More Horror
Last night, I watched two films in different genres which use the death of a child as a trigger for violence and horror. Both explore the ways in which two mothers express and ultimately deal with their grief. In Freedomland, the single mother allows her passion to take her away from her child which causes his death. Rather than accept responsibility, she blames a mysterious car jacker which results in unrest and then violence. Through the persistence of a policeman, she confesses her guilt and there is hope at the end that she can learn and reach outside of herself to help heal the community.
As the name implies, The Descent follows a journey into the darkness. It begins with a car accident in which a woman's husband and daughter are impaled. Her friends, lovers of extreme sports, convince her to go spelunking in North Carolina with the hope that she will be able to pull herself out of her depression. Instead, she plunges into literal and then spiritual darkness. Lost in a cave full of Gollumesque cannibals, you watch as her attempts at survival lead her into madness. By the end she has become one of the creatures of the night. In the American ending, she makes her way to the surface but in the European ending she remains in the cave with the memories of her daughter. Regardless, she has become the horror that she had witnessed.
As I lay in bed thinking about the two feel-good movies, I realized that almost all the books I've read this week, (White Oleander, The Road, The Return of the Player) foreground the real or potential injury of a child by their parents. And they all show how that pain or the threat of that pain leads the protgagonists on journeys. That of The Road is literal. The father leads his son to the west coast in an attempt to save him from the pain and horror all around him. In White Oleander, the mother's inhumanity leads to her daughter on a trip through a series of foster homes where she is emotionally and physically battered. In The Return of the Player, the mother's slap of her daughter in a shopping mall triggers the formation of a new and stonger family unit. The Road ends with the boy safe in the arms of a "good" family. And the daugher in White Oleander grows into a creative and sensitive artist.
Another common theme is cannibalism as representing the loss of our humanity. It seems as if The Heart of Darkness is woven into all my choices. In The Road, the father does all that he can to save his son but refuses to cross what is presented as the final line. Unlike the majority of survivors, he will not murder or eat others. Although we don't see the protagonist of The Descent knawing on thigh bones, we've seen the cannibal that she will become if she can survive in the caves.
posted by cim @ 9:22 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
The recovery of cannibalistic violence for aesthetic and entertainment purposes is suggestive. I recently read an article by a Danish anthropologist named Kirsten Hastrup entitled “Out of Anthropology: The Anthropologist as an Object of Dramatic Representation” (it appeared in the journal Cultural Anthropology in August, 1992). I was interested in the insights it might provide into blogging, and I was surprised to discover that its central metaphor was cannibalism (which I suspect should be one of the privileged models we use to understand what happens when we so readily give our lives to strangers).
Hastrup discusses the experience of being dramatized, of seeing a version of herself (and the details of her autobiography) cast as the main character of a play called Talabot. Hastrup actively cooperated with the play’s director throughout its writing, rehearsal, and final performance. Accustomed to fieldwork, she took notes, labeling the various stages of the process thus:
1. being myself
2. writing myself
3. seeing myself
What she discovered upon seeing her life staged was that nothing was left after the play closed. She writes of her feelings after the final performance: “My panic was acute, and in retrospect I know it was related to the fact that ‘meaning is connected with the consummation of a process—it is bound up with termination, in a sense, with death.’ Through the restoration of my life history, Talabot had created a whole out of biographical fragments. Its meaning implicated my death. Alive as I was, no one understood my agony.
“The following weeks I was caught in the void between two histories, one that was terminated and another that had yet to begin. The experience of having been ‘fieldworked upon’ made me realize that I could no longer be an anthropologist. Since important parts of my history had been given away, I also knew that I could no longer be me. The theater had left, and there was no way to live the mythical life of Kirsten that they had created. The only answer was to vanish” (p.336).
Hastrup found that to be written up as theatrical ethnography was to be used up as a human being. It was, in fact, to be cannibalized: “Elsewhere,” Hastrup writes, I have discussed how the anthropologist in the field becomes a third-person character in the discourse of her informants. They can converse with her only by insisting on her being a well-defined ‘she” in their world. In this way, subject and object constantly change place, as was also my experience on this particular occasion. While speaking of my subjective experience, I became an object of their professional interest. Fieldwork is only one remove from cannibalism, and in my position as object, I sometimes felt consumed—as have innumerable informants before me” (p. 332).
What must one do when she finds herself consumed by others of her kind? Hastrup says we have to replenish the myth that had been devoured. And this is what I think is going on in the films you reference.
In the final section of her essay, Hastrup considers what she has been up to in writing a critical article about the experience of having her subjective experience “consumed” by being projected into objective form. She says: “We do not have identities, we invent them. In writing this, I am trying to reclaim a position in the world in spite of the fact that Talabot left me naked. Thrown back to my nature, I realize that I am neither me nor not-me because I am not. Only myth provides us with life: ‘Where historical life itself fails to make cultural sense in terms that formerly held good, narrative and cultural drama may have the tasks of poiesis, that is, of remaking cultural sense’” (p. 342).
What, I wonder, no longer holds good for a film like Descent? What has given way? And why are the deaths of children such a touchstone for the way we need to understand our dilemma? What kind of cultural sense is being remade?
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