Affectivity and Corporeal Transgression on Stage and Screen
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CONSUMING MUTILATION: AFFECTIVITY AND CORPOREAL TRANSGRESSION ON STAGE AND SCREEN PhD Thesis, Lancaster University December 2012 Xavier Aldana Reyes, BA (Hons), MA This thesis is submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ProQuest Number: 11003437 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 com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 11003437 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 DECLARATION This thesis is my own work. It has not been submitted for the award of a higher degree elsewhere. Xavier Aldana Reyes December 2012 3 ABSTRACT Xavier Aldana Reyes, BA (Hons), MA Consuming Mutilation: Affectivity and Corporeal Transgression on Stage and Screen PhD Thesis, Lancaster University December 2012 This thesis suggests the possibility that psychoanalytic frameworks may prove insufficient to apprehend the workings of post-millennial horror. Through a sustained exploration of how affect theory may be applied to horror, I propose a new affective corporeal model that accounts for the impact of recent films such as Saw (James Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005). I also explore how such a theoretical approach exceeds cognitivism in favour of an understanding of the genre founded on phenomenology, Pain Studies and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘body without organs’. This thesis finds the seed for spectatorial affect in the dramatic tradition and its corporeal instantaneity. It thus also offers a brief genealogy of affective mutilation as it is evolves in Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama, the Gothic stage, the theatre of the grand guignol and Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Case studies of representative texts shed light on the affective innovations that cinema draws from in order to convey similar participatory experiences. I consider how contemporary horror appeals directly to the somatic body through a focus on moments of extreme mutilation. I therefore find it necessary to complicate traditional views of the genre as sadistic, and offer a more nuanced conceptualisation of visual mutilation that allows for fluid, organic and non- representational connections between on-screen bodies and spectators. Issues of cinematic identification and alignment are addressed in relation to key texts of the ‘torture porn’ and ‘snuff films’ subgenres. Ultimately, I show that the affective corporeal model may be used to analyse a number of texts which utilize and manipulate the organic aspects of human embodiment. Precisely because the chosen texts have not been traditionally studied under an affective lens before, the results render an innovative re-evaluation of their cultural and spectatorial dimensions. 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis could not have been written without my supervisors, Catherine Spooner and Brian Baker. I am forever grateful for their diligence, patience and time. I would also like to thank the English and Creative Writing department at Lancaster University for all the inspiring conversations and engagement with my work. Special thanks should go to John Schad, Liz Oakley-Brown, Alison Findlay, Andy Tate, Michael Greaney, Arthur Bradley, Kamilla Elliott, Keith Hanley, Lindsey Moore, Lynne Pearce, Jayne Steel and Rose Jack for all the support I have received from them over the last three years. I am also indebted to Janet Tyson, Lindsey King, Anne Setwart- Whalley, Caroline Sutcliffe, Leila Atkinson and Lynne Kellett, who have always been extremely helpful and warm whenever I have encountered problems. The library has been a major repository of information for me, and I am humbled by the generosity of Louise Tripp, who has consistently gone out of her way to source the most obscure and grisly materials. Thanks too to all my friends and fellow postgraduate students. I have learnt as much from conducting research alone as I have done from informal conversations with them. Lancaster has one of the most welcoming and exciting postgraduate communities I have ever had the luck to be involved in and I will miss them. I am particular grateful to Sarah Post, Chris Witter, Lucy Perry, Alan Gregory, David McWilliam, Stephen Curtis, Enrique Ajuria Ibarra, Malgorzata Drewniok, Neal Kirk, Chloe Buckley, Sunday Swift and Dawn Stobbart for pushing my thinking in ways I had never anticipated. Last, but not least, I would like to thank my family. Without their unending (transnational) support, none of this would have been possible. 6 CONTENTS Introduction: Corporeal Nightmares 8-30 Chapter 1. Theoretical Implications: Towards an Affective Model 31-93 of Horror Section 1. Psychoanalytic and Cognitive Approaches to 31-44 Horror Section 2. Reclaiming Corporeality 45-59 Section 3. Affective Corporeal Transgression 60-72 Section 4. Philosophical Implications of the Affective 73-93 Corporeal Model Chapter 2. Dramatic Affect: The Staging of Corporeal 94-169 Transgression Section 1. Early On-Stage Mutilation 94-111 Section 2. The Gothic Stage 112-139 Section 3. The French Theatre of Death 140-157 Section 4. Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty 158-169 Chapter 3. Cinematic Affect: The Screening of Corporeal 170-238 Transgression Section 1. Early Horror and the Cinema of Attractions 170-178 Section 2. Peeping Tom and the Challenge to Sadistic Cinema Section 3. Post-Millennial Horror: Torture Porn and Visual Affect Section 4. The Limits of Corporeal Transgression: Faux Snuff and Films about Snuff Conclusion: Horror, Affect and the Transgressed Body Bibliography Filmography INTRODUCTION: Corporeal Nightmares ‘The only object of terror is the body’.1 At the beginning of Eli Roth’s influential horror film Hostel (2005), a shy and good- hearted American named Josh (Derek Richardson) suddenly finds himself trapped within the walls of a sultry Amsterdam brothel. As he uncomfortably waits for his friends in a corridor that leads to various sex chambers, he hears loud screaming and assumes a prostitute is being beaten. Eager to help, he bursts into the room, but what he encounters far exceeds the already wild scenario played out in his mind. Rather than shouting for help, the woman in the room is fully clad in S/M gear and is offering a particularly loud customer a severe, but consensual, whipping. What is remarkable, however, is not the victim/punisher reversal, but rather that the dominatrix assumes Josh is spying on their sexual practices. Her automatic deadpan demand, ‘you watch, you pay’, is more largely indicative of the voyeurism inherent in the graphic displays of violence which have permeated the horror genre in the new century. It is not surprising that, after this sequence, Hostel proceeds to exploit the corporeal nightmares of torture chambers and their even more extreme and severe carnal treatments. It is my contention that, through horror’s marked emphasis on carnality, the boundaries dividing spectatorial and fictional bodies blur. A film like Hostel seeks, at least partially, to explore the possibility of finding pleasure in the consumption of mutilation. In this thesis I explore how carnage can and does generate a fonn of somatic affect. If modern horror has often been preoccupied with replicating dismemberment, mutilation, bodily transformation or murder convincingly, post- 1 Jonathan Lee Crane, Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), p. 9. 9 millennial horror cashes in on an even stronger affective connection between spectator and text. In 1983, Philip Brophy coined the word ‘horrality’ to refer to the growth of special effects in horror cinema and their particular convergence with a form of cinematic realism used to depict the thorough destruction of the body.2 Refusing the psychological in favour of the physiological, blockbusters like The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977) or The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) were described as cinematic carnival rides that would ‘tense your muscles, quicken your heart and jangle your nerves’. Corporeality was seen to have taken over the genre, privileging the ‘act of showing over the act of telling’ and galvanising cinematic and physical transgressions.4 However, if it is true that the slasher genre, which was at its peak at the time of Brophy’s writing, did contribute to the gradual increase in levels of on screen gore, one could argue that such has been the fare of horror since the first cinematic experiments of Georges Melies. Before the endless slaying and sexual indulgence of the Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) and Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) franchises, the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis had already caused a stir for the visual excesses they indulged in. Before him, the now celebrated Hammer Horrors brought gore into the age of Technicolor. Even the Frankenstein monster of the first Universal horror productions can be perceived as a major corporeal breakthrough in terms of the highly accomplished and realistic portrayal of its reanimated corpse. The story of horror is, to a certain extent, inextricable from both the constant overexposure of the body and