My High School Sweetheart Did It: Today's Trauma for a Wholesome Anti-feminist Final Girl.

This, it seems to me, is the premise and thus a more suitable title for recent horror DVD release (in the UK anyway), My Bloody Valentine (2009). I wanted this piece to publish at the same time as the film was released on DVD (and yes I realise I'm two weeks late there), most notably because I never got to go see it at the cinema in 3D (a most irritating admission on my part considering my own vested interest in 3D as a medium; I wrote my frickin' masters dissertation on it). So, what follows is my review of the film in 2D, which will of course ignore what I can only assume are the few redeeming features of the film, for most likely the blood splatter and bullet-time cinematography would have been far more stimulating up close and personal in 3D (and no, sitting extra close to a 2D screen is in no way a worthy substitute). But as the two dimensionality of its home viewing counterpart fell relatively flat, I'm going to hone in on the absurdity of its characterisation, specifically of its female protagonist, the emptiness that she embodies, and her ultimate effect in rendering the film a huge disappointment. Basically, it shits all over the very good work other films of the genre have done in presenting powerful, contemporary, kick-ass final girls. 

As a female viewer, one of the great things contemporary horror gives me is the presentation of a Final Girl (for more about this term see Carol J. Clover's excellent book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 1992), who is strong and willful in the presence of societal/patriarchal horrors; she survives despite the odds being favourably against her. But, unlike such films as I Spit on Your Grave / Day of the Woman (1978), All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006) and Martyrs (2008), the protagonist in My Bloody Valentine is pathetic and reassertive of capitalist/religious/patriarchal ideologies. 

Jaime King plays Sarah Palmer, the busty, beautiful final girl and 'all-American moral mom' whose extreme stereotype is pit against the other similarly overdrawn female characters in the film; slutty and outspoken Irene (Betsy Rue) and bitchy back-stabbing mistress, employee and friend to Sarah, Megan (Megan Boone), who both, unsurprisingly for their respective 'sins', die bloody and violent deaths. Not exactly new territory here, and certainly a thinly veiled cinematic confirmation of the sanctity of marriage & the virtues of heteronormative life. Dull yes, but at least the deaths are interesting in their exploitation; Irene, who is seen having rampant sex with a characterless man finds out she is being filmed and treated like a prostitute, (unsurprising really, most women who have sex in a non monogamous manner in horror flicks get punished according to their so-called 'crimes'), but Irene bears no shame and, tits out, runs outside following said man to retain the video footage of her exploits- a thinly veiled guise for what's left of her dignity- but failing (of course) to retrieve the tape, she watches as the man who she just fucked gets killed and then runs timidly (breasts still bouncing) back into the sleazy motel room, home to her 'sins', before being bloodily butchered herself. Nice. 

Megan's death is even more interesting for as she carries the unborn child of Axel (boss and supposed 'friend' Sarah's hubby), her punishment is not just death but the most bloody & smeared death of all; the excess of blood involved in her murder accounts for her 'deserved punishment' (in a Freudian sense) as woman who cannot bleed. Pregnant, she is unable to menstruate and so she is almost situated in a position of machismo; certainly she is shown to be stronger and ballsier than Sarah is. Her punishment is the ultimate: body and bastard baby bloodily smeared all over a wall so that the Other woman who challenges the holy sanctity of marriage is publicly and brutally punished for her anti-ideologically sound crimes.

As the film goes on it appears to be increasingly confused about its own identity and no sequence better illustrates this than the typical psychoanalytical nexus: the Freudian moment. Sarah is confronted in the mine/mind by her two beaus - one of which has cheated on her and the other who left her. The 'return of the repressed' is evident in Tom's return to Harmony, but also through his own character's troubled repression of events past. Unfortunately, layering repression isn't as fascinating a filmic device in this instance as one would usually find because of what follows: as Sarah confronts them both trying desperately to pin 'psycho-killer' on one of her former fucks, she enters her own psyche; Sarah is the Id, Axel her ego and Tom her superego. She listens to each of them in turn unsure as to which is telling the truth. That her fragile mind is represented as a woman in doubt conflicted by the two patriarchal voices in her head is insulting enough, but My Bloody Valentine takes it further and presents the choice as one between unrequited love/road to adultery and the sanctity of holy matrimony. Wait, can you guess which one she chooses? It is at this juncture, abandoning the Freudian moment altogether, that her asshole husband takes the moral high ground telling her to shoot them both - at least then she won't be stuck down in the mine with a psycho-killer. Aw, isn't that sweet? The adulterer would rather die than see his missus with another man. No wait, that's also misogynistic. Ok, let's continue then. Suddenly, the viewer is supposed to side with Axel who, as it is poorly revealed, is innocent and the sanctity of their marriage lives on? Just to be clear then, so long as your hubby isn't actually a serial killer and so long as his mistress and their unborn child are dead, you can still have a holy fucking happy ending? This is more retarded than the most ludicrous of Shakespearean resolutions.

What remains then, is the godly couple with their golden child living happily ever after. Although, the killer 'lives on' as the promise of a sequel hangs in the balance- Valentine's day occurring annually giving plenty of time for production and another no-plot plunder to make its way to a cinema near you. If anything, V-day is all about the money, so on some level the film did communicate its main message to the youths of today: you just can't evade Valentine's Day - a deeply capitalist, heteronormative, patriarchal holiday - but, if you're a woman then you should be careful harbouring feelings for an ex, or any other man for that matter, because you never know when he's gonna turn out to be a psycho-killer. Stellar message.

Trapped in One's Own Reflection or Embracing Cinema's Spectatorial Past?

As any good film student will know windows, screens and mirrors in film are never 'just there'. They are, as reflective surfaces, always indicative of some kind of self-reflexive, psychoanalytical or phenomenological, spectatorial meaning. So it is hardly surprising then that I found the film Mirrors (2008) to be jam-packed with psychoanalytic meaning and indentificatory issues (ahem, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the "I", anyone?). What is surprising (or perhaps not to the reader who knows me a little) is that I'm going to argue Mirrors takes this a step further and propose a reading of the film as a wider commentary on the history of spectatorship in film theory. The reading is quite a simple one really, but to find it in a contemporary blockbuster-horror flick is an absolute joy because I have recently found films belonging to this generic category to be rather one-dimensional and subsequently complacent about, or indifferent to, the forms of self-reflexivity and subversion formative films of the genre inherently brought to the screen and their avid cult audiences.


So, Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) is a man who has just about lost everything; suspended from the force and estranged from his wife and kids, sleeping on his sister's couch and addicted to meds that are supposedly helping him kick his alcoholism (poor Carson), takes a job as a security guard, night shift of course, at the burnt-down Mayflower department store in New York City where he begins to see things in its grand old mirrors. In terms of my own reading the fact that this film is a remake of a Korean film and whether or not it is in fact scary is of little significance, it is really only the role of the mirrors and the role of the Carson that are of interest to me. That out of the way, Carson's primary encounters with the mirrors are ones where he sees things that are not physically there in the world around him, although, as the viewer later learns, they did happen in that very place sometime during the past. The psychological process that goes along with this is such that it allows him to understand himself and his own world as separate from that which he sees in the mirror. This process is clearly Lacanian in origin and parallels that of the infant distinguishing between himself and (m)other. Furthermore, this contemporary psychoanalytic process which includes his vision of something past figuratively mirrors the position of Lacan's theories as appearing later than, yet still in acknowledgement to, well established psychoanalytic models that came before, most notably those of Freud. Carson has now accepted this past model and identified himself within the context of both past and present, the importance of context being a significant acknowledgement for film studies in the 1960s.


Later, Carson learns that the Mayflower department store used to be a psychiatric institute where (of course) 'terrible things' happened. Back peddling to the '50s here he tracks down a elderly woman, Anna Esseker, who, now a nun, was supposedly possessed by an evil spirit as a child. Forced to face her demon (quite literally) Anna was strapped to a chair in a room surrounded by mirrors - some kind of supposed identification therapy. Of course, this form of therapy marks several significant moments in film studies whereby theorists such as Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey took spectatorship theory to the next level: from subject-object identification, sharing POV with the cinematic apparatus, the spectator then aligned his POV with the on-screen male gaze. Initially in the film the viewer's gaze is aligned with the camera's POV, opening with an objective view of the previous security guard taking his own life - in a mirror image. Then, once the camera has settled on Carson, and up until this point in the film, the viewer's gaze is aligned with his.


Next in our metaphorical story of cinematic spectatorship, the only way to stop the 'evil force' behind the mirrors from killing himself and his family Carson must bring Anna Esseker back to the Mayflower and to that fateful room. Okay, okay, dramatics aside, once back in the room and forced to re-identify with herself and her past, something really interesting occurs: the viewer becomes entombed in the room of mirrors just like Anna, and faced with an all-encompassing situation which reeks of Kaja Silverman's theorising of cinematic suture whereby the spectator is stitched into the filmic world so that the look of the camera is completely forgotten.


The departure from theories of passive spectatorship paved the way for contemporary film theorists from the 1990s onwards to explore more active and experiential models of spectatorship through phenomenology, cognitivism and haptics. Vivian Sobchack's writing on phenomenology considers spectatorial experience one of embodiment, through corporeal affectivity. Adopting a nonanthropocentric gaze, the focus shifts from the film as authoritative maker of meaning to an essentialist view of its affective reflection as experienced by the spectator. And this is what Mirrors is really about. Evident in the scenes where Carson's family are at home, in danger, the gaze has shifted and it is no longer the person in front of the mirror (the filmmaker, the film itself) that determines the outcome; the 'meaning'. It is that which lies beyond the mirror, behind the screen; it is the spectator for whom the film is a mediated experience, but one in which determinism is something they must embody.


The film also flags up other active modes of spectatorial studies such as cognitivism. Distinct from both psychoanalytic and phenomenological models, Noel Carroll and David Bordwell theorise the spectator as a subject of cognition. After having identified himself, his context and its resolution it is completely up to Carson to 'actively' make meaning out of it all - i.e. that he must reach the conclusion to find Anna Esseker and deduce that she must be brought back to the Mayflower in order for these horrific events to stop. Finally, when Anna re-embodies the demon she expelled many years earlier the mirrors explode and shattered glass fills the frame for a good minute or so. Obsessive framing is used to a point of excess which as Kristin Thompson has us all studiously believing is counter-narrative and operates on a level of materiality so that the spectator simultaneously sees the material nature of the film as well as its underlying structures - that is to say that the pretence is stripped bare and indeed the early spectatorial and Freudian cinematic suggestion that one must disavow is removed in accordance with it. The fragmentation of the mirrors that until this point were so perfectly intact parallels the arrival of that dreaded word, (now rather passe of course) that Cultural Studies has afforded us with; 'postmodernism' meets film theory.


But where Mirrors truly comes alive is right at the end, for even after this fantastic scene of excess violently introducing postmodernism and all its baggage, the final scene reveals something truly spectacular: Carson has made it to the Other side. He has turned the psychoanalytic mirror into a phenomenological window, shattered the restraints of what came before and literally walked through the looking-glass like little Alice did so many years ago. What is on the Other side? Or, are we to think he is trapped within the mirror-world? Either way, this leads to new areas of film studies that are, as I write, being opened up in accordance with Carson's movements: haptics & ethics. Laura Marks's theorising of haptic spectatorship is similar to phenomenology in its emphasis on the cinematic experience and is primarily concerned with sensory impressions, yet it is distinct from phenomenology in its attempt to theorise a proximity to the object, closing the distance between object and subject whilst still allowing a symbolic distance from it. Well now, I'd say going through the mirror, being in one's own reflection is probably about as haptic as it comes. And if turns out to be ethics (should Carson really have sacrificed the life of Anna Esseker for the survival of his own family?) well, his encounter with the Other will surely make for a seriously challenging sequel.