The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema , Historical Trauma and National Identity

233 Pages·2008·1.534 MB·English

by  Linnie Blake

The wounds of nations

The wounds of nations
Horror cinema, historical trauma
and national identity
Linnie Blake
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave
Copyright © Linnie Blake 2008
The right of Linnie Blake to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Pat-
ents Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK
and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
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Distributed exclusively in the USA by
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Distributed exclusively in Canada by
UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for
ISBN 978 0 7190 7593 3 hardback
First published 2008
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Edited and typeset
by Frances Hackeson Freelance Publishing Services, Brinscall, Lancs
Printed in Great Britain
by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
Introduction: traumatic events and page 1
international horror cinema
Part I German and Japanese horror: the traumatic
legacy of the Second World War
Introduction 19
1 The horror of the Nazi past in the reunification 26
present: Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantiks
2 Nihonjinron, women, horror: post-war national 44
identity and the spirit of subaltern vengeance in
Ringu andThe Ring
Part II The traumatised 1970s and the threat of
apocalypse now
Introduction 71
3 ‘Consumed out of the good land’: George A. 78
Romero’s horror of the 1970s
4 All hail to the serial killer: America’s last 101
frontier hero in the age of Reaganite eschatology
and beyond
Part III From Vietnam to 9/11: the Orientalist
other and the American poor white
Introduction 123
5 ‘Squealing like a pig’: the War on Terror and 128
the resurgence of hillbilly horror after 9/11
vi Contents
Part IV New Labour new horrors: the post-
Thatcherite crisis of British masculinity
Introduction 155
6 Zombies, dog men and dragons: generic 161
hybridity and gender crisis in British horror of
the new millennium
Conclusion: horror cinema and traumatic events 187
Filmography 193
Bibliography 201
Index 219
Introduction: traumatic events and
international horror cinema
In a catastrophic age … trauma itself may provide the very link
between cultures: not as a simple understanding of the pasts of
others but rather, within the traumas of contemporary history, as
our ability to listen through the departures we have all taken from
ourselves.1
Horror is everywhere the same.2
Since the late 1970s psychoanalytically informed and often Holo-
caust-focused academics have brought into being an interdiscipli-
nary area within the Humanities known as Trauma Studies. Broadly
speaking, this is a theoretical caucus that attempts to articulate and
critique the diverse ways in which traumatic memories have been
inscribed as wounds on the cultural, social, psychic and political life
of those who have experienced them, and those cultural products
that seek to represent such experiences to those who have not. Such
articulation and critique is intimately concerned with the ways in
which ideas of integrated and cohesive identity may be violently
challenged by traumatic events such as genocide, war, social
marginalisation or persecution, being part of a broader academic
project to give voice to the historically silenced. Trauma Studies can
thus be seen as a body of theoretical scholarship that addresses itself
to cultural memory, to the modes in which traumatic historical events
are representationally transmitted in time and space, to the politics
of memorialising such events and experiences and to the cultural
significance of vicarious modes of witnessing trauma. And as such,
it is an entirely apposite discipline through which to read that most
traumatic and traumatised of film genres – cinematic horror, a genre
2 The wounds of nations
here shown to undertake precisely the kind of cultural work that
Trauma Studies takes as its subject.
Profoundly concerned with the socio-cultural and psychological
ramifications of trauma, both Trauma Studies and the trauma-raddled
and wound-obsessed genre that is horror cinema can be seen to ad-
dress themselves to ‘the psychic and social sites where individual
and group identities are constituted, destroyed and reconstructed’;3
both by the wounds inflicted by trauma and by those psychological,
social and cultural attempts to bind those wounds in the interests of
dominant ideologies of identity. For by virtue of its generic strate-
gies, its representational practices and its recurrent thematic con-
cerns, I will argue, horror cinema is ideally positioned to expose the
psychological, social and cultural ramifications of the ideologically
expedient will to ‘bind up the nation’s wounds’ that is promulgated
by all aspects of the culture industry in post-traumatic contexts in
an attempt, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, to ‘achieve and cherish a
just and lasting peace’4 for the nation and its people.
Following Dominick LaCapra, this study understands trau-
matic events to be man-made historical phenomena such as geno-
cide or war that may be theorised retrospectively in the conceptual
vocabulary of disciplines such as sociology or psychology.5 It does
so in the awareness, however, that such retrospective philosophising
does not heal the traumatised subject who, lacking a pre-existing
frame of reference within which to locate the traumatic experience,
is unable to assimilate it into normative conceptions of the world.6
For this is where cultural artefacts such as genre films can be seen to
enact what Freud would term Trauerarbeit or the work of mourning;
exploring trauma by remembering it and repeating it in the form of
diagetically mediated symbolisations of loss. For as I will argue, hor-
ror cinema can function precisely in this way; for by focusing on the
sites where ideologically dominant models of individual and group
identity are sequentially formed, dismantled by trauma and finally
re-formed in a post-traumatic context, such narratives can be seen
to demand not only a willingness on behalf of audiences to work
through the anxiety engendered by trauma, but a willingness also to
undertake a fundamental questioning of those ideologically domi-
nant models of individual, collective and national identity that can
Introduction 3
be seen to be deployed across post-traumatic cultures, as a means of
binding (hence isolating and concealing) the wounds of the past in
a manner directly antithetical to their healing.
Since at least the early 1990s it has been a critical common-
place for trauma theorists such as Hayden White to assert that the
stylistic experimentation of literary modernism may represent the
reality of events such as the Holocaust in a way that ‘no other ver-
sion of realism could do’7 precisely because ‘the kinds of anti-narra-
tive non-stories produced by literary modernism offer the only
prospect for adequate representation of the kind of “unnatural” events
– including the Holocaust – that mark our era and distinguish it
absolutely from all of the “history” that has come before it.’8 Con-
testable in its conception of the post-traumatic uniqueness of our
age, White’s predilection for high-cultural modernism thus occludes,
quite deliberately, the ways in which popular culture since the 1960s
has repeatedly returned to narratives that privilege both the abject
and the uncanny as core signifiers of traumatic historical events,
establishing in the process what Andreas Huyssen would term a popu-
lar ‘culture of memory’9 that is unstable, aporetic and often very
frightening indeed.
This study is, then, a response to the longstanding occlusion
of popular cultural forms (specifically those such as horror cinema
that are generically driven by the abject and the uncanny) from con-
temporary theorisations of the cultural legacy of trauma. It focuses
on film, a medium that is ‘sufficiently plastic to render the shifting
colors [sic] and shapes of human experience as it manifests inter-
nally, and externally, in things that happen and are perceived by
witnesses and participants’10 and is concerned specifically with hor-
ror cinema, as a genre that attracts consumers by virtue of being
‘expressly repulsive’11 while appearing ‘to take pleasure from the fact
that so many people find it disturbing, distasteful, or even down-
right unacceptable.’12 Thus offering ‘a portrait of ourselves and of
the kind of life we have chosen to lead,’13 horror cinema exists at the
conjunction of cultural analysis and cultural policy – being the popu-
lar genre most prone to legislative regulation through censorship
from above.14 For if the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
have been characterised not only by a bewildering array of traumatic