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Real Nightmares a Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the College of Arts

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Real Nightmares a Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the College of Arts Real Nightmares A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts Jayme Russell June 2011 © 2011 Jayme Russell. All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled Real Nightmares by JAYME RUSSELL has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Mark Halliday Professor of English Benjamin M. Ogles Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT RUSSELL, JAYME C., M.A., June 2011, English Real Nightmares Director of Thesis: Mark Halliday This is a group of poems, prefaced by an attempt to explain Dario Argento’s influence on me as a poet and how our approaches to writing about dreams, nightmares, and the flimsy line between reality and consciousness coincide. In dreams we build our reality. In both Argento’s films and my poems this construction of inner and outer space, as well as the emotion attached to that space, is essential. The characters, in both the poems and the films, represent different identity roles that we all struggle with. Approved: _____________________________________________________________ Mark Halliday Professor of English 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks to Ike Oden, who endlessly read these poems in every draft form. Thanks to my son Dylan Yonker, who recently recognized how hard writers work. Thanks to my fellow writers and friends Damien Cowger and Ashley Cowger for workshop feedback. Thanks to Mark Halliday, Jill Rosser, and Eric LeMay for support and understanding. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ………………………………………………………………………………3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………...4 INTRODUCTION: DISCOVERING IDENTITY IN DARIO ARGENTO’S SURREAL FILMS…………...………………………………………………………………………...7 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………...20 REAL NIGHTMARES.………………………………………….……………………....21 I. The Child You have made me Mnemosyne………………………………………....23 Frankenstein’s Zombie…………………………………………………...24 Soar…………………………………………………………………........25 White Shadows…………………………………………………………..26 Voyeur…………………………………………………………………...27 I Don’t Want to Play……………………………………………………..28 Riding Upside-Down…………………………………………………….29 II. The Child Changes I Was………………………………………………………………..……31 Mangosteen………………………………………………………………33 We Know Basements and Attics………………………………………....34 Moon Madness…………………………………………………………...35 Mind the Gap………………………………………………………….....36 Synaptic Gap……………………………………………………………..37 6 On the Table……………………………………………………………...38 III. The Mother Latches Do Not Lock and Hinges Do Not Hold…………………………40 The Town Police Insist I am Paranoid All Summer………………..……41 Slice of Life…..………………………………………………………….42 Spiraling…..……………………………………………………………...43 Sacrificial Stare………………………………………………………….44 Internal Instincts……….………………………………………………..45 A One-Sided Conversation……….……………………………………..46 Dreams Born……………………………………………………………..47 IV. Reflections Looking Glass Girl…………………………………………………….....49 Reality Checks to Gain Lucidity…………………………………………50 Directed Dreams……..…………………………………………………..51 Memory Processing Through Stages of Sleep………………..…………54 7 INTRODUCTION: DISCOVERING IDENTITY IN DARIO ARGENTO’S SURREAL FILMS “Keep telling yourself it’s all in your mind.” -Bird with the Crystal Plumage trailer Trembling, Sara closes and locks the door. Slowly a straight razor blade enters through the crack in the door. Repeatedly and steadily the knife rises and falls, clinking metal blade on metal lock over and over. At any moment, the lock could open, letting the killer inside the room. Frantically, Sara crawls onto a pile of flimsy boxes and through a small window. However, the more she runs the closer she is to being caught. On the other side of the window, she drops down-- into a room full of razor wire. This room is a weapon. The more Sara struggles to escape the tighter the wire grips. Impossibly, the killer is now ahead of her, reaches into the room, and cuts her throat. When I watch a scene like this one from a Dario Argento film, I feel as if I am in a nightmare. Argento forges a deep emotional connection with his audience, while deftly blending psychology and dream into his own surreal reality. When others read my writing, I want them to feel an initial reaction to the imagery but also to look deeper into the psychological elements present. I want them to feel and think the way I do when watching an Argento film. These movies do not rely on logic or narrative, but they do rely on emotion and intense visceral reaction. The films mimic lyric poetry, shaping the most grotesque ideas into beautiful hyper-stylized images. Upon first watching these films, a viewer may only concentrate on his or her own visceral reaction to the unfolding mystery; however, a closer examination reveals that these films are about deep 8 psychological concerns and questions of identity. Argento’s films captivate me because he creates a dream setting to struggle with aspects of psychology--identity, disrupted family dynamics, and the relationship between victim and victimizer. Argento’s movies have basic similarities in story structure. At the heart of each movie is a mystery, the identity of a killer, which the main character searches to discover. In Deep Red Marc Daly, like Sara and other main characters, tries to work out the mystery with a key buried in his subconscious. The main characters always have a clue that they think about endlessly: in Suspiria the phrase “secret irises,” in Deep Red a composition of faces, in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage a painting, and so on. Most of the characters search for the killer’s identity while fleeing from the killer through elaborately lush set designs, often washed with bright red and blue lighting. In contrast with the bright primary colored setting, the faceless killer hides in shadow, is a silhouette, or can only be partially seen, usually showing hands or eyes without a face. The threat of this faceless killer mimics a dream in which someone is chasing the dreamer but no one is seen. The faceless killer is a reference to Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow. In response to a question in which his interviewer calls the psychology in Suspiria “weird,” Argento says, “It’s just not Freudian, that’s all. It’s Jungian…When the psychiatrist in Suspiria says that bad luck doesn’t come from broken mirrors, but from broken minds, I was thinking of Jung” (McDonaugh 241). Many other references to Jung’s ideas appear in various films. Sara’s pursuit in Suspiria is one of Argento’s most intense moments on 9 film. As Sara backs away, the viewer can see a black outlined human form in the shadows. Sara forebodingly backs directly in front of the form, as if it is her shadow. There are many other instances in Argento’s films in which the killer is the character’s Jungian shadow. In Tenebrae, the police chief bends down to reveal the killer standing directly behind him. He stands back up again perfectly covering the killer’s face with his own. In Deep Red, the killer, who is just behind her but unseen, pushes Helga Ullman into a window. According to Jungian psychology: When dark figures show up in our dreams and seem to want something, we cannot be sure whether they personify merely a shadowy part of ourselves, or the Self, or both at the same time. Divining in advance whether our dark partner symbolizes a shortcoming that we should overcome or a meaningful bit of life that we should accept--this is one of the most difficult problems that we encounter on the way to individuation. (Jung et. al. 184) The superimposition of characters upon each other interests me in my own work. In dreams the shadow character chasing the dreamer is not literally a character. They are projections or shadows simply embodying the anxiety or the problems of the dreamer. In several of my poems the speaker runs from an entity, but ultimately I want the entity to be the source of the speaker’s restless state of mind. Because the killers who lurk in the shadows are deeply connected with Argento’s settings, the violence connects with the surroundings, one example being at the beginning of the film Suspiria, perhaps Argento’s most surreal film. A girl named Pat stares through a window, out into the black night. She has been fleeing from someone or something. Pat 10 thinks she has escaped but feels paranoid, believing that she sees something right outside her window. Yet the lighting in the room allows her to focus only on her own reflection in the window. She places her face closer. She holds a lamp to the glass, but still she can only see herself. Then suddenly glowing yellow eyes flash open in the dark reflection. A hand breaks through the window barrier and pulls Pat’s head closer, smashing her screaming mouth against the glass. The character’s interaction with the window is one example of a character examining the setting closely and trying to see what they cannot, as well as an example of how a killer uses the setting to hurt a victim. Spaces are gendered in these films. Outside spaces are masculine and expansive, usually filled with large architecture and male sculptures. In these spaces, the victim is completely exposed but usually not attacked. Inner spaces appear to be safe, but the majority of victims are killed inside. The masculine figure dominates both outer and inner spaces, eliminating the people inside. I also deal with gendered space in my poems. In several poems a male figure is outside and threatens to intrude upon the woman or child in the inner spaces. By gendering the spaces, I hope to set up a tense and anxiety-filled situation, which allows the voice to be matter of fact without being anxious, like an objective camera lens. Exaggerated details in the setting are important in visually cueing the viewer in on the dream. The color of blood is not blood red but a primary paint color red. The color draws attention to the fact that this is not a realistic scene. The extreme brutality of the killings and the excessive chase scenes make the audience feel extreme anxiety and fear, while recognizing that the images are not realistic because of the color and the extreme 11 amount of blood.
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