Slavoj Žižek[129] argues that the mother’s house in Psycho reproduces the three levels of human subjectivity. The ground floor is ego where Norman acts as a normal son. The first floor is the super-ego in the figure of the dead mother. Down in the cellar is the id—the reservoir of illicit drives. When Norman carries his mother’s mummified corpse down to the basement, it’s as though he were transferring the super-ego to the id. Žižek—through Freud[130]—sees the super-ego as an obscene agency perpetually bombarding the self with impossible orders, unapplicable ethics, unrealizable morals, that make us feel guilty for not achieving (or heeding) its dictums. Both Bertrand and Kürten had unsuccessful relationships with their fathers, they had no identification with the parental agency. If the installation of the super-ego can be described as a successful instance of identification with the parental agency, these men were failures, their super-egotistical striving for perfection retarded at an early age, they did not develop a conscience to control their fantasies, drives, and actions. Without a regulatory super-ego they did not feel guilt. Both Bertrand and Kürten simulated a super-ego in their dress, manner, and occupations, yet neither had any conception of social acceptability. If the super-ego is the regulatory control of the father internalized, then Bertrand and Kürten were without the father, without conscience, without morality and taboo, both men living in a perpetual Oedipal complex stage, the fear of castration transferred to the other—the other as victim. It could be argued that revolutionary France and Weimar Republic Germany had shifting and inchoate super-egos, the cultural and personal super-ego—which should be inter-locked—fractured and formed these men in worlds of relative morality and transitional ethics because a cultural super-ego ‘does not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human beings.’[131]
If the cellar, basement, tomb represents the id—the arena of abasement—then that is where the necrophile resides, in the realm of the ‘pleasure principle,’ the unconscious becomes the freedom from tension (Bertrand’s blackouts and Kürten’s need to release built-up pressure). This is Freud’s ‘chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations’ in which ‘contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other out.’ Neither Bertrand or Kürten can be considered evil because they do not understand the concept, their pleasure instinct existing alongside their death drive, the bodies they kill, they have sex with, they mutilate are an attempt to ‘lead organic life back into the inanimate state.’[132] Bertrand and Kürten’s sexual and violent psychopathic events were ‘instinct(s) of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms.’[133] Or, in Bertrand’s case, destruction directed against the internal organs. He did this to destroy the human—Bertrand the id-machine, the dead but made alive, made dead bodies, fuel to his libido, his virtual reality powered by his libido that is always/already firing his fantasies. The fantasy realized is sustained by extreme violence. Discussing the implied necrophilia in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Žižek claims the fantasy is realized as ‘a process of mortification, which also is the mortification of woman’s desire. It is as if in order to have her, to desire her, to have sexual intercourse with her, with the woman, Scottie has to mortify her, to change her into a dead woman. It’s as if, again, for the male libidinal economy, to paraphrase a well-known old saying, the only good woman is a dead woman.’
6
NecroCinema—Prohibition, Inhibition, Exhibition
From the outside, the building resembles a classic American house, all apple pie and brilliant smiles: white clapboard, porch swing, all framed by a blue sky embroidered with puffy white clouds. A young woman—Pam—dressed in halter-neck, red shorts, walks into the house looking for her boyfriend Kirk. In the dark hallway, she hears a noise—something like large blades slicing against one another. In the background, the incessant hum of a generator. She pushes open heavy curtains, trips, and falls on to the floor. Beneath her fingers, thousands of feathers, and within the feathery undergrowth, hundreds of bones. A fat chicken in a too-small cage clucks and pecks at the bars. Pam looks around the room, the floor is littered with femurs, mandibles, the tarsals, metatarsals, and phalanges of a human foot. She looks up and sees that the foot connects to a tibia, but then the skeleton becomes deterritorialized. The phalanages, metacarpals, and carpals of a human hand lead to an ulna and radius, which in turn lead to a non-human connective bone attached by leather ties to a human skull flanked by a pair of cow scapula. (So far, so Hans Bellmer.) As the camera pans out, the monstrous assemblage resembles a shrine. As Pam looks around the room in terror, she sees various skeletal remains, human and animal, tied together with string or mounted on the walls—a human skull with a bull’s horn penetrating its jaws, a turtle carapace, a tiny thoracic cage. On her hands and knees, she vomits in the ossuary/fetish/altar/shrine. Choking and panicking, shouting for her boyfriend Kirk, Pam stumbles out of the room into the corridor. A metal door slides open—the door should not be there, it has no right to be in the dream house, it has been transported there from the slaughterhouse, from the nightmare, from Père Lachais, from Düsseldorf. A man wearing a butcher’s apron catches her and, laughing, carries her screaming back into the house and into the room beyond the sliding metal door. Once inside, he lifts her—still screaming—on to a large butcher’s hook, a human body on the slab in front of her. The man crosses to a sink area and revs up a chain saw. It is then that we get a proper glimpse of his mask—it is made from segments of human faces, the skin stitched together with black leather thread. Later. Sally, having witnessed her wheelchair-bound brother sliced open by the chainsaw-wielding masked man, flees into the dream house, runs upstairs to the attic. Applying Žižek’s psychological house rules, Sally flees into what she hopes is the super-ego, the arena of control, the realm of conscience, the antithesis to the id-wielding masked man. But there—in a similar way to the discovery of the mummified corpse in Psycho—she discovers the desiccated corpse of an old woman, and the near-to-death body of an old man—who turns out to be the grandfather—the super-ego near extinction. Later. Sally’s fingers are bled and the blood fed to the corpse-like grandfather (resembling an animatronic William S. Burroughs), who sucks her fingers, a perverse oral sexuality, and gains strength as he does so.
Norman Bates and Leatherface are monstrous realizations of our own repressive desires and, concurrently, manifestations of oppressive economic transferences of otherness. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,[134] the two couples are split up (literally and viscerally in one case), their sexual and potentially familial normality sundered. Leatherface’s ‘family,’ ostensibly driven to cannibalism by the mechanical automation of the slaughter-house—their ‘otherness’ played out in their unemployment and their necrophagy—threaten the status quo, threaten the perception of the human in its emancipated desires. Both monsters—Norman and Leatherface (and Bertrand by association)—represent their particular culture in crisis. All attempt to annihilate women from their twisted all-male families, or Bertrand’s military substitute. Bates, Leatherface, and Bertrand deny the human, deny the possibilities of normality, of capitalist society, and of reproduction.
129
130
See Sigmund Freud, The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,
131
Sigmund Freud,
132
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id,’
134
For a further analysis of