Blog # 3 Safa Naibzada

Since the late 1960s the American bourgeois patriarchy has been experiencing disintegration and transfiguration. According to Vivian Sobchack in “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange” a man’s home in bourgeois patriarchal culture is no longer his castle. His home is influenced and effected by the outside world. It is no longer possible for Dad to shelter his family from the influences of the corrupted outside world. The nuclear family has found itself unable to from social upheavals, many of which have been initiated by the teenager and by women. From early to mid-1970s the child was portrayed as cannibalistic, monstrous, murderous, selfish and sexual in response to the youth movements and drug culture of the time (Sobchack, 144-150). Although in the movie Psycho Norman Bates is in his mid to late 20s his madness began during his teenage years when he murdered his mother and her lover in her bed. Norman’s mental development is that of a confused man-child who’s repressed sexual desires lead to murder. Yet throughout the movie the audience is convinced of “Mothers” guilt at either being the murder or being the cause of Norman’s madness.  Norman (as the child) is oppressed and at home and therefore threatens both his immediate family others that come across his path who have the freedom he does not.  

Killers being in the psychosexual grip of their mothers and fathers are often portrayed in horror films however starting in the late 1970s we begin to see a shift in the ascription of responsibility for the breakdown of traditional family relations. According to Sobchack the responsibility has been shifted from child to parent. One can see in both movies The Brood and The Shining that the child grows smaller, younger, and less adolescent. Yet the children, both Candy and Danny, still keep certain supernatural powers without making them uncanny or wicked. The parents instead become the primary negative force in the middle-class family (Sobchack, 152).

In The Shining the haunted middle-class family Dad who was economically, professionally and socially failing is possessed into attempting to kill his wife and son. Jack Torrance becomes the mad face of patriarchy. Jack was already feeling patriarchal hatred, fear, and self-loathing before he even moved into a possessed hotel. Therefore the movie is attempting to subconsciously hint that since patriarchy is challenged all men feel the rage of paternal responsibility while being denied the economic and political benefits of patriarchal power. In The Shining Jack is powerfully absenting himself but then returns to terrify the family. Throughout the movie Jack begins to abandons his paternal rights and desires. And yet even as Jack begins to lose grip with his sanity due to paranormal forces and his own inner demons audience members like me can’t help but to feel a sense of blame being put on Jacks wife, Wendy. She is portrayed as a meek, submissive, timid woman who although bows down to her husbands every whim still undermines him by being a better parent as well as completing his tasks as the caretaker of the hotel. In Jacks mind it is Wendy who is the root of all his problems, she is undermining him as a parent, is a constant reminder of all his failures and she is physically not good looking enough for him and therefore standing in his way of his entitlement.

One particular scene in which the audience can see the marital problems between Jack and Wendy is their confrontation in the lobby.  1:14:34 Wendy who has become suspicious of her husband’s mental state creeps into the lobby clutching a bat (a very masculine weapon) where she makes the ultimate mistake of looking at the story that Jack has been working on, to find that he has simply been typing the same sentence over and over again. Wendy begins to frantically search through the papers in the hopes of finding actual work. It is then that Jack approaches her from behind asking her “How do you like it?” in a condensing tone. One can sense the imbalance of their relationship as he begins to question her. He begins to approach her aggressively and corners her into the altercation. He asks her what she would like to talk about, and when she explains that she is worried about their son’s health he begins to verbally attack her, something that comes very naturally to him as if it occurs often in their marriage. Although throughout the verbal abuse his main argument is that Wendy is not taking into consideration his needs, desires or even his commitment to his employers the core of his rage (aside from the paranormal influences) seems to be the fact that Wendy realized his failure at writing. And as he malevolently stalks up the stairs towards her, he tells her “Wendy, darling, light of my life I am not going to hurt you, I just want to bash your skull in” and as the scene ends with a wonderful crunch as Wendy’s bat hits Jacks skull the audience is left with a guilty feeling because we all know that martial situations like theirs occur all over the world.   

The Brood has certain plot themes that mirror The Shining, once again we have a dysfunctional family where the parents are having marital issues and it is effecting the child. However in The Brood the mother in the family is hard, selfish, strong and mad and she is tearing the family apart. Once again there is an innocent child involved and is suffering due to the destruction of the nuclear family. Just like Wendy, Nora is subconsciously sabotaging her husband, Frank, by being mentally ill and breaking up their family (Creed, 45). By being away Nora is forcing Frank to complete all the tasks that a mother would. Giving Candy a bath, taking her to school even changing her clothes. Frank resents this and yet in order to be a good father cannot truly complain. The movie attempts to cast Frank as the protagonist and Nora and the antagonist and is hoping that a cross-gender identification occurs where the female audience identifies with Frank.  In order to this the movie portrays Nora’s character as alien to our societal beliefs as they can.  This is evident in the first and final encounter between Nora and Frank that the audience witness 1:18:17.

In the scene Frank is portrayed as a loving father who is doing whatever he can to get his daughter back, even trying to trick his mentally ill wife into believing that he still loves her. Nora on the other hand is portrayed as something alien, although she looks lovely in her white gown she is hiding the monster that she has become.  Her body has morphed to be able to produce children on its own no longer needing a man to produce. Not only does her parthenogenetic body disgust her husband but her obvious comfort with it does as well, he nearly gags as she licks the blood off her new broodling. As it becomes clear to Frank that Nora will do anything to keep her daughter away from him he leaps on her and strangles her to death while she still holds the bloody body of her brood. It makes one wonder why he could not simply knock her unconscious? Why did the Frank have to turn into a killer himself? The implication of the movie is that without a man, woman can only give birth to a race of mutants and that woman’s destructive emotions must be kept in check (Creed, 45).

Family dynamics and social changes often effect the plot and underlying messages of movies. The role of each family member is constantly changing in horror films but the role of each family member is under equal transformation in our society today. It will be interesting to see how our societies new changes will translate into horror movies since we now have different family lifestyles emerging, such as the single mother, single father, same sex parents, and polygamous parents.   

Work Cited 

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993.

Waller, Gregory A. "Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange." American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. Urbana: U of Illinois, 1987.