University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 8-2010 Queer tension : Le Teuer inside me. Nicholas Ryan Wood 1986- University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Recommended Citation Wood, Nicholas Ryan 1986-, "Queer tension : Le Teuer inside me." (2010). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1587. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/1587 This Master's Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. QUEER TENSION: LE TEUER INSIDE ME By Nicholas Ryan Wood B.A., Centre College, 2004 A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of English University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky August 2010 Copyright 2010 by Nicholas Ryan Wood All rights reserved QUEER TENSION: LE TEUER INSIDE ME By Nicholas Ryan Wood B.A., Centre College, 2010 A Thesis Approved on August 2, 2010 by the following Thesis Committee: TheSis Director ii ABSTRACT QUEER TENSION: LE TEUER INSIDE ME Nicholas Ryan Wood August 2, 2010 The film High Tension (2005) is a complex and powerfully threatening portrait of queer monstrosity and negativity. Upon its release, the film's twist ending garnered widespread derision, but there is a mad method, so to speak, in its insistence on purposeful irreconcilability. This thesis aims to tease out the nuances of High Tension's subversive twist. It examines the makeup and history of the slasher sub-genre of horror, as well as relevant 'criticism in the field, in order to locate High Tension's specific contribution. The film presents an image of queer monstrosity that performs what Michael Moon calls sexual disorientation, as well as a profoundly queer disidentification. In its final scenes, the film portrays a vibrant and violent queer sexuality, one that threatens beyond the screen. High Tension figures the terrifying manifestation of queer negativity, proffering a radical threat to the social itself. 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ................................................................................... .iii LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................... v INTRODUCTION ............................................................................ 1 SECTION I. ....................................................................................8 SECTION 11. ..................................................................................... 33 SECTION 111. .................................................................................42 SECTION N ..................................................................................46 SECTION V ................................................................................... 57 REFERENCES ............................................................................... 63 CURRICULUM VITAE ..................................................................... 67 IV LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE PAGE 1. High Tension (2003) DVD Cover. ............................................................7 2. High Tension Press Poster. ..................................................................... 32 3. Prom Night (1980) Press Poster. .............................................................. 32 4. High Tension Press Poster. ..................................................................... 32 5. Friday the lfh (2009) Press Poster. .......................................................... .32 6-14. The Kiss in High Tension .................................................................... 56 15. The Hospital in High Tension .................................................................62 16. The Dream in High Tension ... ............................................................... 62 17-19. The Final Scene in High Tension ......................................................... 62 v Introduction When the French film, High Tension, crossed the Atlantic into theaters in 2005, it never had much of a chance with American audiences. It was partially dubbed into English, the goriest scenes were shortened, and it was a foreign horror movie released in the middle of summer next to a slew of blockbusters. What few reviews it received were poor, focusing on the problems of dubbing, the terrible violence, and the nonsensical nature of the plot twist in the final reel. Audiences which were alienated by the initial dubbing were later shocked by the realistic violence perpetrated on a corpse, a family, and a small boy, and annoyed by the derivative aspects of a genre film. So great were the obstacles that when the twist finally came, it was met with nearly uniform derision and complete dismissal. It is then, perhaps, no surprise that High Tension has been largely ignored by the critical community. Four years ago, I came upon the film after hearing of its rather ingenious scene of decapitation by credenza, and was not disappointed. The film, in its original form on DVD, is a precise and brutal thriller. The narrative follows a sadistic killer (Le Teuer) and a strong lesbian heroine (Marie) embroiled in a tense game of cat-and-mouse, he to abscond with her love interest (Alex) and she to rescue the damsel. In the twist, the killer and the heroine are revealed to be one and the same. The twist which had stopped so many viewers cold struck me as astonishingly willful. What had been seen as nonsensical plot holes and bad editing, I found to be the purposeful irreconcilability that dealt heavily 1 with sexuality, gender, love, and violence. For years I struggled to understand the reasons why irreconcilability was brilliant rather than simply inane, gathering friends for showings and meeting the same wall of dismissal that the film had upon its release. This Thesis is the culmination of such striving-an effort to elucidate the meaning of the film and the subversive possibilities contained therein. In his study, Imps of the Perverse: Gay Monsters in Film, Michael William Saunders writes: The idea of the monster derives from two fundamental etymological myths: that monsters are anomalous creatures that serve as signs indicating the consequences of deviating from the natural order (Look what happens when you do bad things!); and that monsters are marvelous, monumental manifestations of the power of God (Look what God can do!). (2) The monster's fundamental purpose, as an image, "is to reveal the power and, more importantly, the terror, of divinity" (2). As such, it is intended to be seen, but "its nature as image is to discourage us, either through fear or through awe, from looking," or else we "endanger ourselves by presuming to look casually at what we are not meant to be able to bear" (2). For Saunders, it is no surprise that the queer is figured as a deviation from the natural order, but he believes that images of the queer monster possess a "subversive potential" for appropriating power (17). Michael Moon writes that merely showing an audience "powerful images of ostensibly perverse desires and fantasies," disorients "our currently prevailing assumptions" about sexual orientation (our own and otherwise), "by bringing home to us the shapes of desires and fantasies that we ordinarily disavow as our 2 own" (46). In that they force us to "recognize at least liminally our own familiarity or 'at­ homeness' with these desires, these images produce unheimlich-uncanny-effects" (746). Saunders believes that the "subversive potential" of queer monsters is realized because they "play havoc with the binary pairs of repulsion/desire and terror/fascination," which demonstrates "the proximate nature of such terms" (17). Judith Halberstam takes that a step further in claiming that, insofar as the monster inspires "fear of and desire for" the monster, it also inspires "fear of and desire for the possibly latent perversity lurking within" the viewer (13). Through the disruption of such binaries, the monster is uncannily brought too close to home. And Halberstam writes that "the postmodern monster is no longer the hideous other storming the gates of the human citadel, he has already disrupted the careful geography of human self and demon other," he is "already inside-the house, the body, the head, the skin, the nation" (162). Donald Wildmon, founder and head of the American Family Association, conceives of the ultimate danger of "looking casually" at such a proximate monster: "Acceptance or indifference to the homosexual movement will result in society's destruction by allowing civil order to be redefined and by plummeting ourselves, our children and grandchildren into an age of godlessness" (qtd. in Edelman 16). Before queers protest the homophobic rhetoric, promising to support the gods of social structure by marrying and keeping our perversions in the privacy of our own homes, Lee Edelman asks, "dare we pause for a moment to acknowledge that Mr. Wildmon might be right­ or, more important, that he ought to be right: that queerness should and must redefine such notions as 'civil order'" (Edelman 16)? Saunders