Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood

By S. Arnold

Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood examines the function of the mother figure in horror film. Using psychoanalytic film theory as well as comparisons with the melodrama film, Arnold investigates the polarized images of monstrous and sacrificing mother.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Apr 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781137014122

Book preview

Introduction

In the film Psycho (1960), the shy young Norman Bates demonstrates the powerful hold of the maternal on the filmic and cinematic imaginary. We hear the voice of Mrs Bates, chastising poor Norman for desiring another woman, we hear Norman express his concern and love for his mother and, finally, we see the mother kill Marion Crane. Of course there is no Mrs Bates. Or rather there is no physical, real mother, only a representation of her. That she does not exist, or no longer exists within the world of the film, seems inconsequential. In terms of how the film has constructed her and from how Norman has constructed her, we can already assume much about her: she was violent, overbearing, patronising. Yet it remains the case that there is no Mrs Bates; she is purely a representation. That one of the most memorable mothers of horror cinema is someone who was never truly there says much about maternal representation and the maternal imaginary/imaginary maternal in the horror film. This book does not seek to make any statements about ‘really lived’ motherhood. Instead it explores the function of maternal representation in the horror film. To return to the Psycho analogy: like Norman, the horror film represents the mother as a site of both fascination and repulsion. In other cases, she is stringently tied to the concept and practice of exclusive childcare, more so than the father, through her undeterred sacrifice for or, as in the case of Norman Bates, abject neglect of the child.

In the years following Psycho the mother has taken a more central role in horror cinema. This is not to suggest that she is absent in the genre prior to this date, merely that a body of maternal horror emerges during the 1960s. As Robin Wood suggests in his seminal essay on the American horror film, ‘since Psycho, the Hollywood cinema has recognised Horror as both American and familial’ (Wood, 1985: 210). For the sake of clarity this study is limited mainly to US horror cinema (as well as a cross-cultural comparison of US and Japanese motherhood horror), since to extend beyond this would necessitate too many divergences into cultural and historical clarification and explanation. Although my theoretical analysis of maternal horror draws upon mythical and historical constructions and symbolisation of motherhood and the maternal,¹ I specifically refer to post-1960s’ US horror cinema.²

Throughout the book I offer close textual readings of individual films as well as groups of films which are thematically similar. I support these readings with psychoanalytic film theory and broader feminist theory. My reasons for using psychoanalytic film theory as a method of understanding the figure of the mother in horror cinema are twofold: firstly, it offers a discourse of the nuclear family, which remains a central feature of the horror film; secondly, it offers a means of accounting for the underlying pleasures of film spectatorship generally and horror film spectatorship more specifically. Psychoanalytic theory has come under scrutiny of late and this is nowhere more evident than in the book Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare (Schneider, 2004) or Cynthia Freeland’s essay ‘Feminist Frameworks for Horror Film’ (1996). But those who seek to dismiss psychoanalysis as a project typically do so while offering an equally unscientific method for the analysis of the horror film. The act of both the psychoanalyst and the film reader is to interpret forms of data, whether the data is the information offered by the analysand or the film text. The horror film lends itself to analysis precisely because of its disruption of the ordinary, its shift from the normal and its provocation of anxiety. There is now a plurality of interpretive methods that may account for the pleasurable experience of such anxiety. One can interpret the film through philosophy, cultural studies or cognitive studies. As in psychoanalysis, no single method can determine the truth, nor can any claim to be more ‘truthful’ than others. Yet in the case of horror, the language and interpretive methods of psychoanalysis are often referenced directly or indirectly in the horror film. We might think of the tongue-in-cheek explanation offered for Norman Bates’ mental state at the end of Psycho. It both satirises and somehow validates the efforts of interpretation. As Noël Carroll, who is sceptical of psychoanalytic film theory, concedes, psychoanalysis ‘is certainly relevant, even apposite, to the analysis of many horror films, because many horror films presuppose, implicitly or explicitly, psychoanalytic concepts and imagery’ (2004: 257). Carroll suggests that psychoanalysis is useful as a method of interpretation insofar as we are now embedded in the language, imagery and symbolism of psychoanalysis. He uses the example of reading a film in terms of Christian imagery. A film may not consciously or reflexively refer to Christianity, yet it may still evoke Christianity simply because it is so pervasive. While Carroll suggests that this reading is, in a way, incidental, I would suggest that it is much more significant. Like Christianity, psychoanalysis is a cultural myth of sorts, yet it shapes ideas, understandings and practices much in the way that Christianity does. In other words, psychoanalysis responds to and is constructive of a psychodynamics of the subject, of the family and of culture more generally. That many horror films evoke some psychoanalytic concepts is perhaps more significant than the question of how valid psychoanalysis is as a ‘science’.

Typically, psychoanalytic understandings of the horror film draw upon the semantic elements of the horror film, such as the various iconographies closely associated with horror cinema: night-time settings, isolated locations, violence on the body and supernatural events. However, over the course of this book I pay particular attention to the syntactic elements of the genre (Altman, 2004), which I read as more typically associated with melodrama, or, at least, understood as melodramatic: familial relationships, plot structure or the theme of maternal sacrifice. As such, I draw upon psychoanalytic film theory more closely affiliated with melodrama. In doing so I hope to offer new ways of understanding how motherhood functions in the horror film. Indeed, both horror and melodrama are unstable categories, insofar as each often denies or problematises the concept of genre. For example, Gledhill notes:

Melodrama was at best a fragmented generic category and as a pervasive aesthetic mode broke genre boundaries. In so far as it had a visible generic existence in the family melodrama and its lowly companion, the woman’s film, melodrama could [not] offer ... the thematic and evolutionary coherence exhibited by, say, the western.

(Gledhill, 1987: 6)

Nevertheless, despite the fluid generic borders of both horror and melodrama, analysis of the genres, particularly in the context of psychoanalytic readings, tends to diverge at certain points. In the case of horror, psychoanalytic readings often refer to the ‘return of the repressed’, the uncanny, monsters of the id and the abject. In the case of melodrama, the readings often focus on Oedipal scenarios, excess, masochism and female desire. As such, psychoanalytic methods seem to separate into different strands of film genre. This book proposes that horror and melodrama intersect at various points, most specifically in representations of the mother. There has been a wealth of research on the mother in melodrama but relatively little on the mother in the horror film. Yet there are enough similarities in terms of the construction of motherhood to warrant the use of psychoanalytic theory usually reserved for the melodrama.

With this in mind, my central questions will be: are anxieties about motherhood and pregnancy that are raised in horror, as well as notions of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother, culturally and historically specific? Does an essential type of mother appear across a vast body of horror films? The book will investigate why horror films are so fascinated with the figure of the mother.

Chapters 1 and 2 of this book establish a framework for understanding two prevailing representations that have come to dominate horror cinema. The second half of the book uses this framework as a means of investigating how discourses of motherhood exist within the horror texts. Chapter 1, ‘The Good Mother’, delineates the identifiable features of the ‘good mother’, as constructed within dominant patriarchal culture, by drawing from historical incarnations in cinematic history, notably the maternal melodrama, as well as dominant Western culture. I argue that, while maternal horror cinema perpetuates an ideology of idealised motherhood, certain contradictions and ruptures emerge from the texts, indicating that the maternal ideal is not a stable construct. Chapter 2, ‘The Bad Mother’, revisits the most popular maternal figure in horror: that of the evil or transgressive mother. I ask whether she is punished for acting outside the behavioural pattern that characterises the ‘Good Mother’ and suggest that her correspondence to the dominant ideology of motherhood is historically specific. Chapter 3, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Japanese Maternal Horror and US Remakes’, examines how the US remake of Japanese maternal horror introduces and erases particular maternal motifs in order to situate the text within a Western ideology of good or bad motherhood. Comparing two culturally different yet thematically similar texts allows for the recognition of the ideology of motherhood present in US cinema. Such a comparison also indicates that Western approaches to psychoanalysis, which are often presented in universal terms, are limited and unstable and operate as much to reinforce dominant ideologies of motherhood as they do to explain how these very ideologies function. Chapter 4, ‘Pregnancy in the Horror Film’, examines how pregnancy in horror is often equated with apocalyptic and religious narratives, and specifically investigates how the pregnant woman acts as a marker between two opposing ideologies (family/individual, good/evil). In particular, I note that discourses of motherhood are imposed on the pregnant body, and that the pregnant woman is often equated with the mother. As such this chapter examines how discourses of pregnancy are replaced with discourses of motherhood.

Typically the horror film is understood as invoking deep, primal or unconscious fears about the human condition, death and so on. However, with these fears resides a certain corresponding pleasure. That the maternal (in either body or sign) so often acts as the site of pleasures or anxieties, or both, points to its extraordinary significance culturally and filmically. The following section outlines some of the debates and theories of motherhood and the maternal that shape the book, beginning with the broader investigations of cultural and psychoanalytic motherhood and moving into motherhood in cinema and, finally, motherhood in horror.

Psychoanalysis and the Good and Bad Mother

Typically, classic psychoanalytic theory, including Freudian and Lacanian theory, was driven by the desire to account for how the subject is culturally and socially formed and, in particular, to account for the gendered subject. Thus, psychoanalytic theory operated from the position of the infant and proposed that unconscious as well as conscious elements shaped the development of the child. Although her presence within psychoanalysis was sometimes limited and fragmented, the mother was and is thought to have a central role in this development. Speaking about how the mother was situated within early psychoanalytic theory, Nancy Chodorow, one of the most prominent voices to emerge on the subject of feminism, mothering and psychoanalysis, states that ‘an investigation of the child’s experience of being mothered shows that fundamental expectations of women as mothers emerge during this period’ (Chodorow, 1978: 77). Therefore, although psychoanalytic theory researches the child’s maturation by way of the mother, it also determines what kind of mothering is appropriate or inappropriate. For example, if the mother is indeed central to the child’s early life, later pathological behaviour in the child could be traced back to her mothering. In accounting for the formation of the subject, psychoanalytic theory also provides a template for successful mothering, which may in turn be accused (and indeed has been accused) of being ideologically motivated. Thus, psychoanalytic theory can be considered political in the sense that it touches upon wider issues regarding gender and social hierarchies. Although it claims to shed light on the unconscious and the psychic structures which constitute subjectivity, feminist psychoanalysts are careful to note the social organisations which determine the power dynamics that are productive of gendered subjectivity. Thus, within the field of psychoanalysis, there are tensions and contradictions particularly in terms of gender, and especially in terms of the maternal. For example, Chodorow reflects on the project of psychoanalysis:

In a society where mothers provide nearly exclusive care and certainly the most meaningful relationship to the infant, the infant develops its sense of self mainly in relation to her. Insofar as the relationship with its mother has continuity, the infant comes to define aspects of itself ... in relation to internalised representations of aspects of its mother and the perceived quality of her care.

(Chodorow, 1978: 77)

However, this mother, despite the appearance of her centrality and significance, takes on a variety of conflicting meanings which are dependent on gender (of the infant) and age (pre-or post-Oedipal). Freud, for example, situates the mother primarily in relation to the boy’s Oedipal journey. At first the child, who is as yet ungendered, imagines a fusional tie to the mother. The child at this stage is ‘pleasure seeking’ and autoerotic and the mother fulfils the child’s needs. During the later pre-Oedipal stage, according to Freud, sexual identity determines the course of the child’s development. The boy begins to desire the mother and project hatred onto the father, whom he sees as a rival for the mother’s attention. The girl, Freud claims, has a similar attachment to the mother; however, the Oedipal crisis marks the beginning of sexual difference (or the knowledge of sexual difference). Both girl and boy discover that the mother is without a penis, is ‘lacking’. The boy, who associates the penis with pleasure, is faced with the symbolic threat of castration (a threat perceived to be from the father) should he identify too readily with the mother. Because of this threat the boy will switch identification from the mother to the father and give up his desire for her. The father, representative of the superego, marks the transition to culture. The repression of the mother also marks the formation of the unconscious since the loss of the mother and the desire for her must be repressed, expelled from consciousness. The penis, then, is associated with power and authority, since to ‘have it’ is to be in a positive state in contrast to a woman, who does not have it and is defined negatively as a result (Freud, 1953). For Freud, the girl discovers the boy’s sexual difference and perceives herself to be lacking in relation to it (despite her having an equivalent). She blames the mother for denying her the penis, since the girl, too, recognises the power and significance attributed to it. Just as the boy gives up the feminine elements of his identity, so too will the girl give up the masculine elements of her personality (Freud, 1953).

For Freud, then, the mother is predominantly defined in terms of passivity or lack. During the pre-Oedipal stage she is simply an object of the child’s desires, wants and drives. Later, she is considered in terms of castration, of being without the symbolic marker of culture, the phallus, and this knowledge drives the girl to the Oedipal stage. Thus, unlike the boy, who is led to the Oedipal phase through the threat of castration, the girl already recognises herself as castrated. As a result, and as Freud suggested, the girl’s hostility to the mother is not due to the fear of castration, but results from the disappointment of being like the mother. The girl does not, as the boy does, move towards the father so much as move away from the mother. This has posed a number of problems for psychoanalytic theory, and for feminist and gender theorists, who find that the theories of infantile development reproduce patriarchal gender relations. For Jane Flax, ‘by privileging the oedipal phase and denying the power of the first object relation, Freud participates in and rationalises an act of repression both typical of and necessary to the replication of patriarchal culture’ (1990: 81). Freud later acknowledged the significance of the pre-Oedipal period for girls, in which the mother-daughter fusion ‘possesses a far greater importance in women than it can have in men’ (1931/1953: 230). Drawing from the works of Deutsch and Lampl De Groot, Freud acknowledged the role of the pre-Oedipal attachment between mothers and daughters. However, for Freud, the little girl never fully resolves her Oedipal crisis (despite his later acknowledgement that the parallels between a boy’s and a girl’s Oedipal phase were limited) since she cannot identify wholly with the father. Instead, the girl may develop what Freud termed ‘penis envy’, where she wishes to possess the symbolic marker of power, like the father. She may transfer her desire to her father (after turning from the mother, who she now perceives as castrated), with whom she wishes to have a child (as a replacement for the penis) and replace the mother. In either case (of male or female development) the mother is effectively sidelined in favour of the father, who becomes a point of identification or object of affection. While Freud did not pay much attention to the motivations of the mother (in comparison to her actions), the concept of sacrifice (of and by her) is clearly introduced here (it was to be developed further later on). Freud’s ‘mother’ is essentially a passive one, and so any activity will be acted upon her, rather than her taking any action.

For Lacan, language becomes the central marker of difference, rather than biology. In addition, Lacan foregrounds the significance of the pre-Oedipal relationship with the mother for both the boy and girl (1977). Although the mother will, as Freud also suggests, take up a negative relation to the phallus in time, in the pre-Oedipal stage she seems omnipotent to the child. Like Freud, Lacan believes that the mother’s desire is for the phallus, although, unlike Freud, Lacan believes that it can never be fulfilled through having a child. Rather the mother continues to invest in the child as phallus and the child tries to ‘be’ the phallus for the mother, be what she really desires. This state, for Lacan the pre-mirror, is one of contradiction. On the one hand the mother is omnipotent to the child, yet at the same time her desire indicates that she is lacking something. The child has fantasies of being devoured and engulfed by this mother, since it is subject to her absence or presence. Here, the child is in the maternal realm, which is not defined by language (the Symbolic, the Law of the Father). However, the child comes to realise that the mother cannot satisfy her own desire. She lacks the phallus that she so desires. Similarly the child realises that it cannot ‘be’ the phallus that the mother wants to have.

Lacan, in contrast to Freud, maintains that the phallus is a signifier of lack; it is a mere symbol that cannot really be ‘had’ by anyone. However, there are crucial differences in how man and woman will take up a position in relation to the phallus, either as ‘having’ the symbolic phallus (male) or ‘being’ it (female). To be the phallus, therefore, is to be the object of desire (one can begin to see the curious position that women find themselves in, being the phallus but also desiring it). For Lacan, what marks the transition from mother-as-omnipotent to mother-as-lack is the mirror stage, in which the child moves from a state of dependence to independence (from the Imaginary state of the mirror stage to the Symbolic governed by the father). This moment is crucial for the infant’s ego or identity formation. The infant, having experienced itself as fragmented and feeling a mixture of love and hate towards the mother, now begins to experience itself as unified. The infant begins to perceive a ‘self’ in the reflection of another (its mirror reflection or the mother). This is an imaginary self, as it is based on misrecognition of a whole and complete ‘self’, something which is not a true reflection of the infant. Hence, Lacan terms this the Imaginary. This ruptures the fusion between mother and child, since the child now recognises separation. This instigates desire in the child, since separation from the mother leads to feelings of loss of fusion. This desire will always remain unfulfilled, however, since to achieve it would mean the obliteration of the self. Fusion with the maternal is always what is out of reach and impossible. The maternal body comes to represent both the sense of fulfilment (the memory of it) and unfulfilled desire (the impossibility of a return to that time). At this stage the child will acquire language (dominated by the phallus) as a means of compensating for the loss of the mother, as a substitute for it. It will submit to the Law of the Father. For Lacan, this is the Symbolic and, as Elizabeth Grosz summaries Lacan:

The process of social construction is predicated on the necessary renunciation and sacrifice of the child’s access to the maternal body and the child’s submission to the Law of the Father. The paternal figure serves to separate the child from an all-encompassing, engulfing, and potentially lethal relation with the mother.

(1990: 142)

Thus, the maternal functions as a source of ambivalence for the child: something which must be repressed through the acquisition of the language of patriarchal authority.

Apparent within these theories is an obvious lack of maternal subjectivity or perspective. However, they inadvertently point to an idealised mother imago through the construction of her opposite, or rather by presenting the threat of the mother not intercepted by the third term of the father. Early fusional bonding with the infant is permitted so long as it does not interfere with the transition of the child to the Symbolic realm. Grosz, paraphrasing Lacan, goes on to identify the ways in which the mother may step beyond her prescribed role:

If left to itself, the mother-child relation would entail a vicious cycle of imaginary projections, identifications, internalisations, fantasies, and demands that leave no room for development or growth. Lacan claims that if the child and mother form an enclosed, mutually defined relation, relations with a third, independent term become impossible ... . The unmediated two person structure of imaginary identifications leaves only two possibilities for the child, between which it vacillates but cannot definitely choose: being overwhelmed by the other, crowed out, taken over (the fantasy of the devouring mother/voracious child); and the wretched isolation and abandonment of all self-worth by the other’s absence or neglect (the fantasy of the bad or selfish mother/child).

(1990: 50–51)

This suggestion of a Bad Mother, who identifies too extremely with the child, prefigures a Good Mother who will give up this identification for the Law of the Father. The Bad Mother can operate on two levels: she may resist giving up the child (corrupt maternal power), or there may be no third term available to facilitate the child’s transition into the Symbolic (the terrifying fear of matriarchy). Matriarchy and maternal power are, therefore, figured as primitive, archaic and boundary-less, since they are not governed by language, culture, or the social. Maternal power is figured as violent, destructive and detrimental to the child.

The Good Mother, on the other hand, recognises the Law of the Father as legitimate. She acknowledges the language of the Symbolic as authoritative and, in doing so, enables the boy to move from a position of ‘being’ the phallus (the object of the mother’s desire) to ‘having’ it. For the girl, access to the phallus is a possibility if she accepts being the object of male desire. Lacan points to how the Good Mother operates, not as a passive object, who bears no relation to the Symbolic, but as a constituting element of the Law of the Father,

It will be said that the accent is placed precisely on the link of love and respect, by which the mother does or does not put the