect of causality, does defy its intelligibility aspect, even as does Jack the Ripper's madness. And though I explored a couple of Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories briefly, I have not yet decided whether or not Holmes' unusual command of arcane knowledge can be termed "anti-intelligible." I am tending currently to think not.

Fictional reiterations of Jack the Ripper, though, do not show the same ambivalence. 

I do not render any final verdict here as to whether "the causality human beings experience in life" is entirely naturalistic or not.  But it is certainly of a different order than anything we experience through fiction, and so the two are not homologous.  That said, when I think of the historical figure of Jack the Ripper, I opt for the default characterization that almost everyone does: that he was a real human being who killed out of some lunacy and eluded the law.

I have yet to encounter a fictionalized Jack the Ripper, however, whose spectre does not suggest either "the uncanny" or "the marvelous."  This is in contrast to many other perilous psychos. 


In this essay I showed how Norman Bates, though his character was based on the real-life aberration Ed Gein, exceeded what I now call the intelligibility aspect of causality.  Despite attempts by writer Bloch and director Hitchcock to inject standardized psychological readings of Norman Bates, Norman is not reduced by these readings.  He remains a figure who dominantly suggests the antipathetic affect of dread, as signified by the famous shot of Anthony Perkins at the film's conclusion, which I like to call the "Mona Lisa Death's Head."

Ironically, the A&E BATES MOTEL teleseries manages to reduce Norman to the more mundane level of "fear"-- although to be sure, the opening episodes focus more on the fearful nature of his mother, Norma Bates, and softening Norman as the series works toward its "evolution of a psycho."


I admit that I have not seen or read every fictional portrayal of Jack the Ripper, which this Wikipedia list purports to cover.  There may be renditions of the Ripper that do to him what A&E did to Norman.  Yet because the real Ripper was never apprehended, his figure resists the naturalistic straight-jacket.  Of course, many "imitation Rippers" may fall into this category.

 This 1927 Hitchcock film departs from its source by renaming the serial killer "the Avenger." Further, though Hitchcock had wanted to keep some ambivalence as to the guilt or innocence of the man suspected of being the killer, he was overruled, with the result that the accused man is proved innocent and the real killer, though his capture is mentioned, is never seen on-screen.  Without question Hitchcock introduces visual motifs to suggest the dread associated with a serial-killer boogieman, but one may argue that these are overpowered by the film's naturalistic focus.

And of course, Hitchcock himself did a seventies-era version of this type of serial murderer in 1972's FRENZY, reviewed here.  I noted in the review that despite an early comparison between the film's "Necktie Killer" and the legendary "Jack the Ripper," there was no "strangeness" in Hitchcock's handling of FRENZY's strangler, in contrast to his handling of Norman Bates.

By contrasting Hitchcock's approach to the serial killer in this and a genuinely uncanny film like PSYCHO,  I find that Hitchcock's approach with FRENZY has more in common with his 1943 film SHADOW OF A DOUBT.  In my earlier essay I asserted that the psycho-killer of SHADOW lacked any of the "strange or unworldly aspects" I find in Norman Bates, and the same is true of the "Necktie Killer" in FRENZY, even though he's compared to Jack the Ripper in the film's first ten minutes.

To my knowledge, though, whenever a modern writer attempts to write of the actual Jack the Ripper-- the tendency is to see him through the lens of the uncanny affect of dread, whether he is seen as a man hiding a psychotic secret (A STUDY IN TERROR),  a delver into supernatural secrets (Moore and Campbell's FROM HELL), or even-- as in one novel I won't name to avoid giving away the "big reveal"-- Sherlock Holmes himself.  There are, as I said above, also versions in which Jack the Ripper is some marvelous being, as in Robert Bloch's short story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper." But more than any other famous madman of reality or fiction, the Ripper seems to work best as an image of dread--one that bends, but does not break, the normal configurations of the causal world.

 

OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS PT. 2

In PART 1, I said this of Sherlock Holmes' unusual deductive abilities:

After weighing the matter, I would say that most of Holmes' amazing observations about people still tend to belong to the naturalistic, as they do not create a sense of strangeness.  So Holmes uses a naturalistic, not an uncanny, version of the "illusionism" trope. 

Having said that most of these demonstrations of mental superiority are naturalistic, by what criterion can one judge even a few of them to enter the domain of the uncanny?

The most striking-- literally-- example of an uncanny employment of such skills appears in the 2009 SHERLOCK HOLMES film.  In this essay I noted that Holmes showed rather "hyped-up" combative skills in this film.

What I did not then note is that in this scene Holmes-- who is obviously less heavily muscled than his opponent-- is utilizing his deductive skills as Doyle's character never did and probably never would have: to suss out his opponent's weaknesses and to plan his attack with machine-like efficiency.  Thus this film, which I have not yet reviewed, would fit the uncanny version of my trope for "uncanny skills." The film's use of graphics to depict the way Holmes thinks-- projecting words or images onto the screen, to share diegetic space with the actors-- also imparts an aura of "strangeness" to Holmes' computer-like cogitations.

But it may not always be necessary to use visual graphics to suggest mental strangeness. 


In my review of the 1931 adaptation of the Doyle short story, THE SPECKLED BAND, I deemed this film to be uncanny due it features 'a method of murder so peculiar that it falls into my category for "bizarre crimes."  Said method is that of an evil stepfather forcing his stepdaughter to sleep in a pre-designated room with a bell-cord pointlessly hanging over it, and then to introduce a swamp adder into the room's ventilator shaft, so that the serpent will crawl down the cord, kill its victim with a bite, and then retreat when called back up the bell-cord.

My rationale for deeming both the short story and its adaptations as works of the "uncanny-metaphenomenal" is the same as with all others: though there is no violation of the laws of cause and effect, causality's rules are bent, in that people, their societies, their devices or the creatures with whom they interact go beyond the domain of the naturalistic in terms of normal behavior.  In many cases, the person who commits the bizarre crime-- such as the near-supervillain Blofeld in Ian Fleming's THUNDERBALL-- is the only one associated with it.

However, the villain of SPECKLED BAND may conceive of his bizarre murder-method, but the hero mirrors the villain's ingenuity by being able to deduce the plot by piecing together such disparate clues as a useless bell-cord and a mysterious whistling sound-- the one being the snake's method of entry, the other being the method by which the snake's owner calls the creature back up the cord.  In this story, Sherlock accomplishes his feat of detection by drawing upon his encyclopedic knowledge of exotica, rather than by making deductions based on reasonable premises.  In contrast, Holmes' solution of the HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES mystery depends not on special knowledge but on a careful observation of available facts.  Holmes' knowledge of exotica then may qualify him as an uncanny entity in this story, just as a similar body of knowledge elevates Professor Van Helsing in the DRACULA novel to a status above that of an ordinary individual. 


Ironically, neither method would work in the real world.  It's very unlikely that a snake could negotiate a hanging cord without simply falling off, and since snakes are deaf, it would hardly respond to a whistle-cue.  But these are merely errors of verisimilitude.  Such errors don't affect whether or not a work logically qualifies as a metaphenomenal one.  And even if some character in the movie stopped the proceedings and started telling the audience that there was no such thing as a "swamp adder," such a scene by itself would only rate as a "fallacious figment" in the naturalistic mode.  A similar scene appears at the beginning of 1965's THE ALPHABET MURDERS, when Tony Randall briefly breaks the fourth wall to tell the audience that nothing unusual is going to happen.  In contrast, a "figment" in the uncanny mode can be seen in 1968's HEAD, where the Monkees' attempt to win clear of the clichés of the entertainment industry are doomed, and they remain the prisoners of their own, or someone else's, "heads."

AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY PT. 3

At the end of THREE PROBABILITIES  I said:

Some specific examples of the different intersections of probability and sublimity seems called for. I'll be drawing on my examples from TEN DYNAMIC DEMONS, since that's one of the essays in which I invoked the now untenable, Aristotle-derived association of "the impossible and improbable."

For the time being I'll supply just one of the ten: the trope I labeled "perilous pyschos."  For this trope I chose the literary-and-cinematic figure of Norman Bates.

I considered drawing a comparison between the fictional character of Norman-- whose film I reviewed here -- and a film based on the principal real-life model for Norman, ED GEIN.  I do find GEIN to be a film bereft of the subtler types of antipathetic effect, of dread and awe: it is first and foremost a film about fear, where physical peril is the dominant threat.  Though GEIN tells the true story of the real psycho's misdeeds, it takes the form of "fictionalized reality" rather than a pure documentary. The film begins with a few quotes from persons who knew Gein or persons involved in his murders, but following this preface-like section, the film depicts all real-life events in a fictionalized manner, portraying events that a pure documentary could not legitimately represent, as with a scene where Gein traipses around his yard in his "woman-suit." Yet, even though GEIN pursues the tropes of fiction, it seems inappropriate to draw comparisons between even a fictionalized version of a real person and a completely fictional figure.

But it is appropriate to compare one version of Norman with another.  Here's the Anthony Perkins version, whom I view as "uncanny" due to the nature of his madness.

And here's another version, from the recent A&E teleseries BATES MOTEL.

MOTEL shuffles a few of the basic configurations of the original PSYCHO-- the nervous young man (still in high school here), his domineering mother, and the titular motel.  However, MOTEL shows none of the intensity of the madness depicted either by Bloch or by Hitchcock.   The ten episodes thus far aired have dealt with assorted mundane menaces-- a crooked sheriff, a white-slavery ring, a rapist-- who makes the mistake of raping Norman's mother, who retaliates by knife-murdering him-- and Norma Bates herself, who may be narcissistically devoted to her son but falls very short of the sort of dreadful madness one sees in Bloch and Hitchcock.  If the teleseries lasts long enough to develop the character of Norman-- who is depicted as nothing more than a slightly geeky, but not repulsive, young fellow who captivates some of the local girls-- BATES will certainly have him doing some of the same sort of things that the Bloch-Hitchcock character does.  But in the predominantly naturalistic atmosphere of the series, it seems unlikely that it will conjure forth any of the uncanny atmosphere utilized by either Bloch or Hitchcock.

A side-point: at the end of AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY PT 1 I demonstrated the conditions under which a particular film-- in this case, the serial ACE DRUMMOND-- could have been naturalistic, uncanny or marvelous, depending on whether or not certain elements were present in the diegesis.  I viewed ACE as being dominated by the antipathetic affect of "awe" because I felt that this affect "trumped" those of "fear" and "dread," even though the other two were present and could have been dominant given the aforesaid alterations.  I want to add that it is feasible in some cases for the "subtler" affects to be "trumped" as well.  Hitchcock's suspense-drama SHADOW OF A DOUBT possesses a naturalistic phenomenality, for the monstrous "Merry Widow Killer" is principally a physical threat to anyone who discovers his identity, including his niece, "Young Charlie."  Yet though fear is the controlling affect, there are instances in which the film does depict moments of dread, a dread that stems from Young Charlie's anitpathy to her very relatedness to her insane relative.  This antipathy, at base a fear of psychological absorption by a threatening "Other," is not dwelled upon in SHADOW.  But roughly seventeen years later Hitchcock returned to a far more intense meditation upon that theme, thanks to his encounter with Robert Bloch's work.

TEN DYNAMIC DAEMONS

Having put forth the idea of "coherent improbabilities" here, it occured to me that though I've given examples of particular tropes or literary works that fit this category, characters are probably more accessible as exemplars.  Thus here are ten characters to match each of the ten tropes with which I've illustrated the manifestation of the "uncanny" phenomenality.

In all but one case, I chose an exemplar who appeared during the period that gave birth to the phenomenon of popular fiction, though a few of my choices come from canonical literary works.

ASTOUNDING ANIMALS-- Moby Dick, from Herman Melville's MOBY DICK.  Melville's book technically remains within the causal realm in a cognitive sense-- that is, the colossal cetacean is constantly compared with godlike beings, but there's no evidence that he's anything but a formidable animal.  But the Great White Whale, like his obsessed co-star Ahab, dwell in a world that constantly pushes into the metaphenomenal in a purely affective sense.

BIZARRE CRIMES-- Juliette, from the novel of the same name by the Marquis deSade. Sade is, in his way, something of an apostle of naturalism to the extent that he constantly denies the ideas of divinity.  Nevertheless, for Sade as for Goethe the motto is, "In the Beginning was the Act!"  But for Sade the act is not creation, but the obsessive need to find new and more exotic ways to destroy human beings-- a need which seems embodied most strongly in the character of Juliette, the blood-hungry sister of the innocent Justine.

DELIRIOUS DREAMS AND FALLACIOUS FIGMENTS-- Alice, from Lewis Carroll's two books starring that prodigious dreamer.  Within this trope, even though causality seems to win the game when Alice wakes from her descent into meaningful nonsense, it's the dreams that become more real to us than the reality.

ENTHRALLING HYPNOTISM AND ILLUSIONISM-- Svengali, from the 1894 TRILBY by George DuMaurier.  As yet I haven't reviewed any of the films starring literature's most famous
hypnotist, though most moderns know the Svengali of the movies if they know him at all.  As noted elsewhere, both "hypnotism" and "illusionism" have the effect of waking persons that dreams do upon the dreamer; making the impossible and improbable become real for the subjects.

EXOTIC LANDS AND CUSTOMS-- Allen Quatermain, from H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel KING SOLOMON'S MINES.  The novel is famous for launching the genre of the "Lost World story," in which an archaic civilization has managed to survive in some remote corner of the world without contact with the onrush of history.  I have not read any of the "Allen" books aside from the one in which Haggard encountered Haggard's other great character, "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed," but have gained the impression that most of the other Allen books possess an uncanny phenomenality, rather than a marvelous or naturalistic one.

FREAKISH FLESH-- Quasimodo,from Victor Hugo's 1831.  Though Hugo's original novel hews closer to the genre of the "historical novel" than that of horror, the image of the hunchback-- be it Quasimodo's or that of some lesser epigone-- has become a familiar icon of horror.  In contrast to a naturalistic exhibition of a "freak of nature," as one sees in the 1980 David Lynch film THE ELEPHANT MAN, Quasimodo's physical freakishness in the novel is constantly tied to the dark nature of humankind as a whole.

OUTRE OUTFITS, SKILLS, AND DEVICES-- These three aspects do not always occur together in a given character, though I group them together because weapons and costumes, as much as a character's physical skills, are extensions of his persona as an uncanny spectre.  One character who combines all three in significant fashion is The Lone Ranger, spawned by a 1933 radio series.  Although the hero moves through a largely naturalistic world in most of his incarnations, the very notion of an Old West champion able to dispense justice despite wearing a bandit's mask and firing silver bullets with flawless accuracy, is a figure who resides only in an uncanny domain.

PERILOUS PSYCHOS-- Norman Bates, from Robert Bloch's 1959 novel PSYCHO.  Though Jack the Ripper is a more famous psycho-killer, he's disallowed here by virtue of being a real character, however mysterious.  The Norman birthed by Bloch and midwifed by Hitchcock seems to have the fictional psycho who, directly or indirectly, spawned the greatest number of imitators.  Some of these may be considered merely naturalistic versions of the original, as with the current BATES MOTEL teleseries.  But an uncanny psycho is always discernible by his ability to invoke more "dread" than simple physical "fear."

 PHANTASMAL FIGURATIONS-- The Phantom of the Opera, from Gaston Leroux's 1909 serial novel of that name.  Leroux also employs the trope "freakish flesh" for this famed monstrous presence, but the trope that most informs the novel is the character's ability to lurk beneath the Paris Opera House, pretending to be "the Opera Ghost."  Regardless as to whether readers believed or did not believe in the existence of this particular ghost at the outset, the Phantom remains far more than the sum of his impostures.

WEIRD SOCIETIES AND FAMILIES-- Fu Manchu, first appearing in Sax Rohmer's 1913 MYSTERY OF FU-MANCHU.  Admittedly, even in that first novel, Fu Manchu displayed more "marvelous" characteristics than any of the other characters cited here, in that he often controlled assorted weapons of "mad science." At base, though, Fu Manchu's greatest appeal to readers was one that did not depend on the marvelous elements of the series: his status as a sort of "Alexander the Great" of Oriental Evil, in that his "Si-Fan" organization embraced a wildly diverse group of Asian fiends-- Indian thuggee, Burmese dacoits, the Sea-Dyaks of Borneo, and so on.  This vast conspiracy by itself stands as one of the period's best evocations of a "weird society" that goes beyond the bounds of a mere criminal organization, and sometimes seems more like a "Pandemonium" presided over by the Satanic genius.