Lt. Brann: Mrs. Mahoney, I’m going to screw you to the wall. Eileen Mahoney: Where am I now, then? Lt. Brann: There are walls, and walls.
A central figure in the Cinema of Transgression, the contra cinema movement that flourished in New York City’s underground art scene from the late 1970s to mid 1980s, Beth B has long been obsessed with power and its circulation within a capitalist and patriarchal culture. From 16mm shorts like “Letters to Dad” (1978), in which multiple “actors” read excerpts from suicide notes by members of the notorious People’s Temple, to longer, increasingly more developed films that explore the politics of torture (Black Box [1978]) and the hypocrisy of organized religions (Salvation [1987]), Beth B’s consistently provocative visions confront audiences with images that vacillate between the gut-wrenchingly visceral and the overtly satirical. Screened in such non-traditional spaces as punk rock clubs and, in the case of some of her more recent multi-media installations, functioning prisons, Beth B’s works have thrived on the fringes, finding audiences, and occasionally distribution, in the least conventional arenas. Fittingly, her feature-length 1993 Sundance Film Festival entry, Two Small Bodies, was financed by, and initially released through, German television, a venue that provided Beth B. with the opportunity to, in her own words, “explore subjects that are more unusual…whereas Hollywood sort of follows industry standards.” As the excerpt that begins this article suggests, Two Small Bodies is a text that coheres with the complex and, at times, controversial socio-political concerns evidenced in even her earliest works, addressing the theme of power through a visual rhetoric of incarceration, exploitation, and entropic disintegration.
The plot of Two Small Bodies is deceptively simple. A police detective, Lt. Brann (Fred Ward), investigates the apparent abduction of two young children by repeatedly interrogating their mother, Eileen Mahoney (Suzy Amis), in the hopes of uncovering whether or not she has murdered them. From the very start, his line of questioning is both aggressive and recursive, a mode of inquiry that compliments the film’s critique of male authority, as well as its relentlessly claustrophic tone. Through a visual logic that echoes Lt. Brann’s persistent desire to “go over [Eileen Mahoney’s] story one more time,” Beth B. composes her shots so that the viewer’s gaze is literally circumscribed by the very parameters of the screen itself. The film’s two characters are repeatedly framed by variously opened doors, austere walls, and assorted windows through which we can glimpse landscapes of barren, skeletal trees that more closely resemble frazzled nerve endings than foliage. Even within the context of the film’s narrative, any hope of escape is immediately frustrated by the detective’s inevitable return to the “scene of the crime,” as well as his compulsion to persistently re-engage in a dance of power and psychological manipulation over which his command becomes increasingly tenuous.
As the film’s plot unfolds, Eileen’s house becomes a cramped and dimly lit microcosm of a society predicated upon the circulation of disciplinary power within a largely sexist cultural matrix. As a symbol of oppressive patriarchal authority, Lt. Brann’s desire to “dominate” finds articulation through acts of physical intimidation and linguistic tyranny. He struts about Eileen’s house as if he owns it (smoking freely, opening windows and doors without permission, etc.), all the while imposing his base corporeality through a multiplicity of threatening postures; likewise, he consistently labels (or “brands”) Eileen’s lifestyle and behaviors with terms that impose specific – and frequently gendered – meanings upon her life. In the discursive realm Lt. Brann attempts to simultaneously create and police, Eileen is not a “mild” “hostess” at an establishment for “exotic dancers,” but and employee at a “strip joint”; she is not a single mother pursuing her right to experience physical pleasure through sex, but a “whore, fuck, slut.” For Lt. Brann, and the patriarchal ideology he represents, the manipulation of language and the meaning of words is a vital mode of control. It provides “handles” that are “helpful” in establishing and maintaining systems of meaning through chains of signification that, as the film progresses and the balance of power between Lt. Brann and Eileen inevitably vacillates, ultimately reveal themselves as verbal constructions used to maintain the illusion of order. As Eileen responds to Lt. Brann’s tellingly, and self-consciously clichéd request for “just the facts, ma’am”: “there are no facts.”
In the insular world of Two Small Bodies, where language and meaning are consistently destabilized, the characters’ panicked attempts to effect coherence function to expose the theatricality of everyday life, i.e., the roles we play in creating (and recreating) ourselves on a daily basis. Ward and Amis purposefully deliver their dialogue like actors from a hackneyed community theater production. Consequently, their performances emphasize the very artificiality of their roles and, perhaps, of film itself. From the very start, Lt. Brann, clad in tan trench coat and dark brown fedora, assumes the mantle of the prototypical tough-guy film noir detective committed to ferreting out the “truth.” In a seemingly rehearsed tone, he mumbles existential platitudes (“if you want false hope, go to church…this is reality”) and employs melodramatic threats of physical violence whenever he feels his macho façade begin to slip away (“I’ll kick your ass if I think you’re fucking me over”). Eileen Mahoney, on the other hand, is somewhat more complicated. Speaking in a tenor by terms venomous and indifferent, Eileen is a figure who elides simple classification. She is a mother, and yet, because of her occupation as a “hostess” and the fact that her children are missing, she is not a mother in the “proper” (i.e. “culturally endorsed”) sense of the word; likewise, although the film’s narrative suggests that her children might possibly be the victim of a psychotic kidnapper’s desire for bloodlust, because Eileen’s reactions do not coincide with Lt. Brann’s expectations regarding proper gendered behavior, she is never above suspicion regarding their disappearance. Resistant to Lt. Brann’s aggressive tactics, she twice turns his blatant attempts at coercion through sexual harassment against him, reducing his use of nudity – both his own and, in a particularly unsettling scene, Eileen’s – into fumbled gestures that reveal the dents in his own fragile armor. By responding with little more than mild disgust, Eileen short-circuits Lt. Brann’s appeal to the socio-cultural impact of the human body, that most immediate vessel for the circulation of cultural power. Without emotional attachment, Eileen notes that “when [one] ceases to feel tender towards naked flesh,” the body becomes “meat,” dead tissue open to various forms of control and consumption. Thus, while at times the elusive femme fatale, a role that supports and perpetuates Lt. Brann’s own tenuous persona, she is also the catalyst for the narrative’s deconstruction of patriarchal authority’s imaginary edifice. Furthermore, she is the primary figure in Beth B’s ultimate project: the exploration of power as endogamous rather than hierarchical, a disciplinary force that, operant throughout all levels of culture, is as alluring as it is contestable.
Two Small Bodies’ recursive narrative structure, an organizational logic underscored by Lt. Brann’s frequent exits and entrances, provides the ideal forum for Beth B’s study of the function, circulation, and seductive quality of power in Western culture. As the illusory edifices supporting Lt. Brann’s hyper-masculine posturings begin to crumble, power is traded back and forth and roles are reversed. Once the target of patriarchal inquiry, Eileen becomes Lt. Brann’s inquisitor, interrogating both his position in, as well as the resilience of, those social and cultural institutions (law enforcement, the family unit, etc.) from which his “authority” emanates. Beth B maps these exchanges through the film’s mise-en-scène, with the empowered character generally occupying a commanding position within the frame. When Eileen assumes control of their progressively sadistic (and masochistic) interchanges, her figure dominates the shot, rendering Lt. Brann’s form as submissive. Once empowered, she relishes her moments of control, attacking Lt. Brann with the same spirit-crushing tactics through which she is assailed. Likewise, as Lt. Brann’s patriarchal shell comes perilously close to shattering beyond repair, he temporarily re-assumes power, and a dominant position within the frame, through one of the only means left at his disposal – physical violence. Perhaps the most profound instance of this panicked reassertion follows close upon Eileen’s revelation that not only has Lt. Brann been the subject of her surveillance, but that he might not possess that ability to ensure his own family’s safety or prevent his “boys” from molestation. Angered and confused, he lashes out at her with obvious distress in his voice, emphasizing that “yours [children] weren’t molested!” Hence, through the text’s recursive dynamic, the cycle of power and abuse Beth B sets into motion suggests that the underlying focus of her film is not simply the deconstruction of patriarchal authority, but a revelation of the myriad dangers and inequalities inherent in power itself. Even though power changes hands throughout the course of the narrative, its ultimately destructive potential remains, threatening to further “break” their progressively shattered identities. In this sense, it soon becomes clear that the eponymous bodies refer not only to Eileen’s absent offspring, but to the text’s central protagonists as well.
In western culture, power functions through its discursive imposition, and thus it necessarily requires an object upon which it can be exercised. Indeed, in its most effective manifestation, the disciplinary apparatus need not be present for the subject to adhere to it precepts. This symbiotic exchange underlies the sadomasochistic motif that informs much of the film’s action. As in many sadomasochistic relationships, in which the power relations between the aptly named “top” and the “bottom” are consistently open to negotiation. Lt. Brann, the trench coat sadist, needs Eileen Mahoney. It is a desire that demonstrates Beth B’s understanding of power as recursive, and it is a yearning that Eileen verbally acknowledges on several occasions throughout the film (“You don’t want me to break,” she says during one exchange, “because if I do I won’t be of use to you anymore”). Lt. Brann and Eileen Mahoney’s sadomasochistic interchanges find their most explicit articulation during the film’s final sequences, in which Lt. Brann and Eileen Mahoney trade both fleeting hypotheses and intricate fantasies about her missing children’s fate, a linguistic danse macabre that Lt. Brann allows to continue even after the children’s corpses are discovered and the real killer (“a drifter”) has surrendered himself to the authorities. Building towards its entropic climax through the various application of handcuffs – that most over-determined of sadomasochistic signifiers – Lt. Brann and Eileen culminate their erotically-charged power-play cuffed together, literally and figuratively exchanging the “upper hand” as they at once realize their respective insignificance (their smallness) and their mutual indispensability.
In a closing shot the seems designed to recall the concluding scene in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous final work, Salò o le 120 giomate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom), Lt. Brann and Eileen Mahoney dance, their bodies occupying an equal space within the frame. Likewise, in a gesture akin to Pasolini’s cinematic critique of fascism and its will to dehumanization, the cyclical, closed, and entropic system on display in Beth B’s film is one in which the only possible outcome is “death” in the form of spiritual rigor mortis or physical and/or mental disintegration. In the end, they dance, leaning against one another as if to keep from falling to the floor. They are “dead” bodies cuffed together, rotating slowly in a clumsy, listless waltz. As Eileen notes in a whisper against Lt. Brann’s ear: “It’s what they do in graves.”
Widely excoriated upon its release in 2005, Thomas Clay’s debut feature, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, combines highly stylized compositions and meticulous camera movements with representations of extreme sexual violence that, in their graphic and visceral intensity, rival the most gut-wrenching moments of Coralie Trinh Thi and Virginie Despentes’ Baise-moi (2000) or Gaspar Noe’s Irréversible (2002). However, unlike Baise-Moi and Irréversible, which received insightful critical defenses from internationally acclaimed film scholars like Nicole Brenez and David Sterritt, even the most positive reflections upon Thomas Clay’s The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael have been guarded at best. Writing for The Guardian, for example, Peter Bradshaw mitigated any gestures towards commendation by damning Clay’s effort as a “deeply horrible and objectionable film” in the style of “European extreme cinema” (para 1). Similarly, in his slightly more generous review for The Observer, Phillip French quickly conditioned a recognition the fledgling filmmaker’s “poise” by noting that much of the film’s effectiveness – particularly its visual rigor – was undoubtedly the result of the contributions made by Theo Angelopoulos’ and Catherine Breillat’s longtime collaborator/cinematographer, Yorgos Arvanitis (para 2). Taking a loosely varied, though by no means more enthusiastic, approach in his review for Total Film, Jamie Graham observes that Clay’s portrait of disaffected Brighton teenagers evoked “Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Haneke’s Funny Games, and Bergman’s The Virgin Spring” (para 2).
While French is correct that Arvantis’s bravura tracking shots assist Clay in realizing his disturbing vision, his review, like Bradshaw’s and Graham’s assessments, and my own opening sentence above, approach The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael through a conspicuously oblique rhetorical strategy: comparison. While by no means unusual within the discourse of film analysis, this approach seems appropriately ironic, and perhaps ultimately unavoidable, when entering into a discussion of Clay’s notorious initial feature. For, as a careful close reading of this controversial film’s form and content reveals, it is mediation as technological process and ontological practice that ultimately emerges as not only the guiding thematic within the film’s diegesis, but also as Clay’s primary political and aesthetic strategy. In this sense, the “great ecstasy” of the film’s title is, to appropriate a phrase from Baudrillard, nothing less than the “ecstasy of communication.” As this essay demonstrates, Thomas Clay’s The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael is a startlingly accomplished and philosophically complex work that examines the plurality of intercessions that emerge at the very core of film spectatorship itself, namely the negotiation between text and context, image and idea.
Few critics will argue that Robert Clay’s film lacks its share of sensationalistic content. Indeed, it is the inclusion of highly disturbing and occasionally graphic depictions of physical violence – including one of the most brutal representations of sexual assault in the history of cinema – that have almost single-handedly accounted for the majority of the invectives directed towards Clay’s feature. BBC film critic Jamie Russell, for instance, claims that the violent scenes punctuating the film’s narrative lend themselves to being potentially misunderstood as “shock tactics” orchestrated merely to incite spectators rather than to provide valuable insights into why such intense conflicts occur among human beings. Such negative receptions by spectators prove unfortunate in that “outright dismiss[als]” of the film’s more extreme content can blind viewers to the work’s larger socio-political revelations (para 2). “Shock tactics,” as theorists of visual culture like Sean Cubitt have demonstrated, can even be said to serve a vital, progressive purpose. By making “sensation an end in itself,” artists “challenge as radically and deeply as possible every aspect of the audience’s physical, emotional and intellectual life” through an aggressively immediate confrontation “with death, finality, the sublime, the abject, the incommunicable, and the timeless” that violently compels viewers to re-acclimate themselves emotionally (and perhaps physically as well) to the simulated world of the film flickering on the screen before them (358). This cinematic gesture reinforces, if only momentarily, the spectator’s awareness of the schism between the images and the ideas we impose upon them, allowing for a more active engagement with the suggested logics behind the extreme violence depicted. One could even go so far as to assert that reducing The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael to an inconsequential exercise in “transgressive cinema” created for the purpose of offending audience sensibilities is not simply missing the forest for the trees, but deliberately cutting down all of the trees with a hatchet and then complaining that no one ever showed you a forest in the first place.
What, then, are the cultural critiques informing Robert Clay’s The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, and how do they emerge from a comprehension of mediation as a rhetorical and socio-political practice?
The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael presents a fictional portrait of the fishing community of Newhaven, a township in which the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” has become a nearly unbridgeable chasm. Faced with a collapsing economic and a disintegrating social edifice that diminish employment opportunities and restrict chances for upward mobility, the film’s eponymous teenage cellist and his friends Ben, Joe, and Joe’s drug dealing cousin, Larry, meander through a cultural landscape marked by disillusionment and despair. Additionally, although Clay’s camera mainly follows the exploits of his teenage protagonists, much of Newhaven’s adult population, particularly the parents and teachers to whom we are introduced, can barely mask their own despondency over their variably precarious positions within a society fueled by exploitative labor practices that threaten to create a sporadic and disposable work force to which only a select few have increasingly temporary access. In one of the film’s earlier sequences, for example, Robert Carmichael’s friend Joe, having been expelled from school during what would have been his final year, visits a pub in the middle of the day. There, he meets up with his father and several of his father’s friends. The men, struggling to find consistent work in the town’s fishing industry, drink beer and complain about unfair labor practices, including their employer’s failure to provide any compensation to a new widow and her children following a fisherman’s death while the on-the-job. When Joe inquires as to the possibility of finding work on one of the boats, his query is met with mildly derisive laughter accompanied by a clear articulation of the economic realities for which the education system provides little preparation. “You’d be lucky, mate,” one of Joe’s father’s friends flatly states. “There ain’t enough work to go around as it is, you know that.”
An important component in the film’s depiction of social class relations and labor alienation is the inclusion of wealthy couple comprised of Jonathan Abbott, a chef and prominent television personality with a lucrative book deal, and his glamorous, newly pregnant wife, Monica. Cruising through Newhaven in expensive sports cars and estranged from the general population through the conspicuous particularities of their bourgeois bohemian lifestyle (Pilates classes, LA shopping expeditions, etc.), they are seemingly oblivious to their position within an economic system in which the rift between social classes has steadily widened into an unbridgeable chasm. In a narrative detail that directly contrasts the chef’s ravenous consumerism with the plight of the exploited workers in the pub scene discussed above, Jonathan giddily celebrates his purchase of an enormous fish. “It was so cheap,” he remarks, as if the actual cost of the food were ultimately reducible to the sale price rather than the physical labor exerted and time expended by the poorly compensated workers on the fishing boats. Given the chef’s inability to recognize the greater human value behind his acquisition, his wife’s subsequent remark that “it’s only a fish,” a statement originally voiced to ease her husband’s disappointment at potentially having to freeze his culinary conquest, assumes a far more profound resonance. As the exchange in the pub deftly illustrates, the fish is by no means “only a fish”; rather, it is emblematic of the very livelihood and economic (in)security of a significant portion of Newhaven’s residents. This is not to suggest that Clay depicts the upwardly mobile couple as monolithically antagonistic characters. Their prattle may seem obnoxiously banal and clichéd, but they are not depicted as void of feeling; they are presented as very much in love, and although their social relations with the immediate community frequently borders on the painfully naïve or insultingly condescending, Clay is careful to avoid letting his portrait of the wealthy couple slip into dehumanizing parody. The chef obliges when asked to speak at the high school music recital, and his wife actively resists clumsy flirtations that she sees as an unwelcome and sexist intrusion upon her personal space. Indeed, were it not for Clay’s resistance to easy narrative reductionism, the notorious assault that comprises the film’s climax would lack much of the power that consistently elicits visceral reactions from audiences around the globe.
Thus, a concentrated engagement with the aesthetics and politics of the presentation/re-presentation of images is crucial to understanding Clay’s ultimate project in The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, and an exploration of mediation as a discursive practice constitutes a vital first step to revealing the film’s implicit and systemic critique. Of course, as a filmmaker, Clay is well aware of the power of images and the influence that communications media can have over how people conceptualize themselves and the world in which they live. He even goes so far as to have Robert’s teacher lecture to a classroom of largely disinterested students about the more obvious – and, hence, perhaps the least pernicious – impacts of cinema and other technologies of mediation upon the cultural imaginary:
There is no such thing in the media as objective reality. Now, think about all of the films we’ve looked at today. Lifeboat, Le Corbeau, Saving Private Ryan, Come and See…Now the point is all these films deal with the second world war, but each gives us a different version, a different interpretation. Now it’s different because it’s filtered through the perception and ideology of the creator…this doesn’t just apply to fiction. It applies to all forms of media: newspapers, broadcasting, documentary filmmakingthe media is media because it mediates between you and the reality it seeks to represent.
Robert’s teacher, and the curriculum he espouses, begs viewers to consider the efficacy of one the more (stereo)typical, and short-sighted, of neo-liberal responses to the perceived coercive potential of mass media. Specifically, by asking his students to simply recognize that the media functions as a mechanism for furthering subjective agendas, Robert’s teacher fails to consider how the realization he wants his class to make is itself an integral component of a culture’s ideology, of the society’s “imaginary relationship…to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser 162). In other words, if, as Marx posits, ideology is a kind of “distorted conception” comprised of what people do when they don’t know that they are doing it (50-1), then the lesson Robert’s teacher endeavors to impart fails in that it doesn’t go far enough in its consideration of how ideas, beliefs, and prejudices circulate. As Todd McGowan correctly notes in The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan, “[o]ne does not resist ideology through the act of becoming conscious” (13). Rather, “consciousness is itself a mode of inserting oneself into ideology and avoiding one’s unconscious desire. Ideology operates not only in unconscious ways, but also through the illusion of consciousness itself – namely, the assumption of mastery implicit in consciousness with vision that allows us not to see the roll of the gaze in structuring our vision” (13).
Robert’s teacher further perpetuates this illusory “assumption of mastery” through his coordination of the class project: a collaborative student produced video that replicates conventional war films while using local landmarks and monuments to Great Britain’s former military supremacy as convenient (if unconvincing) settings and props. Removed from any significant connection with the historical moment they are charged to recreate, the students’ performances vacillate between rote utterances inflected by anachronistic colloquialisms, and melodramatic pronouncements that foreground the clichéd content of many World War II films. Rather than contextualizing the students’ work in relation to his previous explanation of mediation and ideology, or even locating the politics of the 1930s and 1940s in relation to the news reports of the US-led invasion of Iraq that fills virtually every television screen we see in The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, the teacher rushes the students from scene to scene in an effort to get the assignment finished as quickly as possible. The depiction of the class project, however, occupies an important space in the film’s narrative in that it affords Clay the opportunity to make two valuable observations. The first of these transpires when Robert and a fellow student clash over the placement of the school’s video camera and, consequently, the composition of a single shot. Frustrated by his classmate’s criticism of his arrangement, Robert lashes out violently, knocking the camera and tripod to the ground, and beating his peer so viciously that he has to be physically pulled off of his bloodied classmate and restrained. This attack, though clearly an overreaction on Robert’s part, comes as little surprise given an earlier scene in which the introverted, seemingly sensitive cellist is verbally chastised by a group of fellow students. “Keep your filthy eyes to yourself Robert Carmichael,” a young woman sneers when she catches him looking at her as she passes, adding, in an aside that takes on a chillingly ironic connotation given Robert’s character arc, “he’s such a rapist.” An awkward, marginalized teenager, Robert absorbs the verbal assault with a disquieting indifference, a response that allows for a plurality of potential readings of his character, including the understanding of Robert Carmichael as a character that may inevitably morph into one of cinema’s more resilient dramatic tropes – the figurative walking time bomb that could explode at any moment. In addition, Robert’s violent eruption during this class project conforms to the logics informing many of the film’s violent scenes: repressed anger and gender-based insecurities manifest themselves in what is, on the surface at any rate, an apparently unrelated moment of frustration. The altercation is nothing less than a struggle for representation, a violent contestation between two males vying for control of vision/image in a culture in which economic crisis has led to widespread class and gender alienation.
Furthermore, the collaborate class video project, like the school recital at which Robert Carmichael displays his musical talent before embarking on a night of rape and murder, posits insufficiently reflective art as an inadequate response to the cultural inequities inherent within the contemporary social relations. The performances at the recital, while technically proficient and aesthetically pleasing, apparently lack any significant meaning for either the students (absurdly touted as “stars of the future”), With dour expressions and rigid postures, they robotically “go through the motions” before an audience that shifts uncomfortably in rows of folding chairs, laughs politely at even the lamest gestures towards humor, and applauds at the appropriate moments. Perhaps the most telling detail is the inclusion of the Jonathan Abbott as the guest of honor, a distinction that, by the chef’s own admission, is questionable given his lack of musical knowledge. “So why am I here?” Chef Abbott, sensing his inappropriate charge, inquires. As he freely admits, he “played the violin…badly,” giving up “after grade three.” The answer is to his question is simple: the decision to invite “television’s favorite chef” to provide the program’s commencement is based solely on his social status as a celebrity, late capitalism’s nearest approximation to the cultural prestige once ascribed, often without merit, to members of the aristocracy.
Like the student video project Robert disrupts with his violent outburst, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael draws upon multiple cinematic texts for inspiration. However, in the case of Clay’s film, three instances of self-conscious intertextuality illuminate cinema’s potential for advancing a sustained social critique by “draw[ing] the viewer’s attention to his or her relation to the screen in order to make him or her ‘realize’ the social relations that are being portrayed” (MacCabe 92). Of the films Clay’s feature references, Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) are at once the most obvious and the most vital. An extended oblique tracking shot past an extensive array of parked cars recalls the famous absurd traffic jam from Godard’s skewering treatise against bourgeois consumption run amuck, while the aggressive use of the chef’s fish as a sexually suggestive instrument of torture echoes a similar sequence preceding Weekend’s climactic cannibal feast. In addition, in a visual strategy in keeping with, but by no means as overt as, the Brechtian distantiation techniques deployed by Godard, Thomas Clay constructs his work so that sequences structured around sublimely elegant cinematography vie with graphic and prolonged representations of extreme brutality. The resulting juxtapositions jolt the viewer, frustrating any possibility of maintaining a comfortable distance from the film’s action. As a result, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael compels spectators to re-acclimate themselves to the subject matter and their assumptions regarding the central characters’ motivations.
It is here, as well, that Clay’s film intersects most productively with Stanley Kubrick’s more rigidly formalist and politically sardonic cinematic exercises. In spite of its notorious “excesses,” Clay’s mise-en-scène is always carefully considered, meticulously constructed, deliberately edited, and precisely paced. Consider, for instance, the so-called “blue room” sequence, which encapsulates many of the texts most important themes and motifs while exposing the works’ – and, by extension, cinema’s – artifice. After popping pills and smoking dope at a local playground, Robert, Ben, Joe, a girl named Charlotte, and Joe’s drug-dealer cousin, Larry, drop by an apartment in which a small group of young people are gathered, getting high and listening to one of the tenants mixing house music on a pair of turntables. In a bravura unbroken tracking shot, the camera meanders throughout the apartment’s main living space; eventually, it travels about the perimeter defined by the room’s blue walls, periodically coursing in towards the middle of the room to capture simple yet illuminating actions – Robert purchasing a half gram of coke, Charlotte slowly slipping into a state of semi-consciousness as Joe and Larry loom lasciviously. Approximately half way through the sequence/long take, Joe, Larry, and a third male abscond to the bedroom with Charlotte, whom they subsequently rape. The assault occurs off screen, behind a door that soon comes to occupy the center of the shot. To screen right we see the young man mixing music behind his turntables; to screen left we see Robert and Ben reclining in chairs and watching as a news program on a small color television delivers updates on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government. What follows is a brilliant combination of cinematography and sound design. The lighting in the room shifts dramatically. What at first seemed a close approximation to ambient light gradually gives way to spotlights illuminating the actors on either side of the bedroom door as the camera dollies further and further back until it becomes obvious that it occupies a geographical location far beyond where the room’s “fourth wall” was earlier shown to be. We are now clearly witnessing an event transpiring on a set in a studio; any pretence towards verisimilitude has been thoroughly abandoned. As the camera dollies back, an artful if harrowing mélange of three distinct sounds coalesce to complete the scene: the pop rhythm of the dance music (DJ Hixxy’s rave anthem, “Toyland”) “originating” from the turntables, Charlotte’s screams of pain and terror as she is sexually assaulted somewhere beyond the bedroom door, and pithy sound-bytes from British Prime Minister Tony Blair espousing plans for a “post-conflict” Iraq, which includes an “oil for food” program. The scene concludes as the young man mixing the music kicks out the rapists (and Robert) for making too much noise and then stands beside his roommate at the open bedroom door, with Charlotte’s desperate sobbing the only sound we hear.
Structurally, the “blue room” sequence is a fantastic accomplishment, brilliantly fusing form and content. The spotlighted areas accentuate the mise-en-scène’s overtly formalist symmetry, effectively dividing the frame into thirds, with the bedroom door in the center of the shot impeding a visual apprehension of the assault so chillingly evoked by Charlotte’s piercing screams. By combining the screams, the voices on the televised news report and the throbbing dance music, the sound design coalesces into a kind of dialectical aural montage that links the “literal” rape “occurring” behind the bedroom door with the “figurative,” if all too real, rape of Iraq by the US-led coalition forces. It is here that Clay advances his most incisive critique of violence in both its most explicit, as well as its most treacherously subtle, dimensions. In each instance, human beings are reduced to objects, but the inclusion of footage of Tony Blair advocating a “post-conflict” “oil for food” program takes the connection between the “local” and “global” atrocities one vital step further. Specifically, it reveals the violence that lurks, often unrecognized, beneath the pretences of civilization. It is, after all, the imperialist cultural, economic, and military aggression against Iraq that created the humanitarian crisis that the “food for oil” program is intended to address through a coercive, exploitative exercise masquerading as charitable cultural exchange. As well, by integrating (or mixing) the dance music, the girl’s screams of pain, and the news report’s level tone in a manner that allows the disparate sounds to complement, rather than conflict with, one another, Clay illuminates the extent to which Robert and his friends are removed, emotionally and politically, from both the immediate trauma of a fellow classmate’s suffering, and the mediated anguish of a populace experienced exclusively through the filter of a mediating technology like television. The result is a disturbing scene, but it is a scene deliberately orchestrated to disturb. In other words, it is a scene construed to disrupt conventional viewing pleasures for the purpose of interrogating the processes by which people understand actual or imagined violence, especially when their own material reality is conditioned by an increasing sense of alienation from a larger historical continuity, as well as a progressive recognition of the limited avenues available for challenging one’s immediate social circumstances.
For the vast majority of the population of Newhaven in The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, the sun has long since set on the British Empire. Wars are either re-imagined nostalgically or presented as a series of flickering images originating in a distant land made increasingly (in)assessable through a process of mediation that obfuscates far more than it clarifies through a discourse of easily digestible and ambiguous words and phrases like “terrorist,” “Osama,” and “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” It is perhaps fitting, then, that the lyrics to the music being mixed during the “blue room” sequence expresses the desire to be transported “together…soul to soul” to a magical “promised land.” Thus, despite the array of film titles mentioned by Robert’s teacher, the war movie with which The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael has the most in common is Stanley Kubrick’s deconstruction of the Vietnam War, Full Metal Jacket. In their aesthetic and critical sensibilities, both films deploy narrative strategies intended to prevent audiences from succumbing to the illusion that what they are witnessing is in any way intended as representational reality. Rather, Kubrick and Clay create cinematic experiences that allow for more expansive, self-conscious critiques of the motivations for, and proliferation of, psychological and physical violence in a culture dominated by images, including motion pictures. While Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket achieves these ends largely through the use of direct address, a strategy that Thomas Clay avoids, the debt that The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael owes to Kubrick’s postmodern riff on war and war movies is most apparent in a comparison of the long shots with which the respective films end. As Robert, Joe, and Ben walk into the sunrise after an extended bout of carnage, the reference to Kubrick’s weary soldiers marching off into a flaming sunset while singing the theme to The Mickey Mouse Club (another idealized “promised land” of unfettered capitalist consumption) is hard to overlook.
This comparison is further strengthened when one considers the lengthy homage to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange that dominates much of The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael’s final fifteen minutes. Fueled by a plethora of chemicals and motivated by a combination of envy, rage, and a virulent despair over the steady realization that the economic divisions that define Newhaven’s social hierarchy are in all likelihood far too wide to overcome, Robert, Joe, and Ben wage a three person class war on the local signifiers of unattainable wealth, Chef Abbott and his glamorous wife, Monica. “Do you think you’re ever going to own a car like that?” Joe asks, gesturing towards Monica Abbott’s Porsche when Ben and Robert initially balk at his plan to break into the wealthy couple’s secluded residence and rob them. “Cunts like this have been ripping you off since the day you were fucking born. To them we’re just a spot on the fucking windscreen just waitin’ to get wiped off.” Like Alex and his “droogs” in Kubrick’s screen adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ dystopian vision of an England populated by disenfranchised youth and precariously teetering on the brink of totalitarianism, Robert, Joe, and Ben take the wealthy couple by surprise, their yearning to merely flee with money and jewels giving way to a baser desires for power in the face of their own powerlessness. Cinematographically, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael closely approximates the visual grammar at work in Kubrick’s depiction of Alex and company’s memorable attack on the subversive writer and his wife, a particularly unsettling sequence that contributed to A Clockwork Orange being banned in Great Britain and reintroduced the song, “Singin’ In The Rain,” to a new generation of film-goers. Jonathan and Monica Abbott are physically dragged through their home, and Monica is raped by each of the intruders in full view of her husband, who, like the writer in Kubrick’s film, is bound, gagged, and forced to watch. At one point early in the prolonged sexual assault of Monica Abbott, Clay places his camera at floor level, strategically recalling the low angle photography Kubrick deploys as the writer forced to “viddie well” as the surprise intruders systematically violate his wife. However, unlike Kubrick’s low angle shots, which are established – through shot-reverse shot editing – as conforming in part with the beaten writer’s POV, Clay’s camera placement reveals both Monica (in the foreground) and the battered, trussed-up chef (in the background). Thus, while Kubrick aligns his viewer’s perspective with that of the assaulted writer, Clay locates the audience as both victim, in that our angle of vision approximates – albeit in reverse – the chef’s, and voyeur, in that the spectator’s gaze is definitively not intended as an absolute surrogate for the sightline of a character compelled against his will to watch what he does not want to see.
Consequently, Clay “ups” the ontological “ante” in this homage to Kubrick’s infamous meditation on violence’s scopophilic allure. Through a mise-en-scène explicitly arranged to portray violence as paradoxically unpleasant (it causes physical pain to the recipient) and visually pleasing/compelling (we are, after all, voluntarily watching it), Clay appeals to his audience’s prurient instincts even as he raises the specter of their complicity in the tacit acceptance and mass consumption of media(ted) violence. In this sense, Clay’s strategy visually echoes the sentiments of the film critic Serge Daney who, in his famous essay on the social and political implications of the aestheticization of violence, writes: “To Lacan’s formula ‘Do you want to watch? Then watch this?’ there was already the response of ‘Has it been recorded? Well then I have to watch it,’ even and especially when ‘it’ was painful, intolerable, or completely invisible” (28). Through his homage to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, then, Clay uses overt intertextuality (between two films/artifacts within a popular mode of mediation) to mediate/convey to his audience a metacinematic reflection of the very economies of mediation that inform the proliferation of violence in its most conspicuous and inconspicuous forms. In a patently filmic moment that functions in large part by immersing itself within the play of artifice that has long pervaded the history of cinema, Clay accomplishes a task that Colin MacCabe, in his discussion on “realism” in cinema, understands as an imperative for filmmakers:
The filmmaker must draw the viewer's attention to his or her relation to the screen in order to make him or her "realize" the social relations which are being portrayed. Inversely, one could say that it is the "strangeness" of the social relations displayed which draws the viewer's attention to the fact of watching a film. It is at the moment that an identification is broken, becomes difficult to hold, that we grasp in one and the same moment both the relations that determine that identity and our relation to its representation. (92)
The vicious rape and murder of Monica Abbott likewise furthers the economic and political critique suffusing virtually every frame of The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael. If, as I suggest above, we understand Robert, Joe, and Ben’s attack upon the celebrity chef and his pregnant wife as a kind of class war in miniature, with the teenager’s actions motivated by an awareness of the insurmountable social and economic inequities slowly evaporating their hopes for a better future, then the events that transpire in the Abbott home are clearly intended as far more than mere “shock tactics” mobilized to simply sell tickets and generate hype. The violent acts portrayed may indeed be considered “extreme” when compared to the content of most contemporary films, but a closer reading of these brutal actions reveals a strikingly nuanced deliberation upon the politics of violence in late capitalist culture.
Consider, for example, three movements within the larger symphony of violence enacted during this notorious sequence. In the first of these, after Joe and Ben have each raped Monica, Robert stands above the chef’s traumatized wife. His expression is deliberately ambiguous. Is he excited? Bored? Numb? Clay cross-cuts between a medium close up of Robert from a slightly low angle and an extreme high angle close up, presumably from Robert’s POV, of Monica, prone upon her living room carpet, breathing laboriously. The lack of a matching shots in this cross-cutting eradicates Monica’s gaze from the scenario, thus aligning the audience’s view so that it approximates a perspective akin to that of one of the perpetrators, or, at the very least, positions the spectator within the role of a witness who is ultimately complicit in the violence occurring on screen through the very act of spectatorship. Soon after Robert disrobes and mounts Monika, Joe, who, from the film’s earliest scenes, is established as the most aggressive and domineering of the trio, pushes Robert off of Monika and proceeds to rape her again. This action, frighteningly similar to that of an alpha dog maintaining supremacy within its pack, illustrates one of the least acknowledged traits of individuals participating in a cultural and political economy predicated upon the importance of economic status and social stratification. Here, too, I turn to Slavoj Žižek’s recent treatise on violence. In his exploration of the role of desire in contemporary capitalist culture, Žižek makes the following claim when investigating how capitalism compels people obsessively (and subconsciously) to desire not only what they don’t have, but also what they already possess and yet see others trying to obtain:
The problem with human desire is that, as Lacan put it, it is always “desire of the Other” in all senses of that term: desire for the other, desire to be desired by the Other, and especially desire for what the Other desires. This last makes envy, which includes resentment, constitutive components of human desire…” (87)
It is this “envy” and “resentment” that motivates Joe to advocate breaking into the Abbott’s residence in the first place, and it is these “constitutive components of human desire” that drives him to usurp Robert the moment he notices that Robert is empowering himself, and potentially enjoying himself, at the expense of Monica and the class difference she symbolizes for many of Newhaven’s residents.
The second movement takes place when Robert, shoved aside by the domineering Joe, acknowledges that he once again been assigned a subordinate position within a social hierarchy that has disturbing parallels to the larger cultural logics reinforcing widening class differences within capitalist nations generally, and the community of Newhaven specifically. Like the town’s exploited laborers, Robert becomes increasingly aware of his social impotence, however his response is one that, enacted through a series of increasingly grotesque mediations, leads directly to the sequence’s third movement, in which Thomas Clay substitutes stock footage of World War II battles in the place of a more literal representation of interpersonal aggression. Enraged to the point of psychosis, Robert desperately struggles to reassert a semblance of individual power by grabbing a wine bottle and, after ordering Joe and Ben to hold Monica Abbott’s legs apart, drops to his knees and repeatedly plunges the bottle’s neck deep into her vagina. Still not satisfied, Robert smashes the bottle on the floor and grabs a small sword from a scabbard hanging decorously on the living room wall. As he pauses to stare contemplatively at the sword’s phallic blade, Joe and Ben react with obvious, if finally fleeting, trepidation. “Oh man, Robert…I don’t know,” Ben says, before he, like Joe, ultimately obeys Robert’s command to “pull her fucking legs apart!” In a visual strategy reminiscent of Pier Paolo Passolini’s decision to lens many of the most sadistic sequences in Salò o le 120 giornate de Sodoma from a noticeable distance, Clay frames the violation that follows in a high angle long shot reminiscent of the perspective one might experience if viewing the attack through a surveillance camera mounted near the ceiling of one of the room’s furthest corners.
As Robert thrusts his arms forward, the sword’s blade arcing downward towards its target, Clay cuts to a short montage of World War II footage that includes images of exploding bombs hurtling debris towards an ashen sky and a burning fighter jet spinning out of control. The stock footage culminates with a close up of Winston Churchill, perhaps one of the most familiar icons of a former triumphant UK, smiling as he bites down on a cigar and holds two fingers aloft in a gesture of victory. By punctuating the film’s most brutal moment with filmic reminders of Britain’s lost glory, Clay temporarily removes his viewers from the visceral immediacy of the attack on the Abbotts to further advance the film’s consideration of the extent to which the social conditions informing human relations in the UK result from living in a present devoid of any significant or sustained connection to a comprehensible past. In keeping with the depiction of the class project and the repeated presence of television broadcasts of the most recent invasion of Iraq, Clay deploys these scratchy black and white images of Britain’s former military triumph to reengaging with the theme of an increasingly expansive – and potentially destructive – ahistoricism, a relationship with the not-too-distant past in which conceptualizations of one’s position within a larger historical, national, or communal continuum reside almost exclusively in a system of mediated images bereft of context, a series of visual signifiers that circulate without even the remotest pretext of adhering to a coherent or meaningful system of signification.
Lastly, as Joe repeatedly stabs the utterly drained and heart-broken chef and leaves him to bleed out onto the floor, the back of the chef’s involuntarily seizing head beating a staccato rhythm against the edge of his designer coffee table, it becomes clear that there will be no retribution for this attack, no revenge. The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael concludes with the dawning of a new day that promises to be every bit as bleak and hopeless as the one before it. Consequently, the “Great Ecstasy” of the film’s title proves to be an ironic one at best. There is no orgasmic bliss, no spiritual or philosophical transcendence. In keeping with the effects of synthetic party drug of the same name, this “Ecstasy,” like religion and mass media, is yet another illusion, another quick fix, another opiate for the masses.
. Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and the Philosophers. New York: Monthly Press Review, 1971.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Semiotext(e), 1988.
Bradshaw, Peter. “The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael.” The Guardian, Friday October 20, 2006. . Date accessed 6 May 2008.
Brenez, Nicole. “The Grand Style of the Epoch: Baise-moi - Girls Better than Maenads, Darker than Furies.” Screening the Past, April 2003.
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. MIT Press, 2005.
Daney, Serge. Postcards from the Cinema. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007.
French, Philip. “The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael.” The Observer, Sunday, October 22, 2006. . Date accessed 6 May 2008.
Gilbey, Ryan. “The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (UK 2005). Sight & Sound. November 2006. . Date accessed 6 May 2008.
Graham, Jamie. “The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael – Film Review.” Total Film. . Date Accessed: 6 May 2008.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick. The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976.
McGowan, Todd. The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.
Russell, Jamie. “The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2006).” BBC Online. 15 October 2006. . Date Accessed 6 May 2008.
Sterrit, David Sterritt and Brottman, Mikita. “Irreversible.” Film Quarterly, Issue 52 (2002), pp. 37-42. Available Online at: . Date accessed 8 June 2008.
Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. New York: Picador, 2008.
END NOTES
[1] Perhaps the most extreme example of “criticism” via association opens Ryan Gilbey’s negative review of Clay’s film in the November 2005 edition of the British Film Institute’s journal, Sight & Sound: “Should Peter Greenaway ever film a script by Bruno Dumont featuring characters conceived by Mike Leigh, the result might resemble The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael” (para 1).
[2] See Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Semiotext(e), 1988.
[3] This combination of economic despair with an explicit anxiety over the collapse of stereotypical masculine roles (e.g. as “provider”) is perhaps best evidenced in an early scene in which Joe’s father, driving a nondescript white van, pulls up to a service station at which the chef’s wife, sporting a black Porsche, rebuffs his maladroit flirtations to their mutual disgust.
[4] This dynamic of explicit and disguised violence is similar to the modes of “subjective” and “objective” violence Slavoj Žižek discusses in his recent book, Violence (Picador, 2008). According to Žižek, one of the primary reasons that subjective violence is easier for human beings to recognize and manage psychologically is that: “…although our power of abstract reasoning has developed immensely, our emotional-ethical responses remain conditioned by age old instinctual reactions to suffering and pain that is witnessed directly. This is why shooting someone point-blank is for most of us much more repulsive than pushing a button that will kill a thousand people we can’t see” (43).
Since its release in 1968, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead has become a classic of the horror genre and a staple of late-night Halloween screenings on televisions and in movie theaters around the globe. Made for a mere $114,000, this intimate chamber play from hell assaults viewers with a grainy, black and white vision of the unburied dead tottering and shambling across a darkened rural landscape to feast upon the flesh of the living. In the process, Romero’s film offers a bleak apocalyptic vision that almost single-handedly redefined the “zombie” as a monstrous, cannibalistic entity whose sheer numbers and single-mindedness of purpose constitute the locus of horror. Given its status as a landmark work of horror cinema, Night of the Living Dead has given rise not only to a franchise of sequels, prequels, and remakes, but to a seemingly endless onslaught of imitations and would-be innovations that endeavor to put their own, frequently banal spin upon the “dead walk the earth” formula. Furthermore, given the crucial position that Romero’s zombie films have come to occupy within the horror genre, it is perhaps not surprising that Romero’s groundbreaking film and its monstrous progeny would induce a deluge of critical analyses. These texts range from reviews speculating upon the appeal of the film’s horrific premise to book-length anthologies comprised of philosophical inquiries seeking to interrogate the ontological, phenomenological, and metaphysical implications of the living dead.
The prolonged fascination with the zombie as signifier is itself a worthy subject for critical inquiry, particularly given the zombie’s continued appeal as a cultural barometer for gauging the metaphorical weight attached to mass-culture representations of aggregate social collectives ("swarming" bodies and "unruly masses" as opposed to "orderly groupings," etc.). Swarms, and the myriad bodies that comprise them, have long been associated with the evocation of fear and dread in the Western popular imagination. From literary and cinematic representations of locust plagues and “Africanized” killer bees to mass media depictions of overpopulation, urban riots, and the forced or voluntary migrations of large numbers of ecologically- or militarily-displaced people from one location to another, a discourse of swarming and non-containable social congregations has been constructed that takes as its primary logic a narrative of border violation and indiscrete social and corporeal formations. Immigrants and refugees, for example, are frequently described in the media as “overwhelming floods” of people that, like locusts, devour resources and create “humanitarian nightmares” as they cross over from one country to another, their movements graphically depicted by colorful arrows on maps that call to mind war-time illustrations of troop movements. Mobilizations of so-called “illegal aliens” are likewise portrayed as undisciplined and/or unauthorized influxes of bodies that threaten a nation’s cultural or political integrity. Even large public protests calling for necessary social change are described as potentially destructive configurations, or “unruly mobs.”
Swarming bodies, then, occupy a significant and politically charged position in the cultural imagination. Endowed with predominantly negative connotations within popular discourse, these heterogeneous and fluid groupings are also objects of continual fascination, as evidenced by “info-tainment” programs like The World’s Deadliest Swarms. Indeed, it is exactly the potential indeterminacy of crowds that mark them as both dangerous, in that they challenge the structures that support the status quo, and appealing, in that they offer a multitude of alternative economies. As Steven Shaviro points out in his essay, “Two Lessons from Burroughs,” swarms “form immense crowds without adopting rigid hierarchical structures. Their loose aggregations offer far more attractive prospects for postmodern sociality than do State organizations…swarms are populations in continual flux, distributing themselves across vast territory” (51). In late capitalist culture, where, as David Harvey has demonstrated, flows of capital are infinitely re-configurable in the face of potential crisis, the prospective indiscretion of swarming crowds offer a model of society in perpetual transformation, a body politic that, like the subject positions that constitute it, is open to perpetual legislation.
The zombies that congregate outside of the farm house in Night of the Living Dead, however, are motivated exclusively by their desire to devour, a behavior that Romero will push to its allegorical breaking point in 1979’s Dawn of the Dead and its primary setting – a shopping mall besieged by zombies seemingly drawn by a powerful primordial will to consume. Indeed, it will not be until 1985’s Day of the Dead and 2005’s Land of the Dead that Romero will embark upon a consideration of the “zombified” masses as a possibly progressive alternative to the scientific-military apparatus that may not only be largely responsible for the dead bodies overtaking the living, but that may also lack the basic interpersonal skills necessary to set aside meaningless partisan agendas and organize an effective response. In Night of the Living Dead, however, the swarming crowd of zombies recalls the critique of crowds that Elias Canetti poses in his Nobel Prize winning tome, Crowds and Power (1960). In an ironic reversal of the abject repugnance many people feel when social and sartorial boundaries are ruptured and our all-too-human flesh makes unexpected and undesired contact with the stark physicality of another human being, crowds, for Canetti, not only eradicate such fears, but provide comfort through a physical and psychological surrender to the spatial and political formulations of the mass that moves as an apparently unified, uncontainable collective. Like the zombies, who no longer adhere to the hierarchical constructions to which they were subject while alive, a person in a crowd, Canetti reminds us, is equal, merely another organ in a larger, incomprehensible body at war against any boundaries that endeavor to contain it (be they doors, windows, or human beings deemed “outsiders”). Consequently, individual responsibility for one’s actions is quickly abandoned; as Voltaire observed: “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
One of the strengths of Romero’s film, and indeed one of the primary reasons that it endures to this day as a subject of such expansive and diverse critical reception, is its resistance to reducibility. For the last forty years critics have met Romero’s shoe string budget monster flick with readings informed by the latest theoretical platforms that popular and academic analyses have to offer, and his humble B-movie has, like one its tell-tale zombies wandering aimlessly in their filthy burial garments, continued to stagger back into the public’s imagination. For this critic, what makes George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead truly remarkable is the way the narrative counters the swarming crowds of the walking dead with a seemingly antithetical mode of social organization, namely the nuclear family taken to its destructive, quasi-incestuous extreme. Comprised of Harry, the abrasive patriarch, Helen, his beleaguered wife, and Karen, their daughter-turned-zombie, the Coopers (a family whose very name implies enclosure) assume antagonistic roles within the hastily boarded-up farmhouse. Harry and Helen’s continual sniping and bickering exacerbate tensions within an already stressful environment, and Harry’s persistent and selfishly motivated challenges to Ben’s democratically-sanctioned authority further endangers the safety of those gathered in hopes of surviving the zombie assault. Harry’s pernicious self-interest reaches its crescendo when he locks Ben out of the house, a move that results in Harry being shot during a physical altercation with Ben. Bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound, Harry finds himself back in the very room to which he constantly advocates return: the basement. Bereft of escape routes (literal and figurative “lines of flight”) the basement proves to be every bit the “deathtrap” that Ben claimed it to be all along. It is in this subterranean space that the isolationist family unit devours itself, the undead daughter feasting upon her father’s organs before turning on the hapless, pleading mother and butchering her with a trowel.
It is perhaps appropriate, then, that the most horrific moment in Romero’s film transpires well after the eponymous night has given way to the break of day and the arrival of the trigger-happy zombie hunters who, as numerous critics have pointed out, are far more reminiscent of lynch mobs and conservative thugs than knights in shining armor (or, in this case, flannel). Like the undead they aim to eliminate from the planet, the zombie hunters lack the desire, or indeed the inclination, to determine whether a figure half-glimpsed in the distance is a member of the living or a representative of the rapidly growing ranks of the dead. Given that their target is both the film’s hero and a person of color, their mindless slaughter for slaughter’s sake takes on an even more harrowing dimension. As the montage of grisly snapshots with which Night of the Living Dead concludes clearly suggests, the zombie hunters have as much in common with their undead quarry as they do with the Cooper family who sequester themselves within the cellar-soon-turned-family-crypt. As is made abundantly clear throughout the film’s narrative, the destruction of the zombies must ultimately come from without; as one expert hunter puts it: “shoot ‘em or burn ‘em; they go up pretty easy.” Sadly, the human race is at risk from both without – at the cold dead hands of the walking corpses – and from within – at the somewhat warmer hands of their fellow humans.
