The Erotic Screen

Desire, Addiction and Perversity in Cinema

Wolman, Thomas

• Publisher: Phoenix Publishing House
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781912691272
• eBook ISBN: 9781912691289
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

An exploration of psychosexual themes in a selection of classic Hollywood films and their contemporary successors by Thomas Wolman. Featuring The Thing from Another World, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alien, The Maltese Falcon, Wall Street, The Lost Weekend, The Days of Wine and Roses, Leaving Las Vegas, Secretary, Little Children, and Peeping Tom. The Erotic Screen takes as its starting point that Hollywood movies were steeped in eroticism from the beginning but censorship forced filmmakers to devise hidden sexual subtexts to preserve a film's subliminal eroticism. In this way, Hollywood films seed our collective psyches with unconscious subtexts. Science fiction films are particularly effective, using horror to induce sexual excitement, as studied in 'Part I: The nature of desire in a trio of science fiction thrillers.' Another device was to display unrestricted consumption of alcohol and tobacco and gratuitous spending. Today, this is a cliché of mainstream cinema but some filmmakers expose the dark underbelly. The five films scrutinized in 'Part II: Portraits of addiction in Hollywood melodrama' make explicit the connections between greed, addictions, and sexuality. Finally, in 'Part III: Perverse desire in mainstream cinema' the nuanced position toward the psychosexual obsessions on view in the films is investigated by posing the provocative question of whether S&M practice can work as a 'cure' for psychic suffering, by raising the alarm over sexuality run amok in a suburban community, and by offering a devastating critique of voyeurism's 'fatal attraction' to viewers.

The Erotic Screen is an investigation of the nature of human sexuality through the medium of film. It stirs up discussion and debate - and helps these movies live on in our minds.

Part I

The Nature of Desire in a Trio of Science Fiction Thrillers

CHAPTER ONE

The Object of Desire: The Thing from Another World

Near the beginning of Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World (1951) we join the Air Force crew of a C-47 cargo plane, huddled around the controls. Present are: Captain Patrick Henry, his co-pilot, radioman, chief engineer, and Carrington, the chief scientist. They are en route to an area near the North Pole where a mysterious object has crashed. During the flight, the plane encounters unusual headwinds and a powerful electromagnetic force, causing the compass reading to deviate by twelve degrees.

The men realize they are dealing with no ordinary object. Carrington immediately deduces from its upward vector right before the crash that it is not a meteor. And its powerful effect on the compass suggests a capability for disruption. By causing the plane to veer off course, it interrupts the “flight plan” and seems to defy the laws of nature. It certainly upends the crew’s expectations and their assumptions of a predictable world view. And yet, while its behavior is no doubt disturbing to the men, it is also intriguing. It challenges them and sets their minds to work. It stimulates the free exchange of ideas about the nature of The Thing. Captain Henry, however, limits himself to the practical task at hand: locating the object. And with this aim in mind, he plots a new course using “known landmarks.”

Upon landing, and without delay, the group locates the alien entity as a bottle-shaped outline on a patch of ice. A tiny portion of what is assumed to be a spaceship protrudes above the surface. It appears to be some kind of stabilizer. The men fan out to the dark edge of the ship with their hands outstretched. From above we see them arranged in a circle. This discovery prompts Captain Patrick Henry, the team leader, to deploy “thermite” bombs in an effort to melt the ice. We hear two explosions, the first when the bombs detonate, and the second when the entire ship explodes. When the smoke clears, the men realize too late they have inadvertently destroyed the very thing they were charged to investigate.

But if their actions seem premature, let us note that the “thermite” bombs have provided the filmmakers a solution to a technical problem. Without the production budget to construct a spaceship, or even a scale model, they opted instead to indicate its broad outline and reveal only a tiny part or appendage. Then, by destroying the ship, they removed the possibility of ever having to reveal it.

But if these measures were driven by necessity, they have also advanced the film’s aesthetic. On the one hand, they introduce a policy of postponement that will successively defer the actual appearance of The Thing. By the time the ship explodes, we are already twenty-four minutes into the movie. On the other hand, by offering up approximations of The Thing that never amount to a complete picture, they elicit curiosity, encourage speculation, and invite questions.

And not least of these questions asks why they committed such a precipitous and premature act in the first place. The rationalization that they were following “standard operating procedure” seems lame. It only highlights their failure of judgment. Yet the action advances the film’s aesthetic by exposing human recklessness. It seeds the idea that the mad pursuit of mayhem for its own sake comes from us.

Of course the shape of the vehicle offers one loose approximation of The Thing. Its ovoid perimeter prompts one of the men to call it a “flying saucer.” That phrase was not as hackneyed as it is today. Yet as speculation it is certainly premature: it offers an answer before the proper question has even been posed. This popular fantasy reduces the unknown Thing to an ordinary household object. A “flying saucer” may evoke fear but it doesn’t evoke dread or horror.

Interestingly, the image that stays in the mind is the one shown right before the explosion: the circle of men and women, arms outstretched, forming a human chain around The Thing. Their hands almost touch but leave a small gap in between. This broken line depicts the ties that bind humans together and the gaps that prevent absolute solidarity. The roughly circular shape follows the outline of the spacecraft and also establishes the human perimeter. And at the center of the circle lies a dark shadow, an area of obscurity. Although it sits right underneath their feet, it remains inaccessible. Thus the human chain circumscribes an area of impenetrability, the boundary of the unknown.

And this cloak of invisibility persists when the crew unearths the occupant (or an occupant) of the ship encased in a block of ice, and transports him (or it) to the camp’s storeroom. Like the ship, only the creature’s bare outline is visible through the ice. He appears humanoid, and this fact alone is enough to stimulate interest. Wanting to investigate further, the men bring the creature inside the compound for more detailed observation by the combined group of scientists and military personnel. Curious but wary, the group places the visitor under twenty-four-hour guard while they grapple with the problem of thawing him out.

The alien gaze

But as the ice begins to melt, the creature’s eyes become visible and its gaze exerts a disturbing effect on the guards.

The sergeant relays this news to Captain Henry. He suggests that the intervals of guard duty be reduced from four to two hours, and the captain readily agrees. But even this remedy proves insufficient. The corporal guarding The Thing becomes so anxious he drapes his electric blanket over the creature to block its gaze.

His actions precipitate a crisis. The camera pans to the electric switch and then the bottom edge of the blanket where melting water is dripping down. The film then cuts to the corporal standing up and blindly firing his weapon at The Thing. We viewers never see the toxic gaze first hand. We are meant to infer that The Thing has gotten up and escaped its restraints. In recounting the event to the captain, the wild-eyed corporal becomes visibly distraught. When his agitation threatens to spin out of control, the captain throws a glass of water in his face to “snap him out of it”.

Now, to clarify the destabilizing effect of the gaze, let us rewind to the moment when the visitor escapes his shackles. In that instant, he goes from being literally frozen in time and space to rapid movement. The corporal shoots wildly—that is, he “sees” The Thing, but he cannot bring it in to single-point focus; he cannot “take aim” or keep the visitor in his sights. In other words, he cannot “fixate” upon The Thing. To fixate means to make stable or stationary.

Thus his emotional disarray matches the breakdown in perception. He literally “loses focus.” The film depicts this state in a montage of single shots showing the corporal firing in seemingly random directions. These directions simply do not line up. We can imagine the corporal feeling lost among these static figures. His dismay comes from the realization that he is missing in action; that the agency he thinks of as being in charge of his mental faculties has faded from the scene.

In a certain sense, therefore, the corporal—and by extension anyone exposed to the alien gaze—has himself been “fixated” by the gaze. Just as the creature was “fixated” inside the block of ice, so the corporal has become “fixated” by the creature’s gaze. In other words, he has become at once fascinated, enthralled, and immersed, just as if he were watching a movie called The Thing. The word “petrified” conveys both the sense of horror and the resulting paralysis of the will. Perhaps the latter is most destabilizing of all, for it reduces the corporal to that of a pure object of the gaze, striking him mute, and robbing him of any sense of agency.

The crew’s evolving strategy

Mobilized by the toxic and fatal effects of any close encounter with the visitor (two scientists have been killed), the crew begins a methodical search of the rooms inside the compound, using a Geiger counter to track its movements. The Geiger counter allows them to track the creature through its indirect effects, thus avoiding exposure to its gaze. Their initial goal is one of containment. They intend to trap the creature within a closed space—and block all conduits leading in or out. By keeping The Thing behind closed doors, they plan to limit exposure to its effects.

Their method bears fruit when they locate their adversary behind a closed door. With guns drawn, the captain asks his sergeant, “Are you ready?” The sergeant replies: “No, but go ahead”. This gives the sergeant a moment to process what they are about to do. He recognizes his unreadiness and yet that very avowal announces his readiness and his preparation. “I am ready in my unreadiness”, he seems to be saying. In fact, the brief verbal exchange between captain and sergeant, with the crew in attendance, acts as a thin buffer of time between the intention and the action—in effect a kind of verbal barricade against what they (and we) are about to see.

The door opens and the creature strikes out with his clawed hand. In the same instant, the men slam the door, trapping the appendage just outside the door. The creature then pulls in his hand and retreats. In this brief interval of time, he appears directly for the first time, at fifty-seven minutes running time, well past the halfway point of the film. Already his grand entrance has been postponed as long as possible. In point of fact, the strategy of limiting contact with the visitor dictates that the actual “close encounter” be deferred indefinitely. But the delay is effective in ramping up audience anticipation to a fever pitch. Indeed the sudden shock of seeing the creature, even for a millisecond, releases pent-up tension. At this point the mere approximation of a bogeyman would be enough to trigger a response.

Hence the director has performed a neat sleight of hand: he has given us the illusion of a hideous thing without any “special effects”. For no sooner does The Thing appear, than it shrinks from sight. The door slams shut before our minds have time to take in the shot. The slamming door is like the closing of a camera shutter taking a still photo or a “freeze frame” of the action. And within this now stationary frame, we think we see The Thing. The frame appears to capture—much like a camera with a fast shutter speed captures a phenomenon invisible to the naked eye—The Thing itself. The stability of such an image would appear to fix it indelibly in the mind.

But actually the reverse happens: the slamming of the door disrupts and dissipates our impression of The Thing, effectively blotting it out. It is almost as though the filmmakers replicate the effect of the alien gaze: in the moment of rapid exposure, the “ego” of the viewer—namely, that part of the mind that interprets and judges sensory input—disappears.

However, the space of this blot serves as a “screen” upon which each viewer may project his own private version of The Thing. And by steering clear of actually showing lurid scenes of mauling and dismemberment, they allow primitive fantasy to supply the missing horrific elements. In the scene in question, the effect is facilitated by the eye’s natural focus on the clawed hand, the one element that remains inside the visual field. A viewer may then extrapolate from the hand to a plausible body schema—a hybrid of man and beast like a centaur, satyr, or sphinx, for example; or perhaps a creature with multiple appendages such as a cephalopod.

But once again the director’s decision to sharply curtail our visual access to The Thing goes beyond mere technique. For had the cinematographer shot The Thing in a long take or, heaven forbid, in close-up, the result would have been very different. Instead of a brief glimpse of something truly uncanny, we would have peered at a tall actor (the young James Arness) in a funny looking monster suit. Think of the effect on viewers whose patience is already strained. In place of the thrill of having their deepest fears realized on screen, they would feel only the deflation of an anticlimax and the dismay of being deprived of satisfaction. In other words, the movie’s whole edifice would collapse if The Thing loses its aura of the extraordinary. Seen merely as a “thing” like any other—even a dangerous being eliciting fear—it would no longer fill the billing of its grand title, The Thing.

The Thing and the sexual object

The opening scene of The Thing establishes a connection between The Thing and the sexual object. The officers sitting around a card table first refer to The Thing as an object of “secret research.” In almost the same breath, they mention an attractive woman assigned to the research group, who is a person of interest to Captain Henry. The men kid him about this, but he warns them not to step over the line. He is usually loose about pulling rank, but in this case he is obviously sensitive on the subject. His cautionary attitude warns the men not to reduce his interest to a purely prurient attraction. He is no doubt thinking of how sexual fantasy can proliferate among men isolated from women.

In a later conversation between Captain Henry and his co-pilot, this connection is made explicit. The co-pilot compares the effect of The Thing to that of an attractive woman on a captive male population. And he observes that, for the scientists, it is like a new toy in the hands of eager young boys. In both cases, he stresses the disturbing effect of the object. It is a source of attraction, yes, but it is also capable of rattling a tightly knit group or a tranquil mind.

The romantic subplot between Captain Henry and Nikki, the stenographer for the scientific group, shows the pair struggling with the sexual “thing.” They are attracted to each other from the start. But that attraction has already caused a potential rift: Henry has recently made a pass at Nikki while intoxicated.

To its credit, the film allows Nikki to speak frankly to Henry about this unwanted sexual encounter. She explains that, for her, it was like being set upon by “eight hands” at the same time. She compares the eight hands to some sort of octopus. And although she doesn’t spell it out, she leaves it to us to imagine what that must feel like. What’s creepy is the sense of being assailed by disembodied (or severed) hands, each possessing a mind of its own, and acting independently. The subject of the “eight hands”—Captain Henry—is missing in action, a temporary casualty of his intoxication.

From Nikki’s point of view, the experience is like being reduced to the “thing” the hands are pursuing. In that moment, she does not recognize her pursuer, nor does she recognize herself as a co-participant. She responds, not with desire, but with disgust and horror. Part of her response perhaps stems from being too close to the raw, undiluted physicality of sex, as if she were viewing the sexual act in extreme close-up. Her ability to sustain pleasure and anticipation depends on some degree of distance from the sexual “thing”.

And this is exactly what she advocates in her continuing dialogue with Henry. In a second scene, she presents to him an alternative approach to the same given: their mutual attraction and liking for each other. She proposes they acknowledge the danger posed by “the sexual thing” and treat it with caution and circumspection. She demonstrates her approach by playfully tying-up Henry’s mischievous hands. In so doing, she also shows that she desires Henry. That desire is coded in the implicit sadomasochistic fantasy. In the fantasy, she reverses the “eight hands” scenario and gives herself the dominant position. But she does so in a spirit of teasing exploration that allows both partners to participate. Certainly, the tying up enhances the erotic charge between them, while still holding Henry’s impetuosity in check.

Yet she also tells him that her action will make a civilized man of him. In this fitting sentence she raises the “tying of hands” to the level of a symbolic act. It first of all represents the joining of hands—the human ties—required of civilized life. We will soon see, for example, that these connections acting in concert empower the human group to successfully stave off the alien visitor. The tying of hands also conveys the loss of freedom involved in any formal arrangement or contract. Thus it plays with the idea of marriage, evoking for example, the image of “ball and chain.” And on a deeper level still, the tying up reinforces the cornerstone of civilized society: the prohibition against incest. That fundamental prohibition gives rise to the sexual taboos of a particular time and place, viz. sexual relations outside marriage. In the 1950s exceptions were made if a couple were “engaged.”

Yet it is equally important to emphasize that Nikki does not speak on behalf of conventional morality—although what she says is certainly consistent with it. On the contrary, hers is an independent voice. She implies that restraint will actually enhance their future sexual encounters because it amplifies desire and spices it up with just a dollop of sadomasochism. But, most importantly, restraint protects the couple from the unforeseen consequences of untethered sexuality, such as pregnancy (a real possibility in the era before the pill). Indeed, its disregard for consequence temporarily suspends the subjectivity of both parties—their very ability to take consequences into account or to make ethical decisions.

Interestingly, Nikki places the sexual “thing” outside the couple per se. Each partner may temporarily become a “thing” in the eyes of the other—an object of lust, say, or object of disgust and horror. But a person is not to be equated with the “thing” itself. And while the man and the woman may hold different attitudes toward the “thing,” “it” must remain forever a “thing” apart. Nikki advocates that she and Henry approach “it” as a couple, their partnership in effect se...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Full title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Part I - The Nature of Desire in a Trio of Science Fiction Thrillers
• Part II - Portraits of Addiction in Hollywood Melodramas
• Part III - Perverse Desire in Mainstream Cinema
• References
• Index