Embodiment and Horror Cinema

Larrie Dudenhoeffer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137404954
• eBook ISBN: 9781137404961
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Using the four tissue types (connective, epithelial, nervous, and muscular), Dudenhoeffer expands and complicates the subgenre of "body horror." Changing the emphasis from the contents of the film to the "organicity" of its visual and affective registers, he addresses the application of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, object-ontology, and cyborgism.

1

Elbows and Assholes: The Anal Work Ethic in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho

The commentary on the infamous shower murder scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) runs steadily in the direction of a theoretic crapshoot. In the film, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a real estate clerk, absconds with $40,000 in order to marry Sam Loomis (John Gavin), with whom she is carrying on an affair. She flees and, during a freak storm, checks into a desolate motel, where she meets Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who seems at first gentle, friendly, and almost childlike. Norman, though, is not “normal”: after once murdering Mrs. Bates and internalizing the mother’s voice, he reappears in drag to stab Marion to death while she takes a shower. He disposes of the corpse in a swamp close to the motel, motivating Sam and Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) to investigate the disappearance. Robin Wood, concentrating on a close-up of Marion’s eye after the murder sequence match-cut to the shower drain, argues that this scene allegorizes “the potentialities for horror that lie in the depths of us all . . . which have their source in sex.”¹ Raymond Durgnat agrees with Wood’s assessment, while also suggesting that this scene exaggerates and counterpoints the quickie with Sam that opens the film’s narrative, in that it more fully emphasizes Marion’s “sensuality.”² He further argues that the murder fleshes out the course of this narrative’s “double predestination,” as it follows the axiom “God sends sinners a chance to repent in order that by rejecting it . . . , they will damn themselves more thoroughly than ever.”³

Robert Samuels seconds these arguments while claiming that the shower scene’s 50-or-so cuts, which formally complement the slicing up of Marion’s torso, suggest the effacement of the female subject in a “male-dominated cultural order” that situates the flesh at “the limits of the representable.”⁴ Linda Williams, reconsidering the critical reflex to interpret the murder as an instance of symbolic castration, argues that this scene, its form reenacting its content, rather disciplines viewers to take fun in the forfeit of “control, mastery, and forward momentum” that occurs when the film’s narrative setup and center of spectator identification together spill “down the drain.”⁵ These theorists, as we can see, offer scant attention to the toilet that frames this scene, the drawn-out filming of it a serious violation of the Hays Code. Robert Kolker, after viewing this object and the staging of the murder as “symmetrical images of drainage and sewage,” moves on to reestablish the correspondence of the scene’s content to Hitchcock’s editing style.⁶ George Toles theorizes a metaphorics of the eye in the film, describing the shower murder as a moment of “blockage” that exerts on the audience tremendous “pressure for release” or, more explicitly, interpretation.⁷ However, as Jacques Lacan argues, the anus, not the eye, represents “the locus of metaphor” and also the mechanism driving the simultaneous slippage and condensation of the images of staining, flushing, and cleansing fundamental to this scene.⁸

In any case, this chapter will address—or dilate and fill in—this critical gap, first discussing the connection of anality to Max Weber’s religio-idealist work ethic, and then tracing out its implications for Psycho’s own cinematographic, figurative, and intertextual workings. The frequent shots of toilets, of cesspools, of Marion and the other characters constantly looking behind themselves clue us into the fact that the muscle tissue of the anus, rectum, and intestines informs Hitchcock’s mise-en-scène, editing style, and camerawork. They share the structure and functions of this tissue type, and taken together suggest that the eruptions of violence in the film only serve as embellishments of the real ethic of class elitism: that one’s salvation depends on consuming and amassing more than anyone else, that it depends on the intestinal fortitude to compete with others who feel a similar urgency to reduce the world’s things to their own shit. This chapter will then finally tease out some of the work Psycho continues to do on the slasher film, that subgenre, so successful in the 1980s and 1990s, featuring villains whose malformations make them as ugly and formless as shit, villains whose role in their respective series resembles the work of our gastrointestinal muscles to reduce everything that comes into contact with them to much the same.

What Goes In . . .

Weber’s study of the capitalist work ethic chews over the differences among certain Christian value-systems: that Catholics, for one, desire to sleep soundly, whereas Protestants desire to eat well.⁹ This tidy distinction sanitizes at the same time that it drops on the reader the deeply gastrointestinal materialism subtending Weber’s imagery and structuring those economic realities that necessitate a fierce work ethic for the sake of maintaining class imbalances, driving up consumer expenses, and reprocessing nonproductive sectors into their opposites. Weber argues, for example, that the “calling” is the “central dogma of all Protestant denominations” that reject the Catholic asceticism demanding the “surpassing of innerworldly duties” for the fulfillment of those duties “which arise from the individual’s station in life.”¹⁰ In short, the combination of conscientious work with the signs of material success offers some reassurance of God’s favor, thus establishing a ratio correlation of one’s savings to one’s salvation. However, the more significant correspondence at stake in Weber’s argument might translate “duties” into “doodies,” since the spiritualization of work, with its overvaluation of cleanliness, self-order, and thrift, might, as Sigmund Freud suggests, function as a reaction-formation to “what is unclean and disturbing and should not be a part of the body.”¹¹ Of course, the opening of Weber’s study concerns more than Christian attitudes to filth or the fantasmatic relation of shit to money; it concerns a sort of colorectal scedasticity, the distributional variation, turnover, and dispersion of “what is unclean” into the consumerist waste items and short-life technologies that clutter up our space. In fact, we might term this dispersion scatastic, in that it makes work-to-assets commensurable so as to convey, rather than the subject’s chances for salvation, its manic exteriorization of the “innerworldly” and the increase in the volume and concentration of its self-extension—or its capacity to fill up the space defining its relation to others with its own shit.

Weber thus argues that Calvinism, with its doctrine of the strict and inexorable distance of God from man and woman, represents in some ways the clearest and also the muddiest example of the impulse to fill in this distance with one’s shit, which involves taxing the anus for more than it can release. The Calvinist ethic of “constant self-examination” and the systematic “regimentation of one’s life” stimulate a certain “pressure” within the subject,¹² trapping it within a rheometric of fullness-emptiness. To feel a sense of fullness inside means to feel a sense of emptiness outside, due to the subject’s distance from God and others. The subject thus works to maximize its self-extension, to make what is inside it congruent with what is outside. The anus can never relieve this pressure, can never quite fill up this outside enough, and so the subject competes with others, rather than identifies or communes with them, as it anxiously surrounds itself with the objects of its consumption.

The subject, in so doing, disavows the relative shortfalls of its “innerworldly nature,” transfiguring its own shit into a concept of God as similarly separate and illimitable.¹³ Also, the subject compensates for its distance from other subjects, weighting the socio-moral order upon the expulsion of some from certain class strata and such consumer territories as one’s office, vehicle, or residence. As Weber suggests, Calvinism redirects “religious need to an inward emotional feeling in the present”¹⁴ even while it mystifies the more ahistorical mounting and discharge of shit into a condition that crudely structures the manufacture, distribution, and display of consumer disposables, and also shapes and colors the ever-modifiable dimensions of the rich elect. Or rather those who are full of shit and own a lot of it.

This “anal work ethic” at first seems another case of simple metaphorics; nonetheless, Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of exscription allows us to think of it as materially operative rather than merely figurative. According to Nancy, the body is “being inscribed-outside,” continuously exscribing its movements, desires, apperceptions, and “sense” from the inside to the outside. The subject, in other words, “ex-ists” outside of itself as it unremittingly rewrites its spatial orientation to other objects/bodies. Thus the subject, as it opens up to the “incorporeal,” to the world’s most fundamental alterities, does not really experience a “fall” or a “casting out” so much as a state of abandonment “at an extreme, outward edge that nothing closes up.”¹⁵ Nancy suggests that the reshufflings of our embodiment, relative to the distance of one subject from another, makes the socially transformative aspects of work more anal than fecal, in that the subject remains “open” to its sense-environment only as res extensa, only through touching it, tactilely and epistemologically. The body, in the constant dislocation of its form and dimensions, is thus always “appropriating/inappropriating,” always in creative touch with its socio-material “outside” while depositing its traces there at the same time.¹⁶ As Nancy argues,

The world of bodies owes its techne and its existence, or better, its existence as techne, to the absence of a foundation, that is, to “creation.” It incurs the tiny expenditure of a few grams that open a place, spacing an exposition.¹⁷

This exposition refers to more than the unstable textures of the body; it refers to the body’s always already immanent displacement and disfigurement, its constant transposition in space from where, as trace, it nevertheless remains, which enables us to extract a few grams of sense from the opening sequence of Hitchcock’s film.

The camera funnels into an open window on the Phoenix, Arizona, skyline, a visual move that Hitchcock will rework in the first murder sequence, where the mise-en-scène, through certain editing and cinematographic acrobatics, seems to spiral down the shower drain. Marion dresses after a tryst with Sam, while they discuss the financial difficulties that deter them from marrying each other. Marion, with some frustration, says, “I better get back to the office. These extended lunch hours give my boss excess acid,” suggesting at the outset of the narrative the significance of the digestive-excretory system to the film’s moral universe. Marion, in an attempt to redeem their sexual relationship from its “sinful” condition, treats the net deposit of $40,000 at the office as a scatastic expression of this “excess acid,” as the simultaneous appropriating/inappropriating of the company’s owner and clients, who in Marion’s eyes take in more than can sit well with them. Sam, meanwhile, tries to console Marion, claiming that if they marry at the moment, she can only expect to “live with [him] in a storeroom behind a hardware store in Fairvale.” Sam, working under Calvinist assumptions, realizes that the sinfulness of their extramarital relationship will condemn them to continual economic struggle as a sign of God’s displeasure with them. Moreover, the dialogue in this scene establishes the coordinates of the film’s “anal” workspaces: Sam envisions an outwardly respectable storefront in which to conduct the week’s activities, with a room in the rear of it for the couple’s “dirtier” affairs, in a rough delineation of the shower scene, as Norman meets Marion at the front desk of the motel, commits the murder in one of its rooms, and disposes of the mess in the swamp nearby.

The marriage scenario, as a spatial analogue to the murder, suggests that the couple’s work, whether in retail or realty, will only result in the two of them wasting away, squandering their energies selling their wares only to exchange the money they make off of them for other commodities, which, as they compile them, will only take up more space in their storeroom. The more material items they accrue and dispose of—“shit,” in colloquial terms, they can call their own—the more they might close their distance to God as a sign of divine favoritism, were they not first of all shut up, as Sam intimates to Marion, in a scrimp-and-save workaday existence.¹⁸ The sex act off-camera that opens the film thus flushes this dream down the drain, so to speak, even as it creates a moral stain that Marion tries to wash away throughout the narrative’s first section. After she skips town with the money, she constantly evades the eyes of others, as though fearing they might detect this stain, as well as constantly watching the rearview mirrors of the cars she drives, as though a trail might form from out of the “dirtiness” of the crime and the spirit or motives with which she commits it. The $40,000, or the few grams of that which might comprise such a trail, spaces the exposition of the “world of bodies” in the film’s opening scene, meaning that, even as it displaces Marion from the routines of the workweek, it also traces each and every one of this woman’s movements—driving, walking, trying to sleep on the roadside, or shying away a state trooper of whom she runs afoul—to what she has been doing in sexual rendezvous with Sam. The $40,000, while it technically extends the couple’s ability to consume, to freely waste what they fritter it away on, actually follows Marion as a stain of the efforts with which she tries to conceal these sexual-physical expenditures and convert them into a more socially acceptable relationship.

The aperture the camera enters, then, might seem the mouth of the film, in that the scene that it captures, the walls that it sees through, serves as fodder for its first section, energizing Marion’s exscriptive movement throughout the narrative, much in the way the stomach and the duodenum mechanically and chemically supply chyme for absorption into the walls of the intestine, energizing the rest of the organism with fats, amino acids, carbohydrates, vitamins, and other nutrients. According to Nancy, the body exscribes as it skims, thrusts,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Darkness into Light: An Introduction to the Four Tissue Types of Horror Cinema
• 1 Elbows and Assholes: The Anal Work Ethic in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
• 2 Spectral Filtering: Smart Television on the “Silver Screen” in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring
• 3 The Red Scare: Marxism, Menstruation, and Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror
• 4 Grindhouse Ago-Go: Sounding the Collagenous Commons of Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem
• 5 Spheres of Orientation: On Why Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm Series Is More Cerebral than One Might Think
• 6 The AIllusion: Intelligent Machines, Ethical Turns, and Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity
• 7 Monster Mishmash: Icon, Intertext, and Integument in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
• 8 “Little Children, It is the Last Time”: The Ovolutionary Trees of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist
• Conclusion   Post-Op: Giving Horror Films Another Chance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index