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Contextualizing the Contemporary Transgressive Auteur
The controversial Gothic horror / sexual psycho-drama Wound marks the return to the genre of transgressive director David Blyth, whose seminal 1984 New Zealand horror film Death Warmed Up earned him a place as a cult auteur.
Although Death Warmed Up took the indie horror scene by storm in its day, Blyth had earlier come to attention in serious critical circles with the government funded Angel Mine, a film more concerned with surrealism and sexual repression than horror, allied nevertheless to New Zealand’s burgeoning punk scene. More so perhaps than stylizing horror for its own sake – shock value being nevertheless important to Blyth as a means of destabilizing bourgeois audiences from their complacency – it was the root of psychological horror in sexual repression, suppression and perversely anarchic self-expression that interested Blyth. Indeed, the focus on the anarchic, morally relativistic complexity of human sexuality would stay with Blyth even when his subsequent horror genre works of the 1980s and 1990s failed to secure major distribution and joined the ranks of the direct-to-video obscurities that filled out video stores with stock. In that, he is one of the few truly veteran independent creative talents within the field able to survive the glut of direct-to-video horror features of the 1980sn and 1990s.
Following Death Warmed Up, Blyth’s eclectic career (he was replaced as director on the pioneering serial killer fantasy The Horror Show, the film re-titled House III and released as a sequel where it wasn’t initially associated with the House franchise) stabilized in the early C21st into documentaries exploring the sexual underside of human nature.
It was in this form that the director re-constituted his temperament and honed his skills – first up was Bound for Pleasure, exploring the role of the BDSM (bondage/discipline, sadism/masochism) sexual subculture in the sexual emancipation of women, and was recently followed by the sell-out hit of the 2009 Brazilian Film Festival, Transfigured Nights, the first film to explore “masking” as a form of Internet sexual fetishism. These documentaries showed Blyth at his most provocative: though their stylization was contained by the realistic context of the documentary genre, Blyth effortlessly seized upon the Freudian sexual psycho-dynamics of transgressive human sexuality with a rare verve, resulting in a rare balance of visual destabilization and realistic mise-en-scene. Thus it is that his long-awaited return to horror psycho-drama in Wound – which Christian conservative morals campaigners associated with the political party Family First tried to have banned in New Zealand (even though they had not seen it) – invests a surreal, disjointed Gothic rape-revenge fantasy with the schlock-gore of Death Warmed Up and the intense Freudian psycho-drama of his more recent documentaries: the result is both a recap of the director’s work to date and his most accomplished feature film to date.
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The Inter-relationship between Sexual Fetishism and Sexual Self-Expression
Wound stands above the rut of indie horror in thematic complexity and stylistic sophistication.
With the possible exceptions only of Eli Roth’s Hostel (and its sequel) and the recent Human Centipede, the majority of contemporary horror is still indebted to slashers and serial killers (the hugely successful Saw franchise), vampires (the Twilight and Underworld sagas replacing such as Blade) and influenced by remakes of 1970s nightmare cinema (with Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remade). Lost in this tendency to stylize nihilism as “attitude” (the modern horror film is self-consciously “cool” in style) is what provides genuine terror: the “return of the repressed” and the visualization of Freudian sexuality. Horror and sexuality have always been symbiotic, the hallmarks of Gothic literary traditions which drew on the romanticization of psychological instability (“madness”) and an obsessive pre-occupation with human mortality.
Inherent in horror’s definition of the “monster” is a subversive critique of Patriarchal (specifically Patriarchal Christian) morality.
Theorist Carol J. Clover in the seminal reference work Men, Women and Chainsaws even posited the slasher film – which British moralists in the 1980s led by such as Festival of Light leader Mary Whitehouse (and her Australian lackey Fred Nile) termed “video nasties” and endeavoured to get banned as inherently amoral works the viewing of which was harmful to children and could erode “family values” [ed. the rhetoric used by Christian political parties to cloak their Theist agenda] – as a morality play in which it was the virgin girl who survives the killer’s onslaught. As a new generation of young women latched onto the fetishistic erotica of horror, contemporary Gothic literature, as perhaps best exemplified by such authors as the gender-defying Poppy Z. Brite, it was again Freudian sexuality, specifically his theories of women’s sexual socialization within a Patriarchal structure (i.e. his studies of female hysteria and the “neurotic”), which saturated progressive horror.
The intriguing thing about Wound is its invigorating expression of this trend It is on this theme – the exploration of female sexuality within Freudian conceits of female hysteria, neurosis and psychosis - that Blyth is able to tie in his remaining interest in monstrous Patriarchal gender socialization (as explored in both Angel Mine and the mind-control theme of Death Warmed Up) with contemporary views of sexual fetishism pertaining to female sexual self-assertion. In addition, Blyth effectively psychologizes the rape-revenge film within the trappings of nightmarish Gothic horror, bringing a Freudian intensity to his tale of feminist psycho-drama that evokes such early Polanski works as Repulsion and even the Bunuel of Belle de Jour as much as it does the tortured rape victims turned killers of the exploitation movie staple and the fetishistic contemporary Gothic romanticism of Brite et al. Female psycho-sexual pathology is the common element in these diverse genres, united with new-found, refreshing creativity in Wound.
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The Contemporary Neurotic Heroine within Gothic Horror Psychodrama (spoilers)
The protagonist in Wound at first resembles the traditional Freudian neurotic – the hysterical woman long associated even with Hollywood melodrama – and indeed much of the film transpires indoors, within a domestic setting usually associated with the so-called “women’s picture”.
Oddly enough, the female protagonist even looks like the male director: actress Kate O’Rourke and Blyth share a gaunt facial structure and appear to be of a similar age and physical constitution – a teasing riff on the auteur theory in that it evokes (and perhaps symbolizes) the director’s personal investment in the sexual psycho-drama more indicative of gender disassociation than represented by the film’s diegesis alone. However, as Wound proceeds, the line between neurosis and psychosis (as drawn by Freud himself who finally considered the neurotic woman treatable but psychotics to be beyond the benefits of psycho-analysis) is systematically bridged as the viewer’s relationship to the film is progressively de-stabilized and the narrative able to read both literally and symbolically: the balancing act in such a mix being capably handled by Blyth.
Beginning with a stylized credits sequence and a voice-over evocation of the film’s lineage in Gothic verse, specifically the romanticized interest in the relationship between dream and waking states (here analogous to that line between psychosis and neurosis), Wound first shows the interior of the protagonist’s house from the point of view of a security camera. The use of home security POV here is intriguing for it sets up the idea of an objective representation of reality – indeed as the protagonist’s own world increasingly becomes a mixture of reality, projection and hallucination so does Blyth play subtle tricks with the idea of an objective point of view: hence, just when we doubt that one of the characters may be real and not a projection of the protagonist’s troubled mind, that character appears in a bank security camera. Indeed, just as real and psychotic states merge so to the security cam POV as a measure of an objectified external reality becomes unreliable, complemented by the use of new web-cam recording devices (and hence monitor POV shots) in the documentation and broadcast of both sexual perversion and psychiatric diagnosis. This security cam device and the progressive evocation and dislocation of an objective POV also works intertextually as sly inversion of the famed Hitchcockian eye-of-God shot so beloved of thrillers since Brian DePalma’s pop-culture elevations of Hitchcockian camera tricks as the tropes of the thriller genre in his own explorations of female hysteria in Carrie and Sisters.
The rape-revenge / exploitation nature of Wound is also quickly established: a man enters the woman’s house (her symbolic sanctuary) whereupon she strikes him unconscious and when he awakens – tied up and pleading to her, his daughter, that the incestuous sexual abuse she suffered was because she wanted it – she asserts herself by castrating him (in a scene the special effects of which combine the schlock-horror of John Waters in such as Desperate Living with the gruesome realism of such contemporary torture-porn as Hostel).
Rather than feel a triumph in this vengeful emasculation of Patriarchal authority, however, the protagonist retreats into infantilism, singing to, and caressing, a bizarre two-headed doll, the symbolic meaning of which is tantalizingly developed throughout the film. Significantly, in the violent expression of her sexual pathology, she briefly dons a mask: such masks are repeatedly worn by sex offenders in the film, most notably the male rapist wearing a pig mask, and recall the phenomenon of “masking” as a form of internet sexual fetishism in director Blyth’s previous hit documentary Transfigured Nights.
The juxtaposition here is telling: Blyth cuts from a low angle of the Patriarch being strangled to a similar angle of the Patriarch raping his daughter. However, where the rape is from the protagonist’s point of view, the murder is not as the mature woman now towers behind her rapist. The merging of past and present in this scene is crucial for it sets up much of the subsequent narrative, which is propelled by flashbacks and a disjointed exploration of the protagonist’s sexuality: she is a role-playing submissive. Blyth deploys a complex evocation of BDSM culture, at first inverting the gender hierarchy of his exploration of the dominatrix in the earlier documentary Bound for Pleasure to show the female sex slave as passive accomplice to power-based male sadism. Indeed, here Blyth suggests the transgressive nature of BDSM and role-play within gender socialization, implying in the woman especially a sexual identity something akin to a passive/aggressive nature: the passive protagonist is also vicious murderer, her “madness” evident in her obsession with faeces, collecting from the toilet bowl her own excrement which she buries, wrapped in aluminium foil, with the castrated corpse.
Men here are either authority figures, sadists, rapists or fantasy figures of female desire, Blyth implying that bourgeois socialization conveys as masculine the subordination, domination and sexual humiliation of the woman: this is conveyed in a tense scene in which the protagonist, pegs on her nipples, is forced to broadcast her humiliation on web-cam – the torture of the nipples inverts the torture of the penis in Bound for Pleasure just as the web-cam again evokes Transfigured Nights.
Cutting to the burial of her murdered father, with the excrement that her male master refuses to let her expel from her body as she must refrain from going to the toilet during her web-cammed humiliation, Blyth mocks the ornamental ritual of Patriarchal burial rites (a gravestone rests at one end of the shallow grave, an overturned trash bin on the other). Likewise, as Blyth’s camera explores the interior spaces, so the high angles evoke the security cam and suggest the destabilization of an objective perception, a fact confirmed by the arrival of the second major character, the protagonist’s daughter whom the mother had abandoned as presumed dead, and thus the inferred child of the incestuous union with her father.
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Establishing Matriarchal ties within a Patriarchal Socialization
Blyth is careful never to fully confirm nor deny the “reality” of the daughter character (played by Te Kaea Beri), and takes time to establish the protagonist’s own descent into psychosis – a phone call made from the toilet (an icon in Blyth’s surreal repertoire since its striking deployment in the early scenes of Angel Mine, also allying female sexual socialization within Patriarchy to the abject dread of faecal expulsion) reveals that she has stopped taking her medication.
Later, she talks with her psychiatrist, a stern male not unlike her father, who tells her that there is no record of her giving birth to a daughter, though by now the daughter has made contact with her mother, seeking some psychological explanation for her own propensity to BDSM fantasy, subsequently in effect re-creating her own mother’s incest trauma. Blyth’s control of the narrative is here intriguing: one can interpret the daughter figure literally or as a projection of the protagonist: a woman in midlife confronting a projection of herself as an adolescent.
The use here of the “objective” POV security cams adds a delirious ambiguity to either literal or psychological explanations of the narrative. Blyth also compounds the irony: the same Patriarchal authority which demands the subordination of women and effectively sanctifies incestuous rape considers the tormented psyche of the incest victim to be unstable and thus prescribes medication. This sublimation of female psycho-sexual experience to the diagnostic criteria of the male authority responsible for the same passive-aggressive gender socialization (symbolized by the two-headed doll) it considers aberrant inherently revokes Freud’s theories of female hysteria and neurosis just as it evokes them. In that, Blyth again echoes such as Repulsion in suggesting that such considerations of neurosis and psychosis must be re-examined from within a specifically feminine psychology if they are to be of truly objective benefit.
However, he concedes the Freudian point that that same female (or feminist) psychological view is the direct result of gender subordination and corresponding sexual submission within a Patriarchal authority, the pathological dynamics of which are both blurred and fetishized when played out in the role-play fantasies of the BDSM subculture.
In that, it is ironic that the gender dissolution within BDSM can empower women – indeed at one point the protagonist considers herself a failure to her gender by her victimology and inability to embody the figure of the “dominatrix”, so central to the notion of female independence within Patriarchal sexual socialization in the earlier film of Bound for Pleasure. Hence, the contrast and comparison between mother and daughter characters, both of whom are accorded fully-rounded psychologies (confounding the ambiguity over the daughter’s true existence), makes for a dynamic portrait of Matriarchal identity (and passivity within female sexual identity) in deference to, and ultimate subversion of, Patriarchal order. A parallel cut between webcam POV of passive mother and webcam POV of aggressive daughter epitomizes this Matriarchal intent.
Said Patriarchal order is expressed as orderly and routine, bourgeois decency and cleanliness symbolized in Blyth’s films by the afore-mentioned icon of the toilet, the protagonist’s excremental psychosis inferred to as caused by the bourgeois hypocrisy that desires order but is unable to suppress the raging sexual pathology beneath the façade of cleanliness and decorum. Thus, Blyth explores layers of sexuality, contrasting the tortured and interiorized pathology of the protagonist with the literal underground nightclub where sexual fantasies are ambiguously played out, the distinction between reality and psychosis (or between waking and dream to use the metaphor beginning the film) blurred until the viewer is immersed in one of the finest visualizations of female hysteria within contemporary Gothic horror cinema. To Blyth, such female hysteria as considered within its Freudian lineage epitomizes the anarchic nature of human sexuality and the dangers of its repression by a hypocritical Patriarchal order which validates the sadistic subordination of women in order to preserve a façade of gender power. As mentioned, only the BDSM subculture subverts this traditionally socialized gender power through transgressive role-play fantasy, where even passivity is legitimized (an inherent problematic to contemporary feminists).
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The Psycho-Pathology of Female Sexual Socialization
In this sense, the daughter’s dilemma is the absence of a strong motherly influence, again in the deference to the masculine authority of the rapist (the man in pig mask, a manifestation of the incestuous father).
The daughter plays this out in fantasies of a Gothic romanticism, her developing sexuality within the punk underground held in tandem with the submissive role-play enactions of her mother. Within this evocation of inter-generational Matriarchal socialization, Patriarchy and masculinity are ugly and repellent: an abhorrent constant against which the progression of feminism is measured – fish eye lenses, distorted camerawork and looming camera angles on big-bodied men forcing themselves on petite women, smothering them with the authority of the rapist/father. As the security cam shots reveal the protagonist’s house in an increasing state of disarray, Blyth too echoes the use of interior settings within melodrama – specifically the notion of a woman’s domain as the household in which she asserts her self-worth (at least such as Patriarchy allows).
Hence, the confrontation between mother and daughter, narrative ambiguity aside, symbolizes a confrontation with past trauma. As the protagonist retreats into the bathroom and vomits, sick from such a reckoning, Blyth’s camera becomes disorienting. This Matriarchal trauma climaxes in a subsequent scene, replete with homosexual incestuous connotations, in which the mature daughter suckles from her mother’s breast, the mother in a later shot bearing a scar on her breast from such suckling. Symbolically, the child as manifestation of the mother’s neurosis here held in counterpoint to the suggestion of the mother scarred by the biological ties to her offspring – “motherhood” and procreation as a socialized identity symbolized here by the scarred breast once used to suckle (and tortured by the male sadist for webcam humiliation).
The breast as icon of femininity is deployed with symbolic ambiguity, less an erotic objectification of the female form than a condensation of the culture which at once invites the male to gaze at the breast and through censorship condemns the same gaze as immoral.
The film’s acknowledgment of what might be termed a Matriarchal psychosis is, however, in the birth scene. Recalling DePalma’s Carrie and the evocation of menstruation within horror cinema, the birth of the monstrous twin (paralleling the two-headed doll and another evocation of the passive-aggressive nature of female sexuality) here ends with another scene of shocking incestuous perversion as the daughter licks the afterbirth. It is a complex scene – a psychosomatic manifestation of incest trauma which can ambiguously be read as either real or fantasy, recalling such diverse horror films as David Cronenberg’s The Brood and the alien-invasion fantasy Xtro.
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Trangsression and the Cinema of “Menstrual Psychosis”
Blyth here manages a highlight of truly transgressive cinema, making of Wound what might be terms a “menstrual psychosis”.
Any resolution Blyth offers to this is at the level of the symbolic rather than the literal, as daughter is now driven to an act of matricide in order to sustain an individual identity beyond that of the mother driven mad by Patriarchy. But again, just as a symbolic reading seems the likeliest one, Blyth ambiguously posits the possibility of a literal reading, cleverly insisting that the daughter is real and not a symbolic projection of her mother’s traumatized psyche. Deliberate ambiguity aside, it is as a study of female hysteria borne of incest trauma within Patriarchal codes of sexual subordination and the paradoxical freedoms offered women so socialized to a passive-aggressive sexuality by Patriarchal oppression within BDSM that Wound succeeds admirably, and with remarkable complexity in an age which still insists that horror must be visceral rather than psychological. In dungeon scenes which recall those in Bound for Pleasure, Byth here extends the thesis of that film and suggests that the male oppressor seeks to punish women for the psychosis he engenders in them as a result of his sexually violent objectification: sexual dehumanization. Fetishized victimology: such is the burden the daughter (literal or symbolic) must free herself from if she is to attain an individual identity outside the monstrous traumatization inherent in Patriarchal socialization.
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