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DARK DESIRES: Male Masochism in the Horror Film Barbara Creed from SCREENING the MALE

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DARK DESIRES: Male Masochism in the Horror Film Barbara Creed from SCREENING the MALE DARK DESIRES: Male masochism in the horror film Barbara Creed From SCREENING THE MALE: Exploring masculinities in Hollywood cinema Edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark 1993 The body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic (Kristeva 1982) Whenever male bodies are represented as monstrous in the horror film they assume characteristics usually associated with the female body: they experience a blood cycle, change shape, bleed, give birth, become penetrable, are castrated. Traditionally, the male body has been viewed as norm; the female body a deviation. One of the more popular medieval ideas of the difference between the sexes was that women were men turned inside out. Galen explains in careful detail how this reversal works. His discussion is part of a wider treatise justifying woman’s inferiority. A second reason is one that appears in dissecting...think first, please, of the man’s [sexual organs] turned in and extending inward between the rectum and the bladder. If this should happen, the scrotum would necessarily take the place of the uteri [sic], with the testes lying outside, next to it on either side; the penis of the male would become the neck of the cavity that had been formed; and the skin at the end of the penis, now called prepuce, would become the female pudendum itself...In fact, you could not find a single male part left over that had not simply changed its position; for the parts that are inside in woman are outside in man. (quoted in Bullough 1973:492) The reason Galen gives for this unusual state of affairs is body temperature. Because woman is colder than man, her bodily parts, formed when she was still a fetus, ‘could not because of the defect in the heat emerge and project on the outside.’ The view that women’s internal organs were the reverse of man’s external ones dominated medical thinking until the late eighteenth century; it even included the naming of the ovaries as female testes. One of the more novel superstitions, which 118 sprang from this view, was that if women stood or sat with their legs spread apart their internal organs would fall out—the vagina would drop through as a penis—and women would become men! Young girls who wanted to be ‘lady-like’ should keep their legs crossed at all times. At the heart of this medieval view, influenced no doubt by the Platonic theory of ideal forms, is a belief that there is only one sex and that men represent its more perfect expression. In the 1980 horror film Dressed to Kill, we find an unusual re-working of this ancient theme, although an interesting reversal has taken place— woman is now the prototype. Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill tells the story of Dr Elliott (Michael Caine) a man who masquerades as a woman, Bobbi, and who wants to have a sex-change operation. Dressed to Kill belongs to a group of horror films (Psycho, 1960, Homicidal, 1961, A ReFlection oF Fear, 1973) in which the monster is seen as monstrous precisely because she or he does not have a clear gender identity. Dr Elliott/Bobbi is monstrous because of his cross-dressing/transsexuality. Towards the end of Dressed to Kill, two of the main characters, Liz (Nancy Allen) and Peter (Keith Gordon), sit in a restaurant discussing transsexualism. Liz, a prostitute, begins to tell Peter, who is younger and relatively naive, about the procedure for changing sex. She explains that if a man wishes to become a woman he takes female hormones which will soften his skin, cause breasts to grow and stop him from having erections. Peter, who never shows any sexual interest towards Liz, is extremely interested in this proposition. ‘Instead of building a computer, I could build a woman,’ he says with great delight. Liz, who loves to shock, gives Peter all the details. A lot more is involved than simply letting it all ‘hang out.’ Liz: ‘The next step is...penectomy.’ Peter: ‘What’s that?’ Liz: ‘Well, you know. They take your penis and slice it down the middle.’ Peter: ‘Yeh, yeh. That’s what I thought it was.’ Liz: ‘Then castration. Plastic reconstruction and the formation of an artificial vagina of vaginal plastics—for those in the know.’ Peter: ‘I thought Elliott just put on a dress.’ Liz: ‘Oh, he did and a wig too. But that’s not good enough in bed when you’ve got to take everything off.’ Peter: ‘Well, I think I’m going to stick with my computer.’ In Dressed to Kill, woman’s body is represented as the ideal body desired by man—and voyeuristically by the camera. On the one hand, it might be argued that we cannot accept Bobbi’s desires as true for other men; Bobbi is psychotic, a monster whose desires are sick and perverted. On the other hand, the monster of the horror film is, in a sense, monstrous because he/she dares to speak the truth of repressed 119 Image rights not available Figure 15 Michael Caine in women’s clothes as ‘Bobbi’ attacks Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill desire. Whether male or female, the monster speaks the unspeakable, defies order and system, flaunts morality and the law. By drawing a number of parallels between Bobbi and Peter, De Palma, in fact, makes it clear that Bobbi’s desire to become a woman should not be seen simply as the desire of an insane mind. The problem with Dressed to Kill, and other films about the sexually ambiguous monster, is that, while they might present a critique of a culture fearful of changes in traditional sex roles, they also equate cross-dressing and transsexuality with monstrousness. In ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism,’ Freud described three forms of masochism: erotogenic, moral, and feminine. Erotogenic refers to the primary experience of ‘pleasure in pain’ and moral masochism to the ego’s need for punishment either from the super-ego or from outside powers. By ‘feminine,’ Freud did not mean ‘masochism in women,’ but rather the feminine position adopted by the subject in relation to masochistic desire. He proposed that what constitutes the essence of a masochistic phantasy in men is that they place the male in a ‘characteristically female situation’. But if one has an opportunity of studying cases in which the masochistic phantasies have been especially richly elaborated, one quickly discovers that they place the subject in a characteristically 120 female situation; they signify, that is, being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby. (Freud 1924:162) Freud also linked masochism to the infant’s developmental phases: fear of being eaten by the totem animal (the father) originates in the primitive oral phase; the wish to be beaten by the father relates to the sadisticanal phase; and castration is a precipitate of the phallic stage. Here Freud specifies two other forms of masochism in addition to those associated with the specifically feminine position: a desire to be eaten and a desire to be beaten. Phantasies of man’s masochistic desire to take up a feminine position are one of the central topics that the horror film exists to explore. Almost all articles (Lenne 1979, Neale 1980) written on the horror film define the majority of monsters as male, the victims female. Very few writers (Williams 1984, Hollinger 1989) have attempted to qualify this opposition in any way. Yet, it seems clear that in the process of being constructed as monstrous the male is ‘feminized.’ This process is not simply a consequence of placing the male in a masochistic position — although this is crucial to many texts—but rather it stems from the very nature of horror as an encounter with the feminine. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject provides us with a preliminary hypothesis for understanding the maternal bases of horror.1 Kristeva, like Freud, also defines the ‘feminine’ as essential to her project. In Powers oF Horror, Kristeva argues that the constitution of acceptable forms of subjectivity and sociality demands the expulsion of those things defined as improper and unclean. Whatever is expelled is constituted as an abject, that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (Kristeva 1982:4). A crucial aspect of the abject is, however, that it can never be fully removed or set apart from the subject or society; the abject both threatens and beckons. The abject constitutes the other side of seemingly stable subjectivity. ‘It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire’ (ibid.: 1). The abject constitutes the gap or hole at the border of subjectivity which threatens to engulf the individual when its identity is threatened. The place of the abject is ‘the place where meaning collapses’ (ibid.: 2), the place where ‘I’ am not. Kristeva distinguishes between three main forms of abjection; these are constituted in relation to food, bodily wastes, and sexual difference. The ultimate in abjection is the corpse. The body expels its wastes so that it might continue to live. But the corpse is a body which can no longer expel its wastes. The corpse is ‘the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled’ (ibid.: 3–4). The notion of the border is crucial to our understanding of the abject and the way it is represented in the horror film. The abject exists on the other side of a border which 121 separates out the subject from all that threatens its existence.
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