Reconfiguring gothic mythology: The film noir--horror hybrid films of the 1980s.
IJoan Copjec suggests that film noir is a modality of particular contemporary significance in that it reflects a culturally noteworthy "felt mutation in the structures of power" (1996: xi). She elsewhere suggests an important contribution made by detective and gothic fiction to what Claude Lefort terms a "mutation of the symbolic order" (1991: 4Th). The latter is merely a remark in a footnote and is not elaborated upon; I quote both observations only because they draw together American dark crime and gothic literature and suggest, as I will do in the present essay, a considerable importance in that convergence. The importance of film per se in the development of modern and contemporary horror has been remarked upon by Linda Badley, who sees the film media's horror significance as on a par with that of the 19th century High Gothic literature that strongly influenced classic horror films. Badley notes the power of the traditional movie setting: "Horror returns to pre-literate, somatic modes of knowing....Sitting in the darkened theater, which replicates the den or campfire, we re-encounter our earliest dreams" (8). She correctly observes that in fact the literary work of Stephen King, Ann Rice, Clive Barker, and Thomas Ligotti, among others, derives in large part from visual media--especially, in terms of film, from the now themselves classic movies of the 1930s and 1950s.
The following discussion takes off from and concludes with consideration of the arguable importance of a set of realist and quasi-realist films that appeared in the 1980s bringing the film noir crime tradition together with the film horror one in a way that had not been done so fully and effectively before. A series of films during that decade, notably The First Deadly Sin (1980), Blowout (1981), Tightrope (1984), Angel Heart (1987), and Fatal Attraction (1987), conflated crime and particularly noir conventions with gothic ones to produce a crossbreed form; Alan Parker's Angel Heart, arguably the defining version of the hybrid to date, did so with shocking power. This gothicized noir mode closes the traditional investigator's distance from the material being investigated, and collapses the cerebral, detached investigative model. The detective in this subgenre becomes eminently vulnerable, descending into the dark night of the soul usually associated with horror invention--witness Clarice Starling (Julianne Mo ore) in Hannibal (2001), Scully and Mulder (Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny) in The X-Files (1998), and so on. In Wolfen (1981), the tough and streetwise detective played by Albert Finney disintegrates in the face of a preternatural challenge. In Tightrope, the Clint Eastwood character, likewise tough and experienced, becomes lost in the pornographic labyrinth an investigation takes him into. John Travolta in Brian DePalma's Blowout is emotionally mangled despite his efforts to technicalize his investigation and distance himself through his electronic expertise. In these films, contrary to the cerebral detective story tradition in which, as Badley describes it, "the rational subject separates itself from the body of evidence," there is no such remove; as in horror, the protagonist "descends into primal fear and desire. It is a loss of ego in cellular chaos" (10).
The significance of these hybrid works in the twentieth century development of the horror modality, I would argue, has yet to be critically clarified or creatively exploited, though The X-Files, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Seven (1995), and Stigmata (1999), to mention a few examples, suggest their influence. (1) Not that the 1980s films lacked for their own precursors; detective literature and horror had been edging toward each other for a long time. Two or three of Hitchcock's works, as well as Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1971), Alan Pakula's Klute (1971), and Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), might be seen as anticipating the five I have identified--certainly Play Misty anticipated Fatal Attraction. Both Eastwood's film and Fatal Attraction, it should be noted, can be regarded more as heirs to the James M. Cain line of noir than to the Hammett-Chandler one. Like Play Misty and Fatal Attraction, Cain's work, while almost always mentioned in criticism of the hardboiled detective tradition, did not inc lude a detective element. Whatever detection went on in Cain's novels-Keyes' sleuthing in Double Indemnity, for example--was distinct from the narrator and even directed against him, and detection is marginal in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Mildred Pierce if it is there at all. Cain's influential work in fact calls for the employment of the term "hard-boiled crime" literature rather than hard-boiled detective. Lawrence Kasdan's neo-noir Body Heat (1981) is another film more specifically in the Cain line than in that of Chandler and Hammett. It turns on the kind of gothic, Faustian element that typically informed Cain's Poesque work--the making of a mortally evil decision or pact and the fateful coming around of consequence.
That the tough crime tradition in America rejected high-I.Q. deduction and genteel sleuthing as its driving force, and gravitated toward a model more akin to horror, should not be surprising if Leslie Fiedler's work is credited. Fiedler argues that the bias of Americaii imagination has always been toward the Gothic, always pretending realism but edging toward nightmare. "The tale of terror in a thousand forms," Fiedler argues, is a prevailing genre among minor and major American writers; "images of alienation...and abysmal fear posses our fiction" (142-43). Film noir and the crime novels that begot it all along provided an invitation to gothic influences, and neo-noir films have easily accommodated narratives in which realism undergoes incursions of the uncanny, enchanted, pathological, or hallucinatory--Chinatown or Wolfen, for example. Angel Heart begins by rigorously establishing the hard realism of Dashiell Hammet-- the rather seedy office of the seen-it-all, acerbic private investigator, the well-to-do c lient who offers a caper off the track of the detective's accustomed divorce rounds, and so forth. But in this case the gumshoe, it turns out, has by no means seen it all yet. The film's tough-noir profile, its realistic dimension, lures viewers into a receptivity to uncanny possibilities, to the entertainment of "surmounted beliefs" like that of, here, the unconscious, murderous, Satan-indebted alter-ego. (2) Contemporary American gothic, on the other hand, shows signs of fertilization by the noir detective mode--in the narrative voice in Stephen King's work, for example, where bleak, Chandleresque similes often occur: "His face looked sad and old, like the glasses of water they bring you in cheap diners" (Salem's Lot, 592). The X-Files, too, suggests a surreal rendering of the American noir crime tradition, but much earlier the novels of Chandler and Cain were tending toward an hallucinatory aesthetic themselves, as were Ross MacDonald's a little later and James Ellroy's are at present.
The medium of film drew out the surreal qualities already implicit in the dark crime texts of Cain, Chandler, and Hammett. Film deepened the surreality that was present in the literary originals because film lent its own implicit dreamlike quality to the narratives. "Cinema is 'like' dream in its mode of presentation: it creates a virtual present, an order of direct apparition. That is the mode of dream.... The dreamer is always 'there,' his relation is...equidistant from all events" (Langer, 412-13). The original noir films, pre-video, were of course viewed in the extreme darkness of the public cinema, the cave-like setting referenced by Badley. The dark crime narratives thus gained a yet greater darkness in translation, and the later introduction of a gothic dimension to the genre completed a vital hybridization evident by the 1980s. Brian DePalma has been arguably the contemporary director most sensitive to noir's surreal and horror dynamics as he returns, in the mode of dream, to classic film noir images- -the first of the serial murders in Blowout, for instance, reprises the night murder of Archer in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), the victim crashing backwards through a construction area fence and downhill into a dark urban excavation. (3)
The American tough-detective genre often veered close to gothicly extravagant transgressions, wrapped, as in Chinatown or Angel Heart, in intricate layers of plot. This was so even before the seminal noir novels became translated into a major film genre. Chandler's works provide numerous examples of grotesque, quasi-gothic characters, like the hissing, childish-murderous Carmen Sternwood of The Big Sleep. And Phyllis, in Cain's novella Double indemnity (as opposed to the parallel character in Billy Wilder's 1944 film) was a literal witch, a monster and serial murderer numbering children among her victims--a precursor of Annie Wilkes in Stephen King's Misery, who is also a nurse-murderer. Cain's book concludes with a full measure of horror tropics and atmospherics. Phyllis and Huff, having fled California, are aboard a ship in the Gulf of Mexico but are aware their options have run out. Phyllis tells Huff that "the time has come," and when he asks what she means, replies, "For me to meet my bridegroom. The onl y one I ever loved. One night I'll drop off the stem of the ship. Then, little by little I'll feel his icy fingers creeping into my heart." A shark is following the ship, Huff as narrator notes: "I saw a flash of dirty white down in the green." As Phyllis grooms for her fatal leap, he describes her ritual preparations in her stateroom: "She's made her face chalk white, with black circles under her eyes and red on her lips and cheeks. She's got that red thing on. It's awful-looking. It's just one big square of red silk that wraps around her, but it's got no arm-holes, and her hands look like stumps underneath it....She looks like what came aboard the ship to shoot dice for souls in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (Cain x 3, 465).
This is an example of the way essentially "realistic" crime literature can accept gothic preternaturalism, extraordinary psychopathology replacing the literal Satanic evil of the kind found in, say, Matthew Lewis's The Monk or, much more recently in Angel Heart or The Exorcist (1973). Unlike in Angel Heart, Satan does not manifest in Cain's Double Indemnity, but events approach that threshold. The extremity of Phyllis's exotic psychopathology reaches at least the boundaries of the preternatural, as does Alex's (Glenn Close) in Fatal Attraction. The same is true of the evil in films like Tightrope, The First Deadly Sin, and Seven. Film noir had always shared a complimentary framing with the gothic species--bleak, stylized landscapes and interior decor, investigation moving into uncharted territory, convoluted plot, aberrant psychology, claustrophobic spaces, social disintegration and reactionary anxiety, a sinister world viewed in nocturnal shadow, and so on; the two modalities were arguably spawned from the s ame elemental myth-pool.
The American noir film tradition, spun off from the hard-boiled crime novel--itself born out of pulp fiction--now provides horror with a new and energizing frame, one as amenable to it as formerly the antiquated estates of a decadent aristocracy were. Literary gothicism always favored a superannuated mis-en-scene, and the city of film noir offers that--it is largely a retro-reality. James Ellroy's current crime fiction, L.A. Confidential, etc., is set in the Los Angeles of the 1950s, and the New York and New Orleans cityscapes of Angel Heart are those of an urban America from decades before the rise of suburbia; this city of classic hardboiled detective fiction and film noir is by now a receding memory but endures as a crime-horror trope. That stylized city provides a useful setting for contemporary American psychopathological crime--especially serial murder--as well as for the whole range of traditional gothic horror dynamics. The following discussion considers the films in question in terms of their reconfi guration and urbanization of traditional gothic archetypes, as situating, in James Iaccino's phrase, "newer interpretations of...age-old [horror] myths" that link to the human archaic past (qtd. in Schneider, 170).
II
"And terror's free--/Gay, Ghastly, Holiday!"
-Emily Dickinson
One aspect of what we mean by the "real" is the normative, the established quotidian regularity of things. Mikhail Bakhtin has famously analyzed medieval and early modern carnival as a suspension of the terms of a socially constructed version of reality and the creation of a temporary paranormal pageant during which folk, by way of radical festivity, would see through social convention and cultural high seriousness and in fact laugh at the whole hierarchical, fixed cultural assemblage to which they were ordinarily committed, participant, and acquiescent. Bakhtin's description of the original carnival rubric emphasizes the ceremonial disestablishment of official norms, carnival's suspension of the allegiance normally afforded workaday reality, and festival's revivalist function. This is an essentially comic vision, one of liberation and holiday transcendence, but it has as well a bearing upon horror; indeed the dialectical transactions that generically occur between comedy and horror are manifested graphically in carnival, the surface of which is festive, but which, given a slight shift in imagination, traces into the unsavory and violative. (4)
Comedy's disestablishment is at length creative; its breakage is part of a cycle accomplishing renewal. But the suspension of prosaic time and the establishment of a temporal frame in which ordinary social assumptions are in abeyance speaks, dangerously enough, to the pathological mind as well as to the festively liberated one, and with a very different resonance. Crime and abomination blend in and disguise themselves readily in the whirl of festive holidays--Castle refers, for example, to masquerade's "hallucinatory ambivalence" (251). In Angel Heart, the macabre-occult designs of Johnny Favorite and his Satanist cohorts are carried out in the midst of New York's 1943 New Years Eve celebration. A lone G.I., Harold Angel (Mickey Rourke), is lured from the Times Square holiday reveling to an apartment where he is ritually gutted, his heart eaten by Favorite while still beating. Montressor in Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" likewise takes advantage of the atmosphere of festival--what he calls "the supreme madness o f the carnival season"--to waylay his victim, Fortunato, and to enact a bizarre homicide in the catacombs beneath the celebrating city. The psychopathic killer in Blowout (John Lithgow) is also drawn to the highest pitch of festival to carry out his murder of Sally, whose screams are drowned out by the sounds of celebration and fireworks.
The carnivalesque provides a means whereby realistic horror can track into the uncanny and hallucinatory, often without resort to supernatural devices. The depraved possibilities of one carnivalesque expression, masquerade, are in fact explored recurrently in Poe--in "Hop Frog," "Masque of the Red Death," and "King Pest," as well as in "Cask of Amontillado." In "Cask," both victim and perpetrator are bizarrely arrayed--the unfortunate Fortunato in clown's garb, and the murderer, Montressor, in the sinister black cape and mask appropriate for his role as executioner. Masquerade creates a symbolic space, Terry Castle notes, in which "'whirl is king' ... a world of dizzying transformation" (53). Such an exotic symbolic space, it goes without saying, in creating a condition that enables uncanny experience, is ideal for gothic literary imagination and for real world depraved undertakings.
Castle remarks upon the "aura of excitement and moral danger" surrounding masquerade, one which situates "a collective return to various sorts of atavistic behavior, the upsetting of erotic taboos." (In Tightrope, the masquerade underworld of sado-masochism mixes eerily with the masquerade environment of Mardi Gras New Orleans.) She notes the masque's "sheer, estranging power," and quotes Roger Callois's observation that, in its most extreme forms, "masquerade phenomenology resolved into surrender [to] 'that spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness'" (52-55). "Carnival," "revel," "romp," and so forth--like the contemporary usage "to party"--carry both festive and illicit connotations, the latter stemming from the implied liberty which can enable aberrant inclinations and lead in effect to a carnival of feral impulses. The Woodstock-versus-Altamont, flower children-versus-Manson family oppositions of the 1960s, for example, played out very different scenarios of suspended soci al restriction and festive liberation. "Altamont was our Waterloo," writes Camille Paglia; "there the Dionysian forces released by the Sixties showed their ugly face" (212). Social norms regarded as only provisionally binding, as the object of ironic laughter, may be seen as moving worryingly close to sociopathic perception. The gothic often situates precisely this excessive carnival dynamic, the treacherous ramifications of festive looseness. In a video rental store I recently noted in passing a legend on one of the sleazier and more lurid horror-flick boxes, one which would confirm Castle's observations: "EVIL LOVES TO PARTY." This suggests the festive regarded as a walk on the wild side, and parallels dark carnival's ancestry in "the circus side show, the phantasmagoria show, the wax museum, the Theatre du Grand Guignol...and the Theatre of Cruelty" (Badley, 9).
The way in which salacious as well as comic spirits manifest in the various carnival contexts--masque, parade, fair, holiday, festival--is evident in Disney Studio's Fantasia 2000, for instance, in a segment based on Hans Christian Andersen's toy soldier story. It is the leering jack-in-the-box character, the harlequin in cap and bells out of masquerade tradition, who looms menacingly and has villainous designs upon the little ballerina. It is likewise a jester figure, the nefarious Joker, who plagues Gotham and its super-hero in Batman. The narrator of Thomas Ligotti's horror story "The Last Feast of Harlequin" remarks that "clowns have often had ambiguous and somewhat contradictory roles to play." He has earlier observed that "the jolly, well-loved joker familiar to most people is actually but one aspect of this protean creature" (434). (5) But carnival is itself protean, as certain personality types are well aware. The anarchic, destabilizing elements in the carnivalesque were terribly vivid to, for instan ce, the Victorian hysterical personalities Freud dealt with. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in their The Politics and Poetics of Transgression note that, to such personalities, for whom stability and predictability are at a premium, carnivalesque mayhem is anathema.
In Freud's Studies on Hysteria, they observe, "many of the images and symbols which were once the focus of various pleasures in European carnival have become transformed into the morbid symptoms of private terror" (174). "Carnival debris spills out of the mouths" of hysterical patients. "Don't you hear the horses stamping in the circus?" one woman desperately implores Freud (171). The transformation the authors describe--originally festive material undergoing a conversion from which it emerges in a morbid form--is frequently exploited in literary and filmic macabre constructions.
A classic film evocation of festival laced with menace is of course Black Orpheus (1959), in which the presence of a figure stalking Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) transforms the masquerade, the jubilant rythmns and images of carnival in Rio, into something darkly hallucinatory and ominous; a spectacle, to borrow Castle's phrasing, of "seething, grotesque, and paranormal forms" (53). Similarly, John Travolta in Blowout must desperately navigate through incongruous hilarity and celebration in an attempt to prevent the murder of a young woman. It is ironically the function of carnival to defamiliarize the ordinary landscape of reality like this, and such a defamiliarization, the gothic tradition recognizes, may enable abomination along with celebration.
What Castle notes in her Bakhtinian study of masquerade is true of carnival broadly and gestures towards its horror-comic synergy--as "promiscuous gathering," she argues, masquerade draws comedy and danger together since, at least in its excessive forms, it embodies both potentials in its licensing of misrule and subversion of routine, established reality (2). The prostitute in Klute, the Jane Fonda character, uses "party" in the illicit sense, counseling her clients that it will be healthy to let go their inhibitions, to "let it all hang out." But as Paglia problematizes the matter, "Eros, like Dionysus, is a great and dangerous god" (30). (Nor, seen in this light, is the much satirized norm-affirming conservatism of the classic slasher films as simplistic as some glib parodies like Scream [1996] would have it.) Unwittingly, the prostitute unleashes a monster. It is not surprising that both Castle and Julia Kristiva, two critics upon whom Bakhtin has had considerable influence, have devoted extensive attenti on to horror, and to the grimmer implications of the carnival mythic configuration. The dangerous aspect of Eros is dramatized in a segment of Fatal Attraction when Glenn Close and Michael Douglas drift into a pastoral, holiday illusion; they are seen frolicking with a dog in a park, innocent and lighthearted in the lilting charm of endorphin reality. Following shortly thereafter, however, are stark indoor scenes--grim elevator shafts in parking garages and in the devouring Close's building--the symbolic shadow world of her maniacal psyche.
It may be that, as some have argued, an evil side was in fact always inherent in revel traditions. Harassment and humiliation may have been all along part of the shadow side of the historic carnival profile. At the Flemish kermesse of the 16th century, "rat poison salesmen swung strings of their victims in the air. Showmen exhibited madwomen gibbering in their chains. Young folk joined hands to skate.. . on ripe garbage. Organized fights pitted blind men with clubs against each other.. .beneath the frantic surface jollity lay somber violence" (Foote, 118). This would tend to bear out Terry Eagleton's negative characterization of carnival as "by no means as attractive a world as it sounds.. . full of aggression, male bravado, and coarse buffoonery... (207). And even when not sinister in and of itself, carnival can create a weirdly incongruous background for horror as it does, for example, in the merry-go-round climax of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951). And the amusement park across the black wat er, its lights and calliope music, had earlier provided an equally incongruous backdrop for Bruno (Robert Walker)'s demented strangulation of Guy (Farley Granger)'s wife. Festive elements thus frequently function invertedly in dark literature, situating precisely the un-festive, or treacherously deceptive festive.
Films like Blowout, Carnival of Souls (1962), and Tightrope likewise exploit the transgressive potential in masquerade's "world upside down" climate. The murderers in films such as Psycho (1960) and Dressed to Kill (1980) are, in effect, masquerade figures, and the licentious climate of masquerade continues to provide a context for film and literary horror invention. The protagonist narrator of Thomas Liggotti's "The Last Feast of Harlequin" is an anthropologist and amateur clown drawn to a small Midwestern town's annual festival when he hears that clowns are included "among its other elements of pageantry." Like Angel Heart or Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth," this tale involves a protagonist who believes his investigative drive is professional or hobbyist when in reality it is an inexorable tropism, a biological pull toward an appalling self-realization. His line, "1 had no idea where my disguise would take me that night...," resonates with masquerade's dangerous allure (Oates, 434). It also, disturb ingly enough, brings to mind the professional clowning ingredient in the serial murder career of John Wayne Gacy. One wonders if Gacy, like Liggotti's character, at least at first thought that his interest in clowning was umproblematic and incidental, when in fact it appears to have been an expression of a depraved imagination relishing masquerade's "free familiar contact"--wherein twisted erotic-homicidal possibilities might be realized in the unusually free fraternization and anonymity the clown context offered. In its suspension of established order, the camivalesque situates a complimentary ground for the psychopath who himself perpetrates "a violent penetration of boundaries that upsets epistemological, ontological, and teleological conceptions"(Simpson, 12). (A seemingly analogous confusion perhaps comes through to those children who are disturbed by live clowns and their antics--a not uncommon reaction which would seem to stem from the child's inability to grasp the publicly sanctioned nature of behavi or that appears to be hysterical.)
Carnival speaks to the psychopath's desire to violate and affront "notions of propriety and civilized conduct." It can also, in actual and in literary terms, facilitate entry into what Philip Simpson characterizes as "the mythic territory reserved for the most extreme taboo..." (11). Gacy, like Montressor, executed his macabre projects with single-minded and systematic perfection. Carnival-masquerade provides a useful messiness--Simpson's term--a social derangement in which situation the psychopath's narrow, obsessive agenda can be carried out (11-12). Holiday departure from social high seriousness is no doubt healthy, but careless tinkering with elements of social order--and this situates the cautionary-conservative conviction of horror--can be catastrophic. "Go read King Lear," Paglia suggests, "to see the anarchy and wolfish-ness, the primitive regression that result from a sentimental deconstruction of social institutions. Stormy nature in our hearts and beyond the gates is ready to consume us all" (31).
Murderous psychopathology in real life, Simpson observes, is characterized by the "aesthetic decentering of meaning common to horror narrative strategy." The serial killer and the horror literary modality in effect relish disestablishment, the breakdown of the regular and predictable. Harold Angel, the private detective! serial murderer in Angel Heart, asks a police detective if he watches the Mickey Mouse Club. The detective doesn't reply, but Angel goes on:" ... because today is Wednesday--anything can happen." (6) A temporalspatial frame in which anything can happen--such as the shaken-up, dancing reality of carnival--is an ideal atmosphere for psychopathic adventuring. Stephen King notes that "the melodies of the horror tale are simple and repetitive... They are the melodies of disestablishment and disintegration" (Danse, 13).
The shifting terms of festival, the phantasmagorical identity-play of masque, suits the promiscuous murderer well since, as Simpson notes, "the murderer's identity is not solidly cast" (11). (7) The serial murderer in Tightrope in fact aggressively and eerily mixes and merges his identity with that of the detective (Clint Eastwood); refusing the role of the pursued, he takes on that of pursuer. This is the classic carnivalsaturnalia inversion: the investigator becomes the object of investigation; the police detective finds himself subject to the criminal's seemingly panoptic gaze. Asked by his girlfriend if he is getting any closer to the killer, Eastwood replies: "He's getting closer... to me," a line that situates the trope of the investigator's vulnerability in the noir-horror hybridization. Carnival themes inform the film. Eastwood tracks the killer through a warehouse in which carnival paraphernalia are stored. Mardi Gras street celebration provides a context in which Eastwood's daughters interact unwitt ingly with the serial killer who is in clown dress, offering balloons. He releases one balloon the upward traveling of which the camera follows in an allusion to the pedophile pick-up scene in Fritz Lang's M (1931).
The freedom of festival seems to the so-inclined to suggest and sanction transgression, and among demonic things nothing is more bizarrely so than the demonic parade, fair, carnival, or masque. Bakhtin notes the vulgar physicality that once grounded popular-festive celebration, that "in the atmosphere of Mardi Gras, reveling, dancing, music were all closely combined with slaughter, dismemberment, bowels, excrement..." (223-24). They indeed are in Angel Heart, where a voodoo parade in Harlem is background for cuts to ceilings leaking blood and blood-spattered walls. In gothic presentation, such elements, without the ameliorating factor of festive renewal, darkly revise the carnivalesque paradigm.
III
"My rites were old when the rites of your church were unconceived"
--Barlow the Vampire, Salem's Lot
Other mythic, ceremonial, and arguably gothic elements surface in the films under consideration. Murderous outrages, single or serial, in these noir-horror films tend to be contextualized--wedded, as in traditional gothic, to inverted elements of ritual, pageant, or sacramental framing--something not native to the noir crime genre itself but an important part of the developing hybrid. The vampires of traditional gothic narratives, for instance, are beholden to prescribed ritual formalities; they move in the special and enabling atmospherics and masquerade of their tribe. They do not operate in real or figurative daylight, but manifest in a required occult setting.
Robert Giddings points out the ritualizations of murder in Poe's work, the ceremonial tenor of the homicides--"several of the stories deal with a death very elaborately planned, staged, and executed" (47). This would certainly be true of "Hop Frog," and Giddings cites the "punctilious and time-consuming" ritual of entombment in "The Cask of Amontillado," wherein Fortunato "is treated to a personal funeral ceremony" replete with Masonic symbolism, wine, and a final "In pace requiescat" (47-48). The gruesome, ineluctable course of events in Angel Heart are interwoven with a mix of voodoo rites and Catholic symbolism--altars, rituals, and ceremonial objects and images. The elaborateness here and in "Cask," as well as the quasi-religiosity, brings to mind the extraordinary schematization of the murder scenarios conjured by the serial killer "John Doe" (Kevin Spacey) in Seven, the very title of which is an ecclesiastical-canonical reference to the traditional seven deadly sins. In John Doe's mind the killings are not isolated and arbitrary, but rather are part of a formal spiritual imperative in which he is an agent of God's wrath. His execution of sinners by way of ceremonial tortures that mimic their specific sin--force-feeding the glutton and so on--hearkens back to the medieval gothic art of Hieronymous Bosch, Peter Bruegle, and their confreres, but has surfaced elsewhere in fairly recent horror film and literature as well. In The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), for example, the Vincent Price character murders his victims according to the dictates of the ten biblical plagues. And Stephen King describes an early Ray Bradbury story involving "an undertaker who performs hideous but curiously moral atrocities upon his 'clients'--for instance when three old biddies who loved to gossip maliciously are killed in an accident, the undertaker chops off their heads and buries these three heads together, mouth to ear, so the can enjoy a hideous kaffeeklatsch throughout eternity" (Danse, 326).
Much of the horridness of serial killers like the one in Tightrope, Daniel Blank (David Dukes) in The First Deadly Sin, Johnny in Angel Heart, John Doe in Seven, or the John Lithgow character in Blowout, derives from the fact that their actions do have a quality of ritual inversion about them, an aesthetic perfection, and a deranged sense of transcendent mission. The ritual undercurrent in such films tends to be derived from Catholicism, contemporary America's closest contact with ritual tradition. Even their doppelganger motifs, for instance, arguably reflect a gothic Manichaeanism. Eastwood in Tightrope is haunted by an evil psychic counterpart, as is Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart. Travolta in Blowout has paired personalities--one morally sensitive and the other that of a hard, cynical, porn movie sound man. The doubling in The First Deadly Sin is more complex, and that film, an unduly neglected noir-gothic piece, reveals other notable survivals of traditional gothic tropics in the context of otherwise reali stic American crime film conventions. I would therefore like to conclude with a consideration of this 1980 film, directed by Brian Hutton and starring Frank Sinatra and Faye Dunaway, giving it a more extended treatment than I have been able thus far to afford to any other individual 1980s film in this discussion.
Daniel Blank goes head-hunting along dark New York streets, where he performs precise, virtually balletic killings employing a single blow to the head with a mountain climber's ice hammer wickedly honed, glinting, and curved like the fingernails of Freddy Krueger. The motiveless murders seem almost pointedly arbitrary, a defiance of any meaning or logic. But before each execution and following upon it, Blank performs patient, elaborate rites--conditioning his body with Samurai devotion, bathing, treating his clothes as vestments and his killing implement as if it partook of an occult sacredness. The killings themselves are clearly not to him things in isolation; they are part of some ritual rubric, some system of black protocols.
Northrop Frye has observed that "It is part of the critics' business to show how all literary genres are derived from the quest-myth" (17). However overly sweeping many might regard the observation, it is not difficult to find somber, ironic echos of the Ur legend Frye references in films like The First Deadly Sin or Angel Heart. In the latter, the detective is impelled upon a quest which, not unlike those undertaken by knights in medieval legends, is surreally unclear as to its terms and significance. But Angel Heart's main mythic ancestry is of course Faustian; The First Deadly Sin, on the other hand, employs a defining trope out of quest legend--that of the maimed king whose wounding has dire communal-tribal implications. In this film, Inspector Edward Delaney (Sinatra) confronts an order of criminality that transcends what day-today police procedure encounters, and one which tracks into the preternatural. The city is besieged by crime, cynicism, and suspicion, and is stalked by a serial killer. A maimed q ueen (Dunaway) embodies the city's illness as the maimed king does in the grail legend.
Chretien de Troyes's romance legend begins on notes of vegetational health, with bounteous metaphors of sowing, harvest, reaping, plant, and seed. It is Spring, and "trees bud, bushes leaf, and meadows turn green ... everything is aflame with joy ..." (340). Evoked is that vitality C.L. Barber refers to, in which all living things stir together (20). This foregrounds Eros, but Thanatos, the dynamic of horror, is Eros's shadow-- Barber refers to "the mortality implicit in vitality" (10). In Chretien's narrative, notes opposed to the original energetic ones occur, notes of lapse and languishment. Early in his travels, Perceval comes upon a settlement that is dissipated and under siege; the bridge approaching its gate is "so feeble that he thought it could scarcely support him" (361). What he finds within are further markers of enfeeblement and destabalization, of things amiss: "Everywhere he went he found the streets empty and the houses old and fallen down..." There are two former abbeys, "one of frightened nu ns, the other of helpless monks.... Throughout the town there was no mill grinding or oven baking.... The town was so desolate ... that there was no bread, pastry, wine, cider, or ale." The settlement is a study in exhaustion: there is no art, no creative endeavor, no affirmation. There are "no fine decorations or tapestries ... only split and cracked walls and roofless towers" (361-62). The mythic poles, the downward and upward impulses, vitality versus depletion, are thus entangled in the quest pattern.
The besieged town is the town of the horror mythos, a trope, complementary to that of the besieged body, which situates the spirits of torpor and flagging volition. Even in The Exorcist, the diabolical inroads are not confined to the girl's physical body but extend out into place--into the Georgetown community in the form of mysterious desecrations of churches, and dwindled spiritual conviction among the Jesuits (traditionally the vigorous, militant arm of the Church). In the grail story, Perceval is burdened with an esoteric obligation to affect the cure of the wounded King and thereby to restore the faltering kingdom--the King and the land and its crops are identified; his illness is one and the same as the territory's. The same theme surfaces in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," in which a traveler not unlike Perceval comes on horseback to the estate of a waning figure, one whose dissolution is at the same time the dissolution of the house, the lineage, and the land--not symbolically, but on a biolog ical continuum. The Waste Land curse hangs over the moribund estate: "I looked upon the scene before me--upon ... the bleak walls--upon the vacant, eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees-with an utter depression of soul" (54). It falls to the visitor to determine the nature of his host's malady, and to restore him--and implicitly his estate--to wellness, a task Perceval himself is unable to accomplish, and one at which the "Usher" narrator also fails.
A heroine rather than a male hero is the wounded, failing figure in The First Deadly Sin, and her illness equates to that of the languishing commonweal, while the knight and would-be healer is Inspector Delaney. The film begins in a nocturnal urban landscape, one feature of which the camera emphasizes--the large lighted cross of a Christian street mission. Parallel editing indicates simultaneous events occurring--in one, a woman is being wheeled into emergency surgery; in the other, a shadowy figure, well-dressed, is prowling a dark street. The scene switches abruptly back and forth between the concurrent actions. The surgeon's scalpel parts the woman's abdomen, cutting through the layers of flesh, and a crucifix is flashed full screen. Cut to the street where the lighted mission cross has been shown; the shadowy figure passes a man, spins around, and slams a glinting metal instrument down into the latter's head. Again a crucifix, and the scalpel severing the woman's flesh, blood pouring out and down into the operating room drain. The suggestion is not of simultaneity merely, but of convergent realities--the esoteric, spiritual oneness of the events.
For the rest of the film, the narratives continue to run in parallel at critical, violent points as the woman becomes increasingly ill. The crosscutting makes clear that she is in crisis sympathetically with the city, and that her body and the city are affected by the same morbid influence--arguably reflecting the mythic sense Jesse Weston refers to as "the community of the Life principle" (35). She is Mrs. Delaney, the wife of Police Detective-Inspector Delaney, who is investigating the murders (which turn out to be a uniform series of slayings involving the use of an unidentified metal implement). Delaney rushes from a murder scene to the hospital when he hears of his wife's emergency surgery, and is stunned to find her grievously ill. The distressingly evasive surgeon informs the detective that his wife's kidney had to be removed, that they had found it to be "diseased...rooting." It is a Catholic hospital, and crucifixes are a constant symbolic accompaniment as Delaney talks to his wife or desperately int erviews the doctor in a vain attempt to understand what is happening to her. Nor can he comprehend what is happening to the city, her spiritual double. Returning to the investigation, the detective visits the morgue, the gruesome abattoir possibilities of which are fully exploited--cadavers are being laid open and the camera follows the blood running into the drain beneath the table, a repetition of the earlier operating theater scene. Not long after, Delaney is walking through--gothically and quest-romantically enough--a medieval hail with armored knights on horseback and weapons under display glass. He is talking to the curator--an eccentric antiquarian who, like Delaney, is on the verge of retirement. The detective believes the murder weapon may be a medieval artifact of some sort.
As Delaney's investigative work proceeds, the dissolution of the city becomes a prominent motif, its pathology insistently equated with that ravaging his wife's body--not in Delaney's mind (he does not make this connection), but in fact supernaturally. The metropolis is essentially poisoned; it is under an influence manifested in a generalized dishonesty, crime, and meanness, and it is fractured along ethnic and linguistic lines. Mrs. Delaney's doctor turns out to be an ambitious careerist not unlike the precinct Captain around whom Delaney must steer if he is to get anything done in terms of the serial-murder investigation. When another detective is told the street on which one of the murders has occurred, he comments, "that used to be a safe area." "Nowhere is safe," Delaney replies. And the systemic breakdown takes in the legal network--Blank has connections that, it is made clear, would more than suffice to keep him on the loose even if he were caught and arrested.
This brief summary can only suggest the gothic conception informing this film. The Maimed Queen figure is visited by a concerned ally who attempts to free her of her illness--he brings gifts, encouragement, prayer. But the affected character declines inescapably, recapitulating and em-bodying the larger communal dissolution. The traditional Catholic and medieval motifs of literary gothicism are abundantly exercised. The biological preoccupation is returned to consistently in lurid scenes reinforced with images of the operating table, the autopsy table, and the psychopathic butchery enacted on the city streets by the killer. Horror, Badley has noted, is the most physiological of genres, "with the possible exception of pornography" (11). And Poe's "Usher" is echoed in the film's conclusion when Delaney, his wife inexorably failing, is reduced--like the narrator of Usher reading the Tryst tale--to helplessly reading her a children's book, Honey Bunch.
If the significance of the mythic convergence discussed here is missed, the Faye Dunaway character's place in the film is superfluous, a cameo, and the cutting to the hospital seems an arbitrary departure from the crime investigation--a sentimental, tacked-on love interest. Thus the Variety review of the film, failing to note its gothiccrime configuration, reductively observed that "paralleling the crime-and-detection yam, and slowing down the entire proceedings, are Sinatra's visits to wife Faye Dunaway, who's not recovering well from a kidney operation" (Variety Portable, 421). The reviewer misses the genre hybridization involved, and so reads the film one-dimensionally--as a crime movie in the straightforward realist tradition. This is perhaps symptomatic of the fact that the depth and possibilities the crime-horror mutation that defined a number of significant films of the 1980s remains to be caught up with. In these neo-noir films, events unfold not just in the city at night, but in the gothic City of Dr eadful Night.
Notes
(1.) The X-Files, however, like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and some other films, merges noir and science fiction-horror. I will not be addressing the sci-fi angle of things here.
(2.) Regarding "surmounted beliefs," see Schneider 2000.
(3.) DePalma's obvious indebtedness to Hitchcock--something that has been made much of by unsympathetic critics--should not, I think, obscure his extraordinary film imagination.
(4.) John Waters is one of the key filmmakers to exploit this space. See especially his early Multiple Maniacs (1970) and Pink Flamingos (1972). The present essay is related to a book forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press--The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film--in which I argue at length the involvement of the comic and horror modes synergistically with each other. See also Morgan 1998.
(5.) Dery 1999 and Carroll 1999 both discuss the evil clown trope.
(6.) Monday was "Fun with Music Day," Tuesday "Guest Star Day," Wednesday "Anything Can happen Day," Thursday "Circus Day" ...
(7.) The fact that there is no there there adds to the elusive dreadfulness of gothic serial killers like Blank in The First Deadly Sin or John Doe in Seven. Their characterlessness is akin to the horror of whiteness Melville defines in Chapter 42 of Moby Dick, which can "heighten... terror to the furthest bounds" (224). Vampires too are essentially empty: "Mirrors fail to perceive them as they float / Through the great hall and up the staircase / Nor are the cobwebs broken" (Wilbur, "The Undead").
Works Cited
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-----. Shades of Noir. London: Verso, 1996.
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JACK MORGAN teaches American literature in the English Department, University of Missouri-Roila. He has co-edited, with Louis A. Renza, The Irisil Stories of Sarah Dine Jewett (Southern Illinois-Carbondale University Press). He has published articles on film in Tile Irisil University Review and Melus, and has a forthcoming book from SIU-Carbondale University Press: The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film.
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| Author: | Morgan, Jack |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Post Script |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Jun 22, 2002 |
| Words: | 7679 |
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