Freud.
There, just wanted to say the word, make sure you’d be sticking around. You are? Great! Because we’ll be talking a bit about the Original Cigar Aficionado today, I’m afraid. Turns out that in addition to his contribution, if not the invention, of the field of psychoanalysis, Freud also contributed one of the seminal (groan) works in the field of horror criticism, too–his essay “The ‘Uncanny.'” Freud’s project was not unlike my own: He was attempting to pinpoint what people found weird (in the old-school, bizarre-cum-creepy sense) and frightening, and why.
Unsurprisingly he traced the power of horrific images back to repressed memories, of both the individual-infantile and somethin close to the collective-sociohistorical varieties. I summarize his approach in the ol’ thesis, but what we’re talking about today is his analysis of the doppleganger, or double. Freud theorized that the frightening power of such entities stems from its ability to force us to recall such forgotten mental processes like “primary narcissim” (if I recall correctly, this meant that as infants we projected our own personalities onto pretty much everything we encountered–we were our world, and our world was us) and the ego’s formation of a conscience (a process once reassuring, but now, made literal, one we find terrifying).
Freudian “doubling” is a powerful and recurrent theme in horror art. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Caligari and the sleepwalking Cesare, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, the Wolf Man and his human alter ego: these are the obvious cases. But one could go even further to say that the entire concept of “monster” is one of doubling–creating a separate, threatening, yet somehow appealing personification of the primal and unsociable drives that the hero or heroine of the story (and by extension the viewer) unconsciously deny.
Speaking of unconscious, my own understanding of this concept is pretty shallow, and indeed I had next to no knowledge of it during the bulk of my studies back in college. It was only when I put together my thesis that I encountered The Double as explicity articulated, and attempted to re-articulate it myself. But in looking back on the horror-related papers I wrote during college in preparation for Where the Monsters Go, I was surprised to see doubling recur, in one form or another, in several otherwise unrelated essays. I figured, Why not make a day of it?
So here are three essays (downloadable as PDFs) that deal with doubles.
The first concerns the pervasive theme of duality and doubles in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, focusing specifically on images and scenes involving mirrors and reflections. One of the fun things about Kubrick is that with him more than almost any other filmmaker one can be confident that any given thing going on in one of his films is not happening by accident. This makes even the closest reading of his work a worthwhile, undistorted peek into his intentions and obsessions. The amount of mirroring going on in The Shining is almost incredible–it’s practically like the “all work and no play” manuscript in its repetitious intensity. I think fans of the film would enjoy this little paper of mine on the topic.
The second deals with the 1913 German horror film The Student of Prague and its 1926 remake. The storyline of both concerns a rambunctious but impoverished student named Baldwin who makes a Faustian bargain that leads to the creation of an evil doppleganger; the essay discusses this and other motifs in the films, and depicts (in light of the historical theses of expressonist-film theoretician Siegfried Kracauer) how the two films serve as “doubles” of one another as well. I think it ends up as an interesting examination of the preoccupations of these films, two of the earliest in the cycle of German expressionist/horror films (and by extension some of the earliest in the larger German-influenced American horror-film cycle of the 1930s and ’40s).
The third concerns Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II, which were the first two films in the Hellraiser series, the ones with which Barker himself was most involved, and the only ones worth watching. Here I’m focusing on a more oblique form of doubling: the duality of body and mind as depicted in these viscerally horrific movies. Using Steven Shaviro’s essay on David Cronenberg, “Bodies of Fear,” as a starting point, I try to pinpoint what Barker is trying to say about the horrors and delights of physical experience. It’s a very different thing than what his friend and fellow horror visionary Cronenberg is getting at.
I do hope you enjoy the essays. Though they suffer from the twin faults of undergraduate film studies prose–occasional jargonese and pervasive breathy prose (how many times can I use the words “powerfully” and “masterpiece”?)–I think they’re strong, and sometimes revelatory, despite this. Take a minute–or two–and see what you think.