Slide 1: The Monstrous Gaze in Holocaust and Horror Films: Based on a book, Working through the American Fictional Holocaust Film under review with Rutgers and Minnesota University Presses; an article on Schindler’s List is forthcoming with Film & History (co-authored with David Frank, U. of Oregon) Prepared by: Caroline (Kay) Picart Assistant Professor of English, Courtesy Assistant Professor of Law Florida State University
Slide 2: Juxtaposing Holocaust and Horror Films • Schindler’s List (1993) • Psycho (1960) • Apt Pupil (1998) • Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Slide 3: Aim: • In this presentation, I examine horror films’ visual rhetorical construction of monstrosity, and the Holocaust “documentary” drama’s appropriation of horror film techniques as a “therapeutic” which somehow proves incommensurate with the trauma of the Holocaust.
Slide 4: Spielberg’s Schindler’s List • The look of “realism” • “Shooting in blackand-white gives everything a sloppy urgency . . . Which is what real life is.” • Spielberg on SL
Slide 5: The Bilderverbot • SL is too realistic in rendering visible an event that defies depiction, whose horror renders any attempt at direct representation obscene.
Slide 6: Schindler’s List as Acting Out • Spielberg “acted out” the Holocaust by framing it as a Hollywood horrorpsychological thriller. • Acting out, vs. working through, reenacts trauma, rather than heals it. • To confront the trauma of the Holocaust, he resorted to conventional cinematic depictions of evil as unproblematically monstrous, victims as simply passive, & suffering as an act of violent erotization.
Slide 7: Schindler’s List as Acting Out • SL’s portrayal of suffering borrows from sado-masochistic horror conventions • SL’s portrayal of Nazism renders it unproblematically “monstrous” (monere/monstrare)
Slide 8: Schindler’s List as Acting Out • The shower scene at Auschwitz • The seduction-turnedtorture of Helen Hirsch by Amon Goeth
Slide 9: Schindler’s List as Acting Out • Kaminski (the cinematographer) and Spielberg heightened the terror by using techniques that would make a viewer a participant in the scene.
Slide 10: Schindler’s List as Acting Out • Schindler’s List mimes but reverses Psycho’s shower scene. – The gaze in the two films – The narrative pattern in the two films
Slide 11: Schindler’s List as Acting Out • Two stereotypes: • The Jewish woman as irresistible, tabooed, reluctant seductress • The German man as irrational, demented killing machine
Slide 12: Jungian Shadows • The inferior/feminized shadow: the Jewish feminized victim • The technologized/hypermasculinized shadow: the insane and monstrous German male
Slide 13: The Voyeuristic Camera in Silence of the Lambs • The introductory scene when Clarice Starling is at the FBI training camp • The scenes in which Lecter and Clarice converse
Slide 14: Complications of the Voyeuristic Gaze in Silence of the Lambs • Jame Gumb’s preening in front of the camera and mirror • Gumb’s toying with Clarice as she penetrates his basement, and her exorcism of the “monster”
Slide 15: The Nazi as Bogeyman: Apt Pupil • In an interview with Ruthe Stein, Singer spoke candidly: “Obviously, it is difficult to sell on the subject matter . . . It is creepy. But it’s also an intriguing premise: A boy plays with a monster and gets eaten. It is a true horror story.”
Slide 16: The Nazi as Bogeyman in Apt Pupil • “My line now is that ‘The Usual Suspects’ had a twist at the end, and ‘Apt Pupil’ has a twisted end”
Slide 17: The Nazi as Bogeyman in Apt Pupil • Singer reframes his fascination with King’s short story in terms of his own biography—how, when he was eight years old, he had done a “very stupid thing” by creating a crayon facsimile of a Nazi armband, which he rushed off to show his mother proudly, only to be profoundly moved by her distress. Singer also astutely welcomed the endorsements that came from Jewish political and spiritual leaders, and performed an interesting rhetorical dance between describing the film as a Holocaust memorial and an entertaining film
Slide 18: The Nazi as Bogeyman in Apt Pupil • In this film, Evil has a face—Nazism, which is configured as quintessentially innate, supernaturally crafty, and in a more subterranean way, dangerously blurring the boundaries between homoeroticism and homosexuality
Slide 19: Acting Out in Apt Pupil • Sexual “abnormality” is means by which both King and Singer structure a specific monstrosity. In other words, the historical malevolence of the Nazi atrocity as a social and ethical problem is conveyed and constructed as a sexual problem. And this is done through the erection of a series of binary dichotomies: normal versus monstrous, heterosexual versus homosexual, healthy versus sick. Yet this attempt to create easy binary dichotomies unveils hidden tensions because the line between victim (feminized) and victimizer (masculinized) is a thin one, as revealed in the reversals of power that bind Todd to Dussander and vice versa
Slide 20: Acting Out in Apt Pupil • Like Spielberg, Singer ultimately acts out, rather than works through, a representation of the Holocaust by reducing it to yet another backdrop for the unfolding of a set of perversions (misogynistically based in the novella, and ambivalently homoerotic and homophobic in the film) that render Nazism monstrous
Slide 21: Shower Scene 1: • Despite its wide screen format, the film restricts most of the development of Todd and Dussander’s relationship— framed mostly in close-ups— within a crepuscular, dim-lit and claustrophobic bungalow, in which the hidden Nazi lives in obscurity, with the exception of the bus ride, dinner at the Bowdens’, and the hospital scene. This close proximity, framed in close-ups every time Dussander touches Todd, intensifies a homoerotic intimacy, punctuated by dread of contact with the monstrous, which cannot be attained visually in the novella.
Slide 22: • Homoeroticism in the film is further created by the camera’s gaze on Todd’s body, a factor that is conveyed in the novella (e.g. the focus on the “moistness” of Todd’s genitals and lower abdominal region, 189, 206), but further explored in the film. Jake Wilson draws attention to a memorable “pin-up shot,” in which, “teenage hunk Brad Renfro [is] sprawled on his bed in his underwear, gazing up at the hovering camera . . .” The everencroaching camera and the lighting serves to fetishize Todd’s youthful body in a manner more customarily applied to the female body, particularly in the shower or “peeping tom” scenes in Psycho, Silence of the Lambs and Schindler’s List. This insight may be applied to a broader number of scenes throughout the film, where Todd’s white face, with its mild complexion is fetishistically captured by the close-up and he is given to wandering about without a shirt on. Wilson does not miss the implication of this structuring: “At times it’s hard to say whether deviant sexuality is meant as a metaphor for evil or vice versa, given the film’s fixation on Renfro’s muscular body, pale fine skin, and rosebud lips (held vacuously open, like an actress playing a bimbo).”
Slide 23: Shower Scene 2: • This second shower-gas chamber scene, which is ripe with references to both the gas chambers of the Holocaust and Marion’s lethal shower in Psycho (staples in Holocaust and horror films), is described in the following way in Boyce’s script:
Slide 24: Shower Scene 2: • Todd gets under the nozzle and allows the warm water to blast the top of his head. He closes his eyes. Against the high tile walls the boys’ voices echo loudly. A dozen running shower heads contribute to the din. Todd opens his eyes . . . Writhing bodies, thin, malnourished. These are bodies he has seen before. The room is darker, concrete. The steam rises. Or is it steam? Smoke, thick smoke, surrounds him. The voices of the boys are more like screams. •
Slide 25: Shower Scene 2: • One by one the boys file out the shower. Through the heavy steam we see Todd virtually motionless under the raging steam of water. His eyes are clamped shut. Finally, Todd opens his eyes, realizing, suddenly, that he is alone. He turns the shower off. His skin is red and steaming from the prolonged exposure to the hot water . . . •
Slide 26: Shower Scene 2: • There are no overtly naked old men who are described in the passage cited above—only “thin and malnourished” ones. Yet the film visualizes the grotesque geriatric body and lustful gaze prominently.