As I finished the fourth Paranormal Activity film, the most recent of the series to date, I found myself reliving the same disappointments I experienced with the first three films. As I reflected upon these consistent problems--problems for my enjoyment, at least--I realized that maybe these aren't so much flaws in the films as they are a new narrative approach to horror. While I don't particularly enjoy this narrative approach, the series' millions of fans suggests it is working. This leaves me with a lot of questions. Why do I keep coming back to the Paranormal Activity films? What is it they're doing that isn't 'doing it' for me but is for so many others? Why is this approach so popular? I can answer some of these questions better than others, but mostly I want to ponder them.
The basic progression of every Paranormal Activity film is the same. A camera-obsessed family member records nearly every waking minute of mundane household life. This coincides with the eruption of some supernatural evil that takes its sweet time manifesting itself. Highly repetitive, static shots of inactivity are presented rhythmically until, finally, something of a spooky nature happens in one of those spaces. While the characters may discuss these events and the emotional effects of them, ultimately they do nothing until the supernatural evil possesses someone and kills everyone else.
Basic narrative functions much as your high school English teacher taught you. You have your exposition, rising action, climax, and denouement. A protagonist fits in there, centering the action and either triumphing or falling in the climax. Harry Potter always triumphs and Hamlet always dies. The Paranormal Activity movies can be pinned to that structure in some sense. You get to meet the characters, the supernatural evil takes a while to appear, and then it kills everyone--I guess that's a climax. However, this pinning comes loose the more you scrutinize it. A fiction editor for Weird Tales used to say, "A protagonist must protag." The Paranormal Activity protagonists do not. They observe. Then they die. They never fight back against the spiritual force. Nobody calls an exorcist, breaks out the holy water, tries a circle of protection, or any other supernatural movie bullshit. They just die, because the supernatural force can throw them like ragdolls.
This is what I don't like about the Paranormal Activity movies. Static shots of mundane life is lightly touched by creepy incidents for a little over an hour, then everyone dies without making any effort to extricate themselves from the nightmare. What keeps me coming back is that there are some creepy moments and they are quite well done. I just keep imagining that, as narrative invades the barebones approach that was the first Paranormal Activity film, a protagonist might actually emerge. So far, no luck.
What is it about this lack of a protagonist that pleases so much of contemporary horror viewers? There was a time when the plucky, resourceful heroine was the stuff of which great horror films are made. Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween, Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, David Arquette in Scream--all great heroines of horror. Perhaps self-confidence, the ability to fight and defend oneself against horror is too predictable, too old, too contrary to reality. Or perhaps it is too similar to reality. Perhaps we need horror movies that makes us feel powerless and doomed in the face of an omnipotent evil that wants us dead not because we need to be punished, but just because it doesn't like our faces. Is that an American phenomenon? Or is there a guilt to being human that's only gotten worse without any true adversity? Maybe it's just that life is too peaceful and mundane in the West today and the thought that a supernatural evil may just destroy us at any time is the kind of horror we need; it's exciting. I don't know.
Perhaps there's just a purity to the Paranormal Activity movies that the youtube generation enjoys. With the Paranormal Activity movies, you get a series of isolated, almost abstract creepy scenes, like youtube vignettes or even an animated gif dropped on tumblr. "Wouldn't it be creepy if you just turned around in the dark and there were like fifty people standing there looking at you?" Boom! Climax to Paranormal Activity 4. Yes, that would be creepy. Good work. With these movies, you aren't bothered by the tedium of a story, a narrative you have to follow and get behind emotionally or intellectually. You just get creepy moments. Of course, wouldn't they be a lot better with a story? With emotional investment? With the sophistication to order them in a mounting way? I think so; but I am in the minority.
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The Paranormal Activity Films
Author: Jared RobertsGeorge Romero's Philosophy of Violence
Author: Jared Roberts
Romero's entire cinematic oeuvre can be taken as a lifelong reflection on the nature of violence. Violence in fantasy and action, not zombies, has been the one constant in all of Romero's films. His attitude on the subject is certainly complex. In order to study this, I have isolated only Romero's non-zombie films. Certainly Romero's zombie films have much to say about violence as well, but that will remain for future studies.
Romero has two general film structures that he frequently revisits. The one for which he is best known is the co-operation structure. The central issue of these films is the inability for groups of humans to cooperate in the midst of a swarming, supremely cooperative invasion. This broad structure can be found in Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), The Crazies (Romero, 1973), Dawn of the Dead (Romero, 1978), Day of the Dead (Romero, 1985), Land of the Dead (Romero, 2005), Diary of the Dead (Romero, 2007), and most recently Survival of the Dead (Romero, 2009). The other is his self-realization structure. The central issue of these films is self-realization through the release of pent-up emotional energies in violence. This structure can be found in Jack’s Wife (Romero, 1972), Martin (Romero, 1976), Monkey Shines (Romero, 1988), The Dark Half (Romero, 1993), and finally Bruiser (Romero, 2000). In each film the structure is used to investigate a unique issue. However, each of these films follows the same pattern in dealing with its issue. In the following, I will describe how this structure underlies each of the five above-mentioned films and how Romero uses and develops this structure in new ways with each successive film. In doing so, we reveal something about Romero’s techniques, obsessions, and attitudes toward violence that can be applied in more in-depth studies of his work.
Jack’s Wife
Jack’s Wife is the first film to deploy the self-realization structure and thus basically sets the pattern for all the following films of the structure. The film is about a housewife, Joan Mitchell, who gradually begins to realize her life is not satisfying her emotional needs. Joan has disturbing dreams of her husband keeping her in a cage and on a leash like a dog. Meanwhile, her daughter’s boyfriend provokes her to outrage by mocking her old-fashioned values. The dreams and the teasing affect Joan strongly because she’s sufficiently aware that the traditional gender role she has assumed stifles her. As we gather from her conversations with her daughter’s boyfriend, she is of high intelligence but limits her ideas on ideological grounds.
When Joan begins showing interest in witchcraft, however, her dreams take a more defensive and violent form: an intruder is breaking into her home and she has to use her resources to escape him. As she progresses further into witchcraft, she gets closer to defeating the intruder within her dreams. At the same time, she also begins to take control over her life, to the point of having an affair with her daughter’s boyfriend. Finally, the dream comes true and she shoots a real-life intruder, only to discover the intruder is her locked-out husband. She’s now free, no longer oppressed.
In this plot Romero creates the structure that will, with its interplay between violent fantasy and violent action, inform all his following self-realization films. Joan’s dreams are clearly indicating that her husband is the intrusive presence in her life and, with him, the whole ideological background of gender roles she had been holding. Witchcraft, a traditionally matriarchal religion, empowers her to use violence within her fantasy life, expressing her inner rage or frustration at being oppressed. The violent fantasy, however, liberates her through violent action in a way she never consciously intended. The pattern revealed in Jack's Wife is oppression leading to frustration; frustration to violent inner energies and fantasies; those violent energies to finding a proxy for them that is both frightening and attractive (witchcraft); and, finally, the proxy leading to discovering or freeing one’s true self through the release of the violent energies.
Martin
Despite considerable differences, Martin follows the pattern created in Jack’s Wife quite closely. Martin is about a young man, Martin, who is sent to live with his Lithuanian Catholic cousin, Cuda. Cuda believes Martin is a several-decades-old vampire in need of salvation and destruction in equal measure. Martin struggles with Cuda’s surveillance and paranoia while maintaining a job during the day and a habit of drugging, raping, and killing women and drinking their blood by night. He confesses his vampiric identity to a radio show and explains his difficulties relating to the opposite sex. Finally he falls for an abandoned housewife and vows to commit no more violence, but is killed by Cuda when the housewife commits suicide.
So, for Martin, oppression is a result of the expectations of his family and of traditional masculine values. Slightly effeminate and shy, Martin displays little interest in women or masculine activities. His foils in this are Arthur, the possessive, macho boyfriend of Cuda’s daughter, the womanizing husband of the lady to whom he delivers groceries, and the adulterous lover of one of his victims. Perhaps it is this that leads Martin’s family to view him as so extremely different, namely a vampire. Where he likely only suffered social anxiety originally, the insistence by his family that he is a dangerous vampire has perverted his sexuality so that he seeks unconscious women for release.
Rather than resist the preposterous notion that he’s a vampire, Martin embraces the fantasy and wilfully construes himself as a vampire. A very timid young man, vampirism empowers Martin as much as witchcraft empowers Joan Mitchell. The form of oppression in Jack’s Wife is oppression of women in the traditional gender roles, so the sort of empowerment Joan finds is empowerment to liberate herself from that oppression. In Martin, the oppression is not actually about oppression, but about family and sexual confidence. So, the empowerment Martin finds in vampirism is one of mastery over the opposite sex.
The two films can readily be taken together as unconventional investigations of traditional (violent) horror motifs (witchcraft and vampirism) as potentially liberating, regardless of their lack of basis in reality. Romero’s radical idea in both of these films is to turn a somewhat sceptical eye on their reality, yet allow their value as therapeutic fictions. So, just as witchcraft was Joan's proxy for relieving violent energies, the myth of vampirism is Martin’s. The choice of horror motif, moreover, is particularly apt in each film. As a matriarchal religion like witchcraft empowers Joan to liberate herself from an oppressive husband and be independent, vampires, ever since Bela Lugosi’s turn as Dracula, have usually been represented as suave, attractive, strong men, with infinite powers of seduction. The fantasy allows Martin to imagine himself as a suave, powerful male. Soaked in Gothic imagery out of a Universal or Hammer horror film, Martin’s fantasies of his past are part of his self-mythologizing and thus give him permission for violent action. Where Joan’s violent fantasies are dreams, Martin’s are not only conscious, but he believes them to be genuine memories of his life a century or so in the past.
Martin’s belief that he is a vampire, then, is an empowering fantasy for him. As many young men, Martin feels he is (and is in fact) being watched and having his freedom constricted by his family and by society. By seizing upon the mythologizing power of the notion of vampirism, he liberates himself to do violence to others and, with this ability to overpower, to be confident, efficacious with women. He can tell himself he is performing violence out of the strictest necessity, for, as ‘nosferatu’, he must kill to survive. When Martin does kill for blood it, in turn, affirms his mythologized identity. When, however, Martin does find a woman to have consensual sex with, he resolves to abandon his vampirism; for, now being freed from his oppression and accepted by a woman, he no longer requires the violent action or the violent fantasy. The tragedy is that his violent self-mythology has caught up with him and ultimately destroys him by Cuda's hand. This idea is developed much further in Romero's next film.
Monkey Shines
With Monkey Shines, Romero uses the structure to address the theme of masculinity and the expectations that come with it. The film begins by showing the idyllic male life of the allegorically-named Allan Mann. Mann is in great shape, handsome, successful; he owns his own home; he has a beautiful trophy fiancée and a good job. He has, in other words, achieved everything the American male is supposed to achieve to be a good, stable man. He has all a man could want. Within minutes, however, a truck hits him and he is rendered quadriplegic. In his impotent state, he finds his fiancée has left him—for the surgeon who repaired his spine, no less. Are Successful Males so interchangeable? His mother smothers him with maternal attention. And his caretaker takes over his home. With all the trappings of successful masculinity removed, he’s either abandoned or exploited by women. He is oppressed by femininity, both without (his mother, caretaker, etc.) and, insofar as his outward signs of masculinity have failed, within.
In the scenes following his hospitalization, he is extremely irritable. His frustration and with it violent energies are mounting. Ella the lab monkey, initially a gift to help Mann around the house, becomes Mann’s proxy for his violent energies, just as witchcraft is for Joan Mitchell and vampirism for Martin. As Joan, Mann begins to have violent fantasies about the women who have taken advantage of his impotence. He begins seeing these fantasies enacted through the eyes of Ella the monkey. His violent fantasies, he discovers, have actually been channelled telepathically to Ella and translated into real life violence by her. One-by-one, all of the women who have taken advantage of his impotent state are destroyed by Ella. With each murder, however, Ella begins to dominate Mann. Soon, she's feeding him the monkey treats and he's at her mercy. The proxy for violent fantasy has turned on its originator; all of Mann's violent energies have been translated into a physical form that now turns back on him.
Another elaboration on the structure, extending that found in Martin, is that Mann’s vengeful rage has a distinctly feminine and primitive face in the monkey. Mann must ultimately act against Ella, the very proxy of his violence, to save the one woman who treats him as a real man (i.e. has sex with him). At the moment he acts against the personification of his own violent energies, he regains his ability to move, his potency. He kills the monkey, and, of course, gets the girl. However, rather than a conventionally masculine ending, Mann has exited the horror realizing the Successful Male type he had been inhabiting is a precarious sham. At the film’s end he has achieved a more realistic masculinity that does not depend upon social conventions. His new relationship is one of mutual respect with a less-attractive but much more intelligent woman, a woman who has seen his weakness and loved him just the same. Through violence, Mann has been brought to face the worst in himself and transform into a better person. Romero extends this notion further with The Dark Half.
The Dark Half
The Dark Half concerns a writer, Thaddeus Beaumont, whose creative power is linked to a violent inner nature that takes physical form as a partial twin growing in his skull and is surgically removed during childhood. As an adult he’s a professor of creative writing, writer of serious literature, and, on the sly, writer of violent crime novels under the pseudonym George Stark. When a blackmailer threatens to reveal his identity, he comes public and realizes he can no longer write novels about his uber-violent character Alexis Machine. George Stark then takes on physical form through a handy bit of magic realism and begins a real-life killing spree of everyone involved in suppressing Beaumont’s George Stark identity. The film climaxes with a show-down between Stark and Beaumont to discern which personality will triumph. Naturally, Stark is destroyed.
Romero’s attraction to The Dark Half, of all Stephen King novels, was no doubt its inherent relationship to the self-realization structure Romero had visited three times prior. While the film necessarily contains a tension between Romero’s interests and the source material, the pattern is still discernible. Beaumont’s oppression comes from a literary community that will not accept that a writer of serious literature can simultaneously be a writer of violent pulp novels, let alone that the violent pulp novels are perhaps serious art. Just as Romero is pigeonholed as a horror director, the literary community forces Beaumont to be either “Thaddeus Beaumont” or “George Stark.”
As we begin The Dark Half, Beaumont has already learned to channel his frustrations into violent fantasies and, even further, to channel the violent fantasies into violent art instead of violent action. Beaumont is, however, still split, divided; he may be in equilibrium, but, so long as he continues to divide his personality between Beaumont and Stark, he has not attained the liberating self-realization Joan Mitchell and Mann attain. So long as he persists in equilibrium, he remains oppressed and divided. When he is forced to reveal that he is in fact George Stark and thus to stop writing as Stark to preserve the serious, socially-admired Beaumont identity, his violent fantasies finally begin to translate into real violence in the real world. As with Joan Mitchell and Allan Mann, Beaumont never consciously wills the violence; quite the opposite, he abhors it. Nevertheless, Stark is a manifestation of his inner life, his violent fantasies. As Allan Mann, Beaumont ultimately faces off against the proxy of his violence and only emerges victorious when he accepts violence as a part of himself by fighting Stark. As Stark is physically removed from the world, Beaumont is left not a divided person but a whole, integrated person who, presumably, will be able to write both serious and violent literature.
Curiously, Beaumont’s violent fantasies do not arise in response to external oppression. This is doubtless the influence of King: Beaumont has a dark, violent nature quite apart from any oppression. His violent energies are not the cause of social forces, but a part of himself that he’s learned to compartmentalize, and it is this very tension that oppresses Beaumont. Like Martin, Beaumont’s proxy is kept in check in the realm of fantasy. Once the proxy is removed, the fantasy is no longer contained and seeps into the physical world. Like Joan Mitchell and Alan Mann, Beaumont is horrified to discover that his violent fantasies—so difficult for him to own that he must create both George Stark and Alexis Machine to distance himself—are resulting in violent action. The climactic face-off with the horror of violent action, having, as Mann, to face the proxy for his violence in physical form, leads him to discover his true self as an integral being rather than two halves, uniting his artistic nature and his violent nature. King’s narrative of two dualistic souls fighting for one body, alas, obscures the Romero-esque moment of self-realization in a wave of fantastical sparrows; yet the pattern is still present.
What is most interesting about The Dark Half is how it appears to be self-reflective upon the self-realization structure of Romero’s films. Thad is, after all, denying his need for and pleasure in violent fantasy itself. But in Romero’s self-realization films, violent fantasy is shared by all the oppressed, and any human may potentially be oppressed. For that matter, Romero’s films, like Thad’s writings under ‘George Stark,’ are violent fantasies. The immature attitude of much of Western society toward violence as sin or jest is the root of the problem is The Dark Half, a problem Beaumont ultimately has to resolve on a personal, psychological level, as society is not going to change. That Romero could use his self-realization structure to reflect upon his self-realization films, in a sense, shows what a powerful structure it is in Romero’s hands and just how far he had developed it by this point in his career. Unfortunately, with the next self-realization film, the structure’s development takes a step back.
Bruiser
Bruiser is about a stereotypically nice guy, Henry Creedlow, whose boss mistreats him, whose best friend is stealing his money, and whose trophy wife, he learns, is sleeping with his boss. Even his wife’s pet dog and the cleaning lady take advantage of his good nature. As he goes about his daily business, he has violent fantasies of standing up for himself, such as throwing a lady who cuts in line under a train, seeing her head split open graphically. Upon learning of the many betrayals of those he trusted, Creedlow’s face suddenly disappears, replaced by a blank, white mask of sorts. With his newfound anonymity, Creedlow begins to take revenge, killing first his cleaning lady, then his wife. The film climaxes when Creedlow successfully kills his helpless, hapless boss and escapes police to find work as an office mailboy, his face and identity now returned to him by whatever forces had taken them away.
The source of oppression for Creedlow, what keeps him from being himself, is his commitment to a particular notion of ‘success’ that his personality is really not formed to handle. He is surrounded by sociopathic jerks who have no qualms about exploiting him for their own success. One might say that this commitment is his own damn fault, but one could do likewise for Joan Mitchell. Both Creedlow and Mitchell are victims of their social circumstances. Creedlow’s milieu is one of American capitalism. He believes his success as an individual depends upon having a high-paying job, a large house, a limitless credit card, a nice car, good stock investments, and, of course, a gorgeous wife. In this, Creedlow is a newer incarnation of Allan Mann, to some extent. As we first see Mann rising out of bed with his sexy wife to go for a jog, we first see Creedlow going through an extensive morning grooming ritual and entering the bedroom to view his sexy wife. The difference is that for Mann this lifestyle of the Successful Male is a reflection of his notion of masculinity, and he’s achieved it as the film begins. For Creedlow it is a reflection of his notion of identity, and it’s as incomplete for him as his plastic-covered house is. Creedlow ties the notion of being ‘somebody’ with a very materialistic model of success. By marshalling his life in such a way as to present himself to others as this kind of ‘somebody’, he creates his own sense of identity upon this materialistic success. Creating identity is, after all, what Creedlow does. As he refers to himself, he’s a ‘face man,’ a man who finds beautiful women to put in magazines and creates for them an identity from of their outward appearances.
After Romero dedicates the first act to showing us Creedlow’s own ‘face’, the social identity he’s created for himself, he dedicates the second act to stripping it away. First Creedlow discovers that, because his investments have been returning much less than he expected, he doesn’t have sufficient assets to get a limitless credit card. Then he sees his wife giving his boss a handjob at a barbecue in the boss’s yard, a profoundly emasculating experience. Finally, when he confronts his wife about it, she subjects him to a heinous verbal castration: she tells him that he was too wimpy to punch out his boss, or her, for their transgression and that, though she only married him to get ahead, she hates him for not even being successful enough to justify her gold-digging. With these few effectively cruel scenes, Creedlow loses his trophy wife to the boss who totally dominates him and loses his very image of himself as a successful man. With the loss of all the paraphernalia he used to define his identity, he is left stripped of all identity, symbolically rendered by a loss of his facial features.
This magic realist mechanism that strips Creedlow of his facial features is itself the proxy for his violent fantasies. While Creedlow is oppressed by an amoral and self-interested society, he is only capable of violent fantasy. He imagines pushing a woman under a train and sinking an axe into his wife’s head. However, he could never perform any of these actions so long as he was afraid of losing the paraphernalia (wife, house, job) upon which he had built his social identity. A magic realist riff on The Invisible Man, this total loss of social identity to the point of facelessness, empowers Creedlow to perform violence on those who were responsible for inhibiting his success and with it the identity he had chosen for himself.
Where the need for violence is entirely obvious in Jack’s Wife, as the violence frees her from oppression in a very concrete way, the violence in Bruiser is more a matter of principle. The ability to be violent, to defend oneself and one’s principles, “standing up for” oneself, is part of creating a solid identity. There is no integrity without the possibility of violence. Creedlow hasn’t just had his identity stripped away, but even the very power to confer upon himself a new identity. As a magic realist fantasy, we could say his identity has literally been taken away by each person who betrayed and humiliated him. By killing them, overpowering them with violence, he regains his power to create his identity. Hence after killing his wife a portion of his face briefly returns to normal skin. It is as though their perception of Creedlow as nothing is, in a way, what is responsible for his loss of identity. By killing them, he frees his identity from their negating perception.
Having killed all of those who formerly humiliated him, Creedlow regains his identity and chooses to be a quasi-hippie working as a mailboy in an office. Like Mann, Creedlow does not return to his previous idea of success (or masculinity, in Mann’s case). His process of violence is one that leads him to realize that he was never suited for his old identity. He now finds a model of success and identity more suited to his personality. Unlike Mann or Beaumont, though, Creedlow never has to face off with the proxy for his violence to achieve this synthesis. Rather, like Joan and Martin, his proxy simply enables him to reach a state where he is free to be himself. For whatever reason, Romero chose to end Bruiser by showing Creedlow's face vanish and violence erupt at the slightest provocation from his boss, a move that undermines much of what preceded. Whatever its flaws, Bruiser is certainly the purest of Romero's self-actualization films, stripping the structure almost to its pure framework.
Coda
If I have made my case successfully, it should be undeniable that the self-realization structure is present in each of Romero’s non-zombie films. Each of these five films is patterned on the notion that oppression breeds violence and with violence one can liberate oneself from that oppression to arrive at a better state. Martin alone required any mental gymnastics on my part to make the structure fit. This is not because the structure is not present but merely complicated by how very ambitious that film, one of Romero’s best, happens to be.
While each film has its unique theme that Romero adapts the structure to address, there is an overall attitude or worldview expressed in this films that is remarkably consistent. The myriad ways in which human beings allow themselves to be oppressed or even oppress themselves, must result in violent energies. In Romero’s films, violence itself is not evil, but can be a real response to the ways in which we are oppressed. Violence is not an innately immature solution, but rather our attitudes toward violence are immature. Most of us are unwilling to accept the violence inherent in human nature, lest we not appear as culturally and spiritually advanced as Gandhi. We watch horror movies only to swiftly disavow the reality of the violent fantasy, to say it is not fantasy at all but entertainment and harmless. We would not dare admit the satisfaction of the violence or how similar it is to our own fantasies of abusing our abusers. Of course the fantasy is harmless, but it is a fantasy humans all need and have always needed. We have all had Joan Mitchell’s fantasies, Creedlow’s fantasies, and sometimes even the self-aggrandizing fantasies of Martin. Like Thad Beaumont, violence is a part of us and it is to our detriment that we deny our need for it and its ability to liberate us on individual or social levels. While most violence is senseless, not all is. Romero’s films give us the fantasies. The action is left to us.
Romero has two general film structures that he frequently revisits. The one for which he is best known is the co-operation structure. The central issue of these films is the inability for groups of humans to cooperate in the midst of a swarming, supremely cooperative invasion. This broad structure can be found in Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), The Crazies (Romero, 1973), Dawn of the Dead (Romero, 1978), Day of the Dead (Romero, 1985), Land of the Dead (Romero, 2005), Diary of the Dead (Romero, 2007), and most recently Survival of the Dead (Romero, 2009). The other is his self-realization structure. The central issue of these films is self-realization through the release of pent-up emotional energies in violence. This structure can be found in Jack’s Wife (Romero, 1972), Martin (Romero, 1976), Monkey Shines (Romero, 1988), The Dark Half (Romero, 1993), and finally Bruiser (Romero, 2000). In each film the structure is used to investigate a unique issue. However, each of these films follows the same pattern in dealing with its issue. In the following, I will describe how this structure underlies each of the five above-mentioned films and how Romero uses and develops this structure in new ways with each successive film. In doing so, we reveal something about Romero’s techniques, obsessions, and attitudes toward violence that can be applied in more in-depth studies of his work.
Jack’s Wife
Jack’s Wife is the first film to deploy the self-realization structure and thus basically sets the pattern for all the following films of the structure. The film is about a housewife, Joan Mitchell, who gradually begins to realize her life is not satisfying her emotional needs. Joan has disturbing dreams of her husband keeping her in a cage and on a leash like a dog. Meanwhile, her daughter’s boyfriend provokes her to outrage by mocking her old-fashioned values. The dreams and the teasing affect Joan strongly because she’s sufficiently aware that the traditional gender role she has assumed stifles her. As we gather from her conversations with her daughter’s boyfriend, she is of high intelligence but limits her ideas on ideological grounds.
When Joan begins showing interest in witchcraft, however, her dreams take a more defensive and violent form: an intruder is breaking into her home and she has to use her resources to escape him. As she progresses further into witchcraft, she gets closer to defeating the intruder within her dreams. At the same time, she also begins to take control over her life, to the point of having an affair with her daughter’s boyfriend. Finally, the dream comes true and she shoots a real-life intruder, only to discover the intruder is her locked-out husband. She’s now free, no longer oppressed.
In this plot Romero creates the structure that will, with its interplay between violent fantasy and violent action, inform all his following self-realization films. Joan’s dreams are clearly indicating that her husband is the intrusive presence in her life and, with him, the whole ideological background of gender roles she had been holding. Witchcraft, a traditionally matriarchal religion, empowers her to use violence within her fantasy life, expressing her inner rage or frustration at being oppressed. The violent fantasy, however, liberates her through violent action in a way she never consciously intended. The pattern revealed in Jack's Wife is oppression leading to frustration; frustration to violent inner energies and fantasies; those violent energies to finding a proxy for them that is both frightening and attractive (witchcraft); and, finally, the proxy leading to discovering or freeing one’s true self through the release of the violent energies.
Martin
Despite considerable differences, Martin follows the pattern created in Jack’s Wife quite closely. Martin is about a young man, Martin, who is sent to live with his Lithuanian Catholic cousin, Cuda. Cuda believes Martin is a several-decades-old vampire in need of salvation and destruction in equal measure. Martin struggles with Cuda’s surveillance and paranoia while maintaining a job during the day and a habit of drugging, raping, and killing women and drinking their blood by night. He confesses his vampiric identity to a radio show and explains his difficulties relating to the opposite sex. Finally he falls for an abandoned housewife and vows to commit no more violence, but is killed by Cuda when the housewife commits suicide.
So, for Martin, oppression is a result of the expectations of his family and of traditional masculine values. Slightly effeminate and shy, Martin displays little interest in women or masculine activities. His foils in this are Arthur, the possessive, macho boyfriend of Cuda’s daughter, the womanizing husband of the lady to whom he delivers groceries, and the adulterous lover of one of his victims. Perhaps it is this that leads Martin’s family to view him as so extremely different, namely a vampire. Where he likely only suffered social anxiety originally, the insistence by his family that he is a dangerous vampire has perverted his sexuality so that he seeks unconscious women for release.
Rather than resist the preposterous notion that he’s a vampire, Martin embraces the fantasy and wilfully construes himself as a vampire. A very timid young man, vampirism empowers Martin as much as witchcraft empowers Joan Mitchell. The form of oppression in Jack’s Wife is oppression of women in the traditional gender roles, so the sort of empowerment Joan finds is empowerment to liberate herself from that oppression. In Martin, the oppression is not actually about oppression, but about family and sexual confidence. So, the empowerment Martin finds in vampirism is one of mastery over the opposite sex.
The two films can readily be taken together as unconventional investigations of traditional (violent) horror motifs (witchcraft and vampirism) as potentially liberating, regardless of their lack of basis in reality. Romero’s radical idea in both of these films is to turn a somewhat sceptical eye on their reality, yet allow their value as therapeutic fictions. So, just as witchcraft was Joan's proxy for relieving violent energies, the myth of vampirism is Martin’s. The choice of horror motif, moreover, is particularly apt in each film. As a matriarchal religion like witchcraft empowers Joan to liberate herself from an oppressive husband and be independent, vampires, ever since Bela Lugosi’s turn as Dracula, have usually been represented as suave, attractive, strong men, with infinite powers of seduction. The fantasy allows Martin to imagine himself as a suave, powerful male. Soaked in Gothic imagery out of a Universal or Hammer horror film, Martin’s fantasies of his past are part of his self-mythologizing and thus give him permission for violent action. Where Joan’s violent fantasies are dreams, Martin’s are not only conscious, but he believes them to be genuine memories of his life a century or so in the past.
Martin’s belief that he is a vampire, then, is an empowering fantasy for him. As many young men, Martin feels he is (and is in fact) being watched and having his freedom constricted by his family and by society. By seizing upon the mythologizing power of the notion of vampirism, he liberates himself to do violence to others and, with this ability to overpower, to be confident, efficacious with women. He can tell himself he is performing violence out of the strictest necessity, for, as ‘nosferatu’, he must kill to survive. When Martin does kill for blood it, in turn, affirms his mythologized identity. When, however, Martin does find a woman to have consensual sex with, he resolves to abandon his vampirism; for, now being freed from his oppression and accepted by a woman, he no longer requires the violent action or the violent fantasy. The tragedy is that his violent self-mythology has caught up with him and ultimately destroys him by Cuda's hand. This idea is developed much further in Romero's next film.
Monkey Shines
With Monkey Shines, Romero uses the structure to address the theme of masculinity and the expectations that come with it. The film begins by showing the idyllic male life of the allegorically-named Allan Mann. Mann is in great shape, handsome, successful; he owns his own home; he has a beautiful trophy fiancée and a good job. He has, in other words, achieved everything the American male is supposed to achieve to be a good, stable man. He has all a man could want. Within minutes, however, a truck hits him and he is rendered quadriplegic. In his impotent state, he finds his fiancée has left him—for the surgeon who repaired his spine, no less. Are Successful Males so interchangeable? His mother smothers him with maternal attention. And his caretaker takes over his home. With all the trappings of successful masculinity removed, he’s either abandoned or exploited by women. He is oppressed by femininity, both without (his mother, caretaker, etc.) and, insofar as his outward signs of masculinity have failed, within.
In the scenes following his hospitalization, he is extremely irritable. His frustration and with it violent energies are mounting. Ella the lab monkey, initially a gift to help Mann around the house, becomes Mann’s proxy for his violent energies, just as witchcraft is for Joan Mitchell and vampirism for Martin. As Joan, Mann begins to have violent fantasies about the women who have taken advantage of his impotence. He begins seeing these fantasies enacted through the eyes of Ella the monkey. His violent fantasies, he discovers, have actually been channelled telepathically to Ella and translated into real life violence by her. One-by-one, all of the women who have taken advantage of his impotent state are destroyed by Ella. With each murder, however, Ella begins to dominate Mann. Soon, she's feeding him the monkey treats and he's at her mercy. The proxy for violent fantasy has turned on its originator; all of Mann's violent energies have been translated into a physical form that now turns back on him.
Another elaboration on the structure, extending that found in Martin, is that Mann’s vengeful rage has a distinctly feminine and primitive face in the monkey. Mann must ultimately act against Ella, the very proxy of his violence, to save the one woman who treats him as a real man (i.e. has sex with him). At the moment he acts against the personification of his own violent energies, he regains his ability to move, his potency. He kills the monkey, and, of course, gets the girl. However, rather than a conventionally masculine ending, Mann has exited the horror realizing the Successful Male type he had been inhabiting is a precarious sham. At the film’s end he has achieved a more realistic masculinity that does not depend upon social conventions. His new relationship is one of mutual respect with a less-attractive but much more intelligent woman, a woman who has seen his weakness and loved him just the same. Through violence, Mann has been brought to face the worst in himself and transform into a better person. Romero extends this notion further with The Dark Half.
The Dark Half
The Dark Half concerns a writer, Thaddeus Beaumont, whose creative power is linked to a violent inner nature that takes physical form as a partial twin growing in his skull and is surgically removed during childhood. As an adult he’s a professor of creative writing, writer of serious literature, and, on the sly, writer of violent crime novels under the pseudonym George Stark. When a blackmailer threatens to reveal his identity, he comes public and realizes he can no longer write novels about his uber-violent character Alexis Machine. George Stark then takes on physical form through a handy bit of magic realism and begins a real-life killing spree of everyone involved in suppressing Beaumont’s George Stark identity. The film climaxes with a show-down between Stark and Beaumont to discern which personality will triumph. Naturally, Stark is destroyed.
Romero’s attraction to The Dark Half, of all Stephen King novels, was no doubt its inherent relationship to the self-realization structure Romero had visited three times prior. While the film necessarily contains a tension between Romero’s interests and the source material, the pattern is still discernible. Beaumont’s oppression comes from a literary community that will not accept that a writer of serious literature can simultaneously be a writer of violent pulp novels, let alone that the violent pulp novels are perhaps serious art. Just as Romero is pigeonholed as a horror director, the literary community forces Beaumont to be either “Thaddeus Beaumont” or “George Stark.”
As we begin The Dark Half, Beaumont has already learned to channel his frustrations into violent fantasies and, even further, to channel the violent fantasies into violent art instead of violent action. Beaumont is, however, still split, divided; he may be in equilibrium, but, so long as he continues to divide his personality between Beaumont and Stark, he has not attained the liberating self-realization Joan Mitchell and Mann attain. So long as he persists in equilibrium, he remains oppressed and divided. When he is forced to reveal that he is in fact George Stark and thus to stop writing as Stark to preserve the serious, socially-admired Beaumont identity, his violent fantasies finally begin to translate into real violence in the real world. As with Joan Mitchell and Allan Mann, Beaumont never consciously wills the violence; quite the opposite, he abhors it. Nevertheless, Stark is a manifestation of his inner life, his violent fantasies. As Allan Mann, Beaumont ultimately faces off against the proxy of his violence and only emerges victorious when he accepts violence as a part of himself by fighting Stark. As Stark is physically removed from the world, Beaumont is left not a divided person but a whole, integrated person who, presumably, will be able to write both serious and violent literature.
Curiously, Beaumont’s violent fantasies do not arise in response to external oppression. This is doubtless the influence of King: Beaumont has a dark, violent nature quite apart from any oppression. His violent energies are not the cause of social forces, but a part of himself that he’s learned to compartmentalize, and it is this very tension that oppresses Beaumont. Like Martin, Beaumont’s proxy is kept in check in the realm of fantasy. Once the proxy is removed, the fantasy is no longer contained and seeps into the physical world. Like Joan Mitchell and Alan Mann, Beaumont is horrified to discover that his violent fantasies—so difficult for him to own that he must create both George Stark and Alexis Machine to distance himself—are resulting in violent action. The climactic face-off with the horror of violent action, having, as Mann, to face the proxy for his violence in physical form, leads him to discover his true self as an integral being rather than two halves, uniting his artistic nature and his violent nature. King’s narrative of two dualistic souls fighting for one body, alas, obscures the Romero-esque moment of self-realization in a wave of fantastical sparrows; yet the pattern is still present.
What is most interesting about The Dark Half is how it appears to be self-reflective upon the self-realization structure of Romero’s films. Thad is, after all, denying his need for and pleasure in violent fantasy itself. But in Romero’s self-realization films, violent fantasy is shared by all the oppressed, and any human may potentially be oppressed. For that matter, Romero’s films, like Thad’s writings under ‘George Stark,’ are violent fantasies. The immature attitude of much of Western society toward violence as sin or jest is the root of the problem is The Dark Half, a problem Beaumont ultimately has to resolve on a personal, psychological level, as society is not going to change. That Romero could use his self-realization structure to reflect upon his self-realization films, in a sense, shows what a powerful structure it is in Romero’s hands and just how far he had developed it by this point in his career. Unfortunately, with the next self-realization film, the structure’s development takes a step back.
Bruiser
Bruiser is about a stereotypically nice guy, Henry Creedlow, whose boss mistreats him, whose best friend is stealing his money, and whose trophy wife, he learns, is sleeping with his boss. Even his wife’s pet dog and the cleaning lady take advantage of his good nature. As he goes about his daily business, he has violent fantasies of standing up for himself, such as throwing a lady who cuts in line under a train, seeing her head split open graphically. Upon learning of the many betrayals of those he trusted, Creedlow’s face suddenly disappears, replaced by a blank, white mask of sorts. With his newfound anonymity, Creedlow begins to take revenge, killing first his cleaning lady, then his wife. The film climaxes when Creedlow successfully kills his helpless, hapless boss and escapes police to find work as an office mailboy, his face and identity now returned to him by whatever forces had taken them away.
The source of oppression for Creedlow, what keeps him from being himself, is his commitment to a particular notion of ‘success’ that his personality is really not formed to handle. He is surrounded by sociopathic jerks who have no qualms about exploiting him for their own success. One might say that this commitment is his own damn fault, but one could do likewise for Joan Mitchell. Both Creedlow and Mitchell are victims of their social circumstances. Creedlow’s milieu is one of American capitalism. He believes his success as an individual depends upon having a high-paying job, a large house, a limitless credit card, a nice car, good stock investments, and, of course, a gorgeous wife. In this, Creedlow is a newer incarnation of Allan Mann, to some extent. As we first see Mann rising out of bed with his sexy wife to go for a jog, we first see Creedlow going through an extensive morning grooming ritual and entering the bedroom to view his sexy wife. The difference is that for Mann this lifestyle of the Successful Male is a reflection of his notion of masculinity, and he’s achieved it as the film begins. For Creedlow it is a reflection of his notion of identity, and it’s as incomplete for him as his plastic-covered house is. Creedlow ties the notion of being ‘somebody’ with a very materialistic model of success. By marshalling his life in such a way as to present himself to others as this kind of ‘somebody’, he creates his own sense of identity upon this materialistic success. Creating identity is, after all, what Creedlow does. As he refers to himself, he’s a ‘face man,’ a man who finds beautiful women to put in magazines and creates for them an identity from of their outward appearances.
After Romero dedicates the first act to showing us Creedlow’s own ‘face’, the social identity he’s created for himself, he dedicates the second act to stripping it away. First Creedlow discovers that, because his investments have been returning much less than he expected, he doesn’t have sufficient assets to get a limitless credit card. Then he sees his wife giving his boss a handjob at a barbecue in the boss’s yard, a profoundly emasculating experience. Finally, when he confronts his wife about it, she subjects him to a heinous verbal castration: she tells him that he was too wimpy to punch out his boss, or her, for their transgression and that, though she only married him to get ahead, she hates him for not even being successful enough to justify her gold-digging. With these few effectively cruel scenes, Creedlow loses his trophy wife to the boss who totally dominates him and loses his very image of himself as a successful man. With the loss of all the paraphernalia he used to define his identity, he is left stripped of all identity, symbolically rendered by a loss of his facial features.
This magic realist mechanism that strips Creedlow of his facial features is itself the proxy for his violent fantasies. While Creedlow is oppressed by an amoral and self-interested society, he is only capable of violent fantasy. He imagines pushing a woman under a train and sinking an axe into his wife’s head. However, he could never perform any of these actions so long as he was afraid of losing the paraphernalia (wife, house, job) upon which he had built his social identity. A magic realist riff on The Invisible Man, this total loss of social identity to the point of facelessness, empowers Creedlow to perform violence on those who were responsible for inhibiting his success and with it the identity he had chosen for himself.
Where the need for violence is entirely obvious in Jack’s Wife, as the violence frees her from oppression in a very concrete way, the violence in Bruiser is more a matter of principle. The ability to be violent, to defend oneself and one’s principles, “standing up for” oneself, is part of creating a solid identity. There is no integrity without the possibility of violence. Creedlow hasn’t just had his identity stripped away, but even the very power to confer upon himself a new identity. As a magic realist fantasy, we could say his identity has literally been taken away by each person who betrayed and humiliated him. By killing them, overpowering them with violence, he regains his power to create his identity. Hence after killing his wife a portion of his face briefly returns to normal skin. It is as though their perception of Creedlow as nothing is, in a way, what is responsible for his loss of identity. By killing them, he frees his identity from their negating perception.
Having killed all of those who formerly humiliated him, Creedlow regains his identity and chooses to be a quasi-hippie working as a mailboy in an office. Like Mann, Creedlow does not return to his previous idea of success (or masculinity, in Mann’s case). His process of violence is one that leads him to realize that he was never suited for his old identity. He now finds a model of success and identity more suited to his personality. Unlike Mann or Beaumont, though, Creedlow never has to face off with the proxy for his violence to achieve this synthesis. Rather, like Joan and Martin, his proxy simply enables him to reach a state where he is free to be himself. For whatever reason, Romero chose to end Bruiser by showing Creedlow's face vanish and violence erupt at the slightest provocation from his boss, a move that undermines much of what preceded. Whatever its flaws, Bruiser is certainly the purest of Romero's self-actualization films, stripping the structure almost to its pure framework.
Coda
If I have made my case successfully, it should be undeniable that the self-realization structure is present in each of Romero’s non-zombie films. Each of these five films is patterned on the notion that oppression breeds violence and with violence one can liberate oneself from that oppression to arrive at a better state. Martin alone required any mental gymnastics on my part to make the structure fit. This is not because the structure is not present but merely complicated by how very ambitious that film, one of Romero’s best, happens to be.
While each film has its unique theme that Romero adapts the structure to address, there is an overall attitude or worldview expressed in this films that is remarkably consistent. The myriad ways in which human beings allow themselves to be oppressed or even oppress themselves, must result in violent energies. In Romero’s films, violence itself is not evil, but can be a real response to the ways in which we are oppressed. Violence is not an innately immature solution, but rather our attitudes toward violence are immature. Most of us are unwilling to accept the violence inherent in human nature, lest we not appear as culturally and spiritually advanced as Gandhi. We watch horror movies only to swiftly disavow the reality of the violent fantasy, to say it is not fantasy at all but entertainment and harmless. We would not dare admit the satisfaction of the violence or how similar it is to our own fantasies of abusing our abusers. Of course the fantasy is harmless, but it is a fantasy humans all need and have always needed. We have all had Joan Mitchell’s fantasies, Creedlow’s fantasies, and sometimes even the self-aggrandizing fantasies of Martin. Like Thad Beaumont, violence is a part of us and it is to our detriment that we deny our need for it and its ability to liberate us on individual or social levels. While most violence is senseless, not all is. Romero’s films give us the fantasies. The action is left to us.
Categories: essay, horror, romero Saturday, August 3, 2013 | at 10:54 AM 0 comments
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