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Malice in Wonderland: the Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child

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Malice in Wonderland: the Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child The Dissertation Committee for Andrew David Scahill certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child Committee: ____________________________________ Janet Staiger, Supervisor ____________________________________ Mary Celeste Kearney ____________________________________ Jennifer Fuller ____________________________________ Julia Mickenberg ____________________________________ Harry Benshoff Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child by Andrew David Scahill, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2010 Acknowledgements I extend my deepest thanks to all of the individuals who have provided me support during this phase of my life. Thank you to Dennis and François, who were present at different stages in this process, but who both patiently served as sources of positive reinforcement and never let me give in to self-doubt. Thank you to my excellent interns who worked with me through the Intellectual Entrepreneurship program. My deepest appreciation goes out to Charlotte, Chris, Jeffrey, Sarah, Aaron and Elizabeth, who performed many of the tedious tasks of finding films, cataloguing texts, and scouring message boards for anti-queer rhetoric. Also, thank you to the excellent scholars who were willing to read different versions of this dissertation and offer up their suggestions for revision and further reading, especially Linda Mizejewski and Kathryn Bond Stockton. Thank you as well to my dissertation committee—Julia Mickenberg, Jennifer Fuller, Harry Benshoff, Mary Celeste Kearney, and Janet Staiger. They each provided guidance and insight, and managed to make both my prospectus and my dissertation defenses feel like a conversation between scholars rather than a test of my academic meddle. Finally, thank you to my mom Kathy, who managed to raise a fairly unrevolting child. iii Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child Andrew David Scahill, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: Janet Staiger “Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child,” explores the place of “revolting child,” or the child-as-monster, in horror cinema using textual analysis, discourse analysis, and historical reception study. These figures, as seen in films such as The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, and The Exorcist, “revolt” in two ways: they create feelings of unease due to their categorical perversion, and they also rebel against the family, the community, and the very notion of futurity. This work argues that the pleasure of these films vacillates between Othering the child to legitimate fantasies of child abuse and engaging an imagined rebellion against a heteronormative social order. As gays and lesbians have been culturally deemed “arrested” in their development, the revolting child functions as a potent metaphor for queerness, and the films provide a mise-en-scène of desire for queer spectators, as in the “masked child” who performs childhood innocence. This dissertation begins with concrete examples of queer reception, such as fan discourse, camp reiterations, and GLBT media production, and uses these responses to reinvestigate the films for sites of queer engagement. Interestingly, though child monsters appear centrally in several of the highest-grossing films in the horror genre, no critic has offered a comprehensive explanation as to what draws audiences this iv particular type of monstrosity. Further, this dissertation follows contemporary strains in queer theory that deconstruct notions of “development” and “maturity” as agents of heteronormative power, as seen in the work of Michael Moon, Lee Edelman, Ellis Hanson, Jose Esteban Muñez, and Kathryn Bond Stockton. v Table of Contents Introduction ………………………………………………………………….……………1 Chapter 1 Sugar and Spice and Everything Vice: The Terrible Performativity of Childhood ...…...48 Chapter 2 Demons are a Girl’s Best Friend: Possession as Transgression ..........................……….87 Chapter 3 Raising Hell: Parental Rejection and the Possibility of Gay Adoption ………………..119 Chapter 4 It Takes a Child to Raze a Village: Demonizing Youth Rebellion …………………….168 Afterthoughts Fear of a Queer Playground ……………………………………………………………214 Film Appendix …………………………………………………………………………239 Works Cited .…………………………………………………………………………...253 Vita ……………………..……………………………………………………………...269 vi Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child I think that many adults (and I among them) are trying, in our work, to keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in childhood: promises to make invisible possibilities and desires visible; to make the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in where it must be smuggled and, with the relative freedom of adulthood, to challenge queer-eradicating impulses frontally where they are to be so challenged. --Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies1 In August 2009, I attended a screening of the horror film Orphan (2009), just before it slipped out of the movieplex and into that brief abyss between theatrical release and DVD reissue. My delinquency in seeing the film was a shock to my friends and colleagues who had been emailing me images, articles, and reviews for weeks. Indeed, the poster design, with its black-eyed neo-Victorian child looming large below the tagline “There’s something wrong with Ester,” seemed the apotheosis of the research that had engaged me for two years. Part of my reluctance, I suppose, was the concern that the film would needlessly complicate everything that I had theorized thus far concerning the child-as-monster in horror cinema. I feared Orphan may have no place within my dissertation—itself a problematic child with no home. However the film—in which a nice 1 family adopts Russian orphan only to discover that she is, in fact, a deranged adult midget posing as a child—did not disappoint. In fact, it brought together multiple strains within this dissertation, in particular the manner in which these films reveal revolting children to be not children at all, after all, to allow for the representation of child abuse on screen. Waiting for the film to begin, I noticed (or suspected) that the theater was unusually filled with gay men—I cannot be sure, of course, but the signs (the intimacy, the looking relations, and the coupled body language) along with the usual stereotypical markers told me that this film had a curiously queer clarion call. Now more attuned to the audience in the theater, I focused on those enunciations of anxiety, disgust, and pleasure that define the spectatorial relationship to the horror film.2 In the film’s final act, I witnessed cries of pleasure and release as the childlike monster (revealed to no longer be a child) was vanquished—but more intriguing was the film’s previous 100 minutes, which often courted sympathy for Ester as a misunderstood and mistreated outsider. Indeed, the audience was no less vociferous in their pleasure when Ester physically attacked her grade school bully, leading at least one of my fellow spectators to yell “Get her!” as the would-be child monster pushed her tormentor off of a balcony. I rehearse this story to state simply that revealing the subgenre’s practice of Othering the child to enable fantasies of child hatred tells us only part of the story. The rest—the truly disavowed pleasure in the cinema of revolting childhood—is pleasure inherently more dangerous, more perverse, and more queer. If the cinema of revolting childhood creates a type of topsy-turvy Wonderland where children are empowered and adults are endangered so as 2 to ritualistically punish the child, then the looking glass reflects a certain pedophobic rage. But there is not one but many spaces of malice in these films: against the child, with the child, with the scene of desire. It is the question of spectatorship and pleasure that guides this dissertation—in particular when and how audiences derive pleasure (authorized or not) from the cinema of monstrous childhood and what forms those pleasures take. In Andrew Tudor’s book Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Film, he details the point in which the horror film gained blockbuster success in the United States. “Only occasionally,” he says, “has a horror movie transcended its specialization and attained real mass success. The Exorcist did so, as had Rosemary’s Baby (1969) before it and as would The Omen (1976) two years later.”3 One of the remarkable features of all three of these films is that the monstrosity at the center of each text is, in fact, a child. What does it mean for these movies, all about monstrous children, to achieve mass success? In what has become a seminal text in the study of horror cinema, Robin Wood claims in “An Introduction to American Horror” that the child as a figuration of the Other is one of the major tropes of the horror genre. Children are one of many oppressed groups, Wood states, that stand in for the eruption of chaos into a tenuous space of social order. The monster stands in, then, for those abjected elements of the self and society that must be denied or assimilated to ensure the coherency of hierarchical structures. 4 Several of these “othered” groups mentioned by Wood (the proletariat, women, non-white ethnicities, non-heteronormative sexuality) have been extensively examined within studies of the horror genre. Wood’s final group, however—that of children—has yet to be 3 given substantial treatment in critical accounts of the genre. Rather than assume that the child-as-monster is merely a miniaturized version of more adult, more “real” monsters, this dissertation argues for the singularity and the specificity of the child monster. The particularity and peculiarity of the child warrants an emotional ambivalence that alights in the fact that “the child” is a figuration we have all occupied, though one that seems alien or lost to us.
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