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Proquest Dissertations WHERE LIGHT IN DARKNESS LIES: THE GROTESQUE IN THEORY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FILM A Dissertation By SCHUY R. WEISHAAR Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Middle Tennessee State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December 2010 Major Subject: English UMI Number: 3459292 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI Dissertation Publishing UMI 3459292 Copyright 2011 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. uest ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 WHERE LIGHT IN DARKNESS LIES: THE GROTESQUE IN THEORY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FILM SCHUY R. WEISHAAR Approved: DA: Dr. David Lavery, Dissertafipn Director -c^. Dr. Linda Badley, Reader Qlk~ HAS? Dr. Allen Hibbard, Reader Dr. Tom Strawman, Chair, English Department Dr. Michael D. Allen, Dean, College of Graduate Studies DEDICATION For Felicia, Finn, Athan, and Kyle 11 ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates the work of five contemporary American filmmakers (Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Joel and Ethan Coen, and David Lynch) through the lens of the grotesque. Chapter I discusses the roles of genre and classical Hollywood style in the emergence of aspects of the grotesque in film history and suggests that the disintegration of the old structures of the industry, well under way by the 1960s and 70s, afforded filmmakers new opportunities to experiment with the grotesque. Chapter II provides a thorough examination of the theories of the grotesque that have been prominent in contemporary scholarship on the subject, beginning with Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin and moving to the more recent theories of Dieter Meindl, David K. Danow, and Geoffrey Gait Harpham, among others. The subsequent chapters on Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Joel and Ethan Coen, and David Lynch build on facets of grotesque theory. Each chapter begins by delineating a critical direction from within the more eclectic theory chapter (II) and specifying and extending the theoretical approach taken in interpreting the material. Chapter III focuses on locating a Bakhtinian relationship between the "official" and the "carnival" in Tim Burton's films. Chapter IV explores the connection and overlap of the mythic (in Harpham and Danow), madness (in Foucault's Madness and Civilization), and the grotesque as a prominent feature of Terry Gilliam's films. Chapter V interprets physically manifested responses to catastrophe and the acting style through which they are presented in the films of iii Joel and Ethan Coen as related to Geoffrey Gait Harpham's notion of "the grotesque as interval" (14-15). Chapter VI investigates the modernist grotesque (as theorized by Dieter Meindl) in David Lynch's films through figures and functions (associated with the concepts of the double and the abhuman) that threaten human and/or subjective identity and that also suggest some degree of conceptual overlap among the uncanny, the gothic, and the grotesque. Finally, Chapter VII, relying on reflections from Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and an excerpt from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, attempts to bring closure by linking the grotesque, with all of its vagaries and contradictions, with humanity itself. IV TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I: INTRODUCTION l Cinematic Grotesquely, Genre, and History l Establishing Shot 8 Matte Shot: Auteur/Grotesque 10 II: THEORIZING THE GROTESQUE: ART, BEING, AND CONTRAST 12 The Grotesque and Theory: Beginning Where There Is No Beginning 12 The Exorcist and the Clown: Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin 17 Of Gaps and Bridges: Other Theories: Dieter Meindl, David K. Danow, Geoffrey Gait Harpham, and Others 34 Conclusions: The Grotesque, Paradox, and Dialectic 48 III: TIM BURTON'S TWO WORLDS: INVISIONING THE CARNIVAL- ESQUE GROTESQUE AND THE OFFICIAL IN BURTON'S FILMS 60 IV: THE MYTHIC AND MADNESS: IMAGINING THE GROTESQUE WITH TERRY GILLIAM'S FILM 101 V: THE CROSSROADS IN COEN COUNTY: THE MUNDANE AND THE CATASTROPHIC IN THE FILMS OF JOEL AND ETHAN COEN 147 VI: "LOST IN DARKNESS AND CONFUSION": OBLITERATING THE SUBJECT IN THE FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH 182 VII: FADE OUT: CONCLUSIONS 226 WORKS CITED 233 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION "Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling ..., able to see only in front of them. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them. Between the prisoners and the fire, there is an elevated road stretching. Imagine that along this road a low wall has been built.... Also imagine, then, that there are people alongside the wall carrying multifarious artifacts that project above it." —Plato, The Republic, Book VII I: Cinematic Grotesquely, Genre, and History In an accompanying sketch that demonstrates Athanasius Kircher's "magic lantern" in the 1671 edition of his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, he has drawn a dark room divided in half: on one side is the box containing his invention; emerging from the other side of a partition is a shaft of light projecting an image on the brick wall some distance away (Parkinson 10-11). And what is the content of that image, now a foundational one in the prehistory of cinema? It is the figure of grinning death: a human skeleton, a sickle tucked under its right arm and an hourglass in its left hand (10). The grotesque, defined succinctly and judiciously by Phillip Thomson as "the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response": "the ambivalently abnormal," has been a part of the movies since their conception in or out of 2 other art forms and manners of visual representation (27). While it can be glimpsed across the history of popular film in America from the silents through the 1960s, allowed to explore variations amenable to various generic requirements (in the incorporation of grotesquery in depiction of the monsters of horror or of the ridiculousness in comedy, etc.), it is also chained in a way, tethered to the concept of genre.1 Even so, the collision of opposites on which the grotesque thrives is present in early American film, especially in comedy and gothic/horror (and, later, in science fiction/fantasy as well), though only to a certain degree. The demands of genre allow glimpses, elements or aspects, of the grotesque, but rarely on the scale of what is possible after the studio system falls apart and the production code with it. Silent slapstick comedies of the Sennett Keystone variety appeal to the grotesque in their clownish reliance on comic violence and play with the threat of death. The mild, Dickensian grotesquery of Chaplin's Tramp in The Gold Rush or Modern Times makes satiric comedy out of dehumanizing situations (Cook 202). Chaplin extends this trajectory even further in Monsieur Verdoux, his brooding, grimly comic film in which a middle aged clerk takes to romancing and murdering rich women in order to get their money to support his family. The most disturbing scene in this film may be the final one in which Verdoux walks away from the camera to his death at the 1 In Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond, Barry Langford argues that even as narrative cinema emerged as melodrama, a concept he uses to describe pregeneric cinema of the silent period, films are already being drawn toward generic poles, often associated with the class positions of viewers. He identifies melodramatic pathos as the center around which films as different as Griffith's Birth of a Nation and Chaplin's The Kid orient themselves, even as such films gravitate towards the confines of the genre film (42-43). 3 guillotine, but suddenly he is walking with a slight limp—Chaplin as lady- killer and Chaplin as lovable Tramp merge uneasily. Buster Keaton, too, plays with the comic grotesque, particularly in scenes like those in The Navigator or Steamboat Bill Jr. when the world seems to be crashing down around him, and he escapes death, often by chance, but remains apparently unaffected, keeping the stoic deadpan gaze on his face throughout. And others (W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, the anarchic Marx Brothers, et al.) extend this trajectory in their various ways. Whereas early comedy arrives at light grotesquery by engaging in humor through introducing the threats of violence, social problems, and catastrophe into comic situations, narratives, and structures, early film horror and gothic invert this strategy. The grotesquery in these films seems to rely on the mismatch of humor, ridiculousness, and the like within a gothic/horror aesthetic context reliant on the ominous style of German Expressionist cinema (Bordwell and Thompson 103). The films by directors such as James Whale (Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and Bride of Frankenstein), Tod Browning (Dracula and Freaks), and Karl Freund (The Mummy), among others, rely on exotic, threatening presences, represented in their films by actors like Boris Karloff and Bela Legosi, whose performances can at times cross the border from the terrifying into the ridiculous. At other times, films such as these seem to cast an ironic eye on their own subject matter, as the example of Browning's Freaks demonstrates. Freaks is a film that takes experimentation with the grotesque in this era of American filmmaking about as far as it can go within the Hollywood 4 system. With a cast composed mostly of actual circus performers (circus "freaks" to use the parlance of the variety of "show" they are associated with), Browning reverses the horror film, similarly to what Whale does with Frankenstein, and makes monsters out of the cruel "normal" people in the film.
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