THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 5

 

As I wend my way toward the final chapters of METROPOLIS, it seems like Von Harbou may be losing control of some aspects of her dramaturgy.  

Chapter 10 is long and talky, as the ailing Freder is visited by his servant Josaphat (who has a separate minor plotline of no great importance). This gives the author a chance to recapitulate many things the reader already knows, with the protagonist conflating the imagery of the Seven Deadly Sins (from the cathedral) and the Whore of Babylon (from his own reading, apparently). He doesn't seem overly convinced that he merely hallucinated seeing his fathe and Maria together, but he talks about it in highly religious terms: "I saw Maria's brow, that white temple of goodness and virginity, besmirched with the name of the great harlot of Babylon." He also compares her to various archaic goddesses, two ancient cities (Gomorrha and Babylon) before labeling her "Metropolis," which brings one back to the origins of the name, "mother-city." This continues into Chapter 11, and Josaphat, not to be outdone, goes into huge detail about a seductive dancer who's performing at Yoshiwara, and who has sowed enmity between families and young males. This is presumably Fake Maria, but Von Harbou apparently forgot her timeline, for Josaphat imagines that this seductress was dancing in Yoshiwara during the same time that Freder saw Maria at Rotwang's house. Perhaps the 1925 proofreaders were as bored with this section as I was, that they didn't catch the error. The reference to Futura dancing for wealthy patrons has no plot-purpose but to set up, both in book and film, a later sequence where Futura seeks out Yoshiwara to make merry while the city falls apart.      

Von Harbou follows this up with an unusual tangent for Joh Fredersen. Though no version of the movie alludes to any Fredersen relatives except his son, Chapter 12 has the Master of Metropolis leave his domain and go to some nearby rustic locale, to visit the house of his unnamed mother. Described as "paralyzed," she appears to live alone in a farmhouse, supported by Fredersen's money though the two of them maintain a hostility between them due to the son's "sin" in seducing Hel away from Rotwang. Apparently, though Fredersen has always seemed stiff and unbending in his every encounter with his son, he's now disturbed at how easily virtuous Maria won him away from his father, and he's come to ask his mother's advice. (As I predicted, no one ever brings up Fredersen's reverse-Oedipal flirtation with a robot made in the image of his son's lover.) The mother doesn't give her son much advice beyond the platitude of "you reap what you sow." It's not clear how if at all this visit causes the Brain of Metropolis to alter his later course.      

The film has a scene in which Rotwang is seen talking for a bit to his prisoner Maria, but in the novel he Freder goes on and on with ornate phraes just like those of Freder: "Women know nothing of love either. What does light know of light?" He wants some sort of forgiveness from Maria, even though he boasts about having stolen her "soul" and given it to her impostor, who will soon bestir the workers into rebellion. The chapter suddenly ends with Fredersen showing up and strangling Rotwang unconscious.   

Meanwhile, we're finally getting close to the big finish. Freder still doesn't know that there are two Marias, but he's heard that the Real One is going to speak to the rebels that evening. Futura addresses the crowd, encouraging them to riot and destroy the machines that make life in the city possible. To his credit Freder finally realizes that this is an impostor. He tries to denounce her, but he's recognized as the offspring of Fredersen and he's forced to flee. 

Slightly later Maria finds herself alone in the room with the unconscious body of Rotwang. The cut 1927 film doesn't even include the scene of Rotwang's strangulation, but in the book, it seems that Fredersen, despite being in the same room with the captive, doesn't interact with Maria in any way. Did Von Harbou want readers to believe she was just sitting in shadows (the room isn't well lit) and so Fredersen just didn't see her, and that she didn't call attention to herself? In any case, after Fredersen leaves, Maria escapes as well. She immediately heads to the city of the workers, evidently arriving some time after Freder runs away. She doesn't see him but she sees Fake Maria leading the rebels in an assault on the city's maintenance machines. I realize that this is supposed to be the book's great cataclysmic climax, but despite all Von Harbou's fervid descriptions I found it rather boiler-plate. Maria eventually finds a bunch of kids to whom she gives succor, which is clearly meant to bookend her Christ-like association with kids in her first appearance. The film improves on this by having her try to correct the malfunctioning machines.    

Freder seeks out and finds his father at the New Tower of Babel, but nothing much comes of it. Fredersen, who originally seemed obsessed with crushing the rebellious workers to protect the status quo, has suddenly "got religion" of a sort, telling Freder hat he unleashed the violence "for your sake, Freder; so that you could redeem them." In one of Von Harbou's best images, Fredersen happens to be standing on a platform supporting a power-tower, whose struts remind Freder of "the crosses of Golgotha," emitting "long, white crackling springs of sparks." Freder eventually concludes that his father won't help stop the cataclysm, so he returns to the underground, where he helps Maria save the imperiled children.

Elsewhere the revolting workers become incensed at Fake Maria for unleashing the chaos that endangered so many of them, so they go looking for her in Yoshiwara, where Futura is captivating the rich boys. Instead of the two groups fighting, the leader of the cathedral-monks also shows up, condemns Futura as a witch, and persuades both groups to burn her at a stake. Freder, having somehow become separated from Maria, happens across the scene and initially thinks Real Maria has been immolated. For some reason Von Harbou doesn't produce anything like the memorable reveal of the film, where Futura's robotic nature is revealed.

Almost lastly, Maria runs around looking for Freder, and Rotwang attacks her, suddenly imagining that she's Hel reborn. There's no precedence for this in the novel, though one line in the film has the inventor fantasizing about bringing back Hel in the form of a robot. So it seems as if the two father-figures in the story both conceive an unnatural passion for the young heroine, even though one knows that he's messing around with a fake woman. Freder catches sight of Maria being menaced again and overtakes Rotwang, eventually tossing him off a roof. This is the last of the big spectacle-moments, as Fredersen the Father turns over the administration of Metropolis to Freder the Son and his bride, who is also-- sort of a "holy mother?"

I'm glad I reread METROPOLIS, for all of its uneveness and its purple prose. I'm not sure how deeply invested Von Harbou was in her vision of a perfect, sexless madonna-woman as the counter to the Whore of Babylon, but the sheer excess of all of her fulminations about sin and virtue is entertaining in a way that, say, John Bunyan could not be. I've said almost nothing about the author's Big Moral that appears throughout the book and movie, because like most platitudes it doesn't really amount to much. METROPOLIS the novel is much more interesting when judged as a form of "religious fiction," rather than as "science fiction," even allowing for the story's indubitable impact upon the SF genre.      

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 4

 The scene in which Freder thinks that Maria has given herself to Fredersen is in my mind the almost definitive proof that Von Harbou was aware of some basic aspects of Sigmund Freud's Oedipal theory. Here's an apposite example of that theory from a 1910 essay:

When after this he can no longer maintain the doubt which makes his parents an exception to the universal and odious norms of sexual activity, he tells himself with cynical logic that the difference between his mother and a whore is not after all so very great, since basically they do the same thing. The enlightening information he has received has in fact awakened the memory-traces of the impressions and wishes of his early infancy, and these have led to a reactivation in him of certain mental impulses. He begins to desire his mother herself in the sense with which he has recently become acquainted, and to hate his father anew as a rival who stands in the way of this wish; he comes, as we say, under the dominance of the Oedipus complex. He does not forgive his mother for having granted the favour of sexual intercourse not to himself but to his father, and he regards it as an act of unfaithfulness.

^[Of course, Von Harbou would have been filtering any Oedipal concepts through her novel's heavy Judeo-Christian religious structure. But as mentioned in the last post, Freder does not get directed by Rotwang to seek out his father, and there's no evidence that Freder even knows that the mystery-house belongs to Rotwang. He does know of Rotwang's affiliation with Fredersen, though because Freder tells a confidante that he wonders if Rotwang and his father have a hand in Maria's disappearance. With that theory in mind he seeks out his father's "New Tower of Babel."

 The film is actually a little more explicit this time about clarifying Maria's primary purpose for seeking out Fredersen. A brief scene shows Fredersen giving Maria her assignment, to go among the underground workers, preaching violence so that they will revolt and so Fredersen can crush them--and then Freder barges in, seeing his father with the Fake Maria. The book is more ambiguous. We don't see Fredersen talking to Futura; Freder simply intrudes on the two of them, with his father embracing Futura. In fact, he seems to be in full seduction mode: "She [Futura] was not struggling. Leaning far back in the man's arms, she was offering her mouth, her alluring mouth..." Up to this point Fredersen has seemed utterly asexual, obsessed only with power, and he certainly showed no interest in Maria when he spied upon Freder and her in the underground city. Futura, as far as the reader knows, has never been anywhere or done anything, but somehow Rotwang has imbued her with a mature, knowing sexuality. Fredersen knows that Futura is just a robot, not his son's true love, but though I'm still working my way through the novel, I suspect Von Harbou will not make further comment on this curious book-scene.

Still, whatever Von Harbou had in mind, symbolically Fredersen is messing with the image of his son's beloved. Thus she has him reversing the usual course of the Oedipal configuration, where the son becomes possessive of the mother and envies the fact that she gave her "whorish" attentions to the father rather than the son. 

In both book and film, Freder goes berserk and attacks his father, who simply fends him off. Maria watches the father-son conflict a bit and then leaves the room, after which Fredersen convinces his son that he hallucinated the whole incident. Freder falls ill and is confined to bed. Later he has a long conversation with a confidante, during which he recapitulates some of the imagery of the Seven Sins imagery he saw at the cathedral, and brings into it the Scarlet Woman imagery, which apparently he acquired from his own religious education, whatever that was. Freder's ramblings about the Scarlet Woman go on for two chapters before they terminate with the confidante telling Freder that he's seen Fake Maria dancing at some men's club. Lang cuts most of Freder's speech or substitutes hallucinatory imagery, and then moves on to the subject of Fake Maria bringing all the boys to the yard.     

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 1

 I've just started re-reading Thea Von Harbou's METROPOLIS for the first time in perhaps forty years, as it occurred to me that it might prove interesting to compare the book with the screenplay for the 1927 movie in its extant versions. But because this entails a lot of detailed analysis I'm posting my reactions as I go along, which I haven't done with a prose novel review since I did Rider Haggard's SHE on this blog. My understanding is that Von Harbou began the novel with the expectation that her then-husband Fritz Lang intended to adapt it for the UFA studio, and that she completed the novel before she wrote the screenplay. It's possible Lang had some input into the novel but I have no evidence of this. 

The first thing I'll point out is that the city of Metropolis, which means roughly "mother-city," is the true star of the story, easily eclipsing any of its human characters. That said, the viewpoint character Freder is almost as important in the novel, if not so much the truncated original release. The name "Freder" is generally translated as "son of Frederick," which itself means "peaceful ruler." Von Harbou only calls Freder by his first name, but his father, Joh (short for Johann) Frederson is called by his full name. One online source says that both "Freder" and "Fredersen" can be patronymics," but I don't know if Von Harbou intended this to carry any special symbolism. I think, for reasons I'll show later, that Von Harbou might have chosen the name "Freder" because it sounds like the Latin word "frater," meaning "brother." 

The 1927 release opens with a quick montage of scenes in Metropolis, with the memorable image of dozens of identically clad workers trudging down into "the City of Workers." After that, the film shifts to "the Club of the Sons," a paradisical pleasure-dome for the male children of the city's movers and shakers. Freder is first seen cheering on other young men engaged in sports, and playing tag with a cute young serving-girl-- all of which is meant to suggest that he's unaware of the suffering of the lower classes.

The novel, however, starts with what seems much like a "sturm-and-drang" moment from a 19th-century German novel. Freder is still at the Club when first viewed, but he's in a room with star-designs on the ceiling, playing an organ and apparently working himself into a froth about some tormenting matter. By the second page it's disclosed that he has some obsession with an idealized image of femininity, which in early chapters Von Harbou calls, at least three times, "the austere countenance of the virgin, the sweet countenance of the mother-- the agony and the desire with which he called and called for the one single vision for which his racked heart had not even a name..."

 Now, why is Freder so "racked" by thinking about what sound like rather pacific images of femininity, both of which have strong associations with Christian imagery? I find it interesting that both "virgin" and "mother" become blended in the icon of Mary Mother of Jesus, but I don't think Freder is so wrought up by any sort of religious vision. What I think Von Harbou is editing out is the other half of what Sigmund Freud, in 1905, called "the Madonna-Whore Complex." In this formulation, Freud observed that young men felt ambivalence toward females their own age, for though the men had been raised from childhood by non-sexual mothers, or "madonnas," what young men in their maturation wanted from females was their sexual availability. I think it's likely Von Harbou was aware of Freud's theory, but that she elided the scandalous part of it to make her protagonist seem more noble and selfless-- though even in 1925, I feel sure that most readers would have made the same correlation I've made, that Freder is tormented by his natural biological concupiscence. A later scene with Freder in the Club with other young men does NOT show him canoodling with barmaids, and in conversation with his father in the novel, he as good as admits to being a virgin. 

Back to the novel: Freder dolefully leaves the organ-room and mixes with other young men in the stadium of the Club, where he is served a drink by a sexy young woman-- the book's first image of a provocative female-- but Freder certainly does not pursue this girl.

Then book and film enter a parallel course, for into the Club comes a pretty young woman-- later given the name "Maria"-- who is surrounded by an entourage of children. In both works Maria's only purpose seems to be to show the children the pleasures of the city's idle rich, though she does so without condemnation. Speaking of the wealthy swains, she tells the children, "Look, these are your brothers." She does not seem to see Freder, but he immediately recognizes her visage to be that of the "virgin mother" with which he's obsessed. Maria and the children then leave the Club-- which leads to another divergence I'll address in Part 2.                     

MYTHCOMICS: ['THE SISTER AND THE SPIDER"], A.I. LOVE YOU (1997)

 

 

For most of the three-year run of Ken Akamatsu's A. I. LOVE YOU, the stories were just basic harem comedy without much complexity, aside from one two-part tale, THE SMILING INVADER. But toward the end of that run, Akamatsu upped his game, evoking many of the same clansgressive patterns he'd later evoke in LOVE HINA. 

I won't repeat my quick summary of the serial's premise, which appears in the above essay, but I'll add some details. By the time the series wraps up, teen inventor Hitoshi Kobe and his live-in A.I. almost-girlfriend Saati are also living with two other artificial intelligence-creations, Toni and Forty. I won't spend any time on Forty-- though one of the last seven stories gives that character a sendoff of sorts. But the interaction of Hitoshi, Saati, and Toni within the arc of the other six stories-- what I've titled "The Sister and the Spider"-- is crucial to delving into the psychological matrices of Akamatsu's narrative. 

I also have to add that A.I. is one of many manga-serials in which a teen protagonist lives in Japan with no parental supervision, though the parents are often still alive and sending the teen money for his daily bread. Obviously, this situation has considerable appeal for real-world teen readers. The characters are able to live on their own, as adults, while not really stepping outside the bounds of the social contract (except in the case of true erotica). For most of the series, the reader never sees the members of Hitoshi's nuclear family. There are a handful of stories in which Saati gets some romantic competition from Hitoshi's cute female cousin Kikuko. But neither Kikuko nor her barely-seen father take the focus off the artificial "family" that Hitoshi's made for himself. I should specify that in contrast to most harem comedies, particularly LOVE HINA, the other two females occupying Hitoshi's house are not dominantly rivals to Saati for Hitoshi's love-- though as we'll see below, Toni signals some quasi-Freudian potential in the protagonist's makeup.        

As "Sister" commences, the viewer flashes back to Hitoshi when he was in the ninth grade and was just beginning constructing potential A.I. models on his computer. The rest of the family is about to leave for the unseen father's new job in the United States, though for no specific reason Hitoshi gets to stay behind in Japan. This is the only story in which we see Hitoshi's mother, though it's in a teasing half-panel that insinuates that she may have been the model for Saati.

But it's Hitoshi's contentious relationship with his sister Yayoi that receives the most attention here. The earliest stories in the series established that Hitoshi's first A.I. program was Toni, also known as "Twenty," and that she was physically modeled on a hot schoolmate whom Hitoshi desired. The first part of "Sister" loosely implies that somehow Hitoshi also mixes in some aspect of Yayoi into the Toni A.I.-- though I don't know what kind of data the horny teen derives from putting his sister's panties on a copier-plate. After Yayoi hits her brother and departs, suddenly the Toni-program asserts its independent intelligence. Though she's confined to the computer, Toni relentlessly bullies Hitoshi and drains his bank account. Then she takes it into her head to dominate the world with her A.I. powers.

   

Hitoshi, desperate to stop his run-a-muck creation, remembers that he was working on another A.I. prototype, and he turns the unnamed A.I. loose on Toni. This provides an amusing reversal. Even though it's already been implied that Future-Hitoshi will pattern the physical appearance of his next A.I.-girlfriend on his mother-- albeit a teen version of her-- this earlier prototype is clearly Saati-as-a-small-girl. Li'l Saati beats Toni with a variation of the old "convince-the-genie-to-go-back-in-the-bottle" schtick, after which Hitoshi locks her program away, not to be seen again until after Saati's advent into reality as a living program. Toni becomes a living program as well, and briefly competes with Saati over Hitoshi, though once defeated, Toni loses all interest in her creator. The story ends with modern-day Toni yelling at modern-day Hitoshi for having salted her way for a full year. The second story is irrelevant to the master trope of "Sister," though it's the only one where Forty, a program that alternates between male and female kid-forms, assumes a teenaged body and messes with Hitoshi's hormones. 

However, in current-time Hitoshi gets a visit from a member of his organic family. Yayoi returns to Japan with no warning, and the first things one learns of her is that (1) she has a bit of a brother-complex, even though he seemed to be the one with the skeevy fixation in the previous tale, and (2) she has a massive inferority complex about her breast-size, possibly because Young Hitoshi used to call her "flat-chested." Yayoi also wears an A.I. of her creation in her locket, and it's as sassy as Toni, accusing Yayoi of having a "brocon." When Yayoi shows up at Hitoshi's house, she mistakes Saati for an intruder and ties her up, but after introductions have been made, the sister announces her intention to take Hitoshi back to the U.S. with her. Hitoshi, who's tied to the house where the main computer keeps the three A.I. alive, makes an excuse and falls into old habits with another "flat-chested" insult, earning himself a kick in the chops.

Yayoi becomes more or less reconciled with her brother's decision to remain in Japan. However, her massive complex about her breast-size gets separate treatment, for she's somehow started wanting to massage other women's boobs, as if Yayoi thought the amplitude of others would "rub off" onto her. I suspect Akamatsu or someone before him concocted this dubious psychological motif as an excuse to depict the spectacle of one woman feeling up another's titties, purely for the enjoyment of teen boy readers. Hitoshi spies on one such titty-party and gets kicked out a window by both Saati and Yayoi-- sort of a "mother/sister combo" in a metaphorical sense. Saati and the other A.I. girls talk Yayoi into entering a beauty contest, which of course she wins despite her "shortcomings."

Yet Yayoi isn't finished messing with Hitoshi's life. Once she finds out that her brother's living-companions are all sentient A.I. programs, Yayoi publicizes Hitoshi's breakthrough, hoping to make her brother famous. Hitoshi explains that humankind is not yet ready for this quantum step. Then he also reveals, for the first time in the series, that he didn't create the "reality module" that gave the programs life. Rather, the man who co-created Hitoshi himself, the teen's unnamed, unseen father, also invented the module that made possible Hitoshi's new A.I. family. Further, the father also created a program code called "Zero" who's more or less the "older brother" of the three female programs.

However, all these revelations give Yayoi another idea for luring her brother and his A.I. buddies to the US. She tries to upgrade the Zero program to complete her father's research and to curry favor for Hitoshi. But in the process of so doing, she finds a "Trojan Horse," a floppy disk marked "Spider." She mistakes it for a file created by her brother and uploads it.

 However, the floppy was the creation of Hitoshi's opposite number, the super-hacker Billy G, who among other things created the virus that almost killed Saati in "Smiling Invader." Zero comes to life-- briefly inciting a bit of a "brocon" vibe in the three female programs-- but his only intentions toward them are fatal. Renaming himself "Spider Zero," the rogue program begins attacking other computer systems around the world, much as Toni did during her power-crazy phase. Yayoi's A.I. "Ma-Kun" briefly stymies Spider Zero.

        

Saati decides that only she can go into cyberspace to battle Spider Zero, but his influence has transformed her, making her demi-human, just at a time when she can least afford a Pinocchio-esque "real girl" moment. Nevertheless, she translates herself into cyberspace. Spider Zero declares that Saati and her fellow programs are nothing but "ones and zeroes," and he destroys both Toni and Forty. Yet, somehow drawing on all of the humans Saati has known in her short life, she boosts her power enough to eradicate Zero's program. She then has a touching death-scene--

--but not really. Hitoshi rebuilds all of the programs and brings them back into their quasi-real existence. It's a little surprising that Yayoi gets her way despite all the negative consequences of her obsession, for Hitoshi and his harem-entourage then emigrate to the US at the end of the story. The only excuse given in my translation is that it would have been hard for Hitoshi to remain in Japan after Yayoi outed him. 

It's possible Akamatsu meant to imply that Hitoshi would try to "live off the grid" while keeping his discoveries out of the hands of a humanity not ready for such scientific leaps. But as in the rest of the series, the emphasis is more psychological than sociological. I don't think the author had any hard-and-fast proposition in mind here, but he was definitely playing with all sorts of polymorphous familial affiliations. Ordinarily, if a scientist created an android or robot with some sexual capacity, one would tend to think of the scientist as the entity's "father." But since "Sister" reveals that both Hitoshi and Saati were spawned by the potency of the unnamed father, then in one sense, they might be seen as siblings more than parent-and-child. And what if anything does it mean that Hitoshi patterned Saati physically after his mother? Is she the nurturing mother, the punishing mother, or a little of both?  But no one will ever guess what further adventures Akamatsu might've conceived for his clansgressive couple, for he never returned to this particular narrative well.  

   
 

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, AGAIN PT. 2

 "Oh, God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place!"-- Beatrice lamenting the limitations of her not very muscular gender, MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.                                                                                                                                                                                                     "No one wants to be born a woman."-- Dave Sim, long before anyone knew what trans ideology was.                                                                                                                                                                       Obviously, Shakespeare's audience did not think that Beatrice really wanted to be a man, just because she fantasized about becoming one so that she could go toe-to-toe with Claudio-- who, admittedly, is something of an asshole. But since she knows she can't change her sex, she's okay with using her sexual favors to motivate Benedick into assaulting the target of Beatrice's wrath. As for Dave Sim's infamous statement-- which may have been made with an eye to being provocative-- it goes without saying that some men do wish they had been born women, whether or not one credits the diagnoses of gender dysphoria as an illness. In fact, some statistics suggest that trans women outnumber trans men two-to-one.                                                                   

I've no use for the ideology-based pseudoscience of imagining endless genetic blueprints for whatever gender-combinations can be imagined.  I consider it more logical to see even the syndromic desires to be the opposite sex to exist in a continuum that includes non-syndromic fantasies about possessing the characteristics of the sex opposite to one's birth-sex. Even the syndromic compulsions share much of the "grass is greener on the other side" mentality. I don't agree with the sexual determinism of conservative thought, but neither do I agree with the liberals' falsehood that biology can be (or should be) entirely circumvented.                                                                 

Fiction, as I've said many times, is a world where anyone can indulge any number of fantasies as to the true nature of the world, and those that challenge an alleged "status quo" are not perforce more imaginative than those that do not. For example, Dave Sim made many snide remarks (with which I have disagreed) about the fantasy of the heroic female because he thought the archetype ran contrary to "real life," even within the context of his own independent fantasy-world-- which was, of course, responsive to his own fantasies. But most of the ultraliberal feminists (which includes male feminists like Kevin Feige) wanted more female heroes not out of a deep passion for the archetype and all its possible permutations. but for an artistically barren concept of ideological representation. In my mind at least, there's no doubt that Sim is an artist and Feige is just a lucky hack, possibly one whose greatest accomplishments were entirely collaborative in nature.                                                                                                                                                                                                                    That'll teach me to bring up Dave Sim here; I totally got off the subject of the dimorphism blues. Maybe I'll make it there in Part 3.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

TOWER OF SCREAMING FREUDIANS

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of excitation-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of emotion-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of correlation-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of cogitation-quanta.

           --STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: THE FOUR POTENTIALITIES

          

So I've just finished reviewing the 1968 French thriller TOWER OF SCREAMING VIRGINS,only to find that the movie's diegesis contained more material than I could fit into a film-review. It's a shame I'm not a Freudian, because the film is really a treasure trove of Freudian tropes, for all that the narrative was based on a story written some twenty years before Freud was born. I judged that the film has only "fair" mythicity because it was not as interested in what I have called "correlation-quanta" as on "emotion-quanta." 

Here's the setup material I wrote the review.

This English-dubbed French thriller, despite its exploitative title, boasts a distinguished lineage. The source material is partly from a legend from French history: that, in the 14th century, Margaret of Burgundy, wife to King Louis X, committed adultery within a Parisian guard-tower, the Tower of Nesle, for which offense the unhappy French queen was imprisoned for the remainder of her life. A writer named Frederic Gaillardet dramatized the incident, though Alexander Dumas rewrote the play, possibly because he'd become famous for a stage-success in 1829, prior to his later fame as a novelist. However, the Gaillardet-Dumas story only takes various names and places from the historical account, concocting a wild hybrid story I'm tempted to call a "psycho-swashbuckler." I have not read any version of the prose source material. But I theorize that one of the authors borrowed a folklore-tale about Cleopatra, which asserted that the Egyptian queen had the habit of taking male lovers into her boudoir for one night of passion, only to have them executed afterward. 

TOWER, like the play on which it's based, spins out the idea that Queen Margaret-- who, according to the story's dynamics, ought to be in her middle thirties-- uses the deserted Tower of Nesle for a series of one-night stands with young Frenchmen, whether they are or aren't "virgins" like the title says . In fact, there are usually three such encounters each night, since Margaret (Teri Tordai) sets up liaisons for her two handmaidens as well. Then comes the "screaming," as Margaret's main henchman Orsini and various hooded thugs slay the male victims and toss them into the Seine River. I don't know why any of the henchmen, or Margaret and her ladies for that matter, affect any sort of masks, since they expect all to be killing off any and all visitors. The attempts at secrecy don't keep the locals from getting the sense that nasty things are happening at the "Tower of Sin," as they call it.

Like a lot of psycho-dramas, TOWER depends on a crapload of big revelations about things that happened prior to the film's diegesis. So for purpose of deeper analysis, I'm citing the actual events of the film in order that they are said to have happened, to get a handle on the psychological constructs the adapters used, which may or may not all be in the original play, or any book adaptation thereof.

1) Some time before Margaret of Burgundy becomes Queen of 14th-century France by marrying Louis X, she's just a young noblewoman living with her father. Margaret has some conflict with her father that will lead her to plot his murder. She then has intimate relations with two young pages, hypothetically when she's in her teens or twenties, though there's no testimony as to how old the pages were. One of the pages, Orsini, she gets to poison her father, which may help her rise to power in some way. But by the other page, who later goes by the name Bouridan, plants a bun in her oven. That bun results in two non-identical twin boys, and either Margaret or Orsini gives the order to have the incriminating children killed. This apparently happens without the knowledge of Bouridan, though it's not clear what he knew and when. But the henchman (or huntsman?) in charge of the killing leaves the two infants with a church, and they're raised to manhood. They both look about twenty when they arrive in Paris, which would make Margaret at least 35 by that time (though actress Teri Tordai was in her twenties). 

2) Bouridan presumably has various adventures before he becomes celebrated for military valor in the service of Louis X, and he too should be at least in his middle thirties, though the actor playing Bouridan was in his forties. He's first seen on his way to Paris, but he takes time to chat up Blanche, who's both implicitly in her innocent twenties and played by an actress of the same age.

3) Bouridan encounters the twins, Philippe and Gautier, in Paris. He thinks it's odd because they both have old scars on their forearms, which reminds of a similar scar on the arm of his former lover, though he does not say as much. Both Bouridan and Philippe get invited to party at The Tower, and though Bouridan seems to be familiar with the place's bad rep, he doesn't try to talk Philippe out of going.

4) Bouridan is set up to have sex with one of the Queen's handmaidens and then be killed, but he avoids both fates and escapes the Tower. Philippe has sex with the Queen, all the Oedipal innocent who doesn't know he's shagging his mom. Margaret, who's sacrificed numerous victims to her lust and that of her two handmaidens, feels a little tender about Philippe and almost spares him. But the enthralled young man tries to see the face under her mask, and Margaret has Orsini kill him and dispose of the body.

5) Around the same time, Orsini-- also played by an actor in his forties-- takes a fancy to Blanche when she arrives at court. He strongarms her into becoming a handmaiden to Margaret. Later he gets her alone and tries to rape her, but he's interrupted and Blanche gets away.

6) Bouridan seems to nurture an old rivalry with Orsini, since his main concern is to blackmail the Queen, threatening to reveal her ilicit activities to King Louis X, newly returned from a foreign campaign-- though later in the film it's implied that the King suspects Margaret's doing something not quite right. However, Bouridan gets a chance to question one of Orsini's henchmen, whom they both knew from their time as pages. The henchman reveals that he spared the lives of the twins and marked them with scars, though he doesn't say why. 

7) So now Bouridan knows that the two children he sired with Margaret lived, even though Philippe died after getting sexed up by his mother. The captain doesn't seem too broken up by this revelation, and he's still more interested in forcing Margaret into giving him a special position at court, even going to the extent of confronting her with the dead body of Philippe. Bouridan also doesn't seek out his surviving son Gautier, though Gautier tries to kill the older man, thanks to Orsini telling the young fellow that Bouridan killed Philippe. 

8) Bouridan does not reveal his filial relationship to Gautier, but somehow talks him into helping Bouridan assault on the Tower while the Queen intends to have one of her orgies. The end result is that Gautier is killed by the Queen's men, though she's belatedly horrified to see her other son slain (though apparently it was okay when they were infants). Bouridan duels Orsini but it's Margaret who stabs Orsini, her former favorite, to death. Then, since the Tower has conveniently caught on fire, she consigns herself to the flames. The King, summoned by Blanche's efforts, shows up mostly to give Bouridan the commission he wants, and the hero cleaves to his (much younger) beloved.

So none of these Freud-tropes are brought together in the service of either a didactic or mythopoeic discourse, only to exploit an array of emotional responses. The Oedipal drama of a son accidentally sleeping with his mother isn't even the main focus here, though. If anything, the main plot resembles Freud's scenario from TOTEM AND TABOO, in which a male tries to keep all the nubile women to himself. Obviously, in his youth Bouridan is not able to do this, because Margaret forms an alliance with his rival Orsini. Still, she later says that she felt a deeper relationship to Bouridan than anyone else, so there's a strong implication that he was such a good lover that for years Margaret's been trying to satisfy herself with lesser (read: younger) peccadillos. 

Bouridan, though, doesn't display any longing for Margaret; he doesn't even try to kiss her at any time. The implication I take from this series of tropes is that he was betrayed by her taking up with his rival Orsini. He doesn't really care about his two sons any more than he does about Margaret. He's dominated by a "will to power," and he prospers as a result of infiltrating Margaret's murderous operation. Also of Oedipal interest is that he ends up with a woman young enough to be his daughter, though to be sure actor Jean Piat did not look to be in his forties for this role. It's also interesting that both Bouridan and Orsini desire Blanche, just as they presumably both desired Margaret as well. I might even theorize that, to Bouridan's ego, both of his sons can be easily sacrificed in his quest for power, and for sex with a younger woman. I'd call it a double standard, but of course Margaret is still the greater sinner, since she kills for her thrills.

Interestingly, I did some additional writing on another film with strong age-inappropriate clansgression. In TUTELARY SPIRITS I mostly addressed the question as to which characters were the superordinate icons of the schlock-film MOTHER GOOSE A GO GO. There the writer showed little attentiveness to anything like emotional tenor. But he did succeed in using fairytales as a means of creating a mythic discourse around a quaternity of taboos concerning age and blood-- and no such discourse appeared in TOWER OF SCREAMING FREUDIANS.

INCEST WE TRUST PART 7

 I was looking up something about the TV show MODERN FAMILY and stumbled across an academic article for Gale Research, which is only readable through one's library subscription service. In this article, "Modern Family: the Return of the Incest Aesthetic in Culture,"  author Stephen Marche argued that the primary use of incest in traditional societies has been for the purpose of describing the dissolution of stable cultures, and that modern cultural artifacts that utilize incest topics or incest humor (GAME OF THRONES and RICK AND MORTY are cited) represent an "incest aesthetic" oriented on societal dissolution as well.

I don't deny that the trope of incestuous relations can be used to signal societal downfall, but my own occasional examinations of the trope in popular fiction don't bear out Marche's conclusions. In short, like almost any subject matter, incest can be used to signal whatever any author pleases to reference.

Here's a section of Marche's article that gets the subject wrong.

Incest appears at the end of things because the fear of incest, the law against it, rises at the beginning of things, at the beginning of meaning for both individuals and societies. In the early twentieth century, anthropologists struggled with an odd fact about human society: the prohibition against incest was so universal and so ancient that it could hardly be described as cultural. "This rule [against incest] is at once social, in that it is a rule, and pre-social, in its universality and the type of relationships upon which it imposes a norm", Levi-Strauss wrote in The Elementary Structure of Kinship. Nature plays some role in the incest prohibition. We have evolved not to have sex with our family members. A study from 2002 found that same-sex siblings dislike their siblings' smell and that mothers dislike their children's smell--an aversion, the researchers speculated, expressly to prevent incest. For Freud, the repression of the incestuous urge was essential to the formation of the ego. The "family romance" demands prohibition. This prohibition lies at the moment of separation between nature and culture, both a bridge and a fracture.

The problem with this view of Freud, though, is that Freud doesn't just say "incest must be prohibited." Given that he thinks the Oedipus Complex is inevitable in everyone, different only in degree, the complex must not just be prohibited but sublimated. This means that the mature Oedipal male must re-direct his affection for his maternal unit to some more plausible marriage-partner. However, Freud continued to maintain that even sublimation did not destroy the power of the complex. Instead, Freud had it both ways. If the mature male marries someone similar to his mother, he's still "marrying his mother." Yet if he marries someone markedly dissimilar, this is a form of "deflection," which just shows how much work the male goes through to dampen down his original affections.

Actually, most recent iterations of the incest-trope have, in my opinion, followed Freudian orthodoxy, and though I could cite other essays I've blogged here in support, the teleseries MODERN FAMILY actually does counter Marche's "Modern Family." I won't go into onerous detail here, since anyone can find assorted Youtube videos chronicling all the show's humorous jokes about sons subconsciously desiring mothers, brothers sisters, and so on. The point is that this was a well to which the MF writers kept returning-- and yet they certainly weren't trying to sell their fictional family as a paradigm for "the end times." If anything, the showrunners represented their paradigm as the future of American families, inclusive of various ethnicities and sexual proclivities. Within that context, MODERN FAMILY got humor out of sublimation, not actual incestuous feeling. Thus, for just one quick example, the Dunphy daughters at one time or another date males reminiscent of their daffy dad, and one daughter, Haley, marries her goofy beau in the later seasons. The one Dunphy boy, raised by both a permissive dad and a bossy mom, is mainly seen gravitating toward older women as sex-partners, though the series concludes without giving him a permanent love interest.

What MODERN FAMILY celebrates with its take on incest-tropes is a tacit assumption that every family has these little hangups and that sublimating them is just part of the maturation journey, though the hangups remain funny because they're always incongruous to the audience's expectations about what family "ought to be." This has nothing to do with any "end times," and may be closer in spirit to "the carnivalesque" spirit promoted by the Russian critic Bakhtin. The disruptions to "normalcy" are like those of the carnival; they divert, but do not permanently overthrow, the boundaries of normal life. And that, I believe, is the real dominant "incest aesthetic" in the 21st century.

THE LONGING OF THE WEAK

One of these days I'd like to see a compilation of references to Sigmund Freud and his theories in popular culture. I don't imagine I'll attempt one myself, but here's a curious entry for such a list.

In preparation for a review on the NUM blog, I re-watched the 1952 musical SHE'S WORKING HER WAY THROUGH COLLEGE, in which star Virginia Mayo is a burlesque performer who only bumps and grinds so that she can earn the money to get her college degree. I remember that whenever I first saw COLLEGE, I happened to have seen the film adaptation of James Thurber's play THE MALE ANIMAL, and thought it interesting that this musical-ized version of Thurber's play more or less reversed Thurber's meaning. I assume that the movie version of the play fairly reflected Thurber's theme, since I've seen other Thurber works in which he was rather scathing toward the fetishization of visceral entertainments like sports and sex-games. COLLEGE is just the opposite, exulting in the world of the senses (with musical numbers that celebrate, among other things, Madame Du Barry, royal mistress of King Louis XV). It's an extremely lightweight film, though the Mayo character is interesting given that she's trying to escape her (rather high class) burlesque past by becoming a playwright, and she ends up writing a play about how great sex and love are.

All of the songs by the well-heralded Sammy Cahn are lightweight too, except for one section of a song entitled "The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of." Here's a link to the full lyrics, but the only section that interests me here is Cahn's curious take on Freud:

I’m sure that Mister Freud
Would really be annoyed
If I presumed to contradict him
To him all dreams are explainable
As the longing of the weak for the unattainable
Admitting Mister Freud was very, very wise
My personal dreams I alone can analyze

I'm not sure if there are any big Freudian references in the original Thurber play, but it's a distinct possibility that Cahn was building on something Thurber wrote, given the statement from this site:

Thurber's first book, Is Sex Necessary?, came out in 1929. It was jointly written with the fellow New Yorker staffer E.B. White. The book presented Thurber's drawings on the subject, and instantly established him as a true comic talent. Thurber made fun of European psychoanalysis, including Freud's work, and theorists who had been attempting to reduce sex to a scientifically understandable level. In 'The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism' (1929) Thurber claimed that "in no other civilized nation are the biological aspects of love so distorted and transcended by emphasis upon its sacredness as they are in the United States of America." (Writings and Drawings by James Thurber, 1996, p. 3) According to Thurber, baseball, prize-fighting, horse-racing, bicycling, and bowling have acted as substitutes for sex. The female developed and perfected the "Diversion Subterfuge" to put Man in his place. "Its first manifestation was fudge-making."

Regardless of Thurber's reasons for dismissing Freud, I would certainly also dismiss the psychologist's tendency to view all dreaming-activity in terms of "the longing of the weak for the unattainable." At the very least, this attitude certainly appears in Freud's interpretations of his Oedipus complex, in which a child feels sexual possessiveness toward his/her opposite-sex parent, and takes refuge in fantasies that satisfy that repressed desire.

I've given multiple reasons on this blog for rejecting Freud's views of fantasy, so I won't repeat any of those. But curiously, before Mayo and Gene Nelson sing the "Dreams" duet, the professor character played by Ronald Reagan-- who is very close to the one in MALE ANIMAL-- listens to a stodgy authority figure complain about seeing a play that he thought was "dirty," and the professor objects that this philistine has just talked crap about the Greek classic "Oedipus Rex." This may be a line in the original Thurber play. But whether it is or not, this tip of the hat to Sophocles seems to be at odds with Sammy Cahn's determination to dispel Mister Freud's logic regarding fantasy's origins in "the longing of the weak."

And all this in a film which loosely addresses the conflict between sexuality and the intellect, yet really has no significant Oedipal conflict between its characters...

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 4

 I ended the previous essay in the series on this observation:

From one viewpoint, if the prehistoric myth-maker was trying to counter the unfamiliarity of the physical world with images of the familiar (like making the sun into a godly charioteer), the authors of metaphenomenal fiction were challenged by the familiarity of science's reading of the physical world into generating new images of the unfamiliar.

By "new" I meant images that were not wholly rooted in traditional mythico-religious concepts of unfamiliar presences or activities. Given my Jungian outlook, I don't believe that any such images are ever completely novel. The renascent dinosaurs of THE LOST WORLD are functionally identical with the dragons of knightly romance, even though each carries its own specific mystique. But because of the influence of science-based naturalism in the 18th and 19th centuries, both dinosaurs and dragons had to be justified as never before. So even a magical dragon has to explained as having originated in some special locale, like Oz, Middle Earth, or some period of Earth-history not yet governed by science, like Howard's Hyboria.

In fact, all marvelous things or entities, being a contradiction of naturalistic law, are implicitly separated from the naturalistic order by some *estrangement* from either the laws of time, space, or both. This deduction underscores the one of the flaws in Rudolf Otto's system. In the quote I cited in Part 1 of this series, Otto speaks of "the uncanny" as "a thing of which no one can say what it is or whence it comes." This raises the question as to what if any term the Lutheran Otto would apply to such Biblical marvels as the Ark of the Covenant or the burning bush. 

With the literary forms of uncanny phenomena, there's much more of an attempt to conform to the rules of naturalistic law. To my knowledge the term "uncanny"-- which debuted in the 18th century-- doesn't take on any literary significance until it appears in the works of Otto, Ernst Jentsch, and Sigmund Freud. None of them focus on the exact same interpretation of the world, but it can be argued that they all have in common is what Jentsch calls "psychical uncertainties." 

The Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe, most of which appeared at the end of the 18th century, may or may not ever use "uncanny," but they became famous for setting up supposed supernatural occurrence, only to explain it away with some contrivance. What is often overlooked, though, is that the feeling of the "uncanny uncertainty" is not necessarily dispelled by the revelation of the contrivance. Indeed, the contrivance itself, while not usually extravagant enough to contravene laws of time or space, may be sufficiently imaginative that it *seems* to depart from the naturalistic world. In Sherlock Holmes' world, no real demon-hounds can exist. Yet how realistic is a world in which murderers plot to kill their victims with trained dogs covered in phosphorescent paint?

In order to create strangeness of either phenomenality, the author must take a temporary holiday from verisimilitude, and draw upon tropes that exist not in the real world, or in our perceptions of it, but exist purely within the corpus of literature. Such tropes are fiction's conduits to the unfamiliar-- though, after a time, they too can become overly familiar, and can only be rejuvenated by seeking to put new wine in old bottles.

NEAR MYTHS: “NIGHTMARE” (SUZIE COMICS #67, 1948)

 In the preceding essay I argued against the too-easy attempt to find syndromic significance in every fictional act of sex or violence. As I also mentioned, Gershon Legman had a unique take on the generally ignored comic-book genre of “teen humor:”

...there are published not only a handful of female crime-and western-comics, but whole series of so-called 'teen-age' comic-books specifically for girls, in which adolescent sexuality is achieved in sadistic disguise... through a continuous humiliation of scarecrow fathers and transvestist boyfriends by ravishingly pretty girls, beating up the men with flower-pots and clocks and brooms..."-- Gershon Legman, LOVE AND DEATH (1949), p. 47.

I’ve stated that I don’t think either Legman’s one cited example or the majority of teen hijinks embodied the syndromic sadism of female comics-readers of that period. But as a consequence of his overstatements, I have kept a weather-eye out for real syndromic sadism in any teen-humor comic book, though my main orientation is of course that of “Looking for Mister Goodmyth.”

I did come across some mildly suggestive material in a late 1940s MLJ (“Archie Comics”) feature named GINGER. This ditzy teen redhead debuted as a backup feature in another title—one devoted to a ditzy blonde named Suzie—and later enjoyed ten issues of her own title lasting into the early 1950s. So, I frittered away an afternoon glancing through the adventures of Ginger via the online Digital Comics Museum. As I expected, most of the redhead’s exploits were as expected typical enough, and none of them qualified as “Goodmyths.” But one tale, “Nightmare,” did have enough psychological material that qualified as a “near myth.”

Like many teen females before her, Ginger starts off the story by asking her father for money to buy clothes. This was a frequent trope in the series, and Daddy George responds as did most teen-humor fathers: he doesn’t like his daughter constantly milking him for money. However, this request is a little different. Ginger aspires to join a girls’ baseball team, so she wants money for a uniform. George doesn’t exactly call his offspring a liar, but he’s not sure of her sincerity. Thus, George follows his daughter to the team’s next game to gauge Ginger’s dedication to the sport.

Ginger takes her place on the team, but the girls are missing their pitcher. George, puffed up with memories of his glory days playing baseball, volunteers to pitch in the belief that he can easily smoke the girls on the other team. Naturally, he gets his ego slammed out of the park when the girls repeatedly belt his balls (so to speak). To top it off, when Ginger’s team goes to bat, George gets beaned by a ball, accidentally sent at him by none other than his darling daughter.

So far, the story’s dealing with standard “dumb daddy” stuff. But while unconscious, George has a dream, beginning with imagining himself to be a baseball, complete with face. George the Ball gets pitched at his daughter, who, to the delight of any remaining Freudians, wields a bat three times normal size. Ginger belts her dad out if the park and into a clothes store.

Once in the store, George becomes human again, and picks up the thread of the argument about having to buy his daughter’s clothes. A slightly Satanic salesman reveals that George must buy clothes for a couple dozen duplicates of Ginger, who probably represent George’s feeling of being overwhelmed with clothing expenses. The floorwalker then makes a bargain with George: if he can hit a ball out of the park, he’ll get the clothes for free. However, George’s feelings of inferiority then take Alice-style permutations. As the pitched ball comes at him, it expands in size while George shrinks, so that the ball creams him. However, this ends the titular nightmare. When George wakes, he retaliates by paddling the (mostly) guiltless Ginger. Some readers might have deemed this belated revenge for the many times she humiliates him and doesn’t get punished.

This story might indeed be deemed an example of syndromic sadism, since it does really lay on the “humiliate daddy” tropes, if only in the author's belief that this was what the audience for GINGER wanted to see. However, it doesn’t succeed as a mythcomic. It might do so if it were built only around George’s aggravations about Ginger’s sartorial needs, or only around George’s chauvinistic attitude toward women. But here the two tropes fight each other rather than complementing one another, and even the element of the Satanic salesman doesn’t enhance the story’s symbolic discourse.

SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICA PT. 2

In the essay SADISM OF THE CASUALKIND, I pointed out that writers like Legman and Wertham viewed every apparent act of fictional sadism to be deeply revelatory of how messed up the audiences were. In this the two authors followed the example of Sigmund Freud, who, despite his disavowals to the contrary, hardly ever met a cigar he didn’t deem a phallic symbol.

I’ve pointed out various salient differences between Wertham and Legman, but historically they’re on the same page insofar as both men believed that American popular entertainment offered far too much sex and violence for a healthy culture. At times both authors slanted their arguments to apply to the effects of such unwholesome diversions upon children, but both also caviled at the effects of bad books and movies on adults as well. Neither of them seemed capable of imagining that for the majority of consumers, the depiction of excessive sex and violence, even those configured into sadistic actions, provided little more than “casual” entertainment, temporary respite from the dull round of the workaday world.

Instead, for these worthies, everything in popular entertainment—the muscles of comic book superheroes, the “bitch-heroines” of paperback thrillers—denoted something deep and syndromic in American culture. Wertham in particular expressed the belief that children could be bent into deviance as easily as the proverbial twig, as if psychological syndromes sprang out of some “monkey see, monkey do” impulse. By saying this, I don’t deny that some individuals may have psychological syndromes that are brought to the fore by their encounters with various types of art. But this phenomenon certainly isn’t confined to encounters with popular entertainment. One of the most famous syndromic avatars of literary sadism was the Eton-educated Algernon Charles Swinburne, who didn’t need crime novels (or crime comic books) to write such odes to sadistic women as “Anactoria” and “Faustine.”

I should further note in some cases an author may repeatedly use transgressive materials not because they express some syndromic aspect of the author’s psychology, but simply as an avenue of captivating a large audience. Though I considered most of Gershon Legman’s identifications of sadistic entertainments to be fatuous, I agreed with him to some extent regarding Chic Young’s newspaper comic BLONDIE. Still, when I read a collection of the original BLONDIE strips from 1930, I found barely any such sadisterotic motifs there. The early strips are all over the place, even writing Dagwood out of the story for a time. The feature didn’t enjoy sustained success until Blondie became a hausfrau and Dagwood a harried victim of the middle-class rat-race. This suggests to me that Young may have happened on his formula — “torture the husband”—by sheer accident, and that he and others who followed the formula did so simply to make a buck. I would not even argue that a syndromic consciousness was behind the one BLONDIE episode that I’ve thus far identified as mythically concrescent, a two-page comic book story signed (but probably not produced) by Young.

Legman’s argument was that BLONDIE was important to American audiences because it showed an American housewife temporarily getting the better of her husband, though in theory she would always have to return to a condition of subservience. I have no way of knowing what BLONDIE strips Legman saw at the time he penned the essays in LOVE AND DEATH. Yet I tend to doubt that Young ever varied his act by much, so in all likelihood the only “subservience” Blondie ever suffered was having to cook Dagwood’s meals—though, as I showed in the analysis of “Shaved and Clipped,” she seems to have no problems telling him that she can cut off his meals any time she pleases.

I’ve also differed with Legman on the sadistic content of teen humor comics, for reasons I detailed in the BLONDIE essay and won’t repeat here. But because Legman made the assertion, I have at times sought to test his hypothesis, perhaps more rigorously than he did—as I will show in the ensuing “near myth” essay.

FINAGLING THE FOCAL PRESENCE PT. 5

Today I finished a review of the 1964 Hammer psycho-thriller NIGHTMARE, one of five such films written by long-time Hammer scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster.

In other essays in my FINAGLING THE FOCAL PRESENCE series, I've talked about how various films alternate between focusing either on a disruptive "monster," such as a madman or a criminal schemer, or on the person who investigates the monster's crime. In Part Four, I expatiated upon on the British horror-thriller THE BLACK TORMENT, reversing an earlier position when I decided that the accused "monster" of the story was not the star, but rather the person who uncovers the plot against the innocent man.

Of the two Sangster psycho-thrillers I've thus far reviewed, the investigator was the focal presence of 1961's SCREAM OF FEAR, while in PARANOIAC, it's an evildoer who's "paranoid" because of his guilt over a horrible act. In contrast to both films, 1964's NIGHTMARE is focused upon an innocent whom a pair of schemers seek to drive mad. Indeed, the film is roughly cut in two, first showing the travails of young Janet Freeman as she seeks to fend off her fear of maternal madness, and then focusing upon the fate of the schemers, who appear to get away with driving Janet mad but are thereafter destroyed by Janet's friends. As I point out in my examination of the film's quasi-Freudian symbolism, I said:

We don't know if Child-Janet, on the day of her eleventh birthday, nurtured any jealousy of her mother's relationship with her father. Still, the mother's murder of the father has the effect of taking away the most important man in Janet's young life. There are no suggestion that teenaged Janet has ever considered boys her own age, and, had Sangster been forced to address the issue, he could have argued that her fear about inheriting her mother's insanity would have kept her isolated from the opposite sex. The one man for whom she shows regard is Baxter, who like her late father is another older married man, though this doesn't keep her from being interested in him. Baxter and Grace apparently believe that Janet's fear of her negative maternal image is so strong that it can be transferred to another target, simply by having Grace waltz around the family abode in a mask of Mrs. Baxter.

Even though the film is structurally bifurcated, though, I'd argue that Janet is still the focal presence, even though the actress playing the character is never seen once she's consigned to the nuthouse. I pointed out that even though the schemers stage-manage Janet into committing a murder for them, the female schemer Grace becomes agitated when she's told (falsely) that Janet has escaped the asylum. She instantly fears that her male partner Baxter is seeing Janet on the side, even though there's never been any indication that Baxter holds any regard for the teenager; rather, the viewer has only seen Janet becoming slightly moony over Baxter.

Still, even though Janet does nothing explicit to save herself, the friends who "gaslight the gaslighters" are all in her service, and so in a symbolic sense they are an extension of Janet. Janet's fears of inheriting her mother's madness is the element most central to the entire story, and the villains are made to plot their plot in line with Janet's "Electra Complex" (actually a term from Jung rather than Freud). In my analysis, I even argued that in Janet's absence from the second half, Grace is stage-managed into imitating the insane husband-murder committed by Janet's mother, and thus the madness Janet feared is visited upon Grace.

 Indeed, even though Janet is entirely absent from the latter half of the film, one could view the entire denouement of NIGHTMARE as a transference of Janet's psychic fear to her victimizer Grace. Janet's helpers stage-manage things so that Grace believes Janet has escaped the asylum, and that Baxter is meeting some other woman even after having married Grace. But Grace jumps to the conclusion that Janet is the other woman, and though the conclusion makes no logical sense, it makes symbolic sense. Grace, by exploiting Janet's fear of insanity, has in essence engendered her own madness, even to the point where she, unlike Janet, duplicates the husband-killing deed of the institutionalized Mrs. Freeman.

Within my persona-terminology, Janet is entirely a demihero, and she does even less to redeem herself than the character of Angela in the 1944 CLIMAX, whose demihero-persona I analyzed in this essay. Angela at least triumphs over her opponent-- an antagonist whose influence she doesn't even suspect-- through her devotion to her love of singing. Janet's protectors insure that the schemers' plot fails, but as characters the protectors are all nugatory. They are in essence a medium through which Janet's feared madness is transferred to those who deserve it-- which arguably frees Janet from the weight of her imposed Electra Complex, though Sangster is admittedly more fascinated with making all of his plot-complications seem halfway convincing. Thus, of all the Gothic innocents redeemed in thousands of books and films, Janet may be one of the few whose writer didn't even bother showing her final redemption, devoting but a single sentence to the fate of what may be Sangster's most interesting original character.