HORRIFIC REFLECTIONS: American Society and The Slasher Film

HORRIFIC REFLECTIONS

AMERICAN SOCIETY AND THE SLASHER FILM

When art, whether consciously or unconsciously, manages to tap into the zeitgeist and say something about the times we live in, it is never coincidental. It is often the purposeful choice of the creator; when Charlie Chaplin wrote, produced, directed and starred in The Great Dictator in 1940 as a character called Adenoid Hynkel, there can be no doubt that he had something to say about the rise of the Nazi’s and chose the filmic medium to communicate this. Sometimes, however, films can’t help being influenced by the times they are made in and, through a kind of artistic osmosis, they are reflections of their times. One could argue, for example, that the spate of American b-movie sci-fi films released in the late 50s which were concerned with invasions by evil, sinister forces may not have been intended as explicit explorations of the nation’s cold war anxiety, but they were. Quite often, people ask ‘But did the filmmaker really mean that? Or are you reading too much into it?’ The answer is that whether they did or didn’t (and most of the time, the really good ones do!) it doesn’t alter the fact that it is there. The film was made at a particular moment in history and art is like a sponge, absorbing the social, political and cultural concerns of the time in which it was produced.

Slasher films have been derided and dismissed since the first one – Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. At the time, it received quite negative reviews, was called a blot on Hitchcock’s career and renowned film critic C.A Lejeune even resigned her post at The Observer after walking out of a screening in disgust. Now however, along with the majority of Hitchcock’s work and thanks in no small part to french film critics of the 60s and the magazine Cahiers du Cinema, it is now held up as a masterpiece. Can the same be said, however, of the Slasher films that started to be churned out by low-budget producers as soon as Halloween became one of the most successful independent films of all time in 1978? Probably not. It would be hard to convince anyone that Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare deserves to be compared to Hitch’s stunning film. But that doesn’t mean these films don’t have something very interesting to say about the American society they were produced in.

Freddy’s Dead is pretty rubbish, however.

The opening of John Carpenter’s Halloween is a prologue to the narrative set in 1963. In this famous one-take sequence, a teenage girl and her boyfriend are watched as they make out on a couch before running up to the bedroom. After the boy leaves, dismissively claiming he’ll call her, the girl is horrifically stabbed to death by her younger brother Michael, who she was supposed to be babysitting. So far, so schlocky. But there is something deeper under the surface here. 

The fact that the sequence is set in 1963 is extremely interesting. This is around the same time that the contraceptive pill for women was freely available for the first time in the US. One cannot underestimate the impact this had on how women lived their lives and were seen by society. No longer were they only to be wives and mothers, there essentially for procreation and as submissive to their male counterparts. Now, they could have consequence-free sex exactly like men could. They were liberated from the confines of society’s expectations of them at this time. Some felt this was an exciting, progressive move towards sexual equality. Others, mainly men, were threatened.

Combine this with what happens in the scene itself. The teenagers are in a clearly casual relationship. They are unmarried, young and appear to not be committed, especially as the boy leaves immediately after they have finished having sex. And she doesn’t seem to care; she asks him to call her, but isn’t troubled by his lack of an affirmative positive response – she continues to brush her hair, semi-naked, humming a tune serenely. This is clearly representative of a new type of relationship in American society. The fact that the sequence is a POV shot from Michael’s perspective, who calmly takes a knife and only deviates from looking forward to glance at the couch he saw them kissing on and the bed he knows they’ve had sex on, before he kills her, indicates perhaps the ideological perspective of the filmmaker. Is Carpenter using the character of Michael to explore a metaphorical conservative response to this new sexual revolution? Perhaps. Either way, this scene is clearly a reaction to the female liberation which was only on the rise when the film was actually made in 1978.

Halloween also presents us with the iconic figure of the grown up Michael Myers; a masked, vacant blank canvas onto whom American could project its own particular fears and insecurities. He attacks America where it feels most safe – the suburbs. Here the middle classes fled in the 50s away from the cities with their crowds and crime and immigrants (hence the term White Flight) desperate to live the American Dream. It was here they built their castles, encased in white picket fences, a haven for these traditional, affluent families. It is no coincidence that the film is set in the fictional suburb of Haddonfield; this could be anywhere. That was the point. Carpenter places into this idyll the almost supernatural figure of Myers, a hulking, brutally violent, silent assassin. And he penetrates the one place that is truly sacred in American society – the home. His motives are hinted at, but never crystallised or made explicit. He has no facial expressions for us to read or understand. He represents the rotten core underneath the surface of suburban America; the anxious, sickening feeling that something isn’t quite right. Think about what had happened to the once glorious post-war America by the time we arrive at the late seventies: a shift away from patriarchal society into something more open and less rigid. A President assassinated in broad daylight, his brother the same only 5 years later. An unjust war in Vietnam that tarnished their reputation, killed and traumatised their own young men and, worst of all to the American psyche, a war they lost. The Kent State Massacre in which American forces killed their own people without provocation and finally Watergate – an entire nation deceived by the one man they had always held up as a symbol of honesty and hope – The President. Here was a country besieged by themselves, fighting a civil war between the hearts and minds of their own citizens. Here was a country worried, scared, anxious and fearful, uncertain of their place in the world and of what might happen next. Here was Haddonfield, under attack by one of their own, Michael Myers, without any way to work out how to stop him.

Flash forward almost twenty years and the humble Slasher film is still capable of reflecting the concerns of American society. Scream – Wes Craven’s post-modern deconstruction of the genre – is still at its core a genuine Slasher with all the tropes present and correct, although some hilariously inverted and injected with a heavy dose of irony. This in itself is a reflection of the times – the mid-nineties saw the rise of the internet and an eruption of nostalgia for popular culture which in turn led to a generation one step removed from the actual times they were living in, which in turn has led to where we are now: an almost virtual existence where all popular culture from every historical period exists at the same time and is constantly consumed and then regurgitated into pastiche, parody, homage or simple carbon copy.

Scream clearly has something to say about this new generation of teenagers and the American society they live in. In the White House is Bill Clinton; a permissive, progressive pot-smoking liberal with a somewhat relaxed attitude to sexuality. What we see in Scream for the first time is a female protagonist who loses her virginity but who is allowed to survive. This reflects the now definite change in how women were viewed – not only were they allowed to defeat the killer themselves (in Halloween a cowering, weeping Jamie Lee Curtis needs an authoritative male to use the gun on Myers, whereas Neve Campbell not only shoots the killer in the head, but actually dresses in his costume, a bold statement on the empowerment of women at this time), but they were now allowed to be sexually active in a consequence-free environment.

What’s also interesting about Scream is that it clearly has something to say about the state of the American family in the 90s. The (mainly absent) parents in Scream are the teenagers of Halloween – the baby boomers. Here is a generation who broke down societies rules, desperate not to become their parents and to wither within the confines of their traditionalist structures. This is a generation who embraced the idea of divorce and, as a consequence, the whole idea of the family unit began to disintegrate. We know that Slasher has always been a distinctly Conservative genre, a reactionary genre, and Scream is no different. Here, Neve Campbell’s protagonist is sexually frigid as a result of her mother’s rumoured sexual openness. Billy blames the fact that he is a homicidal maniac on the fact that his father left his mother and had an affair. What we see here is a generation of teenagers – the 90’s Generation X – hurt and emotionally stunted because of their parent’s embracing of casual sex and a more relaxed attitude to monogamy. What Scream appears to be saying is that we have created a youth who are all too aware of the fragilities of the once strong and undefeatable American family and who are now turning on each other, concerned with nothing but self-preservation and themselves; a narcissistic generation ruined by their parents. It is no coincidence that in Scream the killers are the teenagers themselves. In this America, the threat is not from the outside anymore. The threat is themselves and their own decaying values. In addition to this, Scream also has something to say about desensitisation and the effect that violent films have had on these teenagers. Scream is so conservative in its ideological outlook, that it even attacks itself! For example, Stu is literally killed by a Slasher film – a TV showing Halloween is thrown on his face and electrocutes him. Billy is attacked and defeated when he momentarily loses focus and is distracted by a Slasher film showing on video. Craven clearly seems to be accusing the very genre he helped create of corrupting this new teenage generation who have been raised on home video and casual violence. 

What we see here then is that popular culture and film in particular will always have something to say about the time in which it was produced, whether by design or coincidence. Slasher in particular soaks up the cultural climate, the fears and anxieties of our time, and presents them to us as allegories or metaphors – moralistic fairy tales for each new generation.  And what’s really interesting about Halloween especially is that it manages to exist in two ways; as a firm reaction to the time in which it was made and as something which transcends historical, political and social factors. We can project whatever we like onto Michael Myers; in his emotionless face and blank expression we will always see what really frightens us. His eyes are the mirrors in which we will always see our own horrific personal and cultural reflections.

When Structures Become Shackles

WHEN STRUCTURES BECOME SHACKLES

IDEOLOGY IN THE DARK KNIGHT RISES


This analysis contains spoilers.

Recently a right-wing analysis of the final instalment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy emerged online and promptly went viral. In the piece, John Nolte argues that The Dark Knight Rises is a searing indictment of liberal policy, that the poor of Gotham City who migrate to the sewers to find employment with Bane are “...insecure thumbsuckers raging with a sense of entitlement, desperate to justify their own laziness and failure...” and it suggests that the film is a love letter, by proxy, to liberty, free-markets and capitalism.

This is certainly an interesting theory.

If we look at the second film – The Dark Knight – we could also interpret certain elements as displaying a clear conservative ideology. In the film our hero, Batman, in order to catch a nihilistic, existentialist terrorist who is seeking to destroy the city, decides to impinge on the basic human right to privacy; he hacks into citizen’s mobile phones in order to use this information to track down The Joker. He justifies this to Lucius Fox as a necessary evil. This is remarkably similar to the debate surrounding The Patriot Act – the piece of legislation created by the Bush administration that gave them unprecedented power to hack into emails, phone calls and personal messages if there was even the slightest possibility that it could lead to information on terrorist activity. This was derided in left-wing circles as a government using fear and manipulation in order to push through its own republican agenda. But whichever way you choose to respond to The Patriot Act itself, there is an undeniable link between that and what happens in the final third of The Dark Knight.

Many will see this as conclusive proof that the only way to read The Dark Knight is as a conservative parable; they read Batman as George W Bush – a leader who must make difficult decisions while his people fight a war against a terrorist who is willing to sacrifice himself for his own cause. These people might apply this same ideological approach to The Dark Knight Rises. Here, they might see Bane as representative of the Occupy Wall Street Movement – in the film we see the poor of Gotham join forces to attack the Stock Exchange. We see them throw the rich out of their luxurious abodes and set up a people’s court that tries the 1% and sentences them to icy death. We see them led and inspired by an evil, hulking villain and we see our hero, Bruce Wayne, placed in cold opposition to them. Here is a film where our protagonist is a billionaire capitalist seeking to destroy and suppress an uprising by the people of Gotham City who are sick and tired of being marginalised and mistreated by the wealthy. As Selina Kyle whisper’s into Wayne’s ear: “You and your friends better batten down the hatches, cause when it hits, you're all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large, and leave so little for the rest of us." But even she, eventually, comes round to Batman’s way of thinking.

So that’s that then, yes? Nolan has presented us with a right-wing, conservative epic?

I don’t think so.

The main issue here for me is that commentators and critics seem to be looking at this from only two fixed perspectives; left-wing and right-wing. My suggestion is that there is a third way to look at the film which is not as inherently political but more humanistic in its approach.

To me, The Dark Knight Rises seems to be a film that wholeheartedly supports the ideological viewpoint of Individualism.

Consider this: what Nolan appears to be presenting to us is a world where all structures are broken. Yes, he seems to suggest that an anarchic uprising of people will ultimately lead to violence and chaos. This pleases right-wing commentators. But they are conveniently ignoring the fact that Nolan also, in an even clearer fashion, presents the police, the government and rich corporations as corrupt and morally-bankrupt, all the way from Batman Begins.

In Batman Begins, Rutger Hauer plays a businessman who seeks to bully his way into a position of power in a large conglomerate, a position he then ruthlessly exploits. Meanwhile Ra’s Al Gul reminds Batman that Gotham is so corrupt he has managed to infiltrate its entire infrastructure.  In Batman Begins and The Dark Knight the police force is portrayed as being riddled with leaks and informants and as containing officers willing to use their positions of authority for greed or personal gain. Even believing in Harvey Dent isn’t good enough – Gotham’s saviour and District Attorney ends up a homicidal maniac who almost kills a child.

This extremely negative portrayal of the institutions and people that the right-wing usually holds up as examples of heroism and pride reaches its conclusion in The Dark Knight Rises when arguably the trilogy’s most decent human being – Commissioner Gordon – is accused of being morally corrupt. As Officer Blake tells him – “Your hands look plenty filthy to me.”

And this is where the third way of looking at The Dark Knight Rises – the Individualism Approach – really starts to take shape. It is too easy to label Nolan’s film as right-wing or left-wing. Or rather, it’s too difficult, because it just doesn’t fit. Nolan isn’t siding with either liberals or conservatives  – he is saying that all institutions, all organisations are corrupt. What he seems to say is that the power to really change things lies in the hands of the individual.

Batman, when boiled down to his bare essentials, is a vigilante. An individual who seeks to make a difference. Nolan allows Batman to exist all the way through the trilogy in a moral grey area; he never really attempts to decide whether Batman is right or wrong because he is often both or neither. He never really attempts to align Batman with a strong political ideology because he doesn’t have one. He is an individual. Gotham City is ultimately saved from annihilation not from an organisation or the government or the police or the people – they are saved by the heroic sacrifice of an individual. There are also obvious Christ parallels in Batman’s story arc – left for dead, betrayed by his own people, destroyed and buried, only to rise, save the people and ascend into the light. This makes sense when we acknowledge the possibility that Christ himself was resolutely individualist in his outlook and preached about how one man could make a difference and, if he existed at all, it is almost certain he would be appalled by the wealth, hypocrisy and structures of the modern day, morally suspect Catholic Church. 

When, at the end of the film, John Blake – the only character in The Dark Knight Rises whose dignity and morality remain intact throughout – symbolically throws his police badge into the river and claims that structures become shackles, this is the clearest evidence to back up the Individualism Approach. This is a film that above everything seeks to remind us about the difference that one person can make. It tells us that as personal visions and ideas become diluted and distorted by committee and ‘structure’, they become corrupt and less powerful in their ability to create actual change for the better. It’s no accident that the final image we are left with is Blake rising into the light. Nolan is telling us that he is the best hope for Gotham because he, like Batman, believes in the power of the individual. Nolan is telling us that what the world needs, more than anything, is for individuals to act, regardless of politics.

As Rachel Dawes said:

“It's not who you are underneath, it's what you do that defines you.”

It seems Individualism was right there from the start in Batman Begins.