For almost thirty years now,
critics and theorists alike have been baffled by the visceral attack on the
senses provided by Cronenbergian cinema. Be they human flies, venereal zombies,
killer dwarves or morphing typewriters, his creatures have always hinted at an
underlying revolution(1) that needed blood to be shed and all sexual
inhibitions to be annihilated. However, amidst a chaos of sexual promiscuity
and metamorphosis of the flesh, there lies an authorial text, whose coherence
within the lifelong work of the director is almost universally granted. Of
course, detractors to this text have risen through the years and, among them,
many feminist and more liberal critics (leader of which is Robin Wood) accused
Cronenberg of being a reactionary misogynist. But the director also has many
supporters, including William Beard, Pierre Véronneau and myself, whose chief
concern is not so much to shut down this view altogether, but rather to open up
discussion of other possible interpretations of such a complex bulk of work (no
less than sixteen feature films to date, with two in the making: a pretty good
overall number for a Canadian filmmaker…). I would like however to focus on one
particular film: Rabid. Standing at the crossroads of feminist horror
theory, it poses a specific problem to any Freudian reading of it: that of the
woman possessing a phallus. This will be the basis of my reconstruction of
feminist theory, away from psychoanalysis, and toward the study of
Cronenbergian binaries and the subversive nature of disease in his films.
In her article on classical horror cinema, Linda Williams stipulates a clear link between femininity and monstrosity (which would seem useful in an analysis of Rabid, wherein the monster is female), but only to fall in the trap set by Laura Mulvey. Indeed, she transposes Mulvey’s theory directly onto the horror genre, by associating the punished female of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” with the punished monster who stands for her within the genre: “The destruction of the monster that concludes so many horror films could therefore be interpreted as another way of disavowing and mastering the castration her body represents” (88). Now, it would seem such an interpretation is virtually useless to comment Rabid because the monstrosity is here specifically constructed around the possession of the phallus, and not its lack. Indeed, the presence of this phallic appendage is emphasized by its ability to spring out and retract from a vaginal opening in Rose’s armpit. That is, the vagina is also the phallus, so the very term “lack” is now totally meaningless. Even the very definition of Rose as female becomes problematic within the psychoanalytical framework.
However, Williams also goes on to discuss the question of vampirism, concerning which she stipulates that the vampire’s horror lies in “the power to mutilate and transform the vulnerable male. The vampire’s insatiable need for blood seems a particularly apt analogy for what must seem to the man to be an insatiable sexual appetite – yet another threat to his potency” (90) (that she specifically speaks of the male vampire is irrelevant, because she equates male monsters with female sexuality(2)). This idea of aggressive female sexuality then becomes the source of horror. This view is indeed consistent with that of Robin Wood: “We can nonetheless underline that the film [equates horror with] the expression of aggressive female sexuality” (1990: 205). Following in those footsteps, Bart Testa offers us this interpretation of the ending: “repression has won, and particularly it has won over a dead woman’s active sexuality” (42). Wood further ties this conception of female desire as the source of horror with the Freudian concept of the woman’s “masculinity”, “which our culture is swift in repressing” (205). What Wood and Testa fail to observe though, is the punitive nature of Rose’s attacks, not only upon some of the film’s characters, but also upon the audience. “The attacks led by Rose can also be interpreted as assaults against the traditional male predator” (193), says Piers Handling. According to him, the counterattack by Rose upon the eyes of a drunken rapist is “a symbolic attack against the ‘look’ of the male, the male ‘gaze’(3)” while her stabbing of the hands of a lustful porno theater patron, an attack against “the unsolicited male fondling” (4)(193).
Unfortunately for Handling, he doesn’t expand on this last idea as to associate the reversal of predatory sexual roles within the film with the one created without. In fact, few people at the time, even fewer within the film’s audience, ignored Marilyn Chambers’ background as a porn star (she had starred in the recent Resurrection of Eve which the film references by naming the porno theater “Eve”). It is indeed strange that Handling would speak of the shattering of traditional institutions within the film, while ignoring this simple ambiguity in the process of identification. Indeed, Chambers breaks away from her role as passive sex object and aggressively engages in rape-like attacks, becoming an active perpetrator. Whether this instills fear of female sexuality within the viewer or simply deceives his expectations is debatable. At any rate, we can turn psychoanalytical reading against its advocates by stipulating a tear in the active/passive policies of the look and the masochist/sadist roles associated respectively with female and male under Mulvey. For her part, Andrea Dworkin specifically addresses the question of male power within pornography. She translates the active/passive axiom into hunter/hunted, stating that this power resides notably within the physical power of men over women, the power of terror and the funereal power of sex, all of which are challenged by Rose. More interestingly however, she discusses the penis as a weapon: “A saber penetrating a vagina is a weapon; so is the camera or pen that renders it; so is the penis for which it substitutes (vagina literally means ‘sheath’)” (49). In Rabid’s case, the vagina becomes the actual sheath, not that of a foreign weapon, but that of Rose’s weapon: the phallus, which she uses to overwhelm men. No longer is the knife the replacement phallus (that of Jamie Lee Curtis and countless others), it is now the female body itself. No longer will it be abused because it will stab back. Its initial revolt against patriarchal abuses (Keloid is, according to Piers Handling (p. 184), the quintessential Cronenbergian father figure), its transformation, has produced a permanent defense against further attacks.
In her analysis of feminist criticism of horror films, Cynthia Freeman rejects psychoanalytical and psychodynamic theories in favor of a more socially oriented, perhaps more fair and constructive interpretation of the genre. “It is limiting to translate a social critique into a depth-psychological thesis about how we all (allegedly) have deep ambivalences about our abjected mothers” (200), she says ironically. She then goes on to interpret Cronenberg’s The Brood as an allusion to mad scientist horror films, framing “the megalomaniac psychiatrist” Dr. Raglan as the film’s main villain, instead of the monstrous Nola Carveth (the villain according to Barbara Creed’s psychodynamic lecture of the film), herself a fruit of Raglan’s experimenting with psychoplasmics. In further reacting to Creed, Freeland states that “she also misrepresents [please note that she doesn’t use the term ‘misinterprets’] the structure of the film’s plot, which depicts an appropriate punishment that Dr. Raglan suffers for his hubris – as he is destroyed by the monstrous children he has so freakishly ‘fathered’” (200). Similarly, Rabid’s Dan Keloid is killed by the creature he has unjustly brought into the world, namely the newly vampiric Rose. Of course, the demise of the mad scientist at the hands of his creation is reminiscent of Frankenstein. Now, recent theorists of the James Whale film overwhelmingly play the monster as victim of the selfishness of his bourgeois master. Interestingly enough, Robin Wood is among them. His inscription of the monster as standing for the repressed proletariat in his introduction to The American Nightmare (page 11) suggests an exploitative relation between the creator and his creation(5). Why is he so diligent then, in overlooking Keloid’s responsibility within Rabid?
Seemingly, Wood does not consider the relation between Rose and Keloid to be exploitative. However, an analysis of Cronenbergian binaries might prove him wrong. For one, the opposition between mind and body permeates his work. Now, his association of female with the body (nature) and of male with the mind (reason) apparently supports a normative conception of the sexes. In the case one adheres to such a conviction, my analysis of the director becomes a simple matter of pointing out the contradictions within patriarchy, as suggested by Judith Mayne in “Feminist Film Theory and Criticism”. Indeed, it is always nature that is misunderstood and selfishly modified by reason within Cronenberg’s films. Dan Keloid’s decision to utilize experimental surgery on an unconscious Rose is a good example of those excesses of reason, which lead to a bloody revolt of the abused human body. In this case, it is the abused female who strikes back against patriarchy with all the strength she’s been infused with, exactly as did the Frankenstein monster (whom I consider fully human, even more so than his creator). Moreover, there is something Cronenberg recently said, which I think is crucial in understanding him and his opinion of women (in relation to nature): “the idea that the most basic human is a female and then the perversion, the late development, is a male […] does make some kind of sense” (Simon: 55). This, not only justifies the binary, but also assigns perversion to the male, and reason.
The inadequacy of the male toward the female within the film seemingly stems from this fact. Rapists aside, Hart’s relation with Rose is spiked by the shortcomings of his rational mind. It is indeed his obsession with rebuilding the motorcycle that has crushed Rose which isolates his helpless girlfriend from his positive influence (she calls him in a moment of panic, but he doesn’t answer because he is too busy listening to a woman’s voice on the radio and piecing back together his hunk of scrapped metal, instead of listening to his girlfriend’s voice and piecing her back together). Ultimately, he also causes her death. By reacting to her disease as he does (he gets angry and violent, nastily accuses her of being a monster), he denies her the loving care she deserves after being altered against her will. In the end, as she talks to him on the phone, she insists on the fact that she is afraid. When she gets attacked, though, Hart helplessly breaks the phone, illustrating the film’s emphasis on their lack of communication, the result of a selfish and fiendish masculinity, more interested in the coldness of metal than the warmth of a lover. In fact, hasn’t it ever occurred to anyone that Rose’s monstrosity directly comes (no pun intended) with the phallus?
Surely, the female body is ill and eventually dies in Rabid, seemingly marking a disgust for disease and death, that of the natural body, of nature. Now, I’d like to consider both from a novel point of view, that of (r)evolution. Antonin Artaud once said that the plague and theater are alike. “Theater, like plague, is a crisis solved by death or healing. And the plague is a superior ill because it is a complete crisis after which there is only death or an extreme purification. […] The theatrical action like that of the plague, is beneficial, because it pushes men to see themselves as they are, […] revealing to collectivities their dark power, their hidden strength, inviting them to face destiny with an heroic and superior attitude which they would never have had without it” (46). Likewise in Cronenberg’s films, disease inevitably reveals to men their own repressed humanity and it also invariably topples the status quo, be it sexual repression (in Shivers), male supremacy (in Rabid), the family nexus (in The Brood), or simply science(6) (in all those previous instances). Such a revolutionary power, considering its corrosive impact on bourgeoisie as well as its empowering patriarchy’s victims(7), is not unlike a form of pathological communism. And although Cronenberg addresses the question of revolutionary diseases(1), he also discusses evolutionary diseases. “Darwin’s theory of evolution by mutation had a serious flaw, because he never considered the possibility of evolution by disease. […] In my films, there is an attempt by some of the characters to see their diseases as metamorphoses” (56) Now, the abolition of gender is just around the corner, with Cronenberg’s idea of “omnisexuality” as the omen of a world wherein sexism is abolished. The new humanity is hermaphroditic, free of the prejudices stemming from gender. It further redefines the sexual act itself, bringing about a universal solution: mutual penetration, subverting the cult of the phallus into a cult of humanity. Who knows, perhaps mutual childbearing is the next phase of this disease…
Controlling nature and controlling women are two primordial capitalist principles. Under Cronenberg, the two are one and the same, against which the revolution of nature (in this case, the female body) operates. Now, the weapons of the revolution are the weapons of the oppressor, turned against him. Namely, it is the phallus, turned against itself, faced with the terror it instills and the injustices it creates. Likewise, psychoanalysis is a weapon used against itself through feminist theory. However, when it becomes as overdetermined as the social norms it is supposed to attack, it is no longer an extension of the revolution, but rather that of the institution. In short, waging war against Cronenberg on gender issues might also mean forgetting that he lets us glimpse at the solution to this very war.
Notes:
1- In an interview to
Adam Simon, Cronenberg and him discuss a line from The Brood, wherein Hartog
(one of the patients of Dr. Raglan), refers to a tumor his mental desires have
created as a “small revolution”. Cronenberg goes on to say not only that
“rather than actually dealing with the political revolution, I deal with the
metaphorical political revolution of the body”, but also that “we all know
there are societies that we felt were better off changed, even though there
were civil wars and bloody battles that were required to achieve that”. Whether
he talks of the communist revolutions of the Cubans, Bolsheviks and Chinese or
the anti-colonialist (Algerian, Congolese, South African…) wars for freedom is
shadowy. I believe he talks of the former, however.
2- “The vampiric act
of sucking blood, sapping the life fluid of a victim that in turn becomes a
vampire, is similar to the female role of milking the sperm of the male during
intercourse”. Interestingly enough, there is a footnote for this line, which
states that, according to Stan Brakhage (!), the word “nosferatu” means,
“splashed with milk”…
3- In targeting
Mulvey’s concept of the “male gaze”, Handling seems to specifically imply the
shortcomings of psychoanalysis in film. The rape scene itself (in the barn) is
strictly a play on conventions. The would-be rapist is the quintessential
drunken, horny bum, while his female victim is the quintessential victim,,
lying on the floor, arms stretched in front of her to protect her body from the
dark masculine figure. That is, until she counterattacks and gets him at his
own game (through unwanted penetration).
4- The guy, who looks
strangely like a bald Ashton Kutcher, spots her as she comes into the theater
and decides to move in for the kill. To approach the lovely young woman, he
decides the best course of action is to stroke her hair from behind and pass it
as an accident, in order to get her attention. At that point, she complains
that “men always bother her”, as if prompting the guy to leave her be, which he
doesn’t. Instead, he decides to make his fantasies come true and play her
boyfriend, insisting he is only after “a handful of popcorn”. He snakes his way
to the seat next to her, upon which he is offered popcorn, as a test to prove
his good faith. Emphasizing his own lie, he picks up some of it and drops it
back, taking a handful of her instead. He then starts grabbing her
breasts, unaware of the sting to come. In this sequence, Cronenberg makes very
clear who the harasser is. In fact, just as Dr. Keloid thought he had the right
to experiment on the female body, this guy also believes he has rights over it,
that he can deceive women into giving it to him. The same is true for the guy
in the mall, who seemingly believes that if Rose accepts to have him sit next
to her, she will necessarily accept his inept seduction tactics.
5- “In time, I could
have trained him to do my will” says the baron Frankenstein while lying in bed
at the beginning of The Bride of Frankenstein, leisurely discussing the
monster’s fate (as a potential slave, a human robot).
6- I have a theory,
according to which all men in Cronenberg’s films are mad scientists. In Dr.
St-Luc’s waiting room in Shivers, there is an old man giving a
speech to Janine Tudor. He brags about the hypothetic reversal of the ageing
process, and the words he uses clearly remind us of the scientific mumbo-jumbo
used by Rollo Linsky in a previous scene. Moreover, recent films by Cronenberg
bring the mad scientist character from the background to the foreground. For
example, Seth Brundle is the protagonist of The Fly and the mad
scientist. The same is true for Beverley and Elliott Mantle. In Crash, Vaughan is
interested in the melding of the human body and the machine. In eXistenZ, Gas claims to
have, through Allegra Geller’s games, Godly powers, those of “God the
mechanic”. Of course, this theory is only in its embryonic stage. Still, it
shows promise as a further explanation of the Cronenbergian binaries.
7- There is a
particularly revealing scene wherein health official Claude Lapointe and some
city official leisurely discuss the epidemic while being driven to Montreal.
There are then attacked by rabid construction workers who literally penetrate
their car with a drop hammer. This is a clear role reversal, with the blue
collars taking action against disinterested bourgeois. Also, the simple fact
that a reactionary British health official is likened to P.E. Trudeau is highly
subversive. What of the diseased, then? Can they be likened to the revolutionary
separatists of 1970? Surely, they can.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ARTAUD, Antonin. Le Théâtre
et Son Double, Éditions Gallimard, Saint-Amand (Fr.), 1964, 220 p.
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The Shape of Rage) (ed. Piers Handling and Pierre Véronneau), La
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DWORKIN, Andrea. “Power”, from
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Cronenberg (French version of The Shape of Rage) (ed. Piers Handling and
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