Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)
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Mutating Masculinity: Embodying the Hu(man) in The Hills Have Eyes / Rebecca Hawkins
<1> Discussing gender identity in the female warriors of kung fu films, critic Kwai-cheung Lo asks, "Does maleness automatically produce masculinity? Is there a kind of masculinity independent of the biological male? Can the women who kill in action cinema occupy a position that has been historically thought of as exclusively masculine" (138)? In this paper, I am asking similar questions regarding the construction of masculinity in the male victim of a horror film. Since the slasher film genre rose to popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, horror films have often been accused of reveling in voyeuristic misogyny (a main contention, for instance, of Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure), and the recent popularity of the horror genre aptly labeled "torture porn" (including films such as Hostel, Captivity, Saw and Turistas) has created even more skepticism about just what sort of gendered work is done in/by horror films. Nevertheless, I want to argue that the film under discussion here, Alexandre Aja's 2006 remake of Wes Craven's 1977 horror classic The Hills Have Eyes, despite incorporating graphically-represented cannibalism and depicting a horrifyingly-realistic rape, departs from the standard lexicon of gender roles in both torture porn and slasher films in significant ways as it explores modern, middle-class, white male identity.
<2> Perhaps the most important differences between Hills and other contemporary horror films have to do with the gender of the film's "hero" and with the film's depiction of death and pain. To begin, the hero of Hills is not a brawny, self-reliant male but a bespectacled, married-with-a-baby, decidedly middle-class pacifist whose unremarkable personality from the film's outset seems to be echoed by his diminutive stature. Women play only a small role in the action of the film: Two of the four main female characters are killed during the first attack, and the third female victim suffers nothing further at the hands of the film's monsters. Film critics have long noted that horror film thrives on generic imitation; what works in one film will surely be repeated over and over again, sometimes with noticeably little variation, from one film to the next, yet Hills' depiction of male/female gender roles departs significantly from generic expectations. [1] As a prime example, Carol Clover relates that since the 1980s horror film has abandoned the device of a male hero saving the day, instead allowing the "Final Girl" – that is, the psycho killer's last remaining victim – to save herself, while the recent proliferation of torture porn has emphasized the female body in various states of eroticized mutilation. For Hills to forego tropes of either genre suggests that the filmmakers are commenting on the gendered performances called up by the missing or revised generic elements.
<3> Furthermore, Hills' excessive emphasis on bodies already-mutated, instead of on bodies in the process of being mutilated, departs from the more common generic strategy of creating horror by dramatizing agonizing death. The monsters in Hills, a family of miners mutated by governmental nuclear testing on their desert land, are oozing, limping, lumbering sacks of tumor-sprouting flesh. In spite of their grotesqueness, however, they are undeniably human in both appearance (unlike, say, the madmen who hide behind masks in the Saw or Halloween series) and in action, in their determination to maintain communal bonds that darkly mirror mainstream society. While Hills certainly offers up moments of gruesome dismemberment and cannibalism, the monsters themselves are truly monstrous.
<4> Hills' "gender bending" and frighteningly human psycho killers highlight intriguing connections between our fear of the uncontrollable biological body and our anxieties about unstable gender identities. In this paper, I intend to show how the psychosexual journey of Doug, the son-in-law of the doomed Carter family who experiences arguably the most profound psychological transformation (one might say "mutation") of any character in the film, becomes a quest for an acceptable modern masculinity, one informed by and formed in relation to the social reforms brought about through second-wave feminism. Doug's initial masculine identity, which is transgressively effeminate, comes by the film's end to "embody" a more balanced, though by no means traditional, combination of feminine-masculine characteristics. I will argue that this mutation/transformation occurs as a result of Doug's forced confrontation with what Jack Morgan, drawing from Foucault, terms "biological horror," the repulsion we feel for our fragile, decaying, defenseless organic bodies.
<5> My questions, mirroring Lo's, might be framed as: Can horror films subvert our expectations for biological maleness to automatically produce masculinity? Can a biologically male character embody feminine characteristics and survive a horror film? Can horror films, by making visible the monstrousness of what we might call "transgressive masculinities" (either too passive/feminine or too aggressive/hyper-masculine), reveal to us new combinations of masculine-feminine/feminine-masculine gender identities? To put it more simply, I am arguing that Hills advocates a male gender identity Anne Ferguson would call "gynandrous." Responding to criticisms of her Sexual Democracy, Ferguson acknowledges that although biological sex and gender are unlikely to disappear as categories of organizing difference, we should still strive for
a society in which the female body and its social implications have been revalued in such a way that . . . [they] have equal value to those associated with the male body. In such a situation, the symbolic implications of gender-associated traits will be detachable from bodies altogether, and it will be possible for both women and men to strive for a human ideal that combines and reconstructs those traits historically associated with masculinity and femininity into a new, unified human ideal. 211
<6> My reading of Doug's psychosexual transformation rests on three basic premises. First, although gender-associated masculine and feminine traits exist independently of biological sex, for gender is a socially-constructed category, our interpolation into gender roles means that the construction of gender has become socially invisible, making male masculinity and female femininity seem inevitable despite copious evidence to the contrary. The invisibility of gender construction leads to my second contention: The increased presence of women in the public sphere and the increased pressure on men to inhabit the domestic sphere in the decades since the rise of second-wave feminism has left masculinity in crisis, because the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s resulted in on-going changes to our ideas of gender, equality of the sexes, marriage, domestic responsibility, parenthood, and so forth. In a world where women have come to inhabit what were, prior to second-wave feminism, traditionally "male" economic and political roles; where men are increasingly expected to share some traditionally "female" domestic roles; and where personal, sociopolitical, and sexual relationships between men and women have been redefined through women's liberation, Hills shows us one male character's struggle to "be a man" in a culture that apparently hasn't totally embraced the de facto changes in gender roles advocated by second-wave feminism (though we might like to believe that we have).
<7> Herein lies my third and final premise. Horror films, by showing us the "horror" of monstrous masculinity, does not resolve the crisis brought about by second-wave feminism, since horror as a genre does not "heal"; instead, horror makes visible (even graphic) the work of constructing a psychosexual identity, and in the case of Hills, suggests the downfall of masculinities that are either too feminine or too masculine. I want to clarify, though, that in talking about the search for "acceptable" gender roles in Hills, I am not referring to either a predetermined biological roles or to an idealized "equality" (androgyny) that erases differences between men and women. What I see happening in Hills is a journey toward a balanced, gynandrous gender identity that makes available the best feminine and masculine characteristics, as those have traditionally been defined (i.e., feminine nurturing and masculine strength), to a male character.
<8> Gaylyn Studlar's examination of masochism in film presents a similar argument regarding the pleasure we take from watching transgressive gender performances. Drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze, Studlar wishes to revise the feminist psychoanalytic approach to visual pleasure, most notably forwarded by Mulvey, through a Deleuzean model that
questions the pre-eminence of a pleasure based on a position of control rather than submission . . . Deleuze's theory of masochistic desire challenges the notion that male scopic pleasure must center around control – never identification with or submission to the female . . . The cinematic spectator experiences . . . the pleasure of re-experiencing the primary identification with the mother and the pleasurable possibilities of gender mobility through identification . . . [F]or both male and female, same-sex identification does not totally exclude opposite-sex identification. The wish to be both sexes – to overcome sexual difference – remains. (208, 218)
Studlar essentially argues from a psychosocial perspective that men and women alike may experience a psychological "lack" when expected to be only either masculine-men or feminine-women (what Studlar calls our "idealized ego"), and as cinematic spectators, we may find pleasure in opposite-sex identification. I am simply moving her argument a step forward to propose that Hills seeks out not merely opposite-sex identification but a cross-gendering that combines feminine and masculine characteristics in a biologically male character in a way audiences find pleasing, even satisfying. The possibilities of horror film in particular to demonstrate this search for both/and gender identities will be a major focus of my analysis.
<9> Of course, I must attend to the fact that the version of Hills discussed herein is a remake of a classic Although the possibilities for such a project are tantalizing, I am not reading the 2006 film against the previous one. I am reading the new film as a cultural artifact of the current filmic and social climate. My rationale for doing so likely parallels the filmmaker's rationale for remaking the film thirty years after the original: Aja's version in large part targets a new audience, one likely unfamiliar with Craven's film and, importantly because of its departures from the genre, more familiar with torture-porn.
Embodying Gender: Biological Horror and Psychosexual Anxiety
<10> In his study of literary and cinematic biohorror, Morgan explains that "ours is a psychology correlative to and defined by our biological character, but the human psyche is not comfortably at home in this biological landscape . . . everywhere characterized by perishableness" (2). To put it another way, in our information- and technology-saturated age, where our bodies seem to exist only in service of our minds (that is, the laboring mind, not the laboring body, stands as the locus of economic productivity in our culture), blatant reminders of our physicality produce in us a kind of horror. Morgan argues that we experience this horror when "physicality . . . intrudes upon routine life in the form of stroke, coronary, dream and nightmare, the menstrual cycle, childbirth, menopause and so on" (3); moreover, biohorror can also be created when physicality "finds expression in the atavistic, demonic images conjured by macabre literature. Body horror, pain, death and dismemberment are facts of everyday physical life on the one hand and phantoms of our dreams and imagining at the same time" (3).
<11> Using as example films like The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby and Stigmata, Morgan argues that the "supernatural" and the "natural" collide in the corporeal reality of our biological bodies, so that within the gothic tradition, which includes the horror film, "our 'psychological' fears are realized in very physical terms" (6). Likewise, Linda Badley's Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic locates the truly horrific in biological, not fantastic, sites – or, to use Morgan's terms, in the inescapability of the Natural, not in the fantasy of the "supernatural." Describing her experience of walking through a "haunted house" as part of a Halloween festival, Badley relates that "the text here was not fear of death in any traditional [supernatural] sense but fear and loathing of life...The haunted house was the human body itself – threatened at every turn, covered with tubes, cannibalized for cells, fluids, tissues and parts, tortured and reconstructed on the procrustean bed of biotechnology" (6).
<12> More so than ghosts or goblins, what we fear is the body itself, or more accurately our inability to control and/or protect the body. Films like Hills play upon these fears by showing us what Clover calls the "body in threat": "The target in [horror films] is the body, our witnessing body, . . . [but] what we witness is also the body, another's body, in experience: . . . the body in threat" (189). If we were to conceive of the horror film as a rhetorical act (that is, an argument), we could say that a dialectic exists between the biological horror represented in and the biological horror invoked by the horror film. On the one hand, our own witnessing body responds physiologically – our hearts race, our stomachs clench – to the terror invoked in us by the horror on screen; at the same time, however, what causes our terror is the body we witness "in threat." Thus horror films position us to experience biohorror on two levels, the immediate (our own physiological response) and the voyeuristic (our sympathetic response to the character), thereby engaging our bodies and our minds in a parallel construction of the "horror" that is biological existence.
<13> Biohorror assumes a more complex spectatorial subject than Lacanian theories of psychoanalysis permit, calling instead for a post-structuralist subjectivity that, as Deidre Pribram's "Spectatorship and Subjectivity" says, is "decentered, noncoherent, externally constructed rather than internally originating" (46). Pribram suggests that we combine Foucault's discursive subject with cultural studies' social subject to question "what constitutes the person seated in front of the movie or television screen, and . . . which configurations, out of limitless possibilities, constitute viewing subjects so that they see themselves, the text, and the world(s) it represents within specific systems of meaning" (46). Like many contemporary critics, Pribram finds Mulvey's theory of visual pleasure too delimiting, for it assumes a universal, monolothic subjectivity that glosses over the lived experiences of race, class, and so on, ascribing all subjective experience to sexual and gendered causes. Against this univocal subjectivity, Foucault posits a subject whose "identity is not a function of singular, solely psychic or unfaltering processes, but rather . . . is constructed by the cultural forces of multiple, overlapping, and sometimes competing discourses" (152), of which gender is only one component.
<14> Foucault's discursive subject has been accused of denying individual agency, which leads Pribram to advocate the inclusion of a social subject to the spectatorial model. Cultural studies, according to Pribram, offers a "theoretical return to the 'everyday experiences' or lived specifities of the material, historical subject" (158). The social subject, while not outside of culture, is nevertheless an active maker of meaning instead of a passive recipient of ideology: "Indeed, cultural studies understands popular culture as the terrain where cultural power, relationships and systems of meaning are negotiated and established – and, consequently, can be resisted and/or reestablished otherwise" (160).
<15> Pribram's idea of the discursively-constructed social subject matters for my project because, first of all, biohorror expands, like these theories do, the realm of factors impacting the spectator's visual pleasure. Not only psychology but also biology, not only psychosexual identity but also biophysical experience, create our response to the body in threat. Psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity are insufficient to explain biohorror, whereas discursive subjectivity allows for personal experiences with physicality, indoctrination into a cultural mind/body dichotomy that privileges the former over the latter, and exposure to medical discourse that treats death and disease as "unnatural" (monstrous) to figure into biohorror. Furthermore, according to Pribram, the whole point of popular culture is to challenge and potentially reform social systems. Therefore the social subject opens up the possibility, as I will argue later, for biohorror to do more than reify "unfaltering" psychological processes; social subjectivity assumes a political power through individual agency wherein cultural change can result from the subjective experience.
<16> Another layer of dialectic complexity is added to biohorror when a character on-screen acts as a "witnessing body" that, like the audience, experiences both the immediate and the voyeuristic horror of either seeing another character's death or viewing proof of that death (the corpse). As Dennis White argued as long as ago as 1971, "the arousing of our fear of death itself is not enough to produce horror; horror requires a certain kind of manipulation of that fear . . . - not just murder, but the kind of death from which there is no protection, no warning, no escape" (7). What terrifies us as the audience is what terrifies the character on-screen who also acts as a "witnessing body" – the realization of death's inevitability, that when we are unable to protect our bodies we become that most unnatural thing: the corpse, the life-less body.
<17> In Hills, Doug experiences biohorror upon discovering his wife's dead (or at least dying) body in the trailer. I will argue here that it is no accident that Doug's masculinity begins to "mutate" at this point in the film, so that he becomes positioned as active agent within rather than passive spectator of the violence and horror unfolding around him, although he has yet to encounter a single mutant. The recognition of corporeality brought about by witnessing the aftermath of murder awakens in Doug a horror of his own biological reality not unlike what the audience has experienced; in response, the character takes action to preserve his biological body, action that will ultimately require a transformation of his psychosexual identity.
<18> Because the corpse plays such an important role (excuse the pun) in Hills, it should be emphasized here that the corpse in horror film shares equal representational status with the depiction of actual torture and/or death. Hills in particular places corpses quite literally at stage center: Doug cries over the bloody corpse of his wife, who "reanimates" briefly for one last, terrifying gasp; the surviving Carter children must remove the corpses of their mother and sister from the trailer; Bobby sees a mutant remove and eat the heart from his mother's corpse; Doug awakens in a bathtub filled with dismembered body parts after being captured in the mutant village; Big Bob's burnt corpse sits at the head of the dining room table inside the mutant Brain's house. Elizabeth Klaver's Images of the Corpse from the Renaissance to Cyberspace concludes that the corpse can generate biohorror because "once the Cartesian division of the soul and the body had occurred, the dead body in both the medical and aesthetic arenas could become the landscape of a quest for meaning" (xvi). Death itself was "exposed as culturally constructed . . . Whether in the discourses of medicine or the arts and humanities, the dead body is viewed as a textual, semiotic, discursive entity" (xvi).
<19> But what exactly is the corpse in horror film trying to "tell us"? Artists Jennifer and Lorraine Webb posit that
as Other, death constitutes the limit and the boundary of both life and meaning: the limit because it marks the end of self-awareness; the boundary because it removes the human subject from the symbolic order and returns it to the Real . . . Death thus dissolves meaning because it is itself beyond language, beyond signification and beyond the symbolic order . . . The dead body, by being life's Other, provides for the living that difference that names and confirms our being. But the slipperiness of signification means that in the process of providing the guarantee of our life – our aliveness – the dead simultaneously call us to, and recall to us, our own death. 207, 209
Webb and Webb's description of the corpse as "Other" reminds us that, throughout much of Western history, the female has been so defined by patriarchal culture. It may in fact not be much of an analytical leap to suggest that horror films provide such a rich source of gender commentary because of their fixation on the body, which in Western culture has traditionally been associated with the feminine Other.
<20> While the negative connotations of the female/body, male/mind dichotomy are undeniably exploited in horror film, is it unthinkable that we can find what Ferguson calls a "revaluation" of femininity in horror film? I would argue that some horror films, like Hills, engage in gendered performance that exposes the power and the necessity of the feminine even as they redefine traditional gender roles, denying, for instance, the benefits of a traditionally feminine "passivity" or "silence" while showing masculinity as monstrous for lacking these very traits. Accepting this seemingly counterintuitive argument, however, necessitates understanding the semiotics of gender representation in film generally and in horror film specifically.
<21> Since Mulvey published her seminal work on "visual pleasure" three decades ago, Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark note that the predominant feminist approach to film studies has been to demonstrate "how difficult it is for a woman to resist becoming implicated in the representation system that is Hollywood cinema: the apparatus not only uses the female to signify a male desire that disavows difference, but it excludes her from the masculine address as well" (1). Nevertheless, Cohan and Hark critique this analytical perspective for its failure to appreciate the capacity of film to subvert mainstream constructions of appropriate gender roles by playing with and on representations of masculinity and femininity. [2] Joining critics like Sally Robinson and Badley, Cohan and Hark contend that the veneer of male gender universality – that is, that "masculinity" is not properly a gender, but instead the universal "way of being" against which femininity is defined – is often exposed as so much social myth in film, where "the problem of masculinity which motivates the [representational] system" is presented for consideration each time a biological male nacts "maleness" on-screen (2, 3).
<22> The crux of the question as to what type of cultural work horror film performs with regards to gender, in other words, lies in the question of whether or not the feminine can assert power within a masculine-dominant representational system. Alice Jardine's theory of gynesis, the "putting into discourse of woman" (25) argues that, as the once-universal male perspective becomes decentered, female perspectives and, indeed, female textual bodies (that is, representations of women in text), are written into being (Robinson 204-205). For instance, Mulvey's theory of visual pleasure assumes that the masculine perspective acts as the universal, normalizing perspective from which women on-screen are to be viewed; visual representations of the female are always-already inscribed with masculine (read: misogynist) ideas of the feminine, because the male gaze both constructs the character on-screen as a gendered being and instructs the viewer, whether male or female, in the appropriate way to "look" at a woman. Yet Mulvey's thesis does not account for what Robinson terms "the death of the paternal metaphor" (204) in Derridean theory. According to Robinson, the dominance of the male perspective has long imbued the masculine with "the power to construct both itself and the feminine, . . . a discursive power to which accrues a privilege of self-representation, a privilege the feminine does not share" (206). Yet as the female author, character, critic, subject, reader, viewer and filmmaker has become a pervasive cultural force, "a crisis in the hegemony of the male perspective" has led to "what Robyn Wiegman calls a 'regeneration of the masculine,' a reconstruction of the masculine perspective in order to include the feminine in its representations" (205-206).
<23> My analysis of Hills rests upon both Ferguson's gynandry and Jardine's theory of gynesis, not only in the audience's viewing of the film but also in the construction, de-construction, and re-construction of Doug's masculine identity. Gynesis asserts that a woman can be "put into discourse," created in/through/with language. I maintain that the horror film's emphasis on bodily experience expands the potential for feminine gynesitic power because it reinforces the inescapable biological fact that it is in the most literal sense the female who constructs – gestates and delivers – the biological bodies of both men and women; when men try to eradicate women from the textual landscape, they become psychokillers like the mutants in Hills, and when they go a step further and try to usurp the maternal role, they create monsters. As Badley has argued, "the discourses of horror are not separable from the discourses of gender. Horror expresses and diagnoses gender trouble, the schisms of self and other, mind and body, and the cognitive limits of mortality in the language of the fantastic" (36).
<24> In the remainder of this essay, I want to turn from theorizing how gender "trouble," as Judith Butler has termed it, may be played out in horror film in order to look specifically at the gender trouble in Hills. I will argue first that Doug's transformation from castrated, domesticated male to avenging paternal hero, occurring as it does through his encounter with the horrors of pain and death, speaks to his masculine fear of the bio-discursive power of the feminine. In one sense, Doug must purge the feminine from himself before he can "regenerate" (note the biological overtones of Robinson's term, suggesting that masculinity must be "reborn"), achieving a less transgressively-feminine masculinity: His wife Lynn and her mother, the maternal figures in the film, must die before Doug can become the center of the narrative. The maternal biological body impedes Doug's attempts to inhabit an appropriate masculine identity; he is not comfortable as a father, son, brother or husband until the maternal body and its castrating power are neutralized, at which point he becomes the hero of the tale.
<25> At the same time, however, I will also argue that the masculinity Doug embodies in the second half of the film, while no longer castrated or effeminate, is too savage, brutal, and "hyper" masculine to be acceptable either. Rather, I intend to show that through his confrontation with biohorror, Doug moves toward a gender identity that could be labeled "gynandrous," Ferguson's "unified human ideal." At the film's conclusion, Doug's gender is not so much ambiguous as it is multiplicitous, selectively combining the masculine and the feminine, the mother and the father, the giver of life and the bringer of death.
Feminine Horror: Encounters with the Not-(Hu)man
<26> Quoting Noel Caroll's Philosophy of Horror, Morgan relates that "monsters are 'impure and unclean. They are putrid, moldering things, or they hail from oozing places, or they are made of dead or rotting flesh' . . . It must of course be recognized that it is not repulsive things as such that literature and film address but those things symbolically realized" (16-17). In the case of monsters like the mutants in Hills, what is symbolized seems to be our repressed horror of our own physicality, the corruptibility and vulnerability of our flesh. Monsters, like the mutilated victim or the dismembered corpse, symbolize not just the body but what Badley calls "the body fantastic." Horror movies are "a theater of cruelty specializing in representations of the human anatomy in extremis – in disarray or deconstruction, in metamorphosis, invaded or engulfing, in sexual difference, in monstrous otherness, or Dionysian ecstasy: the body fantastic" (26).
<27> Moreover, because of the feminine-body association, monsters like Hills' mutants may also symbolize horror of the feminine or, in some cases, of transgressive, effeminate masculinity. Linda Williams, discussing the "excesses" shared by the filmic genres pornography, horror, and melodrama, claims that each emphasizes an "ecstatic" body, the "body 'beside itself' with sexual pleasure, fear and terror, or overpowering sadness" (4). But it is not just any body that we see "beside itself" in these films; the woman's body has come to represent both pornographic pleasure and sensationalized horror. Thus, before looking at how the mutants in Hills may represent monstrous femininity, it is necessary to first investigate how femininity becomes "monstrous" – the body fantastic, the body ecstatic – in the film.
<28> To an extent, Hills follows familiar tropes regarding the use of women to "embody" our horror of the physical. Four female characters figure prominently in Hills: Ethel Carter, the matriarch of the Carter clan; Lynn, eldest daughter, wife to Doug and mother of the infant Katherine; Brenda, the teenage daughter; and Ruby, an adolescent mutant who proves to be the savior of the Carters. Through the three Carter women, the filmmakers establish the film's gender dynamics. Ethel and Big Bob bicker constantly, yet they also seem to truly care for one another. More importantly, Ethel is not depicted as a shrewish wife. She is slightly overbearing, perhaps a bit neurotic in her religious convictions, but given that her husband has been a police detective for many years, her anxiety for his safety and for her children's seems understandable, even sympathetic. In any event, once the family is stranded in the desert, Ethel falls in line with traditional gender roles by deferring to Big Bob to see them through the crisis.
<29> Lynn largely imitates her mother's approach to marriage and motherhood. She is a full-time mother who "helps Doug out at the store." Although she refuses to let Doug have his way in most matters, Lynn's overbearing tendencies, like her mother's, seem to stem from good intentions. For instance, when Doug strikes off into the desert to see where the gas station attendant's "shortcut" leads, Lynn insists that he wear a goofy-looking denim hat to protect him from the sun. When he protests, she laughingly tells him, "It's not about fashion," placing the hat on his head as she tenderly kisses him.
<30> Unlike Ethel, however, Lynn does not realize that in order to maintain what a man like her father – a gun-toting retired cop – would see as an "appropriate" husband-wife relationship, she should sometimes defer to Doug. Instead, Lynn's unwavering assertiveness is perceived by Doug as a castrating femininity that leads him to private rebellions, not to open anger with his wife such as Big Bob displays when Ethel questions him. Before the car crash, while alone with his teenage brother-in-law Bobby in the trailer-home, Doug lights a cigarette despite having told Lynn that he has kicked the habit. When Bobby questions him about the lie, Doug, quite out of character for the almost diffident man we have seen up to this point, responds, "You know what? Fuck your sister." Moments later, Doug playfully offers Bobby a cigarette and inadvertently reveals the fear of castration that has motivated his offensive remark: "Your sister would cut my nuts off if you start smoking," Doug says, and agrees with Bobby's retort that Lynn already "did that a long time ago."
<31> Regarding gender roles, Lynn and her mother thus represent two sides of the same coin. Ethel displays many of the attitudes toward a "woman's place" that we would expect from a woman raised by parents from the sexually-repressive, gender-restrictive 1940s and 1950s; Lynn, although she appears to hold more ideas about a woman's right to domestic authority (authority over the husband) than her mother, also seems comfortable inhabiting the "traditional" wife/mother role she has learned from Ethel. Yet neither woman poses a great threat to masculine domination because they are willing to, in some sense, "play along" with accepted gender roles. Brenda, on the other hand, represents what in horror films is usually the most dangerous feminine: the beautiful, hyper-sexualized girl.
<32> For the first third of the film, Brenda engages in every behavior that normally marks a female character for death. She disrespects her parents by swearing in front of her mother and arguing over joining in a family prayer; she degrades her sister for being a stay-at-home mother; she admits to using drugs; she flaunts her sexuality, suntanning in her bra with smug awareness of the effect her near-nakedness has on Doug. Into the world of mothers, Brenda introduces the unpredictable element of the almost-grown, unmarried daughter whose budding sexuality prevents her father from completely controlling her and whose status as a "single woman" means she has no husband to keep her in line. Brenda's ill-defined place within the gender hierarchy of the seemingly all-American Carter family threatens to crack the veneer of gender normalcy which conceals the tensions running just beneath the surface of the family's relationships.
<33> Given the gender dynamic Hills establishes prior to the mutants' first attack, audiences schooled in the generic elements of horror film most likely expect that Brenda will have to die and that Lynn at least, if not Ethel as well, will either have to die or be "reformed" to inhabit less-assertive feminine roles. As the first attack gets underway, Hills appears to fall in line with these expectations. Brenda is brutally raped in the trailer-home while the rest of her family deals with the murder of her father, Big Bob; Lynn, rushing in to rescue her sister and her baby, is sexually assaulted by the mutant Lizard. Although both women fight back, each is easily overpowered, as is Ethel, whose heroic entrance to save her daughters ends when Lizard shoots her in the gut, literally blowing her across the trailer.
<34> At this point in the film, we are in familiar territory. Brenda's hyper-sexuality has been punished through rape; Lynn's overbearing maternity, including how she "moms" her husband, has been deformed so that she is forced to suckle her would-be rapist; Ethel's presumption that she could replace the father as her daughters' protector is answered by a bullet. Lynn's emulation of her mother's heroism will earn her a fatal bullet as well after she stabs Lizard in the leg.
<35> Nonetheless, even as it plays along with the logic that "the women must die," Hills violates our expectations for how those deaths will occur. Neither Ethel nor Lynn is systematically tortured or mutilated, as we would expect from torture porn; although their dead bodies are laid over with significance, as I will discuss shortly, their dying bodies are not fetishized. Instead, their deaths are, like violence in the world off-screen, so unexpected as to be breathtakingly horrific, for they force us to recognize that these women never stood a chance against their attackers. They were never given the opportunity to run, to escape, that female victims in other horror films are given.
<36> If the focus during Ethel and Lynn's final moments is not on fetishistic denouement of the feminine Other, the point of their deaths instead seeming to be the mere fact that they are removed from the narrative landscape, we must ask where the narrative actually centers. The answer quickly becomes clear. The source of "gender trouble" in Hills, our fear of the embodied Other, relocates from the female body – and specifically the maternal body, as Brenda, the only non-mother, survives – onto the male.
<37> One might argue that by re-centering the narrative onto Doug, the filmmakers are engaged in cultural work running exactly counter to gynesis. That is, by making Doug the film's main character, we might be tempted to read Hills as an attempt to restore masculine discursive power, to reclaim the author-ity of self-representation from the invading, castrating female, to usurp the role of the Final Girl. Yet the male character upon which the film centers for its final two-thirds is not Big Bob, the symbol of "normalized" masculinity, but a character whom the filmmakers have taken pains to portray as Big Bob's gender-bending foil.
<38> Hills goes to some lengths to emphasize what the traditionally masculine culture represented by Big Bob (and understood by the audience) perceives as Doug's inappropriate femininity. Before the first attack we're shown that Doug is not mechanically inclined (he can't fix the trailer-home's air-conditioner and doesn't understand what Big Bob means when he says the car is "totaled"), that he capitulates to his wife's demands (he wears the sun-hat into the desert to please her though he feels silly), and that he dislikes weapons, especially guns. Big Bob consistently degrades Doug's feminized masculinity. In the most blatant insult, after Doug protests against Bobby jokingly aiming a gun in his direction, Big Bob sarcastically instructs his son to "leave Doug alone. He's a Democrat. He doesn't believe in guns." In response to Bobby's invitation to try firing the gun because it will make him feel "powerful," Big Bob even pointedly agrees with Doug's unflattering self-assessment that he would probably "shoot [his] foot off."
<39> My point is that Hills does not relocate the male as the center of the narrative in order to write "maleness" into the heroic forefront while demonizing "womanness" as the dangerous Other which must be destroyed. Instead, as Cohan and Hark as well as Badley have said, visual representation of maleness-as-construction denies the misogynistic power of the camera, which has often functioned like the male gaze to penetrate and control its female subjects. By pretending that "'man' is still the 'universal' body," films, especially those like torture porn which fetishize mutilation of the female body, have propagated the fiction that "the gendered male – male anatomy viewed as psychosexual identity – . . . [should not] even [be] recognized as an image" (Badley 126). What the reversal of male/female roles in Hills – man, not woman, as primary victim – therefore achieves is neither a re-centering of the masculine nor a de-centering of the feminine, but a reconfiguration of how masculine-feminine will/should be constructed. Like the David Cronenberg films Videodrome, The Fly and M. Butterfly, Hills places the (transgressively) gendered male "at the center of the transformation film, simultaneously usurping the mother's function and recovering the feminine within himself" (126), an unmistakably gynesitic endeavor. [3]
<40> Doug's transformation becomes possible only after the castrating maternal force represented by Ethel and Lynn is removed from the film, but moreover it occurs as a result of Doug's encounter with the horror of the biological body and with biohorror's concomitant repulsion for the feminine. Doug begins to change immediately following the attack on the women in the trailer. In the remainder of this section, I want to look at three pivotal moments in that transformation: Doug's discovery of his wife's corpse, his quest to rescue his infant daughter, and his final fight with Lizard.
Encounter with the Abject Feminine Body
<41> Aja and co-writer Gregory Levasseur note that the film's true entrance into horror begins with Big Bob's murder. The filmmakers were reportedly determined that the transition from the suspense of knowing the Carter family is on a slow march toward doom to the terror of realizing that the family is actually under attack should be unmistakable, that the film should be definitively bisected into the family "before the attack" and the family "after the attack" through the instantaneous horror of the moment. The camera, centered on Doug and Bobby, races wildly away from the trailer-home toward a tree where Big Bob bursts into flames. Computer-generated effects allow us to witness his immolation in excruciating detail, right down to the bubbling and blistering of his skin.
<42> Up until now, we have known the Carter family is being stalked. This atmosphere of what Stephen King calls "dread" quite literally explodes into "havoc" with Big Bob's death. Big Bob is more than the first to die; as the patriarch, he is the stabilizing force staving off chaos. Without him, the family's sole protector is Doug, whom the filmmakers have taken care to establish does not possess the aggressive masculinity we would assume necessary for defeating rampaging monsters in the desert.
<43> Doug's reaction to the sudden horror is, as we have come to expect, passive. His instinct is to stay back while Bobby, Lynn and Ethel run toward the scene of horror, even plaintively calling after them, "We don't know what that is," as if by simply denying reality he can make the horror not-real. Doug again hesitates to join the fray following Big Bob's death when he and Bobby hear gunshots at the trailer, seemingly paralyzed for a moment before following his brother-in-law into danger.
<44> Not that Doug proves to be much help. Bobby, armed with his father's pistol, chases off the mutants while Doug looks down in mute horror at Brenda's raped form, then moves wordlessly indoors. There, he stares aghast at his dying, gut-shot mother-in-law and, upon discovering Lynn's body in a pool of blood, drops to his knees and starts to sob. Lynn, it turns out, is not quite dead, for she draws one last, gasping breath that leaves Doug begging her to hang on, though she soon dies in his arms.
<45> Doug's encounter with his wife's corpse represents the beginning of his psychosexual transformation, the moment at which his passivity begins to "mutate" into action for self-preservation. It is at this moment that Doug first seems to experience biohorror. Although he has witnessed Big Bob's murder and patted the flames from his corpse, Doug does not appear to be as affected by his father-in-law's dead body as he is by Lynn's. His reaction goes beyond the fact that Lynn is his wife. As Deborah Jermyn explains, "the sight of the female murder victim's body has . . . a resonance arguably not shared by the male victim. In Julia Kristeva's terms, one might say she is doubly abject, not just a woman but a dead woman" (154, emphasis added). Big Bob's death, while gruesome and terrifying, does not have the power to awaken in Doug biohorror because the male body in death does not, like Lynn's female corpse, "bring together two strands of the abject – femininity and mortality . . . The female murder victim's corpse...comes to testify for the ultimate violent act against women in our culture, as she resonates as the final outcome of everyday misogyny" (154).
<46> Earlier, I asserted that the suddenness of Ethel and Lynn's deaths deviate from the norm of how transgressive women in horror film will/should die: Ethel and Lynn are unable to defend themselves against stronger male attackers, and so, quite simply, without the fetishistic adornment of torture porn, they die. And yet they continue to tell their story through their life-less bodies. What they tell us, what they tell Doug, is that those who are weak, like women or effeminate men, cannot survive against brutality. Without the strength to successfully fight back, in other words, the biological body is doomed.
<47> Webb and Webb's assertion that the corpse "call[s] us to, and recall[s] to us, our own death" (209) becomes particularly apt when applied to the gynesitic power of the female corpse on-screen. Jermyn, drawing from Luce Irigaray, maintains that patriarchal culture silences women in life, so that "the female murder victim's corpse [becomes] the ultimate symbol of this . . . voicelessness – but in these films voicelessness is problematized . . . [for] despite their voiceless states, on a symbolic level at least and in a different kind of language to that of conventional speech, the victim speaks" (159). Although Jermyn is discussing forensic examinations of female murder victims, her argument can be usefully transposed onto Doug's "interpretation" – his reading – of Lynn's corpse. Her dead/dying body, unable to speak for itself except in a final, inarticulate gasp, confronts him with his own weakness, his own failed masculinity, his inability to protect his wife or, as he realizes when he sees Katherine's empty cradle, his child. As well, Lynn's dead body represents the ultimate monstrous femininity, for the female corpse is utterly passive, unable to defend itself even against the ravages of nature (decay). In his wife's corpse, Doug discovers the coincidence of feminine and biological horror, and through this encounter he realizes that, without the action culturally associated with masculinity, he will likely become a corpse himself.
Encounter with the Monstrous Body
<48> Doug does not instantaneously transform into the avenging hero following Lynn and his mother-in-law's deaths. In fact, when Bobby in a fit of rage suggests chasing down the mutants, Doug tells him to "look what they did to [his] mother," invoking Ethel's corpse as proof that they must put aside revenge and form a plan for survival. Doug's reasoned approach stands outside Big Bob's style of masculinity, and Bobby steps into his father's role by accusing Doug of cowardice: "You're a fucking pussy like my dad said," he yells. Yet Doug quickly proves this to be untrue – or at least, not as true as it was prior to the first attack – when he ventures out of the trailer, alone and unarmed, to investigate a noise that turns out to be the mutant Goggle's walkie-talkie, still clutched in the dead mutant's hand.
<49> As Doug's first act of bravery in the film, his venture into the unknown darkness outside of the trailer is also the first indication that he is capable of decisive action. He shouts into the walkie-talkie for the mutants to "give [him] back [his] baby" and then asks Bobby, clearly with the aforementioned plan in mind, how many bullets he has left. Even this small transformation from near-total passivity to (albeit well-planned, not impulsive or furious) action establishes Doug as the patriarch for the leaderless family. Bobby readily defers to him, asking eagerly, "What are we doing?"
<50> The filmmakers immediately cut from Bobby's question to the beginning of Doug's quest to rescue his infant daughter. Armed with a baseball bat, flashlight, screwdriver and Goggle's walkie-talkie, Doug hurries through the desert with the family's German shepherd Beast leading him toward the mutants. Their journey opens with a descent into darkness; to reach the mutant village, Doug must walk through one of the abandoned mines. If Hills were to follow generic conventions, we would expect that Doug would encounter at least one mutant in the mine, yet he simply walks through unmolested. The point of the short scene seems to be to establish that Doug is changing. He moves forward fearlessly, steadily, in the cavernous blackness, announcing to no one in particular that he is "not afraid of the dark." When he emerges into the blinding sunlight, we are no longer in familiar horror film territory: The terror in this film will be created not by things in the dark half-seen but by inescapable daylight confrontation with the visibly monstrous.
<51> From the mine, Doug enters the "mutant village," a test site for nuclear weapons built during the 1950s. In Arthurian legend, Morgan notes that "the besieged town situates the Bad Place of the horror mythos – that trope, complementary to that of the besieged body, [that] represents the spirits of torpor, dissolution and flagging volition – through the landscape of human artifice – soulless streets, buildings, and so on" (159). The mutant village in Hills serves a similar function to the besieged town of legend, representing not only the mutated cannibalistic society Doug is about to enter but also parodying the 1950s-era fiction of the "American dream." A blatant indictment of the mindless adherence to mainstream culture, including rigidly-constructed masculine and feminine identities, expected in mid-twentieth-century America, the village is a barren wasteland covered in ash and peopled by vacantly-staring mannequins. Each home Doug enters is arranged in a scene eerily reminiscent of "normal" domesticity with furnishings that, minus their thick coating of dust, would not look out of place in June Cleaver's living room; each building, wrecked and ruined by the bombs detonated in the surrounding hills, sports these plasticized people with faces frozen into perpetual ghastly smiles.
<52> While the film obviously does not celebrate the circumscribed gender roles (feminine submission, masculine domination) of the 1950s, neither does it suggest that Doug's effeminate masculinity, evocative of male fears of castrating femininity (which may have been exacerbated by second-wave feminism's push for equality), is more desirable. In fact, the film demonstrates that Doug's initially effeminate masculinity will be insufficient for surviving his encounter with the mutants on their own ground. Doug may have shown that he can be brave, but he has not yet embodied a masculinity that would send him into the mutant village on a vengeance quest. He is on a rescue mission, hoping to sneak his daughter away without being forced into a physical confrontation with the monsters that have killed and tormented his family.
<53> As the site which begins and realizes the second stage of Doug's psychosexual transformation, the mutant village furthermore symbolizes the bodily pain and suffering Doug's psychosexual transformation will require. Morgan explains that the besieged town of Arthurian legend represents "an uncanny continuity from wounded protagonist to wasted place and torn social fabric" (159). Doug's gender identity is not the only skewed psychosexuality in the village; the mutants are not "appropriately" masculine, either. Therefore Doug's quest becomes about more than physical survival. If he is to save himself and his child, he must also achieve a gender identity that will allow him to reenter a world outside the dark mirror of "ordered life" reflected in the mutant village.
<54> In the village, Doug first encounters the mutants face to face. As Badley has established, the body fantastic is often represented by and just as often represents femininity in the horror film. The latter certainly seems to be the case for the monsters in Hills, since their genetic mutations place such emphasis on their bodies that they are unable to escape their corporeality, the feminine-body, in order to engage the masculine-mind. Nowhere is the corporeal prison more evident than in the mutant "Big Brain," a monster patterned after photos of actual radiation-exposed fetuses with giant, melon-shaped heads. Brain, who directs the mutants via walkie-talkie and is, as his name suggests, the "brains" behind their operation, is trapped in his house (the domestic, feminine sphere). Because of his enormous head, he is unable to rise from his wheelchair or to care for himself in any way. His physical mutation forces him into complete, helpless passivity.
<55> Building upon Kristeva's Powers of Horror, Barbara Creed argues that although "the conventional interpretation is to argue that the male monster . . . represents the repressed bestial desires of civilized man and that woman is almost always the object of his aggression," such interpretations overlook the feminization of the monster itself, for "all monstrous figures are constructed in terms of Kristeva's 'non-symbolic' body: the body that gives birth, secretes, changes shape, or is marked in some way" (130, 131). On the one hand, we do see the mutants acting out violence on women, yet as Ethel and Lynn die before the film reaches it halfway point and Brenda is never again seriously endangered, the mutants' "monstrosity" would not appear to reflect misogynistic aggression so much as it results from their attempts to compensate for their monstrous, feminized existence. That is, mutants like Lizard, who rapes Brenda and breastfeeds from Lynn, and Pluto, who tries to rape Brenda and beats Doug within an inch of his life, engage in hyper-masculine behavior, characterized by sadism and brutality, to define themselves against the feminine Other. Yet they are always-already feminized by imprisonment within their mutated bodies.
<56> The mutants, in other words, lead us as the audience and Doug, the witnessing body in the narrative, to realize the horror of patriarchal misogyny through the avenue of biohorror, just as Lynn's voiceless corpse led us and Doug to realize the horror of the abject feminine and, by extension, feminized masculinity. Creed acknowledges that monstrosity is often perceived as such because it is a "form of abjection," a Kristevan term demarcating the "process by which we define the 'clean and proper body' as well as the rational, coherent, unified subject. Insofar as abjection speaks to perverse and irrational aspects of desire it speaks to all spectators regardless of gender" (131) and, Creed argues, can apply to all "monsters," regardless of gender. In their abject monstrosity, like Lynn's corpse in its abject femininity, the mutants, in the language of the oozing, bleeding, broken body, represent the horror of hyper-masculinity resulting from attempts to deny the feminine in one's male self.
<57> Once Doug begins encountering mutants in the village, he enters the second phase of his transformation, wherein he does embody a vicious masculinity not unlike the mutants'. This second phase opens with a pseudo-rebirth. After Doug is knocked unconscious by the mutant Big Mama, he awakens inside a locked freezer filled with body parts; its cramped, wet darkness is reminiscent of a diseased womb littered with severed limbs instead of fully-formed babies. Doug screams and pounds against the top and sides of the freezer until he manages to break the lock. The camera, which has been with Doug during his struggle, pulls back to show him toppling over the edge, vomiting and gasping. Covered in blood and gore, Doug's first successful self-rescue is rendered in the fashion of an infant who has torn free of the monstrous, suffocating female body.
<58> Separated entirely from the maternal now that both mothers (Ethel and Lynn) are dead, Doug "births himself" out of horror and swiftly assumes a hyper-masculine identity, which the film immediately problematizes. Echoing Doug's wholly-male birth, Brain in the next scene describes the equally-unnatural "birth" of the mutants. "Your people," he lectures Doug, meaning the military, "asked our families to leave their town, and you destroyed our homes! We went into the mines. You set off your bombs and turned everything to ashes. You made us what we are." Brain's words are an indictment of hyper-masculine culture, for what the "military men" created in the desert was not "life," the construction of which lies properly with the woman's discursive, biological power, but a horrific parody of life. Likewise, what Doug's rebirth, achieved without the maternal, creates is a deformed gender identity.
<59> Doug's fight with Pluto dramatizes his transformation into hyper-masculinity. When Pluto bursts through the door of Brain's house, Doug, in a familiar display of feminine passivity, runs away and barricades himself inside the bathroom. The camera freezes on Doug standing in motionless terror, bat held aloft for attack; all sound fades away except for his frantic heartbeat. Escape, however, is futile, and Doug is forced to fight for survival when Pluto breaks through the wall and seizes him by the throat. Doug finally draws his first blood when he stabs Pluto in the gut with the broken end of his bat, yet instead of finishing off his enemy, Doug stares in mute horror at the injury he has inflicted, giving Pluto a chance to pull the bat from his own stomach and embark on another rampage.
<60> Doug finds himself lying stunned on the floor of Brain's dining room amidst a macabre dinner party attended by charred mannequins and presided over by Big Bob's burnt corpse. Before he can recover enough to defend himself, Doug loses three fingers on his left hand to Pluto's axe. Screaming, he scrambles under the table, only to have even this tenuous vestige of safety destroyed as Pluto chops through the wood. Finally, seeming to be utterly helpless, Doug crawls out from under the table, kneels before Pluto, and, in a gesture of ironic heroism, weakly brandishes a screwdriver at his axe-wielding attacker.
<61> On his knees, Doug appears to lose all semblance of masculinity. He drops his head to one side in apparent invitation of the death-blow; he makes no move to escape or retaliate when Pluto slides the axe-blade along his neck. He begins to cry, begging, "Please don't kill me, please don't kill me." Brain mocks Doug from his wheelchair, where he watches in gleeful anticipation of Doug's decapitation.
<62> But Doug's surrender is only a pretense – a final play on the effeminate masculinity, on being a "pussy," the hyper-masculine mutants find so repulsive about him. The instant Pluto turns away, Doug's expression morphs from pleading to merciless. He stabs the screwdriver through Pluto's foot, grabs the American flag the mutants have rammed into Big Bob's skull, and plunges it through Pluto's neck; not satisfied to watch his enemy choke to death on his own blood, Doug buries the axe in Pluto's head, watching with a maniacal grin as his opponent slumps dead to the floor. The intimation is clear: Doug has not only killed to survive. He has enjoyed killing Pluto.
<63> The threat of his own death, made horribly real through the severing of his fingers, causes Doug to forego all vestiges of humanity. He is no longer femininized, certainly. But as he trades in his baseball bat for Pluto's axe, uses that weapon to slay the mutant Cyst, and trades up the axe for what he has previously refused to wield – a gun he takes from Cyst's dead hands – it also becomes apparent that Doug has strayed into the realm of hyper-masculinity. Even his body, like the bodies of the mutants, has become monstrous. Creed reminds us that "whenever male bodies are represented as monstrous in horror film, they assume characteristics usually associated with the feminine: they experience a blood cycle, change shape, bleed, give birth, become penetrable, are castrated" (118). Running from the mutant village in pursuit of his daughter, Doug is covered in gore, leaking blood from cuts and severed digits. Although as the audience we are cheering for him to save Katherine, Hills at this point seems to pose the question of how "monstrous" Doug can become and still remain human enough to escape the film alive.
Encounter with the Unspoiled, Un-gendered Body
<64> "The individual and the society," Creed explains Kristeva to say, "define themselves, in effect come into being, through the rejection of what is 'rank and vile' as intolerable, through the drawing of a line in the sand as a margin excluding filth and excrement" (65). Morgan puts it another way: "Horror's sickening descent into ashes defines an endpoint and a beginning; disintegration can entail in and of itself a negative power that is therapeutic in that it impels toward reintegration" (226). In the context of Hills, the film's happy ending seems to depend not only on if Doug can rescue his infant daughter from the mutants but also on if he can discover a gender identity that will allow him to become the father Katherine (and the surrogate father Bobby and Brenda) will need once they leave the chaos of the desert and return to the ordered, outside world.
<65> Understanding horror films as potentially regenerative, when on the surface they seem to be solely concerned with the violent loss of life, requires an examination of the relationship between horror, comedy and tragedy. Thus I briefly digress from the final stage of Doug's psychosexual transformation to argue that the emphasis on bodily pain and death in horror films can, and in the case of Hills in fact does, lead to a redefinition of what is "normal," "proper," and "healthy" in our culture.
<66> My argument is indebted to Morgan's equation of biohorror with Bakhtinian Carnival. Noting that "tragedy has traditionally been occupied with fate, horror, it might be argued, is driven by the recognition Camilla Paglia articulates that 'biology is . . . Fate'" (15), Morgan goes on to say that horror may in fact be generically closer to comedy than tragedy. However, in its "tragic" or Fateful twist, Morgan claims that horror does not provide the same kind of rebirth into new life that comedy does, instead leaving us mired in the disturbingly corporeal world of the Bakhtinian Carnival. Whereas in comedy renewal follows what Morgan terms comic "degradation," horrific degradation "is a one-way street; the elements of built-in upswing, of rejuvenation, are not there" (25).
<67> Morgan's point is well taken, for horror films are not regenerative in the comedic sense of restoring our willingness to adhere to normal, or traditional, social values. At the conclusion of the Bakhtinian Carnival, communal bonds are solidified and society is strengthened because individuals have been allowed to transgress normal rules for physical, sexual, and social behavior, but they have done so in a contained/containable ritual that, while outside the boundaries of everyday life, nonetheless does not (and does not attempt to) alter boundaries themselves. Horror, by contrast, does not take as its aim a renewal of the norm; horror subverts authority and the status quo by refusing to accept that the "rules" it exposes are, in fact, rules.
<68> Comedy and horror both highlight the constructed-ness of social and cultural boundaries. Were they not constructed, they could not be transgressed. Nevertheless, comedy's purpose is not to reinvent the rules but to provide a safe space within which to break them. Comedy provides cathartic release, which can take horrific forms as it shows the body in extremis of sexual pleasure or physical pain, yet the catharsis is followed by a reintegration of the transgressive individual(s) into mainstream culture. Horror, on the other hand, does not "reintegrate." At the conclusion of a horror film, we are not presented with a whole, unspoiled communal body; "bodies" have been torn asunder, in ways that cannot be repaired or even re-covered. Instead of resolution, we are left with the horrific as contemplatable, "as virtually present for consideration" (Morgan 28), without the comforting veil of cultural normalcy to hide from us once more what Carnival lays bare – the constructed-ness of society. By refusing to heal either the individual or the communal body as comedy does (by covering over social problems that still exist), horror thereby offers a chance for cultural norms to be re-constructed as a result of their de-construction.
<69> In the context of Hills, we might ask, what type of gender identity is advocated? That is, what gender identities are deconstructed, and how does the film suggest they be reconstructed? Doug's effeminate masculinity at the beginning of the film has proven inadequate and undesirable, quite possibly for women as well as men, given the message of feminine passivity inscribed on Ethel and Lynn's corpses. Yet Doug's hyper-masculinity prior to the final fight with Lizard is incompatible with anything other than slaying mutants in the desert, and to survive the family ultimately must return to civilization. In short, we don't want Doug to return to the "man" he was at the film's outset, nor do we want him to remain as he is following his trials in the mutant village. What we want for Doug, what the film seems to want us to want, is a gender identity that, in a biologically-male body, can embody the masculine-feminine and the feminine-masculine, the mother-father in balance: gynandrous gender.
<70> Doug's comes closest to this gendered ideal after his final fight with Lizard, which begins as a hyper-masculine competition wherein survival depends upon sheer brutality. Lizard ambushes Doug as he attempts to take Katherine from Ruby's arms; Doug fights back, but even his new-found hyper-masculinity cannot compare to Lizard's viciousness. Left for dead in the road while Lizard chases Ruby and the baby, a bloody and beaten Doug appears prepared to give up the fight – until he sees his wedding band glinting on the bloodied stump of his finger. To Doug, and to the audience, the cultural symbolism of the wedding band recalls the importance of family, of one's literal flesh and blood. Thus – and herein lies the heart of Doug's final transformation – Doug's motivation to fight comes not from his own horror of death, which his broken body appears ready to accept, but from a desire to protect his child. Because Katherine represents the only truly "unspoiled" character in the film, biologically because she suffers no injury and psychosexually because as a pre-lingual infant she remains un-gendered, her "wholeness" extends redemption to Doug. If he can save the baby, he can save himself, in every sense of the word.
<71> Doug's triumph over Lizard involves his greatest display of brutality in the film. Despite its excessiveness, however, the violence no longer seems gratuitous. This is not Doug chopping off Cyst's leg or impaling Pluto with the flag; the violence required to defeat Lizard is warranted by the mutant's inhuman strength and resilience. Doug bashes in Lizard's mouth and nose with the butt of the shotgun before, in a total character reversal from the beginning of the film, shooting his enemy three times in the torso. Importantly, though, once Doug has confirmed for himself that the mutant is dead, he readily abandons hyper-masculine violence as he drops the gun to gather his baby lovingly in his arms.
<72> I have already argued that Hills purposefully omits and revises some aspects of the horror film genre. Therefore, its invocation of other generic elements also holds thematic significance, and the trope of the monster's "last scare" fits into this category. As Doug cradles and kisses Katherine, Lizard, whom we believe to be dead, stands up holding the shotgun. With Katherine in his arms, Doug is no longer the merciless monster of moments before; he is a loving father when a killer is needed. A happy ending seems impossible at this point, for if Doug does not return to his hyper-masculine state, it seems he and Katherine will both die. However, the film, in a reversal of the traditional male-female rescue, offers as Doug's salvation the one remaining female character, Ruby, who charges Lizard and topples them both from the rocky ledge to the gorge below. From the outset, Ruby's function has been to literally embody the monstrous feminine; fittingly, she ultimately destroys that body and takes Lizard's monstrous masculinity with her into the abyss.
Mutated Masculinity: Man as the "Final Girl"
<73> Having rescued his daughter from the mutants, Doug abandons his quest and returns to Bobby and Brenda, who joyously greet him. They cling to one another, reunited though not wholly restored. Doug stands at the center, literally and figuratively, of their family group. No longer transgressively effeminate, no longer hyper-masculine, Doug offers a different option for male gender identity, one which acknowledges the necessary interplay of masculinity and femininity in creating a "whole" person. Male gender, in other words, has been rewritten in the film to suggest how the feminine can/should be written within the masculine.
<74> Nevertheless, Hills does not present us with a fully-integrated example of how to construct a balanced male gender identity. Were Ethel and Lynn alive to welcome Doug back, this might be the case, yet their deaths – the destruction of the maternal – leave a hole in the family and in Doug's new gender identity. He has no woman, no wife or mother, to come home to, and while we hope that he may now be ready to act as both mother and father to Katherine, the absence of the feminine maternal is glaringly obvious in the film's final shot of the reunited Carter clan. Ferguson insists that gynandry is a more appropriate term for gender equality than androgyny "because the revaluing of femininity required to achieve an autonomous yet caring person involves a 'transvaluation' of values that go beyond the traditional notion of androgyny in patriarchal societies" (211). Yet the feminine maternal in Hills is not so much revalued as it is erased from the textual landscape, in much the same way that androgyny erases biological, sexual and gendered difference. Doug's psychosexual journey does, I believe, result in his assumption of positive feminine and masculine characteristics (he can nurture and act), but even the more gynandrous gender identity he achieves cannot restore what has been lost.
<75> We must remember, though, that horror film purposefully resists restoration. Horror's function is not only to expose those sociocultural boundaries that often remain invisible but also, unlike comedy, to refuse to heal the wounds it creates, leaving social problems "present for contemplation," as Morgan has said. Thus the gendered work Hills engages in by dramatizing Doug's psychosexual journey is valuable because the film refuses to tidily resolve its "gender trouble." In fact, Hills' departure from common horror film tropes, particularly its invocation of biohorror in/through a male character rather than through fetishistic emphasis on female death so common to the torture porn genre, may make it an apt medium for this cultural gynesis. Films like Hills position us (the social, discursive subjects in the audience) to experience more than the "expression of repressed sexuality," for "postmodern horror has been energized by . . . a much larger anxiety about gender, identity, mortality, power and loss of control" (Badley 14). In other words, biohorror films perform gender in extremis through bodies in extremis, forcing characters and audiences to confront the constructed-ness of gender in the carnivalesque "theater of cruelty" that, in place of the social reintegration we find in comedic film, challenges our willingness to conform to culturally-prescribed gender identities.
<76> The focus on a male hero in Hills therefore has important implications for the gynesitic capacity of film. Feminist readings of horror films like Clover's have in the past two decades noted an empowering of the feminine through the trope of the Final Girl, the young woman who stands alone against the monster at the end and who quite often triumphs without the help of a man. While "abject terror [in the horror film] may still be gendered feminine," the generic element of the Final Girl, "an anatomical female, would seem to suggest that at least one of the traditional hallmarks of heroism, triumphant self-rescue, is no longer strictly gendered masculine" (219). In choosing to victimize and then valorize an anatomical male, Hills invites us to an even further bending of traditional gender roles as we watch Doug transform from subjugated victim to victorious hero. For horror films do not
show us gender and sex in free variation; . . . they fix on the irregular combinations, of which the combination masculine female repeatedly prevails over the combination feminine male . . . The fact that masculine males (boyfriends, fathers, would-be rescuers) are regularly dismissed through ridicule or death or both would seem to suggest that it is not masculinity per se that is being privileged, but masculinity in conjunction with a female body – indeed, as the term victim-hero contemplates, masculinity in conjunction with femininity. Clover 221
<77> Vital to our reading of Doug's mutated/mutating masculinity, then, is that a transgressively-effeminate biological male becomes the Final Girl, for in so emphasizing the interplay of masculine-feminine/feminine-masculine, Hills goes beyond writing the feminine into masculine space by depicting a strong woman rescuing herself and, just as importantly, avoids having male masculinity simply usurp female masculinity. Doug's abject terror, as both victim and witness, allows him to interpolate non-castrating femininity into non-misogynistic masculinity so that he is able to embody a masculine-feminine/feminine-masculine gender identity. Like the Final Girl, who is physically female but psychosexually both-and masculine/feminine, Doug may be physically male, but at the end of the film he more closely resembles what Ferguson has called a gynandrous gender identity. Is it the ideal "human" identity Ferguson advocates? Probably not, but it may be the closest to the ideal our culture will allow him to come. Ultimately, what matters more than whether we agree that Doug's final gender identity is "acceptable" for a post-second-wave feminist society is that the film has, through the character's psychosexual journey, prompted us – the discursive, social subjects, who have the agency to reconstruct society – to consider the need for gender identities that allow men to embody the masculine-feminine and the feminine-masculine.
<78> The horror trope of the Final Girl celebrates women entering traditionally masculine roles, but now it seems our culture is interested in exploring how "maleness" can be more satisfyingly constructed in a feminist culture, for both men and women. Hills dramatizes our on-going search for a gynandrous modern, white, middle-class male identity by performing a purposeful breakdown of both traditional gendered boundaries and of the fears men and women harbor about gender in extremis (passive/castrating femininity, effeminate/misogynistic masculinity). In so doing, it reveals the promise of new combinations, the possibilities for more socially-realistic and personally-fulfilling gender identities.
Works Cited
Badley, Linda. Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Clover, Carol J. "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film." Representations 20 (Autumn, 1987): 187-228.
Cohan, Steven and Ina Rae Hark. "Introduction." Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. Eds. Cohan and Hark. London: Routledge, 1993. 1-8.
Creed, Barbara. "Dark Desires: Male Masochism in the Horror Film." Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. Eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1993. 118-133.
Ferguson, Anne. Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression and Revolution. Bouldoer, CO: Westview Press, 1991.
The Hills Have Eyes. Dir. Alexandre Aja. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006.
Jermyn, Deborah. "You Can't Keep a Dead Woman Down: The Female Corpse and Textual Disruption in Contemporary Hollywood." Images of the Corpse from the Renaissance to Cyperspace. Ed. Elizabeth Klaver. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 153-168.
Klaver, Elizabeth. "Introduction." Images of the Corpse from the Renaissance to Cyberspace. Ed. Klaver. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. xi-xx.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia U.P., 1982.
Lo, Kwai-cheung. "Fighting Female Masculinity: Women Warriors and Their Foreignness in Hong Kong Action Cinema of the 1980s." Macsculinities and Hong Kong Cinema. Eds. Laikwan Pang and Day Wong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong U.P., 2005. 137-154.
Morgan, Jack. The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U.P., 2002.
Pribram, Deidre. "Spectatorship and Subjectibity." A Companion to Film Theory. Eds. Toby Miller and Robert Stam. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 146-164.
Robinson, Sally. "Deconstructive Discourse and Sexual Politics: The 'Feminine' and/in Masculine Self-Representation." Cultural Critique 13 (Autumn, 1989): 203-227.
Studlar, Gaylyn. "Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema." Feminism and Film. Ed. Ann E. Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2000. 203-225.
Webb, Jennifer and Lorraine Webb. "Dead or Alive." Images of the Corpse from the Renaissance to Cyperspace. Ed. Elizabeth Klaver. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 206-227.
White, Dennis. "The Poetics of Horror: More than Meets the Eye." Cinema Journal 10.2 (Spring, 1971): 1-18.
Williams, Linda. "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess." Film Quarterly 44.4 (Summer, 1991): 2-13.
Notes
[1] See Cohan and Hark. [^]
[2] Lest readers misunderstand my purpose, I note here that my project is not meant to be "recuperative," an attempt to either restore a "lost" masculinist perspective to film analysis or to debunk valid feminist critiques of female exploitation in horror films. What I suggest is that films like Hills engaged in semiotic play with representations of the male-mind/female-body and male-action/female-passive binaries may serve a valuable cultural function in questioning and examining traditional gender roles. [^]
[3] To call Hills a "transformation" film along the lines of Cronenberg's may seem disingenuous, and I certainly don't intend the comparison to suggest that Doug embraces his "feminine side" in the way Cronenberg's protagonists do. Rather, because Hills reveals gendered constructs through Doug's psychosexual journey as much as through the end result (Doug's final gender identity), the film can be considered "transformational" in the sense of Cronenberg's works. Moreover, while it may seem that Doug ultimately rejects femininity, I believe it is more accurate to say that he attempts to recover femininity within himself – femininity that is neither stereotypically castrating nor stereotypically passive, but is instead strong, independent, and nurturing. [^]
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