Ghosts: 'What Lies Beneath' and 'The Others'

UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Escaping entrapment Gothic heroines in contemporary film Onaran, G. Publication date 2017 Document Version Other version License Other Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Onaran, G. (2017). Escaping entrapment: Gothic heroines in contemporary film. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:25 Sep 2021 CHAPTER II ghosts: What Lies Beneath and The Others not so happily after all: from the marital gothic to the maternal gothic In this chapter, I will investigate two contemporary gothic films, namely The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001) and What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, 2000), in order to explore the intricate workings of patriarchal family values and how these affect the contemporary gothic heroine. In doing this, I will follow Massé’s path and try to go beyond a classical psychoanalytic reading by incorporating a Deleuzean perspective in order to explore the deterritorialising potentials of these films. I will start by investigating the political implications of the ‘repression’ theme in the Gothic. Therefore, rather than focusing on the repressed personal traumas of the two films’ heroines, Grace and Claire, I will include social and cultural repressions by formulating the Gothic heroine herself as a symptom of a cultural trauma that needs to be addressed in order to break the Gothic repetition. I will continue by incorporating a Deleuzean framework and try to broaden my political analysis even further. I will mostly deal with becomings and how these are related not only to the heroine’s subjectivity but also to generic deterritorialisations that hybridize the Gothic with influences from the action film. The Others is a typically Gothic film in many respects, with its iconography, setting, and allusion to the supernatural. What Lies Beneath also follows Gothic conventions closely by presenting a typical ‘woman-plus-habitation’1 situation. Both films may be further studied with reference to Massé’s marital Gothic. In her study of Gothic literature, Massé identifies two ‘parts’ for the Gothic in accordance with its historical development: the earliest form of the genre concerns courtship, within which stories usually end in a wedding. The other variant, which Massé calls marital Gothic, began in the nineteenth century. It takes up from 1 Holland, Norman N. and Leona F. Sherman. “Gothic Possibilities.” New Literary History, No. 8 (1977): pp. 279-94. 47 the wedding and deals with the uncertainties of marriage.2 Massé especially focuses on this latter variant, defining it as “a later form of the genre where the husband is present at the beginning rather than the end of the story and ‘repeats’ the role of the father.”3 In these stories, after escaping from her father’s house by getting married, usually quite hastily with a man she barely knows, the heroine finds herself in the same nightmare she was trying to escape: the husband turns out to be the same kind of tyrant the father was, taking away the heroine’s voice, movement, property and, thus, identity.4 While in both the films explored here, the heroines do suffer from these conditions, The Others seems to move one step further, to the next step in marriage that a woman is expected to take: motherhood. Thus, I will call this variant, the maternal Gothic.5 grace and claire Alejandro Amenábar’s film The Others, tells the story of Grace (Nicole Kidman), a religious woman, and her two children, Anne and Nicholas, who have been deserted in their great mansion during the Second World War when their father/husband left to join the army, and all servants took off one morning without notice. The children are photosensitive, meaning that daylight causes them to break out in sores; it could even kill them. Hence, all the mansion’s curtains and doors have to be kept shut at all times. One morning, three people – an older woman, an older man and a young woman – arrive, seemingly to apply for jobs as servants. Apparently they had worked in the house many years ago. The Others starts with their arrival, and the spectator is introduced to the children, the house and its strict rules at the same time as they are. Something is ‘off’ in this house. The children talk about a mysterious event that happened ‘that day’, and about how their mother ‘went mad’. Grace, however, doesn’t want to hear a word about it. Furthermore, Anne claims that there are people in the house and scares her little brother by telling him that a little boy comes into their room at night, which makes Grace, who does not believe in ghosts, very angry. Gradually, however, she also witnesses strange events. Initially she suspects the servants, whom she believes to be plotting something. Eventually, however, it turns out that Grace murdered the children and 2 Massé, Michelle A. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press (1992): p. 20. 3 Ibid., p. 12. 4 Ibid., p. 12. 5 The two films I will discuss in the next chapter (Flightplan and The Forgotten) may also be regarded in this category. Whereas, for instance Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby (1968) may be considered as a transition film where anxiety and paranoia are located in the experience of pregnancy. 48 then committed suicide. They are now ghosts and so are the servants whereas the ‘intruders’, who initially seemed to be ghosts, are actually living people. A family wants to move into the mansion but, having sensed a ‘presence’, they are holding séances with a psychic to get rid of the ghosts. When Grace and the children finally realize this, they scare them off and make a pact to hold on to the house, to never let anyone in. The film ends with their chanting, “This house is ours!” What Lies Beneath (2000) by Robert Zemeckis tells Claire’s (Michelle Pfeiffer) story. Claire lives with her husband Norman (Harrison Ford) in a beautiful house by a lake in Vermont, which used to belong to Norman’s father. Norman is a genetic engineer, which was also his father’s profession. Claire used to be a successful cello player, giving concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York. But, when Norman was offered the DuPont Chair in Genetics at the university in Vermont (which also was his father’s position) they moved there and Claire had to give up her music career. Claire sees a therapist because of memory loss she suffered after a car accident she had a year ago. Claire has a daughter named Caitlin from a previous marriage to a musician. When Caitlin leaves for college, Claire remains alone in the house and starts to reminisce about her old days as a musician. She also develops a curiosity about the new neighbours – Mary and Warren Feur – who fight and make love very loudly. She snoops around their house and, when she sees Warren carrying a big garbage bag out of the house one night, starts to believe that he has killed his wife and is now disposing of the body. Meanwhile, strange things happen in her own house: doors open by themselves, pictures fall... Then, at one point, Claire sees a ghost. She immediately shares her experience with Norman but he dismisses her. Thus, she starts to investigate the mystery behind the ghost who keeps visiting her by herself, with some help from her friend Jody. Eventually, it turns out that Norman had an affair with one of his students, Madison (Amber Valletta), and Claire caught them one day in the house. She left in a hurry and had an accident, causing the amnesia. As Claire gradually recovers her memory she also finds out that Norman murdered Madison and threw her body in the lake. Now Madison’s ghost is haunting them. When Claire refuses to turn a blind eye to this and insists that Madison’s body needs to be retrieved from the water, Norman tries to kill Claire as well. While the two are fighting, they fall into the lake together. As Norman tries to drown Claire, Madison rises from the deep and holds Norman back. Ultimately, Norman drowns, Claire is rescued, and Madison gets a proper burial. The film ends with Claire visiting Madison’s grave. 49 the return of the repressed One of the most prominent themes of the Gothic has been defined from a psychoanalytic point of view as ‘the return of the repressed’. For instance, Jerold E. Hogle, who studies the Gothic extensively, explains that when something haunts the protagonists, it is usually something that has been repressed and that now returns (usually with a vengeance). “These hauntings can take many forms, but they frequently assume the features of ghosts, specters, or monsters (mixing features from different realms of being, often life and death) that rise from within the antiquated space, or sometimes invade it from alien realms, to manifest unresolved crimes or conflicts that can no longer be successfully buried from view.”6 Since The Others plays a trick (which I will discuss in detail below) with the typical Gothic formula, the haunting and its implications need to be analysed in relation to both scenarios in this film.

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