Shocking Cinema of the 70s 9781350136311, 9781350136328, 9781350136298

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Shocking Cinema of the 70s

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Shocking Cinema of the 70s Edited by Xavier Mendik and Julian Petley

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Xavier Mendik and Julian Petley, 2022 Xavier Mendik and Julian Petley have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. ix–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Death Weekend poster, 1976 (Courtesy Everett Collection / Mary Evans) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mendik, Xavier, editor. | Petley, Julian, editor. Title: Shocking cinema of the 70s / edited by Julian Petley and Xavier Mendik. Other titles: Shocking cinema of the seventies Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021017159 (print) | LCCN 2021017160 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350136311 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350194489 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350136298 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350136304 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures--History--20th century. | Sensationalism in motion pictures. | Motion pictures--Production and direction. | Motion picture industry--History. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.S284 S56 2021 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.S284 (ebook) | DDC 791.4309—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017159 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017160 ISBN:

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction New Shocks to the System: An Introduction to Shocking Cinema of the 70s Julian Petley and Xavier Mendik

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Part 1 International Visions of the Extreme 1

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Walerian Borowczyk: Seventies Sexploitation Through Sublimation Aga Skrodzka

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A Woman’s Grudge: Figuring Female Resentment in Japanese 1970s Grindhouse Cinema Laura Treglia

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Rethinking Representation, Race and Rape in the 1970s Women in Prison Movie James Newton

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Part 2 From the Vigilante to the Violated 4

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Death Wish: A Vigilante’s Journey, an Urban Tragedy William Gombash

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Rough Justice: Lone Cops, Vigilantes and Penal Populism Julian Petley

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Small Screen Shockers: Rape-Revenge Narratives in the Madefor-TV Movie Jennifer Wallis

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Part 3 State Sponsored Shocks 7

Tax Shelter Terrors: Cinépix and the Hidden History of 1970s Canadian Horror Cinema Xavier Mendik

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Shocking Canadian Cinema of the 70s: An Interview with William Fruet Xavier Mendik

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‘You miserable, no good, dirty sons of bitches!’: Queer(y)ing ‘Canuxploitation’ Revenge Narratives in the Films of John Dunning and André Link Robin Griffiths

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Part 4 Family-sploitation and Threats to the Family 10 Family Entertainment: Psychotic Slaughter in the 1970s Charles Manson Movies Bill Osgerby

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11 The Peter Pan Syndrome: Murder as Child’s Play in Four 1970s Films T.S. Kord

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Part 5 Porno Chic, Porno Shock 12 ‘They’re Not There Just to Fuck’: Sensibility, Cultural Provocation and 1970s American Hard Core Pornography Darren Kerr

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13 Hardcore and Rough on the Outside: Evaluating Femmes de Sade and Water Power Neil Jackson

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List of Contributors Index

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Figures 1.1

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Immoral Tales: The fetishistic portrayal of the female body. Screengrab under Fair Use/Fair Dealing.

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Django (Sid Haig) performs a fake seduction of prison guard Rocco (Vic Diaz) in The Big Bird Cage. Screengrab under Fair Use/Fair Dealing.

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Rocco is raped by the escaping prisoners in The Big Bird Cage; ‘You’ll finally get to use that thing for what it’s made for.’ Screengrab under Fair Use/Fair Dealing.

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Prisoner Alcott (WiP regular Roberta Collins) attempts to get Harry (Haig again) to rape Miss Dietrich (Christiane Schmidtmer) as an act of revenge in The Big Doll House. Screengrab under Fair Use/Fair Dealing.

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Joe: Cross-class collaborators: Joe Curran (Peter Boyle), Bill Compton (Dennis Patrick) and Joan Compton (Audrey Claire). Image courtesy Everett Collection Inc./Alamy Stock Photo.

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Joe: Joe Curran holds forth in the American Bar. Image courtesy Everett Collection Inc./Alamy Stock Photo.

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The hunting of Amy in Revenge for a Rape. Screengrab under Fair Use/Fair Dealing.

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7.1

André Link (L) and John Dunning (R) of Cinépix.

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7.2

Cashing in on the Quiet Revolution: Valérie.

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You should know how good this film is: Cinépix responds to the Shivers controversy.

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Narratives of containment: social and moral order collapse in Shivers.

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7.5

Figures

Contemplating siege scenarios: John Dunning (L) and David Cronenberg (R) on the set of Rabid.

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Real life road encounter as fiction: director William Fruet on Death Weekend.

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Canada’s first action heroine? Brenda Vaccaro in Death Weekend.

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Phallic conflicts: masculine tensions in Death Weekend.

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Country encounters: tropes of rural depravity in Death Weekend.

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The embodiment of ‘monstrous masculinity’: Don Stroud as archetypical ‘brute’ Lep in William Fruet’s Death Weekend.

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10.1 Constructing the counterculture’s dark side: Charles Manson and Life magazine. Author’s personal collection.

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10.2 Manson-themed thrill seekers on wheels: Al Adamson’s Satan’s Sadists. Author’s personal collection.

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13.1 Femmes de Sade advertising.

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13.2 The sex community as threatened by Rocky De Sade (Ken Turner). Screengrab under Fair Use/Fair Dealing.

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13.3 Rejecting the Sadeian male: Rocky at the climax of Femmes de Sade. Screengrab under Fair Use/Fair Dealing.

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13.4 Sadism lurking in the urban expanse: Jamie Gillis in Water Power. Screengrab under Fair Use/Fair Dealing. 300 13.5 Advertising for the 1977 Water Power premiere at the Kearny Cinema in San Francisco.

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13.6 Sculptures prefigure the dehumanization of female victims in Water Power. Screengrab under Fair Use/Fair Dealing.

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Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank all of the writers who contributed so much hard work to Shocking Cinema of the 70s. We offer additional thanks to these authors for their continued patience and commitment to the volume over the long course of its development. Shocking Cinema of the 70s is based on a prior concept that Xavier Mendik initially developed for Noir Publishing in 2002. Both Xavier Mendik and Julian Petley therefore wish to express their thanks to Andy Black from Noir Publishing for allowing us to revise this original concept into the new volume for Bloomsbury Academic. In terms of its current publication team, we wish to specifically thank Rebecca Barden and Veidehi Hans from Bloomsbury Academic for all their invaluable support and assistance in helping us complete this new version of Shocking Cinema of the 70s. Beyond our publishers, we also offer sincere thanks to a number of film industry colleagues who facilitated the interviews that appear in this volume. Specifically, we wish to thank director William Fruet, content producer Philip Escott and Greg Dunning of the Cinépix Inc. Estate for the provision of interviews and the related publicity materials included in the book. The images from Joe used in the chapter ‘Rough Justice: Lone Cops, Vigilantes and Penal Populism’ are courtesy of the Everett Collection Inc./ Alamy Stock Photo archives. The image of André Link and John Dunning of Cinépix Inc. reproduced in the chapter ‘Tax Shelter Terrors: Cinépix and the Hidden History of 1970s Canadian Horror Cinema’ is courtesy of Greg Dunning and the Cinépix Inc. estate. Additionally, the image of André Link’s written response to the Shivers controversy is also from Mr Dunning’s collection. Further, the images from Valérie and Shivers are also courtesy of Mr Dunning and the Cinépix Inc. estate, as is the production still from Rabid reproduced in the same chapter. The editors wish to thank Greg Dunning for his generosity and support in proving visual materials for several chapters contained within Shocking Cinema of the 70s. In addition, we further thank ix

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Mr Dunning for providing access to the images from Death Weekend that appear in the chapter ‘Shocking Canadian Cinema of the 70s: An Interview with William Fruet’. The image of director William Fruet reproduced in the same chapter is from Xavier Mendik’s 2020 documentary The Quiet Revolution: State, Society and the Canadian Horror Film and is courtesy of the author’s personal collection. The chapter ‘You miserable, no good, dirty sons of bitches!’: Queer(y)ing “Canuxploitation” Revenge Narratives in the Films of John Dunning and André Link’ also uses an image from Death Weekend which is courtesy of the Cinépix Inc. estate, and again we offer further sincere thanks to Greg Dunning for allowing us to reproduce it here. In the chapter ‘Family Entertainment: Psychotic Slaughter in the 1970s Charles Manson Movies’, the magazine image of Charles Manson is courtesy of the author’s personal collection, as is the poster of Al Adamson’s Satan’s Sadists. In the chapter ‘Hardcore and Rough on the Outside: Evaluating Femmes de Sade and Water Power’, the promotional images for Femmes de Sade are courtesy of the author’s personal collection, as is the advertising for the 1977 screening of Water Power at the Kearny theater in San Francisco. The rest of the images contained within this book remain the property of the production and distribution companies concerned. They are reproduced here in the spirit of publicity and the promotion of the films in question. Xavier Mendik dedicates this book with much love to Caroline and Zena. Julian Petley dedicates it to Mary with much love and gratitude.

Introduction New Shocks to the System: An Introduction to Shocking Cinema of the 70s Julian Petley and Xavier Mendik

This collection was originally intended as a second edition of Shocking Cinema of the 70s,1 which was published in 2002 and edited by Xavier Mendik. In the original volume, contributors discussed a wide range of films that Mendik bracketed around three core themes: ‘Hollywood on the edge’, ‘the ethnic other in action’ and ‘seventies horrors’. Under these general headings, some of the topic areas that the authors considered included the 1970s disaster film, Michael Winner’s films as emblematic of the era, American conspiracy cinema as reflective of the decade, blaxploitation horror cinema within wider ethnic contexts, Hong Kong cinema’s constructions of the mutilated kung fu hero, Hammer co-productions of the 1970s, dystopic reflections of society in the cinema of George A. Romero and conflicting constructions of contemporary London across a range of 1970s British horror films. Upon the book’s recommissioning, it had been the intention of both editors to retain the full contents of the original volume, and to complement these with new chapters where appropriate. However, in the course of its long gestation, the new edition of Shocking Cinema of the 70s has become an entirely new book. There are a number of reasons for not reproducing any of the chapters from the first edition of the volume, despite the innumerable merits of the individual contributions. Central to this decision is the fact that since the volume’s original release in 2002, a number of monographs and edited collections have been published which have further recuperated many of the subjects discussed in the first edition, thus rendering them no longer particularly shocking or marginal. For instance, an invaluable primer on 1970s cinema and society such as Lester D. Friedman’s edited collection American 1

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Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations2 offers revised considerations of disaster film cycles and blaxploitation cinema formats alongside a further consideration of ‘disreputable’ horror entries such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974). Friedman’s publication is itself complemented by other recent works that include Barbara Jane Brickman’s New American Teenagers: The Lost Generation of Youth in 1970s Film,3 which provides an updated reading of Hooper’s film in the context of wider discussions around 1970s teen movie constructions. Such publications have been complemented by more sustained studies on key topic areas covered in the first edition of Shocking Cinema of the 70s that have been undertaken by the original contributors themselves. These include Leon Hunt, whose chapter ‘One-Armed and Extremely Dangerous: Wang Yu’s Mutilated Masters’ was then expanded as part of his wider book-length study Kung Fu Cult Masters,4 while Linnie Blake’s contribution ‘Another One for the Fire: George A. Romero’s American Theology of the Flesh’ provided the basis for an extrapolation into her volume The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema Historical Trauma and National Identity.5 The proliferation of such works indicates that the majority of the subject areas covered by the first edition of Shocking Cinema of the 70s can no longer be considered as case-studies that require further review and reclamation, possible exceptions being The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, even though newer studies in the field have helped both now achieve ‘classic’ status in the horror genre. Equally, some of the films had ceased to be shocking even by 2002 when Shocking Cinema of the 70s first appeared. However, one of the purposes of the original volume was to analyse why it was that films that were found shocking were being produced in the 1970s, particularly in the US, and why they were found shocking at the time of their release. Mendik notes that: In the light of Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, political and civil unrest, the construction of the Hollywood narrative altered to reveal a much more pessimistic and downbeat tone. Indeed, it is noticeable that dominant cycles of the era (such as the thriller, western and horror genres) seem dogged by moral ambiguity.6

That the horror genre looms large in the first edition is not simply because of its obvious shock-producing potential but also because it was one of the most

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popular genres of the decade, and, as Robin Wood7 in particular has argued, represents a form of ‘American nightmare’ in which the dominant fears and tensions of the decade were laid bare, albeit in frequently sub-textual forms. Thus, the corruption of the civic body and the degeneration of communal bonds are explored via three Romero films: The Crazies (1973), Martin (1977) and Dawn of the Dead (1978). Moral ambiguity, the evil of the everyday and an absence of authority are the subject of the chapter on The Last House on the Left. And the chapter on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, following Wood, uses the film to explore the collapse of established definitions of good and evil, normality and monstrosity. However, all this is by now familiar territory thanks to Wood and the numerous scholars of cult and exploitation cinema who have, in different ways, built upon the foundations which he laid in the 1970s. Thus, we decided not to re-visit it here. In addition to considering the diminished shock value that many of the contributions from 2002 now generate, both editors also reflected on the sectional nature of the original volume, which was primarily concerned with American cinema, both in its mainstream and independent iterations. The few non-American films considered are the Italian L’anticristo/The Antichrist (Alberto De Martino, 1974); the British Dracula A.D. 1972 (Alan Gibson, 1972), Death Line/Raw Meat (Gary Sherman, 1972) and Theatre of Blood (Douglas Hickox, 1973); the Wang Yu vehicles The Chinese Boxer/The Hammer of God (Hong Kong, 1970), One-Armed Boxer (Taiwan, Hong Kong, 1972) and The Man from Hong Kong/The Dragon Flies (Australia, Hong Kong, co-directed with Brian Trenchard-Smith, 1975); and the UK-Hong Kong co-production The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (Roy Ward Baker, 1974). In this new edition, the transnational net has been cast much wider. Aga Skrodza-Bates’s chapter on Walerian Borowczyk encompasses works by a Polish director made in France and Italy; Laura Treglia explores Japanese ‘pinky violence’ films; and three chapters examine the still rather neglected area of ‘Canuxploitation’. However, given their global dominance in the 1970s, American films still inevitably loom large, although we have attempted to move further into the margins. In industrial terms this involves a turn to TV in Jennifer Wallis’s study of rape-revenge tele-films, and also to the more independent end of the film production sector in James Newton’s chapter on

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the women in prison movie and Bill Osgerby’s study of Manson Family movies (which also features a TV production). And in terms of subject matter, Darren Kerr examines hard core pornography’s move from the margins (and back again), whilst Neil Jackson analyses a form of hard core that could never be anything but marginal and shocking. We did, however, decide to stick with the title of the original edition, and it is important in particular to try to explain why we retained the word ‘shocking’. We wanted the new collection to focus on films from a variety of countries, and from the marginal to the mainstream, which, by tackling various ‘difficult’ subjects, have proved to be controversial in one way or another. Although some of the films have become cult objects, others have not, so Cult Cinema of the Seventies was out. Likewise, although some belong to the realm of ‘cultural detritus’ labelled ‘paracinema’ by Jeffrey Sconce,8 others are mainstream, such as Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974), Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) and the tele-films mentioned above. So Paracinema of the Seventies wouldn’t work either. Consequently, as most of these films have proved shocking at some point or have retained their power to shock, we decided to retain the original title. In so doing, we have also expanded upon the division of core themes that distinguished the 2002 original, but have amended them to fit the revised focus of the contents of the current volume. The headings under which we now review the 1970s as a shocking decade of cinema can be identified as: ‘International Visions of the Extreme’, ‘From the Vigilante to the Violated’, ‘State Sponsored Shocks’, ‘Family-sploitation and Threats to the Family’, and ‘Porno Chic, Porno Shock’. Importantly, we also need to make it clear that via this expanded focus on cinematic shock, we see nothing necessarily ‘progressive’ or even subversive in unsettling or distasteful content. From approaches to the cinema inflected by Surrealism, for example Ado Kyrou’s Le surréalisme au cinéma,9 to works emerging from the US counterculture and underground, such as Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art,10 through to certain aspects of cult criticism, there is a certain tendency to identify films which manage to épater les bourgeois with progressive or even radical potential. As Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton point out: ‘Cult cinema’s modes of reception are informed by debates around how they break boundaries of morality and challenge prohibitions in culture, how they dispute common sense conceptions of what is normal and acceptable, and

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how in doing so they confront taboo.’11 However, the shocks delivered by some of the films discussed in this book are of a very different kind – shocks to liberal sentiment courtesy of the reactionary values of Death Wish and Dirty Harry, and to certain strands of feminism in the women in prison movies discussed by Neil Jackson and in the hard core roughies by Darren Kerr (although it should be added that the latter contain scenes that would shock almost anyone). We will return to this subject when we discuss their individual chapters below.

Shocking Cinema of the 70s: the chapters Opening the section ‘International Visions of the Extreme’ is Aga SkrodzkaBates’s chapter on Walerian Borowczyk, which considers how shocked many critics were that the director had ‘abandoned his background in prestige art, only to take up entertainment films featuring explicit sexual content’. It is also worth adding that such films, namely Contes immoraux/Immoral Tales (1974), La bête/The Beast (1975), Interno di un convento/Behind Convent Walls (1978) and Les héroïnes du mal/Immoral Women (1979), were shocking enough to run into considerable censorship difficulties in numerous countries. For example, in the UK both Immoral Tales and The Beast were banned outright by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), while additionally Behind Convent Walls and Immoral Women were cut. Skrodzka-Bates also identifies another critical ploy used to deal with the shocking content of Borowcyk’s films, namely to argue that his form of erotica is a ‘classy’ one that does so much more than titillate. Thus, she notes that: It has frequently been claimed that there is always more to it, and that the ‘more’ has an authentic artistic, even philosophical, value. Unsurprisingly, Borowczyk’s early reputation as an award-winning experimental film-maker lends his sexploitation fare the kind of credibility that prompts certain critics to group him with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Buñuel and Nagisa Ôshima.

However, whilst not denying his qualities as ‘an experimental animator, a surrealist artist, a philosopher of sexuality, a cultural iconoclast and a technical innovator’, Skrodzka-Bates also wants to claim him as a financially successful

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exploitation film-maker, and one with affinities with Russ Meyer, Jess Franco and Ken Russell. Her chapter explores the reasons why the sexploitation framework is frequently pushed out of Borowczyk criticism, and brings it back in. In doing so she situates the films firmly in the 1970s, when western Europe was experiencing a widespread cultural and political liberalisation, the rise of consumer capitalism, a series of youth rebellions against the status quo, the growth of gay and women’s rights movements, and, most importantly, the arrival of the sexual revolution. As such, the films both speak of and react to the nexus of transformations (political, economic, and cultural) that shaped Borowczyk’s new French milieu. They also speak of the commodified desire that the 1970s mediated and put on display to an unprecedented degree.

While directors such as Walerian Borowczyk shocked the sensibilities that imbued European ‘quality’ cinema during the 1970s, Laura Treglia’s chapter on ‘pinky violence’ (pinkī baiorensu) films provides another international rendition of the extreme. Specifically, the inclusion of a number of references to Japanese 1970s films in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003) exposed a global audience to the (then) virtually unknown world of Japanese exploitation cinema of the period, which is now referred to as ‘pinky violence’. These films featured action and eroticism as their main selling points, and, Treglia argues, are best examined as a diverse set of thematic cycles that play with a multitude of generic conventions, in particular those genres involving erotia, gangsters, swordplay, horror, detective stories, comedy and melodrama. She focuses in particular on the second film in the Joshū Sasori/Female Prisoner Scorpion series (1972–3), Dai 41 zakkyo-bo/Jailhouse 41 (Itô Shun’ya, 1972), taking it as an example of Japanese grindhouse cinema of the early 1970s that prominently features figurations of violent, rebelling femininities in ways that give them an empowering energy and at the same time contain their gender anomalies. The films achieve this by manipulating, parodying and reproducing action film conventions as well as archetypes of female nonconforming characters.

Treglia locates the qualities of the pinky violence films that unsettled contemporary Japanese mores as consisting in the way that their female protagonists transgressed state-sanctioned, official ideologies of gender

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propriety. These construct domestic and nurturing roles as ‘proper’ to women’s identities and have long been supported in Japan by various institutional policies and corporate business practices, but they were also ‘relayed through mainstream cinema articulations of a virtuous, industrious and enduring femininity, acting in deference to social norms and patriarchal authority’. However, nothing could be further from this image of the ideal Japanese woman than the violent, non-conforming, anarchic protagonists of the pinky violence films. As Treglia makes clear, though, these female protagonists are represented in a decidedly ambiguous manner. On the one hand, they have definite agency: These unruly young women – street hoodlums, bikers, pickpockets, swordswomen and gamblers – live by their wits and fight back against (male) oppressors, who are typically embodied by evil gangsters, representatives of state authority and coercive power (policemen, wardens, teachers), and figures generally endowed with higher social, political and economic capital.

But, on the other hand, they are ‘mostly dropouts, they do not pursue education, do not look forward to marrying or securing a job, and live away from their homes and families, wanting only to indulge in leisure activities and a carefree life’. Thus, from a conventional point of view the lifestyle of the pinky violence girls is socially unproductive, and they represent the epitome of irresponsibility and self-interest, and are thus marked in the various series as in some way delinquent. Film titles, for example, usually include the words ‘bad,’ ‘delinquent,’ ‘poisonous’ and ‘terrifying’ (furyō, zubekō, dokufu, kyōfu); in this way, figurations of female non-conformity, independence and violent agency are always-already marked as outlaw, gone-bad, criminal and pathological. Such clear demarcation is one of the devices adopted to disavow the non-normative feminine subjects constructed within the films, while at the same time they are championed by the narrative.

Such contradictions and ambiguities are typical of exploitation cinema in whatever national culture it is found, as is confirmed by James Newton in the final contribution to this section of the volume. Newton’s chapter focusses on a group of women in prison (WiP) movies made in the early 1970s, in order to explore the subversive and transgressive qualities claimed by a number of theorists for the cycle. In doing so, he refers

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back to an early piece by Pam Cook on Stephanie Rothman and exploitation films in which she argued that ‘bad acting, crude stereotypes and schematic narrative’ synonymous with exploitation cinema exposed the ‘ideological structures embedded in the form itself ’.12 This resulted in contradictions and ‘shifts in meaning which disturb the patriarchal myths of women on which the exploitation film itself rests’.13 Newton also quotes Henry Jenkins on Rothman’s women in prison film Terminal Island (1973) which, Jenkins claims, ‘negotiates between . . . two competing discourses’ that can illuminate ‘the ideological fault-lines within popular cinema.’14 So far, so familiar. But Newton then goes on to raise a series of new questions that are pertinent to this book as a whole, which is why it is worth discussing his chapter in some detail. Not least: ‘What is the purpose of revisiting shocking movies from the 1970s when, over the following, decades they have been superseded by work which is far more violent, more shocking, and more directly engaged in presenting marginal spaces, ideas, or identities?’ And this is true not only of the cinema, since mainstream TV series such as The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010– ) and Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–19 ) feature content that would most certainly have been censored, particularly in the UK, had it appeared in feature films in the 1970s. Violent women are now quite commonplace across cinematic genres such as horror, crime and action films, and the WiP genre made its way onto TV as early as 1979 with the Australian series Prisoner: Cell Block H (Grundy Television Productions/Network Ten) which ran until 1986. More recent WiP series include Wentworth (FremantleMedia Australia, 2013– ) and Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013–19). The once-disreputable WiP film is now celebrated as radical even in a newspaper as liberal as the Guardian, with Noah Berlatsky arguing that Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015) borrows a good deal from the WiP movie but is less bold in its treatment of women of colour and is guilty of ‘straightening out WiP’s queerer dynamics’.15 On the other hand, though, Newton points out that ‘the one-time claims for the “feminism” of WiP films have come to be seen by some as contradictory and untenable’. By virtue of the period in which they were made, they, like other exploitation films of the period, often contain content which bristles against contemporary liberal Western values – including images of sexual objectification, humour based on negative stereotypes, and content which

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might now be seen by many as ‘politically incorrect’. Films of the kind discussed in this chapter would be unlikely to face censorship today, at least in the US and UK, but censure is quite another matter. It is thus unsurprising, then, that: Scholarship on exploitation cinema which is still concerned to highlight the positive or progressive elements of the cult film at the same time feels the need to explain, put into context, mitigate or disown its negative elements, such as its perceived racism or misogyny.

In fact, this is very much in line with the approach taken by Cook and Jenkins, namely reframing the films and creating a viewing context in which they can be understood in a way that mitigates their disreputable content (in this case by showing how they counterpoint mainstream Hollywood representations). But, Newton argues: Such an approach suggests that the WiP film is suitable only when viewed through the prism of intellectual enquiry or a feminist quest for transgressive female role models . . . The critic takes on the role of guardian or teacher, ‘educating’ the ‘untutored’ viewer on how to understand, interpret and enjoy such films, but also on when to stop taking pleasure in them and to start critiquing any problematic representations.

It is Newton’s contention that to focus simply on the ‘feminism’ of the WiP cycle is to ignore the films’ principal selling points, namely depictions of sex and violence, with the two mixed up together in ways which may be distinctly uncomfortable to certain contemporary sensibilities. In his view, such films can, and should, be considered as simultaneously transgressive and stuck in stereotypical and regressive representations – what Cook refers to as ‘patriarchal myths’ and ‘ideological structures’. The films can still be seen as subversive, but ‘identifying their subversive qualities involves going beyond a surface interpretation and relies on an acceptance of their cruder side’. As noted earlier, films that shock can disturb both conservative and liberal sensibilities. This contradictory set of reactions to unsettling content is taken up by the second strand of Shocking Cinema of the 70s: ‘From the Vigilante to the Violated’. The seventies gave rise to a prolific cycle of films, beginning with Dirty Harry and Death Wish, that thoroughly disturbed liberal sensibilities. There have been attempts to recuperate the former, but very few efforts have been

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made in the case of the latter, save the chapter contained in the first edition of Shocking Cinema of the 70s. This no doubt has a great deal to do with the different authorial reputations of Don Siegel and Michael Winner, but it surely has to be admitted that Death Wish is now generally deemed as irrecoverable, which is why we decided to devote a chapter to it here. However, there is another reason for our focus on vigilantes in this strand of the collection, and that is because, to a greater extent than any other US films of the seventies, their spirit appears to imbue the ideology of many of Donald Trump’s supporters (indeed of Trump himself) and we are interested in the parallels between the two. It simply cannot be a coincidence that Death Wish was remade in 2018. But it should also be noted that, in the case of the UK, it is not exactly difficult to locate the echoes of Death Wish in Harry Brown (Daniel Barber, 2009) and in the representation of young members of the ‘underclass’ in the films that Johnny Walker characterizes as ‘hoodie horrors’.16 William Gombash’s chapter examines how Death Wish relates to the subject of law and order in America in the 1970s, noting how at the time of its release, the film powerfully resonated with a disgruntled white middle class that feared crime and felt that the traditional means of protection and justice – the police and the courts – had become for some the problem and not the solution as far as crime in America was concerned.

His chapter seeks to provide answers to the question: What were the social and political variables that allowed Death Wish to touch a section of the public that had become so disillusioned with the system of law and order that they cheered a vigilante hero fighting the battle that they wished they could wage themselves?

That Death Wish shocked liberal sensibilities is clear from Vincent Canby’s review in the New York Times, 4 August 1974, headed ‘Death Wish Exploits Fear Irresponsibly’. This stated: It’s a tackily made melodrama but it so cannily orchestrates the audience’s responses that it can appeal to law-and-order fanatics, sadists, muggers, club women, fathers, older sisters, masochists, policemen, politicians, and, it seems, a number of film critics. Impartially. Its message, simply put, is: KILL. TRY IT. YOU’LL LIKE IT’.

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And Canby’s review shows that the cheers mentioned by Gombash were by no means simply metaphorical ones: Its powers to arouse – through demonstrations of action – are not unlike those of a pornographic movie . . . If you allow your wits to take flight, it’s difficult not to respond with the kind of lunatic cheers that rocked the Loew’s Astor Plaza when I was there the other evening. At one point a man behind me shouted with delight: ‘That’ll teach the mothers!’

But Death Wish also shocked other sensibilities. Although it was originally released to cinemas uncut with an R and an X certificate in the US and UK respectively, when it was submitted to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) on video in 1987, the Board’s director, James Ferman, indicated that he was not prepared to pass the film with the rape scene intact. However, as it was impossible to cut the scene effectively, and as the narrative would be damaged by removing it altogether, the video would be refused a certificate. Thus the distributor withdrew their submission and the video joined that select list of films that the Board hadn’t actually banned but remained unavailable on video for years – other notable examples being The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Straw Dogs (Sam Pekinpah, 1971). It was resubmitted in 1999, after Ferman’s retirement, and passed with twenty-nine seconds of cuts at 18 (the successor to the X). It was finally passed uncut in 2006. The examiner’s comment on the 1987 video submission is interesting in that it reveals that standards of what is considered shocking, at least by some, by no means always change over time in the direction of greater liberalization: What is clear on re-viewing is that it’s way beyond the current standards of sexual violence to women that we’re currently using at the Board, even in the adult category. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’ve tightened up on sexual assault and violence to women in the last ten years.17

Further proof of the fluid and changeable nature of the shocking is offered by the fate of Death Wish II (1982), also directed by Winner. When the cinema film was submitted to both the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the BBFC, its rape scenes were heavily cut in order to achieve an R and an X respectively. Various videos of the film were submitted to the BBFC from 1986 onwards, and those which used the original BBFC cinema version

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were passed at 18 without further cuts. In 2006, the R-rated version was submitted, and lost a further twenty-seven seconds, but from 2012 videos using the R-rated version were passed without further cuts. This does mean, however, that all the rated versions of both the film and the video circulating today in the US and UK are still heavily cut. In his chapter on Rough Justice, Julian Petley explains the context of rightwing reaction against the liberal values of the 1960s in a number of 1970s films about both cops and civilians taking the law into their own hands. But whilst noting the elements in Dirty Harry which very clearly critique the workings of ‘due process liberalism’ in the field of law enforcement, he also argues that not every lone cop in subsequent 1970s crime films is necessarily a vigilante nor thwarted in his duties solely by due process liberals – the more common causes are actually apathy and corruption in both the police force and at City Hall level. Indeed, there is even a sense in which Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) himself in Dirty Harry is not a vigilante, in that, unlike Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) in Death Wish or John Eastland (Robert Ginty) in The Exterminator (James Glickenhaus, 1980), he is not involved in an ongoing campaign of vigilante ‘justice’ but is obsessively pursuing one particular criminal, albeit by increasingly illegal means. Indeed, the point is made, admittedly not entirely convincingly, by pitting Callahan against a group of actual vigilante cops in Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973). However, in so far as these films featuring rough justice tend to endorse the cathartic effect of violence and ‘unofficial’ retribution as an alternative to legally sanctioned methods, they can be seen as symptomatic of, if not necessarily endorsing, the Nixonite ideological climate of the 1970s. This, in ways which are now becoming ever clearer, can be seen as prefiguring the values of the Tea Party and Donald Trump, as well as of reactionary populist regimes elsewhere. The final entry to this section shifts the focus from the marginal figure of the vigilante to the violated survivor through Jennifer Wallis’s contribution. This chapter closely examines four TV movies from the 1970s dealing with the rape-revenge theme in order to consider how contemporary discussions of violation and its punishment were played out on the small screen. As Wallis notes, rape-revenge movies such as I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) or Ms.45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981) have been widely covered by those interested in cult and exploitation fare, and many interpretations of these films emphasize

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their feminist potential, with women carrying out the punishment of their rapists independently and outside the official legal channels. However, as Wallis points out, although this is frequently forgotten in these debates, the 1970s TV movie provided an outlet for films that dealt with ‘difficult’ subjects, such as homosexuality, alcoholism and rape, which might have been box office poison at the cinema. It was also geared towards a predominantly female audience, reflected in evening scheduling that fitted in well with housewives’ free time. Wallis observes that the basic plot of many TV movies tended to revolve around the disruption of comfortable suburban domestic life and confronted audiences at home with fictive lives that were very similar to their own. The target audience for the made-for-TV movie were women in their twenties to fifties who were relatively engaged with contemporary social and political issues. It was not surprising, then, that so many TV movies relied on a woman-in-peril motif to capture the attentions and emotions of their audience.

And from here it was but a short step to narratives dealing specifically with rape, particularly as the 1970s coincided with both a renewed concern about crime in the US, and with second-wave feminism. As Wallis points out: Tackling rape was high on the political agenda with the establishment of institutions such as the National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape, growing efforts to debunk rape myths and to highlight the pervasiveness of victim-blaming within the legal system, and the increased reporting of individual rape cases in the press.

However, the prejudices of jurors and judges continued to stand in the way of widespread reform, and it was barriers such as these that constituted the major theme of those made-for-TV movies with a rape-revenge narrative. Many of these were based on specific highly publicized cases, and the use of a personal story to explore wider social or legal problems clearly resonated with secondwave feminism’s motto that ‘the personal is political’. But whilst admitting that TV movies were an important platform for female directors and actresses who might have been less able to find work elsewhere, and that they offered the possibility of feminist-inflected scripts tackling issues that were being discussed at the time, such as sexual assault, street harassment and rape law, Wallis argues

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that ‘their social, political or personal impact was often limited, as any explicitly feminist messages were constrained or rendered less forceful’ and that they were ‘especially careful to contain rape and other women’s issues within the generally conservative discourse typical of the format, emphasizing women’s roles as mothers and wives and the dangers attendant upon independence’. For these reasons she concludes that she finds the TV movies’ messages about rape and the responses to it much less empowering and much more morally suspect than those articulated by films such as Ms. 45. The rape-revenge narrative of the made-for-TV movie was frequently an impersonal one, less concerned with the suffering of the individual victim than with rape as an act prompting broader societal change, ‘revenged’ via legal channels and rarely by the victim herself.

The third key strand of the volume is entitled ‘State Sponsored Shocks’ and considers the controversies that surrounded the films that emerged from Canada’s government-backed film schemes during the 1970s. Some of these films, too, involved vigilantes and victims of assault (although these violations came often from both human and inhuman aggressors). Indeed, one of the more shocking horror debuts of the 1970s was David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), which revealed the inhabitants of a plush condominium as vulnerable to violation from a strain of venereal parasites that were infecting the building. Cronenberg’s film was one of the first of a number of controversial films to emerge from such an unexpected quarter of the film world as Canada. Xavier Mendik’s chapter analyses the social and economic structures that facilitated this decade-long development, linking the shocking impact of a new wave of erotic and horror productions to Canada’s tax shelter subsidy scheme that underpinned their creation. When the government launched the Canadian Film Development Corporation in 1968, and then cemented its commitment to film production through the Capital Cost Allowance Act in 1974, it was intended to herald a ‘golden age’ of national cinema funded by state subsidy and private investment. However, the ribald and visceral nature of the films that emerged from the scheme provoked condemnation, parliamentary discussion and even requests for its film-makers to be deported. Shivers was, in fact, one of the earliest targets of protest after it was violently condemned by Robert Fulford (writing as

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Marshall Delaney) in an article in the magazine Saturday Night, September 1975, headed ‘You Should Know How Bad This Film Is. After All, You Paid For It’, in which he called it ‘the most repulsive movie I’ve ever seen’ and ‘an atrocity, a disgrace to everyone connected with it – including the taxpayer’. Mendik begins by outlining some of the controversies in which these tax shelter schemes became embroiled, and then goes onto explore these with specific reference to the Montreal-based company Cinépix Films. Created in 1964 by John Dunning and André Link, Cinépix became closely associated with these subsidies, and the scandals surrounding them, as they used them to fund over seventy feature films between 1969 and 1984. Through these releases, Cinépix also launched the international careers of not only Cronenberg but also Don Carmody and William Fruet, and the latter’s recollections of working with the company are presented as a separate chapter that follows Mendik’s study. However, despite its prolific output, Cinépix has largely been written out of the leading academic accounts of Canadian national film. Here, critics have frequently rejected the types of populist productions that Cinépix created in favour of those titles that confirm existing conceptions of Canadian national cinema as either documentary realist or experimental in orientation. In order more fully to situate Cinépix productions within their wider social and political contexts, Mendik’s chapter analyses the company’s startling Québecois sex comedies as reflective of social and gender transitions occurring as part of the ‘Quiet Revolution’ of the late 1960s. It concludes by considering the medical, military and home invasion thrillers that Cinépix created as being directly traceable to 1970s fears about the activities of terrorist cells such as the Québec Liberation Front (FLQ). In a further elaboration of the volume’s ‘State Sponsored Shocks’ strand, Robin Griffiths continues the exploration of the aspects of Canadian cinema that dismayed many of the country’s inhabitants. Here, Griffiths examines the so-called ‘Canuxploitation’ productions of Dunning and Link, and specifically, those works that presented a vision of 1970s Canada that was anathema to the nationbuilding, egalitarian utopianism of the era encapsulated by the ‘Just Society’ rhetoric of then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. They were films that, at the time, were seen to constitute a collectively shameful period in the country’s production history.

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However, as the author notes, researchers such as Paul Corupe have observed that the Dunning/Link era was in fact a crucial period during which ‘Canada first revealed itself to be an exceptional breeding ground for innovative, challenging and surprisingly Canadian horror films’.18 Leading on from this observation, Griffiths himself argues that works such as Shivers, William Fruet’s rural revenge thriller Death Weekend/House by the Lake (1976) and the Dunning-inspired siege drama Blackout (Eddy Matalon, 1978) emerged as crucial points of reference in characterising a nation, and a cinema, struggling to cope with the pervasive effects of social division, sexism and bigotry at a time of immense cultural and political upheaval. These proffered an interesting insight into archetypical depictions of postcolonial ‘Canuck’ masculinity that were common to a number of related English-Canadian films of the tax shelter era.

For Griffiths, these films function as ‘ “cognitive maps” that delineate the anxieties, paranoias and fantasies of Canadian society at a time of immense socio-political change as a result of the transition to Trudeau-era neoliberalism’ and ‘collectively constitute an invaluable repository of Canadian culture, cinema and identity at a time of immense transformation, the implications of which thus extend well beyond the confines of the texts themselves’. The author also argues that ‘the overly intense obsession with hegemonic masculinity in crisis that was so characteristic of these films (despite being resolutely heterosexist in intent), in retrospect lends itself quite readily to the subversive re-imaginings of the contemporary queer screen theorist’. His chapter thus critically ‘re-views’ these key Canuxploitation texts ‘in order to explore the transgressive potential that they still hold’. Drawing on Thomas Waugh,19 he notes that Canadian cinema’s marginal status both at home and abroad, its apparent lack of a significant commercial production history and, accordingly, its lack of uniquely English-Canadian forms of cinematic cultural representation, position it as ‘already outside the prescriptive imaginary norms of the industrial mainstream’ and thus as continually receptive to what Waugh terms the ‘romantic possibilities of transgression’. He locates a ‘symptomatic queerness that identifiably circulates around those shifting and anxious forms of masculinity that emerge in Canadian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s’, and concurs with Waugh that:

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It is those local and more regional forms of Canadian cinema (and, in particular, low-budget genre film-making that was deliberately designed to exploit the fears and desires of its audiences) that have engaged more queerly with the complexities of identity than have the big budget imports of the North American mainstream. The Canuxploitation canon’s propensity for constructing narratives that expound the more transgressive realms of the national body has thus functioned as a far more productive means for shaping the social imaginary.

The fourth strand of the new edition of Shocking Cinema of the 70s is entitled ‘Family-sploitation and Threats to the Family’, and considers real-life and fictional 1970s figures that threatened conventional familial structures and the very fabric of the social order during the decade. Arguably, one of the most shocking figures to emerge from the late 1960s was Charles Manson, whose ‘Family’ murdered eight people on 9–10 August 1969, one of whom was Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, who was eightand-a half months’ pregnant at the time. Inevitably, films and television programmes about the Family began to proliferate immediately after this horrendous crime, but, as Bill Osgerby shows, they encompassed a wide range of genres and approaches. He argues that understanding the proliferation of ‘Family’ films during the 1970s demands attention to both the historical context and the economic circumstances in which they were produced. In historical terms, Manson and his acolytes enthralled the media because their character and crimes captured the mood of the times. They seemed to personify the downfall of the counterculture, capturing the moment the sun set on the Summer of Love and the sixties hippy scene turned sour and seedy. More than this, though, the Manson cult was the object of media fascination because it served as a symbolic focus for a broader climate of unease. Configured by the media as America’s ultimate bogeyman, Manson was projected as the embodiment of evils that seemed to threaten the fabric of the nation as the US faced convulsive social and cultural transformations . . . The war in Vietnam was escalating, political assassinations were rocking America and movements for progressive change faced growing repression and violence.

It is no surprise, then, that what Osgerby calls a ‘sense of dread’ pervades Helter Skelter, a gripping and serious-minded TV docudrama based on the Manson

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case. Directed by Tom Gries and originally screened on the CBS network over two nights in 1976, it is based on the 1974 bestseller of the same name by Vincent Bugliosi, the District Attorney who prosecuted the Family. Of course, Manson and his murderous gang are portrayed highly unsympathetically, and quite justifiably so, but, as Osgerby observes, the film is ‘rooted in the fairly conservative codes and conventions of mainstream Hollywood’ and ‘reproduces the period’s reactionary “law and order” discourse through its simplistic depiction of the Family as a group of deranged Others menacing the decency and rectitude of “straight” society’. Osgerby then goes on to show how very different film-making traditions informed another documentary: Manson (Robert Hendrickson and Laurence Merrick, 1973). This is a patchwork of interviews with figures from the Manson case – including Bugliosi, Manson himself, and Family members recorded after Manson’s arrest – but it also contains footage of the group taken between late 1969 and 1972 at the Spahn Ranch and their Death Valley hideout. Osgerby argues that these sequences result in a view of the Family that is nuanced and complex, and that this looser, more open-ended portrait is ultimately more unsettling than that provided by Helter Skelter. But he also notes that Manson’s publicity campaign was decidedly more salacious than Helter Skelter’s, with posters promising audiences: ‘YOU WILL ACTUALLY SEE each member of the Manson family and HEAR their horrifying philosophy of sex, perversion, murder and suicide.’ He thus concludes that: ‘With this combination of disconcerting chills and lurid titillation, Manson is squarely located in the traditions of exploitation cinema’. The rest of Osgerby’s chapter is devoted to the various ways in which the Family feature, both directly and indirectly, in 1970s exploitation cinema. The gruesome nature of their crimes made them ideal subject-matter for independent film-makers keen to take advantage of more relaxed censorship standards in order to push back the boundaries of taste. He also makes the point that many of them, like Al Adamson, who directed the biker movie Satan’s Sadists (1969), had an ambivalent relationship with the media furore surrounding the Family. Superficially, many of the Manson movies echoed the general disgust at the killers’ appalling crimes. But, at the same time, they also revelled in the spectacle of the Manson murders and the circus of outrage that surrounded

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them . . . Like classic exploitation cinema, the 1970s Manson movies savoured tweaking the tail of conservative sensibilities by delighting in all that was shocking, liminal and taboo.

The author then demonstrates how the Manson murders provided fresh inspiration for film-makers who traded in topical sensationalism in a wide variety of genres: in particular biker, mondo and horror movies. Like other writers on exploitation movies in this book, he is particularly interested in the ambivalence of such films. Thus, on the one hand, the bikers in Satan’s Sadists, led by Manson stand-in Anchor (a deranged Russ Tamblyn), are painted as the irredeemably malevolent underside of hippiedom and appear to reproduce the stock stereotypes propagated in the right-wing backlash against the counterculture, as mentioned above. But, on the other, they partake in what Osgerby calls the rich carnivalesque seam that also ran through ‘Familysploitation’. As he puts it: While the films may not have been ‘radical’ in a conventional political sense, they nonetheless effectively satirised and undercut the shrill anxieties proliferating in the media by appropriating the demonic stereotypes and magnifying them to proportions that were incredible and simply outlandish. Moreover, the films’ sheer enthusiasm for the shocking and the controversial flouted conventional tastes. Their brazen pageant of the lurid and the taboo spurned orthodox sensibilities and represented an unruly presence at a time when the ‘law and order’ bandwagon of ‘Nixonland’ . . . was attempting to foreclose dissent, pre-empt dialogue and preclude contradiction.

Osgerby also notes the influence of the Manson killings on what he calls murder vérité films such as The Last House on the Left. But it was the release of Snuff (Michael Findlay, 1976) that added a new element of controversy to the Manson movie mythology. The term ‘snuff film’ had actually originated in Ed Sanders’ book The Family (1972), in which he had reported hearsay that the Family were responsible for hitherto unknown murders which had been filmed, and the incriminating reels buried in the desert. The release of Snuff seemed, at least to the credulous, grim proof that the rumours were true and that ‘real’ murder movies did, indeed, exist. Another shocking family figure to emerge in the 1970s, albeit in fiction of one kind or another, was the murderous child. In point of fact, such a figure

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had first featured in a Hollywood movie in 1956, namely Mervyn Leroy’s The Bad Seed, but it was The Exorcist which was the real progenitor of the ‘evil child’ movie cycle in the 1970s, and by no means only in Hollywood. This has already given rise to a very considerable literature, which is usefully referenced by Susanne Kord in her chapter on this phenomenon, in which she examines the question of whether narratives featuring children murdering adults can be interpreted as a playing out the child’s unconscious and symbolic rejection of his or her own future adulthood, an attack on the concept of adulthood itself: this is the so-called ‘Peter Pan syndrome’. Kord examines this question through the low-budget horror movies Peopletoys/Devil Times Five (Sean MacGregor and David Sheldon, 1974), Kiss of the Tarantula (Chris Munger, 1976) and The Child (Robert Voskanian, 1977), and the more upmarket and hard-to-define The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Nicholas Gessner, 1976). Three of these films cast the child’s act of killing adults in the metaphor of child’s play, and Kord offers two possible interpretations of these killing games: The first is to read them as constituting ‘assimilation’ in Piaget’s sense, namely subordination of the environment to the self, and therefore as selfconstituting and self-asserting acts. The second is to understand them as symbolic expressions of the Peter Pan Syndrome, that is, a vision of childhood as an end rather than a means, or even a wholesale rejection of adulthood as the child’s future.

In her view, Piaget’s definition of play as the child adjusting its surroundings to its own benefit is applicable to all of these films, but is most clearly enacted in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. Here, Jodie Foster, in her first top billing role in a non-children’s movie, plays a quite remarkably assured child who will go to any lengths, including murder, to safeguard the solitary life that she has established for herself in her deceased parents’ house. And since the other films focus on either the child’s refusal to grow up, or to do so in the manner dictated by adults, Kord argues that the Peter Pan syndrome holds for all of them. However, she comes up with a third possible reading, one which is perhaps less obvious because much more disturbing. She notes that David Elkind in The Power of Play: Learning What Comes Naturally20 offers the simplest answer

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to the question: ‘Why do children play?’, namely that it’s fun and comes naturally. She then considers the scandalous consequences of applying Elkind’s insight to 1970s movies in which the murder of adults is actually visualized as child’s play. Why do children murder adults? Because it comes naturally. Because it’s fun. As she points out, Peopletoys is certainly capable of such a reading, its narrative revolving around five children who escape from a bus taking them to a mental institution and terrorize the inhabitants of a holiday lodge. Indeed, the reading is encouraged by the film’s very title. As Kord argues, certain murderous child movies of the 1970s throw adults a bone of reassurance by assigning a child’s murder of an adult (or adults) a logic that works in the adult world, as in the case of The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. This is particularly so where the adult in question is a paedophile. However, she concludes, other films are busily chipping away at such grown-up reasoning. The wound to the adult self-image that these films inflict is threefold: the first cut is the sneaking suspicion that a child’s development may be influenced less by adult modelling than by autonomous experience gained through games. There follows the hammer blow of realisation: children don’t need adults to develop, they need only to play. And the final twist of the knife: not only are adults no help at all, they are, in many cases, an actual hindrance to the child’s development.

If we accept these three premises of certain murderous child films, then we uncover their neat logic. Their objective is the elimination of adverse (and that means adult) interference with the child’s world, and the device through which this is achieved is, cogently enough, the most fundamental means of child development: child’s play. In this way, we can read certain 1970s shocker films not only literally – as interesting insights into the games children apparently enjoy the most – but also figuratively and symbolically: as documents deriding the conclusions of much child developmental psychology, which, in a colossal inflation of adult self-importance, demotes the entire world of children to boot camp for adulthood.

Closing the new edition of Shocking Cinema of the 70s is the strand ‘Porno Chic, Porno Shock’, which features two chapters which analyse the

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impact of explicit sexual representations across 1970s cinema and society. Indeed, one of the most striking, and to some, shocking, features of 1970s American cinema was hard core pornography’s move from the margins to the mainstream. This is discussed in Darren Kerr’s chapter, which offers an account that details the value of recognizing the wider cultural sensibility that paved porn’s path into the mainstream during the period. But for those less familiar with the topic it might be useful here to sketch in the legal developments which made this move possible – and those that put an end to it. In particular, it shows how the relaxation of legal restraints on material found shocking by some is not a one-way process of liberalization and is quite capable of being reversed. The most obvious example of hard core’s trajectory from margins to mainstream is Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972), which, although unrated by the MPAA, grossed $1 million ($6.1 million today) in its first seven weeks of release, and went on to make a then-record $3 million ($18.3 million today) in its first six months. Other, more professionally produced, films soon followed, including Behind the Green Door (Artie and Jim Mitchell, 1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (Gerard Damiano, 1973), and in the New York Times, 21 January 1973, in an article headed ‘ “Hard-core” Grows Fashionable – and Very Profitable’, Ralph Blumenthal coined the soon-to-be-ubiquitous term ‘porno chic’. Such a development would have been utterly impossible in the UK, of course, thanks to its strict obscenity laws and film censorship. And, in fact, in the States too it was pretty short-lived, thanks to a change in the law in 1973 resulting from the famous Miller v. California case, as we shall see. In 1957, Roth v. United States redefined the Constitutional test for determining what material could be constituted  as obscene and thus unprotected by the First Amendment. Up until then, legal authorities had applied the same ‘deprave and corrupt’ test as used in the UK, but the new definition laid down by Justice William Brennan argued that a work could be found obscene only if ‘to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material as a whole appeals to prurient interest’. In his view, ‘all ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance – unorthodox ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion – have the full protection’ of the Court.21 But, in Brennan’s

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view, obscenity fell outside the realm of ideas and was not nor was ever intended to be ‘within the area of constitutionally protected speech or press’.22 The definition of obscenity was still pretty vague (as indeed is the ‘deprave and corrupt’ test) but it did represent a significant move towards establishing national obscenity criteria. This was taken a step further in Jacobellis v. Ohio in 1964, in which Brennan refined his earlier definition of obscenity by arguing that a work cannot be proscribed unless it is utterly without redeeming social importance and goes ‘substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation’.23 But, more significantly, he also pointed out that the ‘ “contemporary community standards” by which obscenity is to be determined are not those of the particular local community from which the case arises, but those of the Nation as a whole’.24 This did a very great deal to protect cinema owners from local bans and film seizures, although of course it infuriated those concerned to protect states’ rights, including certain members of the Supreme Court. In 1966, the Court agreed to hear an appeal against a ban on the sale of John Cleland’s book Fanny Hill (1748–9) by the state of Massachusetts. This is known by the short title of Memoirs v. Massachusetts. The case is important for building on the Roth and Jacobellis standards, Brennan arguing for the majority opinion that all three elements mentioned in the previous tests ‘must coalesce’. As Jon Lewis explains: For a book to or film to be found obscene, Brennan wrote, the work taken as a whole must appeal to a prurient interest in sex, the material must be ‘patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards’, and the material must be utterly without ‘redeeming social value’.25

By making it difficult for local bans on films to be enforced whilst simultaneously facing increasing difficulties and disagreements in trying to define obscenity in any hard and fast way, the Supreme Court clearly played a role in helping to pave porn’s path from the margins to the mainstream. But it would soon be moving in the opposite direction. On 20 January 1969, Richard Nixon was inaugurated as the thirty-seventh President of the United States, and, in the present context, a key move was his rapid realignment of the Supreme Court. The resignation of Chief Justice Earl

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Warren enabled Nixon to replace him with the US District Court of Appeals Judge Warren E. Burger, a hard-line law-and-order Republican. This marked the start of a significant shift to the Right at the Court which, by the end of 1971, contained four Nixon appointees. (Exactly the same process took place in the Trump years.) The effects of this shift were particularly evident in the key Miller v. California case in 1973. In convicting Marvin Miller, a seller of erotic books, of obscenity, the California courts had used the California criminal obscenity statute, which was similar to, but nonetheless stricter than, that elaborated by the Supreme Court in Memoirs. This was the subject of Miller’s appeal to the Supreme Court, which was heard in January and November 1972. In effect, the Court upheld the lower courts’ original verdicts by a majority of five-to-four (a very familiar ratio in the Nixon era). Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Burger established a new, three-part test for juries in obscenity cases: Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.26

The ‘utterly without redeeming social value’ test articulated in Memoirs was rejected as a constitutional standard, and juries were permitted to judge issues of prurient appeal and patent offensiveness by the standards that prevailed in their own communities. Decisions in four other Supreme Court obscenity cases were announced on the same day, 21 June 1973. In respect of films, the most important was Paris Adult Theater 1 v. Slaton, which ruled that adults-only admission policies at hard core cinemas were not enough to protect their owners or managers from local prosecutions. Variety, 27 June, announced: ‘The impact of the new rulings will have to be assessed in the months ahead, but the market for pornography should be effectively reduced almost at once’.27 And so indeed it was, with Deep Throat rapidly falling prey to local bans across the country. From now on, the ability to view hard core films in cinemas would very much depend on the attitudes of local authorities, and very few were prepared to permit such screenings. As Lewis concludes:

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With the exception of a few venues in a few major cities, the public, theatrical exhibition of hard core was pretty much eliminated nationwide by the end of 1973. Hard-core features have since made a comeback on home video, but between 1973 and 1983 or so, between the Supreme Court’s retrenchment and the emergence of home video, the studios have had the theatrical market to themselves. An they have taken full advantage of the opportunity.28

Rather than focus solely on the screen industries and their products, Kerr offers an account that details the value of recognizing the wider cultural sensibility that paved porn’s path into the mainstream during a period steeped in a culture of provocation, not just in countercultural politics but also in the wider landscape of cultural production and activity. He argues that the move from margins to mainstream was not just the result of a series of pragmatic, economic, legislative and industrial influences but was an act of production in itself – constructed, produced and performed. Pornography and sexually explicit materials of the time were not just describing or dramatizing sex but were producing sex and doing so in a time often understood as a golden age – something that involves as much cultural forgetting as it does cultural remembering. The result, Kerr claims, is that the move into the mainstream was epiphenomenal – in other words it was a secondary effect caused by wider shifts in cultural feeling, perceiving and understanding. For the final entry to the volume, Neil Jackson’s chapter focuses on two pornographic films which would undoubtedly have shocked many of those who flocked to the kind of films described as ‘porno chic’. Indeed, they would still be considered shocking by many people today. These are Femmes de Sade (Alex De Renzy, 1976) and Water Power (Shaun Costello, 1977), which fall into the category of ‘hard core roughies’. ‘Roughies’ developed out of the ‘nudie cutie’ in the first half of the 1960s and are aptly described by the Grindhouse Cinema Database as ‘a more aggressively lurid subgenre of classic Sexploitation cinema. These films injected violence and sadism into the standard, rather innocent, softcore mix. They featured stories dealing with S&M, kidnappings and sexual abuse’.29 Seemingly inevitably, most of the violence was directed by men at women. As Eddie Muller and Daniel Faris put it: ‘In a roughie, lust led to violence: women were abused, men erupted in jealous rages. The action is angry, brutal, and simpleminded. Storylines followed the old “morality play” formula – warning audiences of the dangers of depraved behaviour while

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depicting it in detail’30. Early examples include Scum of the Earth (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1963), Olga’s Girls (Joseph P. Mawra, 1964) and The Defilers (Lee Frost and David F. Friedman, 1965). Hard core roughies, however, took things a great deal further, and Jackson describes them as films whose relentless focus upon sexual practices generally regarded as aberrant and abhorrent at the time marks them out as ‘an indigestible strand of an already despised cultural form that rendered them resistant to “porno-chic” appropriation during their theatrical circulation in the 1970s’. It is thus unsurprising that despite their generic roots in the softcore sexploitation film and, to an extent, the crime film and even the horror film, the hard core roughies have remained segregated from their relatives in both the mainstream and exploitation sectors. Jackson notes that Linda Ruth Williams has argued that ‘pornography is the genre that dare not speak its name’31 and has commented on its absence from most scholarly overviews of the cinematic field. However, he observes that: Even a cursory glance at some of the more accomplished hardcore films of the ‘golden age’ – such as The Devil in Miss Jones (Gerard Damiano, 1973), The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Henry Paris, 1976), Through the Looking Glass (Jonas Middleton, 1976), The Story of Joanna (Gerard Damiano, 1977) and Sex World (Anthony Spinelli, 1978) – reveals conventions of melodrama, romantic comedy, horror, science fiction and psycho-drama. All of these elements are inflected very specifically by the demands of hardcore, suggesting that porn films function not just as isolated generic outcasts but as shadows of and adjuncts to their mainstream genre counterparts.

And as far as the hard core roughie was concerned, burgeoning awareness in the 1960s and 1970s of the serial sex criminal was instrumental in defining its parameters. These films thus stood in close historical proximity to horror films foregrounding dystopian breakdown and sexually dysfunctional male monsters, such as Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968), the last two of which were based on real-life cases, albeit to different extents. Thus, as with any development in cinematic genres, hybridization is fundamental to a deeper understanding of the hard core roughie. Jackson here draws on Linda Williams’ observations on the relationship between pornography, melodrama and horror, in which she identifies them all as ‘body

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genres’ whose primary function is to affect bodily and emotional (as opposed to intellectual) responses in the spectator. The roughies often mingle these body genres, thereby reinforcing Williams’ argument that ‘pornography today is more often deemed excessive for its violence than for its sex, while horror films are excessive in their displacement of sex onto violence’.32 Jackson argues that: In this sense, both Femmes de Sade and Water Power (and many other roughies too) confound generic Categorization, questioning the point at which pornographic convention either departs from or fuses with its horrific content. Nevertheless, although sexual violence may have been present as a narrative feature of many hardcore feature films, it was relatively uncommon for it to be the defining element.

However, it most certainly is in the case of the two films under examination here, which is enough to expel them beyond the critical pale. Although Femmes de Sade is replete with traces of a countercultural zeal and defiance, Jackson argues that ‘neither it nor Water Power make enough concessions to a sustained, identifiable project that would make for easy appropriation by even the most tolerant and liberal academic discourse’. Admittedly each film does tackle the exercise of male power and subjectivity that became so central to radical feminist critiques of pornography and its broader popular cultural manifestations, and each does so in different ways, pursuing distinct and divergent paths through their use of porno shock-horror tactics. However, they have to be understood from the outset, Jackson states, as ‘wilful incitements to revulsion, shock and bemusement’, and his discussion of them ‘constitutes neither defence or justification’. But although the discussion does focus primarily on the films’ strategies of representing sexual violence, Jackson argues that they contain elements that allow critical discourse to develop beyond the mere articulation of transgressive content. In his view, these elements, taken together, can help enhance our understanding of graphic, often alarming, depictions of sexual violence within the stylistic norms of cinematic pornography, which might in turn be sensibly accommodated in ongoing debates about realist horror films produced within both the exploitation and mainstream sectors.

Jackson’s point about using these decidedly maudit films to develop critical discourse and to engage in ongoing debates about certain kinds of contemporary

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horror films echoes some of our own intentions in compiling this collection. We wanted not simply to cast a critical light on a series of controversial films which had been variously maligned, misinterpreted or just plain ignored, but also to assess how their production values, narrative features and critical receptions can be linked to the wider historical and social forces that were dominant during this decade. Furthermore, we wanted to explore how these films resonate in our own historical moment – replete as it is with shocks of all kinds. Many of these – and in particular ecological catastrophe and societal breakdown – are clearly prefigured in films from numerous different societies in the seventies, and we would contend that it is the films from the margins of the cinema industries in these societies that, even now, still retain the greatest power to shock. Julian Petley and Xavier Mendik May 2021

Notes 1 Xavier Mendik (ed.), Shocking Cinema of the 70s (Hereford: Noir Publishing, 2002). 2 Lester D. Friedman (ed.), American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). 3 Barbara Jane Brickman, New American Teenagers: The Lost Generation of Youth in 1970s Film (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). 4 Leon Hunt, Kung Fu Cult Masters (London: Wallflower, 2003). 5 Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema Historical Trauma and National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). 6 Mendik, Shocking, p. 11. 7 Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Regan . . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, Barry Keith Grant and Richard Lippe (eds) (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018). 8 Jeffrey Sconce, ‘ “Trashing” the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style’, Screen, 36/4, Winter 1995, pp. 371–93. 9 Ado Kyrou, Le surréalisme au cinema (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1963). 10 Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1974). 11 Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, Cult Cinema (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), p. 97.

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12 Pam Cook, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, Screen, 17/2, Summer 1976, p. 125. 13 Ibid., p. 127. 14 Henry Jenkins, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 103. 15 Noah Berlatsky, ‘Mad Max: Fury Road is less radical than its B-movie influences’, Guardian, 26 May 2015. 16 Johnny Walker, Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 85–108. 17 Quoted in Stevie Simkin, ‘Wake of the flood: key issues in UK censorship, 1970–5’, in Edward Lamberti (ed.), Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age (London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 84, note 77. 18 Paul Corupe, ‘(Who’s in the) driver’s seat: the Canadian brute unleashed in Death Weekend’, in Gina Freitag and André Loiselle (eds), The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), p. 91. 19 Thomas Waugh, The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (Montréal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006). 20 David Elkind, The Power of Play: Learning What Comes Naturally (Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo, 2007). 21 Quoted in Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 239. 22 Quoted in ibid. 23 Quoted in ibid., p. 242. 24 Quoted in ibid. 25 Ibid., p. 246. Emphases in original. 26 Quoted in David L. Hudson Jnr, ‘Miller v. California (1973)’, in The First Amendment Encyclopedia. Available at https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/ article/401/miller-v-california 27 Quoted in Lewis, Hollywood p. 260. 28 Ibid., pp. 265–6. 29 ‘Roughies’, The Grindhouse Cinema Database. Available at https://www. grindhousedatabase.com/index.php/Category:Roughies 30 Eddie Muller and Daniel Faris, Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of “Adults Only” Cinema (New York, St Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 95. 31 Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 38. 32 Linda Williams, ‘Film bodies: gender, genre and excess’, Film Quarterly, 44/4 Summer 1991, p. 2.

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Bibliography Berlatsky, Noah, ‘Mad Max: Fury Road is less radical than its B-movie influences’, Guardian, 26 May 2015. Blake, Linnie, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). Brickman, Barbara Jane, New American Teenagers: The Lost Generation of Youth in 1970s Film (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). Cook, Pam, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, Screen, 17/2 (Summer 1976), pp. 122–7. Corupe, Paul, ‘(Who’s in the) driver’s seat: the Canadian brute unleashed in Death Weekend’, in Gina Freitag and André Loiselle (eds), The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), pp. 91–107. Elkind, David, The Power of Play: Learning What Comes Naturally (Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo, 2007). Friedman, Lester D. (ed.), American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2007). Grant, Barry Keith and Lippe, Richard (eds), Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews (Detroit, MI : Wayne State University Press, 2018). Hudson, David L. Jnr, ‘Miller v. California (1973)’, in The First Amendment Encyclopedia. Available at https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/401/ miller-v-california Hunt, Leon, Kung Fu Cult Masters (London: Wallflower, 2003). Jenkins, Henry, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006). Kyrou, Ado, Le surréalisme au cinema, (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1963). Lewis, Jon, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000). Mathijs, Ernest and Sexton, Jamie, Cult Cinema (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011). Mendik, Xavier (ed.), Shocking Cinema of the 70s (Hereford: Noir Publishing, 2002). Muller, Eddie and Faris, Daniel, Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of “Adults Only” Cinema (New York, St Martin’s Press, 1996). Sconce, Jeffrey, ‘ “Trashing” the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style’, Screen, 36/4 Winter 1995, pp. 371–93. Simkin, Stevie, ‘Wake of the flood: key issues in UK censorship, 1970–5’, in Edward Lamberti (ed.), Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age (London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Vogel, Amos, Film as a Subversive Art (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1974). Walker, Johnny, Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

New Shocks to the System Waugh, Thomas, The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (Montréal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006). Williams, Linda, ‘Film bodies: gender, genre and excess’, Film Quarterly, 44/4, Summer 1991, pp. 2–13. Williams, Linda Ruth, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Wood, Robin, Hollywood from Vietnam to Regan . . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

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Part One

International Visions of the Extreme

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1

Walerian Borowczyk: Seventies Sexploitation Through Sublimation Aga Skrodzka

Introduction Not quite as famous as other purveyors of European exploitation cinema, such as Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, Dario Argento or Mario Bava, Walerian Borowczyk worked hard to compete with his contemporaries to earn his reputation, in some quarters, as a peddler of artistic smut. But his professional journey is fascinating and it is well worth documenting, in particular, the film-maker’s tendency to cross cultural, geographical, stylistic and generic boundaries. The trajectory that emerges shows Borowczyk’s strategic transition from his rigorous early training in the academic arts, through the successful stage of making experimental animation, to his mature preoccupation with the sexploitation genre. Born in the village of Kwilicz, Poland, on 21 October 1923 (and not 2 September 1932, as he would later claim in his official biography), Borowczyk studied painting at the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (where Andrzej Wajda was also briefly a student) before becoming a lithographer, specializing in poster art, and an animator. His father, a railway worker, was an amateur painter, who is said to have inspired his son’s early artistic inclinations. While carrying out his classical training in drawing and painting at the academy, Borowczyk acquired a 16mm camera and began his filmic experiments, soon making his first shorts Sierpień /Mois d’août/August (1946), Głowa/The Head (1949) and Tłum/Crowd (1950). Around this time, he met Ligia Brokowska, who soon becomes his wife and professional partner. Under the pseudonym Ligia Branice, she acted in many of Borowczyk’s early projects. 35

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In his post-graduation animation work, Borowczyk collaborated with Jan Lenica (and later Chris Marker), producing animation that pioneered the collage technique (later popularized by Terry Gilliam) and used nonsynchronic sound in aural/visual counterpoint to satirical effect. His most notable animated films were Byl sobie raz/Once Upon a Time (1957), Dom/ House (1958), Szkola/School (1959), Les astronautes/The Astronauts (1959), Renaissance (1963), Les jeux des anges/The Games of Angels (1964) and Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal/The Theatre of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal (1967). After a number of trips to the West, mainly to acknowledge the accolades bestowed upon his experimental films by various festival juries, Borowczyk and his wife settled in France in 1959. Under a five-year exclusive contract, he made commercial shorts as well as experimental animation films for Les Cinéastes Associés, Jacques Forgeot’s animation company. Although his experimental animation continued to be appreciated at festivals and on art house circuits, Borowczyk gradually transitioned into live-action sexploitation film. In the 1970s he made seven low-budget co-productions, many of which become instant box-office successes. Goto, l’île d’amour/Goto, Island of Love (1968) was his first full length live-action feature, and although not a sexploitation film per se, it contains certain sexploitation elements (such as scenes of voyeurism, and the fetishistic portrayal of the female body) that would be deployed, albeit in various ways and to differing degrees, in his

Figure 1.1 Immoral Tales: The fetishistic portrayal of the female body.

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subsequent films: Blanche (1972), Contes Immoraux/Immoral Tales (1974), Dzieje grzechu/The Story of Sin (1975, his only feature film made in Poland), La bête/The Beast (1975), La marge/The Margin (1976), Interno di un convento/ Behind Convent Walls (1978) and Les heroines du mal/Immoral Women (1979). During this decade, Borowczyk earned a scandalous reputation among film critics as someone who had abandoned his background in high art only to take up entertainment films featuring explicit sexual content. However, his work during the 1980s exploited sexual content to an even greater degree: Lulu (1980), Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes/Dr. Jekyll and His Women (1981), Ars amandi/The Art of Love (1983), Emmanuelle 5 (1987) and Cérémonie d’amour/ Love Rites (1988). In some quarters, these films earned him the label of pornographer. While certain producers wanted to capitalize on this and increasingly pushed him to make soft core pornography, he resisted, and, eventually, was forced to walk away from some of his more compromised projects, such as Emmanuelle 5. Tired and disillusioned, Borowczyk withdrew from the film industry and devoted his last years to writing, painting and animation. Soon after his death of heart failure at a Paris hospital, on 2 February 2006, at the age of eighty-two, Borowczyk’s posthumous autobiography, What Do I Think When I See a Polish Woman in the Nude, was published. Its salacious title and challenging content reaffirmed his status as a master of exploitation.

The battle over Borowczyk’s good name The cinema of Walerian Borowczyk entices as it offends. Every offence, typically staged as a sexual transgression, is carefully framed within a highly choreographed artistic spectacle, often using art objects to decorate the sexual content. In this sense, Borowczyk curates as he exploits. This strategy allows him to circulate graphic sexual images under the guise of artistic contemplation. The exhibition of art objects that so often punctuates his exploitation material functions in such a way as to enlighten and educate the viewer, thus resonating with Eric Schaefer’s theory of exploitation cinema’s origins in ‘respectable films made with the alleged “good intentions”’.1 Critics have argued, and continue to argue, that Borowczyk’s ‘classy erotica’ does much more than titillate (although I have argued elsewhere that it successfully titillates the female viewer by engaging her

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gaze2). It has frequently been claimed that there is always ‘more to it’, and that the ‘more’ has an authentic artistic, even philosophical, value. Not surprisingly, Borowczyk’s early reputation as an award-winning experimental film-maker lends his sexploitation fare the kind of credibility that prompts certain critics to group him with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Buñuel and Nagisa Ôshima. Yet, Borowczyk’s 1970s films, which are the topic of this chapter, also have an affinity with the work of Russ Meyer, Jess Franco and Ken Russell. So why is the sexploitation framework frequently pushed out of Borowczyk criticism? Since his death in 2006, the director’s work has been re-appraised critically and continues to receive scholarly attention as his films are restored and re-released. For example, in 2008, Jeremy Mark Robinson published his monograph, Walerian Borowczyk: Cinema of Erotic Dreams; Pascal Vimenet and Alberto Pezzotta have each edited volumes of collected essays on the filmmaker; Bertrand Mandico, Marina and Alessio Pierro, and Daniel Bird have made films about Borowczyk: Boro in the Box (2011), Himorogi (2012) and Obscure Pleasures (2014). In 2014, Arrow Films released a box set of six of Borowczyk’s greatest films, entitled Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection. A plethora of exhibitions, books, retrospectives, documentaries and blogs have since celebrated Borowczyk as an experimental animator, a surrealist artist, a philosopher of sexuality, a cultural iconoclast and a technical innovator. While he undoubtedly deserves these labels, he was also a financially successful exploitation film-maker, an identity which is consistently and compulsively denied in the new accounts. Many of the most recent critical texts are commemorative and adulatory in tone, disproportionally focused on Borowczyk’s experimental works, and written within the framework of auteur theory (often by self-proclaimed lifelong fans of Borowczyk). For example, books like Boro, L’Île D’Amour (edited by Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda and Michał Oleszczyk) or Kuba Mikurda and Jakub Woynarowski’s Corpus Delicti focus overwhelmingly on Borowczyk’s artistic influences and his investment in the European cultural heritage, particularly surrealism. Marcin Giżycki, whose essay appears in Boro, L’Île D’Amour, attempts to rehabilitate Borowczyk’s oeuvre ‘so that the obvious erotic traits of it don’t overshadow its other, noteworthy aspects’.3 This determination to elevate Borowczyk above and beyond his commitment to exploitation and entertainment is especially symptomatic of Polish film critics and scholars, who have reclaimed

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the expatriate Borowczyk as a Polish film-maker aligned with the venerable tradition of art cinema. This tradition, situated in opposition to commercial and genre cinema, reflects the specific value system that Polish film scholars continue to apply when evaluating film according to the paradigm inherited from the communist cultural production model, which divided cinema between serious works of art (often with anti-communist political implications) and communist propaganda (tendentious films of socialist realism). Within this paradigm, adopted by film-makers and critics alike, very little room is ever left for commercial or genre films whose primary goal is to entertain (with the sole exception, perhaps, of politically engaged comedy). This art cinema tradition is a variant of what Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau call in their discussion of European popular cinema the ‘high white tradition’ of the modernist canon, a tradition used to devalue popular cinema.4 This concept was later referred to by Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik as a tradition that continues to ‘restrict European cinema to a modernist taste-economy’.5 Yet, Borowczyk’s best known and commercially most successful films fall squarely within the category of popular entertainment. They were produced in the 1970s, during the era when Western Europe, continuing trends that started in the later 1960s, was experiencing a widespread cultural and political liberalization, the rise of consumer capitalism, a series of youth rebellions against the status quo, the growth of gay and women’s rights movements, and, most importantly, the sexual revolution. As such, the films both speak of and react to the nexus of transformations (political, economic and cultural) that shaped Borowczyk’s new French milieu. They also speak of the commodified desire that the 1970s mediated and put on display to an unprecedented degree. In her history of twentieth-century European sexuality, Dagmar Herzog describes 1960s and 1970s Western European sex culture thus: Public nudity, premarital sex, marital infidelity, strip clubs, specific sexual techniques that intensified pleasure: all were suddenly fodder for media and public discussion, indeed for obsessive preoccupation. Sex was endlessly and everywhere promoted as the most desirable thing on the planet.6

It is this contemporary cultural context, I insist, that must be considered when approaching Borowczyk’s 1970s films, alongside Borowczyk’s obvious indebtedness to surrealism, Georges Bataille or the Marquis de Sade.

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Not all in good taste While it is agreed that Borowczyk’s 1970s cinema embraced the sexual revolution by enthusiastically engaging with explicit sexual content, in order to push against the codes of propriety through its outrageous scenes of bestiality, infanticide, interracial rape and incest, many critics have also commented on the discerning and tasteful way in which the shocking content is framed by the film-maker.7 For example, Mark Robinson argues that ‘Walerian Borowczyk’s is a highly cultured cinema, a cinema of (for) connoisseurs – eclectic, subtle, stylish, mysterious and haunting.’8 This tactic of displacing the shock effect, which is a common critical practice, relies primarily on pushing the sexploitation spectacle into a faux antique art space that grafts something akin to the Benjaminian ‘aura’ onto the otherwise profane characters and situations. What is consistent about Borowczyk’s sexploitation feasts is that they are placed in the past, and, as Jonathan Owen notes: In Borowczyk’s films desire seems to speak exclusively in the past tense. In literal terms the past designated is generally the historical past, abbreviated and remodeled as cloistered libertine fantasias that exploit the sensuality of antique décor and the fabled transgressions of real historical figures: Lucrezia Borgia and the ‘bloody countess’ Erszébet Báthory featured in the film Immoral Tales.9

This antique framing provides an alibi for Borowczyk, whose sensibility was shaped both by his Catholic and communist upbringing and formal education, both of which were sexually repressive.

Sensibility meets sensuality in Immoral Tales In their study of the upsurge of the heterosexual imperative in post-communist Poland, Tomasz Kitlinski, Pawel Leszkowski and Joe Lockard state that ‘Communism was not only secular, but also prudish.’10 The Communist Party viewed eroticism as nothing more than a symptom of capitalist debauchery. Although ideologically at odds with communism, the Catholic Church of Borowczyk’s childhood and young adulthood shared a negative view of

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eroticism with the official communist line, albeit via a much older and more entrenched tradition of repression. It is, therefore, not surprising that, while diving headfirst into the throes of the sexual revolution in 1960s and 1970s France, and producing there a series of sexploitation films, Borowczyk was nevertheless restrained in the manner in which he entered the liberatory Western discourse (a discourse that must have been quite a shock to the recent immigrant from the European periphery). One quickly notices that the desire that permeates Borowczyk’s erotic visions is often censored. It appears to be controlled by prohibitions of all kinds: the strictures of religious institutions (the Vatican in Immoral Tales and The Beast, a convent in Behind Convent Walls); taboos rooted in class, family or racial constraints (Grozo’s desire for Glossia in Goto, the incestuous relations of the Borgias in Immoral Tales, the interracial sexual violence in the ‘Marceline’ episode of Immoral Women); or the physical confines of restricted space (the room in which Thérèse is imprisoned in Immoral Tales, Glossia’s room in which she is put under house arrest in Goto, or the Countess Báthory’s ‘blood chamber’ in Immoral Tales). By staking out these boundaries in many recurring ways, Borowczyk creates an intensely stifling erotic hothouse where sex is always dirty, no matter how aesthetically pleasing the images might be. This inhibited erotic environment has more affinity with the bourgeois boudoir than the surrealist brothel or the Swinging Seventies scene, thus putting in question the frequent critical claims about Borowczyk’s radicalism and the transgressive nature of his blend of eroticism.11 In many ways, Borowczyk’s assaults on the bourgeois sense of decorum seem to be proscribed by this sense itself. Thus, it is possible to see them as actually a reaction to the 1970s sexual milieu, when, according to Dagmar Herzog, it was market forces that were the key catalyst in changing sexual mores: Certainly, the rise of consumer capitalism played its part in making the revolution happen. So too did the media and the advertising industry. The supersaturation of the visual landscape with ever more risqué images, along with the increasing space taken up in mainstream periodicals by sensationalist reportage on sex-related matters (an especially good way for magazines and newspapers to increase sales among all age groups but also and especially to reach that new lucrative market of postwar youth, a

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generation with more spending money than any that had gone before) certainly helped to wash away the old culture of hypocrisy and taboo.12

Finally, the exaggeratedly racist and sexist patriarchy that organizes social relations in Borowczyk’s erotic universe discloses not only the film-maker’s conformist views on race and gender, but, more importantly, his deliberate use of exploitation cinema’s conventions, which seduce the viewer through outrageously offensive and politically incorrect spectacle. In their introduction, the editors of the most recent collection of essays on Borowczyk argue that ‘his art is not easily classifiable as progressive, since it’s so completely isolated from any traces of queer sensibility – Boro’s erotic utopia is almost exclusively heteronormative’.13 However, the editors then proceed to explain away the film-maker’s chauvinism and racism as ‘pre-modern’ and the result of a creative choice to reach beyond individual motivation and psychology, instead concentrating on analysing a cinematic universe that is ‘intensely focused on processes and objects that surround and envelop individuals’.14 In the course of this interpretation, the retrogressive social and interpersonal relations that exist among Borowczyk’s characters are dismissed as insignificant in the light of the grand, yet vaguely defined, vision of the surrealist master who operates under the principles of abstraction and fragmentation.15

Collecting and consuming In Une collection particulière/A Private Collection, Borowczyk’s short film from 1973, released between Blanche and Immoral Tales, the viewer watches a collector present his assemblage of erotic objects. His identity is never revealed, even though his personal collection is presented to the camera by his very own hands. Similar montages of prized objects appear in the sexploitation features as decorative interludes that interrupt the narrative in the form of bizarre art gallery contemplations. In the 1973 short, we see in close-up a pair of male hands present, manipulate and deploy a series of rare sex toys, items of vintage pornography, erotic lithographs, antique peepshow boxes and various wind-up contraptions depicting erotic scenes. According to different accounts, the items in the collection are said to have been inherited by Borowczyk from his friend the surrealist writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues,16 or hand-crafted by

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Borowczyk himself,17 with most critics arguing for a combination of both. Edwin Carels claims that ‘just like Duchamp so often did, Borowczyk alternates in A Private Collection authentic, found objects with emulations and appropriations.’18 The viewer cannot tell the difference between the authentic antique items and Borowczyk’s props as they make their appearance on screen: the combination of the ritualistic handling (the collector’s hands manipulate the objects lovingly and carefully), high art framing (the series includes a Rembrandt sketch and a close-up of Rembrandt’s signature), vintage textures, intimate lighting and measured tempo lends a decidedly antiquarian gaze to the explicitly pornographic content (the uncut version ends with what looks like a vintage pornographic home movie of a woman having intercourse with a dog). In this way, A Private Collection captures Borowczyk’s sleight of hand and brings into focus his strategy of exploiting erotic images through formal sublimation by associating them with high art. The exploiter becomes the curator, who transforms mechanically reproduced erotic film images created for mass entertainment into images that pose as works of art for serious contemplation. The staging of the erotic art spectacle works to endow Borowczyk’s pornographic visions (whose use value is defined by their ability to facilitate sexual arousal) with what Walter Benjamin would call their premechanical ‘ritual function’ and their ‘cult value’, defined by their existence in a particular time and space.19 Critical interpretations of A Private Collection attest to Borowczyk’s success as the exploiter-curator. Most accounts discuss the film in terms of its artistic value and high art influences, and not of its erotic content. Comparing Borowczyk’s collection to the glass cases and boxes of Joseph Cornell, Edwin Carels argues that the film, with its emphasis on the personal touch, speaks of the film-maker’s ‘love for pre-modernist craftsmanship’ and his ‘scepticism about the industrialized society that achieved both mass production and mass slaughter’.20 Marcin Giżycki reads the film as a work of surrealism in the light of the surrealists’ well-theorized interest in ordinary objects and the technique of defamiliarization, drawing parallels between Borowczyk’s passion for objects and those of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and André Breton.21 Kamila Wielebska frames A Private Collection within the context of Victorian surrealism,22 while in his analysis of the ‘curatorial, classificatory, and

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acquisitive impulses that haunt Borowczyk’s cinema’, Jonathan Owen points out an affinity between Borowczyk and the Left Bank Group’s experimental film-makers such as Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet.23 Elsewhere, Owen sees the ‘vintage erotic mechanisms, scandalous joujous and onanistic fancies’ of A Private Collection situated in juxtaposition to ‘the selfconscious contemporaneity and polemical urgency of sexual revolution, 1970s style’.24 Against this last assessment, I wish to argue that A Private Collection, despite its nostalgic and glaringly anachronistic nineteenth-century feel, is a product of its time, a product of the 1970s fascination with the erotics of commodities. The culture of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s in Western Europe was shaped by the consumerist and hedonistic lifestyles of the prosperous middle classes. The post-Second World War economic boom manifested itself in terms of higher wages, reduced working hours, increased social mobility, wide access to luxury consumer goods and conspicuous consumption (until the events of the mid-1970s precipitated a deep recession). The era’s leisure and consumption habits also included ‘porno chic’ – the mainstreaming of pornographic imagery into fashion and popular culture, as analysed elsewhere in this volume. A Private Collection foregrounds the link between material objects, possession and eroticism. This connection is also articulated in Borowczyk’s feature films from the same decade. In the short film, Borowczyk can be understood as commenting on the acquisition and accumulation of consumer goods, if one agrees that the objects in the collection have both use and exchange value as sex toys, even if the collector assigns to them a rarefied fetish value. Additionally, in films like Behind Convent Walls, we see women produce their own pleasure objects (dildos whittled out of wood, and pornographic illustrations). These objects are then circulated in the convent’s economy, gaining specific exchange value: thus, the nun who produces pornographic images accepts jars of honey as payment. The early writings of Jean Baudrillard, especially The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society: Myth and Structure (1970), may be the most helpful in theorizing Borowczyk’s impulse to showcase material objects alongside his human characters in such a way that the objects take on dramatic significance while the characters (almost always female) morph into passive props. This foregrounding of the material through the filmic portrayal of

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objects and humans, aligned side by side as playful things to be manipulated, collected, arranged into series, displayed and endlessly consumed, resonates with late capitalism’s processes of reification, whereby humans become thinglike through the standardization and homogenization of social life. Baudrillard analysed the mechanisms of reification in the context of mediation. Through his focus on the consumption of objects and signs, Baudrillard extended the traditional Marxist critique focused on modes of production and labour relations, and focuses instead on consumption and the consumer subject and their submission to the seductive power of objects, signs and technologies. In the chapter of The System of Objects devoted to collecting, Baudrillard discusses the symbolic value of object accumulation and its role in the modern subject’s constitution as a possessor: An object no longer specified by its function is defined by the subject, but in the passionate abstractness of possession all objects are equivalent. And just one object no longer suffices: the fulfilment of the project of possession always means a succession or even a complete series of objects. This is why owning absolutely any object is always so satisfying and so disappointing at the same time: a whole series lies behind any single object, and makes it into a source of anxiety. Things are not so different on the sexual plane: whereas the love relationship has as its aim a unique being, the need to possess the love object can be satisfied only by a succession of objects.25

Borowczyk’s films can certainly be analysed as a reflection on the ‘project of possession’ that characterized 1970s culture. The arty things that Borowczyk incorporates into his celluloid collections are objects of consumption: the female erotic objects, which often extend the series of collected art objects (as those very objects in turn enhance the series of female fetishes), are also objects of consumption. Consuming becomes quite literal in Borowczyk’s exploitation films when the camera focuses on the preparation and consumption of food and drink, which become eroticized not only through association with sex but also via enticing presentation (known as ‘food porn’ in today’s consumer culture). Borowczyk’s scenes of delectation are often prefaced by scenes of food preparation that function as gustatory foreplay, and, as such, they echo Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973). In Behind Convent Walls, images of food enter the pornographic register in the opening sequence. Huge slabs of meat,

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carried by a delivery boy into the convent’s pantry, are framed through carefully composed shots which enhance the sensual appeal of the food and eroticize it. In numerous scenes, hot cocoa is prepared and served in beautiful porcelain dishes, and the camera lingers in close-up as the stream of dark liquid is poured into dainty translucent cups. In the ‘Margherita’ episode of Immoral Women, glamour photography is used to frame cherries and bonbons as delightful objects of desire, their consumption conflated with sex scenes. In ‘Marceline’, meat hangs off the butcher hooks and the adolescent nymphomaniac consumes her pet rabbit, a sex accessory in an earlier scene. Once again, Borowczyk strategically curates as he exploits. Many of his food images look like copies of the still lifes of food associated with the seventeenth century Dutch Baroque. The chiaroscuro, the folds of opulent fabric and the antique containers serve as art history references, meticulously constructed details that deploy a heritage discourse. It takes the viewer a moment to realize that Borowczyk’s portraits of foodstuffs come from an era of conspicuous consumption very similar to that of the Dutch Baroque, when the wealthy commissioned paintings of food in order to titillate their desires for more consumables.

Notes 1 Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 2 Aga Skrodzka, ‘Woman’s body and her pleasure in the celluloid erotica of Walerian Borowczyk’, Studies in European Cinema, 8/1 (2011), pp. 67–79. 3 Marcin Giżycki, ‘Borowczyk’s Kunstkamera’, in Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda, Michał Oleszczyk (eds), Boro, L’Île D’Amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), p. 49. 4 Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), Popular European Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 2. 5 Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), p. 3. 6 Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 134. 7 For examples of this approach, see Jeremy Mark Robinson’, Walerian Borowczyk: Cinema of Erotic Dreams (Maidstone: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2008), pp. 15–43.

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8 Ibid., p. 34. 9 Jonathan Owen, ‘An island near the Left Bank: Walerian Borowczyk as a French Left Bank filmmaker’, in Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard (eds), Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014), p. 224 10 Tomasz Kitlinski, Pawel Leszkowicz and Joe Lockard, ‘Poland’s transition: from Communism to fundamentalist hetero-sex’, Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, 72 (2005). Available at https://www.academia.edu/3840817/ Polands_Transition_From_Communism_to_Fundamentalist_Hetero_Sex (accessed 3 June 2007). 11 For a nuanced discussion of Borowczyk’s treatment of sexual transgression, see Jonathan Owen’s ‘Avant-garde exploits: the cultural highs and lows of Polish émigré cinema’, in Kamila Kuc and Michael O’Pray (eds), The Struggle for Form. Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film, 1916–1989 (London: Wallflower Press, 2014). 12 Herzog, Sexuality in Europe, p. 134. 13 Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda and Michał Oleszczyk, ‘Introduction’, in Boro, L’Île D’Amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), p. 7. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., pp. 1–12. 16 Edwin Carels, ‘Immoral toys: on Borowczyk’s A Private Collection (1973)’, in Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda, Michał Oleszczyk (eds), Boro, L’Île D’Amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), p. 103. 17 Kuba Mikurda, ‘Boro: escape artist’, in Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda, Michał Oleszczyk (eds), Boro, L’Île D’Amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), p. 26. 18 Edwin Carels, ‘Immoral toys’, p. 105. 19 Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 217–51. 20 Edwin Carels, ‘Immoral toys’, pp. 106–7. 21 Marcin Giżycki, ‘Borowczyk’s Kunstkamera’, p. 49. 22 Kamila Wielebska, ‘Laugh in the doll house: on Victorian surrealism in the films of Walerian Borowczyk’, in Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda, Michał Oleszczyk (eds), Boro, L’Île D’Amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), p. 122. 23 Jonathan Owen, ‘An island near the Left Bank’, p. 226. 24 Jonathan Owen, ‘The beach, the bubble, and the boudoir: the meeting spaces of Walerian Borowczyk and André Pieyre de Mandiargues’, in Kamila Kuc, Kuba

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Mikurda, Michał Oleszczyk (eds), Boro, L’Île D’Amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), p.148. 25 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1995), p. 92.

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1995). Baudrillard, Jean, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage, 1998). Benjamin, Walter, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 217–51. Carels, Edwin, ‘Immoral toys: on Borowczyk’s A Private Collection (1973)’, in Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda and Michał Oleszczyk (eds), Boro, L’Île D’Amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), pp. 103–10. Dyer, Richard and Vincendeau, Ginette (eds), Popular European Cinema (London: Routledge, 1992). Giżycki, Marcin, ‘Borowczyk’s Kunstkamera’, in Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda and Michał Oleszczyk (eds), Boro, L’Île D’Amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), pp. 48–53. Herzog, Dagmar, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Kitlinski, Tomas, Leszkowicz, Pawel and Lockard, Joe, ‘Poland’s transition: from Communism to fundamentalist hetero-sex’, Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, 72 (2005). Available at https://www.academia.edu/3840817/ Polands_Transition_From_Communism_to_Fundamentalist_Hetero_Sex (accessed 3 June 2007). Kuc, Kamila, Mikurda, Kuba and Oleszczyk, Michał, ‘Introduction’, in Boro, L’Île D’Amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). Mathijs, Ernest and Mendik, Xavier (eds), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (London: Wallflower Press, 2004). Mazierska, Ewa and Goddard, Michael (eds), Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014). Mikurda, Kuba, ‘Boro: escape artist’, in Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda and Michał Oleszczyk (eds), Boro, L’Île D’Amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), pp. 13–47. Owen, Jonathan, ‘An island near the Left Bank: Walerian Borowczyk as a French Left Bank filmmaker’, in Ewa Mazierska and Michael Goddard (eds), Polish Cinema in a Transnational Context (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014), pp. 215–35.

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Owen, Jonathan, ‘Avant-garde exploits: the cultural highs and lows of Polish émigré cinema’, in Kamila Kuc and Michael O’Pray (eds), The Struggle for Form: Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film, 1916–1989 (London: Wallflower Press, 2014), pp. 93–116. Owen, Jonathan, ‘The beach, the bubble, and the boudoir: the meeting spaces of Walerian Borowczyk and André Pieyre de Mandiargues’, in Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda and Michał Oleszczyk (eds), Boro, L’Île D’Amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), pp. 148–58. Robinson, Jeremy Mark, Walerian Borowczyk: Cinema of Erotic Dreams (Maidstone: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2008). Schaefer, Eric, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films, 1919– 1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). Skrodzka, Aga, ‘Woman’s body and her pleasure in the celluloid erotica of Walerian Borowczyk’, Studies in European Cinema, 8/1 (2011), pp. 67–79. Wielebska, Kamila, ‘Laugh in the doll house: On Victorian surrealism in the films of Walerian Borowczyk’, in Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda and Michał Oleszczyk (eds), Boro, L’Île D’Amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), pp. 118–31.

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A Woman’s Grudge: Figuring Female Resentment in Japanese 1970s Grindhouse Cinema Laura Treglia

Introduction The inclusion of a number of visual, structural and thematic references to Japanese 1970s films in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003) exposed a global audience to a (then) virtually unknown kind of Japanese exploitation cinema of the period, which is now referred to as ‘pinky violence’ (pinkī baiorensu). Even the theme songs of two of the pinky violence series that are most popular in the West – Shurayuki-hime/Lady Snowblood (1973–4) and Joshū Sasori/Female Prisoner Scorpion (1972–3), both starring 1970s iconic Japanese actress Kaji Meiko – have been included in Kill Bill’s soundtrack. In particular, the theme song from the Female Prisoner Scorpion films, which is entitled ‘Urami Bushi’ and translates roughly into English as ‘Grudge Song’, would work perfectly as an alternative title for this chapter. The lyrics concern the burning, everlasting resentment of women who have been deceived by men, and convey a sense of pity for and reproach towards those women who allow themselves to be duped by men. In this chapter, I shall address the second film in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, Dai 41 zakkyo-bō/Jailhouse 41 (Itō Shun’ya, 1972), as an example of Japanese grindhouse cinema of the early 1970s that features powerful visions of women’s rebellion and retributive fury. The films imbue such figurations with an empowering energy while simultaneously culturally accommodating their anomaly, which resides at the intersection of gender, sexuality and social status. This is achieved by re-adapting earlier action film 51

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conventions and archetypes of female non-conforming characters, as well as through an original style of direction cinematography and editing. Before I analyse Jailhouse 41, however, an introduction to pinky violence cinema in its socio-historical and industrial contexts is necessary.

Cult contexts: pinky violence cycles The phrase ‘pinky violence’ was created in Japan more than twenty years after the films to which it now refers were first released. In its strictest sense, it identifies Tōei film company’s original cycles made approximately between 1968 and 1975 and their peculiar combination of action, raunchy humour and sleaze (as opposed to the more conventional softcore style of Nikkatsu roman poruno films, for example). The phrase immediately associates them with earlier independent adult productions called ‘eroduction’ (erodakushon) or ‘pink films’ (pinku eiga),1 which the studio sought to imitate in order to survive the financial crisis that swept the industry during this period. Pinky violence films were thus used to fill slots in multiple bill programmes that usually had gangster films as their main features. The films can be loosely categorized in subcycles according to the main motif or scenario, which can involve anything from travelling female gamblers to spring resort geishas and battling all-girl gangs. They all present the typical traits defining exploitation cinema worldwide: censor-sensitive subjects, such as sex and violence, which were suitably hyped up in titles, trailers and advertising materials; ‘camp’ aesthetics often resulting from hasty and on-thego writing and production; a multiple-bill exhibition style; and the transgressive spoofing of traditional generic codes.2 Also central to any pinky violence film is the performance of gender and sexuality, specifically the articulations of femininity that were to be read – via a convenient cautionary tale mode – as other with respect to the gender doxa of the time. These films were released in the wake of a decade of high economic growth, culminating in 1960, during which ‘technologies of gender’3 promoting gendered ideals that would support such growth became part of ad hoc institutional policies and corporate business practices. These ideals were, for example, those of the professional housewife and the salaryman, who would

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form the core of the post-war nuclear family in Japan. Official and media-wide discourses that construed house- and family-bound roles as women’s preferred identities have also been cyclically supported in Japan through the relay of TV and mainstream cinema articulations of a virtuous, industrious and enduring femininity, acting in deference to social norms and patriarchal authority. Bearing this in mind, pinky violence films flaunt women’s non-conforming behaviour as an attractive yet intimidating spectacle. Plots typically see beautiful and proud girls surviving on their wits and hunting down those who have wronged them. The villains here are always represented by men in power, together with their cronies and henchmen, who dwell in the underworld as well as in politics, the government and corrective institutions, such as reform schools and penitentiaries. On the other hand, pinky violence protagonists fall into the subaltern position of underprivileged subjects, both socially and economically. Mostly dropouts, they do not look forward to living a happily married life or securing a job, but live away from their homes and families instead, wanting only to indulge in leisure activities and a carefree life. Therefore, from a conservative perspective at that time, pinky violence girls’ lifestyle is seen as unproductive for the state and society, representing the epitome of irresponsibility and self-interest. Consequently, they are marked in the various series as ‘bad,’ ‘delinquent’, ‘terrifying’ (furyō, zubekō, kyōfu). In this way, figurations of female nonconformity, independence and violent agency are always already marked as outlaw, gone-bad, pathological, thus making for the perfect exploitation film subject. Such clear demarcation is one of the devices that make the non-normative feminine subjects who inhabit the films undesirable if not utterly abject. At the same time, however, the narratives allow these (anti-)heroines to bring forward the action – quite literally – and settle the score whilst getting away almost always unharmed. Moreover, the retributive justice that they administer is justified by their previous brutalization, thereby making the stories fall within the realm of the avenging women films.

Structures of revenge Pinky violence films often manifest the two-phase structure typical of raperevenge films. Rape, murder or other forms of abuse are therefore recurring

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plot elements in the case of the main female character or an innocent person close to her, and provide the trigger for the girls’ revenge. The severity of the act is conveyed by the references to the victims’ trauma and its impact on their lives. The tragedy, however, is made to reside in the stigma implied to be attached to the victims as the result of such an event. Their shaming is unproblematically acknowledged in the films, as sexual abuse is depicted as defiling a woman’s respectability in the eyes of society, apparently paving the way for her moral downfall. Even worse, rape is uncritically employed in the films as a means of punishment (at the hands of women and men alike) for unruly behaviour and is often made grotesque or eroticized. For example, in Jailhouse 41 the protagonist is punished by the guards in just such a heinous way; however, her fellow inmates blame her for being abused in front of everybody without killing herself in shame. Female Prisoner Scorpion is usually ascribed to the ‘women-in-prison’ (WiP) subset of exploitation films, but it will become clear in the course of this chapter how the second film in particular sits uncomfortably with this label – save for the interspersion of nudity and prison tropes. It cannot be said to be a typical example of the rape-revenge film either, although the focus is decidedly on payback. Rape is a narrative device and a theme insofar as it is defined in feminist terms: the crudest gendered expression of all forms of violent oppression, a subjugating and overpowering tool. In Jailhouse 41, rape symbolically subsumes all the vile acts perpetrated by men against women that justify women’s retaliatory violence. The protagonist avenges much more than just her or her fellow inmates’ rapes, but all violence against women as it is interconnected with other forms of social and state-sanctioned oppression. While akin to contemporaneous genre trends from overseas, this film shows the influence of domestic traditions and includes multiple genre conventions (horror, crime film, kabuki and manga imaginaries). Vendetta tales and moral heroes hark back to folk legends and their stage versions, and feature in horror stories, period dramas (jidaigeki eiga), samurai and gangster films alike. Moreover, period and gangster films were two core genres of Tōei studio, which explains the recurring manipulation and fond caricaturing of chivalry film conventions in many pinky violence films.4 On the other hand, it has been noted how genre hybridization – with a penchant for horror and action

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codes – and parodic dynamics often feature in exploitation cinema subgenres worldwide, especially rape-revenge films.5 The leitmotif of ‘protecting the weak and crushing the evil’ (kanzen chōaku) typical of much Japanese action cinema underpins the protagonists’ retributive actions against their oppressors and enables a transition of the type envisioned by Jacinda Read,6 that is, from a ‘feminine’ position to a ‘feminist’ one in the filmic discourse – or a parody of it, as Walters points out with reference to a famous WiP American film.7 The male agents of the oppression and sexual exploitation of the women end up exposed, ridiculed or killed, the heroines wind up victorious, and it is implied that they continue roaming the streets unscathed. As I have pointed out elsewhere,8 pinky violence heroines, similar to the avenging women analysed by Jeffrey A. Brown in stripper B movies and Read’s erotic female avengers in 1990s American cinema, expose themselves to the gaze in their overpowering sexual allure, while at the same time using their eroticism and sexuality to upend patriarchal authority and its power to punish. However, such heterodox performances of femininity in the films are probably not meant always to inspire sympathy or awe in the viewers – at least not squarely or consistently so. On the contrary, pinky violence pictures’ heroines – in particular Ochō (Ike Reiko) in Furyō anego den: Inoshika Ochō/ Sex and Fury (Norifumi Suzuki, 1973), Matsu/Sasori (Kaji Meiko) in Female Prisoner Scorpion and Yuki (Kaji Meiko) in Lady Snowblood – have an uncanny if not outrightly terrifying appearance when carrying out their bloody retributions, which involve impaling, stabbing and blinding their male enemies. Specifically, the films’ ways of construing the bodies of their heroines, and, on many occasions, the conflation of the erotic spectacle of their disrobing with aggressive action against their male enemies, link back to the climactic performances of other female foes in earlier films, such as the temptress (yōfu) 9 in swordplay period films of the silent era (jidaigeki eiga) and the avenging creatures in 1930s monster-cat films (bakeneko eiga).10 The latter are a subgenre of Japanese ghost/horror films that first saw their heyday in the 1930s before disappearing during the war years and then making a comeback at the beginning of the 1950s. The most popular of these films in the West is Shindō Kaneto’s Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko/Black Cat (1968). Such films revolved around revenge stories, in which the resentment of women who

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died violently and unjustly revived in the form of uncanny spirits (visibly female but evoking cat-like behaviour) who then set out to exact bloody retribution.11 These represent a small part of a host of ghost tales (kaidan) originating from Japanese folklore and featuring unorthodox female-coded figures, and over time they have been reworked and adapted as literary, theatrical and cinematic works.12 Many ghost stories, such as Kaidan Botan Dōrō (Ghost Tale of the Peony Lantern) and Yotsuya Kaidan (Ghost Tale of Yotsuya), share with ghost-cat tales and the horror films derived from them an emphasis on the traumatic and tragic events in women’s lives before their death.13 The theme of animals, demons or other supernatural creatures shapeshifting from or back into women is especially popular in folklore and is closely connected to passionate emotions such as jealousy, hatred and obsession. These, in turn, are often triggered by unrequited love or a man’s betrayal, and usually result in a relentless quest for revenge. Renowned archetypes of women bearing deadly grudges never cease to haunt the memory of viewers as their stories are handed down and cyclically remade. Among these is Lady Rokujō in the literary classic Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji), whose jealous ‘living spirit’ causes the death of Genji’s wife. Another is Kiyohime, whose legend is featured in a medieval collection of Buddhist didactic tales, Konjaku Monogatarishū (The Collection of Tales from the Past ), and tells of how, having been deserted, she turns into a serpent that pursues and kills her former lover, the monk Anchin, by burning him alive with the intensity of her passion. Last is the mythical figure of the yamanba (or yamauba), a sort of mountain hag who can disguise herself as an animal or a beautiful woman and feeds on male travellers.

The supernatural and the scorpions: Jailhouse 41 The second film in the Female Prisoner Scorpion series, Jailhouse 41, makes consistent reference to the atmosphere of Japanese ghost-cat and horror films rather than to the conventions of action and gangster films. Ghost films tended to be screened in the summer, the season of obon festivals that honour the dead in Japan. New Year’s releases were reserved for sure-fire hit productions and traditional stories such as those about the 47 rōnin.14 The Female Prisoner

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Scorpion films oscillated between such release seasons, the second instalment being expected to repeat the success of its predecessor. This contrasts with conventional appreciations of WiP and exploitation genres in terms of expectations regarding their quality. Even Tōei executives initially disliked the way in which the director conceived the films, both aesthetically and thematically.15 Moreover, the filming of Jailhouse 41 was an extremely arduous task as it coincided with disputes between the labour unions and Tōei’s management. It could be said that an acute anti-establishment drive was already at the heart of the series, particularly in this film. More to the point, I would argue that the film’s narrative structure, formal elements and intertextual thematic references all work towards emphasizing power reversals in favour of deprived subjects, but, at the same time, curb their disruptive, anti-authoritarian thrust. The original Female Prisoner Scorpion series consists of four films (1972–3), all starring Kaji Meiko (the stage name of Ōta Masako) in the lead role of a female jail inmate called Matsushima Nami, aka Matsu, then nicknamed ‘the scorpion’ (sasori in Japanese). The story is based on a 1970s manga by Shinohara Tōru, and, although there have been many attempts to revive the Scorpion saga through remakes, it is the original trilogy, directed by Itō Shun’ya, that has now achieved cult status, bewitching audiences with its distinctive style and aesthetics. While maintaining key exploitation elements such as violence and suggestive sexual imagery, Itō’s Scorpion films combine these with bizarre settings, symbolic use of contrasting lights and colours, and odd camera angles and shot compositions, all of which produce (especially in the second film) surreal, manga-like effects. At the same time, the films slip through the usual exploitation and women in prison film tropes important elements of social critique concerning violence against women, sexual exploitation, and the brutality of institutional apparatuses of social control and law enforcement, as well as society’s discrimination against and dehumanization of nonconforming subjects. Although each Scorpion instalment may be considered as an independent film with its own self-contained plot, the main character and her desire for revenge, as well as recurrent sequences such as prison breakouts, riots, tortures, love-making or fighting among women, all work as linking threads throughout the series. The plot is simple and revolves around a young woman, Matsushima Nami who, having been set up and betrayed by her lover, Sugimi Tsugio

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(Natsuyagi Isao), a corrupt police detective, sets about exacting revenge, first against him, then against the male guards and gangsters who try to crush her in prison and outside while on the loose. The central focus of the series is the metamorphosis of Nami into ‘the scorpion’, a relentless murderer who transforms from victim into avenger in a typical rape-revenge pattern. Japanese scholars have observed the centrality of this shift. For example, Mana Yaeko16 notes how Itō’s symbolic use of colours and other effects, such as Kaji’s hair standing up straight in the first film’s rape scene (and, I would add, in the woodland scene in the second film), mark this transformation. Washitani Hana17 endorses the association of Nami’s metamorphosis with Barbara Creed’s18 concept of the femme castratrice, a version of the castrating monstrous woman in horror films. As Rikke Schubart19 first observed, Creed’s notion seems apt here, given the instances within the films in which Sasori as well as her terrifying companions threaten to, or actually do, harm men through genital mutilation, and obliterate the other main source of sexual objectification in feminist film theory, the male gaze.20 Indeed, a conspicuous link of the Scorpion films’ representation of the female avenger is with earlier monster-cat films, as Washitani also notes, which were introduced in the former section. They clearly mimic past horror and ghost films’ techniques in order to signal the supernatural, mainly through the use of colours and other stylistic choices in cinematography and set design that evidently reference Japanese traditional kabuki plays. One of the most remarkable sections of the film in this sense is when, during the prison break, the fugitives discover in the rubble of a house a deserted old woman, who continuously mutters the curse: ‘Damn you, I’ll kill you’ (norotteyaru . . . koroshiteyaru), while wielding a large knife. She is brought back by the group to a shack which the women use as night-time refuge. There follows one of the many oneiric sequences in the film, which is openly theatrical in style. Behind a row of flames placed in the foreground of the shot, the seven women sit wearing white kimono. In deep focus above them is the purple-coloured figure of the knife-wielding old lady, who sits at the pinnacle of an imaginary pyramid. It is presumably the old lady’s hollow, chanting voice that reveals the runaways’ past crimes, saying that all the women were driven to commit crimes by the violent or unfaithful behaviour of fathers, husbands and lovers. Through this device, the film tries to make sense of the outlaw women and ‘dangerous’

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femininities that it visualizes, exposing the range of gendered oppression and abuse they have experienced. However, in this way it also reproduces age-old sexist tropes that pathologize women’s violent actions and recuperate their unconventional behaviour through cultural explanations which focus on their alleged inability to control their emotions – passion, jealousy, love, hatred. The old lady and her knife may be seen as allegories of the grudges and the desire for revenge passed along generations of wronged women. The film’s following sequence and closing scenes would seem to support such a reading. After the fugitives leave the shack and flee from the police through the woods, the old woman collapses and disappears under a mound of red leaves, after having first handed her knife to Sasori. Then a whirlwind magically sweeps away the old lady’s body, the brilliant red of the leaves turns into glacial tonalities of white, blue and grey, resembling the Snow Woman (Yuki Onna) section in Kobayashi Masaki’s Kaidan/ Kwaidan/Ghost Stories (1964). Sasori stands up holding the knife in her hands, and a medium close-up fixes her again as a witch: she stares at the camera while the wind blows her hair up, and menacingly slices through the air. The very same knife reappears at the end of the film when it is passed around among the female prisoners. These last scenes develop from an extreme close-up of the prosthetic eye of the warden, who is finally killed by Sasori. Still in their jail uniforms, Sasori and the other women burst into laughter and start running free through the streets. Many other examples may be cited that associate the Scorpion films’ fantasy with the iconography of Japanese folklore about the world of spirits and the supernatural (yōkai). In an interview, director Itō recalls boasting during the film’s production that he would make a witch haunt Tōei screens on its New Year’s release.21 In many scenes, Sasori is made to project a bluish-purple light, something that indicates a ghostly presence in Japanese kabuki theatre and horror films. Moreover, a fixture of Kaji’s interpretation as Sasori is her frightening stare at her torturers (and, importantly, the camera) out of her jet-black hair, which cover the rest of her face, frequently leaving only one eye visible. As I have mentioned elsewhere,22 these elements combine to evoke classic modes of visualization of Japanese vengeful she-ghosts (Yotsuya) and one-eyed creatures of scary tales. The terrifying gaze and stalking crawl of Sadako in Nakata Hideo’s Ringu/Ring (1998) can thus be seen as but a very recent re-elaboration of classic Japanese (and Asian-wide) archetypes of supernatural wrath.

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Female bodies, non-human transformations, fantasies of insurgency Another important element that marks the spectacle of Sasori’s transformation into a victim-avenger, while linking it back to domestic lore about supernatural creatures and the ghost-cat films, is the symbolic association with animals, starting from Sasori’s nickname ‘the scorpion’. The association of women with wild animals in these films refers not only to the loss of human dignity due to their suffering and the grudge which they bear, but also evidences an ideological designation of women’s counter-violence as utterly repulsive and horrific. Such links to feral creatures work, therefore, as a cautionary containment, except that, in the Scorpion films, this is produced not just through costumes and make-up (as it was in the earlier ghost-cat films) but is consistently suggested on other levels too (visuals, dialogues, acting). As mentioned above, Matsu’s nickname ‘the scorpion’ signals this association, as do the words used by prison director Gōda (Watanabe Fumio) when referring to her (‘bitch’, ‘biting’ and the like). Visual and verbal references to non-human states are, however, throughout the series extended to the other female convicts and wretched characters appearing in the films. This is conveyed by the way in which the group of female prisoners lives and behaves while on the run: they are dirty, hungry, move in a pack and hunt other animals. It is also contained in the very title of the series’ third instalment, Kemono-beya/Beast Stable (Itō Shun’ya, 1973), and in the landscapes in which the action is set (deserted places, woods, landfills, and a sewer in the third film). Finally, Matsu’s swift movements when she attacks her targets similarly suggest animal-like behaviour. For example, in Jailhouse 41 she tries to stab Gōda in the eye and then crouches back like a trembling dog. During her brutalization in a pit, she bites her aggressors’ faces, moving her chest and head back and forth like a cobra. This particular sequence is also key to another important aspect of this film, that is, the dynamic of the gaze. As noted earlier, after a botched riot attempt in the courtyard triggered by Sasori’s assault on Gōda, she is gang-raped by the male guards in a quarry, while the other detainees are made to watch in order to avoid her becoming a symbol of insurrection. Subjective camerawork, low-angle rotating pans and muted soundtrack show the action from Sasori’s perspective, while the male

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rapists are depersonalized through their grotesque appearance: they wear monk-like habits and nylon stockings on their faces, thus erasing their individual features and rendering them repulsive. In a series of shot-reverseshots, Sasori is shown looking straight back at her assailants with her eyes wide open, anticipating her violent revenge while they rape her. As mentioned above, Sasori’s fierce stares directed at the camera constitute a consistent feature of the series, so much so that they completely upstage the stock WiP elements. Rikke Schubart23 and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas24 rightly emphasize this aspect as Kaji’s hallmark. This is hard to miss, especially in Jailhouse 41, which is all about gazing – and gazing back – between characters. The whole film revolves around the power battle first between Sasori and prison director Gōda and, to a lesser extent, between Sasori and the other inmates, especially Ōba. Her struggle is symbolically played out on an optical plane too: Gōda’s sadistic gazes are confronted by Sasori’s, who dares to look back and act silently.25 Virtually all the types of gaze theorized so far are present in this sequence. From the top of the pit the other prisoners and the prison governor look on; one inmate cannot bear the sight and looks away, while Sasori witnesses her own violation reflected in the governor’s sunglasses. Furthermore, Sasori challenges her tormentors not just by looking back but also by turning her eyes away from them and onto the camera, as if to question the onlooking, extra-diegetic audience. By watching, viewers are in on the act and thereby interpellated by a chilling, silent stare from the victim. The same happens in the dungeon sequence that opens the film. Here, camera angles, framing and chiaroscuro heighten the perpetrator-victim power divide and highlight the top-down trajectory of the gaze that flows from the faceless guards towering above a hogtied Sasori, and on to the viewers via her. The latter, together with other narrative as well as stylistic choices, elevates the original Sasori trilogy (and Jailhouse 41 in particular) above run-of-the-mill studio exploitation to an experimental mix between pop and avant-garde sensitivities. Power reversals, for example, are underlined in Jailhouse 41 through its peculiar structure, which features a chain of carnivalesque, dreamlike sequences, the style of which typically signals an inversion of order and power balance (for example via the use of camera angles, shot composition, and muting the audio track). However, by encoding depictions of othered subjects’ revolt as surreal, uncanny and also temporary, the film defuses and contains

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their energy and inscribes the difference of woman (particularly if it is a violent, resisting woman) not only at the level of visuals and language, but also at the level of its actual narrative structure. This structure then underpins the ambivalence of the film’s discourses about rebellious femininity and its counteracting violence. The first of such sequences begins right after the opening section set in the dungeon, when Sasori is let out into the courtyard for the superintendent’s visit to the jail. The man notices her resentful glare and tells her they ‘don’t hate [her] personally’. Sasori then tries to stab Gōda in the eye, missing it by a hair’s breadth. At this sight, a terrified superintendent wets his pants and, after a chain of choreographed freeze-frames, a brief riot ensues. This sequence is the first of several throughout the film that cross over to a bizarre, oneiric style reminiscent of the ambience of Federico Fellini’s I clowns/The Clowns (1970). The convicts burst out laughing at the terrified inspector, surround him and take off his pants to reveal soiled underwear. An inmates’ band scatters around playing a merry tune while the other prisoners throw their straw sandals into the air. In a dissolve shot, uniform hats are superimposed over the sandals, and then the scene cuts to the guards’ bayonets against the backdrop of crossed rising sun flags – an element common to other avant-garde film and visual art of the time. The sequence ends with another freeze-frame-like scene indicating that the turmoil has come to an end, as the director orders the guards to punish everybody. The brief carnival of detainees introduces cinematographic elements that signal an inversion of order and induce a sense of discomfort and confusion in the viewer. These are then resumed in the film to introduce similar situations. Another such sequence involves the hijacking of a sightseeing tour bus by the fugitives on the run from the police, which follows the rape and murder of the youngest prisoner by three bus passengers. This act is by no means eroticized and is conveyed in all its violence and brutality, with the men depicted as odious and grotesque. The fugitives witness them ditching her body down a chute and, enraged, capture the men and return to the bus. Once inside, they terrorize the passengers, reserving particular humiliation and violence for those responsible for the rape and death of the girl. The employment of similar filming techniques to those in earlier carnival-like sequences (oscillating camera and distorted angles) and the use of identical music on the soundtrack

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alerts the viewer to another breakdown of order, an upending of the normal state of things, which is thereby questioned. The relations between the torturers and their victims, in this case between ostracized people and ‘law-abiding’ ones, are switched. The female prisoners stomp on the three culprits, who are forced to lie prone on the bus floor and made the butt of ridicule. Finally, the sequence suggests a powerful analogy via a rare and barely veiled critical reference to the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers against Manchurian civilians during the Second World War. Prior to the rape, the three bus passengers are seen cheering on an old man who is bragging about having raped a Chinese woman at gunpoint during his time as a soldier in the occupied territory of Manchuria. Adding to this, the bus has the words ‘Tōa Sightseeing’ (Tōa kankō) written on its sides. The word ‘Tōa’, which translates as ‘East Asia’, forcefully evokes the wartime propaganda expression ‘Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere’ (Daitōa Kyōeiken), which euphemistically referred to those territories that Japan aimed to preside over according to its aggressive expansionist politics of the time. After the group of female convicts hijacks the bus, the old man is forced by the most violent and deranged of the fugitives, Ōba (Shiraishi Kayoko), to shout ‘Banzai’ (‘Long live the Emperor!’) while threatening to shoot him in the groin. The crimes of Japanese soldiers have long been a taboo topic in the official narrative of the Second World War. However, the criticism expressed in this sequence was in tune with the widespread anti-militarist and anti-imperialist sentiments during the 1960s and 1970s, especially within various oppositional circles such as the far left student militants and the radical feminist movement (ūman ribu). I would propose that there is a convergence between the views expressed by the film in this sequence and 1970s Japanese radical feminist politics. The film clearly makes a link between the Japanese young men taking advantage of the female convict’s vulnerable status and the former soldier priding himself on his wartime sexual crimes. The brutalization of a prisoner/ fugitive and the rape of a woman in an occupied country by a soldier of the invading forces share intersecting kinds of subordination: in both cases the victims of violence are women, both of whom have been forced to undergo state-sanctioned subjugation. Radical Japanese feminist activists of the time openly declared their solidarity with the women of poorer East Asian countries, who bore the brunt of Japanese capitalism’s aggressive policies in the Pacific

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area, which included sex tourism on the part of Japanese men. Moreover, radical feminists were among the few at the time openly to denounce Japanese imperial troops’ use of ‘comfort women’ during the war, and to offer their active support to such women. Indeed, in one of her works, leading ribu feminist activist Tanaka Mitsu discussed the imperialist logic underpinning both the soldiers’ sexual exploitation of ‘comfort women’ and Japanese men’s patronage of the Pacific sex industry.26 Referring to US 1970s female rape-revenge films, Peter Lehman27 observes how their diegetic world is full of two-dimensional male characters who are always already villainous, and thus easy to despise. However, in Jailhouse 41, the implication that every ordinary man may change into an abuser is much more clearly articulated as a discourse in the film. Chibi’s rapists are average salarymen on a trip who first cheer on the former soldier’s past crimes and harass the female bus hostess amidst a seemingly entertained crowd (including giggling middle-aged ladies), then attack and kill Chibi during a stopover. Thus, even the sequences before and after the bus hijacking weave in a strong critique of Japanese men and middle-class society as perversely sexist, hypocritical and discriminatory. As one of the prisoners remarks in the bus sequence, the passengers judge themselves to be superior and think that they can freely determine the fugitives’ lives. Thus, the crime committed by the three men is associated with the violence exerted by society and the state, as the brutalization of the outlaw women is all too literally equated with gendered violence against other discriminated against marginal subjects. Through Sasori’s eyes and thoughts, director Itō counterpoints the hijackers’ violence on the bus with imaginative sequences that borrow from Japanese theatre and depict the bus travellers and law-abiding citizens as rabid lynch mobs ready to condemn and batter the women. In such fantasies, Sasori is the only one able to free herself with her knife. In conclusion, it is clear how all of the above render Jailhouse 41 difficult to gauge in terms of ordinary WiP films. In this chapter, I have tried to show how various formal devices and narrative structures in pinky violence, and in particular this film, may work in ambivalent ways so as both to foreground discourses of gendered violence and interconnected structures of subordination and revolt against them, and to curb their potential for the viewer’s cathartic identification. The performances of their female protagonists, evoking past

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figurations of revenge and aggressive femininities such as the vamp and the ghost-cat, involve ways of representing the female body that, by showing it capable of engaging in counter-actions, shifts it away from a position of disadvantage. This passage often suggests fantasies of trans-species metamorphosis, evoking a rich folkloric background in Japanese culture in which women are often associated with demons or animals. The films may thus be aligned with Read’s understanding of rape-revenge films as tales of transition and transformation towards a feminist position. However, since this transition implies the inversion of several interconnected social binaries and the crossing of established gender norms, these figurations also represent a threat which tends, at the textual level, to be stigmatized and contained. This is accomplished through depicting them as terrifying and non-human, which outlaws, others, pathologizes and clearly criminalizes the (counter-)actions of women at the moment of their vendetta. The intertextual resonances that pinky violence films present may work as empowering as well as restructuring devices. The same consideration applies to the films’ narrative structure. Finally, the system of carnivalesque sequences in Jailhouse 41 showing the women’s empowering shift as well as power reversals does briefly celebrate their mutinous, emancipatory impulse, but only to suggest that revolt is just an evanescent hallucination. The lingeringly uncomfortable feeling engendered by the film comes from Sasori’s inquisitive gaze, crawling silently out of the screen – as Sadako would do decades later – and making the audience realize its own collusion with the violence of so-called normality.

Notes 1 Donald Richie, ‘The Japanese eroduction’, in A Lateral View: Essays on Contemporary Japan (Tokyo: Japan Times, 1991), pp. 156–69; Roland Domenig, ‘Vital flesh: the mysterious world of Pink Eiga’, Far East Film Festival – IV edition. 2002. Available at: http://194.21.179.166/cecudine/fe_2002/eng/PinkEiga2002.htm (accessed 12 May 2011); Abé Mark Nornes (ed.), The Pink Book: The Japanese Eroduction and Its Contexts, 2nd edn, Kinema Club, 2014. Available at: http:// kinemaclub.org/pink-book-japanese-eroduction-and-its-contexts (accessed 18 March 2016). 2 Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, Cult Cinema (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); David Church, ‘From exhibition to genre: the case of grind-house films’,

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5

6 7 8

9

10

11

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13 14

Shocking Cinema of the 70s Cinema Journal, 50/4 (2011), pp. 1–25, available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/449687 (accessed 6 February 2014); Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005). See Teresa De Lauretis Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. (London: Macmillan, 1989) Laura Treglia, ‘From myth to cult: tragic heroes, parody and gender politics in the 1960s–1970s “bad girls” cinema of Japan’, in Blais Guarné, Artur Lozano-Méndez and Dolores P. Martinez (eds), Persistently Postwar: Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019), pp. 103–21. Suzanna Danuta Walters, ‘Caged heat: the (r)evolution of women-in-prison films’, in Martha McCaughey and Neal King (eds), Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 106–23; Jeffrey A. Brown, ‘If looks could kill: power, revenge, and stripper movies’, in Martha McCaughey and Neal King (eds), Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 52–77. Jacinda Read, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-revenge Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Walters, ‘Caged heat’. Treglia, ‘From myth to cult’, and Laura Treglia, ‘Mondo-ing urban girl tribes: the boom of 1960s–70s erotic cinema and the policing of young female subjects in Japanese sukeban films’, Film Studies, 18/1 (2018b), pp. 52–69. The bad temptress (yōfu) often acted as the antagonist to the male hero in period films. The western ‘vamp’ was grafted onto a pre-existing ‘bad woman’ role (akujo yakugara) typical of Japanese theatre. Such a character used her beautiful body and sexual allure as a weapon with which to assault and defeat men. Miyoko Shimura, ‘Vanpu Joyū Ron’, in Kenji Iwamoto (ed.), Jidaigeki Densetsu: Chanbara Eiga no Kagayaki. Nihon eigashi sōsho (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2005), pp. 191–219; Washitani Hana ‘Satsueijo jidai no “josei akushon eiga” ’, in Inuhiko Yomota and Washitani Hana (eds), Tatakau Onnatachi: Nihon Eiga no Josei Akushon (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2009), pp. 20–55. According to legend, if a cat licks the blood of somebody who has died an unfortunate and violent death, this person’s grudge passes on to the animal. The cat, as if possessed by the resentful spirit of the dead, then carries out its revenge. Colette Balmain, Introduction to Japanese Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Jay McRoy (ed.), Japanese Horror Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Washitani, ‘Satsueijo jidai’, pp. 33–5. Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer, ‘Introduction’, in Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 7; Isolde Standish, A New History of

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Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film (New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 116–17. 15 Initially planned to be another female version of a yakuza film series, Sasori ended up being something very weird in the eyes of Tōei executives. Luckily the films were a commercial success, which probably saved Itō from Suzuki Seijun’s fate when he shot Branded to Kill (1967) for Nikkatsu. 16 Mana Yaeko, ‘Kedakaki Rashin no Musumetachi – Tōei Pinkī Baiorensu’, in Inuhiko Yomota and Washitani Hana (eds), Tatakau Onnatachi: Nihon Eiga no Josei Akushon (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2009), p. 46. 17 Washitani, ‘Satsueijo jidai’, p. 49; p. 55, note 18. 18 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993). 19 Rikke Schubart, Super Bitches and Action Babes: the Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970–2006 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), pp. 111–16. 20 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in Laura Mulvey (ed.), Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 14–26. I have also touched upon the relevance of Kaji’s 1970s female avenging characters to discussions of monstrous feminine and gaze theories in Treglia, ‘From myth to cult’, p. 113 and 115, and in ‘Sexing up post-war Japanese cinema: looking at the 1960s/1970s “pinky violence” films’, in Katherine Harrison and Cassandra A. Ogden (eds), Pornographies: Critical Positions (Chester: Chester University Press, 2018a), p.146. 21 J-Tarō Sugisaku, ‘Shunya Ito interview,’ in J-Tarō Sugisaku and Takeshi Uechi (eds), Tōei Pinkī Baiorensu Rōman Arubamu (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1999), p. 140. 22 Treglia, ‘From myth to cult’, p. 113. 23 Schubart, Super Bitches. 24 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011). 25 It is known that Kaji, on studying Shinohara’s manga, refused to utter any of the obscenities attributed to her character that were at first retained in the script. Itō agreed that Sasori’s feelings could be conveyed through her eyes and other visuals rather than through dialogue. Indeed, dialogue is shrunk to a bare minimum and almost replaced by gazing between characters. As in the case of other raperevenge film protagonists such as Madeleine and Thana, Sasori does not speak: she first haunts with her eyes, and the opening credits sequence is the best manifestation of the grudge-fuelled resilience of the series’ protagonist. 26 Setsu Shigematsu, Scream from the Shadows: the Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 247.

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27 Peter Lehman, ‘ “Don’t blame this on a girl”: female rape-revenge films’, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 108–9.

Bibliography Balmain, Colette, Introduction to Japanese Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). Brown, Jeffrey A., ‘If looks could kill: power, revenge, and stripper movies’, in Martha McCaughey and Neal King (eds), Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies (Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 52–77. Church, David (2011), ‘From exhibition to genre: the case of grind-house films’, Cinema Journal, 50/4 (2011), pp. 1–25. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/449687 (accessed 6 February 2014). Creed, Barbara, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993). Cook, Pam, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005). De Lauretis, Teresa, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1989). Desjardins, Chris, Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005). Domenig, Roland, ‘Vital flesh: the mysterious world of Pink Eiga’, Far East Film Festival – IV edition. 2002. Available at: http://web.archive.org/web/200211190912 33/http://194.21.179.166/cecudine/fe_2002/eng/PinkEiga2002.htm (accessed 12 May 2011). Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 2011). Lehman, Peter, ‘ “Don’t blame this on a girl”: female rape-revenge films’, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 103–17. Mana, Yaeko, ‘Kedakaki Rashin no Musumetachi – Tōei Pinkī Baiorensu’, in Inuhiko Yomota and Washitani Hana (eds), Tatakau Onnatachi: Nihon Eiga no Josei Akushon (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2009), pp. 179–216. Mathijs, Ernest and Sexton, Jamie, Cult Cinema (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). McRoy, Jay (ed.), Japanese Horror Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in Laura Mulvey (ed.), Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 14–26.

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Nornes, Abé Mark (ed.), The Pink Book: The Japanese Eroduction and Its Contexts, 2nd edn, Kinema Club, 2014, available at: http://kinemaclub.org/pink-book-japaneseeroduction-and-its-contexts (accessed 18 March 2016). Phillips, Alastair and Stringer, Julian, ‘Introduction’, in Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 1–24. Read, Jacinda, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-revenge Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Richie, Donald, ‘The Japanese eroduction’, in A Lateral View: Essays on Contemporary Japan (Tokyo: Japan Times, 1991), pp. 156–69. Schubart, Rikke, Super Bitches and Action Babes: the Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970–2006 (Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 2007). Shigematsu, Setsu, Scream from the Shadows: the Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Shimura, Miyoko, ‘Vanpu Joyū Ron’, in Kenji Iwamoto (ed.), Jidaigeki Densetsu: Chanbara Eiga no Kagayaki. Nihon eigashi sōsho (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2005), pp. 191–219. Standish, Isolde, A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film (New York: Continuum, 2005). Sugisaku, J-Tarō, ‘Shunya Itō interview,’ in Jeitarō T. Sugisaku and Takeshi Uechi (eds), Tōei Pinkī Baiorensu Rōman Arubamu (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1999), pp. 138–42. Treglia, Laura, ‘Sexing up post-war Japanese cinema: looking at the 1960s/1970s “pinky violence” films’, in Katherine Harrison and Cassandra A. Ogden (eds), Pornographies: Critical Positions (Chester: Chester University Press, 2018a), pp. 141–66. Treglia, Laura, ‘Mondo-ing urban girl tribes: the boom of 1960s–70s erotic cinema and the policing of young female subjects in Japanese sukeban films’, Film Studies 18/1 (2018b), pp. 52–69. Treglia, Laura, ‘From myth to cult: tragic heroes, parody and gender politics in the 1960s-1970s “bad girls” cinema of Japan’, in Blai Guarné, Artur Lozano-Méndez and Dolores P. Martinez (eds), Persistently Postwar: Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019), pp. 103–21. Walters, Suzanna Danuta, ‘Caged heat: the (r)evolution of women-in-prison films’, in Martha McCaughey and Neal King (eds), Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies (Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 106–23. Washitani, Hana, ‘Satsueijo jidai no “josei akushon eiga” ’, in Inuhiko Yomota and Hana Washitani (eds), Tatakau Onnatachi: Nihon Eiga no Josei Akushon (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2009), pp. 20–55.

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Rethinking Representation, Race and Rape in the 1970s Women in Prison Movie James Newton

In the 1970s, a new cycle of Women in Prison (WiP) films emerged from the United States, updating a formula that had existed in some form or other since the 1930s. Films such as The Big Doll House (Jack Hill, 1971), Women in Cages (Gerado de Leon, 1971), The Big Bird Cage (Jack Hill, 1972), The Hot Box (Joe Viola, 1972), Black Mama, White Mama (Eddie Romero, 1973) and Caged Heat (Jonathan Demme, 1974) were action pictures with extra amounts of sex and nudity, and recurring narratives of incarcerated women organizing to fight against, and subsequently escape from, the patriarchal prison structures that contained them. They were made at a time when the movements for women’s liberation were growing in prominence and also coincided with burgeoning feminist film criticism, characterized by work such as Claire Johnston’s Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema (1973) and, of course, Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975). Pam Cook turned this feminist criticism towards the exploitation cinema of Stephanie Rothman, who directed several films for Roger Corman, as well as the WiP movie Terminal Island (1973). Cook claimed that the ‘bad acting, crude stereotypes and schematic narrative’ synonymous with exploitation cinema exposed the ‘ideological structures embedded in the form itself ’.1 This resulted in contradictions and ‘shifts in meaning which disturb the patriarchal myths of women on which the exploitation film itself rests’.2 Terminal Island, according to Henry Jenkins, ‘negotiates between . . . two competing discourses’ that can illuminate ‘the ideological fault-lines within popular cinema’.3 Both Cook and Jenkins recognize that while the cycle was superficially transgressive because it presented violent women, its subversive value also lay in the manner 71

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in which it exposed conventions which were perceived to enforce patriarchal ideology through a narrow set of representations and formal constructions. Exploring the subversive and transgressive qualities claimed by some for the WiP cycle is the focus of this chapter.4 Subversion in cinema is one of the main reasons that the scholarship that surrounds cult films exists. Critics of cult cinema typically examine films’ potential for subversion through their critique of societal structures and/or cinematic conventions. Thus, Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art defines subversion as that which challenges ‘existing values, institutions, mores, and taboos’.5 He claims his book is about ‘scepticism towards all received wisdom (including its own), eternal truths, rules of art, “natural” and man-made laws, indeed whatever may be considered holy’.6 Within this framework, Vogel considers everything from the avantgarde through to pornography and Nazi propaganda. But in his history of subversive cinema’s first seventy or so years, among the ‘fantasies of lust, violence, ambition, perversion, crime and romantic love’,7 Vogel makes no comment on the likes of Roger Corman, Herschell Gordon Lewis or Doris Wishman. To find subversion in these cultish, trashy areas of cinema, rather than in the areas that Vogel privileges, means that the critic is not only looking at cult cinema, but is engaging in cult criticism. They are deliberately seeking out that which has been discarded or which is traditionally regarded marginal.8 But what is the purpose of revisiting shocking movies from the 1970s when over the following decades they have been superseded by work which is far more violent, more shocking and more directly engaged in presenting marginal spaces, ideas, or identities? Even the once much-derided WiP film is no longer regarded as transgressive, and violent women are now quite commonplace across cinematic genres such as horror, crime and action films. Furthermore, the one-time claims for the ‘feminism’ of WiP films have come to be seen by some as contradictory and untenable. To focus on the ‘feminism’ of the cycle is to ignore their principle selling points: among the films mentioned above, there are depictions of rape, sexualized torture and molestation, whipping and forced prostitution – what director Jack Hill says was ‘basically exploiting women sexually’.9 Mattias Frey, in his study of contemporary ‘extreme cinema’, refers to the ‘international production trend of graphically sexual or violent “quality” films that often stoke critical and popular controversy’.10 Moviegoers today no longer

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need to turn to exploitation and schlock from the 1970s for sex and violence, but instead can rely on contemporary cinema, and especially art cinema, for some of the most shocking content available.11 Indeed, as Frey puts it, the new ‘extreme cinema’ seeks to offend the ‘culturally inscribed boundaries between art and exploitation’.12 In today’s cinematic landscape, there is a perennial sense of controversy whereby ‘no major festival passes without headlines about a controversial art film’.13 Subversively violent and sexual content is now an expected part of modern film culture. Furthermore, it is now a feature of mainstream television. Programmes such as The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010– ) and Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–19) feature content that would have resulted in censorship had it appeared in feature films in the 1970s or 1980s. Vogel writes that cinema’s subversive potential makes it the ‘target of the repressive forces in society – censors, traditionalists, the state’.14 But these ‘repressive forces’ no longer exist in the same forms. Censorship of violence and sex no longer happens in the same way, nor on the same scale.15 By virtue of the period in which they were made, 1970s shockers often contain content which bristles against contemporary liberal Western values – including images of sexual objectification, humour based on negative stereotypes and content which might be seen by some as ‘politically incorrect’. However, much of the growing scholarship on exploitation cinema is concerned to highlight the positive or progressive elements of the cult film whilst at the same time explaining, putting into context, mitigating or disowning its negative elements, such as its perceived racism or misogyny. Bev Zalcock’s analysis, for example, is generous in finding positive moments across the WiP film, but dismisses the elements that make them primarily a collective ‘wet dream’ aimed at ‘hormonal young men’.16 Cook, Jenkins and Zalcock high-mindedly reframe the films and create a context by which they might be understood in a way that mitigates their disreputable content (in this case by showing how they counterpoint mainstream Hollywood representations). But such an approach suggests that the WiP film is suitable only when viewed through the prism of intellectual enquiry, and that there is a way to enjoy these films as women looking for transgressive role models, and absolutely not as ‘young hormonal men’. This is not to criticize such interpretations – they simply have different motivations from mine – but it is to make a comment on the way that

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scholarship on the cult film frequently maintains a distance between the radical subversion contained in a set of movies, and its own analysis. A look at the critical stance on three exploitation cycles from the 1970s can illustrate this point. The biker movie, for example, was largely countercultural in its imagery (pot smoking and other facets of drop-out culture) and presented visions of individual freedom. But it is also contained homophobia and traded on racist imagery.17 The rape-revenge film demonstrates female agency in its incarnation of violent women, what Jacinda Read calls the ‘refusal of the woman to be killed off ’.18 But this violence is justified only by the violation of these women, often depicted in graphic imagery which the critic has to contextualize. The slasher film frequently centres on sexual ambiguities, but its core iconographical image is the point-of-view shot of women being stalked and murdered.19 Clearly, I am painting the scholarly reception of these cycles in very broad strokes, and deliberately so. But the point here is that they can be considered as simultaneously transgressive yet also stuck in stereotypical and regressive representations – what Cook refers to as ‘patriarchal myths’ or ‘ideological structures’. Often the most dangerous elements of the cult text from the past are mitigated and put into a context which ‘contains’ or dismisses the embarrassing moments. The critic takes on the role of guardian or teacher, ‘educating’ the ‘uncultured’ viewer on how to understand, interpret and enjoy such films, but also on when to stop taking pleasure in them and to start critiquing any problematic representations. This, I would argue, not only reduces the subversive impact of a cult text, it also means that the scholarship surrounding these films tends to become very conservative. The scholar in these instances is certainly discussing cult films, but they are not engaging in cult scholarship. That is, they are not providing a critical voice which is itself marginal, unruly or subversive. When the WiP film can now be celebrated in the mainstream press as being radical, then scholars of cult film need to examine the purpose of looking back to the past.20 If it can be eulogized in a newspaper as relentlessly liberal as the Guardian, can the WiP cycle any longer be seen as radical? Are such films now useless to the cult critic or to those interested in subversive cinema? I do not believe that this is the case. In my view, they are still subversive, but identifying their subversive qualities involves going beyond a surface interpretation and relies on an acceptance of their cruder side. In The Anarchist

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Cinema (2019), I argue for the WiP film as a prominent example of political anarchism on screen – in their mix of intersectional politics and in their recurring representations of patriarchal prison institutions being overthrown and destroyed. But furthermore, this anarchy manifests itself in the way that the cycle agitates against its own narrow conventions through its frequently unruly formal constructions. An analysis of their form reveals that they subvert not only mainstream narrative conventions and stereotypes of women, but also their own rigid set of conventions and codes. It makes them uncontainable, resistant to any singular interpretation. And, in terms of content, the WiP film still comes with a warning because it shows no regard for sensitivity towards subjects that dominate the contemporary culture wars, with its often deeply challenging attitudes towards women, sex, race and rape. This is the inherent contradiction of the ‘politics’ of the WiP film laid bare: they are both progressive and reactionary. It is in these contradictions, the total inconsistency of message, that the cycle remains relevant. It still has much to teach us, not only about exploitation film culture of the 1970s, but also about how to challenge attitudes and methods of artistic expression in film today. The cycle’s often alarming combinations of ‘politically incorrect’ jokes, situations and characters means that it is still dangerous, it is still unruly, it is still, for the cult critic, worth studying – accepting these moments as part of their appeal. This approach could, of course, put the cult critic on dangerous ground. Is it possible to condemn racism, sexism and homophobia, while also celebrating the fact that these films retain their subversive power precisely because they portray these things? Certainly, my discussion of these moments in the cycle is not an endorsement of these attitudes in real life. Instead, I like to think that any audience that the cycle attracts would understand the multiple and varying contexts of the ‘non-PC’ material. I should also make it clear that I consider subversiveness to be inherently interesting, usually positive, and necessary. In her study of lesbian representation, Clare Whatling writes of a ‘nostalgia for abjection’,21 where she re-contextualizes the stereotypical and oppressive depictions of lesbians by acknowledging the pleasures they can contain (that is, for Whatling at least). While I am not claiming that the way WiP films depict rape, homosexuality and race necessarily provides viewing pleasure, the way in which they have the potential for continuing to keep the cycle abject does afford me both enjoyment and critical interest. Zalcock also acknowledges this

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possibility, claiming that images of women being socially transgressive ‘can, for the female spectator, be quite inspiring’.22 This assumes a gendered difference in the reception of the cycle, and if this claim is true, and that the cycle ‘feeds male fantasies’,23 then one of the reasons why we can see it as subversive and worthy of study today is precisely because of the casual manner in which it does so. Mattias Frey sees a more sombre approach to such subject matter as a characteristic of the new extreme cinema, whose directors frequently defend their work by claiming they are taking a serious approach and challenging audiences’ enjoyment of such material.24 This defence, as summarized by Frey, claims that ‘disturbing violence is moral violence . . . artistic, rather than exploitative’.25 In opposition to this rather pretentious position on the part of such directors, I would argue that it is the so-called ‘exploitative’ violence or sex on screen that is the more subversive treatment of the subject, precisely because it takes such a superficial approach to material that we are told, by ‘serious’ film-makers and critics, should be treated with utmost respect and handled with the greatest care.

Reconsidering ‘objectfication’ and other hot topics The WiP cycle invites discussions around the objectification of women and the ‘feeding of male fantasies’ through its casual and abundant onscreen female nudity. But within these scenes there is evidence of an acknowledgment of the complexity of issues surrounding voyeurism and scopophilia, revealing an awareness about looking that complicates the simplistic ways in which the objectification of women in the cycle is often considered. In Black Mama, White Mama a sadistic lesbian guard, Matron Densmore (Lynn Borden), spies on and masturbates over showering inmates. The voyeurism of the scene is explicitly foregrounded in the shot selection and editing. The camera switches between the women in the shower, Densmore illuminated via the hole through which she is looking, and the hole itself, with its border framing the showering women. In Caged Heat, the male prison doctor photographs a drugged inmate prior to sexually assaulting her. This process of on-screen voyeurism, where the audience is watching the voyeur taking part in a photographic process,

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demonstrates a sophisticated awareness of the dynamics between film-maker, audience and character that foreshadows aspects of the famous analysis undertaken by Mulvey. The cycle’s relationship to objectification becomes more complex when considering the preponderance of scenes of women being paraded, scenes in which women have to walk or stand in groups for the benefit of prison authorities. They are either naked in showers or stripping for inspection, fully clothed filing on and off prison buses, or standing to attention in one form or another. This is the use of women’s bodies as mise-en-scène, as set decoration – standing in lines, sitting in cages, standing watching a fight or moment of torture. For example, in The Big Doll House the film pauses to show women looking at another prisoner trapped in a bamboo cage. Such moments result in a doubling of the ‘gaze’: the audience is asked to watch women looking at women, it is asked to survey the surveyors. In Caged Heat, there is an extended scene in which two prisoners perform a series of comic routines in a show for other inmates. The camera switches between the show (mainly in long shots) and multiple shots of the audience watching, laughing and jeering (in mid shots and close-ups) in order to encourage closer identification with the ‘watchers’. In this scene, we perceive the two tendencies, women looking, and women being looked at. Objectification is taking place regardless of whether there is sexual content or not. Such scenes are a convention of the prison movie (male or female) because of the realities of prison life.26 But in the WiP genre these moments dominate the rhythm of the films, developing a sense of the order from which the characters eventually break free. This rhythm, and part of the spectacle the WiP film offers, lies in watching women work, talk and simply stand around, as much as it consists in watching them fight or have sex. So, while casual discussions of the cycle consider the actions of the female characters, the films frequently make a spectacle out of their inaction. And it is in these moments of inaction that the films extemporize on topics such as race and homosexuality. The WiP film afforded prominent roles to Black female actors such as Pam Grier, Carol Speed, Ella Reid, Juanita Brown and Ena Hartman. Grier became the biggest and longest enduring star associated with the cycle, and later one of the icons of Blaxploitation. It was in this respect that the cycle made overtures towards being ‘about’ racial issues. Black Mama, White Mama’s selling point is

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its cast’s racial coupling, and it emphasizes the blackness and whiteness of the prisoners in line with other contemporary Blaxploitation titles. Terminal Island’s marketing also makes a selling point of its racial and gender mix.27 But this injection of race only gestures towards the intricacies of the social reality of 1970s America, while the Blaxploitation film offered a far more meaningful connection to black experience.28 Black Mama, White Mama is based on an updating of the central conceit of The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958), where one black and one white prisoner are handcuffed together and learn to overcome their animosity during an escape attempt. Yet, the enmity between white revolutionary Karen (Margaret Markov) and black hooker Daniels (Pam Grier) derives from Karen’s acquiescence to sex with the aforementioned Densmore. Conflict arises out of her collaboration with a guard rather than through any racial conflict. Karen’s middle-class revolutionary background implies that she is knowledgeable about various different activist causes, and so she appeals to what she assumes would be Daniels’s own activism based on her race: ‘You’re Black, don’t you understand?’ She is met with Daniels’s response: ‘Some jive-ass revolution don’t mean shit to me.’ What results is the depoliticization of the black woman, whilst the activism and intellectualism is transposed almost entirely onto the middle-class white woman. There is thus a softening of the black character’s motivation, reducing the racial threat that she poses. Yet the film does not portray Karen as entirely honourable. Daniels demonstrates more integrity by resisting the advances of Densmore, whereas Karen makes the decision to have sex with Densmore with little thought. Nor is she punished for this decision, and it proves a throwaway moment. Grier moves from ex-hooker to guard in Women in Cages but is still given the backstory of rape at the hands of a white man. This time her character, Alabama, demonstrates anger motivated by racial injustice, but that rage is turned on the inmates rather than into coherent political action. When horrified prisoners are shown a field they have to work, she asks them teasingly: ‘Don’t it make you pine for those cane fields in the South?’ Alabama claims that she escaped the States (for the Philippines, where the film is set) because of its racism, and that she learnt her brutal behaviour in Harlem. While she claims her anger is a result of racial mistreatment, the film negates the political implications of this by making it about her (perceived) personal defects, and synonymous with her predatory lesbian instincts.

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In The Big Bird Cage, Grier portrays a character who, as part of an interracial couple (with WiP regular Sid Haig), leads a gang of Filipino men towards an unspecified revolution. But within this, the issue of race is not a motivating factor, nor is there any consideration of the idea of solidarity across political concerns (which Karen suggests in Black Mama, White Mama). This deracializing of the issue is reflected in the animosity between Grier and the black inmate Mickie (Carol Speed). The racial epithets familiar from Blaxploitation (‘Nigga!’) are almost exclusively thrown back and forth between these black characters, which has the effect of divorcing the struggle from racial politics.29 There is no solidarity between characters of similar racial backgrounds; instead, the white man and black woman are the leaders of a revolutionary group in a foreign country, and the group’s motivations are unexplored. Furthermore, when asking for water, Haig refers to one of his Filipino gang as ‘Gunga Din’, a reference to the Indian water carrier of Kipling’s poem that demonstrates a clear lack of racial sensitivity towards the people of the country for which they are allegedly fighting. However, in the cycle’s defence Bev Zalcock makes the claim that, in the WiP movies set in the Philippines, ‘the cast is predominantly black’.30 This is not really accurate unless one stretches the definition of ‘black’ to include Asians, but such revisionism about race is nonetheless insightful because it signifies the extent to which the Philippines and its people are side-lined in favour of race issues seen exclusively in terms of black and white skin colour. Little attention is paid to the Filipino cast members who fill out many of the locations in the background as essentially set dressing. Filipino women populate the locations as guards and prisoners, and males act as assorted heavies. In The Big Bird Cage’s comic interludes, Filipinos act mostly as an audience for Haig’s tomfoolery. Again, the audience watches people watching, with shots of gangs of Filipinos looking bemused or amused by the actions of white people. In one scene in Black Mama, White Mama, topless Filipino women massage a villain, as assorted bad guys stand and witness a white woman being tortured by having electrodes attached to her breasts. Across the cycle, white topless women are all given speaking roles and dominate centre frame, whereas the Filipino women remain silent and at the margins of both the narrative and the screen. The cycle undoubtedly allows us to see and hear black voices, but the lack of politicization of the black characters and the

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dismissive attitude towards the Filipino cast means it wavers between racism and something more progressive in this regard. Across the cycle there are also prominent examples of same sex relationships amongst and between both guards and inmates, relationships which are frequently exploitative in terms of their power imbalances. While there is some acceptance of fluid and ephemeral sexualities, there is also a ridiculing of ‘dykes’ or men who are ‘not naturally inclined’.31 As epitomized by Grier’s portrayal of Alabama in Women in Cages, the lesbian in the WiP cycle is synonymous with the sadistic and the predatory. In Black Mama, White Mama, Matron Densmore exchanges favours for sex, but is also made pathetic and weak by her desires. Densmore is aggressive, slapping prisoners freely, but is ineffectual in front of her boss, a stronger and more sober heterosexual guard. Densmore cries in front of her, begging to be left alone and not confronted about her behaviour. The predatory lesbian is an historic cinematic stereotype, yet Clare Whatling also talks of the figure’s ‘transgressive power,’32 although noting that the transgression prompted by such depictions of lesbians are nearly always ‘recuperated by the end of the film’.33 However, in the WiP cycle, the predatory lesbian is resurrected in some form, but, like the racial characteristics and the ‘revolutionary’ ideals, male and female homosexuality is only a shallow performance, a device that allows something to happen within the narrative but lacking consideration of any deeper consequences. No matter what happens in one film, they simply reappear as motivations for the next (nearly identical) storyline. The male homosexual, however, is treated far more harshly. The homophobia displayed by the prisoners is because they are (often justifiably) anti-men, and homosexuality is seen as a variant of negative male behaviour and a form of masculinity that is defective. In The Big Doll House, one prisoner has been incarcerated because she killed her adulterous husband after his affair with the houseboy. Rocco (Vic Diaz) in The Big Bird Cage is one of two camp and openly gay (and sadistic) guards. To infiltrate the camp, Django (Sid Haig) performs a fake seduction of Rocco in the toilets. Rocco stands beside him to admire his penis, staring down and clearly impressed. Django affects a swishy voice throughout this gay pantomime, and offers an exaggeratedly limp handshake, presented in close-up to make the point clear. Rocco and the other guard react to Django’s arrival by putting on even more affected mannerisms and voices,

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Figure 3.1 Django (Sid Haig) performs a fake seduction of prison guard Rocco (Vic Diaz) in The Big Bird Cage.

Figure 3.2 Rocco is raped by the escaping prisoners in The Big Bird Cage; ‘You’ll finally get to use that thing for what it’s made for.’

arguing and referring to each other as ‘bitches’ as they fight for Django’s attention. These performances blatantly call up the ‘sissy’ stereotype identified by Vito Russo which dominated Hollywood depictions of homosexuality in its first seventy years.34 When an escapee is raped at knifepoint by a gang, Rocco laments that ‘nothing like that ever happens’ to him, and, as an ironic denouement to this thread, during the final battle he is gang raped and murdered by the female inmates. One of the female characters makes him erect through some offcamera and unspecified oral technique, then as she lowers herself onto him he

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is told mockingly that he will ‘finally get to use that thing for what it’s made for’. His hysterical screams are silenced by another prisoner sitting on his face. The cycle uses rape as humour and a justified or ironic punishment in response to perceived sexual misdemeanours (be they homosexuality or criminal or exploitative action). Jokes about rape are delivered equally by male and female characters, and the women are just as likely to use rape and the threat of sexual assault. In The Big Bird Cage, the prisoners sneer at a rape victim when she is too traumatized to reveal the details of her ordeal, on the grounds that ‘you owe it to us’, and ‘she has no right not to tell us, she’s the only one around here who ever gets any and she won’t even tell us about it’. Django, the closest the film has to a male ‘hero’, announces to Terry (Anitra Ford), after he has kidnapped her on behalf of his ‘revolutionary’ gang, that he is going to rape her, to which she responds: ‘You can’t rape me, I like sex’. In The Big Doll House, Collier (Judy Brown) is internally examined by a female guard but is far more receptive to being examined by a male doctor, and even shows signs that she will enjoy the intrusive attention. Earlier in the same film Harry (Haig again) denies he intends to rape an inmate, saying: ‘I ain’t gonna rape one of them, one of them is gonna rape me.’ Later, he is allowed an extended grope of Grear (Pam Grier) through the bars in exchange for passing her a smuggled letter. Once again, this is represented with the inclusion of shots of other inmates watching. Those looking on, and Grear herself (despite supposedly being a lesbian within the narrative), enjoy the action. It is then revealed that is has been a deception and that the letter was not even addressed to Grear. Later, she attempts to bribe Harry to supply her with heroin by inviting him to grope her again, although this time she traps his fingers in her vagina and refuses to let him go. In the course of The Big Doll House, women are routinely sexually tortured (whipped while topless, having electric devices attached to their breasts), in a prison presided over by the governor, Miss Dietrich (Christiane Schmidtmer). At the climax she is taken hostage and Alcott (WiP regular Roberta Collins) strips Harry to his underwear at gunpoint and attempts to force him to rape Dietrich in the back of a truck. His main objection is that the act will take place in front of other people, and his inability to perform it is the result of embarrassment and performance anxiety rather than moral rectitude. In keeping with the cycle’s attitude towards the homosexual, the film caricatures

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the idea of the ‘right’ kind of man as one who can get it up for a woman on demand. Within these moments we see sexual assault as frivolous, a game in which one can cheat, a joke, a test of manhood and a justifiable form of revenge. As Harry is cajoled at gunpoint, the film emphasizes shots of Dietrich, her blouse ripped open by Alcott, looking aghast. That only mid shots of her are those of her crying ‘no’ means that a distance is maintained from the potential horror of the situation. This distance is also maintained by the humiliating predicaments in which Harry finds himself. Being trapped by Grear’s genitals, and forced to strip and engage in sexual activity, mirrors the abuse endured by the women throughout the film (and across the entire cycle). But even this reading of the scene is usurped when Harry, after molesting Dietrich’s breasts (through her clothes), finally finds himself aroused and sets about enjoying his task. The assault is curtailed by the arrival of the army, which signifies the start of the final shootout – where the film switches back to the trope of violent women going out in a blaze of glory, for which the cycle is famous. Dietrich dies in an explosion during the final shootout, and despite the alarming nature of the near rape, she avoids the ironic fate of Rocco in The Big Bird Cage and Alabama in Women in Cages, who is sexually assaulted and then drowned by a gang of Filipino men. That Harry, who, during the course of the film, has joked about acting out rape, duped a woman into letting him grope her and is about to commit an act of revenge rape on behalf of someone else, is referred to by Chris Nashawaty as a ‘sympathetic smuggler’35 reveals the depth of revisionism in popular writing

Figure 3.3 Prisoner Alcott (WiP regular Roberta Collins) attempts to get Harry (Haig again) to rape Miss Dietrich (Christiane Schmidtmer) as an act of revenge in The Big Doll House.

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about the WiP cycle. It is easy to forget these moments in the films’ general high camp tone, but it is in such scenes and fragments that the cycle retains its relevance as subversive cinema.

Conclusion This chapter is clearly not a comprehensive analysis of the WiP cycle. Instead, I have used certain 1970s WiP films as a template and starting point to rethink approaching cult texts from the 1970s, and in particular to rethink the difficulties of studying a cycle in which contradiction is so prevalent. There is no clear moral or ethical quandary at their centre. They lack any signposting of their moral stance. Characters show kindness, but then spout racist insults. They are sexually abused, but then tolerate, or even attempt to enact, the sexual abuse and rape of others. They are presented as weak, but also sadistic. They are given motivation for their bad behaviour, but that doesn’t prevent them from falling victim to ironic forms of justice. The innocent die or remain trapped (Women in Cages ends with a heroin addict forced into a brothel) while the guilty go free. It is for viewers to decide their own moral position in relation to such depictions and representations. But they are highly relevant to today’s cinema culture, with its debates around minority and female representation, and the use of terms such as ‘whitewashing’. To broaden my study so that it is relevant to the 1970s cult landscape as a whole, one could argue that the biker film was once subversive because it depicted the core ethos of the counterculture. It is subversive now because it promotes the violent reactionary outlaw adorned with Nazi imagery. The rape revenge film was once subversive because it demonstrated the raped woman’s refusal to be killed off. It is subversive now because it forces us to confront prolonged scenes of sexual violence. The slasher film was once subversive because it depicted ambiguous gender roles. It is subversive now because it glorifies voyeuristic violence. The WiP film can be approached in the same way, in that it has a superficial, but nonetheless consistent, relationship to feminist politics. Yet these films are disrespectful, distasteful, violent and semipornographic. They lack a coherent message, are endlessly divisive and confusing, and trade on a sense of continual disorder. But it is precisely this

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which makes them subversive. In a media universe of HD and 4K imagery, an academy built on Western liberal values, and culture wars provoked by the topics explored in this chapter, these films subvert our understanding of what constitutes ‘quality’, the progressive and the culturally important precisely because of their obnoxious and dysfunctional elements. Bev Zalcock argues that: ‘Dubious and prurient they may be, the WIP cycle has consistently provided images of women at the centre of their narratives. These images may not be positive but they are always dangerous and this is more than other Hollywood genres can offer’.36 These films are worth re-visiting precisely because they are dubious, prurient and frequently wallow in what we might call ‘negative’ representations. By embracing the uglier side of these films, by accepting them as inevitable and vital to our understanding of them, the cult critic can maybe take a step towards being as subversive and transgressive as the films they describe.

Notes 1 Pam Cook, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, Screen, 17/2, Summer 1976, p. 125. 2 Ibid., p. 127. 3 Henry Jenkins, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (New York University Press, 2006), p. 103. 4 In doing so, I will be considering the cycle as a whole, adopting Peter Stanfield’s methodology of analysing repetition and recurrence associated with serial production. See Hoodlum Movies: Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966–1972 (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018). 5 Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974). 6 Ibid., p. 9. 7 Ibid., p. 9. 8 See Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), for the nuances of an audience or critic seeking out the discarded film. Also, Jeffrey Sconce, ‘Trashing the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style’, Screen, 36/4, Winter 1995, pp. 371–93. 9 In Chris Nashawaty, Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman: King of the B Movie (New York: Abrams, 2013), p. 109. 10 Mattias Frey, Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today’s Art Film Culture (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), p. 7.

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11 Of course, there is a long history of the relationship between trash and art cinema. See Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant Garde (Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 12 Frey, Extreme Cinema, p. 7. 13 Ibid., p. 3. 14 Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art, p. 11. 15 I acknowledge that I am taking a very Western-centric focus here, and that censorship culture in other parts of the world is still often very oppressive. 16 Bev Zalcock, Renegade Sisters: Girl Gangs on Film (London: Creation Books, 2001), p. 32. 17 See Bill Osgerby, ‘Sleazy riders: exploitation, “otherness”, and transgression in the 1960s biker movie’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 31/3, 2003, pp. 98–108. 18 Jacinda Read, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 33. 19 See Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 20 In an article in the Guardian, 26 May 2015, entitled ‘Mad Max: Fury Road is less radical than its B-movie influences’, Noah Berlatsky begins by speculating why Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t normally considered a WiP film (probably because it hasn’t got a prison in it) and then goes on to sing the praises of progressive representations in the WiP cycle. 21 Clare Whatling, Screen Dreams: Fantasising Lesbians in Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 80. 22 Zalcock, Renegade Sisters, p. 34. 23 Ibid., p. 28. 24 Frey, Extreme Cinema, p. 26. 25 Ibid., p. 26. 26 Variations of this tendency can be found, minus the nudity, in male prison films as diverse in tone as Scum (Alan Clarke, 1979) or Porridge (Dick Clement, 1979). 27 The poster’s tagline specifies: ‘Men and women . . . black and white’. 28 Peter Stanfield writes that the politics of Blaxploitation is divorced from the specificities of the black liberation movement, instead focusing on representing a version of black inner city street life. In doing so however, Blaxploitation films offer a far more meaningful relationship to black experience in American than the WiP movie. See ‘Walking the streets: black gangsters and the “abandoned city” in the 1970s blaxploitation cycle’, in Lee Grieveson and Esther Sonnet (eds), Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of American the Gangster Film (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 281–300.

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29 Exceptions include Anitra Ford’s character being called a ‘skinny honky’ by Grier. Ford also remarks that an Asian prisoner is ‘a good looking dish, if you like chop suey’. 30 Zalcock, Renegade Sisters, p. 29. 31 This comment is spoken by Ford’s character in The Big Bird Cage. 32 Whatling, Screen Dreams, p. 79. 33 Ibid., p. 80. 34 Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). 35 Nashawaty, Roger Corman, p. 112. 36 Zalcock, Renegade Sisters, p. 36.

Bibliography Berlatsky, Noah, ‘Mad Max: Fury Road is less radical than its B-movie influences’, Guardian, 26 May 2015. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/ may/26/mad-max-fury-road-less-radical-exploitation-influences (accessed 22 June 2018). Clover, Carol, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1993). Cook, Pam, ‘Exploitation films and feminism’, Screen, 17/2, Summer 1976, pp 122–7. Frey, Mattias, Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today’s Art Film Culture (Rutgers, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2016). Hawkins, Joan, Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant Garde (Minnesota, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Jenkins, Henry, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006). Johnstone, Claire, ‘Women’s cinema as counter-cinema’, in Claire Johnston (ed.), Notes on Women’s Cinema (Society for Education in Film and Television: London, 1973). Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16/3, Autumn 1975, pp 6–18. Nashawaty, Chris, Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman: King of the B Movie (New York: Abrams, 2013). Osgerby, Bill, ‘Sleazy riders: exploitation, “otherness”, and transgression in the 1960s biker movie’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 31/3, 2003, pp 98–108. Read, Jacinda, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Russo, Vito, The Celluloid Closet (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). Sconce, Jeffrey, ‘Trashing the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style’, Screen, 36/4, Winter 1995, pp. 371–93.

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Stanfield, Peter, ‘Walking the streets: black gangsters and the “abandoned city” in the 1970s blaxploitation cycle’, in Lee Grieveson and Esther Sonnet (eds), Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of American the Gangster Film (Rutgers, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 281–300. Stanfield, Peter, Hoodlum Movies: Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966–1972 (Rutgers, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2018). Taylor, Greg, Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2001). Vogel, Amos, Film as a Subversive Art (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974). Whatling, Clare, Screen Dreams: Fantasising Lesbians in Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Zalcock, Bev, Renegade Sisters: Girl Gangs on Film (London: Creation Books, 2001).

Part Two

From the Vigilante to the Violated

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Death Wish: A Vigilante’s Journey, an Urban Tragedy William Gombash

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to examine the film Death Wish (1974) as it relates to the subject of law and order in America in the 1970s. The specific focus will be on the urban landscape; theories of revenge; the historic context of the American vigilante films of the 1970s; and the relevance of race and the civil rights movement to these subjects. Over forty years after its release, Michael Winner’s Death Wish has seemingly disappeared as a significant statement regarding crime and punishment in America. Lacking the iconic catchphrases of Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1972) or the cinematic dynamism of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Death Wish has faded into becoming a relative afterthought of the subgenre of vigilante cinema. However, at the time of its release Death Wish powerfully resonated with a disgruntled white lower and middle class that feared crime and felt that the traditional means of protection and justice – the police and the courts – had become for some the problem and not the solution as far as crime in America was concerned. This was a group of citizens who in the mid1960s increasingly voted for candidates who took a tougher stance on law and order, railed against Constitutional reforms to protect the rights of accused criminals and were part of a backlash against civil rights legislation.1 So what were the social and political variables that allowed Death Wish to touch a section of the public that had become so disillusioned with the system of law and order that they cheered a vigilante hero fighting the battle that they appeared to wish they could wage themselves? 91

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The analysis in this chapter explores the narrative of Death Wish on three levels. First, as a film about location, where the tragedies associated with the alleged failures of the American judicial system are played out as a form of guerrilla warfare in the arena of a dangerous American urban landscape. Second, as a film about motivation, in this case the factors which motivate the protagonist, Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson), to become a vigilante, as well as the reasons why certain audiences identified with and cheered on his actions. Finally, it explores Death Wish itself, which was produced at the beginning of the post-civil rights movement in America, as a decidedly narrow, white man’s view of justice without regard for complex demographically based problems associated with crime in American cities.

Landscapes of injustice ‘It is sometimes said that American texts are about trying to find oneself in the landscape’2. The themes of American cinema are often firmly planted in a landscape right from the establishing shot. Whether it be the panoramas of the Texas Panhandle in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), the dystopian Hades of futuristic Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), or Monument Valley in any number of John Ford westerns, each gives credence to the concepts that ‘settings are not merely backdrops for the action, but symbolic extensions of theme and characterizations’.3 Likewise, Death Wish is heavily predicated on the significance of setting. More specifically, it focuses on the thematic contrasts between the chaos and criminality of the urban versus the tranquil bliss of the rural rooted in nostalgia for the American past. Significantly, this tale of urban vigilantism does not begin in the mean streets of New York City but in the tropical tranquillity and isolation of Hawaii. In the opening scene, Kersey and his wife are enjoying the pastoral splendours of Hawaii in total isolation. There is no one on the beach apart from them. Even the sunset is reserved for Kersey and his wife alone. At a luau the happy couple watch the islanders perform for them, amused by what they apparently regard as the quaintness of the dancing, food and other native customs. ‘Paul, I don’t want to go back home,’ Joanna

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Kersey (Hope Lange) wistfully tells her husband. And who indeed would want to do so? The cinematic projection of the Hawaiian paradise is very far removed from the crime and decay that affected the urban centres of mainland America in 1974. However, the ‘Hawaii’ in Death Wish is a construct, looking like a travelogue of what only a tourist would see, complete with friendly natives, luaus and sandy beaches. The socio-economic reality behind this construct is never revealed to the moviegoer. From the pastoral splendour of the islands, the film cuts to an establishing shot of New York. Traditionally, cinematic establishing shots of the city would include views of the epic skyscrapers like the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings rising above a teaming metropolis glistening with reflected sunlight or illuminated by the magnificence of the lights from the buildings themselves. At the beginning of the age of the skyscraper – some seventy or so years before the release of Death Wish – these elements of the urban landscape were represented as essentially modern and as aesthetically pleasing wonders. As was written of New York at the time: ‘Atmospheric conditions have rendered the skyline beautiful; its great dimensions have been softened by the lighting and the fog. The skyline appears picturesque and welcoming.’4 But Winner does not provide the moviegoer with such aesthetically pleasing images of this city. There are no shots of the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset or Central Park on a beautiful Sunday in May, nor does George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue play on the soundtrack. This is not Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), which opens with a glorious montage of the iconic symbols of the city from the Empire State Building to Yankee Stadium, leading to a final musical crescendo with a glorious firework display against an evening skyline. Allen was born and raised in New York, and thus his sense of the visual poetry of the city is understandable, but, by contrast, Death Wish was a nightmare of almost gothic horror proportions, because, according to The New York Times film critic Vincent Canby, it was ‘produced by tourists’5 including an Italian producer, an English director and a screenwriter from Los Angeles. Winner’s vision of New York is far from beautiful, picturesque or welcoming. This particular New York, with its sunrise emerging out of what looks like a nuclear winter and its distorted music track sounding like something from a post-modern horror film, is in stark contrast with the lilting sounds of the indigenous music heard in the previous scene at the Hawaiian luau. The city is

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grey and stark and the subway cars are covered with the urban grime and graffiti of a modern American metropolis. This same toxic dust also covers the slow-moving traffic. The Kerseys’ yellow taxi remains stationary in the traffic, caught in the inertia of the civilization represented by the decaying infrastructure of New York. Is it any wonder that Joanna Kersey did not want to go home? Who could possibly want to live in an environment drained of colour and sunlight? New York City is a corpse: the city as represented by Winner has taken on the characteristics of a victim of a vampire that has drained the life both from it and its citizens. In his 1968 acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention, Richard Nixon referred to America’s urban centres, racked by crime and social discontent, as the ‘Valley of Despair’ and promised that ‘the long dark night for America is about to end’.6 Although Nixon’s negative vision of America’s cities is never specifically referenced in Death Wish it is clearly replicated in the aforementioned establishing shots and in many of the scenes that follow. Upon Kersey’s return, Sam Kreutzer (William Redfield), one of his coworkers, greets him with the latest murder statistics. ‘There were fifteen murders the first week and twenty-one last week in this goddamned city’, Sam remarks. Regardless of whether these statistics are meant to scare Kersey or the audience, they lack context (a frequent media ploy where statistics are concerned). For example, we are not told how many of those murders were on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where people like Kersey and Sam are more likely to live, or in the bombed-out slums in the Bronx, Brooklyn or Harlem. Two years prior to the release of Death Wish, The New York Times analysed crime statistics in New York City and found that ‘the slum precincts were found to have far higher rates of crime and violence than the more affluent precincts’.7 Sam suggests that all ‘decent people’ should run away from the city, thus presumably leaving New York to the ‘indecent’ people. However, not only does Kersey not want to run away from the city, but he has empathy for the disenfranchised who cannot afford to do so. Sam accuses Kersey of being a ‘bleeding heart liberal’ and Kersey acknowledges that his ‘heart does bleed a little for the underprivileged’. Sam retorts that ‘the underprivileged’ are ‘beating our goddamned brains out.’ Sam then offers a chilling solution to crime in New York City: ‘Stick them’ he suggests – apparently meaning the under-privileged – ‘in

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concentration camps’. Kersey does not react to Sam’s reference to concentration camps, not even blinking, and his lack of reaction makes it difficult to gauge what is intended by Sam’s remark. Is he intended to be so ridiculous that people are supposed to laugh at this ludicrous statement – made only about thirty years after the end of the Second World War and the revelation of the horrors of the camps? But if his reference is a joke, then who is supposed to laugh? Or is Sam a kind of Cassandra, warning people that if our democratically elected officials will not deal with law and order then people might look to a dictator to reduce crime and make Americans feel safe? Later that same day, Kersey’s boss, Ives (Chris Gimpel) asks him: ‘How does it feel to be back in the war zone after Hawaii?’ But if New York is indeed a war zone, then who is the enemy? In this case it is not an external occupying force but is represented as coming from within, taking the form of young, sometimes minority ethnic, criminals preying mostly on white people. But what Kersey does not know at this particular moment is that the terrors alluded to by Sam and his boss are nearer than he realizes, and that his return has set in motion events that will cost the life of his wife, the sanity of his daughter, and his own soul. The stage has been set, and the props are in place to begin the tragedy of Paul Kersey and his quest for revenge. It does not take long for the ‘war’ to come to Kersey and his family.

Vengeance by proxy While Kersey is at work, three young men identified in the credits as Freak 1 (Jeff Goldblum), Freak 2 (Christopher Logan) and Spraycan (Gregory Rozakis) spot his wife and their daughter Carol (Kathleen Tolan) in a local grocery store. After they have found the address to which the groceries are to be delivered, one of them knocks on the door of the Kersey apartment, pretending to be the delivery man. When Carol opens the door the three men break in, murdering Joanna and raping Carol, leaving her in a catatonic state. When Kersey talks to the police about the crime it immediately becomes obvious that he will never achieve justice. He asks a police detective about the probability that the men who murdered his wife and raped his daughter will be caught, but the response is simply a rather impotent: ‘Just a chance. In this city, that is the way that it is.’

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Encapsulated in that single quotation is the overarching message of Death Wish, namely that the American legal system is a failure. The men who stole the lives of his wife and his daughter, and even his own life – if life can be defined as more than a beating heart but a faith in life as well – will never be arrested, tried or punished. The visceral appeal of Death Wish lies within Kersey’s desire to act, to become a vigilante, and the way in which it encourages audiences to identify with him and cheer him on as he assumes a role in which the police have failed and which some in the audience would like to take on themselves. In his review of the film, Vincent Canby declared that Death Wish ‘exploits very real fears and social problems and suggests simple-minded remedies’.8 And according to Pauline Kael: During the sixties and seventies, with war in Vietnam, political assassinations, and the rise of urban crime, violence became part of our everyday life. Inevitably, the movie screen became bloodier, and while movies about bad guys and antiheroes were still popular, vigilante films became equally successful.9

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a vigilante as ‘a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate); broadly: a self-appointed doer of justice’.10 However, this definition is insufficient in order to understand what motivates Kersey to act and, in turn, sections of the audience to identify with him. When he finally hits the streets armed with an old western six shooter it is not just about justice deferred, it is about revenge. In addition, this revenge involves more than punishing the criminals that Kersey suspects the law will never touch: this is revenge against the state and the system of law and order that failed to protect Kersey’s family. What is revenge? According to Ian McKee and N.T. Feather: ‘The desire for revenge often appears to be a central motive in responses to a perceived injustice.’11 Research in the field of human behaviour indicates that there is a greater propensity to engage in acts of revenge if one or more of the following conditions are met: ‘The offense caused permanent injury, there was malicious intent or gross negligence on the part of the perpetrator, the perpetrator did not apologize or express remorse, and the perpetrator was wholly responsible for committing the offense that led to dire consequences.’12

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For Paul Kersey, his wife is dead and his daughter is in a permanent catatonic state. He has lost two of the dearest things in his life because of the premeditated acts of three assailants who will never apologize because they never will be caught. So, Kersey’s revenge has to be revenge by proxy. Although he can never achieve satisfaction for the loss of his wife and daughter, he can act as an avenger for other citizens. By taking to the streets as a vigilante he can create a sense of balance for his fellow New Yorkers, many of whom now believe that justice is not being served, because when the state fails to achieve justice for one citizen, all citizens are victimized. The justice system, the state, will try to stop Kersey not because what he is doing is illegal or immoral but because he is an embarrassment to the state. Anytime that Kersey kills a mugger on the subway he is a public relations nightmare for the state. As a result, every time that Kersey commits an act as a vigilante, he is taking revenge not just against the criminal, he is taking revenge against the state for its perceived failures to catch and punish criminals. Paul Kersey is represented as someone who takes the law into his own hands in order to restore balance or redress the imbalance caused by those who have done harm to society and who will not be punished by the state for their crimes. Therefore, Kersey’s violent acts of retribution offered a type of catharsis for certain filmgoers in 1974 who felt that the legal system had become unbalanced because the guilty could apparently get away with murder. This relates to the manner in which revenge can be seen as ‘as a way to restore justice and reinstate balance that was disrupted by the original offense’.13 The imbalance created by the original offence may also be perceived as an attack on one’s position or status, and revenge as ‘concerned with the quest for status, in particular, the reassertion or establishment of one’s status when it has been diminished, or one believes that it has been diminished, by the actions of another’.14 For Kersey, and those who cheered for him, that status as an American who was entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness could be redressed only by vigilante justice. Traditionally, in revenge tragedies, ‘revenge is perceived as the only means to address wrongs at multiple levels’.15 These multiple levels are exemplified in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which ‘represents Hieronimo’s revenge which is partly that of a grieving father and partly that of a political scourge [as] a terrible cleansing of a corrupt state’.16 Death Wish works at both levels in relation to the revenge of the grieving father and the revenge of a citizen

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against a state that he perceives as corrupt. Kersey is the literal grieving father seeking revenge against the criminals who caused him harm. The greatest reminder of the harm done to him is perhaps his daughter who, although still living, is no longer psychologically stable. Kersey’s status as a father is called into question in his own mind because he was not there to protect her. But his father’s guilt is further amplified when the doctors who are taking care of Kersey’s daughter tell him that seeing his daughter could release additional painful memories associated with her assault. As a result, for Kersey his daughter’s psychological condition is a constant reminder that he failed and continues to fail as a father. Worse still, he cannot achieve justice for his daughter. That is why Kersey feels that he must take to the streets to protect the daughters of other fathers. To this end, the assault on Kersey’s daughter had to be presented not just as a criminal act against one person but also as a social act representing a threat to all daughters.

White fears, hard justice The gang rape of Kersey’s daughter is filmed in exacting detail which fully bears out its sadistic nature. Although Kersey does not witness the rape, the audience must observe this innocent, wide-eyed young white woman apparently forced to commit unspeakable acts. Although none of the assailants are black, one of them, who wears a bandana similar to those frequently worn by members of street gangs, carries a can of spray paint that he uses not only to vandalize Kersey’s home with graffiti but also to spray his daughter’s buttocks with red paint. This symbolic act of sodomy goes beyond the assault on one young woman. Kersey’s daughter is not just a young white woman, she is all young white women. In the large cities of the 1970s, the can of spray paint was often represented not just as a symbol of vandalism but of all urban crime. Death Wish encourages the audience to identify with the victim on a personal and social level: Kersey’s daughter is being sodomized not just by a young deviant identified as ‘Spraycan’ in the closing credits but also by the permissive social system that created him. Graffiti was a symbol of the urban blight in the late 1960s and 1970s. The New York Times in 1972 referred to graffiti and the decaying of the subways

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and the public transit infrastructure as an ‘epidemic’.17 In 1973, the New York mayor, John Lindsay, stated that graffiti was both a demoralizing influence on the residents of the city as well as a safety hazard, and the writer of the article described those who defaced public property with cans of spray paint as ‘graffiti addicts’.18 A letter to the editor of The New York Times by Staten Island resident George Jochnowitz in 1973 postulated that graffiti, left unchecked in urban centres like New York City, might bring about an end to civilization and thereby ‘New York will become a backwater’.19 The association of graffiti with the crimes of rape and vandalism was thus part of a wider ideological discourse about criminality. But what is being implied here? That those who spray graffiti are likely to be, or to become, rapists and murderers too? That graffiti spraying should be punished by vigilante action? Such arguments clearly lack context and are fallacious, but in the dark light of a movie theatre, with graphic depictions of unspeakable acts against young women, who has the stomach for logic? Rhetorical manipulation in cinematic terms is a powerful means of affecting the attitudes of an audience. For example, Steven Spielberg in Munich (2005) deliberately manipulates ‘the model of victimhood so as to expose the underlying trauma that supports it’.20 The narrative of films that focus on victimhood ‘encourage identification with victimhood, and thus indirectly, extreme acts of retaliation and aggression’.21 In D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), Ben Cameron (Henry B. Wallthal) seeks revenge against Gus (Walter Long), described in the credits as ‘A Renegade Negro’. According to Griffith’s interpretation of the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War, the South Carolina State Legislature, with its overwhelming black representation, passed a law that allowed for the intermarriage of blacks and whites. Gus, emboldened by this new law, asks Cameron’s younger sister Flora (Mae Marsh), to marry him. Flora violently rebukes Gus and runs away from him in terror. Gus, not to be denied, chases after her. As Melvyn Stokes puts it ‘According to The Birth of a Nation, the privileging of social equality encouraged black men to begin pursuing white women in order to “marry” them (marriage in this sense acting as a metaphor for rape).’22 Rather than be raped by Gus, Flora commits suicide by throwing herself off a cliff before he can catch her. To exact his revenge and redress his version of law and order in the South of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, Cameron creates the extra-legal vigilante group the Ku

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Klux Klan. Cameron and the Klan catch and then lynch Gus because Cameron sees himself, Flora and the South as a whole as victims of a legal system that protects the rights of criminals above the rights of law-abiding citizens. Thus, the rape of Kersey’s daughter encourages the audience to identify with Kersey, the grieving father, in the same way that the attempted rape and the suicide of Flora encourages the audience to identify with the father figure, Cameron, with Kersey and Cameron represented as generalized American citizens betrayed by a legal and social system that will not give them justice. Thus, the vigilante Kersey in Death Wish and the Ku Klux Klansmen in The Birth of a Nation represent the attitude of victimhood that has historically motivated all vigilantes. In the United States, the belief in a system of vigilante justice is almost as old as the Republic itself. The efficacy and acceptability of seeking justice as an individual right, bypassing the larger, official justice system, which is often perceived as politically motivated, is well rooted in American history. Richard Nixon, who in 1968 would run for president in part on a campaign to restore law and order, wrote in 1967: ‘Our judges have gone too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces. Our opinion-makers have gone too far in promoting the doctrine that when a law is broken, society, not the criminal is to blame.’23 When individuals believe that the formal system of law and order has become incapable of protecting the individual safety rights of segments of American society, then certain individuals come to believe that it is their inalienable right to take the law into their own hands. They choose this path to ‘law and order’ because they feel that the government and its associated law enforcement organizations are too far removed from the community to be able effectively to enforce the laws and protect the community. Traditionally, the vigilante works within the narrow parameters of a small community and not a larger central governmental entity. As a result, from the perspective of the vigilante, as in the case of Kersey, the capture and punishment of a criminal by the vigilante is an expression of ‘the will of the community rather than the power of a distant and alien government’.24 Although the crimes in Death Wish take place in an eastern urban setting, in many ways the film draws from the tropes of the Western. Traditions of American justice in the hands of those without a lawman’s badge are more akin to the legends of the Old West than to the more ‘civilized’ areas of the East. On the western frontier of America, west of the Mississippi, law-abiding men

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protected their farms, ranches and homesteads – their small part of Manifest Destiny – with a Colt six shooter or a Winchester repeating rifle. The westerns of Anthony Mann, including Winchester 73 (1950) and The Man from Laramie (1955), as well as John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), work within the archetype of revenge as a means of justice wrought by a protagonist who is not a lawman.25 The Fritz Lang westerns, The Return of Frank James (1940) and Rancho Notorious (1952), work within this archetype as well.26 The narrative of Death Wish provides an ample, if not simplistic, counterpoint to what many perceived as the weak values of law and order of the eastern urban centres of America, and indeed western society in general, in the latter half of the twentieth century, where, even in modern suburbia, a man can still take the law into his own hands to protect what is his. As Death Wish progresses, Kersey is sent by his boss to Arizona to design a new housing development. The trip is intended not only to get him out of New York City but to also help him to focus less on the tragedies in his life. Just as Hawaii is framed as a tropical paradise still unblemished by the crime of the urban centres on the mainland of the United States, so Arizona is represented as remaining locked in the myth of an earlier time, framed as a place where criminals fear to tread because frontier and vigilante justice is still alive and the bad guys know it. ‘Can’t own a gun in New York’, Kersey tells Aimes Jainchill (Stuart Margolin), a prosperous Arizona land developer and unapologetic gun owner. ‘Here, I hardly know a man who doesn’t.’ Jainchill replies. ‘And unlike your city, we can walk our streets at night and feel safe. Muggers out here, they just plain get their asses blown up.’ The carefully created image of ‘Arizona’ explicitly frames it as a place that has continued to adhere to the traditional American values of criminal justice. This is a place that Wyatt Earp – frontier lawman, gunfighter and an alleged hero of the gunfight at the OK Corral – would have recognized had he still been alive in 1974. The citizens of 1974 Arizona may have given up their horses for motorized transport but this is still a time when men carry guns and the righteous enforce swift justice with those guns. At least that is the way Arizona’s reality is framed in Death Wish, and it is certainly nothing like the film’s New York City. Winner does not show the desert wastelands of Arizona, only the stage show frontier western town where fake cowboys put on a law and order act for

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the tourists, and a brand new suburban community financed and designed by a white man. The film does not address, acknowledge or even show the original inhabitants of Arizona, the Native Americans or Hispanics, and in particular avoids any mention of clashes of culture between them and the incomers. Like the film’s Hawaii, Arizona is represented in a selective, picture postcard, twodimensional fashion, as the perfect straw man in comparison to the violent New York City. However, an examination of crime statistics of both Arizona and Hawaii reveal that the postcard image is in fact a fraud. A 1978 report from the Arizona State Justice Planning Agency, entitled Update on Crime in Arizona, found that at about the time of the release of Death Wish, ‘the Arizona crime rate rose sharply from 1972 to 1974’.27 Even Hawaii, that pristine tourist pleasure garden so lovingly presented in the opening of Death Wish, bears little resemblance to reality. Thus, according to a 1986 study by the University of Hawaii, an examination of the crime statistics from the 1970s ‘found a statistically significant relationship between tourism and murder/homicide, robbery, rape, and burglary’.28 Such facts rob Kersey’s vigilante tactics of much of the justification that the film is at pains to provide. Regardless of the veracity of the Old West tropes in Death Wish, vigilantism in the United States is part of the historic fabric of the nation.29 In San Francisco in the 1850s, a period of the nineteenth century in which the vigilante movement was particularly active, there were significant vigilante movements that had a profound impact upon the society and politics of the city. During a particularly violent two-year period, vigilante committees led by nativist businessmen attacked primarily Irish-Catholic immigrants as a means of exercising political and social control of a city that the vigilantes believed had descended into chaos and rampant crime.30 This, along with the actions of the Ku Klux Klan mentioned earlier, demonstrates how vigilante activities in American history have served as political and social means of forcing the will of one social or ethnic group on another. Vigilantism has been closely associated with racists in particular. By contrast, the creators of Death Wish have constructed the film’s narrative in order to try to avoid seeming to frame crime and vigilantism as a racial issue. The acts of the vigilante in Death Wish are not represented as being motivated by fears of nativism or ‘miscegenation’ but by the failure of law enforcement to clean up crime in the streets of New York City, something that impacts all races equally.

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To reinforce the non-racist framing of Death Wish, the film-makers have racially ‘balanced’ both the victims and perpetrators of the criminal acts depicted. The police officer who first talks to Kersey about the crimes against his family is a sympathetic black man working hard on the front lines of what is presented as a war zone while white detectives sit back in the relative safety of their offices. The three assailants of Kersey’s wife and daughter are white, as are the first two victims of his acts of vigilantism. One of the men who attack Kersey on the subway is a white man wearing a leather jacket with an American flag sewn on the back, and his clothes cause him to resemble Wyatt, the cocaine-dealing hippie played by Peter Fonda in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1968). The symbolism here may relate more to intertwining the evils of drugs and crime as opposed to addressing the more complex socio-economic issues associated with crime and the city. The first man that Kersey kills is later identified as a drug addict. In 1968, during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, presidential candidate Richard Nixon pledged to declare a war on drugs that would pursue the ‘narcotics peddlers who are corrupting the lives of the children of this country’.31 However, Nixon’s ‘war on drugs’ was predicated on his contention that there was an ‘epidemic’ of drug abuse, particularly among the youth, but this was based on faulty data and motivated by his need to ‘fulfil his anti-crime agenda’.32 Thus it appears as if Nixon’s false narrative regarding drugs and crime became part of the false narrative of Death Wish. After the vigilante tactics of Kersey make him a folk hero in New York City, there is a scene in which a television station is interviewing a woman who fended off her assailants with a hat pin. The character is Alma Lee Brown (Helen Martin), an elderly black woman who is portrayed as feisty, a strong fighter and inspired by Kersey. And yet, in certain ways, Brown’s character harks back to a racial stereotype long prevalent in American cinema: the ‘Mammy’. Brown as a ‘Mammy’ character perfectly represents the fallacy of the appeal to tradition and seems to fit nicely into the stereotypical image of the safe and reliable older domestic black woman that begins with The Birth of a Nation. In that film, the servants were referred to as the ‘Good Souls’, people who were willing fight side by side with their former masters in order to ensure the protection of white folks and their property against laws that were enacted to help the freed slaves. Almost twenty-five years later, former slaves would once

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again be defending their former masters against Yankee ‘oppressors’ in Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939). ‘Mammy’ in Gone with the Wind may have been played by a real black actor (Hattie McDaniel) and not a white one like Jennie Lee, who wore blackface to play the likewise named ‘Mammy’ in The Birth of a Nation, but the stereotypical qualities that motivated both black characters to act in accordance with the norms of white audiences remained the same in both films. ‘People all over the country knew the black woman as Mammy, the reliable servant. The Mammy we first thought of was the steadfast housekeeper in Gone with the Wind (1939),’33 who fought the invading Yankees with the same passion as any Confederate soldier. Thirty-four years after Gone with the Wind and fifty-nine years after The Birth of a Nation, Alma Lee Brown may have been played by a Black actor, and she may now have had a proper name of her own, but to what extent was she still depicted as a servant representing the interests of white citizens over black ones? The ‘Mammy’ of 1974 was still fighting both Reconstruction and the civil rights movement. Unfortunately, for almost 100 years, particularly in the South, the law was not enforced, and black citizens still suffered the indignities of Jim Crow and the violent injustice of lynching. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s, when the United States Supreme Court began to overturn the injustices brought on by segregation and a lack of due process in cases involving black people, that the tide of institutional racism began to turn. The issues in the cases involved may not have always had to do with crime in the cities but they were invariably tied to justice and race. It is not that racism is not addressed in Death Wish, it is that the approach to the issue is both confusing and disturbing. For example, there is a scene at a party that Kersey is attending that seems to mock the progress America was trying achieve through the civil rights movement. Two of the guests, a white man and a white woman, discuss the vigilante killer and whether or not he is a racist. The former says: ‘Tell you one thing. The guy’s a racist. He kills more blacks than whites.’ The latter responds: ‘More blacks are muggers than whites. What do you want to do? Increase the number of white muggers so that we have racial equality among muggers?’ ‘Racial equality among muggers?’ the white man asks laughingly, ‘I love it.’ Indeed, this is another instance of the narrative of Death Wish – the first being the ‘stick them in concentration camps’ line – creating a curious social disconnect

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regarding the struggles of people of colour against racism and white people’s fear of crime. Conflating affirmative action, a series of legal measures enacted to redress hundreds of years of racial discrimination, with the racial balance of criminals is not only patently false but also begs the question: what is the point of the joke? Is the audience supposed to laugh at its obvious absurdity and to dislike the white man and woman? Or is the audience supposed to see it as a legitimate attack on an ‘enemy’: black people who allegedly not only receive preferential treatment in employment and education but who are also more likely to mug you in the streets, thus making the speakers appear not as racists but simply as commentators on the social climate in the United States in 1974? During the Second World War when the Three Stooges and Bugs Bunny were mocking Hitler, Germany was a legitimate enemy and a real threat to America and its freedom. The jokes were meant to mock the fascists. However, in Death Wish, the use of humour takes on a much darker hue. Regardless of the point of the joke, it is essential to note that it is not Kersey, the vigilante hero, who makes these remarks, but a bunch of smug, racist and rich white people at a cocktail party who have never felt the stinging losses that he has suffered. By contrast, Kersey is clearly not a racist. He is a victim, but he will not hide behind locked doors and will not allow himself to remain a victim for long. He addresses the problems of law and order in his own way to help prevent others from becoming victimized – not just by the criminals but also by a system of law and order apparently so trapped in its own inertia that it cannot provide for the general welfare of American citizens. At the conclusion of Death Wish, the New York Police Department has caught up with Kersey. Although they are wise to the fact that he is the famous vigilante, they do not wish to deal with the problems associated with arresting and trying a man who is considered by many in New York City an urban hero. Detective Lieutenant Frank Ochoa (Vincent Gardenia) tells Kersey that ‘we want you to get out of New York . . . permanently’. ‘By sundown?’ Kersey asks, in a nod to the Western and with more than a hint of satire. Both smile at the joke. Exiled to Chicago, on his arrival at the station Kersey notices four young men harassing a young girl who is approximately the age of his wounded daughter. Nobody in the station seems to notice or to care about what is happening to the girl, with the exception of Kersey who walks over and helps

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her with the packages the group have scattered on the ground. He stares at the five young men, and in response they mock him and three give him the finger. Kersey continues to look at them, then raises his right hand and points his index finger at them as if it is the barrel of a gun. This is Kersey’s ‘fuck you’, not just to the punks but to a justice system that is incapable of stopping crime and has forced him to make the tough decisions and take the drastic actions that few others are prepared to do. For Kersey, his journey as a vigilante is not over. Like the United States itself, he is caught in a feedback loop. The clear suggestion here is that unless the American justice system is willing to fight crime as relentlessly and as punitively as a vigilante, then urban violence will continue unabated.

Notes 1 Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of an American President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribners, 2008), pp. 340–1. 2 Patrick Webster, Love and Death in Kubrick: A Critical Study of the Films from Lolita to Eyes Wide Shut (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011). 3 Paul Giannetti, Understanding Movies, 13th edn (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2014). 4 Mona Domosh, ‘Those “sudden peaks that scrape the sky”: the changing imagery of New York’s first skyscrapers’, in Leo Zonn (ed.), Place Images in Media: Portrayal, Experience, and Meaning (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), pp. 9–29. 5 Vincent Canby, ‘Death Wish exploits fear irresponsibly’, The New York Times, 4 August 1974. 6 Richard Nixon XXXVII ‘President of the United States’ 1969–1974, Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, 8 August 1968. Available at https://www.presidency.ucsb. edu/documents/address-accepting-the-presidential-nomination-the-republicannational-convention-miami (accessed 5 May 2016). 7 David Burnham, ‘A wide disparity is found in crime throughout city’, The New York Times, 14 February 1972. 8 Vincent Canby, ‘Screen: Death Wish hunts muggers’, The New York Times, 25 July1974. 9 Pauline Kael, ‘Foreword’, in Reeling: Film Writings 1972–1975 (Boston, MA: Warner Books, 1976), pp. 13–17. 10 Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Available at http://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/vigilante (accessed 12 March 2016).

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11 Ian R. McKee and N.T. Feather, ‘Revenge, retribution, and values: social attitudes and punitive sentencing’, Social Justice Research, 21/2 (2008), pp. 138–63. 12 Noah Milgram, Miri Stern and Shelly Levin, ‘Revenge versus forgiveness/ forbearance in response to narrative-simulated victimization’, Journal of Psychology, 140/2 (2006), pp. 105–19. 13 Arlene M. Stillwell, Roy F. Baumeister and Regan E. Del Priore, ‘We’re all victims here: toward a psychology of revenge’, Basic & Applied Social Psychology, 30/3 (2008), pp. 253–63. 14 Theodore M. Benditt, ‘Revenge’, Philosophical Forum, 38/4 (2007), pp. 357–63. 15 Joy McEntee. ‘“I’ll give you acts of God”: God, the father, and revenge tragedy in three Billy Connolly movies’, Literature-Film Quarterly, 37/1 (2009), pp. 49–71. 16 Ibid. 17 ‘Nuisance in Technicolor’, The New York Times, 26 May 1972. Available at https:// www.nytimes.com/1972/05/26/archives/nuisance-in-technicolor.html (accessed 5 May 2016). 18 Murray S. Schumach, ‘At $10-million, city calls it a losing graffiti fight’, The New York Times, 28 March 1973. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/28/ archives/at-10million-city-calls-it-a-losing-graffiti-fight-lindsay-decrying.html (accessed 5 May 2016). 19 George F. Jochnowitz, ‘Graffiti: offenses against public space’, The New York Times, 19 April 1973. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/19/archives/ letters-to-the-editor-war-on-youth-the-dual-minimum-wage.html (accessed 5 May 2016). 20 Roy Brand, ‘Identification with victimhood in recent cinema’, Culture, Theory & Critique, 49/2, October (2008), pp. 165–81. 21 Ibid., p. 165. 22 Melvyn Stokes, ‘Race, politics, and censorship: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in France, 1916–1923’, Cinema Journal, 50/1, Fall (2010), pp. 19–38. 23 Richard Nixon, ‘What has happened to America?’, The Reader’s Digest, October 1967, p. 50. 24 Steven F. Messner, Eric P. Baumer and Richard Rosenfeld, ‘Distrust of government, the vigilante tradition, and support for capital punishment’, Law & Society Review, 40/3 (2006), pp. 559–90. 25 Martin M. Winkler, ‘Tragic features in John Ford’s The Searchers’, in Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 118–47. 26 Scott W. See, ‘Nineteenth-century collective violence: toward a North American context’, Labour/Le Travail, 39, Spring (1997), pp. 13–38. doi:10.2307/25144105, p. 18.

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27 Update on Crime in Arizona: A Report from the Statistical Analysis Center Arizona State Justice Planning Agency, July 1978. Available at https://www.ncjrs.gov/ pdffiles1/Digitization/48817NCJRS.pdf (accessed 12 February 2016). 28 Meda Chesney-Lind and Ian Lind, ‘Visitors as victims: crimes against tourists in Hawaii’, reprinted from the Annals of Tourism Research, 13/2 (1986), pp. 167–91. Available at http://ilind.net/images_2005/visitors_as_victims.pdf (accessed 12 February 2016). 29 Scott W. See, ‘Nineteenth-century collective violence: toward a North American context’, Labour/Le Travail, 39, Spring (1997), pp. 13–38. doi:10.2307/25144105, p. 18. 30 Jon Jeffrey Walker, ‘The Intellectual Grounding of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851’. Unpublished MA thesis, Portland State University, 1993. Available at https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=2276&context=open_access_etds (accessed 1 March 2015). 31 Richard M. Nixon Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech Republican National Convention Miami Beach, Florida, 8 August 1968. Available at https://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-accepting-the-presidential-nominationthe-republican-national-convention-miami (accessed 5 May 2016). 32 Kevin Yuill, ‘Another take on the Nixon presidency: the first therapeutic President?’, Journal of Policy History, 21/2, April (2009), pp. 138–62. doi:10.1017/ S089803060909006X, p. 144. 33 Allan Lazar, Dan Karlan and Jeremy Salter, The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived (New York: Bristol Park Books, 2006).

Bibliography The American Presidency Project, Richard Nixon XXXVII President of the United States 1969–1974 Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, 8 August 1968. Available at https:// www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-accepting-the-presidentialnomination-the-republican-national-convention-miami (accessed 5 May 2016). Arizona State Justice Planning Agency, Update on Crime in Arizona, July 1978. Available at https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/48817NCJRS.pdf. Benditt, Theodore M., ‘Revenge’, Philosophical Forum 38/4, (2007), pp. 357–63. Brand, R., ‘Identification with victimhood in recent cinema’, Culture, Theory & Critique, 49/2, October (2008), pp. 165–81. Burnham, David, ‘A wide disparity is found in crime throughout city’, The New York Times, 14 February 1972.

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Canby, Vincent, ‘Screen: Death Wish hunts muggers’, The New York Times, 25 July 1974. Canby, Vincent, ‘Death Wish exploits fear irresponsibly’, The New York Times, 4 August 1974. Chesney-Lind, Meda and Lind, Ian, ‘Visitors as victims: crimes against tourists in Hawaii’, Annals of Tourism Research, 13/2 (1986), pp. 167–91. Available at http:// ilind.net/images_2005/visitors_as_victims.pdf (accessed 12 February 2016). Domosh, Mona, ‘Those “sudden peaks that scrape the sky”: the changing imagery of New York’s first skyscrapers’, in Leo Zonn (ed.) Place Images in Media: Portrayal, Experience, and Meaning (Savage, MD : Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), pp. 9–29. Giannetti, Paul, Understanding Movies, 13th edn (Boston, MA : Pearson, 2014). Jochnowitz, George F., The New York Times, 19 April 1973. Available at http://search. proquest.com.db29.linccweb.org/hnpnewyorktimes/docview/119593064/fulltextP DF/4151BC59C78141DBPQ/1?accountid=45777 (accessed 15 May 2016). Kael, Pauline, Reeling: Film Writings 1972–1975 (Boston: Warner Books, 1976), pp.13–17. Lazar, Allan, Karlan, Dan and Salter, Jeremy, The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived (New York: Bristol Park Books, 2006). McEntee, Joy, ‘ “I’ll give you acts of God”: God, the father, and revenge tragedy in three Billy Connolly movies’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 37/1 (2009), pp. 49–71. McKee, Ian R., and Feather, N.T., ‘Revenge, retribution, and values: social attitudes and punitive sentencing’, Social Justice Research, 21/2 (2008), pp. 138–63. Messner, Steve F., Baumer, Eric P. and Rosenfeld, Richard, ‘Distrust of government, the vigilante tradition, and support for capital punishment’, Law & Society Review, 40/3 (2006), pp. 559–90. Milgram, Noach, Stern, Miri and Levin, Shelly, ‘Revenge versus forgiveness/ forbearance in response to narrative-simulated victimization’, Journal of Psychology 140/2 (2006), pp. 105–19. Nixon, Richard, ‘What has happened to America?’, The Reader’s Digest, October 1967, pp. 49–54. Perlstein, Rick, Nixonland: The Rise of an American President and the Fracturing of America. (New York: Scribners, 2008). Schumach, Murray S., ‘At $10-million, city calls it a losing graffiti fight, The New York Times, 28 March 1973. Available at http://db29.linccweb.org/login?url=http:// search.proquest.com/docview/119631705?accountid=45777 (accessed 5 May 2016). See, Scott W., ‘Nineteenth-century collective violence: toward a North American context’, Labour/Le Travail, 39, Spring (1997), pp. 13–38, doi:10.2307/25144105.

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Stillwell, Arlene M., Baumeister Roy F. and Del Priore, Regan E., ‘We’re all victims here: toward a psychology of revenge’, Basic & Applied Social Psychology, 30/3 (2008), pp. 253–63. Stokes, Melvyn, ‘Race, politics, and censorship: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in France, 1916–1923’, Cinema Journal, 50/ 1, Fall (2010), pp. 19–38. Walker, Jon Jeffrey, ‘The Intellectual Grounding of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851’, unpublished MA thesis, Portland State University, Department of History, (1993). Available at https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_ etds/1277/ (accessed 1 March 2015). Webster, Patrick, Love and Death in Kubrick: A Critical Study of the Films from Lolita to Eyes Wide Shut (Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 2011). Winkler, Martin M., ‘Tragic features in John Ford’s The Searchers’, in Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 118–47. Yuill, Kevin, ‘Another take on the Nixon presidency: the first therapeutic President?’, Journal of Policy History, 21/2, April (2009), doi:10.1017/S089803060909006X, pp. 138–62.

5

Rough Justice: Lone Cops, Vigilantes and Penal Populism Julian Petley

Introduction: the emerging Republican majority Most of the chapters in this book are concerned with films which, at the time of their making, tackled taboo-busting subjects of one kind or another, and, in doing so, frequently shocked conservative sensibilities. In this chapter, however, I want to examine a number of films which shocked liberal sensibilities in the 1970s because of the manner in which they dealt with the issues of law, order and justice. Foremost amongst such films are Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) and Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974), but as William Gombash has dealt with the latter in his chapter, I will concentrate on analysing the elements in the former that outraged liberal opinion. First, however, it is necessary to sketch in a certain amount of historical context, and in particular to focus on the roots of the right-wing reaction against 1960s liberalism in the States. Writing in 1969, Kevin Phillips, who at that time worked for the new Republican administration of Richard Nixon, argued that the ‘great political upheaval’ of the 1960s was not Senator Eugene McCarthy’s relatively small group of upper-middle-class and intellectual supporters, but a populist revolt of the American masses that have been elevated by prosperity to middle-class status and conservatism. Their revolt is against the caste, policies and taxation of the mandarins of Establishment liberalism.1

This may be to understate the extent of liberalism’s spread and influence in the first half of the 1960s, but it is nonetheless the case that President Lyndon B. 111

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Johnson’s Great Society programmes, civil rights reforms and War on Poverty led many Democrats, particularly those hostile to the anti-war movement and the whole counterculture phenomenon, into the arms of the Republicans. However, the Republican party itself was changing, as a new right which had developed within it began to push against the ‘Modern Republicanism’ exemplified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and in the direction of its own brand of populist conservatism. In Phillips’s words, this was a ‘popular upheaval’ which spanned ‘Middle America – from sharecroppers and truckers to the alienated lower middle class’ and which would ‘do far more for the entire nation than the environmental manipulation, social boondoggling, community agitation and incendiary promises of the Nineteen-Sixties’.2 What he called the emerging Republican majority spoke clearly in 1968 for a shift away from the sociological jurisprudence, moral permissiveness, experimental residential, welfare and educational programming and massive federal spending by which the Liberal (mostly Democratic) Establishment sought to propagate liberal institutions and ideology.3

Culture wars This new right viewed American electoral politics as an arena of primarily cultural warfare. Whereas many conventional Republicans understood political alignments chiefly in class or regional terms, the new right grasped the centrality of ethnicity, religion and national origins in shaping political allegiances. Thus, they set out to build grass-roots coalitions across existing party lines and to mobilize new groups around various single issues and causes – particularly ones which concerned apparent threats to the ‘American way of life’. As Gillian Peele argues: Almost all Americans will react to campaigns which mention the ‘destruction of innocent life’, the control of pornography, the defence of the family, and, in a slightly different sphere, the issues of law and order and busing. And indeed it was in the very reluctance of the two regular parties to use these issues that the new right found a vacuum to be filled, because new-right spokesman have argued that it is precisely on these issues that the legislative

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elite and the mass public are at odds and that the public most needs to make its voice heard.4

Law and order issues proved particularly fertile for the new right, and especially for its claim that the liberalism of the 1960s, whether in its Democratic or Republican iteration, had turned away from the interests and values of the broad mass of the middle and working classes. In the 1960s, crime rates had risen, detection rates had fallen and suspects had been given new rights on account of the Miranda and Escobedo judgements (both of which are mentioned in Dirty Harry). In 1966, in Miranda v. Arizona, the US Supreme Court established the principle that all criminal suspects must be advised of their right to consult an attorney and of their right against self-incrimination before police questioning. Failure to do so would mean that the prosecution could not use in court any statements made by the accused during interrogation. And in 1964, in Escobedo v. Illinois, the Court ruled that, under the Sixth Amendment, criminal suspects had a right to counsel during police questioning. Crime, along with civil unrest, such as anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, thus became ‘wedge’ or ‘cut through’ issues in the 1960s. The Republican Barry Goldwater made lawlessness and crime in the streets a major issue in the 1964 presidential campaign, as did George Wallace of the Independent Party in the 1968 campaign. The political establishment was initially wary of Wallace’s rhetoric because it was so closely linked with his stance on race, but it proved so popular, particularly with those outraged by levels of street crime, that Richard Nixon made the law and order theme central to the Republican campaign in 1968 in an overt attempt to wrest the issue from Wallace. This had been a key aspect of his notable article for The Reader’s Digest in October 1967, entitled ‘What Has Happened to America?’, in which he complained of ‘the decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law in America’ and bemoaned the fact that ‘our judges have gone too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces’.5 In the event, Nixon won the campaign, but nonetheless more than 9.9 million people voted for Wallace, representing 13.5 per cent of the total vote. Nixon was inaugurated on 20 January 1969 and having repeatedly been highly critical of the Escobedo and Miranda judgements throughout his campaign, immediately declared war not only on crime but also on ‘elite groups’ and the ‘Establishment’.

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His appeal was squarely aimed at what he had called in a speech on 16 May 1968 ‘the silent center, the millions of people in the middle of the American political spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not picket or protest loudly’,6 and in his address on 8 August 1968 on accepting the presidential nomination ‘the quiet voice in the tumult and shouting . . . the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans – the non-shouters and non-demonstrators’.7 He was also to use the better-known term the ‘silent majority’ in a television broadcast on 3 November 1969 (although it was not original to him, having first been used in a conservative political context in 1919 during Calvin Coolidge’s campaign for the 1920 Republican presidential nomination). And in his State of the Union Address on 22 January 1970, he reinforced his conservative crime control message, pledging to create ‘respect for law rather than lawlessness’. In comments directed squarely at what were known as ‘due process’ liberals, Nixon argued: We have heard a great deal of overblown rhetoric during the sixties in which the word ‘war’ has perhaps too often been used – the war on poverty, the war on misery, the war on disease, the war on hunger. But if there is one area where the word ‘war’ is appropriate it is in the fight against crime. We must declare and win the war against the criminal elements which increasingly threaten our cities, our homes, and our lives.8

Significantly, the issue of Time published on 5 January 1970 named Middle Americans as their Men and Women of the Year. It stated: Everywhere they flew the colours of assertive patriotism. Their car windows were plastered with American-flag decals, their ideological totems. In the bumper-sticker dialogue of the freeways, they answered MAKE LOVE NOT WAR with HONOR AMERICA or SPIRO IS MY HERO. They sent Richard Nixon to the White House and two teams of astronauts to the moon . . . While the rest of the nation’s youth has been watching Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, Middle America’s teen-agers have been taking in John Wayne for the second or third time in The Green Berets.9

‘Patriotic insurgents’ Quite clearly, then, major political, ideological and cultural changes were afoot. Meanwhile, civil unrest of various kinds continued unabated. For example, on

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15 October 1970, in an eerie prefiguring of the events of 6 January 2021, some 3,000 police officers from forty-four states massed on the steps of the Capitol, attacking institutions such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Supreme Court, and again Escobedo and Miranda were singled out for specific criticism. In May 1971 (when Dirty Harry was in production), 7,000 anti-war protestors were arrested when they attempted to march on the Pentagon: 5,000 police, reinforced by 1,500 National Guardsmen and 10,000 soldiers, including paratroopers, were involved in the largest such operation in US history. The killing of protesting students at Kent State and Jackson State universities by National Guardsmen and police in 1971 marked increasing intolerance of dissent on the part of the authorities. And in the 1972 presidential election, the Nixon campaign painted the Democrat candidate, the liberal George McGovern, as the representative of the three As: abortion, acid and amnesty (for draft resisters). Nixon was duly re-elected on 7 November 1972. Significantly, in a manner common to right-wing incumbents in both the US and the UK, members of the administration presented themselves exactly as if they were in opposition – what J. Hoberman aptly calls ‘patriotic insurgents’.10 As Theodore H. White points out, there was a considerable culture gap, not to say war, between the Nixon administration on the one hand, and, on the other, not just the McGovern camp but the whole Washington environment: They were talking from the cultures of two entirely different Americas; style, purpose, values – all separated them. The McGovern people were always more sure of themselves and their rhetoric; the White House people were always defensive. The McGovern people were expansive, trusting, romantic; the White House people were wary, never quite sure that they weren’t being lured into ridicule, contempt or exposure. Though they controlled the government of the United States, the White House staff men regarded Washington as a hostile place.11

Their wariness extended to the media too: The men and the White House were, at once, shy and cold; life in the capital had made them gun-shy of the vocalizers. The predominant idiom of Washington journalism was not their idiom, and the White House staff saw the gap in communications and dialogue as positively hostile, if not conspiratorial.12

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In this respect, White quotes Victor Gold, then press secretary to Vice President Spiro Agnew, as complaining that ‘they own the word factory, they make the words. The White House tries to argue it out with them in their words – but they own the ammunition dump.’13 Agnew himself was a vocal critic of the media, bemoaning the fact that its commentators reflect an urbane and assured presence, seemingly well-informed on every important matter. We do know that to a man these commentators and producers live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City, the latter of which James Renton terms ‘the most unrepresentative community in the entire United States’. Both communities bask in their own provincialism, their own parochialism. We can deduce that these men read the same newspapers. They draw their political and social views from the same sources. Worse, they talk constantly to one another, thereby providing artificial reinforcement to their shared viewpoints.14

And on the social front, Nixon’s special assistant, Pat Buchanan, observed resentfully: This hasn’t been our own town. They live in Georgetown, with their parties; they never invited us; they ignored us. We were the vanguard of Middle America and they were the liberal elite. It’s a schism that’s cultural, political, social, emotional.15

The parallel with the Trump administration raging about the ‘swamp’ and ‘fake news’ is too obvious to need labouring.

Joe: the New Republican infantryman Hollywood cinema of the 1960s being a largely liberal institution, it was rare to see the right-wing values of the emerging Republican majority lionized or endorsed – The Green Berets (John Wayne, 1968) being an exception that proves the rule. When they did appear, particularly in the then fashionable youth-oriented movies, they tended to be embodied in the kind of rednecks who harass, and eventually murder, the bikers of Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969). However, with the turn of the decade came a film which placed these

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values centre stage. This was the independently-produced Joe (1970), directed by John G. Avildsen and written by Norman Wexler, who were both unknown at the time, although the former would later direct Rocky (1976) and the latter write Saturday Night Fever (1977). Significantly, the film was released just a couple of months after what came to be known as the Hard Hat Riot, when helmeted construction workers waving enormous American flags and chanting ‘All the Way, U.S.A.’ tore through an anti-war demonstration in Manhattan’s financial district.16 This was just a few days after the killing of four students by National Guardsmen during a peaceful protest at Kent State University, Ohio. After Melissa Compton (Susan Sarandon) has overdosed on amphetamines and nearly died, her father, Bill (Dennis Patrick), an advertising executive, beats to death her drug-dealing boyfriend, Frank Russo (Patrick McDermott). Taking refuge in a local bar after the murder, he meets Joe Curran (Peter Boyle), a racist, hippy-hating factory worker, and tells him what he’s just done. At first Joe thinks he’s joking, but after the death is reported on television, he contacts Bill and tells him how much he admires him. Subsequently they meet up again and become friends. When Melissa leaves hospital, she discovers what her father has done, runs away and seeks refuge amongst the hippies in Greenwich Village. Bill and Joe search for her there, and end up participating in a hippie party, during which their wallets are stolen. Armed with guns from Joe’s considerable collection, they track the thieves to a commune in the countryside. Joe kills one of the hippies, and, so that there will be no living witnesses to the murder, they embark on killing the rest. However, in the course of the shooting spree, Bill unwittingly kills his daughter. The film’s plot reads almost as if it was intended to illustrate Phillips’s thesis. Joe is from lower-middle-class Queens and Bill from upper-middle-class Manhattan. As Peter Lev points out, they are unlike in speech, dress, and income, but alike in conservatism, patriotism, and their definition of masculinity. Both fear social change and demonize the Other – in this case, hippies and drug dealers. Both rely on subordinate, compliant women but allocate to themselves a realm of masculine freedom (drinks after work, sex with hippie women). Both are willing to use violence to ‘protect’ freedom – their own freedom, not necessarily the freedom of others.17

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Figure 5.1 Joe: Cross-class collaborators: Joe Curran (Peter Boyle), Bill Compton (Dennis Patrick) and Joan Compton (Audrey Claire).

Figure 5.2 Joe: Joe Curran holds forth in the American Bar.

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When we first meet Joe, who Hoberman aptly calls the ‘infantryman’ of the emerging Republican majority (2003: 284), he is engaging in a long, drunken monologue in the nudgingly-named American Bar. Almost the first word we hear him utter is ‘niggers’: The niggers are getting all the money. Why work? You tell me, why the fuck work when you can screw, have babies and get paid for it? Welfare – they’ve got all that welfare money, they get free rubbers. Think they use ’em? Hell no, the only way they make money is making babies. They sell the rubbers, and then they use the money to buy booze.

Next up in Joe’s demonology are social workers: ‘The ones in welfare, how come they’re all nigger lovers? You ever noticed that? All those social workers are nigger lovers. You find me a social worker who ain’t a nigger lover and I’ll massage your arse for you – and I ain’t queer.’ Then rich white young people: They’re the worst. Hippies. Sugar tit [dummy] all the way. The cars, the best colleges, vacations, augies [sic]. They go some place like a fancy resort and have augies. Easter augies! The day Christ rose they’re all screwing one another. And the poor kids, the middle-class kids, they’re all copying the rich kids. They’re all going the same goddam screw America way.

And, finally, students: The college kids, they’re acting like niggers. They got no respect for the President of the United States. A few heads get bashed and the liberals behave like Eleanor Roosevelt got raped, The liberals – 42 per cent of the liberals are queer, and that’s a fact. Some Wallace people took a poll.

Such sentiments are absolutely calculated to shock liberals, but although the film does give Joe a convincing background which shows why he is as he is (greatly aided by Peter Boyle’s disturbingly credible performance, which made his name), it does not endorse his point of view, and is not as ‘incoherent’ as Lev suggests.18 The film’s plot is sparked off by one of its two main protagonists dishing out rough justice (Bill killing Frank) and culminates in both of them committing mass murder. Along the way, Joe’s racist bigotry is revealed as being complemented by his oppressive chauvinism in the domestic sphere and his outright hypocrisy in participating in the hippy ‘augy’. However, it’s important to note that although the film was a considerable hit, audiences were

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deeply divided between those who did indeed read it as a critique of the values represented by Joe and those who cheered him on.19 Boyle himself certainly saw the film as an attack on blue-collar conservatism but was equally concerned, for differing reasons, that both hardhats and liberals would identify Joe’s values with his own.20

‘I’m all broken up about that man’s rights’ Joe concerned rough justice meted out by ordinary citizens, but Dirty Harry sees it administered by a cop. Briefly, the film concerns Inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) of the San Francisco Police Department who has earned the nickname ‘Dirty Harry’, partly because, in his own words, he gets ‘every dirty job that comes along’ and partly because of his tendency to bend the rules of police and legal procedure. As the film progresses it focuses increasingly on Callahan’s pursuit of the serial killer, Scorpio (Andy Robinson), which becomes absolutely relentless after he kidnaps and then murders a young girl, Ann Mary Deacon (Debralee Scott). In his efforts to locate her before she is killed, Callahan captures and tortures Scorpio; as a result he does learn where she’s being held, but his methods render inadmissible all the evidence against him which he had extracted. Scorpio is released, Callahan shadows him and eventually shoots him before throwing away his police badge. Dirty Harry was a film that absolutely outraged liberal opinion, which saw it as not only endorsing Callahan’s illegal methods but also pouring scorn on the legal establishment and the liberal principles by which it operated. In this respect it’s important to note that Dirty Harry is very specifically a San Francisco film, as were its successors. At the time the city absolutely epitomized the liberal culture, and indeed counterculture, that conservatives regarded as ‘permissive’ and one of the major causes of crime and disorder. Chief amongst its liberal critics was Pauline Kael, herself from San Francisco, whose review in the New Yorker, 15 January 1972,21 sharply sums up the main points in the liberal critique of the film, which she calls a hard-hat version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. In her view, ‘Dirty Harry is not about the actual San Francisco police force; it’s about a right-wing fantasy of that police

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force as a group helplessly emasculated by unrealistic liberals’. Harry Callahan himself is a Camelot cop, courageous and incorruptible and the protector of women and children. Or at least he would be, if the law allowed him to be. But the law coddles criminals; it gives them legal rights that cripple the police. And so the only way that Dirty Harry – the dedicated troubleshooter who gets the dirtiest assignments – can protect the women and children of the city is to disobey orders.

Those, she argues, are the terms of the film, and because it is so skilfully and effectively constructed, it is admittedly difficult not to want to see the maniac get it so it hurts . . . It has such sustained drive toward this righteous conclusion that it is an almost perfect piece of propaganda for para-legal police power. The evil monster represents urban violence, and the audience gets to see him kicked and knifed and shot, and finally triumphantly drowned. Violence has rarely been presented with such righteous relish.

However, the scene which particularly shocked liberal sensibilities was not one involving violence inflicted by Callahan on Scorpio, but that in the District Attorney’s office after the arrest. Here the D.A. (Josef Sommer) tells Callahan: You’re lucky I’m not indicting you for assault with attempt to commit murder. Where the hell does it say that you’ve got a right to kick down doors, torture suspects, deny medical attention and legal counsel? Where have you been? Does Escobedo ring a bell? Miranda? I mean, you must have heard of the Fourth Amendment. What I’m saying is – that man had rights.

To which Callahan replies: ‘Well, I’m all broken up about that man’s rights’, before being informed that Scorpio will be freed as soon as he’s well enough to leave hospital, as there is no evidence against him that can be presented to a court and ‘I’m not wasting half a million dollars of the taxpayers’ money on a trial we can’t possibly win.’ Told that, under the law, the evidence against Scorpio is inadmissible, Callahan retorts: ‘Well, then the law’s crazy.’ At this point, the D.A. introduces Judge Bannerman (William Paterson) of the Appellate Court, who also holds classes in Constitutional Law at Berkeley, and asks his opinion. As Kael notes:

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Such a perfect touch for the audience. Anyone who knows San Francisco knows that in the highly unlikely circumstance that a law professor were to be consulted, he would be from the University of San Francisco, a Catholic institution closer in location and nearer in heart to the S.F. Police Department – or, if not from there, from Hastings College of the Law, a branch of the University of California that is situated in San Francisco. But Berkeley has push-button appeal as the red center of bleeding-heart liberalism; it has replaced Harvard as the joke butt and unifying hatred of reactionaries.22

One might also note that in the 1960s Berkeley had been the site of numerous student uprisings and home to the Free Speech Movement. During his 1966 gubernatorial campaign Ronald Reagan repeatedly promised to ‘clean up the mess at Berkeley’, which included ‘sexual orgies so vile I cannot describe them to you’.23 Joe Curran must have been listening. All too predictably, then, Bannerman tells Callahan that ‘the search of the suspect’s quarters was illegal. Evidence obtained thereby, such as that hunting rifle, is inadmissible in court. You should have gotten a search warrant.’ Harry responds that there wasn’t time because he was concerned that the kidnapped girl’s life was in danger, to which Bannerman replies that a court would have to recognize the police officer’s legitimate concern for the girl’s life, ‘but there is no way they can legitimately condone police torture. All evidence concerning the girl, the suspect’s confession, all physical evidence, would have to be excluded’. He also tells Callahan that ‘the suspect’s rights were violated, under the Fourth and Fifth, and probably the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments’, to which he replies: ‘And Ann Mary Deakin? What about her rights? I mean, she’s raped and left in a hole to die. Who speaks for her?’ Even though the D.A. and the judge are not represented as caricature liberals – the former telling Callahan that ‘I’ve got a wife and three kids, I don’t want him on the streets any more than you do’ – the film clearly plays in such a way that the spectator is encouraged to share Callahan’s extreme impatience with and incredulity at the legal situation which is explained to him here and to want to see Scorpio apprehended by any means possible. And in this sense, the film can indeed be read as a critique of ‘due process’ and rights-based liberalism and as supporting its antithesis, namely a crime control model of justice. As noted earlier apropos Nixon’s policies on law and order, at a time when lawyers, judges and legal academics were committed to using due process to regulate

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police behaviour and to ensure that suspects’ rights were respected, many lay people, and especially conservatives, were more concerned with the effective apprehension and punishment of criminals, which they regarded as a ‘common sense’ matter of substantive justice.

Harry Callahan meets John Locke It does need to be pointed out, however, that Callahan is not represented as being engaged in a concerted campaign of organized vigilante action, like the rogue cops in Dirty Harry’s sequel, Magnum Force (Ted Post, 1973), to which we will turn shortly. Indeed, when asked at one point why he stays in the job, he replies: ‘I don’t know. I really don’t,’ and the film doesn’t provide any answers either. His motivation remains largely inchoate, although a clue may lie in his remark that ‘I don’t know what the law says, but I do know what’s right and wrong.’ But, via Callahan and his travails with the legal system, the film can convincingly be read as suggesting that when that system is weak or compromised it is permissible to act against the law of the land in the interests of ‘natural justice’. Such an idea stems from the contract theory of government which originated, albeit in differing ways, in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) and John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689). According to this theory, individuals living in society consent to surrender some of the freedoms that they once enjoyed in the state of nature and agree to submit to some form of higher authority in exchange for the protection of their remaining rights and the maintenance of the social order under a system of laws. Among the rights that individuals surrender is their right to prosecute or punish criminal acts, and they do so in exchange for the government assuming responsibility for providing public safety. But citizens retain the right to take the law back into their own hands if the government is unwilling or unable to provide public order, safety, or justice. Thus, in section nineteen of his Second Treatise of Government, Locke argues quite explicitly that in situations where the official forces can’t or won’t do their jobs it is permissible for people to take the law into their own hands.24 As Timothy Lenz argues, Dirty Harry challenges liberal assumptions about the efficacy of law as an instrument of justice, and when Callahan threw away his badge

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he symbolically threw away the law that had effectively disarmed society by forgetting that law was just a means to an end, that due process was the means to achieve justice rather than an end in itself . . . Callahan is outraged that rights and law were actually frustrating justice, and he is willing to violate both to do justice. Dirty Harry voices the conservative belief that due process liberals have misplaced priorities insofar as they treat law and justice as equal values. In fact, conservatives consider law an instrumental value that can be dispensed with when necessary to achieve other, more important values.25

One of these is social order, and Callahan is represented as acting against existing laws but in the interests of social order. But this would appear to be an order of a distinctly conservative kind, as conventionally encapsulated in the phrase ‘law and order’. As Rebecca Solnit states:26 ‘ “Law and order” as a rightwing slogan means that they are the law, and they impose their version of order. Authoritarianism is always an ideology of inequality: I make the rules, you follow them.’ Dirty Harry also raises the issue of the relationship between law and violence, and, in particular, as Lenz puts it, directly challenged the prevailing liberal orthodoxy that violence was an atavistic impulse that needed to be controlled by law . . . Liberals tended to measure human progress by law’s displacement of violence as an instrument of social control. Dirty Harry portrays violence as a legitimate solution to the problem of too much law, and advocates the justice and social utility of violence.27

Of course, none of this is to argue that the screenwriters (Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink and Dean Riesner, along with the uncredited Terrence Malick, Jo Heims and John Milius), director Don Siegel and star Clint Eastwood deliberately embarked on making an all-out attack on due process liberalism, still less one that would be excoriated as fascist and advocating vigilantism. Action movies such as this are, after all, not legal tracts, but, on the other hand, they are most certainly capable of being read through a legal lens. But, whatever the case, the criticism from Pauline Kael and others clearly hit home, as the sequel to Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, pits Callahan against a group of cops who really are vigilantes.

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‘Nothing wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot’ Callahan is still on the San Francisco force, even though he threw away his police badge at the end of the previous film. Here he investigates the murders by unknown assailants of a number of San Francisco criminal suspects who have been found not guilty by the courts on various technicalities. At first he suspects a fellow officer and friend, Charlie McCoy (Mitchell Ryan), who appears to be going over the edge because of the strains of the job, but eventually discovers that the killers are a group of rookie traffic cops who were once Army Rangers together and have now formed themselves into a vigilante force within the police. Eventually they confront Callahan and ask him to join them, telling him: We’re simply ridding society of killers that would be caught and sentenced anyway if our courts worked properly . . . It’s not just a question of whether or not to use violence, there simply is no other way. You of all people, Inspector, should understand that.28

But Callahan refuses, and then finds his life in danger. He tells his superior, Lt Briggs (Hal Holbrook) what he has discovered, but it then transpires that Briggs is actually the leader of the vigilantes and is intent on killing Callahan now that he has discovered who the murderers are. However, in the course of a lengthy pursuit, Callahan manages to dispatch both Briggs and the vigilantes. In his commentary on the Warner Home Video Blu-ray of Magnum Force, John Milius, who co-wrote the screenplay with Michael Cimino, calls the film ‘the flipside of the coin of the first one’ and states that it shows what happens when you take vigilantism too far, when people start to abuse the power of the vigilante and they say ‘we are going to clean up society and we know what is best for society.’ And so there’s a curious line, and the idea that that line is difficult and fuzzy.

In Dirty Harry, Callahan obsessively pursues one particular criminal, but he is not involved in a deliberate campaign of vigilante action, as are the traffic cops in the sequel. Nor is he thwarted here by over-cautious superiors and due process liberals. On the contrary, his immediate boss is himself a vigilante. As he says to Callahan in defence of his actions: ‘A hundred years ago in this

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city people did the same thing.29 History justified the vigilantes. We’re no different. Anyone who threatens the security of people will be executed. Evil for evil, Harry. Retribution.’ In response. Harry explains why he himself has not joined the vigilantes: That’s just fine, but how does murder fit in? When the police start becoming their own executioners, where’s it going to end? Pretty soon you’ll start executing people for jaywalking, then executing people for traffic violations, then you end up executing your neighbour because his dog pisses on your lawn.

Here, in contrast to his position in Dirty Harry, Callahan states that he believes in upholding the law, to which Briggs responds: ‘What the hell do you know about the law? You’re a great cop, Harry, you had a chance to join the team but you’d rather stick with the system,’ to which Callahan angrily retorts: ‘I hate the goddam system. But until someone comes along with some changes that make sense, I’ll stick with it.’ However, this isn’t exactly convincing, as, earlier in the film, in a scene in the city morgue filled with the bodies of the vigilantes’ victims, when Callahan is told by Captain Avery (Joe Miksak) that ‘someone’s trying to put the courts out of business’ he responds: ‘So far you’ve said nothing wrong,’ later adding: ‘Nothing wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot.’ It becomes even less convincing when the film is read through Milius’s commentary.30 Thus, after a series of murders by the vigilantes, Milius says: ‘So far you haven’t got a lot to quarrel with these guys,’ and at another point he actually assigns this attitude to Callahan: Harry is obviously still sympathetic to the [vigilante] idea . . . In fact, they’ve done nothing wrong, they’re just serving out justice, even though it’s not the system’s justice. It’s what this movie is about. The whole Dirty Harry idea is the questioning of modern justice – otherwise why do we have a vigilante? The whole idea of the vigilante cop is that we need him. And there is another side to it, I mean, how far can you go? The moral ambiguity was in the idea that you had to draw a line and that was what made all of this stuff interesting . . . Where is it that you go bad, where is it that this stuff starts to come apart?

The answer appears to be: when the vigilantes kill a fellow cop, as happens in the case of Charlie McCoy.

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Having established the identity of the killers, Callahan tells his sidekick, Earlington ‘Early’ Smith (Felton Perry), that the death squads in Brazil should serve as a warning of what could happen in the US. He doesn’t indicate why he thinks that this might happen, but Milius himself is in little doubt: It’s not too hard to understand how this could happen nowadays, the way things are . . . The whole Dirty Harry concept comes from people are sick of the fact that the law doesn’t work, and I have to say that things haven’t gotten any better. That’s why these films, the idea of the vigilante cop, always works.

In the final 1970s chapter, The Enforcer (James Fargo, 1976), Callahan’s superior, Captain McKay (Bradford Dillman), transfers him to personnel because of his use of excessive force in a hostage situation but soon reinstates him to homicide when he and the mayor (John Crawford) become concerned about a particularly violent crime wave engulfing San Francisco. This they are convinced is the work of the black militant organization, Uhuru, when in fact the ‘People’s Revolutionary Strike Force’ is behind it. However, the radicalsounding name is simply a cover for a purely criminal gang, as the Uhuru leader, ‘Big Ed’ Mustapha (Albert Popwell) enables a grateful Callahan to discover. Indeed, a grudging respect develops between the two, as the following exchange shows: Mustapha Callahan, you’re on the wrong side. Callahan How do you figure that? Mustapha You go out and put your ass on the line for a bunch of dudes who’d no sooner let you in the front door than they would me. Callahan I’m not doing it for them. Mustapha Who then? Callahan You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

Thus, the mystery of Callahan’s real motivation is usefully spun out for further sequels, but the important point here is that after the police arrest the Uhuru members and try to pin the crime wave on them, the mayor and McKay arrange a public commendation for Callahan and his new partner, Inspector Kate Moore (Tyne Daly), for their alleged role in the operation. In particular, they are hopeful that the commendation of a female officer will impress the electorate. However, they refuse to take part in this charade, and McKay

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suspends Callahan. After the mayor is kidnapped by the ‘Strike Force’, who demand $5m for his release, McKay tries to enlist Callahan’s help in negotiating with them (shades here of Dirty Harry), but he refuses to co-operate. However, by interrogating a priest, Father John (M.G. Kelly), who used to give rehabilitation seminars on Alcatraz, he and Moore discover that the gang is holding the mayor on the island, where its leader, Bobby Maxwell (DeVeren Bookwalter), was once imprisoned. By the time McKay arrives to pay the ransom, Callahan and Moore have killed the gang, but the latter has paid with her life. Callahan frees the mayor – who offers him yet another letter of commendation.

Penal populism As Milius sees the Dirty Harry cycle: The captains are forces of civilised law and order, and they always represent the liberal, bureaucratic morass that we all live in. They are the Gordian knot and Harry has to cut that knot all the time. Harry has to go through to get to justice always by semi-illegal means, otherwise he ain’t Harry.

The problem with this formulation, however, is that of the 1970s Dirty Harry films, only the first one specifically critiques liberalism per se. In the second, although Briggs initially earns Callahan’s scorn when he reveals that he’s never unholstered his gun in his life as a cop, he turns out to be anything but a liberal, and Briggs’s superior, Captain Avery, is merely over-cautious and overburdened by procedure rather than hamstrung by liberal principles. Finally, in The Enforcer, Captain McKay and the mayor appear to be motivated primarily by PR concerns, namely protecting and burnishing the image of the San Francisco police. Anti-liberalism does admittedly raise its head briefly in Father John’s seemingly naïve and misguided belief in the powers of rehabilitation, and at first seems to be present in the fact that Moore is promoted because the powers-that-be want the police to be seen to be more diverse, as well as in Callahan’s initial hostility towards her. However, she proves herself to be extremely able and he ends up treating her as an equal. Finally, McKay’s payment of the ransom money is largely a matter of political expediency in the

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face of a campaign of crime that has made the police look hopelessly out of their depth. It is indeed true that Dirty Harry sparked off a series of films in which police officers had to take the law into their own hands in order to fight crime, but for the most part this was because they were stymied not by due process liberalism but by either apathy or corruption, or both, within their own ranks and also at City Hall level. Systemic police corruption is almost the entire subject of Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1973), based on the real-life events which led to the setting up of the Knapp Commission31 in April 1970, which delivered its final report in December 1972, but it also hinders the ‘good’ cops in carrying out their duties in films such as The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971), The Supercops (Gordon Parks Jr, 1973), Busting (Peter Hyams, 1973) and McQ (John Sturges, 1974). One might also note a number of films in which civilians have to take the law into their own hands because the forces of law and order are, for various reasons, unable or unwilling to help them. These include Gordon’s War (Ossie Davis, 1973), Walking Tall (Phil Karlson, 1973), Framed (Phil Karlson, 1974), Vigilante Force (George Armitage, 1975), Fighting Mad (Jonathan Demme, 1976), Rolling Thunder (John Flynn, 1977), Delirium (Peter Maris, 1979) and The Exterminator (James Glickenhaus, 1980). But insofar as the protagonists of all of these films are forced to step outside the law in order to achieve justice – albeit of an extremely rough kind – the films do fit within the Dirty Harry/Death Wish mould, even if shorn of these two films’ overt critique of due process liberalism. What these films ultimately express, albeit to different degrees and in different ways, is a form of penal populism. As John Pratt explains, this speaks to the way in which criminals and prisoners are thought to have been favoured at the expense of crime victims in particular and the law-abiding public in general. It feeds on expressions of anger, disenchantment and disillusionment with the criminal justice establishment. It holds this responsible for what seems to have been the insidious inversion of commonsensical priorities: protecting the well-being and security of lawabiding ‘ordinary people’, punishing those whose crimes jeopardize this.32

From this perspective, elites of various kinds within the criminal justice system are seen as standing in the way of the more legitimate demands of the public at large, or, in populist parlance, ‘the people’. To quote Pratt:

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Penal populism attempts to reclaim the penal system for what it sees as the oppressed majority and harness it to their aspirations rather than those of the establishment, or those of liberal social movements that pull in the opposite direction to which it wants to travel. When rights are referred to in penal populist discourse, it is usually the rights of the public at large to safety and security, and the withdrawal of rights from those very groups (immigrants, asylum seekers, criminals, prisoners) on whose behalf other social movements are campaigning for. In these ways it claims to represent the rights of the general public, not fringe groups or minorities, against what is perceived to be the privileged, highly educated, cosmopolitan elite whose policies have put its security at risk.33

Redemptive violence From such a perspective, it becomes easier to understand why audiences who in real life might well have found themselves on the receiving end of the rough justice meted out in these films enjoyed them so much. As Pauline Kael noted in her review of Dirty Harry: The movie was cheered and applauded by Puerto Ricans in the audience, and they jeered – as they were meant to – when the maniac whined and pleaded for his legal rights. Puerto Ricans could applaud Harry because in the movie laws protecting the rights of the accused are seen not as remedies for the mistreatment of the poor by the police and the courts but as protection for evil abstracted from all social conditions – metaphysical evil, classless criminality.34

Equally, the anti-authority elements of these films, limited and compromised though they are, could well have an appeal to such audiences. As Eric Patterson argues, Eastwood’s crime films, and the Dirty Harry films in particular, tap a widespread and deep reservoir of resentment against existing forms of authority, but their effect is ultimately repressive rather than progressive since they channel this feeling, which potentially could precipitate radical structural change, in directions which will not lead to disruption of existing structures.35

Patterson usefully draws on Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man to back up his point. In this at one time highly influential book, first published in 1964,

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Marcuse notes that modern societies offer people a degree of sexual freedom which helps them to accommodate themselves to the otherwise repressive conditions under which they live. Marcuse calls this a form of ‘repressive desublimation’ which serves as ‘a prop for the status quo’.36 But although he concentrates almost entirely on sexuality, he also suggests briefly37 that the dominant culture allows a similar liberation of aggressiveness, and to similar ends, thus unleashing violent impulses in a selective manner, releasing the frustration and hostility generated by the existing order in ways which pose no serious threat to that order. Building on this insight, Patterson suggests that films such as Dirty Harry depict a reality close enough to the lives of the audience to allow them an intensely satisfying imaginative experience, but far enough from them that the true locus of economic, social and political power never is identified or questioned. The audience is allowed a fantasy of revolt, a dream of recapturing autonomy, but no general critique of authority is made and no call for its transformation is issued.38

Violence is frequently redemptive or regenerative in conservative crime films, which serves only to endorse the cathartic effect of vengeance as an alternative to law. As Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner argue, films which depict the failure of liberal solutions to the problem of crime and disorder portray more accurately than liberal films the real exercise of force that constitutes the manner in which the problem is conventionally dealt with. And in their view, in the absence of measures that address the structural sources of the problem in the capitalist maldistribution of wealth, only conservative solutions to crime will succeed politically, precisely because they offer images of power and just punishment to people rendered fearful, insecure, and resentful by the same unstable social and economic conditions that fuel crime.39

Priti Patel meets Harry Callahan At a time when liberalism in general, and due process liberalism in the legal sphere in particular, is in retreat, films such as Dirty Harry and Death Wish still have considerable resonance. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Death Wish was

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re-made in 2018 (by Eli Roth). During his time in office, Donald Trump repeatedly and violently castigated judges and court judgements that he regarded as overly liberal,40 and his more than 200 appointments to the federal judiciary moved it heavily to the right.41 His three appointments to the Supreme Court also shifted its centre of gravity considerably to the right by giving conservatives six of the nine seats. The most controversial of these was the ultra-conservative Judge Amey Coney Barrett, who, in highly controversial circumstances, replaced the well-known and highly regarded liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg after her death.42 Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Priti Patel, the Home Secretary appointed by Boris Johnson in July 2019, has made a specialism of attacking due process liberalism, taking aim in particular at legal professionals defending migrants to the UK. For example, this gem taken from her speech to the Tory party conference in October 2020: No doubt those who are well-rehearsed in how to play and profit from the broken system will lecture us on their grand theories about human rights. Those defending the broken system – the traffickers, the do-gooders, the lefty lawyers, the Labour party – they are defending the indefensible.43

The same sentiments were expressed by Johnson himself at the conference, and these and other similar remarks resulted in over 800 former judges and senior legal figures publishing an open letter44 in which they accused the prime minister and home secretary of undermining the rule of law and effectively risking the lives of those working in the justice system. Given that this is the same government which wants to limit judicial review, weaken the Human Rights Act 1998 and quite possibly withdraw altogether from the European Convention on Human Rights, it is all too clear that the matters raised by films such as Dirty Harry and Death Wish are still of very considerable concern on both sides of the Atlantic.

Notes 1 Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 549–50. 2 Ibid., xxxiv. 3 Ibid., 552.

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4 Gillian Peele, Revival and Reaction: The Right in Contemporary America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p.72. 5 Richard Nixon, ‘What has happened to America?’, The Reader’s Digest, October 1967, pp. 49–54. Available at https://college.cengage.com/history/ayers_primary_ sources/nixon_1967.htm. 6 Richard Nixon, ‘Remarks on the CBS Radio Network: “A new alignment for American unity” ’, 16 May 1968. Available at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ documents/remarks-the-cbs-radio-network-new-alignment-for-american-unity. 7 ‘Address accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida’. Available at https://www.presidency.ucsb. edu/documents/address-accepting-the-presidential-nomination-the-republicannational-convention-miami. 8 ‘State of the Union Address: Richard Nixon (January 22, 1970)’. Available at https:// www.infoplease.com/primary-sources/government/presidential-speeches/ state-union-address-richard-nixon-january-22-1970. 9 Quoted in J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: The New York Press, 2003), p. 268. 10 Ibid., p. 329. 11 Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1972 (New York, Harper Perennial Political Classics), p. 219. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 220. 14 Spiro Theodore Agnew, ‘Television news coverage’, speech to a Midwest regional meeting of the Republican Party, Des Moines, Iowa, 13 November 1969. Available at https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/spiroagnewtvnewscoverage.htm. 15 Ibid. 16 Jefferson Cowie, ‘The “Hard Hat Riot” was a preview of today’s political divisions’, The New York Times, 11 May 2020. Available at https://www.nytimes. com/2020/05/11/nyregion/hard-hat-riot.html. See also David Paul Kuhn, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-class Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press). 17 Peter Lev, American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000), p. 25. 18 Ibid., p. 24. 19 Ibid., pp. 24–5; Hoberman, Dream Life, pp. 286–7. 20 There is a distinct parallel here with the British television series Till Death Do Us Part (BBC, 1966–75), which its creator, Johnny Speight, intended as a critique of the bigotry of its central character, Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell), but with which many viewers actually identified. The US version of the show, All in the Family

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(CBS, 1971–9), which elicited similarly varied readings, was set in Joe’s locale, Queens. 21 Pauline Kael, ‘Dirty Harry – Saint cop’, originally published in the New Yorker, 15 January 1972. Available at https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/12/28/dirty-harrysaint-cop-review-by-pauline-kael/. 22 Ibid. 23 Quoted in Jonathan Kirsch, ‘At the head of his class’, Los Angeles Times, 16 March 2003. Available at https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-16-bkwestwords16-story.html. 24 The relevant passage is as follows: Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, without authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature. But force, or a declared design of force, upon the person of another, where there is no common superior on earth to appeal to for relief, is the state of war: and it is the want of such an appeal gives a man the right of war even against an aggressor, though he be in society and a fellow subject. Thus a thief, whom I cannot harm, but by appeal to the law for having stolen all that I am worth, I may kill, when he sets on me to rob me but of my horse or coat; because the law, which was made for my preservation, where it cannot interpose to secure my life from present force, which, if lost, is capable of no reparation, permits me my own defence, and the right of war, a liberty to kill the aggressor, because the aggressor allows not time to appeal to our common judge, nor the decision of the law, for remedy in a case where the mischief may be irreparable. Want of a common judge with authority, puts all men in a state of nature: force without right, upon a man’s person, makes a state of war, both where there is, and is not, a common judge. (John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 280–1). The italics are in the original, although I have not followed Locke’s use of capital letters. 25 Timothy O. Lenz, ‘Conservatism in American crime films’, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 12/2 (2005), p. 122. 26 Rebecca Solnit, ‘The violence at the Capitol was an attempted coup. Call it that’, Guardian, 6 January 2021. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2021/jan/06/trump-mob-storm-capitol-washington-coup-attempt. 27 Lenz, ‘Conservatism’, pp. 122–3. 28 Significantly, the vigilante cops are heavily fetishized here, with their white helmets, black leathers, powerful bikes and dark glasses. The scene is like an enlargement of that in which Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is woken up by a highway patrolman in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). As the screenplay’s

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co-writer, John Milius says in his commentary on the Warner Home Video Blu-ray of the film: ‘I like that. That’s a good scene, seeing them like that. They really look frightening . . . They make good villains . . . These guys in their Nazi outfits with their helmets and everything, they do make a good force to oppose him’. 29 What Briggs is referring to here is the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, a vigilante group formed in 1851 and re-formed in 1856. It was a response to the rampant crime and corruption in the city which followed in the wake of the massive population growth consequent on the discovery of gold in 1848. The legal authorities were quite unable to deal with the situation, and hence the formation of the vigilante force. This hanged eight people and forced several elected officials to resign. 30 It has to be said that if Warners was looking to clean up Callahan’s image, the choice of Milius to co-write the screenplay was an odd one, since he has always delighted in not being part of what he regards as Hollywood’s cosy liberal consensus. As he put it apropos the outraged reaction in certain quarters to his Communists-invade-USA movie, Red Dawn (1984): I’m really an extreme right-wing reactionary. I’m not a reactionary – I’m just a right-wing extremist so far beyond the Christian-identity people like that and stuff, that they can’t even imagine. I’m so far beyond that I’m a Maoist. I’m an anarchist. I’ve always been an anarchist. Any true, real right-winger if he goes far enough hates all form of government, because government should be done to cattle and not human beings.

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Interview in Film Threat, 8 March 1999. Available at https://filmthreat.com/ uncategorized/joy-in-the-struggle-a-look-at-john-milius/. Tony Ortega, ‘What Frank Serpico started: the Knapp Commission report’, Village Voice, 1 March 1973. Available at https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/04/18/ what-frank-serpico-started-the-knapp-commission-report/. John Pratt, Penal Populism (Abingdon: Routledge 2007), p. 12. Ibid., p. 21. Kael, ‘Saint cop’. Eric Patterson, ‘Every which way but lucid: the critique of authority in Clint Eastwood’s police movies’, Journal of Popular Film & Television, 10/3 (1982), p. 94. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Industrial Society (London: Sphere Books, 1968), p. 71 Ibid., pp. 72–3. Patterson, ‘Every which way’, p. 103. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 95.

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40 Brennan Center for Justice, ‘In his own words: the President’s attacks on the courts’, 5 June 2017. Available at https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/researchreports/his-own-words-presidents-attacks-courts. 41 Rebecca R. Ruiz, Robert Gebeloff, Steve Eder and Ben Protess, ‘A conservative agenda unleashed on the federal courts’, The New York Times, 14 March 2020. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/us/trump-appeals-courtjudges.html. 42 Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, ‘Trump selects Amy Coney Barrett to fill Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court’, New York Times, 25 September 2020. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/us/politics/amy-coney-barrettsupreme-court.html. 43 Harriet Grant, ‘Home secretary’s “dangerous” rhetoric “putting lawyers at risk” ’, Guardian, 6 October 2020. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/globaldevelopment/2020/oct/06/home-secretarys-dangerous-rhetoric-putting-lawyersat-risk. 44 Owen Boycott, ‘Lawyers call for apology from Johnson and Patel for endangering colleagues’, Guardian, 25 October 2020. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2020/oct/25/lawyers-ask-johnson-and-patel-to-apologise-forendangering-colleagues.

Bibliography Admin, ‘Joy in the struggle: a look at John Milius’, 8 March 1999. Available at https:// filmthreat.com/uncategorized/joy-in-the-struggle-a-look-at-john-milius/. Agnew, Spiro Theodore, ‘Television news coverage’, speech to a Midwest regional meeting of the Republican Party, Des Moines, Iowa, 13 November 1969. Available at https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/spiroagnewtvnewscoverage.htm. Baker, Peter and Haberman, Maggie, ‘Trump selects Amy Coney Barrett to fill Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court’, The New York Times, 25 September 2020. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/us/politics/amy-coney-barrettsupreme-court.html. Boycott, Owen, ‘Lawyers call for apology from Johnson and Patel for endangering colleagues’, Guardian, 25 October 2020. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/ politics/2020/oct/25/lawyers-ask-johnson-and-patel-to-apologise-forendangering-colleagues. Brennan Center for Justice, ‘In his own words: the President’s attacks on the courts’, 5 June 2017. Available at https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/researchreports/his-own-words-presidents-attacks-courts.

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Cowie, Jefferson, ‘The “Hard Hat Riot” was a preview of today’s political divisions’, The New York Times, 11 May 2020. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/11/ nyregion/hard-hat-riot.html. Grant, Harriet, ‘Home secretary’s “dangerous” rhetoric “putting lawyers at risk” ’, Guardian, 6 October 2020. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/globaldevelopment/2020/oct/06/home-secretarys-dangerous-rhetoric-putting-lawyersat-risk. Hoberman, J., The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: The New York Press, 2003). Kael, Pauline, ‘Dirty Harry – Saint cop’, originally published in the New Yorker, 15 January 1972. Available at https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/12/28/dirty-harrysaint-cop-review-by-pauline-kael/. Kirsch, Jonathan, ‘At the head of his class’, Los Angeles Times, 16 March 2003. Available at https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-16-bk-westwords16-story. html. Kuhn, David Paul, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-class Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press). Lenz, Timothy O., ‘Conservatism in American crime films’, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 12/2 (2005), pp. 116–34. Lev, Peter, American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions (Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2000). Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Marcuse, Herbert, One Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Industrial Society (London: Sphere Books, 1968). Nixon, Richard, ‘What has happened to America?’, The Reader’s Digest, October 1967, pp. 49–54. Nixon, Richard, ‘Remarks on the CBS Radio Network: “A new alignment for American unity” ’, 16 May 1968. Available at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ documents/remarks-the-cbs-radio-network-new-alignment-for-american-unity. Nixon, Richard, ‘State of the Union Address: Richard Nixon (January 22, 1970)’. Available at https://www.infoplease.com/primary-sources/government/ presidential-speeches/state-union-address-richard-nixon-january-22-1970. Ortega, Tony, ‘What Frank Serpico started: the Knapp Commission report’, Village Voice, 1 March 1973. Available at https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/04/18/ what-frank-serpico-started-the-knapp-commission-report/. Patterson, Eric, ‘Every which way but lucid: the critique of authority in Clint Eastwood’s police movies’, Journal of Popular Film & Television, 10/3 (1982), pp. 92–104.

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Peele, Gillian, Revival and Reaction: The Right in Contemporary America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Phillips, Kevin, The Emerging Republican Majority (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2015). Pratt, John, Penal Populism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007). Ruiz, Rebecca R., Gebeloff, Robert, Eder, Steve and Protess, Ben, ‘A conservative agenda unleashed on the federal courts’, The New York Times, 14 March 2020. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/us/trump-appeals-courtjudges.html. Ryan, Michael and Kellner, Douglas, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN : Indiana University Press, 1990). Solnit, Rebecca, ‘The violence at the Capitol was an attempted coup. Call it that’, Guardian, 6 January 2021. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2021/jan/06/trump-mob-storm-capitol-washington-coup-attempt. White, Theodore H., The Making of the President, 1972 (New York: Harper Perennial Political Classics, 2013).

6

Small Screen Shockers: Rape-Revenge Narratives in the Made-for-TV Movie Jennifer Wallis

Introduction A forest in summer. A bright blue sky, swaying pine trees, birds singing in the distance. A young woman stands outside a tent. Cut. Three hunters stalk through the forest. A hand brandishes a shining hunting knife. A burly arm in a red plaid shirt pushes branches aside. Inside the tent, the woman reads a paperback novel. A shadow against the canvas – the outline of a man in a hunting cap – before the knife plunges through the fabric. Screams, the sound of a shirt ripping, fingers grabbing and pulling, a hand over her mouth. Another scream. Though it may sound like a scene from a horror or exploitation film, the above is taken from a 1976 made-for-TV movie, one of several such movies to focus on rape and its subsequent revenge. The rape-revenge movie, typified by I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) or Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981), has been analysed by a number of scholars in recent years, most notably Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Claire Henry and Jacinda Read.1 Often beginning with a graphic depiction of sexual assault, rape-revenge films follow their female protagonists2 as they violently wreak their revenge, rejecting legal apparatus to dispense their own form of gory justice. Although these films have attracted the ire of some film critics for their unflinching focus on female suffering,3 several writers have highlighted how they films encourage viewers (male and female) to identify with the victim. In I Spit on Your Grave, for instance, the rapists’ ‘refusal to recognise [the victim’s] rights as a human being make them seem monstrously inhuman’.4 Going further, Carol J. Clover notes that many 139

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rape-revenge films ‘repeatedly and explicitly articulate feminist politics’:5 women seek (and get) revenge independent of other individuals or agencies and abusive, credulous men are punished for their actions. I Spit on Your Grave’s Jennifer Hills entices her rapists to her secluded cabin – exploiting the naïve belief that each has aroused an intense desire in her – before brutally mutilating and mangling them in various ways. Alongside classic examples like these from the horror and exploitation genres, there are a number of made-for-TV movies of the 1970s that pursue a rape-revenge narrative. In analysing these films, I am in agreement with Read’s assertion that ‘rape-revenge is best understood not as a genre, but as a narrative structure’.6 Rape-revenge films are not the product of a particular era or the preserve of a discrete cinematic category but exist across genres, adapting and transforming themselves in line with contemporary social and political concerns.7 Like Read, I am interested in ‘the culturally and historically specific function of narratives’ – rape-revenge not as a sub-genre of horror cinema, but as a more broadly pervasive narrative that has evolved across genres following its intersection with second-wave feminism in the 1970s.8 In Henry’s work, the boundaries of the rape-revenge ‘genre’ are similarly called into question in her analysis of contemporary art-house cinema. Identifying a renewed interest in rape-revenge in post-2000 cinema, Henry argues that films such as Peter Strickland’s Katalin Varga (2009) destabilize rape-revenge conventions by ‘questioning the morality and effectiveness of revenge as a response to rape’.9 As this chapter will show, a similar questioning can be seen several decades earlier, too, in TV movies of the 1970s.10 Paying closer critical attention to these television portrayals, then, further tests the boundaries of the raperevenge genre/narrative, also providing support for Read’s assertion that raperevenge is a historically – rather than generically – specific trend. In focusing on rape-revenge narratives in the American made-for-TV movie, I also wish to explore Read’s point that we should not assume a clear division, or clear points of difference, between ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ depictions of rape on screen.11 Many made-for-TV ventures coincided with bigger-budget counterparts and drew on similar themes and tropes.12 The rape-revenge TV movie shared some key features with films in the exploitation and horror genres, including the deliberate stalking of female characters and home invasion motifs. It differed in several respects, however, partly by virtue

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of its intended audience. It is doubtful how far I Spit on Your Grave or Ms. 45 were specifically targeted at a young male audience by filmmakers and distributors,13 but the TV movie was explicitly geared towards a female audience and scheduled in a way that capitalized on housewives’ free time. With these differences in mind, then, how did the TV movie represent rape and its revenge? In Rape on the Public Agenda, Maria Bevacqua offers two cultural conceptions of rape: a ‘public agenda’ and a ‘feminist agenda’. The ‘public agenda’ constructs rape as a heinous crime, urban, infrequent, committed by strangers, and something that threatens ‘our’ women. The feminist agenda sees it as an expression of broader patriarchal norms: pervasive, committed by any man, and something that curbs women’s freedom.14 Generally, the TV movie corresponds closely to Bevacqua’s ‘public agenda’ while films such as Ms. 45 tend to conform to the ‘feminist agenda’. The rape-revenge narrative in the made-for-TV movie was frequently an impersonal one, less concerned for the individual suffering of the victim than for rape as an act prompting broader societal change that would protect American women; it was ‘revenged’ via legal channels and rarely by the victim herself. In this chapter, I focus on four American TV movies of the seventies – The Sheriff (ABC, 1971), The Bait (ABC, 1973), A Case of Rape (NBC, 1974) and Revenge for a Rape (ABC, 1976) – to explore how contemporary discussions of rape and its revenge played out on the small screen.

Putting rape on TV The 1970s are often identified as the golden age of the TV movie in America, as networks invested more heavily in the format and sought content tied to contemporary issues. Made-for-TV movies have received limited attention from film scholars, however, despite their abundance.15 The made-for-TV movie was pioneered by NBC in 1964 with the chase film See How They Run, directed by David Lowell Rich, and was an alternative to paying big bucks for studio pictures. Networks were charged high rates for screening rights, with Hollywood’s leasing price for its ‘blockbusters’ increasing by a whopping 250 per cent between 1965 and 1970.16 TV movies instantly did away with this cost

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and were also able to use the talents of producers and directors already working for a network. Despite their lack of Hollywood production values, made-forTV movies could be big audience draws, especially at a time when there were only three or four major TV networks for viewers to choose from:17 Although a telefilm can’t make the same Nielsen killing as an AIRPORT or a GODFATHER, in most cases it ranks consistently higher than the regular theatrical movie broadcasts. THE GRADUATE, which drew the sixth largest TV audience of any theatrical film last year, was still outranked by NBC’s topper, A CASE OF RAPE.18

In 1974, 130 new ‘telefilms’ were aired on American TV compared to 118 theatrical feature films broadcast for the first time.19 The large number of TV movies being produced, though, was reflective of the fact that many had a limited shelf life – viewing figures for re-runs tended to be poor. The TV movie relied on current, newsworthy topics for its success, ‘draw[ing] large audiences by presenting social issues in an audacious manner’.20 Screened as one-off productions, TV movies carried a sense of urgency,21 and it is perhaps this speedy, functional approach to production that has divided critics on their worth. Todd Gitlin notes that their brief, strictly time-bound, appearance on television ‘leav[es] who knows what traces in the consciousness of our time’.22 The topics covered by TV movies were often far from forgettable, though, as one critic wrote in 1975: ‘The[ir] big advantage . . . is that they provide the outlet for films which die at the box office. Subjects like rape, homosexuality, and alcoholism can be treated with relative honesty, and the networks can’t lose.’23 The growing popularity of the TV movie in the 1970s coincided with a renewed focus on crime in the United States, and with second-wave feminism. Tackling rape was high on the political agenda with the establishment of institutions such as the National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape, efforts to debunk rape myths and highlight the pervasiveness of victimblaming within the legal system, and the reporting of individual cases in the press. One such example was the ordeal of singer Connie Francis, who was raped at a motel in 1974 and sued the motel chain for failing to provide adequate protection; a jury awarded her $2.5m and – according to The New York Times – awarded her husband $150,000 for ‘the loss of his wife’s services’.24

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As the perspectives of rape victims like Francis received greater media coverage, the public became increasingly aware of ‘sneering police officers, judgmental medical staff, reluctant prosecuting attorneys, sex-biased judges, procedural difficulties in courtrooms, impossible legal standards of proof, and general lack of support from the community’.25 Such challenges were made abundantly clear in the campaign against Wisconsin Judge Archie Simonson, who lost his position following comments he had made about the rape of a schoolgirl by three boys in 1977. Simonson’s remark during sentencing, that one of the boys had merely been ‘reacting normally to relaxed cultural attitudes about sex and the recent fashion of more-revealing clothing for women’, was not a lone instance; in the same year a court sitting in the case of a woman who had been raped while hitchhiking declared that women who hitchhiked should expect sexual advances.26 Despite outraged responses to such episodes, as well as public education efforts like 1971’s Speak Out on Rape campaign and the 1975 resolution of the American Bar Association calling for reform of rape law, the personal prejudices of jurors and judges were recognized as barriers to widespread reform.27 It was these kinds of barriers that constituted the major theme of those made-for-TV movies that used a rape-revenge narrative. The fight to overthrow the culture of victim-blaming was fought not only in the legal arena, but also found its way into media depictions of rape – with television networks more willing to give progressive messages airtime. Television became a campaign and consciousness-raising space, with the screening of documentaries and news specials such as The Rape Victims (ABC, 1977) and The Lonely Crime (WRC-TV, 1972). Beyond the documentary format, a special episode of popular CBS sitcom All in the Family in October 1977 included the attempted rape of character Edith Bunker and the subsequent efforts of her family to help her get over the attack.28 Edith Bunker’s experience was clearly a fictional representation, but the transformation of real-life rapes into small-screen spectacles could blur the lines between news, public education and entertainment. In 1984, CNN screened trial coverage of the Big Dan’s case, in which a young woman had been raped by several men in a bar while others looked on but did not intervene; the case was later dramatized in the 1985 TV movie Silent Witness (NBC), directed by Michael Miller. This ‘re-writing’ of rape stories via trial coverage or film dramatizations, a process that Lisa Cuklanz sees as an effective

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way of emphasizing the long-term impact of rape, has tended to take place on the American talk show in recent years.29 The Oprah Winfrey Show, for example, has interviewed several rape victims. Discussing one of these interviews, Elspeth Probyn identifies the various ‘levels’ of reality in operation when a reallife case is discussed on a talk show – itself presented as entertainment – which is then interrupted by advertisement breaks that disrupt the narrative: ‘We are dealing with at least three levels of “reality” here: the familiar real world of consumption, the true tale of a rape, and the actual situation of women and television at home.’30 The television audience – as Helen Wheatley notes in her discussion of the ‘model viewer’ – is an integral part of the overall performance; their emotional response to the stories on screen is as much a part of the tale as the account of the victim.31 Both Probyn and Wheatley speak to the uncanniness of television. This is particularly relevant to the TV movie, within which the basic plot tended to revolve around the disruption of comfortable suburban domestic life, confronting audiences with fictive lives similar to their own. The target audience for the made-for-TV movie were women in their twenties to fifties, relatively engaged with contemporary social and political issues. It was not surprising, then, that so many TV movies relied on a woman-in-danger motif to capture the attention and emotions of their audience. ‘To have . . . female appeal,’ wrote Nancy Schwartz in 1975, ‘a telefilm must have a central suspense situation: immediate jeopardy, often involving a woman, which is resolved as ninety or more time-bomb minutes tick away. These softcore gothics comprise the bulk of Made-for-TV movies.’32 The TV movie’s penchant for ‘homely trauma’,33 and its tendency to depict people inspired or led by a single individual,34 leant itself well to rape plot lines. The use of a personal story to explore wider social or legal problems also resonated with second-wave feminism’s rejoinder that ‘the personal was political’. Many of the rape-themed TV movies of the 1970s were either based on individual highly-publicized cases or presented as broad representations of the contemporary legal environment. Both approaches chimed with the TV movie’s espoused commitment to authenticity, and rape was used in several network productions from the 1970s through to the 1990s – at which point the focus of many networks shifted towards child abuse in the wake of the McMartin preschool case and concerns about so-called Satanic ritual abuse.

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Some commentators have seen the TV movie as holding out great possibility for presenting divergent, even controversial, viewpoints35 – and certainly they were an important platform for women directors and actresses who may have been less able to find work elsewhere. We might expect the TV movie, then, to offer a variety of feminist-inflected scripts tackling issues that were being earnestly discussed at the time: sexual assault, street harassment and rape law. But whilst many TV movies engage closely with these debates, the social, political or personal impacts of these films were often limited or complicated. The restrictions of the format led to many of the more confrontational aspects of 1970s feminism being rendered less forceful, as networks sought to present stories that would not be too radical or alienating for their broad-based audiences. In more than one instance, TV movies left viewers with the impression that women who were raped could expect little in the way of justice should they pursue conviction, sometimes even seeming to caution against legal action, and occasionally perpetuating the very rape myths that contemporary feminism was attempting to deconstruct.

Revenge for a Rape The made-for-TV movie that comes closest to the horror or exploitation raperevenge is Revenge for a Rape, directed by Timothy Galfas, a scene from which opens this chapter. The happy couple we meet at the beginning of the movie, Travis (Mike Connors) and Amy (Tracy Brooks Swope), are living the American dream, about to spend a relaxing break in the mountains and eagerly anticipating the birth of their first child (Amy is two-and-a-half months pregnant). When Travis leaves their camping spot to go fishing, Amy is raped by the three men they had encountered on an earlier visit to the local market. Amy loses the baby and, while she lies recovering in hospital, Travis sets out to seek revenge, tracking the men through the woods and picking them off one by one. The film plays on the backwoods yokel trope, with Amy’s rape occurring during the hunting season. The unrestrained masculinity that is indulged by the hunting of deer also finds its outlet in sexual assault, as implied by the apathetic response of the local Sheriff (Robert Reed) who tells Travis, ‘Your wife got raped at a bad time,’ and sighs that the town has ‘nothing but trouble’

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during hunting season. Revenge for a Rape’s rural landscape is a place where men run amok, where brutal rape is positioned as just one aspect of the unrestrained masculinity of backwoods America. The film’s rural location, its gang rape and its methodical, bloody slaying of the rapists, suggests a film closely aligned with I Spit on Your Grave or Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974), the latter of which it is clearly heavily indebted to. By the film’s close, however, it has become a strange hybrid, more akin to the ‘legal rape-revenge’ film that suggests that violent solutions are futile.36 As we watch Travis lose himself to his own primitive instincts, hunting the three men through the forest, we are also offered occasional glimpses of Amy in her hospital bed – this is not her revenge, but her husband’s, and indeed his words suggest that his actions are on behalf of his unborn child rather than his wife (‘You killed my son’). In conversations between Amy and the local police, it is finally revealed that Travis has been hunting and killing the wrong men. In the confused melee of a small town during hunting season, Amy’s initial identification of the culprits was mistaken, and it is only when the three genuine aggressors are placed beneath her hospital window in a casual ID parade that she comes face-to-face with her rapists. Revenge for a Rape, then, suggests that the victim’s testimony may be unreliable, also emphasizing the serious consequences of vigilante action. It is the police who secure the arrest of the guilty men, not Travis, and certainly not Amy, who takes a back seat within the narrative as soon as her rape has provided the impetus for the ensuing action.

A Case of Rape More typical than the backwoods setting in the rape-revenge TV movie is the urban or suburban environment. One of the most successful of all made-forTV movies – indeed, the eighth most popular telefeature between 1964 and 199037 – was A Case of Rape, directed by Boris Sagal, aired in February 1974 by NBC. Starring Elizabeth Montgomery as victim Ellen (‘a middle-class housewife on the fringes of swimming-pool suburbia’),38 A Case of Rape addressed a number of rape myths head on and perpetuated some others. Ellen is a wife and mother, and it is the impact of rape on those around her –

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more so than on Ellen herself – that forms the crux of the film. When she is raped in the family home by a friend from evening class who has asked to use the phone, the camera quickly moves away from the scene, settling instead on her young daughter’s bedroom door. (In contrast to the graphic rape scenes of films like A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), TV movies tended not to depict the act of rape itself in any detail, usually fading to black before presenting the viewer with the aftermath of the act.) Mothers are infrequently presented as rape victims so it is significant – if not unsurprising, considering TV movies’ imagined audience – that both A Case of Rape and Revenge for a Rape situate mothers or mothers-to-be as victims, emphasizing that rape victims may be from any demographic group.39 Ellen’s independence, however – her attendance at evening classes and socializing with (male) classmates – perpetuates the myth that the victim has somehow encouraged the rape. Ellen is dissuaded from immediately reporting the assault by the aggressive manner of the police officer on the phone; it is only when she is raped for a second time by the same man that she is moved to take action. This heralds the beginning of a set of painful personal and legal battles. Ellen is interrogated by police who ask her if she wears a bra and whether she perhaps found the idea of force exciting; her husband becomes suspicious of her complicity in the act given that she didn’t report the first rape, blaming her for the impact on the couple’s sex life (‘It was done to both of us’). The most explicit articulation of Ellen’s personal and bodily suffering occurs in a medical examination scene in which the horror of rape is encoded in Ellen’s scratched and bruised body (one publicity shot for the film depicted an apparently naked, bruised and wideeyed Montgomery, photographed from behind as though anticipating another attack). Given its sustained focus on Ellen’s legal team’s efforts to get her rapist convicted, A Case of Rape offers an unexpected conclusion to the audience: the rapist is found not guilty. The police admit that some of the laws they are working with are over 100 years old and ‘don’t make much sense anymore’, and Ellen’s lawyer bemoans poorly-educated and prejudiced juries. Although it was not presented as drawing on a single true-life case, A Case of Rape clearly positioned itself as an accurate rendering of contemporary legal experience, apparently based on various reports from a District Attorney’s office.40 The opening credits of the film recited statistics on rape, and the epilogue added a

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similarly pseudo-factual air with its report that Ellen’s rapist was caught fleeing the scene of another assault shortly afterwards, and that Ellen and her husband later divorced. A Case of Rape does not offer ‘a red, white and blue message about things working out’,41 but in its epilogue suggests that bringing Ellen’s rapist to court has added to a stock of evidence that will be useful in the future, if not immediately. Ellen has come to embody – and to do a service for – good, law-abiding society, but only at great personal cost.

The Sheriff The Sheriff, like A Case of Rape, takes a courtroom battle as its main focus. In contrast to A Case of Rape’s white suburban housewife, the victim in The Sheriff, directed by David Lowell Rich, is a young black college student, Janet (Brenda Sykes), who is raped by a white insurance salesman, Larry Walters (Ross Martin) visiting her home. As the film’s title suggests, her rape is less about her than a plot device allowing for an exploration of small-town racism. Local sheriff, James Lucas (Ossie Davis), believes that pursuing the case to court will prove his own point about the double standards and ‘quiet racism’ of his suburban California town. Rape is thus ‘structured as a scene through which a multitude of conflicts are staged’,42 within which the personal suffering of the victim is just one aspect. As in Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995) or A Time to Kill (Joel Schumacher, 1996), the black victim is presented as incapable of seeking redress herself, instead relying on others whose intervention ensures that she is disempowered at the same time as she is victimized.43 The conviction of Janet’s rapist is only secured by a middle-class white neighbour whose testimony represents a personal triumph over her own racial prejudice. In contrast to Revenge for a Rape, Janet’s inability to (initially) remember what her rapist looked like is rather more clearly articulated as being a result of shock than as a means of questioning her reliability as a witness: ‘I was with him all that time and I can’t remember what he looked like.’ Nevertheless, this serves to establish her as an unreliable witness who is unable to pursue justice on her own. Further, whilst the film introduces ideas that play upon racial stereotypes of black hyper-sexuality, these are presented in an ambiguous way that may allow the audience to read them as either refutation

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or confirmation of those stereotypes. During the trial, Walters tries to present himself as a victim due to ‘the way that girl carries on . . . I was black and blue for three whole days’. Janet is re-Othered even as she achieves justice; the white neighbour who provided vital testimony remains unable to comfortably interact with Janet at the trial’s close.

The Bait The Bait, directed by Leonard Horn, situates rape within a bustling urban environment that has its gaze firmly fixed on the female form. A newspaper seller asks a doorman for the name of the ‘nice pretty girl’ he serves each day. Cut to a scene of our heroine, single mother and undercover cop Tracy Fleming (Donna Mills). Out on an assignment, she confronts a man harassing two young girls on a bus – an intervention that earns her a reprimand from her boss who complains of her taking her eye off the man she was trailing to deal with ‘hypothetical nastiness’. Tracy’s commitment to combatting sexual assault and harassment takes a perversely personal slant when she positions herself as ‘bait’ for a rapist and murderer. The final scenes of the film see her alone with rapist Earl Stokey (William Devane) in her apartment, which he has broken into. Complicating the basic home invasion narrative, however, the apartment becomes a dangerous site for both parties after Tracy sends a coded message to her young son, calling for back-up, and aims to keep Stokey in her home until help arrives. During their time in this domestic space, he is revealed to be an unhinged individual with a fierce hatred of any woman he perceives to be ‘loose’. It is one of few instances in the TV movie in which the psychology of the rapist is explicitly explored, and which plays into the myth – often seen in pre-1970s rape-revenge narratives – that rapists are ‘insane’,44 also suggesting that rape is a crime typically committed by strangers (as in Bevacqua’s ‘public agenda’). No rape actually occurs in The Bait, but the film positions Tracy as a kind of proxy revenger for the local female population who have suffered at the hands of Stokey. Although The Bait is notable as a film that allows the female character to pursue ‘revenge’ on her own, Tracy’s actions are only permissible due to her role within the police force, where she is backed up by male colleagues.

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Throughout the film, Tracy’s attractiveness is emphasized, as her boss comments that she has the ‘best legs on the force’. Tracy herself perceives rape as an act dependent on a woman’s appearance: when she fails to be immediately attacked after making herself ‘the bait’, she jokes that she’s ‘not as irresistible as [she] thought’. It is a neat illustration of the tendency that Mary Buhl Dutta identifies in the television soap opera, which ‘while paying lip service to the feminist stance, actively popularizes the rape myths of patriarchal culture’.45 This tension between condemning rape myths and using them as narrative devices is evident in other films discussed in this chapter, as is the situating of the victim as the object of a voyeuristic gaze. The opening credits of A Case of Rape recite statistics on the number of women raped each year over black and white images of women going about their business at work or in the street, positioning the viewer as voyeur. Focusing in on Ellen, the voiceover announces ‘This woman is about to become a statistic. She’s going to be raped’ – a statement that may be read as both a warning and a perverse promise. The ‘self-aware’ spectatorship of films such as The Accused (Jonathan Kaplan, 1988) can also be seen in those made-for-TV movies where the viewer shares the rapist’s point of view.46 In Revenge for a Rape we see Amy framed through a pair of binoculars as she is watched by her rapists, a viewpoint that makes the hunting analogy explicit as well as putting the audience in the voyeur’s position.

Figure 6.1 The hunting of Amy in Revenge for a Rape.

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The shock of the small screen Contradiction and ambiguity – condemning some rape myths while perpetuating others, for instance – were common features of the TV movie. Though they may have had the freedom to address social issues in a more specific and immediate way than theatrical releases, that freedom was limited by network guidelines about sexual and violent content as well as financial constraints. In addition, the issues that TV movies dealt with had to be articulated in a language that was palatable to the conservative tastes of middle America, gently prodding at audience perceptions without alienating them in the process. The TV movie was careful to situate rape within the generally right-wing discourse typical of the format, emphasizing women’s roles as mothers and wives and the dangers that could come with independence. Their narratives matched those of prime-time television more generally, working to ‘contain rather than enlarge discussions about power and violence’.47 In choosing to present stories that were drawn from real life, and which often revolved around legal battles,48 TV movies also tended to present multiple viewpoints to the audience. Although we may see this as a virtue of the format, it was a practice that could lead to the watering-down of feminist politics even as films professed to challenge rape myths and victim-blaming. Though not discussed in this chapter (primarily because it is a film meriting a chapter of its own), Cry Rape (CBS, 1973), directed by Corey Allen, begins impressively, following the humiliation of a rape victim as she is shuttled between bored doctors and bored policemen. Then, midstream, the plot switches directions and settles on the plight of a young man falsely accused of the crime. Both stories may have been legitimate, but the combination and sequencing of the two narratives seemed to cast doubt on the woman’s story and warn victims against pressing charges. The desire to fit a variety of angles into a format with strict time constraints (around 90 minutes) led Cry Rape to present an unwieldy tangle of questions to the viewer that were unlikely to be resolved before the credits rolled. In a similar way Rape and Marriage (CBS, 1980), directed by Peter Levin – a dramatization of the Rideout trial which was the first case of marital rape to be tried in the US – presented several stories to the audience as a court would to a jury, giving viewers room to question the accusations being made (and,

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interestingly, to encourage them to identify with jurors rather than with the victim).49 In most TV movies, then, discussions about rape were contained within, and articulated via, legal frameworks. Discussing the theatrical film The Accused, which was loosely based on the Big Dan’s case, Clover notes: If something gets gained in this most civilised version of the rape-revenge story, something also gets lost. There is a sense in which the third party, the legal system, becomes the hero of the piece: focus has in any case shifted from the victim to her lawyer, from questions of why men rape and how victims feel to questions of what constitutes evidence, from bedroom (or wherever) as the site of confrontation to courthouse.50

As Read notes in her critique of Clover’s work, the ‘legal revenge’ of The Accused has to be understood with reference to the changes taking place within liberal institutions in the early 1980s.51 In a similar way, I do not necessarily see the TV movie’s pursuit of ‘revenge’ through (ineffective) legal channels as an intentional repudiation of a feminist stance, but rather as a reflection of evolving contemporary discourse as well as the practical constraints of the format. It is understandable that the TV movie would present audiences with a discrete and identifiable problem – a loophole in legal apparatus, for instance – to explore broader systemic injustice or ingrained cultural misogyny, rather than attempt an in-depth exploration of such injustices within ninety minutes. The downbeat conclusion of A Case of Rape was a result of the TV movie’s aim to present realistic, rather than idealized, pictures of the topics at hand. The 1970s was a period of transition as the courts, police, media and the public got to grips with new conceptions of sexual assault, harassment and rape; the sense of uncertainty surrounding such change was reflected in the TV movie. The conception of rape as part of a spectrum of behaviours entrenched in patriarchal society, for example, was an idea articulated in The Bait, but one that was counteracted by the film’s simultaneous unquestioning use of rape myths. Like the ‘women in peril’ thrillers of 1970s Britain studied by Peter Hutchings, the rape-revenge TV movie was the product of a ‘transitional moment in culture’, as long-standing cultural preconceptions, personal prejudices and ugly social realities came up against a drive to transform public attitudes.52 In consequence, both the British women in peril thriller and the

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American rape-revenge TV movie found it difficult to offer a concrete, satisfactory conclusion to viewers. Indeed, many productions played upon this instability to great effect, unsettling their audience’s worldview by suggesting that, though there may be justice in the world, it was by no means guaranteed. As such, despite their hesitancy to adopt a particularly radical political stance, we might still see films like A Case of Rape as part of the consciousness-raising efforts of the 1970s women’s movement: although some viewers may have come away with the impression that legal action was futile, others may have been moved to become more involved with campaigns for legal reform. In her analysis of post-2000 rape-revenge films, Henry points to ‘the versatility and durability of the rape-revenge genre’.53 Within rape-revenge scholarship, the made-for-TV movie has received modest attention, yet it is testament to the versatility that Henry describes, and a further illustration of Read’s point that raperevenge is not a narrative restricted to one or two genres. However, in contrast to the rape-revenge horror or exploitation film that presented the audience with the ‘repressed’54 – female power and violence – the rape-revenge TV movie was produced within a largely conservative structure that had to balance audience expectations with strict time constraints. In consequence, the TV movie rarely granted its female characters the crusading power of Jennifer Hills.

Notes 1 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011); Claire Henry, Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2014); Jacinda Read, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Also see Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: British Film Institute, 1992); Peter Lehman, ‘ “Don’t blame this on a girl”: female rape-revenge films’, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 103–17. 2 There are films depicting male rape victims. See for example Kelly McWilliam and Sharon Bickle, ‘Re-imagining the rape-revenge genre: Anna Kokkinos’ The Book of Revelation’, Continuum, 31/5 (2017), pp. 706–13. Two made-for-TV movies – It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Guy (ABC, 1974) and The Rape of Richard Beck (ABC, 1985) – are notable for their focus on male victims.

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3 See for example Gene Siskel, ‘Most frightening horror of I Spit On Your Grave is its mainstream America audience’, Chicago Tribune, 14 July 1980. Cited in Marco Starr, ‘J. Hills is alive: a defence of I Spit On Your Grave’, in Martin Barker (ed.), The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 48. 4 Starr, ‘J. Hills is alive’, p. 52. 5 Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, p. 151. 6 Read, New Avengers, p. 25. 7 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, ‘Fair games and wasted youth: Twenty-five years of Australian rape-revenge film, 1986–2011’, Metro Magazine, 170 (2011), p. 87. 8 Read, New Avengers, p. 11. 9 Claire Henry, ‘Challenging the boundaries of cinema’s rape-revenge genre in Katalin Varga and Twilight Portrait’, Studies in European Cinema, 10/2–3 (2013), p. 136. 10 Read has analysed three TV movies from the 1980s and 1990s in New Avengers, pp. 208–36. 11 Ibid., p. 29. 12 Heller-Nicholas, Rape-Revenge Films, p. 65. 13 On this see Heller-Nicholas, Rape-Revenge Films, p. 8; Lehman, ‘ “Don’t blame this on a girl” ’; Read, New Avengers, pp. 34–5. 14 Maria Bevacqua, Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2000), p. 134. 15 A notable exception is the recent volume edited by Amanda Reyes, Are You in the House Alone? A TV Movie Compendium 1964–1999 (Oxford: Headpress, 2016). 16 Gary Edgerton, ‘High concept, small screen: reperceiving the industrial and stylistic origins of the American made-for-TV movie’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 19 (1991), p. 117. 17 Reyes, Are You in the House Alone? pp. 3–4. 18 Nancy Schwartz, ‘TV films’, Film Comment, 11/2 (1975), p. 36. 19 Ibid. 20 Sujata Moorti, Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Television’s Public Spheres (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 187. 21 Stephen Hilgartner and Charles L. Bosk, ‘The rise and fall of social problems: a public arenas model’, American Journal of Sociology, 94/1 (1988), pp. 53–78; Laurie Jane Schulze, ‘ “Getting physical”: Text/context/reading and the made-fortelevision movie’, Cinema Journal, 25/2 (1986), p. 37. 22 Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (London: Routledge 1994), p. 157. 23 Schwartz, ‘TV films’, p. 38. 24 Bevacqua, Rape on the Public Agenda, p. 129. 25 Ibid., p. 124.

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Ibid., p. 131. Moorti, Color of Rape, p. 51. Bevacqua, Rape on the Public Agenda, p. 126. Lisa M. Cuklanz, Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 8. 30 Elspeth Probyn, ‘Television’s unheimlich home’, in Brian Massumi (ed.), The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 279. On TV adverts see Elayne Rapping, ‘Made for TV movies: the domestication of social issues’, Cineaste, 14/2 (1985), pp. 30–3. 31 Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 19. 32 Schwartz, ‘TV films’, p. 37. 33 Wheatley, Gothic Television, p. 1. 34 Jane Feuer, Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism (London: British Film Institute, 1996), p. 22. 35 See for instance Moorti, Color of Rape, p. 186; Schwartz, ‘TV films’. 36 Read, New Avengers, p. 206. 37 Edgerton, ‘High concept, small screen’, p. 125. 38 John O’Connor, ‘TV: Fiction sticks close to fact in A Case of Rape’, The New York Times, 21 February 1974. 39 TV movies from the 1980s onwards often depict mothers as ‘avengers’. See Read, New Avengers, pp. 205–40. 40 O’Connor, ‘TV: Fiction sticks close to fact’. 41 Rapping, ‘Made for TV movies’, p. 33. 42 Tanya Horeck, Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 5. 43 See Read, New Avengers, p. 234. 44 Ibid., p. 96. 45 Mary Buhl Dutta, ‘Taming the victim: rape in soap opera’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 27/1 (1999), p. 35. 46 Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 116. Cited in Despoina Mantziari, ‘Sadistic scopophilia in contemporary rape culture: I Spit On Your Grave (2010) and the practice of “media rape” ’, Feminist Media Studies, 18/3 (2018), p. 399. 47 Moorti, Color of Rape, p. 113. 48 The TV movie did not have a monopoly on the courtroom drama rape-revenge film, of course – see for instance Lipstick (Lamont Johnson, 1976). 49 Melissa Ann Bazhaw, ‘For better or for worse? Media coverage of marital rape in the 1978 Rideout trial’, Communication Theses, 35, Department of Communication,

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Georgia State University (2008), available at https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=communication_theses, p. 94. Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws, p. 147. Read, New Avengers, p. 29. Peter Hutchings, ‘ “I’m the girl he wants to kill”: the “women in peril” thriller in 1970s British film and television’, Visual Culture in Britain, 10/1 (2009), p. 68. Henry, ‘Challenging the boundaries’, p. 143. Carol J. Clover, ‘Getting even: rape and revenge in I Spit on Your Grave and The Accused’, Sight & Sound, 2/1 (1992), p. 18.

Bibliography Bazhaw, Melissa Ann, ‘For better or for worse? Media coverage of marital rape in the 1978 Rideout trial’, Communication Theses, 35, Department of Communication, Georgia State University (2008). Available at https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=communication_theses. Bevacqua, Maria, Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault (Boston, MA : Northeastern University Press, 2000). Clover, Carol, J., ‘Getting even: rape and revenge in I Spit on Your Grave and The Accused’, Sight & Sound, 2/1 (1992), pp. 16–18. Clover, Carol, J., Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: British Film Institute, 1992). Cuklanz, Lisa M., Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence (Philadelphia, PA : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Dutta, Mary Buhl, ‘Taming the victim: rape in soap opera’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 27/1 (1999), pp. 34–9. Edgerton, Gary, ‘High concept, small screen: reperceiving the industrial and stylistic origins of the American made-for-TV movie’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 19 (1991), pp. 115–27. Feuer, Jane, Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism (London: British Film Institute, 1996). Gitlin, Todd, Inside Prime Time (London: Routledge, 1994). Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra, ‘Fair games and wasted youth: twenty-five years of Australian rape-revenge film, 1986–2011’, Metro Magazine, 170 (2011), pp. 86–9. Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 2011). Henry, Claire, ‘Challenging the boundaries of cinema’s rape-revenge genre in Katalin Varga and Twilight Portrait’, Studies in European Cinema, 10/2–3 (2013), pp. 133–45.

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Henry, Claire, Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014). Hilgartner, Stephen and Bosk, Charles L., ‘The rise and fall of social problems: a public arenas model’, American Journal of Sociology, 94/1 (1988), pp. 53–78. Horeck, Tanya, Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (London: Routledge, 2004). Hutchings, Peter, ‘ “I’m the girl he wants to kill”: the “women in peril” thriller in 1970s British film and television’, Visual Culture in Britain, 10/1 (2009), pp. 53–69. Lehman, Peter, ‘ “Don’t blame this on a girl”: female rape-revenge films’, in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 103–17. Mantziari, Despoina, ‘Sadistic scopophilia in contemporary rape culture: I Spit On Your Grave (2010) and the practice of “media rape” ’, Feminist Media Studies, 18/3 (2018), pp. 397–410. McWilliam, Kelly and Bickle, Sharon, ‘Re-imagining the rape-revenge genre: Anna Kokkinos’ The Book of Revelation’, Continuum, 31/5 (2017), pp. 706–13. Moorti, Sujata, Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Television’s Public Spheres (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002). O’Connor, John, ‘TV: fiction sticks close to fact in A Case of Rape’, The New York Times, 21 February 1974. Probyn, Elspeth, ‘Television’s unheimlich home’, in Brian Massumi (ed.), The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 269–83. Rapping, Elayne, ‘Made for TV movies: the domestication of social issues’, Cineaste, 14/2 (1985), pp. 30–3. Read, Jacinda, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Reyes, Amanda (ed.), Are You in the House Alone? A TV Movie Compendium 1964–1999 (Oxford: Headpress, 2016). Schulze, Laurie Jane, ‘ “Getting physical”: Text/context/reading and the made-fortelevision movie’, Cinema Journal, 25/2 (1986), pp. 35–50. Schwartz, Nancy‚ ‘TV films’, Film Comment, 11/2 (1975), pp. 36–8. Starr, Marco, ‘J. Hills is alive: a defence of I Spit On Your Grave’, in Martin Barker (ed.), The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media (London: Pluto Press, 1984), pp. 48–55. Wheatley, Helen, Gothic Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

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Tax Shelter Terrors: Cinépix and the Hidden History of 1970s Canadian Horror Cinema Xavier Mendik

The tax shelter’s failure to fit within the critical community’s definition of acceptable Canadian film practice has resulted in their continued obscurity within Canadian film scholarship. Benjamin Wright ‘Canada’s Great Shame: Canada’s Great Shame: Tax Shelters, Nationalism, and Popular Taste in Canadian Cinema’1 The above quotation by Benjamin Wright provides a pertinent opening observation through which to consider some of the social, historical and cultural contradictions that governed the national reception of Canadian horror cinema during the 1970s. In a volume dedicated to films that revelled in their ability to shock and offend cultural commentators and cinemagoers alike, the marginalization of such images may at first seem unsurprising. However, what remains significant about the Canadian horror films surveyed in this chapter is that they have actually suffered from a process of double negation. Here, concerns about nationally produced examples of the extreme merged with wider condemnations around the state subsidies and government funding that motivated an explosion of horror, erotic and exploitation productions during this period. Whether defined by the body horror experimentations of Shivers (David Cronenberg, 1975) and Rabid (David Cronenberg, 1977), the home invasion terror tactics of Blackout (Eddy Matalon, 1978), the grisly concentration camp exposés of the Ilsa cycle (1975–7), or the gratuitous excesses of ‘slasher’ film entries such as My Bloody Valentine( George Mihalka, 1981), Canadian horror films of the 1970s became isolated from national and cinematic orthodoxies through their association with a set 161

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of controversial government incentives that became known as the tax shelter scheme. Indeed, when Wright uses the concept of ‘Canada’s Great Shame’ as the title of his 2012 study, he is referring less to a clutch of extreme and distasteful films from the likes of David Cronenberg, William Fruet and Ivan Reitman, and more to the introduction of state funded schemes which facilitated their early forays into cinema production. To further explore how such criticisms of these finance initiatives can be linked to the wider production of marginal horror narratives in 1970s Canada, this chapter will do two things. Firstly, I will outline the controversies that surrounded the tax shelter scheme before concluding by profiling the output of Cinépix Inc. (aka Cinépix), the Montreal film company that became closely associated with the excesses that the scheme generated.

Situating the tax shelter controversy in Canadian cinema Firstly, it is important to note that despite the tax shelter film controversies identified by Wright’s study, the scheme cannot be divorced from wider attempts to establish a national cinema that could withstand the hegemonic dominance of the Hollywood industry. The author here draws on debates from British film studies, and in particular the work of Andrew Higson, who has predicated the conception of national cinema on a process of distinction from other competitor nation states.2 In the case of Canada, notions of national cinema carried with them a ‘clear sense of urgency’3 in relation to its proximity to the USA. As with the UK case studies that Higson and others have discussed, Canada invested in the documentary realist tradition as the basis of a nationally distinct ‘quality’ cinema, with both cultures drawing heavily on the influence of the British documentary film-maker John Grierson in the development of these trends.4 Through his work at Canada’s National Film Board, Wright argues that Grierson cultivated a documentary tradition that sought to promote the nation’s ‘civic interests’5 both domestically and to the wider world, with actuality film-making ‘championed . . . over narrative features as a means of avoiding the commercial completion with . . . Hollywood.’6 Whilst this realist focus proved pivotal in developing a distinct documentary agenda within the nation, it

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evolved at the expense of fictional film production, resulting in what Wyndham Wise has defined as the ‘lost generation’7 of Canadian feature film-makers forced to travel internationally due to limited opportunities. State funded schemes of the 1960s and 1970s therefore sought to prevent a further exodus of creative talent, as witnessed by two waves of investment into cinema production. The first of these government interventions came with the 1967 launch of the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC), which sought to address the chronic under-expansion of feature film production through the provision of a $10 million government fund dedicated to supporting new film-makers with a distinctive national vision. Under the leadership of the Corporation’s original director Michael Spencer, producers could bid for funding with a ceiling of up to $300,000 for productions that demonstrated definable Canadian elements (either through their content, or their creative personnel). Between 1968 and 1974, the CFDC spearheaded a range of innovative projects from emerging new talents that also spoke to key concerns and aspirations of the Canadian mindset. Writing in the article ‘Canadian Cinema from Boom to Bust’, Wise has identified some of these early CFDC critical successes as including Donald Shebib’s melancholic crime fiction Goin’ Down the Road (1970).8 The film charted the downfall of two rural misfits who travel from the Maritimes seeking a new life of opportunity in Toronto. Shebib’s acclaimed production was written by William Fruet, whose own directorial debut of Wedding in White (1972) proved another critical success for its CFDC backers. In this second narrative Donald Pleasance is cast as an overbearing patriarch who forces his own daughter into marriage following a rape that threatens the family’s fragile reputation. The psychological tensions implicit in Wedding in White were themselves matched by another CFDC-backed entry: Peter Pearson’s 1973 drama Paperback Hero, which details the psychological decline of a Saskatchewan hockey player who begins to believe that he is in fact a wild west gunfighter. Although these releases generated positive appraisal (with Paperback Hero going on to receive Best Canadian film awards for editing, cinematography and sound), they suffered the fate of poor distribution that beset many other Canadian Film Development Fund projects during this era. Unable to complete with higher budget American products that continued to dominate the domestic exhibition circuit, these releases remained very

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much state-funded minority fare, confirming Benjamin Wright’s view of the CFDC as having to maintain ‘a precarious position’, by ‘trying to turn a profit and also satisfy the nationalist . . . mandates of politicians, critics and media scholars’.9 Writing in the article ‘Canadian Cinema from Boom to Bust’, Wyndham Wise has further revealed that only two feature films from a total of 101 CFDCbacked projects managed to gain widespread distribution and Canadian broadcast coverage between 1969 and 1974.10 As a result, when the government renewed its financial commitment to the Canadian Film Corporation in 1974, it did so with an increased focus on commerciality and the export market as mechanisms to recoup initial production costs. While film-makers were still able to bid for CFDC funding, this could either be supplemented or replaced by a new capital cost allowance (CCA), or system of tax shelter investment schemes derived from private finance. As embodied by the 1974 Capital Cost Allowance Act, finance brokers, lawyers and investment houses were now able to negotiate a patchwork of private investment in film productions that would result in higher budgets and further export potential. The scheme specifically targeted middle-class and professional investors by offering them the ability to recoup 100 per cent of the costs for their cinema investments, with the opportunity to defer profit payments on their annual tax returns. The capacity to reclaim funds on films deemed unprofitable, or on titles that failed to proceed from development to final production, provided additional incentives to investors. For Wise, the sanctioning of tax deductions for productions that were never released exposed the scheme to potential financial abuse, which the author sees as being facilitated by the new legion of lawyers, accountants and taxation advisers tasked with the administering the scheme. As he notes: This tax loophole brought into play a new type of film entrepreneur – the tax lawyers and accountants who could make their way through the complicated tax laws and ‘lever’ such investments on the basis of the original down payment . . . This new breed of producer . . . were adept at legally exploiting a grey area over which there was very little regulation and no substantive government policy directive.11

The capital cost investment scheme also evidenced a governmental transition from viewing film as a mechanism of cultural expression towards seeing it

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more as a vehicle for commercial exploitation within a transnational marketplace. This alteration in outlook was very much embodied by the installation of Michael McCabe as the new head of the CFDC in 1978. Although McCabe lacked the cinematic knowledge of predecessor Michael Spencer, his existing skillset within the investment industry perfectly matched the more corporate approach to film production that the tax shelter period came to embody. As Wise reflected: His knowledge of Canadian film was limited but he understood the investment community very well. He set about to exploit that financial base for the benefit of the new-style producer/entrepreneurs.12

Under his reign, it is undeniable that McCabe oversaw a dramatic expansion of Canadian cinema, which accelerated from four releases in 1974 to forty releases in 1978, jumping again to seventy film completions in 1979.13 Not only did 1979–80 mark the peak period of tax shelter productivity, it also evidenced a dramatic climb in budgets. To sustain the public’s interest in film investment, project development and optioning remained highly populist in orientation, often backed by the participation of minor or fading international stars to bolster the export potential of the projected releases. This increased focus on international markets also led to an over-reliance on pre-existing international (read American) film templates, with the anonymization of Canadian landscapes and other national markers accompanying this commercialization process. This process (often referred to as ‘Hollywood North’) confirms Donato Totaro’s assumption that: Many films made during the CCA period were . . . genre films (teen films, horror, comedy) and usually camouflaged their Canadian location for a generic “American” sense of place because they were marketed to a North American rather than an exclusively Canadian audience.14

Although it would be reductive to presume that horror films were the only beneficiary of Canada’s tax shelter fund, it is undeniable that under the scheme ‘there were so many genre films made because the “business” investors (in many cases lawyers, doctors, dentists, architects . . .) knew little about film therefore it was more likely they would invest in films that followed in a tradition that they would be familiar with’.15 Indeed, a cursory glance at some

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of the key titles released between the peak 1979 to 1980 period does reveal the highly generic orientation to tax shelter funded projects: Title

Director

The Brood (1979) David Cronenberg Horror (Canadian)

The Changeling (1980) Horror

Peter Medak (Canadian)

Death Ship (1980) Horror

Alvin Rakoff (Canadian)

Meatballs (1979) Ivan Reitman Comedy (Canadian)

Prom Night (1980) Horror

Paul Lynch (UK-Canadian)

Terror Train (1980) Horror

Roger Spottiswoode (UK-Canadian)

Key Star(s)

Marketing/Tagline

Oliver Reed (British) Samantha Eggar (American) George C. Scott (American)

‘They’re waiting . . . for you!’

George Kennedy (American) Richard Crenna (American) Bill Murray (American)

Jamie Lee Curtis (American) Leslie Neilson (Canadian) Jamie Lee Curtis (American) Ben Johnson (American)

‘How did you die, Joseph? Did you die in this house? Why are you still here?’ ‘Those who survive the ghost ship are better off dead.’ ‘The summer camp that makes you untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, discourteous, unkind, disobedient and very hilarious.’ ‘If you’re not back by midnight . . . you won’t be coming back!’ ‘Don’t waste money on a return fare . . . you won’t be coming home.’

As the above table indicates, key titles released between 1979–80 emphasized a formulaic focus on horror and gross-out comedy whilst also foregrounding the sensationalist styles of marketing and promotion associated with such cycles. Further, the focus on Canadian (or dual-national) directors was often overshadowed or submerged by the multi-national nature of the headline cast, confirming the tactic of disguising the national markers of the production that Donato Totaro has identified. While the increasingly salacious orientation promoted by such titles alarmed Canada’s cultural elite, it was the unsustainable trend towards over-

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inflated budgets for films that were either difficult to sell on completion, or never even made it to completion, which began to destabilize faith in the tax shelter scheme. Commenting on the ill-fated CFDC campaign for the 1980 Cannes Film Festival which stated ‘Canada Can and Does’, Wyndham Wise has argued that the reality was in fact that ‘Canadian films couldn’t and didn’t’,16 as was revealed when the festival became dominated by the critical rejection of a number of funded titles in competition. The poor reception of a clutch of tax shelter titles at this prominent event compounded a raft of unsold pictures that Canada’s banks and public had effectively bankrolled. For Wise, this effectively signalled that ‘after 18 months of intense activity, the bubble had burst’.17 Writing in the article ‘From Boom to Bust: The Tax Shelter Years’, Wise notes that following the Cannes debacle, between $40–70 million of film shares on offer to potential investors remained unsold, with the tax shelter scheme eventually being wound down in 1982. The later rebranding of the Canadian Film Development Corporation as Telefilm in 1984 also signalled a cultural shift away from film as commerce and back to cinema as arthouse production, with a focus on projects that spoke more clearly to issues of national heritage. For Benjamin Wright, Telefilm’s new focus effectively signalled a return to more conventional values associated with state funded projects, namely ‘more Royal Canadian Mounted police, fewer serial killer flicks’,18 with this move further confirming an end to the generic focus of the tax shelter era.19 Although the so-called tax shelter period effectively lasted for only eight years, its ignominious reputation for the production of unpalatable, overtly commercial and economically unsustainable films means that even forty years after its demise, the scheme is still seen, in Wright’s words, as a ‘failure . . . within the critical community’s definition of acceptable Canadian film practice’.20 The author’s observations are confirmed by the negative reception of the scheme amongst not only media commentators and national cinema scholars but even policymakers such as Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who in 1980 stated: ‘It is amazing what tax laws can do. There are now many Canadian films. But there aren’t that many good ones, are there?’21 For Peter Urquhart, the negative statements by Trudeau and other detractors evidence the ‘repetition of received wisdom’22 that passed from one review of the tax shelter scheme to another. These circulating critiques initially centre on the figure of the entrepreneur producer who emerged during this period to

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exploit the fund for purely commercial purposes by constructing narratives that are not deemed as ‘good’ or worthy of national recognition. These condemnations then expand to implicate the CFDC policy makers who supported this initiative, before coming to settle on the productions themselves. Here, titles are clustered together on the basis of their funded/economic origins, rather than possible generic roots or authorial intent, with presumed deficiencies in quality being expanded to critique these works for lacking the conventional markers of Canadian national cinema. Indeed, the absence of sustained critical reviews of the tax shelter appears confirmed by Christopher E. Gittings’s volume Canadian National Cinema. This important book devotes fewer than two pages to the tax shelter era, using much of this space to rerun existing objections to the scheme and its productions as outlined above. For Gittings, the only real benefit of the fund can be found at a craft rather than creative level in that it helped ‘to develop a cadre of skilled technicians and crews’23 within the wider national film scene. However, for writers such as Urquhart, the through line of bias against the tax shelter movies has less to do with the entrepreneurial figures that drove the trend, or even the kinds of titles that they perpetuated. Rather, it was the unconventional body of work that the tax shelter scheme created which strained accepted notions of Canadian film, thus ‘rendering films invisible’24 from sustained critical reappraisal. Because the tax shelter productions departed from accepted definitions of Canadian national cinema they were deemed ‘insufficiently artsy, angsty, or auteurist’,25 and have therefore been ignored in all major critical accounts of cinema following the demise of the scheme. In his attempts to revaluate the derided tax shelter phenomenon, Urquhart discusses a series of case-studies of previously marginal texts that he argues demonstrate clear authorial intent, an incisive understanding of the historical tensions between the Québecois regions and English-speaking Canada, and even provide a self-reflexive commentary on their contested creation under the derided tax shelter scheme. As the author provides a brief analysis of the Cinépix film Hot Dogs (Claude Fournier, 1980) as part of this revaluation of tax shelter productions, the company’s output is worthy of a closer consideration. Not only were Cinépix a noted exponent of the CFDC and tax shelter funding, but they used these schemes to create a sizeable body of controversial work that can be linked to the social and cultural tensions of 1970s Canada.

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A quiet revolution: Cinépix and 1970s Canadian horror Canada has its own studio which makes money producing and distributing shock, horror and sex-related features. That studio is called Cinepix and it’s located in Montreal. Anthony Maulucci, ‘Montreal’s Cinepix Turns a Profit on Torture’26 Created in 1962 by Québec-based exhibitor John Dunning and the Hungarian émigré André Link, Cinépix quickly became a key distributor within the province, and between 1964 and 1968 developed a reputation for importing European films into the region in order to compensate for the lack of feature film production activity in Canada at that time. Based on the seamless synthesis of Link’s business acumen and Dunning’s creative flair, the company came to prominence through its ability to harness the social, economic and gender transitions associated with the so-called Quiet Revolution of the early 1960s.

Figure 7.1 André Link (L) and John Dunning (R) of Cinépix.

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As a term, the Quiet Revolution became closely associated with the premiership of Jean Lesage (1960–6), who pursued a mandate to liberate the province from the repressive influence of his conservative predecessor Marcel Duplessis. Specifically, the Lesage administration sought to redress the dominance of the Catholic church that Duplessis had helped cultivate, replacing religious dogma with educational reform, cultural interventions and a drive towards industrialization and independence. As film critic Paul Corupe has noted, such social transitions were well suited to the types of cinematic activity distributed by Cinépix because: Québec emerged from the strict morality of Catholicism in the sexually permissive 1960s and early 1970s with a newly discovered sense of self . . . Nowhere were these insurgent notions of free love and political sovereignty better set to collide than in local movie houses, and Cinépix was just the company to harness the spirit of the Quiet Revolution.27

Cinépix initially responded to the spirit of the Quiet Revolution by importing a range of explicit international film titles into the province which circulated between ‘artistic’ and ‘sensationalist’ content, thus feeding a growing permissiveness associated with the transitions being enacted by the Lesage administration. Cinépix then moved into cinema production and between 1969 and 1984 created over seventy feature film releases which were notable for employing both CFDC and tax shelter funding to exploit a growing audience fascination with explicit, horrific and unconventional material. These releases circulated across a range of popular film cycles, but focused on Québecois sex comedies, body horror narratives, unsettling home invasion thrillers, sadistic concentration camp exposés, violent slasher films and ribald teen comedies. In so doing, Cinépix not only revolutionized the production of horror content (for both local and international audiences), but also helped mentor a new generation of prolific Canadian film-makers that included David Cronenberg, William Fruet, Don Carmody and Ivan Reitman. Although Cinépix became synonymous with ‘exploiting’ Canadian state funding to create horror and sex cinema, their tactics were mirrored by other production outlets such as Quadrant Films (under the guidance of David Perlmutter), as well as Harold Greenberg’s company Astral Films (aka Astral Bellevue Pathé) and

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Film Plan International (headed by Pierre David and Victor Solnicki), all of which also used government support to create horror productions. What distinguished Cinépix from other outlets was not only their existing footprint in film distribution, but also their ownership of regional cinema chains, which provided a secure exhibition platform for their titles. In her detailed production-based study of Cinépix, Mary Arnatt has argued that while other production companies had to depend on government funding and private investments, Dunning and Link were able to produce films using CCA and CFDC funds, private investments, and by investing their own money that they made in distribution and exhibition, ensuring that Cinépix could consistently produce a large number of films that had relatively high production values.28

Although the company’s sizeable body of work has largely been excluded from key theoretical studies of Canadian film (due to both its content and associations with funding controversies), it can be argued that their films did reflect a number of significant factors within Canada between the late 1960s and 1970s.

Revelling in the Quiet Revolution: Cinépix and Quebec sex cinema Cinépix’s move from film distribution into cinema production came with Valérie (Denis Héroux, 1969), which also coincided with the launch of the Canadian Film Development Fund. Befitting the CFDC’s remit to fund striking new visions of Canadian identity, it seems appropriate that Valérie embodies what Bill Marshall has termed as Québec’s emergent cinema of modernization. This term references the ability of cinema narratives from the region to function as direct reflections of the social and cultural transitions that accompanied the Quiet Revolution. Writing in the volume Québec National Cinema, Marshall notes that the installation of Lesage’s liberal government in the province effectively displaced dominant Catholic principles in favour of a process of technological modernization and industrial nationalization, as well as the expansion of welfare and education for citizens. For Marshall, this collapse of ‘religious belief and practices’ was accompanied

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by a liberalization of sexual attitudes, which he argued were often annexed to the new ‘norms of consumption, suburbanisation . . . and the mass media’.29 It is very much within this framework of social and sexual transitions that Valérie can be located. The film charts the sexual evolution of a naïve teenager (Danielle Ouimet), who in the charged opening scene rides out of a convent astride her lover’s motorbike in a clear renunciation of religious restrictions. The heroine’s subsequent odyssey includes encounters with the 1960s counterculture, as well as a period of prostitution, before she finally accepts the role of maternal substitute to her emancipated male suitor and his son. Despite the film’s salacious reputation, Paul Corupe has identified a paradoxical drive to Valérie whereby the heroine’s ‘final redemption serves primarily as a justification for the film’s uninhibited sexuality, an astute dramatization of the newfound freedom that Québecois audiences felt at the time’.30 Cinépix very much mobilized the currency of the Quiet Revolution in the promotion of the film, while its ending (contrasting the couple’s final union

Figure 7.2 Cashing in on the Quiet Revolution: Valérie.

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with images of Québec’s flags proudly unfurling) reiterates a contemporaneous outlook via references to ongoing debates about independence in the region. Through its narrative concerns Bill Marshall has argued that Valérie ‘lives in legend’,31 not only as Québec’s first pornographic film, but also as a populist narrative that effectively captured wider social and cultural transitions from the era. The sustained influence of the production can be further confirmed in economic terms: it generated more than $1 million in revenues upon initial release and maintained an unrivalled box office position from 1969 until the mid-1980s.32 It was the financial success of Valérie that led Dunning and Link to commission further socially reflective erotic releases between 1970 and 1973. These so-called ‘maple syrup porn’33 titles included L’Initiation (1970), which further sought to harness what Marshall has defined as ‘the new shocks and stimuli of modernity’ occurring across French Canada. L’Initiation reunited director Denis Héroux with actress Danielle Ouimet, using her emergent erotic star status to punctuate a narrative about another young heroine (Chantal Renaud), who embarks on a complex relationship with an older married writer. In so doing, this film further indicated the company’s interest in challenging the ‘impasses of Québec masculinity’34 through an exploration of the new value systems confronting female subjectivity in the region. While L’Initiation’s sex and social commentary formula replicated the box office success of Valérie, its critical reception also highlighted the company’s divergence from the official Canadian cinematic orthodoxies of the period. Several press reviews questioned the creative merits of L’Initiation (which Marc Gervais dismissed as ‘candy-coated skin trash’),35 or else probed the legitimacy of the Canadian Film Development Corporation’s support for such erotic-themed projects. Indicative of these commentaries was the appropriately titled ‘Wouldn’t you know that the first Canadian to make money making movies would turn out to be the WALT DISNEY OF SEXPLOITATION’, from the Saturday Night review of August 1970. Here, Peter Desbarats considers how the economic success of Valérie led to CFDC support for subsequent Cinépix erotic productions. However, given that Valérie had previously been dismissed for its ‘banal’ plot and ‘undistinguished’36 camerawork, Desbarats questioned the cultural value of L’Initiation, which he references as being ‘even worse than Valérie’.37 The author does, however, then confirm that L’Initiation

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‘has the distinction of being the first film not only to pay back the Canadian Film Development Corporation, but to start earning money for it’.38 The paradox of state funded sexploitation cinema as a profitable commodity was further explored in the separate article ‘How the taxpayer gets a slice of skin flicks’, published in The Globe and Mail on 21 September 1970. This considers another Cinépix film, Love is a 4 Letter Word (John Sone, 1970), which depicts countercultural sensibilities as the trigger for sexual disruptions within a bourgeois household.39 Betty Lee’s review of the film also focuses on its CFDC funding, whilst also postulating that four future releases will follow in 1971, ‘all of them apparently available as investments for Canadian taxpayers’.40 While such press coverage reveals Cinépix as operating outside the accepted parameters of Canadian national cinema, it is important to acknowledge how the company’s business structures and market strategies also harnessed such notoriety to further promote the shock value of their releases. Indeed, Mary Arnatt attributes the success of Cinépix to its ‘model of a vertically-integrated adult film company’.41 This format challenged the limits of critical acceptability by seeking CFDC funding for softcore sex dramas whilst simultaneously screening more explicit hardcore content through the company’s chain of cinemas in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver.42 Through these activities, Arnatt argues, ‘Cinépix fostered a public image of a fun, youthful, and sexy studio, rejecting the conventional discourse of Canadian cinema as dramatic, serious, and documentarian.’43

Medical, military and militant fears: from Shivers to Ilsa If their early sex releases helped position Cinépix as the ‘fun and youthful’ embodiment of the Quiet Revolution, it was their later horror film releases with directors such as David Cronenberg that generated wider exposure and condemnation. When the CFDC’s head Michael Spencer greenlit Cronenberg’s feature film debut Shivers (Orgy of the Blood Parasites/They Came From Within) as a Cinépix horror title, the resultant production provoked a national media controversy, and even sparked official parliamentary debate upon its release in 1975. The film focused on the activities of Dr Emil Hobbes (Fred Doederlein), an alienated male scientist who impregnates genetically modified venereal

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parasites into his androgynous teenage lover, leading her to infect the middleclass dwellers of a plush condominium through a series of illicit sexual liaisons. Shivers’ explicit scenes focused on the widespread contamination of previously ‘civilized’ apartment residents, whilst outlining the murderous, polymorphous and even incestuous drives associated with Hobbes’s regime of infection. The film’s visceral imagery provoked further outrage when it was revealed that Cronenberg’s extreme visions had effectively been funded by the state. The most prominent critic of Shivers was Robert Fulford (writing as Marshall Delaney), whose infamous review of the film was published under the title ‘You Should Know How Bad This Film Is. After All you Paid for It’. Here, the author criticized both the film-makers behind Shivers and also the CFDC, whom Fulford argued was responsible for financing a production that was ‘a disgrace to everyone connected with it, including the taxpayer’.44 While the negative reception of Shivers quickly extended from Fulford’s review to other newspaper outlets (such as the Montreal Gazette and The Globe and Mail),45 it also attracted theoretical critiques (notably from adopted Canadian academic Robin Wood, who located Shivers in horror’s ‘reactionary wing’ for its equation of ‘sexual disgust’ with female and queer images of liberation).46 But the film’s controversy extended far beyond media coverage, provoking governmental discussions on the future funding of Canadian cinema. Some officials even called for Cinépix producers Don Cormody and Ivan Reitman to be deported as non-nationals,47 while Cronenberg was himself evicted from his home for participating in the film, after his outraged landlady read Fulford’s review.48 As Arnatt has noted, as a consequence of the backlash against the film: Cronenberg, Dunning, and Link prepared a pamphlet that contained both sides of the argument and sent it to governmental officials, such as R.W. McDonald, the Director of Film Classification, and Stephen Lewis, the Ontario Leader of the New Democratic Party.49

This response was contained in the pamphlet entitled ‘Is There a Place for Horror Films in Canada’s Film Industry?’. Here the company reproduced the Fulford/Delaney critique of the Shivers, and contextualized this against cultural and industrial defences of the film, as well as providing direct commentaries from the Cinépix owners themselves:

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Figure 7.3 You should know how good this film is: Cinépix responds to the Shivers controversy.

Despite the considerable controversy that Shivers generated, the film actually replicated Cinépix’s earlier ‘maple syrup’ formula of notoriety as a means of ensuring box office success.50 Equally, as with the company’s prior sex sagas, it is also possible to read Shivers as directly reflecting social and political concerns in Canada at that time. Specifically, James Burrell has highlighted the film’s focus on Dr Hobbes’s deviant surgical interventions as referencing a long history of Canadian medical abuse which had currency at the time Shivers was released. These infamous cases included ‘2,822 Albertans . . . subjected – either unknowingly or against their will – to eugenically inspired sterilisation’,51 with these physical interventions continuing as late as 1972. Other reported malpractices extended to the Québec scandal surrounding the so-called

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‘Duplessis Orphans’, namely ‘over 3,000 children in Québec Catholic orphanages . . . falsely declared to be developmentally disabled: a number of them were put into straightjackets, exposed to electroshock therapy . . . and even sexually abused by staff members.’52 While this theme of culturally specific ‘bad surgery’ was often lost in the negative press coverage that Shivers generated, the film retains further Canadian relevance for reflecting the 1970s political tensions that emerged when the Quiet Revolution mutated into violent revolt. Here, terrorist cells such as the Québec Liberation Front (FLQ) waged a long and bloody campaign of bombings, kidnappings and urban insurrection to further a separatist agenda that departed from the parliamentary tactics advocated by the Lesage administration. Within this context, Shivers forms part of a wider Cinépix cycle of medical, military and militant home invasion dramas that reflected these terrorist fears. Indeed, when Shivers is viewed as a narrative of containment, its opening visual montage advertising the Starliner Tower as structurally separate from

Figure 7.4 Narratives of containment: social and moral order collapses in Shivers.

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the disruptions and uncertainties associated with the Montreal sphere takes on a particular significance. This promotional film even references the building as a ‘division of General Structures Incorporated’, with the inference that these ‘structures’ segment and protect the condominium dweller from the chaos associated with wider city life. (This capacity to limit the inhabitants’ exposure to violence is later confirmed by a Starliner security guard, who boasts that he has never had to remove his security pistol from its holster during his tenure at the complex.) By contrast, it is noticeable that in Shivers, radio and TV broadcasts reference the widespread chaos and criminality of the urban sprawl as a backdrop to the security offered by the tower. It is therefore significant that the final shot of the film depicts the now infected middle-class inhabitants leaving the Starliner to travel towards this already-conflicted urban space so as to spread further chaos within Montreal’s territories. If Cinépix horror films of the 1970s do reflect the wider social and political turmoil that afflicted Québec society during this era, then the siege drama

Figure 7.5 Contemplating siege scenarios: John Dunning (L) and David Cronenberg (R) on the set of Rabid.

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narrative trope was even more evident in Cronenberg’s next collaboration with the company: Rabid. This film again used CFDC funding towards its completion, generating controversy for its visceral scenes of infection, as well as for Dunning and Link’s insistence on casting the hard core porn actress Marilyn Chambers in the leading role. As with Cronenberg’s earlier film, it is pertinent that Rabid also emphasizes the role of medical malpractice as the basis for social decline. Here, the source of contamination is Rose (Marilyn Chambers), a young protagonist who unwittingly infects a range of Montreal city dwellers after being subjected to a botched operation. Her treatment at the hands of the misguided Dr Keloid (Howard Ryshpan) not only confirms James Burrell’s view that ‘many of Cronenberg’s fictional medical procedures are performed on vulnerable members of society’,53 but also highlights that ‘it is the devastating results of the doctors’ actions on society . . . that are of significance’.54 Indeed, Cinépix’s original marketing for the film employed the tagline of a ‘shocking story of a city in panic’,55 which extends beyond themes of medical malpractice to bring in wider conceptions of the violated urban space attributable to contemporaneous FLQ activities. The group’s violent manifesto of insurrection culminated in the 1970 October Crisis, which centred on the abduction of British ambassador James Cross on 5 October, followed by the kidnapping (and later murder) of employment minister Pierre Laporte on 10 October. These actions prompted the infamous 1970 War Measures Act, enforced by the national Canadian government. As Bill Marshall has noted, this resulted in the ‘Canadian army in control of the province and civil liberties suspended, more than 500 people . . . were interned without trial as suspected “FLQ sympathizers” ’.56 Marshall has identified a number of complex consequences of the government’s authoritarian response to the FLQ threat, whereby ‘the main damage of the October Crisis is seen to be a kind of national self-surveillance for Québec’.57 This component of state sanctioned repression effectively encased Montreal in a siege scenario, subjecting its citizens to a regime of sustained military containment. Rabid perfectly captures the ‘geography of violence’58 that Jason R. Burke has identified in his analysis of the October Crisis, with state surveillance being enacted in spatial terms through a military occupation that seeks to contain Rose’s contagious body from spreading across the differing

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zones of the city. Beyond the example of Rabid, later Cinépix productions such as Blackout further annex this geography of violence to enforced containment, detailing how an urban gang headed by a charismatic countercultural mastermind terrorizes the inhabitants of an upmarket apartment block during a power cut. While Cinépix’s work with David Cronenberg highlighted its controversial deployment of state funding, many of the company’s more notorious films from the 1970s relied on private finance, and often eschewed definable Canadian markers in order to disguise their true nationalistic origins. Specifically, the Ilsa films (1975–7) represent what Paul Corupe has defined as ‘the illegitimate and unacknowledged daughter of the Canadian film industry’.59 The series comprised three releases that detailed the grisly and sexually explicit misadventures of a sadistic female prison camp warden/governess played by Dyanne Thorne. According to Corupe, the cycle was initially inspired by the company’s ‘success distributing Love Camp 7 (Lee Frost, 1969), an American sexploitation film that takes place in a Nazi stalag’.60 This influence was most evident in the initial Cinépix entry, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975). This film detailed the violent activities undertaken by Thorne’s character at a Nazi medical sex centre before she is herself tortured and executed in the film’s closing scene. Although the film was scripted by John C.W. Saxon, a University of Toronto professor, Mary Arnatt has noted that ‘almost the entire production team filmed using pseudonyms, including Dunning and Link, who were not “officially” involved with the film upon its release’.61 Despite the controversies that surrounded the film’s exploitation of concentration camp imagery, the theatrical success of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS facilitated further Cinépix sequels that revived and relocated Thorne’s character to the Middle East (Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks [Don Edmonds, 1976]), before her misadventures in contemporary Montreal (Ilsa: The Tigress of Siberia [Jean LaFleur, 1977]) exposed the genuine Canadian origins of the series. Despite the ambiguous national markers that accompanied the Ilsa films, the series still evidenced a component of national trauma through its extreme scenes. For Corupe, these Canadian anxieties are most visibly marked through the fetishization of torture imagery and paraphernalia (such as electric shock treatments) which dominate the cycle. These instruments effectively evoked the medicalization of authoritarianism associated with the Duplessis regime

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that the liberal mood of 1960s Quiet Revolution displaced.62 Equally, through Thorne’s construction of Ilsa as a libidinally voracious character,63 Corupe indicates that the series also expanded upon the successful ‘sex as freedom’64 formula that Dunning and Link had initiated with their early Québecois ‘maple syrup’ releases. For reviewer Anthony Maulucci, the Ilsa films represent a Cinépix cycle that ‘the CFDC would definitely not want to finance because their subject matter makes them strictly taboo for the government agency’.65 However, the company did return to state subsidies at the end of the decade to create some of the final horror and comedy titles associated with the tax shelter boom. Firstly, they provided significant entries to the Canadian ‘slasher’ cycle that emerged between 1979 and 1982 as a direct consequence of the Capital Cost Allowance fund. These Canadian slasher entries were frequently dismissed as ‘Hollywood North’ derivations, with these productions seen as seeking to conceal their national origins in an appeal to transnational audiences. For instance, Andrew Dowler lambasted the Cinépix slasher entry My Bloody Valentine as ‘yet another in the seemingly endless stream of murdering-masked-maniac movies and is a typical example of the genre. Which is to say, terrible.’66 However, the reviewer did concede that, unlike other Canadian slasher entries, Mihalka’s film did reveal its distinctive national components that included ‘unmistakable Nova Scotian locations’ as well as ‘a Canadian flag flying in one shot’.67 However, for Dowler, these prominent national markers, as well as the film’s atypical economic motivations for the killer’s backstory failed to ‘push My Bloody Valentine beyond the level of trite hackwork’.68 Dowler’s reservations regarding Mihalka’s film were echoed by other reviewers such as Sid Adilman, who objected to the explicit gore of My Bloody Valentine, concluding that ‘Officials at the Canadian Film Development Corporation should wipe the blood of their hands’, rather than invest funds in an ‘exploitive, gruesome and bloody violence flick’.69 As Adilman’s comments indicated, the reception of any progressive potential inherent in later Cinépix horror releases were diminished by the convergence of the slasher and Canadian teen comedy cycles with the tail end of a state funded film boom, which was increasingly seen by reviewers as declining in both cultural and economic value. For Benjamin Wright, the Cinépix comedy Meatballs (Ivan Reitman, 1979) actually reversed many of the stereotypes of

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tax evasion that dogged the Capital Cost Allowance scheme, to the extent that investors ‘were actually disappointed that their investments turned into a sizeable profit, which resulted in higher capital gains fees’.70 However, the fact that Meatballs seemed to eschew established Canadian film traditions in favour of a ‘familiarity with Hollywood norms and conventions – particularly those found in comedies’71 gives some indication why the film’s status as a legitimate example of national cinema remains disputed. Following the collapse of the Capital Cost Allowance fund, John Dunning and André Link continued to produce cult and horror titles, before returning to their former careers in distribution. Cinépix was eventually amalgamated into the emergent Canadian production and distribution outlet Lions Gate Entertainment Corporation in 1997, with Dunning eventually leaving the new incarnation of the company prior to his death in 2011. Although the work of Dunning and Link remains largely neglected by key accounts of Canadian cinema, Ben Wright argues that the output of those creators working through the tax shelter scheme should not be rejected as ‘a hiccup in the national discourse on cinema practice’.72 By annexing cinema industry trends to the wider social, political and military horrors of the era, these Cinépix releases provide a crucial insight into Canada’s isolated culture of terror during the 1970s.

This chapter employs materials from the Cinépix Inc. estate that were used for the documentary The Quiet Revolution: State, Society and the Canadian Horror Film (2020). I wish to thank Greg Dunning for his assistance with this project and for facilitating the use of these resources in this volume.

Notes 1 Ben Wright, ‘Canada’s great shame: tax shelters, nationalism, and popular taste in Canadian cinema’, Spectator, 32/2 (Fall 2012): p. 23. 2 See Andrew Higson, ‘The concept of national cinema’, Screen 30/4 (Autumn 1989), pp. 36–47. 3 Wright, ‘Canada’s great shame’, p. 21. 4 For further information on John Grierson’s influence on Canadian film culture through his work at the National Film Board see ‘Producing a national cinema’, in

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Chris Gittings, Canadian National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 76–103. See also ‘Realism and its discontents’, in Jim Leach, Film in Canada (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 11–35. Additionally, see Peter Morris, ‘After Grierson: The National Film Board 1945–1953’, in Seth Feldman (ed.), Take Two: A Tribute to Canadian Film (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1984), pp. 182–95. 5 Wright, ‘Canada’s great shame’, p. 21. 6 Ibid. 7 Wyndham Wise, ‘Canadian cinema from boom to bust’, Take One (Winter 1999), p. 18. 8 Ibid. 9 Wright, ‘Canada’s great shame’, p. 20. 10 Wise, ‘Canadian cinema’, citing Peter Pearson, p. 18. 11 Ibid., p. 19. 12 Ibid., p. 21. 13 Data cited in ibid., p. 22. 14 Donato Totaro, ‘A “taxing” incentive: the capital cost allowance films’, Off Screen, 12/2 (February 2008). Available at https://offscreen.com/view/a_taxing_incentive (accessed 25 October 2019). 15 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 16 Wise, ‘Canadian cinema’, p. 23. 17 Ibid. 18 Wright, ‘Canada’s great shame’, p. 21. 19 Although private finance initiatives continued in Canadian cinema following the demise of the tax shelter scheme, they operated at a greatly reduced levy of financial compensation for the investor, reducing from 100 per cent to 30 per cent reduction levies by 1987. For further information see Michael N. Bergman, ‘Bye bye tax shelter’, Cinema Canada (July–August 1987), pp. 6–7. 20 Wright, ‘Canada’s great shame’, p. 23. 21 Pierre Trudeau cited in Jay Scott, ‘Burnout in the great white north’, in Seth Feldman (ed.), Take Two: A Tribute to Canadian Film (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1984), p. 29. 22 Peter Urquhart, (2003) ‘You should know something – anything – about this movie. You paid for it’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies 12/2 (Fall 2003), p. 69. 23 Christopher E. Gittings, Canadian National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 97. 24 Urquhart, ‘You should know’, p. 66. 25 Ibid., p. 67. 26 Anthony Maulucci, ‘Montreal’s Cinepix turns a profit on torture’, The Saturday Gazette, 16 April 1977, p. 37.

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27 Paul Corupe, ‘Sin and sovereignty: the curious rise of Cinépix Inc’, Take One, 13/49 (March-June 2005), p. 17. 28 Mary Arnatt (2008), ‘We must be burning film like mad’: Exploring Canadian Production Cultures at Cinépix, 1976–1986. Unpublished MA thesis, University of Calgary, p. 53. 29 Bill Marshall, Québec National Cinema (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001), p. 47. 30 Corupe, ‘Sin’, p. 18. 31 Marshall, Québec, p. 65. 32 Corupe, ‘Sin’, p. 19. 33 Ibid., p. 19. 34 Marshall, Québec, p. 65. 35 Marc Gervais, ‘Monumental trash and sheer magnificence’, The Montreal Star, 10 October 1970. Available at on https://www.cinepix.ca/wp-content/ uploads/2018/07/Initiation-Montreal-Star-October-10-1970.pdf (accessed 25 October 2019). Gervais’s rejection of L’Initiation is particularly significant when contrasted with the reviewer’s praise for other CFDC funded releases such as Goin’ Down the Road. By defining Shebib’s film as ‘so rich in its feel for reality’, Gervais confirms socially-realist criteria as a ‘quality’ marker within Canadian cinema. 36 Peter Desbarats, ‘Wouldn’t you know that the first Canadian to make money making movies would turn out to be the WALT DISNEY OF SEXPLOITATION’, Saturday Night, August 1970, p. 29. Available at: https:// www.cinepix.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Love-in-a-4-Letter-WorldSaturday-Night-Magazine-November-1970.pdf (accessed 25 October 2019). 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., p. 30. 39 Betty Lee, ‘How the taxpayer gets a slice of skin flicks’, The Globe and Mail, 21 September 1970, p. 7. Available at: https://www.cinepix.ca/wp-content/ uploads/2018/07/Love-in-a-Four-letter-World.-Globe-and-Mail.-1970-09-21.How-the-taxpayer-gets-a-slice-of-skin.pdf (accessed 28 October 2019). 40 Ibid. 41 Arnatt, ‘We must be burning film like mad’, p. 53. 42 Ibid., p. 8. 43 Ibid, p.79. 44 Marshall Delaney, cited in Wright, ‘Canada’s great shame’, p. 20. 45 Cited in Ernest Mathijs, ‘The making of a cult reputation: topicality and controversy in the critical reception of Shivers’, in Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andy Willis (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural

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Politics of Oppositional Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 113. 46 Robin Wood, cited in Mathijs, Defining Cult Movies, p. 117. 47 Cited in Wright, ‘Canada’s great shame’, p. 20. 48 See David Cronenberg, ‘The night Attila met the antichrist, she was shocked and he was outraged’, The Globe and Mail, May 14 1977, p. 14. Available at: https:// www.cinepix.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/E-Shivers-Cahiers-du-CinemaP.-15.pdf (accessed 28 October 2019). 49 Arnatt, ‘We must be burning film like mad’, p. 9. 50 According to Greg Dunning of the Cinépix Estate, the CFDC recouped its entire ‘25 per cent financial participation within Shivers in the three weeks that followed its theatrical release.’ Correspondence between author and Greg Dunning, 10 May 2021. 51 James Burrell, ‘The physician as mad scientist: a fear of deviant medical practices in the films of David Cronenberg’, in Gina Freitag and André Loiselle (eds), The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), p. 241. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., p. 143. 55 See Rabid Cinepix marketing materials, available at: https://www.cinepix.ca/ wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Rabid-Milan-Foreign-sales-market-one-sheet-.pdf (accessed 25 October 2019). 56 Marshall, Québec, p. 37. 57 Ibid., p. 42. 58 Jason R. Burke, ‘Conflict in cities and the struggle for modernity. Toward an understanding of the spatiality of the October Crisis’, Géographies de la Violence. 53/150 (December 2009), pp. 335–49. 59 Corupe, ‘Sin’, p. 21. 60 Ibid., p. 20. 61 Arnatt, ‘We must be burning film like mad’, p. 10. 62 Corupe, ‘Sin’, p. 21. 63 Although few academic studies have been conducted on Cinépix as the creators of the Ilsa films, a number of important accounts of subversive gender constructions in the series have been published. See Rikke Schubart, ‘Hold it! Use it! Abuse it! Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS and male castration’, in Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik (eds), Femme Fatalities Representations of Strong Women in the Media (Göteborg: Nordicom, 2004), pp. 185–203. 64 Ibid., p. 20.

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65 Maulucci, ‘Montreal’s Cinepix’, p. 37. 66 Andrew Dowler, ‘My Bloody Valentine’ (review), Cinema Canada, May 1981, p. 67 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Sid Adilman ‘CFDC has no business investing in horror flick’, in Toronto Star, 16 February 1981. Available at: https://www.cinepix.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/ 07/My-Bloody-Valentine-Toronto-Star-1981-02-16-CFDC-by-Sid-Adilman.pdf (accessed 28 October 2019). 70 Wright, ‘Canada’s great shame’ (citing the film’s producer Don Carmody), p. 24. Greg Dunning of the Cinépix Estate has confirmed Carmody’s observations, noting that the film’s investors ‘promptly moved from recoupment to profit for its participation in the film and continues to receive royalty payments from Paramount to this day’. Correspondence between author and Greg Dunning, 10 May 2021. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., p. 22.

Bibliography Adilman, Sid, ‘CFDC has no business investing in horror flick’, in Toronto Star, 16 February 1981. Available at: https://www.cinepix.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ My-Bloody-Valentine-Toronto-Star-1981-02-16-CFDC-by-Sid-Adilman.pdf. Arnatt, Mary, ‘We must be burning film like mad’: Exploring Canadian Production Cultures at Cinépix, 1976–1986. Unpublished MA thesis (University of Calgary, 2008). Bergman, Michael N., ‘Bye bye tax shelter’, Cinema Canada, (July–August 1987), pp. 6–7. Burke, Jason R., ‘Conflict in cities and the struggle for modernity. Toward an understanding of the spatiality of the October Crisis’, Géographies de la Violence. 53/150 (December 2009), pp. 335–49. Burrell, James, ‘The physician as mad scientist: a fear of deviant medical practices in the films of David Cronenberg’, in Gina Freitag and André Loiselle (eds), The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), pp. 231–48. Corupe, Paul, ‘Sin and sovereignty: the curious rise of Cinépix Inc’, Take One, 13/49 (March–June 2005), pp. 15–21. Cronenberg, David, ‘The night Attila met the antichrist, she was shocked and he was outraged’, The Globe and Mail, 14 May 1977, p. 15. Available at: https://www. cinepix.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/E-Shivers-Cahiers-du-Cinema-P.-15.pdf (accessed 28 October 2019).

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Desbarats, Peter, ‘Wouldn’t you know that the first Canadian to make money making movies would turn out to be the WALT DISNEY OF SEXPLOITATION ’, Saturday Night, August 1970, pp. 29–30. Available at: https://www.cinepix.ca/ wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Love-in-a-4-Letter-World-Saturday-NightMagazine-November-1970.pdf. Dowler, Andrew, ‘My Bloody Valentine’ (review), Cinema Canada, May 1981, p. 67. Feldman, Seth (ed.), Take Two: A Tribute to Canadian Film (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1984). Gittings, Chris, Canadian National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002). Gervais, Marc, ‘Monumental trash and sheer magnificence’, The Montreal Star, 10 October 1970. Available at: https://www.cinepix.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ Initiation-Montreal-Star-October-10-1970.pdf. Higson, Andrew, ‘The concept of national cinema’, Screen 30/4 (Autumn 1989), pp. 36–47. Leach, Jim, Film in Canada (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Lee, Betty, ‘How the taxpayer gets a slice of skin flicks’, The Globe and Mail, 21 September 1970, p. 7. Available at: https://www.cinepix.ca/wp-content/ uploads/2018/07/Love-in-a-Four-letter-World.-Globe-and-Mail.-1970-09-21.How-the-taxpayer-gets-a-slice-of-skin.pdf. Marshall, Bill, Québec National Cinema (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001). Mathijs, Ernest, ‘The making of a cult reputation: topicality and controversy in the critical reception of Shivers’, in Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andy Willis (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp.109–26. Maulucci, Anthony, ‘Montreal’s Cinepix turns a profit on torture’, The Saturday Gazette, 16 April 1977, p. 37. Morris, Peter, ‘After Grierson: The National Film Board 1945–1953’, in Seth Feldman (ed.), Take Two: A Tribute to Canadian Film (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1984), pp. 182–95. Rabid Cinépix marketing materials, available at: https://www.cinepix.ca/wp-content/ uploads/2018/07/Rabid-Milan-Foreign-sales-market-one-sheet-.pdf. Schubart, Rikke, ‘Hold it! Use it! Abuse it! Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS and male castration’, in Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik (eds), Femme Fatalities Representations of Strong Women in the Media (Göteborg: Nordicom, 2004), pp. 185–203. Scott, Jay, ‘Burnout in the great white north’, in Seth Feldman (ed.), Take Two: A Tribute to Canadian Film (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1984), pp. 29–35.

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Totaro, Donato, ‘A “taxing” incentive: the capital cost allowance films’, Off Screen, 12/2 (February 2008). Available at https://offscreen.com/view/a_taxing_incentive (accessed 25 October 2019). Urquhart, Peter, ‘You should know something – anything – about this movie. You paid for it’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 12/2 (Fall 2003), pp. 64–80. Vatnsdal, Caelum, They Came From Within: A History of Canadian Horror (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2004). Wise, Wyndham, ‘Canadian cinema from boom to bust’, Take One (Winter 1999), pp. 17–24. Wright, Ben, ‘Canada’s great shame: tax shelters, nationalism, and popular taste in Canadian cinema’, Spectator, 32/2 (Fall 2012), pp. 20–5.

8

Shocking Canadian Cinema of the 70s: An Interview with William Fruet Xavier Mendik

The work of William Fruet is referenced in two submissions included in this revised edition of Shocking Cinema of the 70s. Not only does Fruet’s work feature centrally in Robin Griffiths’ analysis of gender patterns in Death Weekend, but the production company behind this film is extensively discussed in my own contribution on the controversial 1970s output of the Montrealbased production outlet Cinépix Inc. Because of this multiple coverage of Fruet’s work, it seems more than appropriate to include an interview with the director in the volume. Born 1933 in Alberta, he remains one of the true pioneers of 1970s ‘Canuxploitation’ or Canadian cult cinema, as well as being an acclaimed auteur of more ‘realist’ national cinema entries. Having received formal film training at the Canadian Theatre School, he first came to public attention as the writer of Donald Shebib’s gritty drama Goin’ Down the Road (1970). This feature film followed the bittersweet quest of two drifters moving from the Maritimes to try to secure a brighter future in the changing Toronto landscape. Fruet’s script provides not only socio-economic allusion, but also an incisive gender commentary, which he would more fully explore in his own 1972 directorial debut Wedding in White. This compelling family drama featured an edgy performance from Carol Keane as a teenage girl who is molested by her brother’s army friend, only to face the wider injustices of a conceited older patriarch (Donald Pleasance) who refuses to let the incident of rape ruin the family’s reputation. Wedding in White garnered critical acclaim, even winning the Best Canadian Feature Film award for the year. However, when Fruet transposed a similar 189

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thematic of violent male conceit into the realms of genre cinema with Death Weekend/The House by the Lake (1976), the resulting film provoked controversy and condemnation. Made in collaboration with the prolific Canadian producers John Dunning and André Link through their outlet Cinépix Inc., Death Weekend featured a spirited heroine (played by Brenda Vaccaro), who is forced to use her intellect and physical prowess to outwit the brutal gang of thugs who invade her weekend retreat. Although the film’s scenes of violence led to outrage at the time of its release, this notoriety obscured an intelligent drama from a director who continued to cast a forensic eye over wider social and sexual traumas with his later cult entries. For instance, Search and Destroy (1979) fused the topical themes of returning Vietnam troops within a vigilante narrative, creating a suspenseful thriller that details a murder spree enacted against alienated army veterans. With the 1980 production Funeral Home, Fruet adapted contemporary slasher film tactics to focus more fully on the horror of the ageing female body in a narrative that featured a killing spree undertaken by the owner of a former funeral parlor. Although Fruet’s 1982 film Trapped/Baker County USA is often dismissed as one of the final and most derivative entries in the infamous tax shelter craze, the film exceeds both Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), and the wider ‘hicksploitation’ template with which it has widely been associated. Instead, Trapped offered some interesting observations on both the structures of maternal power and the sublimated racial conflicts that exist within such depicted rural communities. The film was also notable for drawing out a chilling performance from former Hollywood heavy Henry Silva, who was cast as the vengeful and duplicitous hillbilly clan leader Henry Chatwill. It was Fruet’s ability to garner convincing performances from iconic and often difficult film personalities that was further confirmed by his later 1983 production of Spasms, which ranged cult actors Peter Fonda and Oliver Reed against a monstrously oversized snake with ESP capabilities. The decline of the Canadian tax shelter system and the funding streams that it provided saw Fruet further diversify his productions as the 1980s progressed. For example, Bedroom Eyes (1984) paired the filmmaker with prolific Canadian producer Robert Lantos for an erotic thriller that unpacks the masochistic perils implicit in male voyeurism. Towards the end of the 1980s he turned to television, further evidencing his ability to adapt and a desire to generate more mainstream appeal. One of his most impressive achievements here was his

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teen anthology Goosebumps, which ran to twenty-eight episodes between 1995 and 1998, and was itself the subject of a 2015 Hollywood remake. In the following interview William Fruet reflects on both the controversies that surrounded the release of Death Weekend, as well as how his wider output from this era can be situated within Canada’s shocking decade of cinema. Xavier Mendik How would you introduce yourself as a film-maker? William Fruet I was the writer, not the co-writer of Goin’ Down the Road, and I was the writer/director of Wedding in White, two early films from the seventies. Why do you think both Goin’ Down the Road and Wedding in White proved so significant to Canadian cinema culture during the 1970s? We didn’t have much film here before those two films came out. I think that probably one of the first commercial features we had was Ivan Reitman’s Cannibal Girls [1973]. He made it all on his own, and he went to Cannes as I recall, and he outsold all of the Canadian product. That was a beginning, we could see that we could possibly have an industry. There were some features being made, but they didn’t reach any kind of notoriety that I know of. Goin’ Down the Road was a real breakthrough film, I guess a lot of people identified with it in some way. It was a Canadian story, definitely. How would you assess your contribution to the production of Goin’ Down the Road? Well, first of all I was the writer, I wrote the script, so it’s my script. Don [Shebib] worked on the story, but he wasn’t a co-writer. I think a lot of people could identify with that period of time. There were a lot of Maritimers coming here, and Don and I actually sat down and talked with them. We saw their living conditions, the kind of things they were going through. These were a lot of the same things I had gone through. From working in a bottling factory or bowling alley, just to get by and just to go to school. Because I had come from the west, which was just the same as coming from the Maritimes, as there was no film-making out west. How do you think changes to 1970s funding structures impacted on the productions you were undertaking at that time? Goin’ Down the Road as you know was made with $80,000 and reversal film, it was kind of a lark really! Wedding in White was made for $250,000, so you can

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see what it is: it’s money. And we had a hard time getting that money. The Canadian Film Development Council had just arrived, and we had a wonderful gentleman Michael Spencer at the time who was running it. He was a film man as I understand it, from the National Film Board. But he was in charge of things and he made the choices, and then it started, it really started. It was certainly Michael who was responsible for a lot of it, I think. Prior to the release of Death Weekend you were seen as one of the new lights in serious Canadian filmmaking. Do you think your involvement in Death Weekend damaged your reputation as a serious filmmaker? Well [laughs], serious film-makers don’t make a lot of money in Canada. I realized this fairly soon after I made Wedding in White. I got of great reviews, a lot to be proud of, and I was. But I didn’t have people coming up to me saying they wanted to make a film like that again. So I decided that I could probably get a genre film going, or a horror film, as they were starting to come in, and that was Death Weekend. How did you come to work with Cinépix on Death Weekend? Well, Cinépix stepped in and acted as executive producers on Wedding in White, those were the conditions I got to get to make it. They were very good. They let me do my thing, and they never interfered at any time. So, it was a very good experience working with them. I hadn’t started out to make horror films, but I had to finally make the move. With Death Weekend, I had no money left, and it was an old script I had put aside. I got it together very quickly. Cinépix liked it, so I was able to pay the rent! With Death Weekend you worked with Cinépix head John Dunning. What are your memories of this collaboration? I didn’t work a lot with John. It was actually Ivan Reitman who produced the film hand on hand with me. But the times that I did meet John, I found him a very humorous man. He saw a lot of fun in things. What contribution did other Cinépix creatives such as Don Carmody and Jean LaFleur make to Death Weekend? Well on that film, Don was a production manager, and as far as I remember he was always busy, which was a good sign! Jean LaFleur of course edited the film

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Figure 8.1 Real life road encounter as fiction: director William Fruet on Death Weekend.

and I was very impressed because I had come out of editing and had done some drama. But I thought he was really good. . . and fast. Death Weekend was apparently based on a real life incident you experienced. Can you say more about this motivation? Well, I had started writing this a few years earlier, and then Straw Dogs came out. And I thought ‘oh-oh, this is very close’ and so I just shelved it. And in desperation I later went back to it, ripped it down and changed a lot of things, but kept the essential thing of a woman surviving on her own. I guessed that it was time for a woman to crawl through the mud and survive through a gritty experience, just like men had been doing. I think Lipstick (Lamont Johnson, [1976]) had also just come out, which was another film where a woman took it upon herself to settle a score, so that shift was coming. How this linked to the real life incident you brought up is that when I returned to finish the script for Death Weekend, I remembered an incident that had happened earlier in Alberta. A friend and I were driving way out in the countryside where you may not meet another crossroad for miles. And suddenly, along came this soupedup car beside us, and they started heaving beer bottles at us. So, they were in front of us and we couldn’t get around them. We finally did, my friend was a

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very good driver, and he actually outdid them. But I remembered the incident. It was quite terrifying because we knew there were no other roads, and if we turned around they are only going to come back, we are in the middle of nowhere. And I thought, ‘I like this, I am going to recreate this for the beginning of Death Weekend, but with a woman in the role.’ Cinépix was one of the most prolific proponents of the Canadian tax shelter system. How important was this funding scheme to productions like Death Weekend? At the time it was a gift, we really needed that . . . even though it was really about tax shelter more than it was about film! People like me wouldn’t have gotten an opportunity to make films without the fund. We didn’t have producers that could find the kind of money to finance films without this type of support. People had to gather their resources together to go into production, and these little bits of money coming in started the whole thing for people to be able to make their films. Coming after the critical acclaim of Wedding in White, it seemed a risky proposition to undertake Death Weekend. This was my second film, and I was having a lot of fun, I have to admit, compared to Wedding in White which is a very sombre thing. I was getting to play with all the bells and whistles, lots of blood around, and I took advantage of it, I was learning a lot on this film too. And as far as the rape scenes went, if people notice I don’t dwell on anything but their faces. There is a rape scene in Wedding in White, but it’s only on faces. I am not trying to exploit rape. It’s the result of rape and what causes rape with men. That was the only thing on my mind with that. What are your memories of the critical reception of Death Weekend at the time of its release? Well, I got a lot of flak for doing Death Weekend after doing Wedding in White. ‘How could you?’ they would say. My reply was ‘To earn a living!’ I quickly turned to a genre film, though I didn’t see it as a horror film at the time. I was accused of hating women. That was the analogy of some critic in Ottawa who runs the film libraries, which of course is ridiculous.

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Figure 8.2 Canada’s first action heroine? Brenda Vaccaro in Death Weekend.

Despite the controversy surrounding its scenes of sexual violence, Death Weekend actually featured one of Canadian cinema’s first action heroines. Would you agree? I think it was. This girl had to think for herself. She had to do all of the things that you had only seen men doing up to this point. And that is what really clicked. I thought ‘This is good, it’s time.’ And it was. The film was very successful. It’s still a cult film today, and I still get the occasional phone call asking me who has the rights to Death Weekend as people want to remake it. So, I feel good about that. Is the film more about masculine tensions than female victimhood? Well, we cast her male co-star [Chuck Shamata] as a professional man who was deliberately taking her out to the country for a weekend of pleasure. She had misinterpreted the situation and didn’t want to go along with this suggestion when she got out there. Then the bad guys arrived, and it became a different story. So, there certainly is a quality of male nervousness and masculinity being shoved around. The men in the film are creating the conditions of victimization and end up featuring in this role more prominently.

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Figure 8.3 Phallic conflicts: masculine tensions in Death Weekend.

At the time, Death Weekend was seen as a very violent and shocking example of seventies Canadian cinema. Most of the films I made at that time had a little more substance to them than just ‘slice and dice.’ There are some scenes of violence in Death Weekend that were seen as over the red line at the time. If you wanted to have a specific vision of a Canadian horror film, that was the closest one I had ever done. It was sort of a landmark film for the content. Like, you mention rape, you just don’t have rapes in film at that time. Leslie Halliwell, who every year put out a guide to films and rated them, actually called Death Weekend pornography, but there’s certainly nothing pornographic about it. So things were quite a bit different then. As well as being a controversial film, did Death Weekend prove to be a difficult shoot? Well, we had an actress who didn’t want to be in it, after she got in it, that became a big problem. She had just been nominated for an Academy award and offered a series and she was asking herself ‘What am I doing in this film?’ It was hard squeezing a performance out of her after that, and we had to work

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around her a lot with a double. Fortunately, I had Ivan Reitman at the time acting as a producer on the set, and Ivan is a real filmmaker, he helped out a lot, we worked things out together. Especially under its export title of The House by the Lake, many critics have submerged Death Weekend into the pre-existing rape and revenge cycle, initialized by Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972). Did you draw any inspiration from these American home invasion narratives? I didn’t set out to make a film about home invasion particularly. I have never seen The Last House on the Left, I have heard that it is similar to my film, somewhat. No, my aim specifically was about the female. It was time to put the female out there and make her a hero, but in a realistic way. So, I think Death Weekend and the films I was making in the seventies were not sort of copycatting others. I think some of the home invasion films that were done were using a very specific kind of formula that had already been trialled a number of times before. These had been highly successful, so I could understand why they were doing that. But I don’t think my films were following that formula, I felt mine had a good decent storyline so that it wasn’t just an excuse to have a bloodbath!

Figure 8.4 Country encounters: tropes of rural depravity in Death Weekend.

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Death Weekend also explores themes of rural debasement, especially through both the antagonists and secondary characters. What interests you about the idea of rural depravity? These characters were based upon real characters that I had seen out in the country. Living in an old streetcar and drinking all day. I actually went out there with somebody who would look after this gentleman’s property, just like in the movie. And he would bring them a big gallon of alcohol mixed with juniper berry or something that would make it taste like gin. And they would get smashed out of their heads, just like the moonshine drinkers down South. There pretty much the same kind of characters. This was again a recollection of several years earlier. At the tail-end of the tax shelter craze you made the killer snake film Spasms with celebrated cinematographer Mark Irwin. What are your memories of working with on this production? Well, he did a great job shooting it. Basically, this was a low budget movie, but it had a big production look to it, and a lot of that was Mark’s contribution. I worked with Mark on three films and I can’t say enough good things about him, he made up for my shortcomings if you will. You also worked with Mark Irwin on Trapped and Baker County USA , which very much functions as a Canadian version of Deliverance. Yes, it just so happens that it was shot exactly where Deliverance was also filmed. There were actually characters who had been in Deliverance who were also in our film. We actually built a town within a little trailer camp in the area. Friday night would be the big church occasion and all the women would get into their prom dresses that they had saved for all the years, and you would see them all walking off in a group going to church that night. We were right in the heart of it! And it did represent what I had earlier seen in Ontario when I first came here to go to school. And I referred to it earlier, the characters in Death Weekend, the country folk were also very close to the people you see in Trapped. Beyond the issue of rural folk, another point of comparison between Death Weekend and Trapped resides in its representations of female power. I am thinking of the pivotal figure of Miriam Chatwill (Barbara Gordon) in Trapped, who acts as a female corrective to the debased male power represented in the film.

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Well, that was the script, and I had a very powerful actress and I think what she represented was quite normal for that situation. She did indeed have power as she was a sister of the leader. She performed it just as it was written, she was a strong woman in the community. It made for good drama too. I thought there were some very good performances in a film that wasn’t much to begin with. Having worked so prominently in the Canadian tax shelter system, what features do you think led to its decline? I don’t even know when the tax shelter ended, but that money was being funnelled into construction. That drew a lot of the film finance away. I lost a film because of that. It looked like we were going to go into production and the money raiser suddenly turned around and said ‘Oh no, it’s now real estate. We can make much more money with real estate’. Again, a lot of it was all about the tax shelter business, what was going on. As a result, I switched to television quite early on because it gave me a more organized life, and I enjoyed doing it too. I just wanted to shoot stories.

How should we view the contribution that Cinépix made to Canadian cinema culture? I think they made a big, big contribution. I think we owe a big debt to Cinépix because it was a leader, it took chances, and a lot of people got an opportunity from them. They made their films very cheaply, but they were people giving people an opportunity. Again, a lot of the subject matter was questioned too, but it was a start. It was the start for . . . well, for David Cronenberg. I am a great student of Mr Cronenberg, I think he is brilliant, the material he’s come up with. But in those days when we first started up with Cinépix, I saw some critics try to crucify him and they never should have. This is film!

How do you think contemporary Canadian genre films differ from those made during the 1970s? Today I am seeing horror films advertised on television, but they have a lot of texture and lighting to them. Everything is done on a much larger scale. In those days, it was more just ‘Get it out, get done fast, don’t fool around with it

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because there’s no time and no money to do it.’ So, I guess realism was the most convenient way to make our point in those stories. Do you have any final thoughts on the significance of Canada’s contribution to shocking 1970s cinema? Well, the seventies were a very special time, no question about it, and I was so fortunate to be a part of it. A lot of important things happened in cinema, it wasn’t just horror films, they were only prominent because of the budgets we could shoot those kinds of productions with. The genre has opened up to women now here in Canada and there are a lot of female directors. We have made a lot of strides since the seventies, and I think that some of our cinema now is second to none. It’s definitely Canadian, but I am happy it stands out that way. *** The interview data provided above was derived from the 2020 documentary production The Quiet Revolution: State, Society and the Canadian Horror Film. The production and promotional materials from Death Weekend are courtesy of the Cinépix Inc. estate. I would like to thank Greg Dunning for allowing me to reproduce them to illustrate this chapter. The image of director William Fruet is from Xavier Mendik’s 2020 documentary The Quiet Revolution: State, Society and the Canadian Horror Film.

9

‘You miserable, no good, dirty sons of bitches!’: Queer(y)ing ‘Canuxploitation’ Revenge Narratives in the Films of John Dunning and André Link Robin Griffiths

The so-called ‘Canuxploitation’ productions of Canadian cinema’s most notorious ‘odd couple’ – John Dunning and André Link – presented a vision of 1970s Canada that was anathema to the nation-building, egalitarian utopianism of the era encapsulated by the ‘Just Society’ rhetoric of then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. They were films that, at the time, were seen to constitute a collectively shameful period in the country’s (albeit to date rather uneventful) production history; because as critic Robert Fulford (writing in the Canadian broadsheet Saturday Night) bluntly proclaimed in response to the governmentfunded Cinépix release of David Cronenberg’s notorious debut feature Shivers (1975): ‘You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it’.1 However, in more recent attempts to revisit, and in the process to reassess, the importance of this contentious period in Canadian film history, researchers such as Paul Corupe have observed that, contrary to such historically negative perceptions, the Dunning/Link era was, on reflection, an undeniably crucial period wherein ‘Canada first revealed itself to be an exceptional breeding ground for innovative, challenging and surprisingly Canadian horror films’.2 In particular, works such as Shivers, William Fruet’s rural revenge thriller Death Weekend/House by the Lake (1976), and the Dunning-inspired siege drama Blackout (Eddy Matalon, 1978), emerged as crucial points of reference in characterizing a nation, and a cinema, struggling to cope with the pervasive effects of social division, sexism and bigotry at a time of immense cultural and 201

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political upheaval. These proffered an interesting insight into archetypical depictions of postcolonial ‘Canuck’ masculinity that were common to a number of related English-Canadian films of the tax shelter era. Moreover, the overly intense obsession with hegemonic masculinity in crisis that was so characteristic of these films (despite being resolutely heterosexist in intent), in retrospect lends itself quite readily to the subversive re-imaginings of the contemporary queer screen theorist. For as a number of recent studies3 have demonstrated, a nostalgic turn to the past can function as a particularly useful critical tool for dismantling the construction of cultural memory and representation through film that has consistently disavowed more alternative (or ‘problematic’) readings and/or manifestations of identity. This chapter will, therefore, critically ‘re-view’ these key representational texts of 1970s Canuxploitation cinema, in order to explore the transgressive potential they still hold as subversive ‘polaroids’ of a much broader ‘zone of trouble and definitional crisis’.4 As queer film historians like Thomas Waugh contend, Canadian cinema is, to all intents and purposes, already queerly-inflected due to its marginal status both at home and abroad. Its apparent lack of a significant commercial production history and, accordingly, lack of uniquely EnglishCanadian forms of cinematic cultural representation, thus position it as already outside the prescriptive imaginary norms of the industrial mainstream. For that reason, it is continually receptive to what Waugh terms the ‘romantic possibilities of transgression’.5 In fact, the symptomatic queerness that identifiably circulates around those shifting and anxious forms of masculinity that emerge in Canadian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s has, to a certain extent, helped to shape a number of public discourses around the intersections of gender, sexuality, nationhood and more troublesome configurations of Canuck identity. Because as Waugh maintains, it is those local and more regional forms of Canadian cinema (and, in particular, low-budget genre film-making that was deliberately designed to exploit the fears and desires of its audiences) that have engaged more queerly with the complexities of identity than have the big budget imports of the North American mainstream. The Canuxploitation canon’s propensity for constructing narratives that expound the more transgressive realms of the national body has thus functioned as a far more productive means for shaping the social imaginary. And it has thereby articulated the fundamental in-between-ness that characterizes the psychological

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configuration of English-Canadian subjectivity, or in Waugh’s view, the innate queerness of the Canadian nation.

‘Is there something wrong with my driving?’ Initially co-founded at a time of intense social, cultural and political transformation for the region as a result of the so-called ‘Quiet Revolution’ of Jean Lesage’s reformist Liberal government, the Montreal-based Cinépix Film Properties as it was then known (later sold to the US-based Lions Gate Entertainment Group in 1997 and renamed ‘Lionsgate Films’) was at the outset renowned – rather salaciously – as Canada’s leading producer of ‘maple syrup porn’. The establishment of the Canadian Film Development Corporation in 1968 (now Telefilm Canada), with a remit to create an internationallyrecognized feature film industry for Canada, had seen many ‘B’ movie distributors of the era (such as Astral or Quadrant) start to expand their operations to include film production. And the unprecedented domestic success of Cinépix’s inaugural release, the seminal sexploitation classic Valérie (Denis Héroux, 1969), from a story idea by Dunning about religious repression and sexual awakening, quickly established the duo as ‘the most prominent Canadian movie moguls most people had never heard of ’.6 And, more importantly, it provided an invaluable platform for the subsequent careers of Canuxploitation cinema’s most notorious enfants terribles, William Fruet and David Cronenberg (of whom Cronenberg is reported to have exclaimed that they were ‘the unacknowledged godfather[s] of an entire generation of Canadian filmmakers . . . Cinépix [was] my film school’). The indiscriminate production boom of the tax shelter period of the mid-1970s to early 1980s (the result of an initial loophole that enabled a 100 per cent capital cost allowance write-off on all Canadian film investment) may have, in hindsight, represented what Fruet himself describes as a ‘deeply ignoble’ time in Canadian film history in which ‘everybody was making films of every piece of junk that got rejected in the United States’.7 However, it was also an era which produced a significant canon that had considerable purchase on the collective Canuck imagination. And more importantly, it mapped out an unquestionably ‘alternative’ historiography of cinema in Canada.

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In fact, Fruet’s 1976 rural revenge thriller Death Weekend raises some interesting questions about 1970s masculinity and identity when re-viewed through a decidedly queer lens. Because in spite of its initial dismissal as an inferior rip-off of earlier US home invasion thrillers like Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971) and The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972), the Dunning/Link-produced film (in collaboration with the latest additions to the Cinépix family, Ivan Reitman and Don Carmody) not only became an influential precursor to such definitive US rape-revenge shockers as I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978), but, more importantly, as Corupe insists, it was ‘uniquely Canadian’ in terms of how it articulated the nuanced complexities underpinning notions of gender, sexuality and class at the time.8 Recounting the harrowing story of an affluent young urban heterosexual couple who are terrorized by a gang of local louts while on a weekend vacation in rural Ontario, the film was inspired by an incident that Fruet had himself experienced a number of years earlier while out driving in the backwoods of Alberta with a

Figure 9.1 The embodiment of ‘monstrous masculinity’: Don Stroud as archetypical ‘brute’ Lep in William Fruet’s Death Weekend.

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friend, when a gang of youths had attempted to run them both off the road. A frightening event that, according to film historian Caelum Vatnsdal, left Fruet pondering, with a rather surprising post-Deliverance naiveté, ‘what might have happened if he’d been with a woman and the rednecks had caught them’.9 But while Death Weekend epitomized many of the tropes associated with the raperevenge subgenre, on closer inspection the film presents a much queerer meditation on the theme of ‘monstrous masculinity’ that was such a cornerstone of many exploitation narratives of the era. Its fixation with the disturbing possibilities of more ‘deviant’ configurations of gender and with a contemporaneous homosocial fear of/acquiescence to effeminization, in particular, emerged as an identifiably unique focus for Fruet’s cinematic treatise on 1970s ‘Canuck’ male identity. In fact, the film features a number of representational archetypes previously identified by critic Robert Fothergill in his contentious, yet oft-cited, essay, ‘Being Canadian means always having to say you’re sorry: The dream-life of a younger brother’.10 In what was essentially a rather sweeping critical lament on the ‘radical inadequacy’ of on-screen portrayals of masculinity in EnglishCanadian narrative cinema (which, in his view, was indicative of the nation’s much broader sense of cultural emasculation or ‘lack’), Fothergill was able to detect three distinct (and rather derogatory) representational categories that were identifiable across a number of key home-grown films of the period, including Fruet’s earlier critically acclaimed collaboration with iconic filmmaker Don Shebib, Goin’ Down the Road (1970). These were what he termed the bully, the coward and the clown. This so-called ‘loser paradigm’ was, as Fothergill explained, part of an all-encompassing inferiority complex, or ‘younger brother syndrome’, in which the low self-image that Canada (and Canadian cinema more specifically) seemingly had of itself – and which was synonymously mirrored by these consistently negative onscreen male representations – was the psychosomatic product of being long overshadowed by a greatly superior older sibling just south of the border, by comparison with whom Canada was always seen to be significantly lacking. Nevertheless, what was unique to Death Weekend’s take on this psychological configuration of internalized masculine identity crisis was the more fluid and nihilistic level of sadistic violence and destruction of which these men were capable in the film, and which, more significantly, went beyond anything that had been previously

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seen in Canadian cinema. It thereby constituted a stark departure from Fothergill’s more measured model, to which Fruet had seemingly appended a fourth, and much more extreme, version of the established bully archetype: namely what Corupe terms the hyper-violent brute.11 But while this subversive new brute archetype functioned as an effective cipher for Fruet’s vision of the gender, class and rural/urban divisions and disparities that so sharply characterized 1970s Canada, the one archetype conspicuously missing from this model was that of the ‘queer’. This Canadian archetype of polymorphously perverse masculinity didn’t really appear in more concrete terms cinematically until the so-called ‘perversion chic’ era of the 1990s, in which the rediscovery of the male body’s erotic potential in films such as Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), for example, was transgressively merged with a ‘simultaneous rethinking of once taken-for-granted ideas about what it means to “be a man” ’.12 However, in Death Weekend it is an invisible yet pervasive presence that inevitably haunts such homosocial displays of inherently conflicted masculinity, and it is especially evident in relation to the film’s two primary character archetypes: the coward as manifested in the form of wealthy urbanite Harry (Chuck Shamata), and the brute as epitomized by local redneck Lep (Don Stroud). Because, in spite of the ugly misogyny and violent abuse meted out to Diane (Brenda Vaccaro), the only female member of the rather hysterical male universe that Fruet depicts, the principal focus of the film’s prolonged set-piece of torture, humiliation and metaphorical rape (in stark contrast to the later I Spit on Your Grave) is Harry himself. The countryside, as always, functions as both a setting and a character within the rural revenge scenario, inevitably shifting from benign pastoral backdrop to isolated space of ever-present threat. Its geographical remoteness and sparsely populated, economically-deprived backwoods communities thus convey a metaphorical social wilderness that typically exploits sub/urban fears of the unruly provincial dangers lurking beyond middle-class control. Within such contexts, the ‘base physicality’ of the rural redneck is consistently positioned, by virtue of his class status, geographical location and resistance to sub/urban values, as ‘outside of middle class social and sexual constraints’.13 He exists not only beyond the regulatory force of heteronormative values and capitalism in such narratives of rural otherness, but also embodies a fluidly performative machismo that can, without such constraints, manifest both

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violent and deviant desire – therefore representing the fantasies and nightmares of the sub/urban imaginary. Furthermore, theorists such as John Moran propose that the hyper-masculinity of the redneck male ‘is itself “queer” and non-normative’ by nature of both its defiantly non-conformist, marginalized social standing and its animalistic excess.14 The ‘deviant redneck’ was, therefore, a typical antagonistic mainstay of many rural/urban exploitation films of the 1970s, in order, as Alexandra Heller-Nicholas argues, to ‘expose the problematic mechanics of masculinity that seeks to privilege urban, middle-class white men by Othering women and the lower class through a language of sexual violence’.15 However, the binary tensions underlying such representations of hegemonic masculine crisis and threat were markedly different when played out within Canuxploitation rural revenge narratives. This was because, unlike the nameless and one-dimensional violent rednecks that populated US hillbilly horror films such as Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972) or I Spit on Your Grave, the Canuck rednecks of films like Death Weekend were, by contrast, noticeably more complexly configured. As Corupe16 explains, what makes these films distinctive is the fact that they were ‘more character and story focused than their American counterparts’, and by drawing influence from Canadian social documentaries of the 1950s, they ‘present[ed] concepts of individuality, community and morality’ that are far more revealing of ‘how Canadians interpret themselves’, functioning as quite deliberate attempts to distance themselves from American popular representations. Lep’s hyper-masculine and phallocentric male persona, with its associated misogyny and general aggression towards women and others beyond his social class (ably embodied by macho 1970s icon Stroud), no doubt typifies many of the tropes associated with the cinematic redneck archetype. But as a product of the so-called ‘loser paradigm’, his characteristically Canadian sense of heightened inferiority and association with a fundamentally feminine rural sphere simultaneously emasculate him and reveal an underlying sense of internal conflict and impotence. In fact, cultural analysts such as Janice Kaye have argued that Canadian cinema’s cultural roots in the iconic North Woods melodramas of the past (with their overly masculine preponderance of rugged Mounties and rural lumberjacks who function as the stereotypical embodiment of everything Canadian) have led Canuck film-makers to become, more than most, ‘historically and culturally preoccupied with the landscape as an important

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psychic symbol of its identity’.17 As a result, this has displaced its central characters into a distinct feminine/masculine and nature/culture set of binaries. In such filmic constructions, the rural male antagonist is more often than not ‘allied with the female space, that is the rural environment/community of which they are a part’ – and he is ‘thereby feminized’.18 These characters therefore exhibit a fundamental lack, and, as a result, their position in the stable binary systems of female/male, nature/culture and, inevitably, homosexual/heterosexual, hence becomes much more problematic. This is because, as Jan Peterson Roddy explains, ‘the words “country” and “queer” used in conjunction identify a territory of otherness where individual and collective identity, based on class, gender, sexuality, race, geographic region, and relationship to modernity is contested or at lease complicated’.19 This is a condition highlighted in extremis in Death Weekend, when Lep finally gets an opportunity to teach Diane a lesson by ‘ramming that supercharger up her ass’ in return for the earlier humiliation she caused him by running his phallic ‘muscle-car’ off the road. But what should have been a violent scenario of enforced masculine dominance that typified the 1970s rape-revenge narrative takes a rather unexpected turn when Lep finds, to his horror, that he is unable to ‘perform’ after Diane (realizing that Lep is aroused only by her fear and resistance) decides to stop fighting his sexual advances and instead to comply with his ‘view of women as passive creatures that must be dominated’.20 This is an unexpected turn of events that serves to draw attention to his underlying impotence and apparent inability to engage in a relationship with a woman; as a result, this triggers a fluid shift in his obsessive and resentful sexual fury away from the more threatening Diane and onto the similarly feminized Harry (perhaps recognizing something of himself in the queerly impotent urbanite). The subsequent scene of humiliation and abuse to which Harry is thus subjected by Lep and the ‘bunch of animals’ that constitute his gang, during which they not only taunt him about his own apparent sexual ‘lack’ but systematically set out to destroy all of his material possessions – the symbolic trappings of his status and class identity – as he helplessly looks on, therefore acts as a metaphorical substitute for the spectacle of Diane’s public humiliation and rape that Lep’s apparent impotence failed to deliver earlier.

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The scene reaches its similarly metaphorical climax when Lep kills Harry by ‘shooting a load’ into his back (after forcing the archetypical ‘coward’ to flee for his life) in what amounts to an unexpectedly suggestive act of enforced masculine dominance and submission, after which a now satisfied Lep lights up a cigarette in a symbolic moment of post-coital bliss (having seemingly ‘rammed it up’ poor Harry’s ass instead). The use of violence and degradation to gain control over women that was such a key aspect of the rape-revenge film is thus queered by its redeployment to a feminized male substitute. In spite of the film concentrating on exploring Diane’s struggle for survival as she fights back against her aggressors following her own rather awkwardly configured sexual assault, she is in many ways the least developed character because as, Corupe observes: ‘Although Diane is a strong, proactive character, more of the script is devoted to developing and clarifying Lep and Harry’s motivations’ than hers.21 And unlike later rape-revenge films that go to great lengths to align us with the perspective of the female victim, Fruet instead ‘pulls the camera away from the supposed protagonist, Diane, to tell the story from the male character’s perspective’ and thereby forces the audience ‘to identify with [their] impotence’ in what Fothergill22 had already established as a common ‘Canadian’ approach. Death Weekend, therefore, takes the well-established gender tropes of the genre and queerly ‘reframes’ them in a way not previously seen in Canadian film. It thus bears out Judith Butler’s point that hyper-masculine forms of gender identity and sexuality reveal much ‘about the fantasies that a fearful heterosexual culture produces to defend against its own homosexual possibilities’.23 In many ways, the materialistic Harry, who exclaims that he wants ‘the biggest and the best of everything’, including the interchangeable trophy girlfriends he wishes to possess, represents the stereotypically feminized nature of modern urban middle-class masculinity that was typical of a number of ‘Canuxploitation’ films of the era. This was an archetype that was effectively personified in Shivers by the ‘effete’ tones of Ronald Merrick (played by openly gay actor Ronald Mlodzik), the obsequious manager of the eponymous Starliner Tower Apartments, whose narration on the benefits of ‘exclusive urban living’ accompanies the film’s opening title sequence. The suggestive queerness of such urban male identity was a typical device in these narratives, which was used to play upon the inherent class/identity conflicts, bigotries and

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resentments underpinning the rural/urban polarity of the genre, or, as Carol J. Clover puts it, ‘the confrontation between haves and have-nots’.24 More problematically, however, it functioned as representational shorthand that was most visibly manifest in the ‘authentic’ and ‘deviant’ dichotomies and rankings of masculinity that these films characteristically presented. In fact, Cronenberg’s highly controversial earlier film (once again a Dunning/ Link/Reitman/Carmody co-production), was a much more transgressive exploration of 1970s notions of gender and identity than Fruet’s Death Weekend, and quickly became a symbol of everything that was perceived to be wrong with this new Canadian popular film industry. For its body horror qualities allowed for a greater emphasis on the instabilities of our most intimate structures: identity and agency, with the transgressive urban male body itself functioning as the metaphor par excellence for an increasingly consumptiondriven middle-class Canada of the 1970s. As Scott Wilson put it: ‘It is a nexus point at which the disciplinary activities of society [and masculine identity] intersect and are played out’.25 The invasive, deliberately phallic parasite enters, and thus feminizes, the male body by disrupting the ‘sacred’ borders of heteronormative male subjectivity. As a consequence, it produces a dangerous and relentless form of queer desire in its upwardly mobile urbanite hosts (symbols of ordered normality that have become ‘perverted’, irrespective of gender or sexual orientation) that metaphorically exploits similar social fears about the threat posed by more modern notions of gender and sexual identity in the increasingly liberal political climate that was characteristic of 1970s ‘Trudeau-mania’. But rather than exploit the concomitant class conflicts that were so ubiquitous in the rural revenge genre, Cronenberg instead reconfigures the gendered body as ‘the visible representation of the social disciplinary order of which Starliner Towers is a microcosm’, and the film’s subsequent movement from the ‘orderly’ to ‘transgressive’ male body ‘plays out as social disruption’,26 thus enabling Cronenberg to illustrate the arbitrary nature of such disciplinary controls and restrictions on identity. His aim with Shivers was, therefore, in a surprising foreshadowing of 1990s queer theory, to reveal that ‘we are part of a culture, we are part of an ethical and moral system, but all we have to do is take one step outside it and we see that none of it is absolute . . . It’s only a human construct, very definitely able to change and susceptible to change and rethinking’.27

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‘The night the power failed’ It is this fear of change, and its attendant instabilities of social status, identity and morality that, therefore, underpins both the body horror and rural revenge subgenres of 1970s Canuxploitation cinema. And it is a pervasive narrative motif in John Dunning’s subsequent siege drama, Blackout, which in effect combined a number of key tropes from both Fruet’s and Cronenberg’s formative texts in order to construct a thematic hybrid, in that while it transposed the ethos of the rural-revenge narrative to the laissez-faire environs of a cosmopolitan New York apartment complex, it still embodied the same divisive social binaries and configurations of deviant masculinity of ‘le condition canadien’ that were so typical of earlier Cinépix cinema. Inspired by the real life blackout that had affected the city the previous year, with its inevitable lawlessness and social disorder, this Dunning/Link/Reitman/ Carmody-produced film (from an original story idea by Dunning himself) explores the fictional aftermath of a similar climactic event wherein a citywide electrical failure enables an assorted gang of ‘weirdos, loonies and rapists’ that have escaped from a prison transport van to terrorize the middle-class sub/urban residents of a New York City apartment complex (with the urban sprawl of Montreal masquerading as 1970s Manhattan). Loss of power, both literally and figuratively, is inevitably a central theme of Dunning’s story, as the gang, led by a sociopathic anti-corporate terrorist with ‘Daddy issues’ called Christie (Robert Carradine) and a pony-tailed so-called ‘fruit’ named Chico (played with a similarly ‘camp’ sensibility to that of his earlier performance as redneck gang member Stanley in Death Weekend by Canadian actor Don Granberry) capitalize on the criminal opportunities that the blackout has facilitated. Meanwhile, the authorities desperately scramble to restore power. However, in a similar vein to the feminized country rednecks of the rural revenge film, Christie’s gang is likewise ‘queered’ by the nature of their criminal class status outside the values of normative middle-class society, which also manifests itself in an obsessive drive to dismantle or subvert corrupt(ed) forms of paternal-masculine power, identity and authority. But in contrast to Death Weekend, Christie’s implicit middle-class origins position him on the opposing side of a quite distinct body/intellect binary, since his physical inferiority to Lep’s brutish excess of masculinity forces him to rely

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upon his twisted ability to manipulate the lower-class members of his gang into submitting to becoming the substitute muscle that he needs to achieve his subversive aims. Christie and his gang have emerged from an exterior urban space that is now characterized by moral fluidity and social chaos as a result of the blackout, and therefore pose an invasive threat to the ordered interior hierarchies that the apartment complex now comes to represent as a result of the reconfigured outside/inside (as opposed to country/city) binary that these events have imposed. The building is populated by a generally white assortment of wealthy middle-class Jews, homosexuals and elderly celebrities (played by an array of regular Cinépix supporting actors), who are of course meant to represent a similar microcosm of urban high society to the inhabitants of Shivers’s phallocentric Starliner Towers, with Christie’s socially disaffected gang of ‘deviants’ to all intents and purposes mirroring the invasive parasites in Cronenberg’s film as they menacingly and methodically infiltrate the apartments on each level of the isolated building. Rather tellingly, however, the first victims of the gang are a stereotypically effeminate, cross-dressing gay couple, who, after salaciously pondering what exciting effect the blackout may have had on their local bathhouse, are mockingly forced (back) into a closet by the gang as they proceed to ransack their gaudily decorated home. And like the ‘effete’ persona of Ronald Merrick that frames the image of modern feminized urban modernity in Shivers, the introduction at the outset of such gay stereotypes performs a similar function in terms of establishing the underlying ‘deviance’ of the interior spaces of the urban building and thereby frames the rather problematic politics of gender and sexuality that these narratives covertly address. Christie’s real motives for the siege, in fact, start to surface when the gang subsequently encounters another queerly suggestive character in the form of lonely ‘bachelor’ Henri (played by iconic French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont), an ageing celebrity magician who desperately surrounds himself with the dusty memorabilia of his past. He is the first true victim of Christie’s desire to punish these privileged, feminized men for the alleged crimes of his own abusive father, who he reveals was ‘an exploiter too . . . except he specialised in people’. The plan to rob the wealthy inhabitants of the apartment block is, of course, merely a pretext, as Christie instead exploits the powerlessness of their situation in order to enact his own brand of violent justice and retribution for what

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these men for him represent. For example, after randomly switching off the life support machine of one elderly male resident, he exclaims that he’s the one who gets to decide who breathes or not. The socially disruptive chaos of the blackout scenario thus functions as the perfect opportunity for the film to address the same thematic tropes of class, gender and crisis explored by earlier 1970s Canuxploitation cinema. These reach their narrative apotheosis in Blackout when Christie and his gang force their way into the antique-adorned abode of wealthy art dealer Richard Stafford, played with typically defiant patriarchal arrogance by screen legend Ray Milland. The ‘miserable, no good, dirty sons of bitches’, as he refers to them, subsequently subject him to the same humiliation and metaphorical rape that Harry suffered in Death Weekend. And in a scene that even more clearly recalls Fruet’s film, particularly given Don Granberry’s camply maniacal participation in both films, Stafford’s feminine materialism is revealed as his true weakness. This is because while earlier threats of torture and violence aimed at his long-suffering wife had failed, he finally submits to the demands of the gang to give them the combination of his safe after Christie threatens to destroy the one thing that is clearly of more value to him: a rare Picasso painting. It is a moment that references Lep’s taunting of Harry in Death Weekend for caring more about his material possessions and ‘crap house’ than he does for Diane’s wellbeing, and which subsequently triggers the same destruction of such feminized configurations of masculinity when the gang, much to Stafford’s dismay, destroy the painting and set about his apartment in a mindless spree of vandalism and arson as he (like Harry) is forced to look on powerlessly. In a similar vein, then, to Fredric Jameson’s analysis28 of 1970s American conspiracy cinema, the films in the Cinépix canon likewise function as ‘cognitive maps’ that delineate the anxieties, paranoias and fantasies of Canadian society at a time of immense socio-political change as a result of the transition to Trudeau-era neoliberalism. But the conflicted, deviant antagonists of Death Weekend and Blackout were also, in many respects, symbols of a much more pervasive under-culture that was resolutely resistant to the break from traditionalist values, social hierarchies and identities that characterized the 1970s more broadly beyond national borders. Lep, Christie and their respective redneck gangs inevitably pay with their lives for such violent social nonconformity, but unlike those imbricated moments of self-realization that were

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characteristic of US rape-revenge narratives (where the antagonists are very much aware that they are paying the price for what they have done), these Canuck men in the end ‘die without ever fully realizing the error of their ways’.29 For there are no easy solutions offered within these narratives to the general social malaise that characterized the ‘alternative’ picture of 1970s Canada that the Canuxploitation oeuvre problematically presents. But what is crucial in terms of these films’ importance to the history of Canadian cinema (in contrast to popular opinion concerning the value of these governmentfunded pieces of commercial ‘trash’) is that, as Corupe concludes, they demonstrate that ‘it is possible to reflect nationalist themes in a genre film context’.30 And by drawing upon the very real discourses of alienation and identity that underlie the overt violence and low-budget exploitation aesthetics which characterized this ‘quintessentially Canadian’ zeitgeist, these Dunning/ Link-produced films collectively constitute an invaluable repository of Canadian culture, cinema and identity at a time of immense transformation, the implications of which thus extend well beyond the confines of the texts themselves. These are films that embody a space of indeterminacy that is simultaneously normative and transgressive, inside and outside, centre and periphery. In short, they were scandalous by dint of their very ‘in-betweenness’ as embodiments of the many contradictions and paradoxes that exist at the heart of normative national narratives and identities. And thereby they inscribe a sense of transgression that once again brings us back to the view that, as Thomas Waugh maintains, Canada is a very ‘queer’ nation indeed.

Notes 1 Robert Fulford, ‘You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it’, Saturday Night, September 1975, p. 83. 2 Paul Corupe, ‘(Who’s in the) driver’s seat: the Canadian brute unleashed in Death Weekend’, in Gina Freitag and André Loiselle (eds), The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), p. 91. 3 For example, Gilad Padva, Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Tamara de Szegheo Lang, ‘The demand to progress: critical nostalgia in LGBTQ cultural memory’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19/2 (2015), pp. 230–48.

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4 Thomas Waugh, The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (Montréal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006), p. 9. 5 Ibid. 6 Bill Brownstein, ‘John Dunning, champion of the Canadian film industry, dead at 84’, National Post, 27 September 2011. Available at http://news.nationalpost.com/ arts/greg-dunning-champion-of-the-canadian-film-industry-dead-at-84. 7 Caelum Vatnsdal, They Came from Within: A History of Canadian Horror Cinema (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2014), p. 119. 8 Corupe, ‘(Who’s in the) driver’s seat’, p. 102. 9 Vatnsdal, They Came from Within, p. 110. 10 Robert Fothergill, ‘Being Canadian means always having to say you’re sorry: the dream-life of a younger brother’, originally published in 1973, reprinted as ‘Coward, bully, or clown: the dream-life of a younger brother’, in Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson (eds), Canadian Film Reader (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates Ltd, 1977), pp. 234–50. 11 Corupe, ‘(Who’s in the) driver’s seat’. 12 Lee Parpart, ‘Cowards, bullies, and cadavers: feminist re-mappings of the passive male body in English-Canadian and Quebecois cinema’, in Kay Armatage, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow and Janine Marchessault (eds), Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 268. 13 J.W. Williamson, cited in Jan Peterson Roddy, ‘Country-queer: reading and rewriting sexuality in representations of the hillbilly’, in Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza (eds), Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p. 53. 14 John Moran, ‘ “Queer rednecks”: Padgett Powell’s manly South’, Southern Cultures, 22/3 (Fall 2016), p. 95. 15 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (Jefferson NC: McFarland and Company, 2011), p. 53. 16 Paul Corupe, Canuxploitation, ‘Canuxploitation: the primer’ (1999). Available at http://www.canuxploitation.com/article/primer.html. 17 Janice Kaye, ‘Perfectly Normal, eh?: gender transformation and national identity in Canada’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 3/2 (1994), p. 69. 18 Ibid., p. 66. 19 Jan Peterson Roddy, ‘Country-queer: reading and rewriting sexuality in representations of the hillbilly’, in Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza (eds), Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p. 37. 20 Corupe, ‘(Who’s in the) driver’s seat’, p. 96. 21 Ibid., p. 104.

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22 Fothergill, ‘Being Canadian’. 23 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 87. 24 Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 126. 25 Scott Wilson, The Politics of Insects: David Cronenberg’s Cinema of Confrontation (New York: Continuum, 2011), p. 40. 26 Ibid. 27 Cronenberg quoted in ibid., p. 41. 28 Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive mapping’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 347–57. 29 Corupe, ‘(Who’s in the) driver’s seat’, p. 106. 30 Ibid., p. 107.

Bibliography Brownstein, Bill, ‘John Dunning, champion of the Canadian film industry, dead at 84’, National Post, 27 September 2011. Available at http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/ greg-dunning-champion-of-the-canadian-film-industry-dead-at-84. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). Clover, Carol J., Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1992). Corupe, Paul, Canuxploitation, ‘Canuxploitation: the primer’ (1999). Available at http://www.canuxploitation.com/article/primer.html. Corupe, Paul, ‘(Who’s in the) driver’s seat: the Canadian brute unleashed in Death Weekend’, in Gina Freitag and André Loiselle (eds), The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), pp. 91–107. Feldman, Seth and Nelson, Joyce (eds), Canadian Film Reader (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates Ltd, 1977). Fothergill, Robert, ‘Being Canadian means always having to say you’re sorry: the dream-life of a younger brother’, originally published in 1973, reprinted as ‘Coward, bully, or clown: the dream-life of a younger brother’, in Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson (eds), Canadian Film Reader (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates Ltd, 1977), pp. 234–50. Freitag, Gina and Loiselle, André (eds), The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).

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Fulford, Robert, ‘You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it’, Saturday Night, September 1975, p. 83. Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (Jefferson NC : McFarland and Company, 2011). Jameson, Fredric, ‘Cognitive mapping’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL : University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 347–57. Kaye, Janice, ‘Perfectly Normal, eh?: gender transformation and national identity in Canada’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 3/2 (1994), pp. 63–80. Lang, Tamara de Szegheo, ‘The demand to progress: critical nostalgia in LGBTQ cultural memory’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19/2 (2015), pp. 230–48. Moran, John, ‘ “Queer rednecks”: Padgett Powell’s manly South’, Southern Cultures, 22/3 (Fall 2016), pp. 95–122. Ogonoski, Matthew, ‘Queering the heterosexual male in Canadian cinema: an analysis of Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo’, Synoptique: The Journal of Film and Film Studies, (13), February 2009. Available at http://www.synoptique.ca/core/articles/ ogonoski_leolo/. Padva, Gilad, Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Parpart, Lee, ‘Cowards, bullies, and cadavers: feminist re-mappings of the passive male body in English-Canadian and Québecois cinema’, in Kay Armatage, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow and Janine Marchessault (eds), Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 253–73. Roddy, Jan Peterson, ‘Country-queer: reading and rewriting sexuality in representations of the hillbilly’, in Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza (eds), Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 37–52. Vatnsdal, Caelum, They Came from Within: A History of Canadian Horror Cinema (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2014). Waugh, Thomas, The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006). Wilson, Scott, The Politics of Insects: David Cronenberg’s Cinema of Confrontation, New York: Continuum, 2011).

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Family-sploitation and Threats to the Family

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Family Entertainment: Psychotic Slaughter in the 1970s Charles Manson Movies Bill Osgerby

Screening ‘human garbage’ Released in 1970 and with a promotional tag-line that promised ‘Human Garbage – In the Sickest Love Parties!’ Satan’s Sadists was a career highpoint for schlock-movie master Al Adamson.1 Producer/director Adamson’s tale of an unremittingly malevolent motorcycle gang who leave a trail of rape and murder through the Mojave Desert was, in many respects, typical of the slew of low budget and gratuitously violent movies depicting the exploits of marauding bikers that had been a staple of the grindhouse circuit since the mid-1960s. But Satan’s Sadists added something new to the stock biker movie mayhem. Adamson’s gang were hardly typical hoodlums. Tripping on acid and with a boundless thirst for brutality, they were altogether more nasty. And the evil was made all the more unsettling because Adamson’s characters had a clear affinity with reality. With its portrayal of a charismatic but deranged leader directing a gang of homicidal pseudo-hippies, Satan’s Sadists had unmistakeable parallels with Charles Manson and his feral band of followers, the ‘Family’. The depraved character of their murders, combined with the celebrity of their victims and their own perverse worldview, ensured the Manson Family were a major news story throughout the 1970s. From their arrest in 1969, through to their conviction in 1971, and beyond, Manson and his cult were the focus for a torrent of books, magazine features and television documentaries. A stream of movies also followed. Films such as The Other Side of Madness (Frank Howard, 1971), Manson (Robert Hendrickson/Laurence Merrick, 1973) and Helter Skelter (Tom Gries, 1976) directly represented the Manson crimes, but many more were 221

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clearly inspired by the Family’s butchery. Alongside Satan’s Sadists there came, for example, Gabrielle (Arlo Shiffen, 1970), I Drink Your Blood (David Durston, 1970), Sign of Aquarius (Robert Emery, 1970), Sweet Savior (Robert Roberts, 1971), The Night God Screamed (Lee Madden, 1971), Deathmaster (Ray Danton, 1972) and, most infamously, Snuff (Michael Findlay/Roberta Findlay, 1976). To understand the proliferation of Family films during the 1970s demands attention to both the historical context and the economic circumstances in which they were produced. In historical terms, Manson and his acolytes enthralled the media because their character and crimes captured the mood of the times. They seemed to epitomize the downfall of the 1960s counterculture, capturing the moment the sun set on the Summer of Love and the carefree hippy scene turned sour and seedy. More than this, though, the Manson cult was the object of media fascination because it served as a symbolic focus for a broader climate of unease. Configured by the media as America’s ultimate bogeyman, Manson was projected as the embodiment of evils that seemed to threaten the fabric of the nation as the US faced convulsive social and cultural transformations. But Manson’s screen success was also indebted to changes in the American film industry. The grisly nature of the Family’s crimes made them ideal subjectmatter for film-makers who, through the relaxation of censorship, were newly able to push back traditional boundaries of taste. And, in doing so, many – like Al Adamson – had an ambivalent relationship with the media furore surrounding the Family. Superficially, many of the Manson movies echoed the general disgust at the killers’ appalling crimes. But, at the same time, they also revelled in the spectacle of the Manson murders and the circus of outrage that surrounded them. In this relish for the grotesque and the marginal, the 1970s Manson movies harked back to the carnivalesque aesthetics of classic exploitation films of the 1930s. Like classic exploitation cinema, the 1970s Manson movies savoured tweaking the tail of conservative sensibilities by delighting in all that was shocking, liminal and taboo.

Helter Skelter The story of Charles Manson has become the stuff of popular mythology. A drifter and petty criminal, Manson rolled up in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco’s

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countercultural epicentre, in 1967. Touting himself as a hippy guru, he began picking up a following of young drop-outs with a philosophy that cast his hangers-on as a reincarnation of the original Christians and himself as the new Messiah. During the summer of 1967, Manson and his clan – mostly young women – hit the road in an old school bus. When he arrived in Los Angeles, Manson’s pop music ambitious were fanned by a short-lived association with Dennis Wilson (the Beach Boys’ drummer) and record producer Terry Melcher (the son of Doris Day). The relationship, however, ended acrimoniously, and in August 1968 an embittered Manson took his growing troop to live at the Spahn Movie Ranch in the dusty hills outside LA. The ranch had once been used as a set for Western movies and TV shows but it had become dilapidated and the owner, eighty-year-old George Spahn, allowed Manson and his entourage to stay in return for doing chores around the property. An expert in devious mind-games, Manson dominated the quasi-commune through his manipulation of sex and drugs, his intimidating menace and his deranged, messianic rants. Manson’s apocalyptic visions drew significantly from the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, but also from the Beatles, with whom Manson was obsessed. For Manson, the group’s White Album (released in December 1968) was full of coded messages and allusions to an imminent race war that would erupt between blacks and whites. Manson dubbed the chaos that would ensue ‘Helter Skelter’ – a term taken from the title of a Beatles’ song – and he prophesized that the triumphant blacks would ultimately turn to himself and his Family for leadership. Manson and his group were, in some respects, unexceptional. Among the myriad protest movements and spiritual sects of the late 1960s they typified the vein of what David Felton and his colleagues termed ‘acid fascism’.2 Born of boredom, loneliness and disillusion, ‘acid fascism’ saw vulnerable youngsters opt for a life of servility in LSD-fuelled cults headed by authoritarian leaders. Victor Baranco, for example, was the domineering head of the Lafayette Morehouse commune in California, while Mel Lyman controlled the Fort Hill Community in Boston, a dysfunctional and disciplinarian commune exposed by Rolling Stone magazine in 1971. For Felton, such leaders were archetypal ‘mindfuckers’, people who ‘have made it their business to fuck men’s minds and to control them. They’ve succeeded by assuming godlike authority and using such mindfucking techniques as physical and verbal bullying and group humiliation.’3

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Manson was another classic ‘mindfucker’. But what set him apart was his trail of murder in summer 1969. The spree began with attacks on two of Manson’s former associates who had fallen foul of the cult leader. Bernard Crowe was shot (although not killed) by Manson himself. Gary Hinman, meanwhile, was tortured and stabbed to death under Manson’s orders by Family members Bobby Beausoleil, Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins who, aping the radical sloganeering of the day, used Hinman’s blood to daub the words ‘Political Piggy’ over the body. The murder was grisly, but it was the group’s subsequent killings that made national headlines.4 For months Manson had been preparing for the Armageddon that he proclaimed was imminent. The Family had stolen several dune buggies and planned a getaway to a bolthole in Death Valley. Then, possibly as a way of igniting the carnage of Helter Skelter (or possibly as a way of settling old scores), Manson directed four acolytes – Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian and Patricia Krenwinkel – to go to the luxury home of Terry Melcher and kill everyone there. If Melcher was the intended target, Manson would be disappointed, as the record producer had moved out some weeks previously. Instead, the new residents were the film director Roman Polanski and his heavily pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate. When the killers broke in, on the night of 8–9 August, Polanski himself was working in London. But the rest of the household were less fortunate. The next morning, the maid found bloody bodies strewn about the house and grounds. Steve Parent (a friend of the caretaker) had been ambushed as he left the property. He had been slashed with a knife and shot four times in the face. Inside, the occupants had been herded into the living room. A tussle broke out, and Wojciech Frykowski (an aspiring screenwriter) was shot twice, stabbed fifty-one times and bludgeoned with a pistol butt. His girlfriend, Abigail Folger (heiress to the Folger coffee fortune) was stabbed so many times that her white dress appeared crimson. Meanwhile, Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring (a hairdresser to the stars) were tied together around their necks with a rope stretched over a high ceiling beam. Sebring was shot in the face and stabbed seven times. Tate was stabbed sixteen times. Later it was revealed that, as she was attacked, Tate had begged for the life of her unborn child. But, in response, Atkins had screamed back: ‘I don’t care about you or your baby.’ And, on the outside of the front door, the word ‘pig’ was left scrawled in Tate’s blood.5

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The following night the slaughter continued. This time Manson himself accompanied six Family members – the previous evening’s attackers, plus Leslie Van Houten and Steve ‘Clem’ Grogan – to the upscale neighbourhood of Los Feliz where they broke into the home of Leno LaBianca (a supermarket executive) and his wife Rosemary. The couple were tied up and Manson left the house but told his followers to kill the pair and to leave something ‘witchy’. The next day LaBianca was found with twelve knife wounds and an additional fourteen injuries caused by a large serving fork, left protruding from his throat. The word ‘war’ was also slashed into his flesh. His wife was found with a bloody pillowcase pulled over her head and a lamp cord tied around her throat. She had been stabbed forty-one times. And, as a macabre calling card, the words ‘rise’ and ‘death to pigs’ were written in blood on the walls, while the phrase ‘Healter Skelter’ (apparently Patricia Krenwenkel’s misspelling) was smeared on the refrigerator.6 The murder spree, however, did not last. Following a series of tip-offs, the cops collared Manson and his accomplices and in December they were charged with the killings. The horrific nature of the crimes and the celebrity of the victims ensured huge press coverage, and the furore continued as the trial itself became a circus of the weird and the creepy. Family members loitered menacingly outside the courthouse, while the accused regularly disrupted proceedings. At one stage Manson was wrestled to the ground after attempting to attack the judge. Later he appeared with a freshly cut, bloody ‘X’ carved on his forehead. And as Manson gave evidence – explaining that ‘the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment . . . Why blame it on me?’ – his female disciples stood up and began a sinister Latin chant. Despite the interruptions, however, the trial reached its conclusion, and in 1971 Manson and his followers were convicted and sentenced to death, although in 1972 the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment after the California State Supreme Court abolished the death penalty.

The dark side of Aquarius The gruesome features of the Manson murders ensured that they were a massive media draw. But the Family’s cultural cachet was also indebted to the

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crimes’ powerful symbolic dimension. They captured the mood of the moment. The war in Vietnam was escalating, political assassinations were rocking America and movements for progressive change faced growing repression and violence. It was a time when the optimistic rhythms of the 1960s were fading and the counterculture struggled with a sense of failure and foreboding. John Lennon announced that ‘the dream is over’ and Bob Dylan sang of the ‘day of the locusts’ as the soaring highs of the 1960s gave way to a melancholic comedown. For many, the Manson murders crystallized the shift precisely. In 1970, for example, Rolling Stone devoted a twenty page feature to Manson as part of its ‘continuing coverage of the apocalypse’, dubbing the killer ‘the most dangerous man alive’.7 And, in one of the first authoritative accounts of the Manson saga – 1971’s The Family – long-time countercultural luminary Ed Sanders wrestled with a hippie cult that seemed to be a grotesque mirror of his own utopian ethic of love and free expression. The ‘Aquarian Age’, Sanders reflected ruefully, had not been simply a story of peace and love, but a scene where vicious predators cloaked themselves in the countercultural vibe in order to stalk a vulnerable prey: ‘The flower movement was like a valley of thousands of plump white rabbits surrounded by wounded coyotes. Sure, the “leaders” were tough, some of them geniuses and great poets. But the acid-dropping middle-class children from Des Moines were rabbits.’8 The Manson case also coalesced more conservative concerns. As historian Michael Flamm observes, by the late 1960s the liberal hopes raised by President Kennedy’s ‘Great Society’ had stalled. Instead, the 1968 election had returned the archly right-wing Richard Nixon to the White House on the promise of a tough stand on law and order. With a campaign that played upon the pervasive sense that America was coming apart, Nixon peddled a political rhetoric that, Flamm argues, ‘enabled many white Americans to make sense of a chaotic world filled with street crime, urban riots, and campus demonstrations’.9 It was a worldview into which the spectre of Manson fitted neatly, and the cult leader was habitually presented as the bête noire of civilized society: the embodiment of a monstrous nightmare lurking behind the counterculture’s groovy façade. For example, Manson’s fierce eyes stared out from a 1969 cover of Life, as the magazine profiled ‘The Love and Terror Cult’.

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Figure 10.1 Constructing the counterculture’s dark side: Charles Manson and Life magazine.

According to Life, Manson represented ‘the dark edge of hippie life’, and the Family’s crimes were emblematic for a much wider set of ills menacing the nation: Long-haired, bearded little Charlie Manson so disturbed the American millions last week . . . that the victims of his blithe and gory crimes seemed

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suddenly to have played only secondary roles in the final brutal moments of their own lives. The Los Angeles killings struck innumerable Americans as an inexplicable controversion of everything they wanted to believe about the society and their children – and made Charlie Manson seem to be the very encapsulation of truth about revolt and violence by the young.10

The same sense of dread pervades Helter Skelter, a gripping TV docudrama based on the Manson case. Directed by Tom Gries and originally screened on the CBS network over two nights in 1976, the film is based on the 1974 bestseller of the same name written by Vincent Bugliosi, the District Attorney who prosecuted the Family. Featuring Steve Railsback as Manson and George DiCenzo as Bugliosi, the film sticks fairly closely to the prosecutor’s book – opening with the murders and then moving on through the investigation, the arrests and the court case. And there is certainly much to commend in Gries’s film. It does an excellent job of showing the piece-by-piece case that Bugliosi developed against Manson and his co-defendants. Additionally, despite being rather dated by its 1970s zoom-shots and melodramatic freeze-frames, the film constructs a compelling sense of realism via its handheld camerawork, bleached-out cinematography, location shooting on some of the actual crime scenes, and courtroom dialogue taken straight from the legal transcripts. The haunting score (by veteran TV composer Billy Goldenberg) also ratchets up the tension nicely, while a wonderfully raw version of the Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ (credited to Silver Spoon) accompanies the film’s opening credits. Nevertheless, although Helter Skelter offers an absorbing version of events, its viewpoint is distinctly conservative. Clearly, Helter Skelter’s unsympathetic portrayal of the murderous Manson and his noxious cronies is wholly justified. But the film reproduces the period’s reactionary, ‘law and order’ discourse through its simplistic depiction of the Family as a group of deranged Others menacing the decency and rectitude of ‘straight’ society. The movie’s portrayal of Manson won plaudits, but Railsback plays the part less as a charismatic mindfucker and more as a madcap nut-job. He regularly stares with fiery-eyed intensity into the camera, and his nonsensical babbling is interspersed with maniacal cackles. And, while Nancy Wolfe puts in a good performance as baby-voiced sociopath Susan Atkins, for the most part Manson’s followers appear as stock hippies-gone-bad stereotypes – running around Spahn Ranch half naked, shouting weird phrases

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at inappropriate times and preaching about the wonders of orgies and LSD trips. Bugliosi, on the other hand, appears as the bastion of order and convention. At the film’s beginning, the character stands in front of the Hall of Justice – a pillar of the establishment with his three-piece suit, side-parting and briefcase. Addressing the camera, the DA introduces the case as ‘surely one of the most bizarre chapters in the history of crime’, and throughout the picture his authoritative voice-over intervenes in order to define the action and its meanings. And at the movie’s conclusion, as Manson sings crazily in his prison cell, Bugliosi’s narration maintains the paranoid ‘law and order’ discourse of the time. Society, the attorney warns sombrely, is still menaced by the diabolic forces that Manson symbolizes: With Charles Manson in jail, does an era of madness now come to an end? Or will the social compost heap from which he sprang produce other, perhaps more virulent, strains of Mansonism? Are there many more? Perhaps hundreds, or even thousands, of young Mansons germinating in the same hotbed that gave birth to Charlie. And will they be more anti-social, more aberrant than the original?

Helter Skelter, then, was rooted in the fairly conservative codes and conventions of mainstream Hollywood. Very different film-making traditions, however, informed the documentary Manson. Originally released in 1973 and directed by Robert Hendrickson and Laurence Merrick, the film is a patchwork of interviews with figures from the Manson case – including prosecuting attorney Bugliosi, followers who quit the Family before the Tate-LaBianca slayings, and Manson himself, talking to hippie activist Jerry Rubin. But most interesting are the conversations with Family members recorded after Manson’s arrest, together with footage of the group taken between late 1969 and 1972 on the Spahn Ranch and at their Death Valley hideout. Shot by Hendrickson at Manson’s request, the sequences give a view of the Family that is nuanced and complex. Documenting their daily lives, Family members are shown skinny-dipping, sewing clothes, dumpster-diving for scraps of food and preparing meals, as the voiceover raises awkward questions about the disaffection of kids who, rather than being monstrous outsiders, were often the products of cosy suburbia: They lived in the ramshackle, broken-down movie sets, panhandled, hustled, stole, shovelled manure and ate garbage. But the obvious discomforts of life

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with Charlie were far more desirable to these runaways than their parents’ comfortable homes. . . . The establishment smugly dismisses the Mansons as an oddball phenomenon. These kids came from our own schools, our own neighbourhoods, our own homes.

Compared to Helter Skelter, then, Manson gives a looser, more open-ended – and ultimately more unsettling – portrait of the Family. And while both films clearly sought to capitalize on the notoriety of the case, the publicity campaign for Manson was decidedly more salacious, with posters promising audiences ‘YOU WILL ACTUALLY SEE each member of the Manson family and HEAR their horrifying philosophy of sex, perversion, murder and suicide.’ With this combination of disconcerting chills and lurid titillation, Manson is squarely located in the traditions of exploitation cinema.

‘Family-sploitation’ and mondo Manson The roots of exploitation film-making lie in the 1920s and 1930s. The original exploitation pictures, as film historian Eric Schaefer argues, embraced a variety of sub-genres – nudist and burlesque films, sex hygiene films, drug films, vice films, exotic and atrocity films – but all shared a common preoccupation with ‘some form of forbidden spectacle that served as their organizing sensibility’.11 Screened in seedy flea-pit cinemas, exploitation films were akin to a gaudy sideshow, offering audiences an exhibition of the astonishing and the outrageous. In this respect, Schaefer contends, exploitation films were characterized by qualities of the carnivalesque. Ideas of the carnivalesque derive from the work of the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. Writing during the 1920s and 1930s, Bakhtin depicted the carnivals of pre-industrial Europe as spaces where the forbidden and fantastic suddenly became possible. The carnival, Bakhtin argued, was an explosion of emotion and bodily pleasure that saw normal social hierarchies ritually inverted. In these episodes of exuberant misrule, prevailing systems of morality gave way to an eruption of the vulgar, the irreverent and the grotesque. Obviously, the original moments of carnival are long defunct, but Bakhtin’s ideas have been embraced by many social theorists in their analyses of more recent cultural phenomena.12 And, for Schaefer, they are especially suited to an

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analysis of exploitation cinema. Exploitation films, Schaefer concedes, were ‘politically ambiguous’ and ‘often espoused a very conservative ideology, particularly with regard to individual pleasure’.13 But, he argues, they also possessed distinctly carnivalesque qualities in the way they ‘privilege[d] the “lower body stratum”, overturn[ing] a classical aesthetics based on formal harmony and good taste’,14 thereby presenting a ‘challenge to the system of orderly presentation of material to well-mannered spectators that was encouraged by Hollywood’.15 By the 1950s, the classic forms of exploitation cinema charted by Schaefer had largely disappeared, but the foundations for new exploitation traditions were provided by significant social and economic shifts. In particular, the growth of the youth market during the 1950s and 1960s was a boon to independent film studios, who cashed-in on youth spending with a wave of exploitation pictures geared around youth culture. American-International Pictures (AIP) led the way with films such as The Cool and the Crazy (William Witney, 1958) and Riot on Sunset Strip (Arthur Dreifuss, 1967). Superficially, these ‘youth-sploitation’ movies purported to preach against the ‘evils’ of reckless adolescence but, beneath this veneer, the films gloried in their spectacle of the daring and the sensational, and much of their box-office pull lay in the way they offered young audiences the vicarious thrills of delinquent rebellion. Simultaneously, a liberalization of censorship allowed film-makers to lure audiences with the promise of greater shocks and astonishment. By the mid1960s, Hollywood was finding it virtually impossible to enforce the system of regulation set up by the 1934 Production Code, and in 1968 it was finally abandoned and replaced by a new – more liberal – ratings system that allowed for more explicit visual possibilities. Again, the exploitation brigade quickly seized upon the new opportunities, creating a wave of movies characterized by greater levels of sex and violence. The trend was exemplified by a crop of biker movies that capitalized on the contemporary notoriety of motorcycle gangs such as the Hells Angels. The cycle had been kick-started in 1966 by the success of AIP’s Wild Angels (Roger Corman), but the changes to censorship gave the genre a new lease of life and there followed a wave of more visceral and violent biker movies such as Run, Angel, Run! (Jack Starrett, 1969), Naked Angels (Bruce Clark, 1969) and The Cycle Savages (Bill Brame, 1969). By the 1970s the biker genre was running out of road, but the Manson murders provided fresh

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inspiration for film-makers who traded in topical sensationalism. A media spectacle brimming with sex, drugs and violence, the Manson case was ideal exploitation fodder and, as Mikita Brottman observes, ‘hippies, hippie leaders, drugs, communes, and murder became essential ingredients in every exploitation picture made between 1969 and 1975’.16 Hendrickson and Merrick’s Manson was an exploitation movie in the mondo tradition. Taking its name from the Italian documentary Mondo Cane (Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi, Paolo Cavara, 1962), the mondo genre comprises movies that are voyeuristic anthologies of scenes depicting spicy sexual display, bizarre tribal rituals, gruesome animal cruelty and stomachturning violence – all spliced together in a pseudo-documentary style.17 During the late 1960s, the weird and wonderful counterculture provided a rich seam of mondo material, and a slew of mondo movies chronicled the freak outs and love-ins of the hippy scene – for example, Something’s Happening (Edgar Beatty, 1967), Mondo Mod (Peter Perry, 1967) and It’s a Revolution Mother (Harry Kerwin, 1968). Manson’s co-director, Laurence Merrick, was already well established in the exploitation market (having directed the 1970 biker flick Black Angels) and in Manson he gave the Family the full mondo treatment. The film traded on boasts that it offered a taste of the ‘real deal’ and it wrung as much mileage as possible from its authentic Family footage. Additionally, former Manson associates Brooks Poston and Paul Watkins provided the movie’s soundtrack, supported by background songs from assorted Family members – including a version of ‘Helter Skelter’ recited creepily by Steve ‘Clem’ Grogan. Mondo-esque touches also featured in other Manson pictures of the period. Most obviously in The Other Side of Madness/The Helter Skelter Murders/The Manson Massacre (Frank Howard, 1971). Put together while the Manson trial was still underway, the film is an oddball blend of pseudo-documentary footage and re-enactment scenes. Its first half comprises a disjointed mix of ‘real life’ sequences intended to give a jolt of gritty authenticity – with footage ranging from an urban riot to hippies smoking hash and freaking out at a rock festival. And additional edges of mondo realism are delivered via scenes shot at Spahn Ranch and Manson himself warbling his song ‘Mechanical Man’ on the soundtrack. But while the mondo elements are intriguing, the re-enactment sequences of the film’s second half are more compelling, especially the

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genuinely difficult to watch re-creation of Sharon Tate’s murder. Overall, however, the movie drags. Indeed, the sparse dialogue and lingering shots of desolate landscapes and inanimate objects are suggestive of an art-house experiment rather than exploitation cinema’s trademark sensationalism. But shocks came aplenty throughout the early 1970s as a welter of other exploitation pictures milked Manson’s topicality and chilling associations. Quick off the mark was Gabrielle (Ron Wertheim (as Arlo Shiffen), 1970), which sees a traumatized Gabrielle (Elaine Trop) hospitalized after she is raped by her fiancé. Falling under the spell of the sinister Dr Matson she joins his family of followers and embarks on a binge of murder and sexual excess. The year 1970 also saw the more hippie-infused Sign of Aquarius/Love Commune/Ghetto Freaks (Robert J. Emery). Filmed on location in Cleveland, the movie’s rudimentary plot concerns Guru Sonny (Paul Elliot), a manipulative hippie leader who entices pretty ingénue Donna (Gabe Lewis) to his commune. But the picture’s main concern is to grandstand the hippies’ ‘way-out’ lifestyle with a procession of scenes in which they protest against the Vietnam War, get hassled by the cops, drop acid, dance about naked and preach their philosophy of liberation to bemused passers-by. Manson was more explicitly referenced in Sweet Savior/The Love Thrill Murders (Robert Roberts, 1971). Although the action is moved from California to New York, the film is clearly a thinly veiled re-telling of the Manson saga and stars former 1950s heart-throb Troy Donahue as Moon, a charismatic cult leader who keeps female acolytes tethered to his will via a combination of sex, acid and trippy pseudo-philosophy. And carnage ensues as bored socialite Sandra Barlow (Renay Granville) invites the gang for a night of wild partying at her mansion. An equally murderous, Manson-styled cult also featured in The Night God Screamed (Lee Madden, 1971). The film sees the Christ-like Billy Joe Harlan (Michael Sugich) and his fanatical disciples convicted of the grisly crucifixion of an itinerant preacher, following which they escape and take terrible revenge on the judge, jury and the preacher’s helpless wife. Other exploitation movies mixed Manson themes with tropes from the world of horror. For example, I Drink Your Blood/Phobia (David E. Durston, 1970) sees a group of Satanic hippies led by the Manson-esque Horace Bones (Bhaskar Roy Chowdry) wreak havoc in a rural town. After a girl is raped by the cult, her grandfather goes after them, but is beaten-up and force-fed LSD.

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Incensed, the girl’s younger brother gets even by selling the evil hippies meat pies infected with blood from a rabid dog. Turning into maddened beasts, the hippies then attack one another in a bloody frenzy. Equally lurid, Deathmaster (Ray Danton, 1972) stars Robert Quarry as Khorda, a mysterious, Manson-like hippie who draws together devoted followers in a local commune. However, he proves to be none other than Dracula and, rather than showering the Beautiful People with peace and love, the vampire count’s more sinister plans soon become clear. The motif of ‘drugged-out hippie thrill-killers’ also filtered into biker movies of the period. For example, both Wild Riders (Richard Kanter, 1971) and The Takers (Carlos Monsoya, 1971) feature pairs of vicious pseudo-hippies-cumbikers who break into suburban homes and launch into LSD-fuelled sprees of

Figure 10.2 Manson-themed thrill seekers on wheels: Al Adamson’s Satan’s Sadists.

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torture, rape and murder. But it was Al Adamson who gave the theme its most outré treatment in Satan’s Sadists. The movie centres around a sleazy motorcycle gang – ‘The Satans’ – who wander rootlessly through the desert, led by the malevolent Anchor. As played by Russ Tamblyn (a former Hollywood star fallen on hard times), Anchor is a charming but chilling hippy-gone-bad wearing a floppy, hillbilly hat and round, purple-tinted glasses. The movie’s minimalist plot sees him lead his ragtag band on a heinous rampage. They rape a girl amid perverse laughter, then murder the victim and her boyfriend. Descending upon an isolated diner they brutally rape a customer and, turning to face the camera, Anchor delivers a hippy-inflected tirade (penned by Tamblyn himself) giving twisted justification for his cruelty – ‘You’re right, I am a rotten bastard’, he sneers to the audience, ‘I admit it’: But I tell ya something. Even though I got a lot of hate inside, I got some friends who ain’t got hate inside. They’re filled with nothing but love. Their only crime is growing their hair long, smoking a little grass and getting high, looking at the stars at night, writing poetry in the sand. And what do you do? You bust down their doors, man. Dumb-ass cop. You bust down their doors and you bust down their heads. You put ’em behind bars. And you know something funny? They forgive you.

Executing their captives, Anchor’s gang then take to the desert hills. Stumbling across a trio of female campers, they force their unwelcome attentions on the luckless threesome. Ultimately, however, the villains meet their own gruesome end at the hands of a chisel-jawed Vietnam veteran. Costing only $65,000 and shot in just ten days, Satan’s Sadists characterized the low budget, rough-and-ready style of exploitation cinema. Nevertheless, it proved a major money-spinner, grossing around $20 million. The success lay in the way Adamson’s picture captured the flavour of the time. While Satan’s Sadists was completed before the Manson trial, the film adeptly cashed in on the media-driven stigma that was already developing around the counterculture. Tripping on acid, decked out in pseudo-psychedelic paraphernalia and with a deep-seated hatred of ‘The Man’, Anchor and his followers are painted as the irredeemably malevolent underside of hippiedom. And a number of eerie coincidences also linked Adamson’s picture with the Manson killings. For example, Manson himself reputedly repaired some of the vehicles used in

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Satan’s Sadists, and several of the film’s scenes were actually shot at the Spahn Ranch – a connection that was eagerly signposted in the movie’s publicity. Of course, there were clearly conservative dimensions to Satan’s Sadists and the other Manson exploitation films. Their misogyny was often pronounced, and their caricatures of ‘evil hippies’ seemed to reproduce stock stereotypes propagated in the right-wing backlash against the counterculture. At the same time, however, a rich carnivalesque seam also ran through ‘Family-sploitation’. While the films may not have been ‘radical’ in a conventional political sense, they nonetheless effectively satirized and undercut the shrill anxieties proliferating in the media by appropriating the demonic stereotypes and magnifying them to proportions that were incredible and simply outlandish. Moreover, the films’ sheer enthusiasm for the shocking and the controversial flouted conventional tastes. Their brazen pageant of the lurid and the taboo spurned orthodox sensibilities and represented an unruly presence at a time when the ‘law and order’ bandwagon of ‘Nixonland’, as historian Rick Perlstein terms it,18 was attempting to foreclose dissent, pre-empt dialogue and preclude contradiction.

Manson and murder vérité The Manson murders remained a thematic influence on movies throughout the 1970s. As Jim Morton observes, their imprint can be found in ‘home invasion’ pictures such as the unremittingly nasty The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972) and visceral horror movies such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977).19 Critics also made obvious connections between the Manson killings and the gore of Macbeth (1971), the first film made by Roman Polanski after the murder of Sharon Tate. But it was the release of Snuff in 1976 that added a new element of controversy to the Manson movie mythology. Snuff is, for the most part, the meandering tale of a South American hippie cult. Led by the mesmeric guru Satán (Enrique Larratelli), the cult comprises beautiful biker girls who willingly rob and murder at their leader’s behest. But it was the movie’s conclusion that sparked uproar. As the narrative suddenly

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breaks, the viewer sees what appears to be ‘real’ behind-the-scenes footage. The film crew departs and the director turns his amorous attention towards a young woman. As his kissing turns aggressive, the woman struggles. More men then emerge to hold her down and different camera angles cover the violence as her fingers are cut off with shears; she’s then stabbed and graphically disembowelled. Then, just as the film reel runs out, the soundtrack catches the cameraman confirming that he ‘got it’ The scene seemed to be confirmation of the dark rumours circulating since the early 1970s that real murders were being filmed and distributed among a shadowy clientele. Indeed, the term ‘snuff film’ itself originated in Ed Sanders’ 1972 chronicle of the Manson clique, the author reporting hearsay that the Family were responsible for hitherto undocumented murders which had been filmed, with the incriminating reels buried in the desert.20 The release of Snuff seemed grim proof that the rumours were true and that ‘real’ murder movies did, indeed, exist. As a consequence, the film met with storms of protest. Feminist groups in particular were outraged. Activists such as Beverley LaBelle argued the movie represented ‘the ultimate in woman-hating’,21 and across America screenings attracted protests at the film’s purported imagery of real sexual violence. Snuff, however, was not all it seemed. Snuff had started out as a threadbare gore film that sought to cash-in on the Manson hysteria through its depiction of a hippie murder cult. Originally titled Slaughter, it was directed by exploitation veterans Michael and Roberta Findlay and had been filmed in Argentina for just $30,000. Low-budget distributor Allan Shackleton took on the film, but, doubting its potential, shelved it for four years. Then, inspired by the snuff film rumour, the wily huckster came up with a money-spinning angle. Unbeknownst to the original film-makers, he removed the movie’s credits, grafted a few minutes of additional ‘shocking’ footage onto the end, and released the re-jigged picture as Snuff. And, in true exploitation style, he stoked the film’s notoriety with a deliberately provocative ad campaign, which announced that the film was ‘made in South America . . . where life is cheap!’ Snuff proved a big earner for Shackleton, but his ruse was short-lived. The number of camera angles and the careful editing made it perfectly obvious that the added footage was faked. And, despite exhaustive searches, no commercially produced snuff movies have ever been uncovered.22 Rumours, however, persist,

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and snuff films have become an urban legend. Indeed, snuff movies and Charles Manson have both become modern myths that serve as motifs of monstrous malevolence. They are such powerful emblems of depravity because both function as touchstones for a wider sense of chaos and crisis and possess, as Brottman puts it, the capacity to ‘conjure up demons of legendary dimensions that possess all kinds of unholy powers: the power to corrupt innocent youth, the power to instigate bloodshed and butchery, the power to make myths and rumours come true’.23 Indeed, both Manson and snuff films have endured as mythologised embodiments of evil, representing hateful repositories of society’s murkiest fears.

The enduring Family Still synonymous with murder and mayhem, Manson remains a potent symbol in popular culture, and, since the 1970s, Charlie and the Family have populated a succession of books, magazines and movies. Throughout the 1980s, for instance, Manson remained the model for hippie-cult villainy in cheapo exploitation pictures such as Thou Shalt Not Kill . . . Except/Stryker’s War (Josh Becker, 1985) and 555 (Wally Koz, 1988), while the blurring of Manson myth and reality was explored in both Manson Family Movies (John Aes-Nihil, 1984) and Judgement Day Theater: The Book of Manson (Raymond Pettibon, 1989). Meanwhile, Charles Manson Superstar (Nicholas Screck, 1989) interspersed segments of the director’s interview with Manson in San Quentin Prison with scenes from the Spahn Ranch and other archival footage in a revisionist documentary that recast Manson as a misjudged fall-guy. The 1990s were leaner times for Manson pictures, but the early twenty-first century saw a mini-boom in Family-inspired material. In 2004, Jeremy Davies remade Helter Skelter, this time with less attention to the investigation and trial and more focus on the relationships between the cult followers and Manson (played quite convincingly by Jeremy Davies). The fortieth anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders brought a burst of interest in the form of the Britishmade docudrama, Manson (Neil Rawles, 2009) and the feature Manson, My Name is Evil (Reginald Harkema, 2009). Subsequent years saw the story tackled from a variety of angles in, for example, House of Manson (Brandon Slagle,

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2014), Life After Manson (Olivia Klaus, 2014) and the Lifetime Television movie Manson’s Lost Girls (Leslie Libman, 2016). And in 2015 Aquarius premiered on the NBC TV network. Created by John McNamara, the period drama series mixes reality and fiction as LAPD detective Sam Hodiak (David Duchovny) pits his wits against a sly Manson, played with a creditable degree of measure by Gethin Anthony. Renewed for a second season in 2016, Aquarius was a prestige repackaging of the Manson story for the DVD box-set generation. But it was Jim VanBebber’s The Manson Family, released in 2004, that came closest to the gusto of the 1970s Manson movies. The film was a labour of love for the cult horror director, who had struggled for over a decade to finish the picture, which had to run as a rough-cut at film festivals under the title Charlie’s Family until video distributors Blue Underground agreed to finance its completion. Blending meticulous docudrama with a brutal fictional narrative, the movie concentrates on Manson’s early days on the Spahn Ranch as he collects his followers and shapes them into the Family. A framing narrative, dated 1996, sees TV presenter Jack Wilson (Carl Day) researching a Manson documentary, and the film proceeds through an array of faux news clips and archive material, together with reproductions of interview scenes from Manson, the 1973 mondo movie. These are intercut with dramatic reconstructions of the Family’s murders – portrayed with a level of graphic violence that some critics found hard to stomach. In its form and style, then, The Manson Family clearly evokes the feel of 1960s and 1970s exploitation pictures. More than this, though, VanBebber’s movie is also a consummate updating of exploitation cinema’s transgressive aesthetic. Like the movies of Al Adamson – the meister of 1970s exploitation – The Manson Family takes no prisoners as it deliberately pushes at the boundaries of taste. Extending the exploitation tradition, the film appropriates the Manson mythology, conjuring with over-the-top images of the grotesque and the offensive in a carnivalesque challenge to the conservative, the mainstream and the turgidly orthodox. Until his death in 2017, Manson himself mouldered in prison for decades. Routinely denied parole, his occasional media interviews sparked periodic flurries of publicity until protracted illness brought his death, aged eightythree, in November 2017. The Manson myth, however, survived. Not least at

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the cinema, evidenced most obviously with the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood in 2019. Written and directed by Tarantino, the movie is set in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969 and follows fading screen star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) as they contend with the rapidly changing landscape of the American film industry. And, as the plot unfolds, Dalton and Booth cross paths several times with Manson’s motley hippie entourage. Played by Damon Herriman,24 Manson himself is a sinister background presence, and tensions build inexorably towards the horrific Tate-LaBianca murder spree. Tarantino’s ninth movie, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood features all the maverick film-maker’s trademarks – non-linear storylines, extended dialogue scenes, stylized violence, flights of eloquent profanity and a bombardment of pop culture references. Indeed, the film brims with allusions to the cinema, TV and music of the 1960s and early 1970s – the formative era of Tarantino’s imagination – and the movie can be seen as the director’s affectionate homage to Hollywood’s last golden era. It is an ardour that ultimately swerves the film out of ‘real-life’ history into an alternate, ‘fairy-tale’ universe. Rather than attacking the Polanski household, the Manson Family members change plans and raid the home of Polanski’s next-door neighbour, Rick Dalton. And, confronted by the fading star and his stuntman buddy, the hippies’ murderous mission is scotched and they are brutally dispatched. This, then, is Tarantino’s fictional ‘correction’ of a horrific reality. Tate’s murder is both averted and avenged, and the Manson Family are left as contemptable failures. A critical and commercial hit, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood both challenges and is, itself, constituent of the Manson mythology. On one level, Tarantino’s fictitious ‘happy ending’ elaborates a version of events that affirms a ‘better’ world in which Manson and the Family are stripped of the dark power that they wield over the popular imagination. At the same time, however, the movie is also testament to the enduring character of this power. Released to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca killings, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood and its box office success were clear evidence of the continuing symbolic resonance of Charles Manson and his murderous Family. As Ed Sanders mordantly observed on the film’s release: ‘Some important people and events fade with time. . . . But some events last and last and last’.25

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Notes 1 For a full account of Adamson’s distinctive oeuvre, see David Konow, Shlock-oRama: The Films of Al Adamson (Los Angeles, CA: Lone Eagle Publishing, 1998). 2 David Felton, Robin Green and David Dalton, Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America, Including Material on Charles Manson, Mel Lyman, Victor Baranco, and Their Followers (San Francisco, CA: Straight Arrow Publishing, 1972). 3 Felton et al., Mindfuckers, p. 12. 4 The most exhaustive accounts of the Manson case remain Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (London: Bodley Head, 1974) and Ed Sanders, The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (New York: Dutton: 1971). 5 See Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, pp. 1–33; Sanders, The Family, pp. 251–73. 6 See Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, pp. 33–54; Sanders, The Family, pp. 285–96. 7 David Felton and David Dalton, ‘Charles Manson: the incredible story of the most dangerous man alive’, Rolling Stone, 25 June 1970, pp. 24–48. 8 Sanders, The Family, p. 34. 9 Michael Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 11. 10 Paul O’Neil, ‘The monstrous Manson “family” ’, Life, 19 December 1969, p. 22. 11 Eric Schaefer, ‘Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!’: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1999), p. 5. 12 See, for example, John Fiske, Reading the Popular (London: Routledge, 1989) and Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 13 Schaefer, ‘Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!’, p. 134. 14 Ibid., p. 122. 15 Ibid., p. 134. 16 Mikita Brottman, Offensive Films (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), p. 91. 17 A thorough historical survey of the mondo genre can be found in Mark Goodall, Sweet and Savage: The World Through the Mondo Film Lens (London: Headpress, 2018). 18 Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008). 19 Jim Morton, ‘Manson movies’ in Jim VanBebber (ed.), Charlie’s Family: An Illustrated Screenplay to the Film by Jim VanBebber (London: Creation Books 1998), pp. 164–84.

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20 Sanders, The Family, p. 211. No evidence supporting such claims was ever found. Police, however, did discover movie equipment and unexposed film reels when they raided Spahn Ranch. 21 Beverly LaBelle, ‘Snuff: The ultimate in woman-hating’, in Laura Lederer (ed.), Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (New York: Morrow 1980), pp. 272–8. 22 For complete surveys of the ‘snuff movie’ phenomenon see Stephen Milligan, ‘The Bloodiest Thing That Ever Happened in Front of a Camera’: Conservative Politics, ‘Porno Chic’ and Snuff (London: Headpress, 2014); Neil Jackson, Shaun Kimber, Johnny Walker and Thomas Joseph Watson (eds), Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 23 Brottman, Offensive Films, p. 9. 24 In 2019 Herriman also portrayed Manson in the second season of Mindhunter, a Netflix TV series. 25 Ed Sanders, ‘Why pop culture still can’t get enough of Charles Manson’, The New York Times, 24 July 2019. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/movies/ charles-manson-family-hollywood-tarantino.html (accessed 2 October 2020).

Bibliography Bugliosi, Vincent and Gentry, Curt, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (London: Bodley Head, 1974). Brottman, Mikita, Offensive Films (Nashville, TN : Vanderbilt University Press, 2005). Felton, David and Dalton, David, ‘Charles Manson: the incredible story of the most dangerous man alive’, Rolling Stone, 25 June 1970, pp. 24–48. Felton, David, Green, Robin and Dalton, David, Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America, Including Material on Charles Manson, Mel Lyman, Victor Baranco, and Their Followers (San Francisco, CA : Straight Arrow Publishing, 1972). Fiske, John, Reading the Popular (London: Routledge, 1989). Flamm, Michael, Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Goodall, Mark, Sweet and Savage: The World Through the Mondo Film Lens (London: Headpress, 2018). Jackson, Neil, Kimber, Shaun, Walker, Johnny and Watson, Thomas Joseph (eds), Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Konow, David, Shlock-o-Rama: The Films of Al Adamson (Los Angeles, CA : Lone Eagle Publishing, 1998). LaBelle, Beverly, ‘Snuff: The ultimate in woman-hating’, in Laura Lederer (ed.), Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (New York: Morrow, 1980), pp. 272–8.

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Milligan, Stephen, ‘The Bloodiest Thing That Ever Happened in Front of a Camera’: Conservative Politics, ‘Porno Chic’ and Snuff (London: Headpress, 2014). Morton, Jim, ‘Manson movies’ in J. VanBebber (ed.), Charlie’s Family: An Illustrated Screenplay to the Film by Jim VanBebber (London: Creation Books, 1998), pp. 164–84. O’Neil, Paul, ‘The monstrous Manson “family” ’, Life, 19 December 1969, pp. 20–31. Perlstein, Rick, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008). Sanders, Ed, The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion (New York: Dutton, 1971). Sanders, Ed, ‘Why pop culture still can’t get enough of Charles Manson’, The New York Times, 24 July 2019. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/movies/ charles-manson-family-hollywood-tarantino.html (accessed 2 October 2020). Schaefer, Eric, ‘Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!’: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1999). Stam, Robert, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

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The Peter Pan Syndrome: Murder as Child’s Play in Four 1970s Films T.S. Kord

Introduction Developmental psychology has had much to say about the question of why and how children play: to expend superfluous energy,1 to train for survival in the adult world,2 to acquire new skills with the assistance of adults,3 or for experiential reasons of their own, also known as having fun.4 Freud famously offered a more sinister analysis of the male child’s development in The Ego and the Id, when he defined, under the heading of the Oedipus Complex, desires to remove (murder) the father as a normal part of the son’s psychosexual development. Freud tempered this disturbing scenario with the good news that the potential killer is merely the son’s Id, part of the child’s unconscious mind and not the child himself. ‘Normal’ development into adulthood involves resolving the Oedipus Complex in a process in which the purely instinctual Id, which wants to eliminate the father, is vanquished by the far more reasonable Ego – like the Id, part of the unconscious mind – which recognizes the father’s superiority, turning him from a potential victim into the object of idolisation and identification.5 All of these assessments of child’s play and child development are motivated not by the world of children but by that of adults. Developmental psychology commonly views childhood as a preparatory rather than an intrinsic phase, as a path rather than a destination. Can these theories help us to interpret cinema narratives of children murdering adults? If childhood is, as developmental psychology overwhelmingly claims, merely the path to adulthood, and if the most significant steps on this path are taken, as Freud has asserted, by the unconscious 245

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rather than the conscious mind, one interpretation that readily springs to mind is the child’s unconscious and symbolic rejection of his or her own future adulthood – what experts on emotional disorders have termed the ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’.6 And yet, when children kill adults, in the movies7 or in real life,8 the act is surprisingly rarely assigned this or any other symbolic meaning. The most common explanations for such acts emerging from journalists’ keyboards and judges’ decisions, ranging from revenge for or self-defence against child abuse to cult, gang and thrill killings, pathology, or violence on TV, to name just a few,9 remain firmly grounded in the literal world of milieu, mechanisms and motivations. Rarely, if ever, is a child’s killing of an adult seen figuratively, as an attack on the concept of adulthood, rather than literally, as an attack on a specific adult. The figurative interpretation would also be severely at odds with the psychological literature’s firmly positivistic view of adulthood as not only the inevitable but also the appropriate and desirable outcome of childhood. To assign a symbolic value to the act of murder – or, for that matter, to child’s play – seems to re-assess the act as an end in and of itself, rather than a means to an end, such as thrill-seeking (in the case of murder) or training for adulthood (in the case of child’s play). Jean Piaget, for example, may have gone half-way down this disturbing path when he described children’s play as ‘assimilation’, the transformation of the environment to meet the requirements of the self, and contrasted it with work, which he defined as ‘accommodation’ or the transformation of the self to meet the requirements of the environment.10 Four films, all hailing from a decade that is now commonly perceived as horror’s heyday, would appear to have taken Piaget’s ideas a step further: Peopletoys (Sean MacGregor, David Sheldon, 1974), The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Nicholas Gessner, 1976), Kiss of the Tarantula (Chris Munger, 1976) and The Child (Robert Voskanian, 1977).11 Three of the four cast the child’s act of killing adults in the metaphor of child’s play. I would like to offer two experimental interpretations of these killing games. The first is to read them as constituting ‘assimilation’ in Piaget’s sense, namely subordination of the environment to the self, and therefore as self-constituting and self-asserting acts. The second is to understand them as symbolic expressions of the Peter Pan Syndrome, that is, a vision of childhood as an end rather than a means, or even a wholesale rejection of adulthood as the child’s future.

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Not so imaginary friends: kids and their pets Both The Child and Kiss of the Tarantula begin with a gender reversal of the Oedipal paradigm: the homicidal child is female, not male; her murderous rampage against adults is initiated not by a desire to remove the father, but by the death of the mother. In both films, the child’s killing of the parent is itself prompted by that parent’s actual or suspected murder of the other parent. In Kiss, little Susan (Suzanna Ling) kills her mother to prevent her murdering her father; in The Child, Rosalie Nordon (Rosalie Cole) expresses her suspicion that her father murdered her mother. The wholesome two-parent family as a model for adulthood is removed early on in both films and replaced with surroundings that symbolize not growth, development and life but death and decay. Susan, whose father is a mortician, grows up in a mortuary; Rosalie spends all of her playtime in the cemetery immediately adjacent to her house. Both girls have chosen unusual pets or playmates, deadly tarantulas for Susan, zombies for Rosalie. Both girls are cast as children by virtue of their accessories but look and behave years older. Rosalie, supposedly eleven, looks every bit of fifteen but clutches her teddy-bear like a four-year-old in virtually every scene in which she does not cavort with zombies. Susan, who performs her pioneer killing – that of her mother – as a child, plays out the rest of her murderous career as a teenager. While Susan, with her long hair, long fingernails and sophisticated clothing could easily be mistaken for a well-groomed college girl, she too is frequently shown playing with stuffed toys. Indeed, this visually confusing mix of cuddly toys in the hands of fledgling adults may point to the most profound trauma that the girl killers are trying to address, because – as we shall see – both explicitly reject the idea of becoming women. In The Child, hints that Rosalie is a problematic child are advanced early and linked to the trauma of her mother’s death. Mrs Whitfield (Ruth Ballen), the Nordons’ kindly elderly neighbour, issues the initial warning to the naïve, young and improbably named Alicianne Del Mar (Laurel Barnett), who is about to begin her employment next door as Rosalie’s nanny: ‘Rosalie’s always been strange – worse since her mother’s death.’ Rosalie’s mother, as it turns out, spent most of her life in a mental institution and died young of unexplained causes. Rosalie, as described by Mrs Whitfield, has inherited her mother’s

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strangeness, including her predilection for wandering the cemetery at night, and has ‘played tricks’ on Mrs Whitfield’s boarders, tricks apparently nasty enough to prompt them all to move. Thus, Rosalie is presented from the outset as rather more than ‘strange’: she is pronounced guilty of both ruining Mrs Whitfield’s business and isolating her (that this is very much Rosalie’s intention is borne out when she instructs her zombies to make off with Mrs Whitfield’s beloved pet dog, followed by her spookily delivered comment: ‘Now she’ll be all alone’). Alarm bells should be emphatically ringing in Alicianne’s head, but she remains blissfully unaware of any ominous undertones, instead sympathizing with Rosalie, to whom she feels instantly linked by her own love of the outdoors and the loss of her own mother as a young child. ‘I’m sure Rosalie and I will get along just fine,’ she chirps, thus establishing herself early on as Rosalie’s surrogate mother and model for adulthood. Much of the film visualizes the fairy-tale theme of the little girl getting lost in the woods, the little girl, in this case, being not little Rosalie but adult Alicianne. Accompanied by eerie, twelve-tone, plucked strings or hysterically tinkling piano, Alicianne, reduced to walking through the woods because her car has stalled, fights her way through what looks like a mix of a Vietnam-style jungle and the Brothers Grimm’s forest that has swallowed up children without number. The fairy-tale nature of these woods is already anticipated by Mrs Whitfield’s incessant warnings: ‘Stay on the path . . . Don’t wander off into the woods . . . Hurry, you’d better hurry . . . there is something . . . I hear them calling to one another at night.’ Wafts of fog obscure Alicianne’s vision, her hapless stumbling and constant squinting indicating clearly that she is utterly lost, whereas Rosalie, who is shown several times in the same setting, always knows exactly where she is going. Once Alicianne has finally traversed the misty woods and the fog-shrouded cemetery, she enters a house that doesn’t seem much safer: the vast, darkly wood-panelled and completely unlit mansion evokes less a country house than Dracula’s castle, and the welcome she receives from her new employer, Nordon (Frank Janson), is eerily frosty. Alicianne’s new charge, Rosalie, is almost entirely defined through her identification with her mother, her recognition of Alicianne as surrogate mother, the trauma of losing the original one and the fear of losing her replacement. Initially identifying with Alicianne because she too lost her mother early, Rosalie is cloyingly possessive of her. When Alicianne takes an

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hour off to go horseback riding, Rosalie flies into a tantrum: ‘I thought she was supposed to take care of me. I want her here. NOW !!!’ Things become even more ominous when Rosalie draws pictures of her mother’s funeral, carefully crossing out the people she plans to kill – including her father and adult brother Len (Richard Hanners) – and holds secret conversations with her dead mother: ‘Mommy, I know Daddy’s sorry, but I promise that whoever did this will be sorry too.’ Throughout the film, numerous passages link Rosalie with her mother (a recurring remark is that ‘Rosalie is like her mother’) and her mother with severe abnormality. Len informs Alicianne that Rosalie’s mother ‘used to read a lot of books about the mind. She said the mind was a secret world, a place nobody had explored yet.’ This exchange hints at Rosalie’s immense mental powers, presumably inherited from her mother, and specifically the power to control her zombie friends to commit murder at her bidding. Add to this an unhealthy obsession with death – her nightly cemetery walks; her hysterical laughter when discussing her mother’s death; her delighted giggles at a story her father tells at the dinner table about a mass poisoning, which escalate into uproarious laughter when he gets to the punch line: ‘Killed every one of ’em! Died like flies!’ – and we seem to have a kid ready for carnage. And yet, after the film has dangled this enticing possibility in front of the audience, it seems to take it all back. Rosalie is set up as the killer kid with a playful approach to murder, as the trailer trumpets: ‘Some girls play with dolls. Rosalie plays with Zombies! Let’s play hide and go kill!’ But this is not quite borne out in the film, where all the evil deeds are committed by the zombies in Rosalie’s absence, her involvement being limited to spooky little hints that she has ‘friends’ who ‘do favours for me’. Rosalie herself gets her hands bloody only once, shooting the Asian groundskeeper, whom she – understandably, given that she has caught him in his cabin fondling her mother’s jewellery – accuses of her mother’s murder (the Asian man confirms our suspicions about the mother’s state of mental health by crying out: ‘Mama crazy! Mama crazy!’ right before Rosalie shoots him in the stomach). Thus, the only killing directly involving Rosalie herself can easily be dismissed as an understandable act of vengeance. The truly disturbing deeds, including the apparently unmotivated elimination of Rosalie’s entire family, are committed by Rosalie’s ‘friends’: these are verbally linked to Rosalie, but visually separate from her.

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Moreover, the film seems strangely uninterested in the colourful killings of Mrs Whitfield, Rosalie’s father, and finally Len, which appear as no more than a drearily routine fulfilment of the gore quota owed to the schlock horror genre.12 All three are killed in a visually identical manner: the zombies’ standard operating procedure is to gouge out one eye and flay the face. There is no amplification of action, length of exposure, or amount of gore from one scene to the next. The visual repetitiveness and the distinct lack of progression indicate that the important aspect of these scenes is not the murders themselves but what they symbolize, namely the removal of the family unit and all adult role models for Rosalie. Symbolically speaking, then, the real crime of which the film accuses her is not murder but refusing to grow up. She does this initially by rebuffing adult advice and admonishments, indeed verbal communication of both kinds: ‘I don’t have to tell you anything,’ she tells her father, closely followed by ‘I won’t listen to you anymore, old man!’ Verbal rejection is followed by physical rejection of adults, taking the form of the moderately messy removal of three successive family generations: grandmother-surrogate,13 father, and finally brother. Perhaps most significantly, Rosalie rejects not only adults but more generally the very idea of adulthood. At the dinner table, her surrogate mother figure Alicianne offers to show her how to bake doughnuts, following a recipe passed down to her from her own mother. Rosalie is thus explicitly cast in a line of little girls who, instructed by their mothers, become mothers (adults) themselves. Rosalie responds to this by pulling a disgusted face, saying ‘Doughnuts?’ in a voice dripping with disdain. At this point Len chimes in: ‘Sure, you wanna know how to bake stuff. When you get married you wanna be a good wife to your husband, dontcha?’ a sentiment Rosalie greets merely with another contemptuous glance. So where does that leave Rosalie as a child playing the killing game? Read literally, as the story of a child offing adults by proxy, the film merely replicates the visuals – flayed face, missing eye – without building appreciably on them. However, read as a figurative rejection of adulthood, with the doughnut scene as perhaps the most significant one in the film, The Child shows progression: the development of a child through murder as a game, evolving steadily from the verbal rejection of adult advice to the physical rejection (elimination) of adults, on the one hand, and the figurative and symbolic rejection of the entire

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concept of adulthood on the other. Rosalie is a true victim of the Peter Pan Syndrome: she does not want to grow up. It is thus only logical that the film spares her this fate by having Rosalie’s surrogate mother Alicianne murder the child with an axe at the end of the film. But let the viewer beware of thinking that this means that the adult world has ‘triumphed’. Alicianne, the only one to escape the slaughter (or does she?), ends the film exactly as she began it: the closing credits roll over a freeze-frame of Alicianne next to a stalled car, her fixed contemplation of the car seeming to express her awareness that if she wants to escape, she’ll have to hoof it through a scary landscape teeming with zombies. Like The Child, Kiss of the Tarantula, a film sporting a virtually identical theme – a girl murders adults through mental control of a proxy, in this case spiders – also confronts us with a similar rift between what the trailer announces and what the film delivers. Over sweet scenes showing a five-yearold blonde cutie walking through green sun-dappled woods and fields which abruptly cut to darkly lit images of teenagers writhing in agony in a car, the trailer’s voice-over informs us: To all the world, this is the face of a child of innocence and beauty. But behind this sweet mask of purity, there dwells a tormented mind filled with the most horrifying imagination. A mind bent and twisted, seething and crying out for revenge, as she sends her playmates, the deadly tarantulas, out to execute her insane desires for death.

The trailer ends with a close-up of the little girl smiling menacingly into the camera. Here, it seems, viewers are promised a movie about a child playing her deadly game of killing adults. In the film itself, however, the little girl of the trailer plays hardly any part at all. And whereas the trailer announces the inexplicable – the unmotivated and playful deadly acts of an unfathomably evil kid – the film shows us a well-motivated teen who kills to defend first her father and later the permanence of her own childhood. Little Susan (played by Susan Eddins at age five and Rebecca Eddins at age ten), daughter of the mortician John Bradley (Herman Wallner), is shown in flashback from the perspective of the teenage Susan (Suzanna Ling) as she is abused by her mother Martha (Beverly Eddins) in ever-intensifying ways. Susan’s mother begins by slapping her, screaming at her and forbidding her to

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play with her beloved spiders; she then traumatizes the child by killing her favourite pet spider and tops it all off by cheating on her husband with his brother Walter (Eric Mason), with whom, moreover, she plots her husband’s murder. Susan, overhearing the plan, kills her mother by putting a huge tarantula into her bed, causing her to die of a heart attack. The rest of the film shows us Susan as a teenager on the cusp of adulthood, who, although looking every bit of eighteen and sporting long, manicured fingernails, nevertheless desperately clings to childhood, surrounding herself with teddies, duckies and dolls – and her beloved pet spiders. The film’s real horror is the dilemma of growing up: several scenes establish the trauma of ever-changing life in direct contrast to the comforting permanence and immutability of death. In one scene, in which Susan compliments her father for making a classmate’s corpse look beautiful, he declares that once the girl’s coffin is sealed airtight, ‘she’ll look this lovely for years’. While death holds no terrors for Susan, life – the essence of which is change, development and growth – clearly does. The horrible necessity of her own development and growth are foregrounded early on in a conversation in which she explains that she does not seek contact with anyone other than her father. When she tells him that she has no friends because of his weird profession, he reassures her in adult terms, clearly mistaking her message: ‘You are a very attractive young lady. You’ll have plenty of friends.’ Making ‘friends’, a thinly veiled allusion to growing up and embarking on sexual adventures, is cast as a series of increasingly traumatic episodes. The first is the harmless friendship with her school friend Joe Penny (Mark Smith), who is nice but unceremoniously (and oddly, given Susan’s obvious interest in him) dropped from the film after two scenes totalling about sixty seconds. The second involves her near-rape by a gang of classmates whom she surprises when they break into her basement, trying to steal a coffin for a Halloween party. The third and last focuses on her slimy uncle Walter, who tells her that ‘you’re as lovely as your mother was’, slaps her on the rump, fondles her, plies her with non-avuncular kisses at every opportunity and finally propositions her directly. If adulthood is identified as sexuality, the latter is – with the exception of the inexplicably truncated Joeepisode – defined as trauma in the form of either rape or incestuous rape. In a gender-reversal of the Oedipal story similar to that portrayed in The Child,

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sexual trauma begins with the mother’s death: by removing her mother, Susan replaces her as the target of Walter’s desire. Susan defends herself against the horror of adulthood by setting her spiders on her sexual attackers. Like the scenes of sexual threat, her killings come in threes. All are presented as motivated, even partly excusable. After murdering her mother to save her father’s life, she inserts tarantulas into the car of her sexual attackers at a drive-in movie theatre. This, by far the most elaborate killing scene in the film, is alleviated in two ways. One is the clear suggestion that Susan intended merely to scare the teens in the car, not to kill them,14 as illustrated by her shocked exclamation ‘Oh my God!’ when she returns to collect her spiders and finds three corpses and one catatonic survivor. Second, the entire episode is shot not as a horror scene but as a spoof on horror, by virtue of its absurd, outrageous, eye-winking disregard for any principles of verisimilitude. In a manner that recalls The Child, this final murder is cast as Susan’s direct response to the prospect of having adulthood forced upon her. Whereas Walter merely issued sickening sexual invitations, the scene in which Susan kills him is preceded by a more serious proposal: he has come to discuss ‘your future and mine. Our future’, condensed as: ‘We can be together now.’ As did The Child, Kiss features a dinner table scene during which Walter praises Susan’s expert cooking, hinting ominously that her childhood will end soon by saying: ‘That was a fine dinner, Susan. You’ll make a fine wife for someone.’ Susan’s father instantly takes up the hint: ‘She will indeed. [To Susan:] Are you still seeing Joe Penny?’ Whereas Susan has previously never been at a loss for words, even in the face of direct sexual attack, this seemingly harmless banter makes her feel uncomfortable enough to leave the table. Growing up, being someone’s wife, is the ultimate horror. In the final scene, having buried the prospect (Walter) for good, the alternative is encapsulated by showing Susan in bed, surrounded by her toys and dolls, reading a book entitled Eliza (could this be the story of Eliza Doolittle, that other little girl in training to become someone’s ‘fine wife’, who responds to such treatment with thoughts of murder?15). Daddy, just back from work, looks in on her. Her bright and cheery: ‘Hey, Dad!’ followed by a sigh of contentment after he closes the door, signify the happy restoration of her childhood, preserved as a competent mortician might preserve a beautiful corpse.

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Unlike Rosalie, Susan survives, but the permanence of childhood is, as in The Child, linked with death.

Peers but no pressure: kids and their toys Peopletoys/Devil Times Five/The Horrible House on the Hill features a team of killer children whose games include interacting with and imitating adults before doing away with them. Fifteen-year-old Sister Hannah (Gale Smale), so called because she appears in a nun’s habit, is the leader of the little troupe, consisting of thirteen-year-old vain and beautiful David (Leif Garrett), twelveyear-old soldier boy Brian (Tierre Turner), pyromaniac Susan, who looks about fourteen (Tia Thompson) and four-year-old cutie Moe (Dawn Lyn). The Fearsome Five are pitted against a group of adults in a snowed-in holiday chalet: arrogant and overbearing patriarch Papa Doc (Gene Evans) and his entourage consisting of his daughters Julie (Joan McCall) and Lovely (Carolyn Stellar), Julie’s partner and Lovely’s ex Rick (Taylor Lacher), Papa Doc’s disgruntled employee Harvey (Sorrell Brooke), Harvey’s alcoholic wife Ruth (Shelley Morrison) and the mentally challenged Ralph (John Durren), who serves the guests as handyman, cook and general dogsbody. Once the children are taken in by the adults, the rest of the film is given over to a predictable series of gory slayings. Two distinguishing aspects of the film are its explicit visualization of all killings as child’s play and the doubts it casts on the definition of ‘childhood’ as a phase leading inexorably and appropriately to adulthood. If in The Child and Kiss the idea of killing adults as a child’s favourite game is lost somewhere between conceptualisation in the trailer and the reality of the film, Peopletoys enacts the idea with great relish. The children entrap and kill Papa Doc with the help of an elaborate contraption such as only a child could devise: a chair swinging from the ceiling with a long, sword-like stabbing instrument attached to its seat. Immediately after his death, David and Brian quarrel about who deserves credit for rigging the murder weapon. Later, the children place Papa Doc outside in a sitting position and build a snowman around his corpse. Harvey is killed – presumably for beating David, an exquisitely sore loser, at chess – while showing David how to chop wood and belittling his swing, but,

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as things turn out, it is more than sufficient to chop through Harvey’s neck. Pyromaniac Susan sets Ruth on fire after Brian and David have set the stage by pouring petrol over her; afterwards all the children dance merrily around the screaming and twisting bonfire that is Ruth. Little Moe, upbraided by Lovely for playing with her make-up, kills her with Hannah’s help as she is taking a bath: Hannah holds Lovely’s head under water while Moe pours Papa Doc’s pet piranhas into the tub, gaily giggling at Lovely’s death throes. Almost all the killings are collaborative, the result of elaborate contraptions and planning, giving the impression of childish problem-solving akin to building a Lego castle or putting together a model kit. Spur-of-the-moment play, such as dances around burning people or snowmen built around corpses, develops spontaneously post-mortem. The final scene shows all the kids with their corpses, their ‘peopletoys’, assembled in the living room, the corpses arranged in a circle the way a little girl might arrange dolls for a tea party. The children interact with them as a child interacts with dolls, with the child speaking both the lines assigned to the doll and his or her own. When finally the decision is made to move on—‘Game’s over,’ Susan announces bossily – little Moe cries inconsolably, wailing: ‘I don’t want to leave Julie!’ but Hannah soothes her with the timeless parental classic: ‘We’re gonna have some brandnew toys soon.’ Mollified, Moe pecks dead Lovely on the cheek with a cheery ‘Bye, Lovely!’ in exactly the way that a little girl would kiss a favourite doll good-bye when Mummy puts her foot down: No, you can’t take your doll into the bathtub. The play-theme is so elaborately enacted that it practically trumps the terror that the scene seeks to create. There is an ‘Aaaawwwww, how cute’ quality about it that contrasts absurdly with, but also quite overpowers, the visual reminders of the awful reality behind the game – gaping wounds, Ruth’s charred face, blood everywhere. Oddly, the film makes absolutely no distinction between these deadly games and ‘normal’ kid behaviour. Although we must assume, particularly given the ending’s talk of going in search of new toys, that the children fully planned to kill everyone the minute they set foot in the house, all the killings are apparently motivated by anger at situations that are part and parcel of every child’s life – such as being shouted at for playing with things you’re not supposed to touch, being belittled, being beaten at a board game. The film portrays no qualitative difference between these normal tantrums and gory killing. Murder is cast as

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normal interaction not only among children, but also between adults and children. Significantly, most of the children are ‘assigned’ an adult: Hannah latches onto Ralph; Susan willingly submits to Ruth’s mothering; David plays chess with Harvey and wants to be his friend; Moe develops a very cuddly relationship with Lovely. But if this seems to imply, at least initially, a normal child-adult relationship, with the adult in authority over the child and the child in training to become an adult, the viewer is soon disabused of this idea. All the men in the film are defined by careerism and greed: Papa Doc, the film’s Alpha Male, brags tirelessly about his own ‘achievements’ and riches, whilst the other men are cast as little more than circling sharks, jockeying for position and hoping for offal from his table. Almost all the adult relationships in the film are fraught and shallow: Harvey resents Papa Doc for withholding his promotion; Rick hates Papa Doc’s overbearing nature; Julie and Lovely cat-fight for Rick’s affections; Lovely tries to seduce retarded Ralph, who does not cooperate because he simply doesn’t understand what she wants; the drunken Ruth rejects Harvey’s increasingly desperate sexual advances in favour of her love relationship with Jim Beam. All women are defined by sex: the wanton (Lovely), the willing (Julie) and the frigid lush who replaces sex with booze (Ruth). There are no adults in this film who could serve as role models for children. If these characters are as good as it gets, adulthood richly merits rejection.

Home alone: on (not) playing their game The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane16 is called Rynn Jacobs (Jodie Foster). She has just turned thirteen and lives in a large house in the woods with her father, or so she claims, although he is mysteriously unavailable whenever adults come to call. Such visits are frequent and always portrayed as home invasions. The most benign visitor is Officer Miglioriti (Mort Shuman), who checks on Rynn frequently, suspecting that she lives all alone and merely upholds the fiction of living with her father. More annoyingly, Rynn’s landlady Mrs Hallet (Alexis Smith) marches into the house without knocking, rearranges the furniture, snoops around and threatens to report Rynn to the School Board because Rynn is home-schooled. And even more disturbingly, Cora’s son Frank Hallet (Martin Sheen), a known paedophile, keeps barging in,

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sexually harassing and brutalizing Rynn: in one scene, he burns her beloved pet hamster with a cigarette, crushes it to death and contemptuously flings it into the fireplace. Until Rynn’s poisoning of Frank in self-defence in the final scene, she does not actually kill intentionally, although the corpses certainly pile up in her basement. There is her mother, who died, like Frank, of poisoning by potassium cyanide, which Rynn, thinking it was medicine, innocently administered in her tea. There is nosy Mrs Hallet, who, going down into the basement to snoop, is hit on the head by the accidentally falling trapdoor and expires on the stairs. Rynn’s fifteenyear-old disabled boyfriend Mario (Scott Jacoby) turns out to be a lifesaver by getting rid of all the nosy adults – the town cop by impersonating Rynn’s father, and Rynn’s mother and the town gossip by helping Rynn to bury them next to the house, where we can safely presume that they will be joined by the town creep. In the end, nothing, and above all nobody, stands in the way of Mario and Rynn living happily (meaning relatively free from adult interference) ever after. This too is a film about a child getting rid of adults (the body count at the end stands at a respectable three), but there are no fun and games involved. In fact, the entire film is about Rynn’s refusal to play games. Visually, there is not a single scene in which she plays a game or behaves like a child. On the contrary, she leads a soberly adult life. At the bank, she informs the bank teller, who hesitates to allow her to cash a cheque because she is only thirteen, that the cheque is drawn on a joint account with her father. At home, she asserts a tenant’s right to privacy when Mrs Hallet barges into the house. Her vocabulary is more advanced than that of all adults with whom she interacts, and she displays an impressive knowledge of the history of disturbed poets from Poe to Plath (her father, or so she claims, being one of them). She is shown studying (learning Hebrew from a tape), reading (Emily Dickinson poems), listening to music (Frédéric Chopin’s piano concerti), in all cases revealing rather sophisticated tastes for a thirteen-year-old, but never playing. Game playing in this film is linked not with children but with adults, in the sense of nasty, manipulative or coercive behaviour inflicted on children. The only lesson Rynn has ever taken from an adult, her dying father, is to refuse all further game playing: He whispered to me in a very soft voice that I wasn’t like anybody else in the world, that people wouldn’t understand me, they’d order me around, tell me

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what to do and try to make me into the person they wanted me to be. Since I was only a kid, I couldn’t say anything . . . Don’t give in and play their game. Fight them any way you have to. Survive. That’s what he said. Then he kissed me and walked off into the trees and down the lane. In that room I found charts of tide tables and waters in the Sound and the ocean. He’ll never be found.

Rynn’s father ensures her survival not only in word but in deed, by killing her mother from beyond the grave. Astutely predicting that the mother, who abandoned the family when Rynn was little, would come back after his death to reclaim her, he handed Rynn a little flask of white powder, instructing her to put it in her mother’s tea if she ever came to visit, telling her that it was medicine that would make her mother calmer, less aggressive. Of course, it turns out to be potassium cyanide, but Rynn, equally unfazed by her act of involuntary matricide and the technicalities of body disposal, takes her father’s fib as his loving legacy intended to ensure her continued autonomy. Her own declarations of independence reproduce her father’s advice down to the wording: ‘I’m not going to play their game. The game is protected, you know? It’s like going through the motions of living without really living.’ Little Girl can, in many ways, be read as the precise opposite of 1970s sch(l)ock horror films in which kids play the game of murdering adults. It is not a horror film: there is only one intentional murder, the little girl is never shown at play, and ‘games’ are motivated only verbally, as adult manipulation sure to thwart the child’s development. The Peter Pan Syndrome, the refusal to grow up, is here replaced with a distinct eagerness to do so, expressed through the portrayal of Rynn’s life as that of an adult: refusing to play games in either sense of the term, managing her own affairs, drinking wine at dinner and having sex with Mario. Of all the films discussed here, Little Girl is the only one that projects a future for the child, rather than merely the repetition of a game (Peopletoys) or preserving childhood in the present tense (Kiss). And yet, Little Girl is a shocker in its own right, linked to other kiddie horror films of the age by its most central theme: its explicit rejection of adults. In fact, Little Girl takes this theme a step further than the films already discussed by making this proposition seem defensible, even rational. The shock of the film is contained in its suggestion that children might not have any need of or use for adults at all. The good parent is the father who voluntarily

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removes himself from his child’s life, who walks into the woods, never to return and never to be found. The bad parent is meddlesome Mommy, narratively cast as Rynn’s mother but visually cast as Mrs Hallet, who bosses Rynn around in the same way, snoops around the house in the same way and suffers the same fate. Or abusive ‘father figures’ like Frank, the paedophile creep. Or Mario’s mother, who is directly responsible for his disability because she neglected to have Mario inoculated against polio (Mario explains that she had so many children that she forgot which of them had not had their shots). So long as there is shelter and money, the film seems to argue, kids are really better off without adults. If Mario is portrayed as the victim of bad parenting, Rynn is a shining example of juvenile self-sufficiency. Despite the constant defensiveness into which interaction with adults forces her, and despite quite a few traumatic events including accidental matricide, the nocturnal interment of two corpses and her killing of a paedophile in self-defence, Rynn is portrayed as cheerful, content, competent and well adjusted.17 Eschewing schools (‘Schools are stultifying,’ she pronounces with adult authority and vocabulary), she is nevertheless getting a good education; in fact, she is described as ‘brilliant’ several times throughout the film. Mario vastly prefers Rynn’s life over his own troubled family life. The implication is obvious: what kid, given a choice, wouldn’t? Rynn, home alone, is doing just fine, and would be getting on even better were it not for the constant necessity of ‘surviving’, here defined as keeping adults off her body, out of her house and out of her affairs.

Final horrific reflections Returning for a moment to the background of child psychology, the rejection of adults and adulthood in all of these films is severely at odds with its most central developmental theory, developed by among others by Groos, Montessori and Vygotsky, namely that children’s games prepare them for their future lives as adults. Piaget’s definition of play as the child adjusting its surroundings to its own benefit of itself seems, at least in the portrayal of these films, closer to the mark. Such subordination of the surroundings to the self is most clearly enacted in Little Girl, in which all the events engineered by Rynn – her selfeducation, the furnishing of her house, her insistence on her rights despite her

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age, her acts of corpse disposal and murder – fall into this category. In the horror films, too, environmental engineering – carefully placing spiders, luring people to places where zombies can attack them, rigging elaborate murder contraptions – is an important part of the killing game. Similarly, the Peter Pan Syndrome holds for all films. All focus either on the child’s refusal to grow up or to grow up in the manner dictated by adults. Within the films’ logic, the murder of adults seems fully justified by the simple fact that adults are a waste of space – useless, annoying, derisive, neglectful, abusive, or simply in the way. So far, so obvious. What is perhaps less obvious – maybe because it is one of the most disturbing ideas voiced by these films – is another link that we might make between playing games and killing adults. In The Power of Play: Learning What Comes Naturally, David Elkind has offered the simplest answer of all to the question: ‘Why do children play?’ Because it comes naturally. Because it’s fun. So let us consider, for a moment, the scandalous consequences of applying Elkind’s insight to shocker movies of the 1970s in which the murder of adults is visualized as child’s play. Why do children murder adults? Because it comes naturally. Because it’s fun. There is, in fact, a fair amount of evidence for this. Particularly in Peopletoys, the children’s joy is clearly visualized through cheery dances around burning people, happy giggles while building snowmen around corpses, or in the simple sense of achievement when a complicated murderous contraption turns out to work exactly as planned. But the joy of killing is not only a diegetic issue. The fact that children experience the killing of adults as a fun game turns out to be a major issue for makers of and adult actors in horror films that feature children killing adults. Interviews with adults involved in the making of such films tend to focus on intense antagonism, to the point of physical violence, on the set, and to link this implicitly or explicitly with the violence portrayed in the film. In 2006, Peopletoys’ producer Michael Blowitz reported that he and the film’s first director, Sean MacGregor, clashed so badly at a production meeting that ‘he took a swing at me and I put him through a plate glass window’.18 Dawn Lyn, who played little Moe, remembered over thirty years later that, according to her mother, she fought with her brother more than usual while making the film. Her mother attributed this increased aggression ‘to the negativity of the roles we were playing, being murderers’,

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although Lyn herself denied both fighting with her brother or being in the least disturbed by the role she was playing. For the adults involved in making the film, the diegetic violence was clearly traumatic to the point where it leaked out into the extra-diegetic world. But what of the children? Thirty-two years after the film first aired, they still remembered how much fun they had. ‘It was like a vacation for us,’ remembers Tierre Turner who played soldier boy Brian, ‘we were having a great time.’ Disturbingly, all the ‘fun’ mentioned by the thenchild actors is directly linked with the murders, seen either as a great lark or even, in Piaget’s sense, as exercises in autonomy. Turner, for example, remembered that ‘I was the person who set out and devised all the murders; I was the person who made everyone else whack everybody else up, and I did this with great pleasure at twelve years old’ (the film, interestingly, portrays all the killings as communal efforts and assigns no such leadership role to Brian). And Dawn Lyn described, her eyes shining, the truly Freudian situation of killing Lovely (played by her real-life mother, Carolyn Stellar) by pouring real (albeit dead, or presumed dead) piranhas into her bathtub, one of which actually latched onto her leg and wounded her. Such radically diverging perceptions of violence – distinctly traumatic for adults, a hoot for kids – permeate the interviews of cast and crew members of other horror films as well, including films separated considerably from Peopletoys by time, space and cultural context, such as the British film The Children (Tom Shankland, 2008), in which a virus of unknown origin turns the children assembled for a New Year holiday into killers of adults. Postproduction interviews with adult actors reveal both that they experienced severe trauma watching scenes in which the kids killed adults and presumed a similarly traumatic experience on the part of the children. Actor Jeremy Sheffield, who played the first father figure dispatched, describes that considerable effort went into minimizing such trauma for the children: ‘We went through different games, exercises, play [. . .] to make it very clear to the kids that it’s a game, it’s not real, whatever happens is not real, no matter how real it seems, it’s not.’19 But Eva Birthistle, who played the last mother standing, seemed aware that such caution was unnecessary: ‘Their confidence just grew, like in the first week, then they were sort of . . . delighted that they were gonna kill us all [giggles].’ Jane Karen, Child Wrangler on the set, confirms this impression with reference to a particularly traumatic scene:

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There’s a little girl who has to stab her mother in the eye with a pencil, and she really likes it. She’s been really . . . good at that. They’re just much better at the kind of bang-bang you’re dead!-kind of games than you imagine, they’re quite gory in their playing, and so it’s not a big leap for them, whereas as adults we get very sensitive about [gasps] ‘How do you, you know, explain this,’ and those kids go: ‘Oh yeah, I’m covered in blood, aren’t I, because I just stabbed Mum Di . . .’

Like the films themselves, the interviews document a strange rift between the verbal and the visual. While the statements themselves come very close to admitting the scary truth, the gasps and the giggles indicate that this is not a truth with which adults can live.20 Horror films in which children kill adults turn child psychology on its head. They take the entire idea of normalisation out of the hands of adults who, diegetically, uphold their fondest illusions of control by severely underestimating murderous children as ‘a little strange’, and, extra-diegetically, are at a loss to explain why playing at killing adults is so much fun. The quite desperate-sounding incantations that these murders are ‘not real, whatever happens is not real’ may be soothing for adults but are apparently completely wasted on kids. Adults need the distinction between game and reality – children don’t. Sometimes, 1970s shockers throw adults a bone of reassurance by justifying a child’s murder of an adult, assigning to the act a logic that works in the adult world, particularly in cases where, as happens in Kiss and Little Girl, the adult in question is a paedophile. Other films, however, are busily chipping away at such grown-up reasoning. The wound to the adult self-image that these films inflict is threefold: the first cut is the sneaking suspicion that a child’s development may be influenced less by adult modelling than by autonomous experience gained through games. There follows the hammer blow of realisation: children don’t need adults to develop, they need only to play. And the final twist of the knife: not only are adults no help at all, they are, in many cases, an actual hindrance to the child’s development. Once we accept these three premises of the kind of shocker film discussed in this chapter, we uncover its neat logic. Its objective is the elimination of adverse (and that means adult) interference with the child’s world, and the device through which this is achieved is, cogently enough, the most fundamental means of child development: child’s play. In this way, we can read certain 1970s shocker films not only literally – as interesting

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insights into the games children apparently enjoy the most – but also figuratively and symbolically: as documents deriding the conclusions of much child developmental psychology, which, in a colossal inflation of adult selfimportance, demotes the entire world of children to boot camp for adulthood.

Notes 1 Herbert Spencer, Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects (London: Dent, [1816] 1911). 2 Karl Groos, The Play of Man, trans. Elizabeth L. Baldwin (New York: Appleton, 1901); Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood (Chennai: Orient Longman, 2004). 3 Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). 4 David Elkind, The Power of Play: Learning What Comes Naturally (Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2007). 5 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (Seattle, MA: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2010). 6 Commonly viewed as a psychological disorder, the Peter Pan Syndrome is defined as affecting ‘people who do not want or feel unable to grow up’ and is blamed, perhaps predictably, on overbearing parents. See ‘Overprotecting parents can lead children to develop “Peter Pan Syndrome” ’, Science Daily, 3 May 2007. Available at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070501112023.htm (accessed 3 January 2016). 7 Murderous, evil or otherwise monstrous children in horror film, long the redheaded step-children of scholarship, have attracted an extraordinary amount of attention recently. Early headway was made by Julian Petley in ‘The monstrous child’, in Michelle Aaron (ed.), The Body’s Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 87–107, and William Paul in chapters of Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Recently, horror’s evil children have arrived on the scholarly scene in grand style. See the following works: Karen J. Renner (ed.), The ‘Evil’ Child in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2013); Dominic Lennard, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Films (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014); Markus P.J. Bohlmann and Sean Moreland (ed.), Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015); Andrew Scahill, The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema: Youth Rebellion and Queer Spectatorship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and T.S. Kord, Little Horrors: How Cinema’s Evil Children Play on Our Guilt (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016). Parts

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of the current chapter, particularly those concerning The Child and Peopletoys, are adapted from material in chapters 3 and 8 of Little Horrors. On this scenario in films and a number of real-life cases, see Julian Petley, ‘The monstrous child’. For a number of real-life cases and their ‘explanations’ in the public realm, see Katherine Ramsland, ‘The unthinkable: children who kill’, Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods. Available at http://www.trutv.com/library/ crime/serial_killers/weird/kids2/index_1.html (accessed 27 March 2014). For example: Frederic Wertham, MD, ‘Battered children and baffled adults’, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 48/7, August 1972, pp. 888–98; Ronald Burns and Charles Crawford, ‘School shootings, the media, and public fear: ingredients for a moral panic’, Crime, Law and Social Change, 32, 1999, pp. 147–68; Carl C. Bell and Esther J. Jenkins, ‘Community violence and children on Chicago’s South Side’, Psychiatry, 56, February 1993, pp. 46–54; Maaike Kempes, Walter Matthys, Han de Vries and Herman van Engeland, ‘Reactive and proactive aggression in children: a review of theory, findings and the relevance for child and adolescent psychiatry’, European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 14/1, 2005, pp. 11–19; Carl Byree, James D. Robinson and Joseph Turow, ‘The effects of television on children: what the experts believe’, Annenberg School for Communications Departmental Papers (1985), pp. 149–55. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, trans. Marjorie Gabain (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 2004). Available at http://archive.org/details/moraljudgment oft005613mbp (accessed 23 October 2014). For useful background and contextualization of 1970s horror and cult horror, see Xavier Mendik (ed.), Necronomicon Presents Shocking Cinema of the 70s (Hereford: Noir, 2002); Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider (ed.), Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (London: Wallflower Press, 2002); Xavier Mendik and Graeme Harper (ed.), Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics (Guildford: Fab Press, 2000). How boringly routine the killings appear on screen has been noted by at least one critic: ‘Not exactly thrilling stuff. [. . .] The film manages to generate some interest with a decent make-up effect of a victim’s half-torn-up face, but it’s too little too late.’ Glenn Kay, ‘The Child (1977),’ Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008), pp. 88–9. Mrs Whitfield is clearly established as a fairy-tale grandmother-figure by virtue of her incessant and unheeded warnings to both Alicianne and Rosalie not to stray from the path through the woods. One participant in the near-rape in the basement, a boy named Bo (Jay Scott), who is meant to be her age but could easily pass for thirty-five, escaped carnage at the drive-in. Susan later mops up by sending her spiders after Bo into a narrow

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crawlspace where he is trying to repair a pipe. This killing is clearly presented as intentional but motivated by her feeling of betrayal: Bo apologized for his participation in the earlier attack, only then to press his unwanted sexual advances on her, again at the drive-in movie theatre. For the purpose of this discussion, I am considering this episode, while presented as a separate incident in the film, as an integral part of the second of Susan’s three killings. The musical My Fair Lady was originally performed in 1958, but experienced an unprecedented revival on Broadway in 1976, the year Kiss of the Tarantula opened, and won that year’s ‘Outstanding Revival of a Musical’ award. See ‘1975–1976 22nd Drama Desk awards’. Available at http://www.dramadeskawards.com/ (accessed 3 January 2016). Brief interpretations of the film are offered in the following sources: Jill Nelmes, An Introduction to Film Studies (London: Routledge, 3rd ed. 2003), pp. 179–80; Jim Cullen, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 188–9. Cullen in Sensing the Past gives interesting expression to the difficulty of both assigning a genre to the film and a character to its heroine: ‘Little Girl is a strange hybrid of a movie, combining elements of the horror and thriller genres while somehow leading you to suspend your judgment about a protagonist who probably should be viewed as a monster’, p. 188. This and all following quotations are taken from ‘Interviews’, supplementary materials on the 2008 Code Red Peopletoys DVD. This and following citations are taken from The Making of The Children, supplementary materials, DVD-release of The Children (Tom Shankland, 2008). Whether facetiously or seriously, Terry Eagleton has toyed, in his book On Evil, with this idea when commenting on the British public’s horror at the 1993 murder of toddler James Bulger at the hands of two then ten-year-old boys: ‘Why the public found this particular murder especially shocking is not entirely clear. Children, after all, are only semi-socialised creatures who can be expected to behave pretty savagely from time to time . . . In this sense, it is surprising that such grisly events do not occur more often. Perhaps children murder each other all the time and are simply keeping quiet about it’ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010, p. 1).

Bibliography Bell, Carl C. and Jenkins, Esther J., ‘Community violence and children on Chicago’s South Side’, Psychiatry, 56 (February 1993), pp. 46–54.

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Bohlmann, Marcus P.J. and Moreland, Sean (eds), Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors (Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 2015). Burns, Robert and Crawford, Charles, ‘School shootings, the media, and public fear: ingredients for a moral panic’, Crime, Law and Social Change, 32 (1999), pp. 147–68. Byree, Carl, Robinson, James D. and Turow, Joseph, ‘The effects of television on children: what the experts believe’, Annenberg School for Communications Departmental Papers (1985), pp. 149–55. Cullen, Jim, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Eagleton, Terry, On Evil (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Elkind, David, The Power of Play: Learning What Comes Naturally (Philadelphia, PA : Da Capo, 2007). Freud, Sigmund, The Ego and the Id (Seattle, MA : Pacific Publishing Studio, 2010). Groos, Karl, The Play of Man, trans. Elizabeth L. Baldwin (New York: Appleton, 1901). Kay, Glenn, ‘The Child (1977)’, Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide (Chicago, IL : Chicago Review Press, 2008), pp. 88–9. Kempes, Maaike, Matthys, Walter, de Vries, Han and van Engeland, Herman, ‘Reactive and proactive aggression in children: a review of theory, findings and the relevance for child and adolescent psychiatry’, European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 14/1 (2005), pp. 11–19. Kord, T.S. Little Horrors: How Cinema’s Evil Children Play on Our Guilt (Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 2016). Lennard, Dominic, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors: The Child Villains of Horror Films (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014). Mendik, Xavier (ed.), Necronomicon Presents Shocking Cinema of the 70s (Hereford: Noir, 2002). Mendik, Xavier and Harper, Graeme (eds), Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics (Guildford: Fab Press, 2000). Mendik, Xavier and Schneider, Steven Jay (eds), Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (London: Wallflower Press, 2002). Montessori, Maria, The Secret of Childhood (Chennai: Orient Longman, 2004). Nelmes, Jill, An Introduction to Film Studies (London: Routledge, 3rd edn, 2003). Paul, William, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Petley, Julian, ‘The monstrous child’, in Michelle Aaron (ed.), The Body’s Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 87–107.

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Piaget, Jean, The Moral Judgment of the Child, trans. Marjorie Gabain (Glencoe, IL : The Free Press, 2004). Available at http://archive.org/details/ moraljudgmentoft005613mbp (accessed 23 October 2014). Ramsland, Katheriner, ‘The unthinkable: children who kill’, Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods. Available at https://web.archive.org/web/20100326133038/ http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/weird/kids2/party_8.html (accessed 27 March 2014). Renner, Karen J. (ed.), The ‘Evil’ Child in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2013). Scahill, Andrew, The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema: Youth Rebellion and Queer Spectatorship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Spencer, Herbert, Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects (London: Dent, [1816] 1911). Vygotsky, Lev, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1978). Wertham, Frederic, M.D., ‘Battered children and baffled adults’, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 48/7 (August 1972), pp. 888–98.

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‘They’re Not There Just to Fuck’: Sensibility, Cultural Provocation and 1970s American Hard Core Pornography Darren Kerr

In one of the few books on pornographic films published during the 1970s, Kenneth Turan and Stephen F. Zito’s Sinema: American Pornographic Films and the People Who Make Them (1974) laid claim to a series of firsts: the first definitive study, the first set of interviews with porn stars and the first to examine industry practice. Turan and Zito, a journalist and AFI theatre programme planner respectively, offer observations on proto-fandom, a chapter dedicated to gay male porn and, quite rarely for such a book, an account of a porn shoot as it happens. Neither an academic text nor an extended piece of journalism, Sinema is a book of its time written in the vernacular of the period, published by Praegar as a general interest work, and a valuable record of popular thinking concerning porn screen culture and practice at the time. Turan and Zito’s book is listed by the Library of Congress Catalog in the category Erotic Films – History and Criticism and is held in just over 200 university, public and county libraries in the U.S.1 As an historical document, the book betrays an awareness of and speculative liberalism towards the porn film’s place on mainstream screens and in public discourse. Matters of politics, culture and identity inform their approach, which also gives a voice to those previously not heard from: the people central to industry practice. The book speaks to a history of bold, variable and exploratory porn film practices and of a time unfolding as it was being written. The most significant point of note, however, is how it can be seen as an historical document that in and of itself captures a cultural moment and navigates a period of sexual cultural history 271

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that has long since been consumed by two equally divisive and reductive rhetorics: that of golden age nostalgia and the ‘porn wars’.2 Importantly it is perhaps best read for its fleeting illustrations of culturally provocative challenges to popular perceptions hinted at through observations on the films, the film-makers and other people encountered. Turan and Zito note that the motivation to write the book was in part down to the people they met who challenged the oft-held perception that the porn industry was ‘a seamy monolith populated exclusively by greasy men with big cigars and pimply heroin addicted actors and actresses’.3 While they don’t shy away from references to the industry and its associations with organized crime, they positively note people’s diversity, openness and honesty towards sex forming ‘a very legitimate slice of Americana, as deftly revealing in its way about the type of country the United States has become as any group you can name’.4 Of the films themselves they indicate a notable point about their affective qualities: There are those moments, bright electric moments where it all works, when the film on the screen by some accident of luck and talent, transcends itself, becoming simultaneously drama, eroticism, and cinema and producing a sexual sequence of riveting emotional intensity.5

This assertion of value in hard core is echoed in Turan and Zito’s interview with film-maker and distributor Radley Metzger, who said of his approach to sex in his films: ‘They’re not there just to fuck . . . It’s a question of whether you want to make a sex picture or take a feeling or an attitude or an emotion in which sex is involved. I think that might be the difference.’6 There are two observations to make regarding Metzger’s point. The first is that positive value judgements are largely absent from popular cultural discourses on sex in cinema, let alone pornographic cinema. This is, of course, hardly surprising when pornography in all its forms has been historically understood through regulation and repression as well as viewed as being entirely monolithic, or as Wicke notes, as ‘one singular phenomenon’. 7 Textual and aesthetic qualities (be they good or bad), and understanding pornographies as having their own histories and cultures of production, distribution and consumption have been left mainly to academia and activism while largely ignored by the press and policy makers of one kind or another. The second observation, which I will be focusing on in this chapter, alludes to sensibility.

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The often intangible qualities of sensibility have an important place in the discussion of hard core porn’s place in the mainstream during (and beyond) the 1970s, and they also go some way towards getting beneath the already documented accounts of the porn film industry in the period. This was a period that actively fostered social critique, engendered the desire for political transformation and encouraged marginalized voices in cultural production. While I am not preoccupied here with producing a history of the adult film industry, I am however drawn to the contradictions and co-existing complexities of the period which suggest that porn film’s time in the mainstream was an affirmative consequence of changing cultural sensibility.8 Metzger’s point is uncannily close to Timothy O’Leary’s account of sensibility, which he defines as determined by ‘feeling, perceiving and valuing [which are] in constant mutual interaction’.9 Whilst acknowledging how starkly ephemeral sensibility is, O’Leary does point out its influence on the very transformative qualities of critique. To extend and consider sensibility as critique intimately links it to acts of cultural production which both influence and are influenced by personal politics and social spaces, and can account for co-existing contradictions and positions within individuals and the wider society. Arguing that sensibility is what underpins the means by which hard core porn films came to occupy a place in the 1970s might be thought of as a nearfutile exercise in revisionism and academic pondering. And yet sensibility is deeply connected to audience studies, explorations of material cultures and also textual analysis. It is worth noting that porn and its attendant sexual cultures have simply always been with us, hidden or revealed, and, like many denigrated forms and voices, it came to share a cultural-critical platform that took root in the 1970s. It comes as absolutely no surprise that films reflect the times in which they are produced. This period in porn film history, though, has since come to be more often understood through subsequent discourses – debates dominated by nostalgia about the golden age and especially the porn wars – much of which was published in the early 1980s and then widely reflected on in the 1990s and 2000s. The porn wars marked a gender-based socio-cultural battle much more than a socio-cinematic one. This period is often perceived through the enduring legacies of radical feminism, the critical examination and

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explanations of male power validated in sexual activity, and an imagined female sexuality being intrinsically linked to cultures of rape and abuse. Phallocentric and misogynistic ‘regimes of representation’ in porn justify such an argument and leave no space for the idea of porn as unstable, varied or capable of soliciting alternative readings.10 Equally the period has suffered from being a touchstone for many subsequent anti-porn social, cultural and political debates into which porn in all its forms is drawn. The twin doctrines of nostalgia and the golden age also often overlook the complexities and contradictions of the period, especially regarding the sexual, where the idea of liberation was still steeped in the realities of persistent patriarchal inequalities, limited rights, oppressive treatment and legislative ignorance. This period of porn has come to be defined metonymically because of its associations with a later time, context and history. This displaces the 1970s cultural climate in which its mainstreaming took place. It is thus unsurprising that porn scholars are now re-evaluating sex, porn and screen practice through material cultures. The cultural climate of the 1970s might best be illustrated by Lester D. Friedman’s observation that this was a time when ‘symbols of America’s strength and power were goliaths struck down by schoolboys flinging stones’.11 The youthful revolt here references the cultural disruptors of their day dismantling received wisdom, contesting generational certainties and creating – not just addressing – social and political challenges. This took place against the backdrop of a poorly performing economy, violent uprisings, the scandalous politics of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, reaction to environmental issues, and activism in the fields of civil rights, youth culture, gay culture and women’s rights. At the same time, legislative interventions raised the plight and the profile of marginalized individuals and featured in a range of landmark cases that aimed to address systemic issues relating to race, ethnicity, sex, gender and identity.12 As is evidenced by the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972, such legislation may be passed but is not always adopted nor ratified across the country. The period, therefore, was not just about a media-reported ‘sexual revolution’ or ‘free love movement’ nor was it the culmination of the previous decade’s Summer of Love leading to a celebrated liberation. Instead, cultural, civic and political space was being opened up and created for cultures of sexual identity and representation to enter and occupy. These examples of social unrest did not represent a series of successes or a sense of progress in any in a linear sense – that is a historical assessment made

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in later years. The experiential qualities of the period are better understood as moments of antagonism, frustration and intervention that were driven by activist and oppositional voices. Campaigns for change questioned conventional values and were met with powerful opposition, with claims for rights being contested and occasionally won. Such successes do not happen in isolation however but come with their opponents, their failures and their contradictions. An illustration of this process is provided by an episode of The Dick Cavett Show which aired in 1970 on ABC.13 Introduced as members of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Sally Kempton and Susan Brownmiller join Cavett, psychologist Rollo May and Hugh Hefner, who was globally recognized at this point and whose Playboy was a notable success in spite of its detractors. While the fight for women’s rights frames this period as a critically progressive one, this episode of mainstream television highlights just how the notion of women defending women was framed as complex and conflicted at the time. Cavett’s typically affable style opens the segment with sincerity by addressing the television audience: ‘Maybe we can find out what the women are all upset about,’ he says. Kempton and Brownmiller then say that appearing on such shows is political, highlighting the need for a change in education, for men to give up power and privilege, and point out the conspiracy to deny women’s rights. Brownmiller’s comment on men – ‘they oppress us as women, they won’t let us be’ – is accompanied by studio silence until a fleeting reference to Hefner as her enemy and a playful intervention from Cavett tells the audience it’s okay to laugh and join in. The audience even appear to cheer when Brownmiller interrupts Hefner, who has referred to them as ‘girls’, saying: ‘Women, women. Yes, I’m thirty-five.’ Towards the end of the segment singersongwriter Grace Slick joins the conversation and turns to Kempton and Brownmiller to state: Some of them look at you like a sex object so fine, you [audio is cut] them. I don’t see where the problem is. It’s just maybe ’cause I don’t see what you’re talking about yet. But I don’t see the problem, yet.

The repeated ‘yet’ says something of a cultural moment that is still in development, and the studio audience applaud Slick’s point that the right to fuck a man is as important as the right to reject him. But the audience also

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applaud Brownmiller’s feminism and take-down of Hefner at the same time as they welcome Cavett’s comfortably conservative humour. Hefner himself goes on to recognize the history of women’s oppression and to reiterate the necessity of progressive rights, but he also refuses to see how Playboy perpetuates any problems, citing women reading the magazine and also choosing to do bunnywork. Brownmiller and Kempton exchange an exasperated glance at this point (and, we can assume, words of solidarity) but then also articulate their own differences of opinion on women’s rights. The segment captures the complexities and contradictions of the time for women’s rights and indeed for other voices often rendered marginal by the media. The position that Kempton and Brownmiller present is clearly both well-informed and contentious but rendered in the moment uncertain. The complexities that they present often hang in moments of silence while more simple and direct comments hit home in what was a head-on intervention on the mainstream screen.14 This is part of a wider sense in which sensibility contributes to mainstreaming the marginal but still lacks clear measures of success or the hope of progress. Porn cinema is perhaps the best exemplar here. The mainstreaming of social and cultural difference, as well as of otherness, illustrates the way in which practices of knowledge are interrupted, adapt and become evident in wider culture. It is worth noting that this is not about the linearity of history but of cultural sensibility – of feeling, perceiving and valuing – oscillating between past legacies, current influences and the social impact of the 1960s into 1970s and back again. The influence of history, time and experience was, in other words, just as spatial as it was temporal. The contradictions of the time created new spaces arising from the visibility and circulation of cultural ideation that had emerged at a time when traditional values were becoming displaced and newly reconfigured. Interested in the spatial as much as the temporal, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja and Martina Löw have all at various times explored how the relational qualities of space are comprised and constituted by social agency.15 Soja’s concept of a ‘third space’ moves beyond the physical to the idea of space as the result of action relating to a range of external factors, including legislation, existing social lives, the impact of the economy, and, of course, cultural values. For Löw, ideation constitutes cultural space in societal structures, and she acknowledges the complexities of co-existing and competing discourses, oppositional ideologies

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and contradictory positions. Of the many critical, cultural and creative spaces to which this relates, film and the cinema of the period are particularly apposite. Cinematically, the time is notable for the emergence of post-classical Hollywood, a period recognized for its divergent approaches to film form, content and independence from producer-led studios. Friedman’s account of post-classical characteristics presents a picture of the kind of material that was drawn in from the margins and mainstreamed before the return and revival of studio products towards the end of the decade. These qualities parallel many of those from porn films from the period, too, and include not only a revisionist approach to narrative storytelling and genre but also the foregrounding of subjective experiences in character-driven narratives which put anti-heroes and outcasts centre stage. They are cynical, critical and suspicious of political institutions and American society, and display overt antagonism towards authority and previous generations. Finally, they are not just more explicit in exploring sex, race, ethnicity, gender and class politics but are intentionally provocative too.16 Post-classical Hollywood, like the hard core porn of the time, is, however, just one example of the creative-cultural interventions that made their mark but also struggled to maintain their place as the decade unfolded. The unravelling of America, the emergence of religion-baiting guilt-free sex and the rejection of traditional roles can actually all be found prior to the 1970s across such varied works as Sylvia Plath’s poetry, notably Ariel (1965), the ‘new journalism’ of Joan Didion collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), which became the first sci-fi novel to make The New York Times bestseller list. Confrontational art in Valie Export’s Action Pants – Genital Panic (1968), Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1974–9) and Dorothy Iannone’s ‘ecstatic unity’ series all engage with ideas about identity, the body and the self, seeking to normalize difference, expose the hidden and voice the unspoken – much like the photography of Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe.17 Modes of explicit rejection informed the early hippy and later punk movements of the time, while the sensational politics and excesses of disco in New York clubs such as Studio 54 and CBGBs regularly attracted cultural luminaries and informed fashion, performing arts, film, television and music. Discordant and divisive interventions could similarly describe the now seminal publication of Helen

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Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (1962) and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), books which would remain highly influential in the 1970s. In spite of Brown and Friedan’s differences, sex and gender, class, power and systemic inequalities underly these works which are credited as igniting the women’s movement, second wave feminism and the sexual revolution. The cultural disruptions continued with Beverly Johnson becoming the first African American on the cover of Vogue in August 1974, Barbara Walters being appointed as the first woman to co-anchor for a major network (NBC) in 1974 and Billie Jean King winning in the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ tennis match in September 1973. Reflecting on her win, King noted the damage that a loss would do to ‘all women’s self-esteem’.18 These examples of the creative and cultural landscape mark out moments that confidently impose upon the mainstream, come to dominate the sexual politics of the time and politicize visibility. In the sex and dating advice available in the 1970s, topics such as self-fulfilment, gender politics, women’s pleasure and sex and inequality were often framed in such a way as to encourage men to think differently about sex and pleasure. Anna Ward has shown how women were encouraged to explore themselves, their bodies and identities at a time when ‘lesbian and gay inquiry into sex and sexual politics’ was also more visible and more widely discussed through sex activism from feminist and queer voices.19 Importantly, though, she also notes the lack of any sense of intersectionality, with one the most celebrated publications of the time, The Joy of Sex (1972), continuing ‘the troubling practice of using slang for sexual positions and acts based on racial, ethnic and national identities’.20 This was also the time of Betty Dodson’s workshops and her book Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love (1974), as well as the publication of Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden (1973). Greg Tuck has highlighted the cultural and creative value of autoeroticism as a driver of new technologies, new media and new voices asserting that ‘we are a profoundly self-pleasuring society at both a metaphorical and material level’.21 Having been introduced in 1968, the Hitachi Magic Wand was now part of the popular sexual imagination, and this was closely associated with the commercial growth of sex shops, as Lynn Comella’s Vibrator Nation (2017) brilliantly illustrates. Reflecting on Dodson’s work Comella explains that: Whatever inroads had been made in the 1970s around carving out more space in the culture for women to talk openly about sex and make their

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sexual pleasure a priority had been hijacked by the anti-pornography movement. Sex was no longer seen by the feminist establishment as a potentially liberating force, but a danger zone’.22

It is not difficult to draw conclusions about the paradoxes of this period of cultural, creative and discursive liberation. Tuck also draws attention to an embedded paradox at the centre of self-pleasure, where satisfaction and autonomy meet self-isolation and separation. In the broadest sense, he conceives of masturbating as exactly the kind of ‘moment of pure consumption required by capitalism’, but since it is not exactly ‘productive’, this activity ensures that we are both ‘encouraged and condemned for enjoying ourselves’.23 For Ruth Rosen, the period has been defined as ‘arguably the most intellectually vital and exciting time for American women, producing an amazing array of revelations and changes in social, political and public thought and policy’.24 And yet the backdrop to these changes was a persistent political backlash against demands for social change. The 1968 presidential election produced a landslide Republican victory, and the strength of the right continued throughout the 1970s. The visibility and demands of the counterculture along with ‘the proliferation of gay and straight bathhouses and clubs [and] the new sexual scripts created by feminism, gay liberation and a new permissiveness’25 were met with what Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer describe as ‘a vast shift toward social and political conservatism’.26 Cultural divisions persisted and the political landscape was steered towards neoconservatism. On the other hand, the American family was changing, the number of people unmarried and co-habiting increased and approximately half of the population was now under twenty-five. America was at this time a ‘symphony of different colors, voices, and customs that demanded to be heard’27 in a time ‘alive with contradictions that ultimately shaped modern America’.28 Hard core porn films are one such contradiction, and represent much more than some utopian moment in the liberalization of sex on screen. A short survey of what are regarded as successful and canonical golden age films summarizes these tensions and contradictions, whether or not presented intentionally. Porn film’s cause célèbre, Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972), finally paid attention to the clitoris only to present women’s pleasure as male pleasure or barely pleasure at all. Behind the Green Door (Artie and Jim

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Mitchell, 1972) uses a narrative of sexual numbers to challenge the male gaze in favour of female pleasure and yet persists as a rape fantasy whose most memorable scene is an extended psychedelic and valedictory cum shot. The Devil in Miss Jones (Gerard Damiano, 1973) is a record of culturally constructed repression being defeated but also a sex-negative indictment of female desire left unchecked. The Resurrection of Eve (Jon Fontana and Artie Mitchell,1973) presents a guilt-free picture of gay, straight and interracial sex but also frames the idea of the sexually liberated woman as the solution to remedying childhood sex abuse and a coercive adult relationship. Perhaps the most interesting and confrontational of the widely recognized golden age films is The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (Radley Metzger, 1974) which, like Green Door and other lesser-known films, playfully reflects on the audience’s desire for and consumption of such films. Private detective Frank (Eric Edwards) is hired by Mr Mann (Alan Marlow) to film, present and analytically explain to him the sexual encounters enjoyed by psychotherapist Pamela Mann (Barbara Bourbon). These include sex with a stranger, a patient who is a prostitute and a double sexual assault by a female radical (Darby Lloyd Rains) and her partner (Jamie Gillis). The private detective explains that Pamela’s sexual desire relates to her arrested development prior to the age of consent, elaborating to her husband that ‘she needs a cock down her throat the way another woman, well, needs a chocolate cake down her throat’. Over the course of the investigation he continues analytically to explain her needs, her drive and her insecurities, which find release in promiscuity and forced sex. Eventually the sexual encounters are revealed to be staged for Pamela and her husband’s pleasure, intercut with and fuelling the final sex sequence between them. The film clearly invests in and reflects on the perceived sensibility of the time, invoking contentious fantasy and role play and acknowledging that sexual pleasures are not always comfortably aligned with conservative, progressive or comfortably liberal politics. Its mockery extends to the intermittent appearance of a young woman, credited as Poll Taker (Doris Toumarkine), who questions Mann on several occasions: Poll Taker Do you think the Welfare State is still viable considering the inability up to the present of the system to reconcile the isolation of the poor with the assimilation into the system of relatively well-to-do hierarchy of government administrators, corporate functionaries and executives and

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the other white collar elite who are the necessary benefactors of these poor? Pamela

No.

Poll Taker Thank you.

The poll taker returns throughout the film with questions about disaffected youth, colonialism, the bourgeoisie and evolutionary politics before being asked by Pamela’s husband ‘Who’re you?’ to which she replies, ‘Oh, I’m here to give the film socially redeeming values.’ The film not only capably demonstrates its awareness of the political climate but also comedically displaces it – as opposed to erasing it. There are of course more provocative examples of hard core beyond this canon that equally have a role in illustrating cultural sensibility alongside the contentious politics of the time. The Dirtiest Game in the World (James Bryan,1970) is a vicious satire in which a politician Titus Moore (Titus Moede) infiltrates a hippy group to secure their vote. The film begins with documentary news footage of rioting and civil unrest and ends in violence and slaughter as Moore’s plan falls apart. His replacement, pot smoking Jean Stone (Jean Stone), is introduced at the end before the credits close on a Nixon quote: ‘Everything I stand for is what they want.’ The impact of political scepticism, threat and cynicism on personal politics continued to inform numerous hard core films throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s including Waterpower (Shaun Costello, 1976), Femmes de Sade, (Alex De Renzy, 1976), Sweet Captive (Lee Frost, 1979) and Reel People (Anthony Spinelli, 1984), this last being a film that is recognized as the first hard core pro-am porn film, thus ushering in reality porn. The sexual provocations presented in these hard core films are often reactionary and not all uniform in intent or approach. They were simultaneously progressive and offensive, misogynistic and celebrated, exploitative and liberal, and were part of an industry that is closely affiliated to the paradoxes and contradictions of 1970s society. Writing about porn during the period that precedes the 1970s, David Church notes how we cannot simply observe it as detached historians but should acknowledge porn films’ allure, appeal and ‘present-day capacity to viscerally resonate with viewers’ while at the same time recognizing that ‘cultural forgetting’ is just as important as recognizing ‘cultural remembrance’.29 For the move into the mainstream this cultural forgetting involves the

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marginalizing of a vast archive of porn in the 1970s whose discomforting social, moral and political ingredients remain a significant part of the period and subsequently inform exploitation and sex film histories with their own gendered frameworks and representational strategies. Porn films’ presence in the 1970s was not the result of a valiant achievement but based on the uncertainty and instability of the time. The critical and creative culture of the 1970s exhibited a sensibility that was informed by the co-existing complexities and contradictions of the period. The composition of that sensibility goes some way towards exploring and explaining the more challenging question of why porn appeared in the mainstream rather than how it did so. Sensibility, for O’Leary, unquestionably comprises ‘sensation and emotion’, ‘systems and practices of knowledge’ and ‘moral and aesthetic appraisals’, all of which played a part in the positioning of hard core in the 1970s.30 Political provocation and revised modes and methods of creative engagement and cultural critique ensure the active, perceptive and discerning qualities of sensibility are galvanized in order to foster critique, encourage change and recognize difference from the norm. Porn’s place in the 1970s was, then, epiphenomenal, determined by a confluence of interventions, challenges and contradictions. This was, after all, the way that America signified its sexual self in the period through a combination of conflicting, contesting and challenging ways that were free and entrapped, exploratory and troubling, enlightened and affronting. Consequently, the move into the mainstream was not just the result of a series of pragmatic economic, industrial and legislative opportunities but was culturally produced. Creative and cultural organizations, with their associated political activism, plus the attendant conservative backlash, provided the platform, as well as the screens, upon which porn appeared in the 1970s.

Notes 1 According to WorldCat.org Turan and Zito’s book is currently located in 231 libraries. Thirty of these are outside the US. For full details see https://is.gd/ cOPVWa (accessed 6 April 2020). 2 Extensive accounts of the ‘porn wars’ can be found in a range of publications including Lynn Segal and Mary McIntosh, Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the

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8

9

10

11 12

13 14

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Pornography Debate (London: Virago, 1992); Avedon Carol, Nudes, Prudes and Attitudes: Pornography and Censorship (Cheltenham: New Clarion Press, 1994); Wendy McElroy, XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995); and Laurence O’Toole, Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999). Kenneth Turan and Stephen F. Zito, Sinema – American Pornographic Films and the People Who Made Them (New York: Praeger, 1974), pp. xi. Ibid., p. xi. Ibid., pp. x–xi Ibid., p. 74 Jennifer Wicke, ‘Through a gaze darkly: pornography’s academic market’, in Pamela Church Gibson (ed.), Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power (London: BFI, 1993), p. 79. The mainstreaming of porn in the period from the perspectives of industry and genre can be found in, for example Lawrence O’ Toole, Pornocopia; Susanna Paasonen and Laura Saarenmaa ‘The golden age of porn’, in Susanna Paasonen, Kaarina Nikunen and Laura Saarenmaa (eds), Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 23–32; Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott, The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means and Where We Go from Here (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2008). It has also been fictionalized in film and television ranging from Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997), Inside Deep Throat (Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, 2005) to Rated X (Emilio Estevez, 2000) and The Deuce (HBO, 2017–19). Timothy O’Leary, ‘Sensibility’, in Mercedes Bunz, Birgit Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele (eds), Symptoms of the Planetary Condition – A Critical Vocabulary (Lüneberg: Meson Press, 2017), p. 150 For more see Berkeley Kaite, Pornography and Difference (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), which highlights how porn transgresses rather than reinforces normative masculinity and femininity. Lester D. Friedman, American Cinema in the 1970s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), p. 7. Such landmark cases include Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) on the right to contraception for unmarried couples, Roe v. Wade (1973) on abortion rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment (1972) which was passed but failed to be ratified in a number of states. See https://is.gd/vazlfm for an extract from the show. Time Magazine went on to produce a special issue on feminism on 20 March 1972 titled ‘The American Woman’, and a ‘Women of the Year’ edition on 5 January 1976

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whose cover story opening line is: ‘They have arrived like a new immigrant wave in male America’. Available at https://is.gd/S392zV 15 See Martina Löw, ‘The constitution of space: the structuration of spaces through the simultaneity of effects and perceptions’, European Journal of Social Theory’, 11/1 (2008), pp. 25–49; Susan J. Smith, ‘Society and space’, in Paul Cloke, Philip Crang and Mark Goodwin (eds), Introducing Human Geographies (London: Arnold, 1999), pp. 18–23. 16 See Friedman, American Cinema, p. 21. 17 Balthus’s notoriously explicit Guitar Lesson from 1934 had never been publicly exhibited until appearing at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York in 1977. 18 Billie Jean King Enterprises, ‘Battle of the sexes’. Available at https://is.gd/9ZPW08 19 Anna E. Ward, ‘Sex and the me decade: sex and dating advice literature of the 1970s’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 43/3–4 (2015), pp. 120–36. 20 Ibid., p. 132 21 Greg Tuck, ‘The mainstreaming of masturbation’, in F. Attwood (ed), Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 77–92. 22 Interview with author published on ScreeningSex.com. Available at https://is.gd/ ThRIVk 23 Tuck, ‘Mainstreaming’, p. 86. 24 Ruth Rosen cited in Friedman, American Cinema, p. 14. 25 Brian Greenberg and Linda S. Watts, Social History of the United States: The 1900s (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc), 2009, p. 161. 26 Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer, ‘Comment: swinging too far to the Left’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43/4 (2008), pp. 689–93. 27 Friedman, American Cinema, p. 12. 28 Ibid., p. 16. 29 David Church, Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), p. 2. Church firmly locates this concept in the appeal of vintage materials but his book is also valuable in considering how it informs nostalgic and ‘golden age’ thinking on porn films. 30 O’Leary, ‘Sensibility’, p. 150.

Bibliography Carol, Avedon, Nudes, Prudes and Attitudes: Pornography and Censorship (Cheltenham: New Clarion Press, 1994).

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Church, David, Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016). Friedman, Lester D., American Cinema in the 1970s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 2007). Greenberg, Brian and Watts, Linda S., Social History of the United States: The 1900s (Santa Barbara, CA : ABC-CLIO, 2009). Jacobs, Meg and Zelizer, Julian E., ‘Comment: swinging too far to the Left’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43/4 (2008), pp. 689–93. Kaite, Berkeley, Pornography and Difference (Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 1995). Löw, Martina, ‘The constitution of space: the structuration of spaces through the simultaneity of effects and perceptions’, European Journal of Social Theory’, 11/1 (2008), pp. 25–49. McElroy, Wendy, XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995). O’Leary, Timothy, ‘Sensibility’, in Mercedes Bunz, Birgit Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele (eds), Symptoms of the Planetary Condition – A Critical Vocabulary (Lüneberg: Meson Press, 2017), pp. 149–54. O’Toole, Laurence, Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999). Paasonen, Susanna and Saarenmaa, Laura, ‘The golden age of porn’, in Susanna Paasonen, Kaarina Nikunen and Laura Saarenmaa (eds), Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp. 23–32. Sarracino, Carmine and Scott, Kevin M., The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means and Where We Go from Here (Boston, MA : Beacon Press, 2008). Segal, Lynn and McIntosh, Mary, Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate (London: Virago, 1992). Smith, Susan J., ‘Society and space’, in Paul Cloke, Philip Crang and Mark Goodwin (eds), Introducing Human Geographies (London: Arnold, 1999), pp. 18–23. Tuck, Greg, ‘The mainstreaming of masturbation’, in F. Attwood (ed.), Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 77–92. Turan, Kenneth and Zito, Stephen F., Sinema – American Pornographic Films and the People Who Made Them (New York: Praeger, 1974). Ward, Anna E., ‘Sex and the me decade: sex and dating advice literature of the 1970s’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 43/3–4 (2015), pp. 120–36. Wicke, Jennifer, ‘Through a gaze darkly: pornography’s academic market’, in Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson (eds), Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power (London: BFI , 1993), pp. 62–80.

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Hardcore and Rough on the Outside: Evaluating Femmes de Sade and Water Power Neil Jackson

Introduction Critical engagement with some of the more outré cinematic artefacts obliges us immediately to relinquish any claims to moral or social fortitude on the part of their authors. Therefore, the ensuing discussion of Femmes de Sade (Alex De Renzy, 1976) and Water Power (Shaun Costello, 1977) constitutes neither defence or justification of the films, accepting them from the outset as wilful incitements to revulsion, shock and bemusement. However, while this chapter will focus primarily on their strategies of representing sexual violence, there are several layers of interest aside from the purely sensational, allowing critical discourse to develop beyond the mere articulation of transgressive content. Taken together, these can help enhance our understanding of graphic, often alarming, depictions of sexual violence within the stylistic norms of cinematic pornography, which might in turn be sensibly accommodated in ongoing debates about realist horror films produced within both the exploitation and mainstream sectors. Emerging at a time when hardcore films were still wrestling with uncertainties regarding their cultural value and legal status alike, they are fascinating test cases for any insistence on both pornography’s dangerous debasement and its non-value as an object of critical inquiry. Each film was directed by a key figure in the development of American pornography: Alex De Renzy produced and directed Femmes de Sade in the wake of pioneering work conducted from his San Francisco production base, while Shaun Costello made Water Power having established himself as one of New York’s most prolific pornographic film-makers, an enterprise supported 287

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by his affiliation with local mobsters. The films are set in the respective locale of each director, and the connotative value of these west and east coast urban centres is also key to understanding the ideological undercurrents of each film. Moreover, their relentless focus upon sexual practices widely regarded as aberrant at the time defines them as seminal examples of the hardcore ‘roughie’, an indigestible strand of an already despised cultural form that rendered them resistant to ‘porno-chic’1 appropriation during their theatrical circulation in the 1970s. Their distribution afterlife has been patchy, often appearing in unauthorized DVD editions which vary in both length and image quality, presentational shortcomings which are the result of everything from postproduction interference to archival neglect and censorial intervention.2 Crucially, while each film showcases frequently startling instances of sexual violence and deviation, they communicate directly with the predominant cultural antipathy to violent pornography, evincing significant levels of selfawareness and formal sophistication, but pursuing distinct and divergent paths through their use of porno shock-horror tactics. Much radical feminist thinking has defined all pornography as an assault upon female liberty and subjectivity. Diana E.H. Russell distinguishes between ‘male heterosexual pornography’ and ‘erotica’, defining the former as ‘the abuse or degradation of females in a manner that appears to endorse, condone, or encourage such behaviour, and the latter as a rejection of ‘sexism, racism and homophobia . . . [with respect for] all human beings and animals portrayed’.3 While founded in arguments for social and cultural parity, this distinction is less than helpful to any film scholar hoping to trace the generic modulations and diversity of feature-length pornography. The more cynically minded feminist film or cultural theorist might easily counter that violent pornography merely gave overt expression to the sadistic gaze which Hollywood films had regularly indulged, and Susan Gubar has argued that ‘the proliferation of violent pornography since 1970 is part of a male backlash against the women’s liberation movement’.4 However, the ground-breaking work of Molly Haskell, Laura Mulvey and E. Ann Kaplan5 ignored the varied conceptual and aesthetic qualities of pornography (indeed, the groundwork for such an approach barely existed in the 1970s), concerning itself largely with a popular classical form seen to be moulded by a dogmatically patriarchal mode of production.

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Instead, the dominant feminist voices in pornography debates emerged through the oppositional and politically engaged radical wing. Andrea Dworkin argued that ‘the major theme of pornography as a genre is male power’,6 denying female selfhood through economic dominion, exercise of terror and ownership, and control of language. She identified the Marquis de Sade as the pivotal cultural-historical figure in this process, dismissing the intellectual tradition which venerated his work. In her view, his work did not propose an anarchic liberation from social constriction but merely bestowed spurious philosophical legitimacy on it, ‘pioneering what became the ethos of the male-dominated sexual revolution’.7 And in partnership with Catharine Mackinnon, she further defined all pornography as ‘the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words’.8 From this perspective, Femmes de Sade and Water Power might easily be construed as narrative refinements of, and perhaps even outlets for the gender hatred thus envisioned by Dworkin. In both films, representatives of a disenfranchised male underclass recklessly indulge perverse pleasures which Georges Bataille observed were usually the province of de Sade’s ‘sovereign man’,9 whose social status and moral privilege denied reason, absolved responsibility and celebrated an excess which aspired to ‘a transcendent pleasure . . . no longer confined to the senses’.10 The hardcore roughies have their origins in a strain of 1960s softcore sexploitation films, which Tania Modleski has suggested ‘contain some of the most disturbing depictions of male violence against women ever filmed’,11 although they may seem relatively chaste compared to the objects under consideration here. A sense of degraded sexuality is built into the very titles of White Slaves of Chinatown (Joseph P. Mawrwa, 1964), Scum of the Earth (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1963), The Defilers (Lee Frost, David F Friedman, 1965), Bad Girls Go to Hell (Doris Wishman, 1965), The Animal (Lee Frost, 1968), The Ultimate Degenerate (Michael Findlay, 1969) and The Ravager (Charles Nizet, 1970). Robin Bougie offers another useful definition encompassing both soft and hardcore variants: ‘Narrative based sex films which have a specific focus on forced sex and/or sexualized degradation . . . Human relationships are base, primal and characterized by exploitation.’12 Bougie’s emphasis upon narrative form, tonal abrasiveness and specific character conventions helps to distinguish

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the feature length roughies from short form stag films or ‘loops’, defining them as dramatizations of rather than mere renditions of sexual atrocity. They should also be distinguished from the niche area of short, consensual S&M films which, as Linda Williams points out, are predominantly ‘non-genital’, but whose tropes would spill over into several prestigious softcore and hardcore films of the 1970s such as The Story of O (Just Jaeckin, 1975), The Image/The Punishment of Anne (Radley Metzger, 1975) and The Story of Joanna (Gerard Damiano, 1977).13

Seventies and the roughie Despite their generic lineage, the hardcore roughies have remained segregated from their relatives in the mainstream and exploitation sectors. However, films such as Forced Entry, (Shaun Costello, 1972) A Climax of Blue Power (F.C. Perl, 1975), Unwilling Lovers (Zebedy Colt, 1975) and Sex Wish (Tim McCoy, 1976), usefully expanded cinematic depictions of the lone sex criminal, an archetype present within prior, frequently fact-based mainstream features. These included Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) The Boston Strangler (Richard Fleischer, 1968), 10 Rillington Place (Richard Fleischer, 1971) and Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972), and soon came to include globally distributed exploitation films such as Deranged (Bob Clark, 1974), The Toolbox Murders (Dennis Donnelly, 1978), Don’t Answer the Phone (Robert Hammer, 1980), Maniac (William Lustig, 1980) and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1986). Other notable hardcore roughies, such as The Defiance of Good (Armand Weston, 1975), Winter Heat (Claude Goddard, 1976) and The Taming of Rebecca (Phil Prince, 1982) foregrounded group abduction and institutional abuse rather than solitary criminal activity, but all featured varying degrees of rape and sexual degradation. A Dirty Western (David Fleetwood, 1975) grafted an abduction and rape scenario onto the conventions of the western genre, while the blaxploitation-inflected Hot Summer in the City (Gail Palmer, 1976) mirrored contemporaneous exploitation trends, conflating already contentious sexual violence with racial unrest. Such structural and iconographic emphases readily call to mind more widely distributed examples such as The Last House

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on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972), and it is certainly worth noting that film’s original conception as a hardcore feature, with trace elements remaining through its casting of pornographic actors Fred Lincoln and Lucy Grantham. Ironically, limited distribution of the hardcore roughies outside of specialist outlets meant that their unchecked extremes were subjected to less opprobrium than either Craven’s film or other exploitation and mainstream counterparts, a phenomenon which reached its apex with demonstrations against Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980) by organizations such as Women Against Violence Against Women and Women Against Violence and Pornography in the Media.14 Joseph Slade concluded that most pre-1970s stag films displayed a suspension of ‘the basic truth that all social and political order is founded on force’,15 and instead expressed ‘the primacy of affection and respect’.16 Of the 1,333 stag films that he studied at the Kinsey Institute, only five per cent used rape or even the mildest form of violence, infusing banal, clichéd and often comedic scenarios with cursory dramatic conflict. Even by the late 1960s the predominant trend was for ‘sappy romanticism, fed by a flower-child mentality . . . The so-called sexual revolution [which] appeared to validate the central dynamic of the pornographic film [emphasised] the sexual desire of women and their obligation to fulfil it with equally liberated men.’17 Slade notes that, until the 1970s, films depicting sadomasochism, fetishism, coprophagia, bestiality and paedophilia remained rare. However, despite acknowledging the presence of problematic violence in porn features after 1970, he does not elaborate greatly on its nature, linking its proliferation to the hybridization of feature-length pornography with conventional melodrama, in which violence and heightened emotional interplay was a primary generic factor. However, while he notes that an ‘articulate discourse of violence’18 influenced the form and iconography of feature-length pornography, Slade does not allude to a distinct sub-cycle. Linda Ruth Williams argues that ‘pornography is the genre that dare not speak its name’,19 noting its absence from most scholarly overviews of the field. However, even a cursory glance at some of the more accomplished hardcore films of the ‘golden age’ – such as The Devil in Miss Jones (Gerard Damiano, 1973), The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Henry Paris, 1976), Through the Looking Glass (Jonas Middleton, 1976), The Story of Joanna (Gerard Damiano,

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1977) and Sex World (Anthony Spinelli, 1978) – reveals conventions of melodrama, romantic comedy, horror, science fiction and psycho-drama. All of these elements are inflected very specifically by the demands of hardcore, suggesting that porn films function not just as isolated generic outcasts but as shadows of and adjuncts to their mainstream genre counterparts. Therefore, as with any development in cinematic genres, hybridization is fundamental to a deeper understanding of them. Williams has noted the relationship between pornography, melodrama and horror, identifying them all as ‘body genres’20 whose primary function is to affect bodily and emotional (as opposed to intellectual) responses in the spectator. The roughies often conjoined these constituent body genres, giving credence to Williams’s argument that ‘pornography today is more often deemed excessive for its violence than for its sex, while horror films are excessive in their displacement of sex onto violence’21. In this sense, both Femmes de Sade and Water Power (and many other roughies too) confound generic categorization, questioning the point at which pornographic convention either departs from or fuses with its horrific content. Nevertheless, although sexual violence may have been present as a narrative feature of many hardcore feature films, it was relatively uncommon for it to be the defining element. However, Williams at least gave credence and credibility to the very notion of pornography as a genre, emphasizing its structural and iconographic components by arguing that ‘just as we expect to see monsters in horror films, guns, suits, and hats in gangster films, and horses and cowboys in westerns, so in a porno do we expect to see naked bodies engaging in sexual numbers’.22 Femmes De Sade and Water Power do indeed include extended ‘sexual numbers’, but only occasionally are they founded in displays of mutual pleasure. Eugenie Brinkema has noted that Linda Williams’s approach allowed for a limited definition of rough or violent sexuality, embodied principally through playful sadomasochistic ritual, female rape fantasy, and rape as ‘nodal negative against which good affirmative sex is positioned’.23 Neither Femmes de Sade nor Water Power depict murder: instead, it is the prolonged depiction of rape and sexual sadism which become the structural bedrocks of each film, a pornographic variation upon the ‘seriality’ of crime narratives which Richard Dyer argued ‘play on the mix of repetition and anticipation, and indeed the anticipation of repetition that underpins serial pleasure’.24 Burgeoning

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awareness in the 1960s and 1970s of the serial sex criminal was instrumental in defining the parameters of the hardcore roughie. As noted above, these films stood in close historical proximity to several realist horror films foregrounding dystopian breakdown and sexually dysfunctional male monsters, but also to the real life cases of Albert DeSalvo (aka the Boston Strangler), Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono (aka the Hillside Stranglers), and Ted Bundy. However, despite their general observation of certain structural norms, neither film adheres to a common formula. Thus Femmes de Sade favours the final narrative catharsis of revenge, linking it to the cycle of films in which victims administer retribution for their own violation, exemplified by titles such as Rape Squad (Bob Kelljan, 1974), Lipstick (Lamont Johnson, 1976), I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) and Ms.45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981), while Water Power favours an open-ended denouement that denies neat narrative resolution, aligning much more comfortably with the nihilism which characterizes Maniac and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

Seventies porno chic and its Other: Femmes de Sade Released in February 1976, Femmes de Sade premiered at the Presidio movie theatre in San Francisco when ‘porno chic’ was on the verge of its mid-decade, creative apex. It unfolds on genuine sex industry locations, encompassing the worlds of prostitutes, hustlers, buyers and business proprietors, a community exhibiting an affectionate, sex-positive solidarity suddenly threatened by the dangerous, recently released sex offender, Rocky de Sade (Ken Turner). Joseph Lam Duong argues that San Francisco’s ‘oppositional politics was a key component of the pornographic film industry in the 1970s’,25 and this is supported by the film’s simple structural opposition between the youth and vitality of the sex industry, and the ageing, violently aggressive interloper, whose physical appearance (almost seven foot tall, grizzled features, flabby torso, grey and unruly balding hair) serve as outward manifestations of his porno-otherness. From the outset, Rocky is defined as a disruptive, freakishly transgressive presence, emerging from the infamous San Quentin prison which looms

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Figure 13.1 Femmes de Sade advertising.

ominously through its geographical situation north of San Francisco. His freakish status encompasses an ability to auto-fellate and lick his own semen. Turner is thought to have appeared in just two hardcore films, his unfamiliarity among already established or up-and-coming adult film performers accentuating his incongruity and otherness. His weirdness is set against the charm, good looks and toned physical fitness of Johnny (John Leslie), whose porn cinema/book store business (actually San Francisco’s Kearny Cinema) serves as an ad hoc community centre for sex industry denizens, as well as an object of curiosity for a string of couples and sensation-seeking Asian tourists, whose female coterie also become the object of Johnny’s active fantasy life. In contrast to the equanimity of this community, Rocky loiters menacingly

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Figure 13.2 The sex community as threatened by Rocky De Sade (Ken Turner).

among the adult bookstores, peep shows, movie theatres, massage parlours and brothels, exploring the dense neon thicket of the pornographic city. Beyond their simple diegetic function of establishing this milieu, these nocturnal images also serve in retrospect as quasi-documentary renditions of what David Church has called the ‘deviant place’, an urban expanse of pornographic indulgence which has since disappeared only to be reconstituted and imagined through nostalgia and second-hand memory.26 Rocky is released from prison alongside Joe (Joey Silvera), whose youth and fresh optimism is boosted by a monogamous relationship with Ellen (Abigail Clayton). Their reunion outside the jail is almost immediately interrupted by Rocky’s bullying insistence that they drive him into San Francisco, leading to the first sexual assault of the film. Rocky initially taunts and humiliates Joe by intimating that he was raped by other inmates, implying a possible trauma behind Joe’s outward positivity. Joe’s tenderness with Ellen is contrasted with Rocky’s grunting frustration and resentment, their sexual reconciliation intercut with images of Rocky contemptuously tossing aside a beer can and urinating against a tree. Obviously, Rocky’s surname flippantly evokes the Marquis de Sade, although while the film’s title translates literally as ‘Women of Sade’, this might imply

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both proprietorial control of and acquiescence by the eponymous females. This is certainly redolent of de Sade’s class and gender based sense of entitlement, but mockingly belies Rocky’s low social status. The featured female players are presented quite explicitly via a masculine gaze, but it becomes uncertain and unfocused through the contrasting points of view of Rocky and Johnny. Although the title implies physical and emotional victimization, the women in the film emerge as a stable and cohesive collective, embodied by the prostitutes that congregate in Johnny’s business premises. They eat pizza, compare client stories and offer jocular support to each other, exhibiting normalizing behaviour marked by loose, improvisatory exchanges which contrast with the controlled intensity of the sex sequences, displaying a feminine energy which anchors the oppositional masculinity of Rocky and Johnny. Clear aesthetic markers establish a dual rendition of the Sadeian male, contrasting the physical assaults of Rocky and the carnal imaginings of Johnny. While the former’s deeds are defined explicitly in terms of victim trauma, the latter’s frequently venture into a perversity contained securely as interior fantasy. These boundaries and gradations of domination and submission engender a neat formal symmetry, encompassing three assaults by Rocky, three fantasy sequences depicting Johnny’s imaginary world, and a climactic orgy which brings these two worlds into collision. The duration and visual detail of this denouement obliterates the earlier dual masculine subjectivities, taking the film into a different realm of sexual spectacle in which Rocky is punished in a form of poetic justice shaped and enacted by his female victims. Rocky’s aberrations range from the forced bondage and vaginal rape of Ellen (accompanied by the sexual humiliation and beating of Joe), the spinal injury of a nameless prostitute (Melba Bruce), caused by forcing her to attempt auto-cunnilingus in replication of his own physical gymnastics, and the beating, cigarette burning and anal rape by bottle neck of another prostitute, Royce (Monique Starr), who is also Johnny’s partner. These sequences lack accompanying music, a stylistic choice steeped in a realism eschewing aural cues which might intensify the depiction of sexual violence. Rocky’s physical characteristics prompt the female actors to improvise comments on the size of his penis, their struggles to stimulate and fellate him lending another layer of performative spontaneity. However, Rocky’s contemptuous insults, ranging from aggressive grunts, demands and fractured exclamations of ‘cunt’ and

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‘bitch’ are steeped in misogyny. The freedoms exercised by the young female coterie merely amplify his sense of exclusion from post-sexual revolution social formations, thus providing a specific object of resentment for his perversions. In fact, he embodies the very problem that Dworkin herself identified in her assaults upon the porn industry and its consumers, but the film proceeds to enact a critique of her position by following up its graphic visualization of sexual violence with a systematic rejection and neutralization of its perpetrator. Johnny’s fantasies involve role play and group sex activity, whose nominally transgressive elements include a gynaecologist/nurse/patient scenario, a gang bang in an industrial boiler room, and an inter-racial threesome, all defined clearly by expressions of mutual pleasure and approval. His self-awareness as somebody in ‘the business of selling fantasy’ is characterized by humorous interaction with his customers, distancing him from the social alienation exhibited by Rocky. The contrast is underlined by gentle taunts from Royce to the effect that he will soon have difficulty separating phantasmic from material desires, which is developed as a running joke in which he becomes so immersed in fantasy that his friends repeatedly have to coax him out of it. Furthermore, his tender relationship with Royce, untouched by a sense of ownership, fuses his interior world to her place within the sex community, equalizing his objectifying gaze and the women who serve as its collective focus. The formal excess of these fantasy sequences accommodates audio-visual experimentation and allusive jokes, further relieving any obligation to accept them as literal or realistic beyond the obvious authenticating images of arousal and ejaculation. For example, in the gynaecologist fantasy, the use of scissors for the cutting of hosiery and undergarments, along with the spectacle of a vagina opened up widely and impersonally by metallic instruments, draw clear parallels with the overt violence of Rocky’s attacks. However, all of this is offset by moans of female pleasure, comic dialogue, the audible pulse of a heartbeat, discordant electronic music and the visual pun of dildos placed alongside other instruments on the operating table, establishing a tonal emphasis quite distinct from that of the rape sequences. Alternatively, in the boiler room fantasy, the visuals are underscored entirely by the repetitive clanks and hisses of industrial hardware, aural textures which stray into the realms of the avant-garde, literally amplifying the detached,

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mechanical nature of hardcore conventions. The sexual aggression demonstrated by actress Leslie Bovee as she encounters three men counters any notion of vulnerability, providing her nameless character with an intensified sense of purpose and energy. Here, the ostensible object of display is endowed with proactivity, assertiveness and fervour, the participants’ bodies glistening in the oils and liquids of the industrial setting. Finally, Johnny’s vision of himself as an ancient Chinese nobleman tended by two concubines is preceded by his gentle ribbing of a group of East Asian customers, introducing them to the various sex toys for sale in a bid to amuse his female friends. Within the fantasy itself (although a threesome, it is the film’s most conventional sexual encounter), Johnny’s mocking of trans-global sexual attitudes and practices is rendered farcical by the make-up applied to alter John Leslie’s ethnic features and exoticized by the projection of an obedient ‘eastern’ femininity. It also becomes unavoidably informed by retrospective awareness of Leslie’s star status within the industry, in which white males dominated in terms of ethnic visibility. To some degree, all of Johnny’s fantasies offer aesthetic ripostes to male violence and domination. A sense of mutuality is set up before and after each instance of fantasy by the exchange of looks, winks and smiles between Johnny and the female foci of his gaze, defining them as scenarios which might also occupy the fantasy imaginings of the objectified women. Nevertheless, the sudden transitions back to the film’s diegetic ‘reality’ always emphasize Johnny’s subjectivity, the Chinese fantasy being halted abruptly by the sight of Rocky as a disgruntled, impatient customer, the pivotal point at which these corepresentatives of the Sadeian impulse come into physical contact. The climactic ‘Blood and Mother’s Milk 1st Annual Leather Ball’ sequence brings these worlds of fantasy and violence into direct confrontation. Its publicity poster welcomes ‘whores, pimps, queens and queers, sadists and masochists, slaves and masters’, a pan-sexual, multi-ethnic, consensual, libertarian celebration of orgiastic activity outlawed by social orthodoxies. This includes inter-racial encounters, inverted bondage, infantilism, spanking, branding and even mild bestiality. However, the sequence also tips the film into the realization of its rape-revenge narrative. Following Rocky’s debasement of their world, the sex community becomes a natural corrective for the violence of the male monster, their retribution actually an expression of cross-gender

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Figure 13.3 Rejecting the Sadeian male: Rocky at the climax of Femmes de Sade.

collectivism. Rocky arrives at the orgy uninvited, his mediaeval executioner’s costume rendering him utterly ridiculous, and this sets up the film’s ultimate rejection of the Sadeian male that he embodies. Amid the party chaos, he is cajoled and duped into a shackled, submissive role, inverting his earlier methods of subjugation and humiliation. He is sodomized by a large dildo (recalling his earlier taunts to Joe and his actual anal rape of Royce), before a procession of female guests urinate and then defecate on his face and torso, the faeces smeared contemptuously over his flesh. This emphasis upon the corporeal desecration and violation of the now supine, helpless sadist is the final symbolic rejection of Rocky, vengeance defined not through murder (a convention often central to the rape-revenge cycle) but as a ritual humiliation. The re-appearance of Joe at the party, snarling that Rocky will soon be heading back to San Quentin, suggests that street justice will be followed by justice administered through conventional legal channels. Nevertheless, this finale remains rooted in the carnivalesque, as the dancing partygoers enact one final performative gesture, encircling Rocky as they sing the band’s mocking refrain: ‘Bye Rocky, that’s what you get. Bye Rocky, you’re full of shit!’

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The erotic and the obscene: Water Power Water Power also foregrounds a sexual sadist, Burt (Jamie Gillis), lurking amid an urban expanse exhibiting outward signs of sexual revolution gone haywire. He is visualized repeatedly against the nocturnal backdrop of Manhattan’s sex district, a historical snapshot of what Wheeler Winston Dixon calls ‘the ultimate domain of the unreal . . . the phantom zone of eternal play and perpetual unease’.27 One brief shot ironically frames him standing before a movie theatre screening Rape Squad, whose self-determining female avengers remain resolutely absent from the world of Water Power. Indeed, the film’s ideological underpinnings are very distinct from Femmes de Sade, most notably through the subjective channelling enabled by devices such as point-of-view shots and a voiceover in which the protagonist attempts to explain the principles underlying his attempt to ‘cleanse’ any female he deems unworthy of his twisted morality. Burt’s weapon of choice recalls those horror films in which a monster is defined partly through his use of an iconic weapon, in this case a rather unwieldly enema kit which facilitates his deluded quest to ‘purify’ his victims but lends a sense of outrageous farce fundamental to the film’s jet black comic elements.

Figure 13.4 Sadism lurking in the urban expanse: Jamie Gillis in Water Power.

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Figure 13.5 Advertising for the 1977 Water Power premiere at the Kearny Cinema in San Francisco.

Jack Sargeant has argued that the film refuses to settle into any comfortably defined category, stressing its heterogeneous status as ‘hardcore pornography, cult movie, and roughie classic . . . unable to truly align itself with any genre, being both too specialized in its fetishism and too sexually vicious for many audiences’.28 Financed by murderers and extortionists, the film has its origins as a Mafia investment, adding another layer of cultural transgression, with Costello working at the behest of Star Distributors, effectively the porn wing of the DeCavalcante crime family, which would eventually be absorbed by the Gambino family. It premiered in February 1977 at the Kearny Cinema, San Francisco (the location used as Johnny’s business premises in Femmes de Sade), and Costello has stated retrospectively (and there is plenty in the film to support this) that the only feasible approach was to construct an outrageous comedy about its own excess, ‘a parody of itself . . . the funniest movie I ever made’.29 Its commercial prospects were restricted in the USA, but Costello has stated that it was successful in European territories such as Holland and Germany, circulating in the latter under the knowing title Spritz.30 However, Costello’s name has never appeared on any of the various versions of the film (which originally played without opening titles and credits), his investors deeming it prudent to re-release it in the USA with a title sequence and poster design crediting the film to Gerard Damiano, whose Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones came, paradoxically, to epitomize the self-same porno chic ethos that Water Power systematically sought to dismantle.

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In the context of porn consumption, the very title Water Power evokes a certain range of negative connotations, not least the notion of patriarchal control and domination so fundamental to Dworkin’s argument. But it also alludes directly to the nature of Burt’s attacks, its hint at the film’s perverse conceit lending an immediate linguistic level of abjection and disgust which compounds what we actually see onscreen. Moreover, it works as a variation on what Robin Wood called ‘the excremental city’, a 1970s cinematic trope that was a culmination of ‘the obsession with dirt/cleanliness that recurs throughout the history of the American cinema’,31 and a recurrent theme in the sexually threatening urban environments of Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), Looking for Mr Goodbar (Richard Brooks, 1977) and Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980). It draws particular inspiration from Taxi Driver through the unauthorized use of Bernard Herrmann’s music, images isolating Burt in his stark apartment room and the use of diary entries read as voiceover. Use of other Herrmann music from Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973), Michel Polnareff ’s score for Lipstick, and of Herbie Hancock’s from Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974) reveals further indebtedness to, and expansion upon, mainstream explorations of human monsters as the product of urban despair and psychosexual disturbance. However, Gillis’s deadpan delivery of the voiceover – exemplified by the line ‘if this is to be my life’s work . . . I can’t just stick tubes up their asses and hope for the best. An enema is more meaningful than that’ – consolidates the comic aspect and mocks the thematic project of Taxi Driver. In this light, one needs to consider only the function of the brothel location in each film: for Travis Bickle it becomes the locus of his drive towards personal catharsis and the blood sacrifice of his criminal victims, whilst for Burt it becomes host and witness to his psycho-sexual epiphany, whereupon conventional pleasures are rejected in favour of wanton, heedless libertarianism. The film also draws superficially upon traditions of true-crime drama, complete with shock-horror newspaper headline inserts and an opening written statement (underscored by a sinister synthesized drone) informing the viewer that the ensuing events ‘could have happened anywhere or to anyone’. Indeed, it draws loosely on the case of Michael Kenyon, the ‘Illinois Enema Bandit’ whose sex crimes in the 1960s and 1970s also inspired a song by Frank Zappa, although it is the scandalous premise rather than forensic attention to human pathology from which the film derives its energies. In contrast to

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Femmes de Sade, it provides merely perfunctory counterbalances to its setpiece sex-horror moments, consisting primarily of the narrative device of a police investigation, introduced after forty minutes as if grudgingly to frame criminal misdeeds within moral parameters. Although this temporarily relieves the film of Burt’s oppressive subjectivity, there are none of the countercultural forces which fuelled the resistance to the monster of Femmes de Sade. Instead, there is a cynical indulgence of a burgeoning American nightmare, evident from the very first sequence, improvized location footage in which Burt aimlessly traverses the streets in a city celebrating the nation’s 1976 bicentennial. His awkward pose for a photographer in front of a stars and stripes backdrop establishes him within precise geographical and socio-historical contexts, linking constitutional principles of individualism and enterprise with a wayward libertarianism corrupted into a criminality defined by sexual dysfunction. Jamie Gillis’s presence in the film is crucial. Unlike Femmes de Sade’s Ken Turner, Gillis was a prolific, familiar presence in adult films, noted for a willingness to explore sadistic and often unpalatable areas of sexual expression. Awareness of both star persona and personal predilection compounds the film’s formal rhetoric, in which Gillis occupies and interacts with the seedy interior and exterior locations. He has commented that much of his characterization was improvized, motivated by a Method-like attempt to ‘get into his head the best I could . . . I was being the Enema Bandit’.32 This immersive approach adds co-authorial weight to his characterization,33 and unlike in Femmes de Sade, the sex criminal is given a home space, used initially to express his obsessive voyeurism. Here, the iconography of the pornographic city bleeds into domestic realm-reading matter with titles such as ‘Wide Open Teenagers’ and ‘Baby Oil Girls’ is listlessly consumed, while apartment walls are festooned with carelessly pinned magazine pages, the chief splashes of colour on the stark, exposed brickwork. This space will be abandoned as he proceeds later to invade the domestic dwellings of his victims. Burt’s voyeurism drives the early section of the film, characterized by his spying upon and photographing a female neighbour, a telescope becoming his first exploratory, invasive tool. The spying takes a crucial turn when he observes an enema administered during a highly theatrical and ritualized session in a local brothel, whereupon the enema kit becomes his favoured weapon of

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choice. While Gillis’s unabashed performance and Costello’s stylistic choices invite subjective attachment (encouraged repeatedly through the guiding voice-over and a visual schemata that typically privileges Burt’s point of view), this descent into the maelstrom is not presented wholly uncritically. Preceding his initial spying session, a brief rack focus shot (accompanied by a synthesized musical sting) shifts attention from the foregrounded – and visually fetishized – telescope to the background figure of Burt, glancing directly into the camera. Such stylistic devices are not belaboured in the film, but this direct gaze at the complicit viewer demonstrates a self-reflexive awareness of the excess that it will proceed to indulge remorselessly. Indeed, the film provides latent commentary upon both the fetishizing and sadistic gaze so fundamental to Laura Mulvey’s famous thesis. It seems deliberately to provide hyperbolic confirmation of the anti-pornography movement’s worst fears, the construction of rape sequences as gross-out comic set-pieces constituting the absolute antithesis of liberal-minded decency and radical-feminist thought. To strengthen further this crass defiance of such positions, the film then proceeds mockingly to endorse the argument that immersion in pornography culminates in a desire not just for harder, more extreme material but that it inevitably spirals into active rather than vicarious participation. Burt’s bored perusal of standard porno magazines is initially supplanted by an enthusiastic consumption of specialist enema publications before his disenchantment with conventional relationships (he has a regular partner) and standard sex worker transactions is replaced by the missionary zeal of his sexual assaults. The pivotal narrative incident occurs in a brothel called the ‘Garden of Eden’, crudely locating Burt’s transformation from voyeur to rapist outside of any pathological compulsion and within an Old Testament ethos of original sin. As he enters the premises, an immediate visual juxtaposition of Burt and a headless female sculpture prefigures the dehumanization of his subsequent victims. However, its sex workers, Eve (Sharon Mitchell) and ‘The Nurse’ (Marlene Willoughby), treat the ridiculous demands of the male clientele with either amused resignation or mocking superiority. Eve reads Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man in between her client sessions, a throwaway visual joke at the expense of both the sexual and intellectual development of the human male. However, the serpent in this libidinous paradise is defined specifically as female: its madam (Gloria Leonard), reclining imperiously on a hammock, her

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Figure 13.6 Sculptures prefigure the dehumanization of female victims in Water Power.

painted lips occasionally rendered in extreme close-up as she seizes upon Burt’s initial reticence. Her menu of so-called ‘specials’ – ‘B&D, S&M, fantasy fetishes, whippage, across the knee like momma used to do, emasculation, infantilism, showers (golden and brown), obedience training, cross dressing, high colonic and panty worship’ – fuels his latent interest in the ‘high colonic’ option as the route to fulfilment. Feminine allure thus becomes both temptation and motivation for Burt, his uncertainty in the madam’s assertive presence occluded later by his repeated blaming of his victims for the pain and humiliation that he visits upon them. Burt’s tryst with Eve is defined largely by boredom, its mechanical processes (‘I will suck you, you will fuck me’) accentuated by Mitchell’s faltering delivery and the intercutting of frantic preparations by ‘The Nurse’ and Pamela (Jeanne Silver) for an outlandish session with a seasoned enema fetishist (Eric Edwards). This client enhances his experience through role play as a doctor, affecting insight into and knowledge of intricate medical procedure. Burt’s observation of this process through a windowed partition marks the transitional point at which his voyeuristic tendencies coalesce with a masturbatory enthusiasm for his newly discovered compulsion. Furthermore,

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his presence embellishes the fantasy of the other brothel client, with Burt casually adopting the role of a ‘medical student’ as the fantasy scenario unfolds before him. Thus, there remains throughout this sequence a pronounced focus upon a perverse but performative spectacle, its mechanics emphasized through extreme close-ups of nozzles, tubes, lubricants, gags and restraints, essential tools in a specialized and, this time, physically invasive, practice. The client verbally endorses clinical sanitary procedures, thus prefiguring Burt’s later self-declared role as moral cleanser of victims he deems guilty of impure action. In this theatre of the perverse, the doctor fantasy feeds a masculinized ideal of interpersonal and professional dominion, Gillis and Edwards playing the scene respectively as a delirious sexual epiphany and a highly exaggerated, mannered comic display, culminating in the intercutting of their orgasmic grimaces and ejaculating penises with the watery anal expulsions of Pamela. Thus, the scene pursues a standard porno trajectory, but is inflected by expressions of body horror and farcical gross-out comedy. The final performative gesture of Willoughby provides a self-reflexive coda to the whole brothel episode: as the profiled rear end of Pamela expels brown liquid in the foreground, Willoughby concludes the facial cum shot by visibly breaking into a fit of giggles as the image fades to black. However, for all of its gross, confrontational verisimilitude, Water Power very obviously resorts to fakery in particular moments, with tubing visible and, during the attack on the sisters, even the arm of a crew member protruding into shots depicting the spray of brown, faecal liquid. This exposes the crude mechanics of low budget film-making, an unintentional visual rejoinder to other, authenticating macro-close-ups of Burt’s activities. The faecal expulsions of Burt’s victims may elicit corporeal disgust, betraying hard core’s principal role as a visual rendition of pleasure, but they are embellished to the point at which some of their most disgusting details must be assessed as clumsy special effects. The film not only denies the ‘frenzy’ of visible female pleasure, it also occasionally falsifies its articulation of the abject. Literally and metaphorically, this is a film which wallows in the shit its protagonist professes to wash away but fabricates the very bodily material that lies at the heart of its gross-out, comic-horror spectacle. Unlike Femmes de Sade, the film does not provide a narrative catharsis of apprehension and punishment, closing on an image of Burt’s face illuminated

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by the vivid, pulsing red light of a police car. Just as he did earlier in the film, he again gazes directly into the camera, his threat underlined by a brief onscreen statement emphasizing the lack of lawful closure in sexual assault cases. But this is as much a taunt as a cautionary coda, a glib, unspoken admission that the film is exploiting a burgeoning social problem for maximum sensational effect. Where Femmes de Sade allowed a natural street justice to unfold, Water Power leaves its monster unpunished, lurking in the night shadows, preparing for his next attack and engulfed in a crimson hue suggestive of a Hell on Earth, one final visual joke wholly appropriate for a journey whose key turning point was played out in a New York whorehouse mockingly trading as the Garden of Eden. Conventional criticism will almost certainly continue to expel De Renzy’s and Costello’s films to a place beyond the ideological pale. Although Femmes de Sade is replete with traces of a countercultural zeal and defiance, neither it nor Water Power make enough concessions to a sustained, identifiable project that would make for easy appropriation by even the most tolerant and liberal academic discourse. Each film tackles the exercise of male power and subjectivity that became so central to radical feminist critiques of pornography and its broader popular cultural manifestations, but each adopts a radically different position on the fears generated by the unfettered Sadeian male in the modern American metropolis. Femmes de Sade ultimately pits its monster against a pan-sexual, cross-gender collectivism that rejects and overcomes his threat, but does so while still espousing a libertarian impulse which keeps its distance from both radical feminist and mainstream sexual attitudes; Water Power allows its lone monster to embody all that pornography’s detractors see as repugnant and dangerous in the form, relishing its status as a cinematic provocateur that literally smears its female cast in (albeit faked) excremental fluid and denies punishment of its unrepentant protagonist. Thus, when viewed together, these films demonstrate how the relationship between pornography, violence and male power is made complex and contradictory according to the very specific handling of common tropes and conventions. These films continue to startle and offend a whole range of sensibilities, yet neither makes concessions to their potential detractors, revealing contradictory impulses at the outer limits of 1970s cinematic excess. Moreover, as additions to the gallery of rough-hewn human monsters that adorned the decade, Rocky

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de Sade and Burt the Enema Bandit may yet prove to be the roughest of them all.

Thanks to Martin Brooks, Laura Helen Marks, Phil Marson, Tony Richards, Joe Rubin and Johnny Walker.

Notes 1 This term was coined by Ralph Blumenthal in The New York Times, 21 January 1973, and then used by Bruce Williamson in Playboy, August 1973. 2 A French DVD of the mid-2000s paired the films as a thematically integrated double bill, revealing that the negatives had been preserved in a condition conducive to contemporary digital standards. Joe Rubin, whose company Vinegar Syndrome holds US distribution rights to Femmes de Sade and is the owner of Water Power (despite its supposed ‘public domain’ status), has indicated that the latter in particular would be legally problematic in the twenty-first century, not only on account of its sexually violent content, but also its use of unlicensed music (email correspondence, July 2016). 3 Diana E.H. Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Diana E.H. Russell (ed.), Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), p. 3. 4 Susan Gubar, ‘Representing pornography: feminism, criticism, and depictions of female violation’, in Susan Gubar and Joan Hoff (eds), For Adult Users Only: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 47–67. 5 See Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies Second Edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 7/3, Autumn 1975, pp. 6–18; and E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London: Methuen, 1983). 6 Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: Women’s Press, 1981), p. 24. 7 Ibid., p. 98. 8 Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (Minneapolis, MN: Organizing against Pornography, 1988), p. 36. 9 Georges Bataille, Eroticism (London: Marion Boyars, 1987), pp 164–76. 10 Ibid., p. 173.

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11 Tania Modleski, ‘Women’s cinema as counterphobic cinema: Doris Wishman as the last auteur’, in Jeffrey Sconce (ed.), Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 50. 12 Robin Bougie, Cinema Sewer, Volume 5 (Godalming: FAB Press, 2015), p. 132. 13 Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 184–229. 14 See ‘Dressed to Kill: a discussion by Giovanna Asselle and Behroze Gandhy’, Screen, 23/4, September 1982, pp, 137–43. 15 Joseph Slade, ‘Violence in the hardcore pornographic film: a historical survey’, Journal of Communication, 34/3, Summer 1984, p. 154. 16 Ibid., p. 154. 17 Ibid., p. 161. 18 Ibid., p. 162. 19 Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 38. 20 Linda Williams, ‘Film bodies: gender, genre and excess’, Film Quarterly, 44/4, Summer 1991, pp. 2–13. 21 Ibid., p. 2. 22 Williams, Hardcore, p. 128. 23 Eugenie Brinkman, ‘Rough sex’, in Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycky and David Squires (eds), Porn Archives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 264–5. 24 Richard Dyer, ‘Kill and kill again’, in Sight & Sound, 7/9, September 1997. 25 Joseph Lam Duong, ‘San Francisco and the politics of hardcore’, in Eric Schaefer (ed.), Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 314. 26 David Church, Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 73–118. 27 Wheeler Winston Dixon, ‘Night world: New York as a noir universe’, in Nicole Solano and Michael Pomerance (eds), City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), p. 243. 28 Jack Sargeant, ‘In celebration of going too far: Water Power’, in John Klein and Robert G. Weiner (eds), From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse: Highbrow and Lowbrow Transgression in Cinema’s First Century (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), p. 85. 29 Shaun Costello’s Blog. Available at https://shauncostello.com/2010/10/11/ waterpower-3/ 9 accessed 8 August 2016. 30 Ibid.

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31 Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p 51 32 Jack Sargeant, ‘In celebration’, p. 91. 33 This is especially pertinent when considered against his later, clandestinely circulated home movies – known commonly under titles such as The Walking Toilet Bowl and Brown on Ebony – that were genuine BDSM and scatological scenarios with San Francisco prostitutes. These films remain difficult to access, but are transcribed in Jamie Gillis and Peter Sotos, Pure Filth (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2012).

Bibliography Asselle, Giovanna and Gandhy, Behroze, ‘Dressed to Kill: a discussion by Giovanna Asselle and Behroze Gandhy’, Screen, 23/3–4, September/October 1982, pp. 137–43. Bataille, Georges, Eroticism (London: Marion Boyars, 1987). Blumenthal, Ralph, ‘ “Hard core” grows fashionable – and very profitable’, The New York Times, 21 January 1973. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/21/ archives/pornochic-hardcore-grows-fashionableand-very-profitable.html. Bougie, Robin, Cinema Sewer, Volume 5 (Godalming: FAB Press, 2015). Brinkema, Eugenie, ‘Rough sex’, in Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycky and David Squires (eds), Porn Archives (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 262–83. Church, David, Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Dixon, Wheeler Winston, ‘Night world: New York as a noir universe’, in Nicole Solano and Murray Pomerance (ed.), City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 243–58. Duong, Joseph Lam, ‘San Francisco and the politics of hardcore’, in Eric Schaefer (ed.), Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 297–318. Dworkin, Andrea, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: Women’s Press, 1981). Dworkin, Andrea and MacKinnon, Catherine, Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (Minneapolis, MN : Organizing against Pornography, 1988). Dyer, Richard, ‘Kill and kill again’, Sight & Sound, 7/9, September 1997, pp. 14–17. Gillis, Jamie and Sotos, Peter, Pure Filth (Port Townsend, WA : Feral House 2012) Gubar, Susan, ‘Representing pornography: feminism, criticism, and depictions of female violation’, in Susan Gubar and Joan Hoff (eds), For Adult Users Only: The

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Dilemma of Violent Pornography (Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 47–67. Haskell, Molly, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1987). Kaplan, E. Ann, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London: Methuen, 1983). Modleski, Tania, ‘Women’s cinema as counterphobic cinema: Doris Wishman as the last auteur’, in J. Sconce (ed.), Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 47–70. Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 16/3, Autumn 1975, pp. 6–18. Russell, Diana, E.H. (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), pp. 1–22. Sargeant, Jack, ‘In celebration of going too far: Water Power’, in John Klein and Robert G. Weiner (eds), From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse: Highbrow and Lowbrow Transgression in Cinema’s First Century (Lanham, MD : Scarecrow Press, 2010), pp. 85–94. Slade, Joseph, ‘Violence in the hardcore pornographic film: a historical survey’, Journal of Communication, 34/3, Summer 1984, pp. 148–63. Williams, Linda, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 1989). Williams, Linda, ‘Film bodies: gender, genre and excess’, Film Quarterly, 44/4, Summer 1991, pp. 2–13. Williams, Linda Ruth, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Williamson, Bruce, ‘Porno chic’, Playboy, August 1973. Wood, Robin, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

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Contributors Robin Griffiths is an independent film scholar, writer and lecturer with over twenty years’ experience of teaching film and media studies in UK higher education. His work over the years has been funded by both the British Academy and the AHRC, and he has contributed to a number of edited collections and academic journals. His books include British Queer Cinema (Routledge, 2006) and Queer Cinema in Europe (Intellect, 2008). William Gombash is a professor of communications at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Among his publications is a chapter in A Critical Companion to Stanley Kubrick (Lexington Books, 2020). His major areas of interest in film studies include American vigilante cinema during the 1970s as well as films about the First World War and American naval aviation. Neil Jackson is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Lincoln and is a co-editor of Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). He recently contributed a chapter to Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street and Beyond (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) and an article on Forced Entry (1972) to the journal Porn Studies. He has also contributed an article on the cultural significance of the pornographer to The Routledge Companion to Media, Sex and Sexuality (Routledge, 2018). He is currently preparing a monograph for Bloomsbury entitled Combat Shocks, a study of the representation of the Vietnam War in exploitation cinema. Darren Kerr is Associate Professor of Sexual Cultures and Head of the School of Film and Television at Solent University, Southampton. His publications include Hard to Swallow: Hard-core Pornography on Screen (Wallflower, 2012) and Tainted Love: Screening Sexual Perversions (I.B. Tauris, 2017). He is series editor for Edinburgh University Press’s Screening Sex book series, co-director of screeningsex.com and a member of the editorial board of the journal Porn Studies.

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Contributors

Susanne Kord is a Professor at University College London and the author of eleven books and dozens of articles on literature and film. Her last project was a book on The Cabin in the Woods (Liverpool University Press, 2012). Xavier Mendik is Professor of Cult Cinema Studies at Birmingham City University, from where he also runs the Cine-Excess International Film Festival (www.cine-excess.co.uk). He is the author/editor/co-editor of nine volumes on cult cinema traditions, including Bodies of Desire and Bodies in Distress: The Golden Age of Italian Cult Cinema (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), Peep Shows: Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic (Wallflower Press, 2012) and The Cult Film Reader (Open University Press, 2008). He has also completed a number of documentaries on cult film traditions including Tax Shelter Terrors: The Real Story of Canadian Cult Film (2017), That’s La Morte: Italian Cult Cinema and the Years of Lead (2018) and The Quiet Revolution: State, Society and the Canadian Horror Film (2020). James Newton is Lecturer in Media Studies and Film at the University of Kent. He is the author of The Anarchist Cinema (Intellect, 2019) and The Mad Max Effect: Road Warriors in International Exploitation Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). He is also a film-maker, and runs the Newton Talks podcast. Bill Osgerby is Emeritus Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at London Metropolitan University. He has published widely on British and American cultural history. His books include Youth in Britain Since 1945 (Blackwell, 1998); Playboys in Paradise: Youth, Masculinity and Leisure-style in Modern America (Berg, 2001); Youth Media (Routledge, 2004); Youth Culture and the Media: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2020); and American Pie: The Anatomy of Vulgar Teen Comedy (Routledge, 2019). He has also co-edited numerous anthologies, including Action TV: ‘Tough Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks’ (Routledge, 2001); Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change (Cambridge Scholars, 2014); and Fight Back: Punk, Politics and Resistance (Manchester University Press, 2015). Julian Petley is Professor of Journalism at Brunel University London. He has written widely about censorship, horror cinema and pornography but in recent years has increasingly turned his attention to a critique of journalism in the UK, and in particular of how the national press covers other media. His most

Contributors

315

recent book is the second edition of Culture Wars: The Media and the British Left (Routledge, 2019), co-written with James Curran and Ivor Gaber. He is member of the editorial boards of the British Journalism Review and Porn Studies, and one of the principal editors of the Journal of British Cinema and Television. Aga Skrodzka is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Clemson University, South Carolina. Her book Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) examines the link between peripherality, socio-economic changes and magic realism in post-Wall cinema of the region. She is the lead editor of the interdisciplinary Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her research interests include visual politics, gender, feminism, sexploitation cinema and post-communist studies. Laura Treglia is presently an independent scholar lecturing and researching on gender, film and Japanese cultural studies. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies and an MA in Japanese Studies from SOAS, University of London, and has taught in British and Qatari universities as Visiting Lecturer and Visiting Assistant Professor. Her research interests mainly revolve around feminist film and media theory, world genre and cult cinema, Japanese society and culture, and exploitation dynamics in reality TV. Her research has appeared in Film Studies and in edited volumes published by the University of Chester Press, Wiley-Blackwell and Berghahn Books. Jennifer Wallis is a lecturer at Imperial College London in the Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication and a teaching fellow in Imperial’s Faculty of Medicine. Her research interests include nineteenth-century culture, the history of psychiatry and 1970s film and television. Her most recent book is the co-authored volume Anxious Times: Medicine & Modernity in NineteenthCentury Culture (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).

316

Index Numbers in italic refer to Figures 10 Rillington Place 290 555 238 ABC 275 Accused, The 152 Action Pants – Genital Panic 277 Adamson, Al x, 18, 221–2, 234, 235, 239, 241 n.1 Aes-Nihil, John 238 Agnew, Spiro 116, 133 n.14, 274 All in the Family 133 n.20, 143 Allen, Corey 151 Allen, Woody 93 American-International Pictures (AIP) 231 Animal, The 289 Anthony, Gethin 239 Antichrist, The 3 Aquarius 239 Arbus, Diane 277 Argento, Dario 35 Ariel 277 Ars Amandi, see Art of Love, The Art of Love, The 37 Ascent of Man, The 304 Astral (company) 170, 203 Astronauts, The 36 Atkins, Susan 224 August 35 Aumont, Jean-Pierre 212 Bad Girls Go to Hell 289 Bad Seed, The 20 Bait, The 141, 149, 152 Baker County USA , see Trapped Baker, Roy Ward 3 Bakhtin, Mikhail 230 Ballen, Ruth 247 Baranco, Victor 223

Barber, Daniel 10 Barnett, Laurel 247 Bataille, Georges 39, 289, 308 n.9 Báthory, Erszébet 40–1 Baudrillard, Jean 44–5, 48 n.25 Bava, Mario 35 Beach Boys, The 223 Beast, The 5, 37 Beast Stable 60 Beatles, The 223, 228 Beatty, Edgar 232 Beausoleil, Bobby 224 Becker, Josh 238 Bedroom Eyes 190 Behind Convent Walls 5, 37, 41, 44–5 Behind the Green Door 22, 279 Berlatsky, Noah 8, 29 n.15, 86 n.20 bête, La, see Beast, The Bevacqua, Maria 141, 149, 154 n.14, 154 n.24, 155 n.28 Bianchi, Kenneth 293 Big Bird Cage, The 71, 79–80, 81, 82–3, 87 n.31 Big Doll House, The 71, 77, 80, 82, 83 Birth of a Nation, The 99–100, 103–4, 107 n.22 Birthistle, Eva 261 Black Angels 232 Black Cat 55 Black Mama, White Mama 71, 76–80 Blackout 16, 180, 201, 211–13 Blade Runner 92 Blake, Linnie 2, 28 n.5 Blanche 36, 42 Blowitz, Michael 260 Blumenthal, Ralph 22, 308 n.1 Boorman, John 190, 207 Borden, Lynn 76 Borowczyk, Walerian 3, 5–6, 35–49

317

318

Index

Boston Strangler, The 26, 290, 293 Bougie, Robin 289, 309 n.12 Bourbon, Barbara 280 Bovee, Leslie 298 Brame, Bill 231 Branice, Ligia, see Ligia Brokowska Brennan, William 22–3 Breton, André 43 Brickman, Barbara Jane 2, 28 n.3 Brinkema, Eugenie 292 British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) 5 British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) 11, 29 n.17 Brokowska, Ligia 35 Bronowski, Jacob 304 Bronson, Charles 12, 92 Brooke, Sorrell 254 Brooks, Richard 302 Brottman, Mikita 232, 238, 241 n.16, 242 n.23 Brown, Jeffrey A. 55, 66 n.5 Brown, Juanita 77 Brown, Judy 82 Brownmiller, Susan 275–6 Brownstein, Bill 215 n.6 Bruce, Melba 296 Brunner, Mary 224 Bryan, James 281 Bugliosi, Vincent 18, 228–9, 241 nn.4–6 Buhl Dutta, Mary 150, 155 n.45 Bundy, Ted 293 Bunker, Edith 143 Buñuel, Luis 5, 38 Buono, Angelo 293 Burger, Warren E. 24 Butler, Judith 209, 216 n.23 Caged Heat 71, 76–7 Canadian Film Development Corporation, The (CFDC) 163–5, 167–8, 170–1, 173–5, 179, 181, 184 n.35, 185 n.50, 186 n.69, 192, 203 Canby, Vincent 10–11, 93, 96, 106 n.5, 106 n.8 Cannibal Girls 191 Canuxploitation x, 3, 15–17, 189, 201–17 Carels, Edwin 43, 47 n.16, n.18, n.20 Carmody, Don 15, 170, 186 n.70, 192, 204, 210, 211

Carradine, Robert 211 Case of Rape, A 141–2, 146–8, 150, 152–3, 155 n.38 Cavara, Paolo 232 Charles Manson Superstar 238 Charlie’s Family, see Manson Family, The Chicago, Judy 277 Child, The 20, 246–7, 250–4 Children, The 261 Chinese Boxer, The, see The Hammer of God Chopin, Frédéric 257 Chowdry, Bhaskar Roy 233 Church, David 65 n.2, 281, 284 n.29, 295, 309 n.26 Cinéastes Associés, Les 36 Cinépix (company) 161–88, 189–200, 201, 203–4, 211–13 Clark, Bob 290 Clark, Bruce 231 Clayton, Abigail 295 Cleland, John 23 Climax of Blue Power, A 290 Clockwork Orange, A 147 Clover, Carol J. 86 n.19, 139, 152, 153 n.1, 154 n.5, 156 n.50, 156 n.54, 210, 216 n.24 Clowns, The 62 Cole, Rosalie 247 Collection of Tales from the Past, The 56 Collins, Roberta 82, 83 Colt, Zebedy 290 Comella, Lynn 278 Connors, Mike 145 Contes immoraux, see Immoral Tales Cook, Pam 8–9, 29 n.12, 65 n.2, 71, 73–4, 85 n.1 Cool and the Crazy, The 231 Corman, Roger 71–2, 231 Cornell, Joseph 43 Corupe, Paul 16, 29 n.18, 170, 172, 180–1, 184 n.27, 184 n.30, 184 n.32, 185 n.59, 185 n.62, 201, 204, 206–7, 209, 214, 214 n.2, 215 n.8, 215 n.11, 215 n.16, 215 n.20, 216 n.29 Costello, Shaun 25, 281, 287, 290, 301, 304, 307, 309 n.29 Crash 206 Craven, Wes 2, 197, 204, 236, 291

Index Crazies, The 3 Creed, Barbara 58, 67 n.18 Cronenberg, David 14–15, 162, 166, 170, 174–5, 178, 179–80, 185 n.48, 185 n.51, 199, 201, 203, 206, 210–12, 216 n.25, 216 n.27 Crowd 35 Crowe, Bernard 224 Cruising 302 Cry Rape 151 Cuklanz, Lisa 143, 155 n.29 Cycle Savages, The 231 Dai 41 zakkyo-bō, see Jailhouse 41 Damiano, Gerard 22, 26, 279–80, 290–1, 301 Danton, Ray 222, 234 Davies, Jeremy 238 Davis, Ossie 129, 148 Dawn of the Dead 3 Day, Carl 239 Day, Doris 223 Days of Heaven 92 De Lauretis, Teresa 66 n.3 de Leon, Gerado 71 de Mandiargues, André Pieyre 42 De Martino, Alberto 3 De Palma, Brian 291, 302 De Renzy, Alex 25, 281, 287, 307 de Sade, Marquis 39, 289, 295 de Szegheo Lang, Tamara 214 n.3 Death Line 3 Death Weekend x, 16, 189–98, 200–1, 204–11, 213, 214 n.2 Death Wish 4–5, 9–10, 12, 91–110, 111, 129, 131–2, 146, 302 Death Wish (2018) 131 Death Wish II 11 Deathmaster 222, 234 DeCavalcante (crime family) 301 Deep Throat 22, 24, 279, 301 Defiance of Good, The 290 Defiant Ones, The 78 Defilers, The 26, 289 Delaney, Marshall (Robert Fulford) 15, 175, 184 n.44 Deliverance 190, 198, 205, 207 Demme, Jonathan 71, 129 Deranged 290

319

DeSalvo, Albert 293 Devane, William 149 Devil in Miss Jones, The 22, 26, 280, 291, 301 Devil Times Five, see Peopletoys Diaz, Vic 80, 81 DiCaprio, Leonardo 240 DiCenzo, George 228 Dick Cavett Show, The 275 Dickinson, Emily 257 Didion, Joan 277 Dinner Party 277 Dirtiest Game in the World, The 281 Dirty Harry 4–5, 9, 12, 91, 111, 113, 115, 120–1, 123–32, 134 n.21 Dirty Western, A 290 Dixon, Wheeler Winston 300, 309 n.27 Dodson, Betty 278 Don’t Answer the Phone 290 Donahue, Troy 233 Donnelly, Dennis 290 Dr Jekyll and His Women 37 Dracula A.D. 1972 3 Dragon Flies, The 3 Dreifuss, Arthur 231 Dressed to Kill 291, 309 n.14 Duchamp, Marcel 43 Duchovny, David 239 Dunning, John ix–x, 15–16, 169, 169, 171, 173, 175, 178, 179–82, 190, 192, 201–17 Durren, John 254 Durston, David 222, 233 Dworkin, Andrea 289, 297, 302, 308 n.6, 308 n.8 Dyer, Richard 39, 46 n.4, 292, 309 n.24 Dylan, Bob 226 Easy Rider 103, 116 Eddins, Beverly 251 Eddins, Rebecca 251 Eddins, Susan 251 Edwards, Eric 280, 305–6 Elkind, David 20–1, 29 n.20, 260, 263 n.4 Elliot, Paul 233 Emery, Robert 233 Emmanuelle 5 37 Equal Rights Amendment (1972) 274, 283 n.12 Ernst, Max 43

320 Evans, Gene 254 Exorcist, The 11, 20 Export, Valie 277 Faris, Daniel 25, 29 n.30 Feather, N.T. 96, 107 n.11 Fellini, Federico 62 Felton, David 223, 241 n.2, 241 n.3, 241 n.7 Female Prisoner Scorpion 6, 51, 54–7 Feminine Mystique, The 278 Femmes de Sade x, 25, 27, 281, 287–311 Ferman, James 11 Ferrara, Abel 12, 139, 293 Ferreri, Marco 45 Findlay, Michael 19, 222, 237, 289 Findlay, Roberta 222, 237 Flamm, Michael 226, 241 n.9 Fleetwood, David 290 Fleischer, Richard 26, 290 Fleming, Victor 104 Folger, Abigail 225 Fonda, Peter 103, 191 Fontana, Jon 280 Forced Entry 290 Ford, Anitra 82, 87 n.29 Ford, John 92, 101 Forgeot, Jacques 36 Foster, Jodie 20, 256 Fothergill, Robert 205–6, 209, 215 n.10, 216 n.22 Francis, Connie 142–3 Franco, Jess 6, 35, 38 Frenzy 290 Freud, Sigmund 245, 263 n.5 Frey, Mattias 72–3, 76, 85 n.10, 86 n.12, 86 n.24 Friday, Nancy 278 Friedan, Betty 278 Friedkin, William 11, 129, 302 Friedman, David F. 26, 289 Friedman, Lester D. 1–2, 28 n.2, 274, 277, 283 n.11, 284 n.16, 284 n.24, 284 n.27 Frost, Lee 26, 281, 289 Fruet, William 162–3, 170, 189–200, 201, 203–6, 209–11, 213 Frykowski, Wojciech 224 Fulford, Robert 14 Funeral Home 190

Index Furyō Anego Den: Inoshika Ochō, see Sex and Fury Gabrielle 222 Galfas, Timothy 145 Gambino (crime family) 301 Game of Thrones 8, 73 Games of Angels, The 36 Gardenia, Vincent 105 Garrett, Leif 254 Genji Monogatari, see The Tale of Genji Gessner, Nicholas 20, 246 Ghost Stories 59 Ghost Tale of the Peony Lantern 56 Ghost Tale of Yotsuya 56 Gibson, Alan 3 Gilliam, Terry 36 Gillis, Jamie 280, 300, 302–4, 306, 310 n.33 Gitlin, Todd 142, 154 n.22 Giżycki, Marcin 38, 43, 46 n.3, 47 n.21 Goddard, Claude 290 Goin’ Down the Road 163, 184 n.35, 189, 191, 205 Goldblum, Jeff 95 Goldenberg, Billy 228 Gone with the Wind 104 Goosebumps 191 Gordon, Barbara 198 Goto, Island of Love 36 Granberry, Don 211, 213 Grande Bouffe, La 45 Grant, Barry Keith 28 n.7 Grantham, Lucy 291 Granville, Renay 233 Grier, Pam 77–80, 82–3, 87 n.29 Gries, Tom 221 Griffith, D.W. 99, 107 n.22 Griffiths, Robin 15–16, 189, 201–17 Grogan, Steve ‘Clem’ 225, 232 Groos, Karl 259, 263 n.2 Guardian, the 8, 74, 86 n.20 Gubar, Susan 288, 308 n.4 Gurley Brown, Helen 278 Haig, Sid 79–83 Halliwell, Leslie 196 Hammer of God, The 3 Hammer, Robert 290 Hancock, Herbie 302

Index Hanners, Richard 249 Harkema, Reginald 238 Harmenszoon van Rijn, Rembrandt 43 Harry Brown 10 Hartman, Ena 77 Haskell, Molly 288, 308 n.5 Head, The 35 Hefner, Hugh 275–6 Heinlein, Robert A. 277 Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra 61, 67 n.24, 139, 153 n.1, 154 n.7, 154 n.12, 154 n.13, 207, 215 n.15 Helter Skelter (1976) 17–18, 221, 228–30 Helter Skelter (2004) 238 Hendrickson, Robert 18, 221, 229, 232 Henry, Claire 139–40, 153, 153 n.1, 154 n.9, 156 n.53 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer 290, 293 héroïnes du mal, Les, see Immoral Women Héroux, Denis 171, 173, 203 Herriman, Damon 240, 242 n.24 Herrmann, Bernard 302 Herzog, Dagmar 39, 41, 46 n.6, 47 n.12 Hickox, Douglas 3 Hill, Jack 71–2, 81, 83 Hills Have Eyes, The 236 Hinman, Gary 224 Hitchcock, Alfred 26, 134 n.28, 290 Hooper, Tobe 2, 236 Hopper, Dennis 103, 116 Horn, Leonard 149 Horrible House on the Hill, The, see Peopletoys Hot Box, The 71 Hot Summer in the City 290 House 36 House by the Lake, see Death Weekend House of Manson 238 Howard, Frank 221, 232 Hudson, David L. Jnr. 29 n.26 Hunt, Leon 2, 28 n.4 Hutchings, Peter 152, 156 n.52 I Drink Your Blood 222, 233 I Spit on Your Grave 12, 139–41, 146, 154 n.3, 155 n.46, 156 n.54, 204, 206–7, 293 Iannone, Dorothy 277

321

Ike, Reiko 55 Image, The 290 Immoral Tales 5, 36, 40–2 Immoral Women 5, 37, 41, 46 Interno di un convento, see Behind Convent Walls Irwin, Mark 198 It’s a Revolution Mother 232 Jacobs, Meg 279, 284 n.26 Jacoby, Scott 257 Jacopetti, Gualtiero 232 Jaeckin, Just 290 Jailhouse 41 6, 51–2, 54, 56–61, 64–5 Jameson, Fredric 213, 216 n.28 Janson, Frank 248 Jenkins, Henry 8–9, 29 n.14, 71, 73, 85 n.3 Jochnowitz, George 99, 107 n.19 Johnson, Beverly 278 Johnson, Lamont 155 n.48, 193, 293 Johnston, Claire 71 Joshū Sasori, see Female Prisoner Scorpion Joy of Sex, The 278 Judgement Day Theater: The Book of Manson 238 Kael, Pauline 96, 106 n.9, 120–1, 124, 130, 134 n.21, 135 n.34 Kaidan, see Ghost Stories Kaidan Botan Dōrō, see Ghost Tale of the Peony Lantern Kaji, Meiko 51, 55, 57 Kanter, Richard 234 Kaplan, E. Ann 288, 308 n.5 Kaplan, Jonathan 150 Karen, Jane 261 Kasabian, Linda 224 Katalin Varga 140, 154 n.9 Kaye, Janice 207, 215 n.17 Keane, Carol 189 Kelljan, Bob 293 Kemono-beya, see Beast Stable Kempton, Sally 275–6 Kennedy, John F. 226 Kenyon, Michael 302 Kerwin, Harry 232 Kill Bill 6, 51 King, Billie Jean 278, 284 n.18

322 Kinsey Institute 291 Kiss of the Tarantula 20, 246–7, 251, 265 n.15 Kitlinski, Tomasz 40, 47 n.10 Klaus, Olivia 239 Kobayashi, Masaki 59 Konjaku Monogatarishū, see Collection of Tales from the Past, The Koz, Wally 238 Krenwinkel, Patricia 224 Kubrick, Stanley 147 Kuc, Kamila 38, 46 n.3, 47 n.11, 47 n.13, 47 n.16, 47 n.17, 47 n.22, 47 n.24 Kwaidan, see Kaidan Kyd, Thomas 97 Kyrou, Ado 4, 28 n.9 L’anticristo, see The Antichrist LaBelle, Beverley 237, 242 n.21 LaBianca, Leno 225 LaBianca, Rosemary 225 Lacher, Taylor 254 Lady Snowblood 51, 55 LaFleur, Jean 180, 192 Lam Duong, Joseph 293, 309 n.25 Lang, Fritz 101 Lange, Hope 93 Lantos, Robert 190 Larratelli, Enrique 236 Last House on the Left, The 2–3, 19, 197, 204, 236 Lefebvre, Henri 276 Left Bank Group 44 Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, The 3 Lehman, Peter 64, 68 n.27, 153 n.1, 154 n.13 Lenica, Jan 36 Lennon, John 226 Leroy, Mervyn 20 Lesage, Jean 170–1, 177, 203 Leslie, John 294, 298 Leszkowski, Pawel 40 Levin, Peter 151 Lewis, Gabe 233 Lewis, Herschell Gordon 26, 72, 289 Lewis, Jon 23–4, 29 n.21, 29 n.27 Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love 278 Libman, Leslie 239

Index Life (magazine) 227 Life After Manson 239 Lincoln, Fred 291 Lindsay, John 99 Ling, Suzanna 247, 251 Link, André ix, 16, 169, 171, 173, 175, 181–2, 190, 201–17 Lions Gate Entertainment Group, see Lionsgate Lionsgate 203 Lippe, Richard 28 n.7 Lipstick 155 n.48, 193, 293, 302 Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, The 20–1, 246, 256 Lockard, Joe 40, 47 n.10 Logan, Christopher 95 Lonely Crime, The 143 Long, Walter 99 Looking For Mr Goodbar 302 Love Rites 37 Löw, Martina 276, 284 n.15 Lulu 37 Lustig, William 290 Lyman, Mel 223, 241 n.2 Lyn, Dawn 254, 260–1 Macbeth 236 MacGregor, Sean 20, 246, 260 McCall, Joan 254 McCoy, Tim 290 McDaniel, Hattie 104 McKee, Ian 96, 107 n.11 McNamara, John 239 McNaughton, John 290 Mad Max: Fury Road 8, 29 n.15, 86 n.20 Madden, Lee 222, 233 Malick, Terrence 92, 124 Man from Hong Kong, The 3 Man from Laramie, The 101 Mana, Yaeko 58, 67 n.16 Manhattan 93 Maniac 290, 293 Mann, Anthony 101 Manson (1973) 18, 221, 229–30, 232, 239 Manson (2009) 238 Manson Family 4, 18, 221, 230, 240 Manson Family Movies 238–9 Manson Family, The 239 Manson, Charles x, 17–19, 221–43

Index Manson, My Name is Evil 238 Manson’s Lost Girls 239 Mapplethorpe, Robert 277 Margin, The 37 Margolin, Stuart 101 Marker, Chris 36, 44 Markov, Margaret 78 Marlow, Alan 280 Marsh, Mae 99 Martin 3 Martin, Helen 103 Martin, Ross 148 Mason, Eric 252 Matalon, Eddy 16, 180, 201 Mathijs, Ernest 4, 28 n.11, 39, 46 n.5, 65 n.2, 184 n.45, 185 n.46 Mawrwa, Joseph P. 289 Melcher, Terry 223–4 Mendik, Xavier ix–x, 1–31, 39, 46 n.5, 161–88, 189–200, 264 n.11 Merrick, Laurence 18, 221, 229, 232 Metzger, Radley 272–3, 280, 290 Meyer, Russ 6, 38 Middleton, Jonas 26, 291 Mikurda, Kuba 38, 46 n.3, 47 n.13, 47 nn.16–17, 47 n.22, 47 n.24 Milland, Ray 213 Miller, Marvin 22, 24, 29 n.26 Miller, Michael 143 Mills, Donna 149 Mitchell, Artie 279–80 Mitchell, Jim 279 Mitchell, Sharon 304–5 Mlodzik, Ronald 209 Modleski, Tania 289, 309 n.11 Moede, Titus 281 mondo 19, 230, 232, 239, 241 n.17 Mondo Cane 232 Mondo Mod 232 Monsoya, Carlos 234 Montessori, Maria 259, 263 n.2 Montgomery, Elizabeth 146–7 Moran, John 207, 215 n.14 Morrison, Shelley 254 Ms. 45 14, 139, 141 Muller, Eddie 25, 29 n.30 Mulvey, Laura 67 n.20, 71, 77, 288, 304, 308 n.5 Munger, Chris 20, 246

323

Munich 99 My Secret Garden 278 Nakata, Hideo 59 Naked Angels 231 Nashawaty, Chris 83 National Film Board 162, 182 n.4, 192 Natsuyagi, Isao 58 NBC 141–3, 146, 239, 278 New York Times, The 10, 22, 93–4, 98–9, 142, 277 Night God Screamed, The 222, 233 Nixon, Richard 23–4, 94, 100, 103, 106 n.6, 107 n.23, 108 n.31, 111, 113–16, 122, 133 n.5, 133 n.6, 133 n.8, 226, 274, 281 Nizet, Charles 289 O’Leary, Timothy 273, 282, 283 n.9, 284 n.30 Oleszczyk, Michał 38, 46 n.3, 47 n.13, 47 nn.16–17, 47 n.22, 48 n.24 Olga’s Girls 26 Once Upon a Time 36 Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood 240 One-Armed Boxer 3 Opening of Misty Beethoven, The 26, 291 Oprah Winfrey Show, The 144 Orange is the New Black 8 Ōshima, Nagisa 5, 38 Ōta, Masako, see Kaji, Meiko Other Side of Madness, The 221, 232 Owen, Jonathan 40 Padva, Gilad 214 n.3 Palmer, Gail 290 Parent, Steve 224 Paris, Henry 26, 291 Parpart, Lee 215 n.12 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 5, 38 Peckinpah, Sam 204 Peeping Tom 26, 290 Peopletoys 20–1, 246, 254–5, 258, 260–1, 263 n.7, 265 n.18 Perl, F.C. 290 Perlstein, Rick 106 n.1, 236, 241 n.18 Perry, Peter 232 Peter Pan Syndrome 20, 245–67 Pettibon, Raymond 238 Pezzotta, Alberto 38 Piaget, Jean 246, 264 n.10

324 pink films 52 pinku eiga, see pink films Pitt, Brad 240 Plath, Sylvia 257, 277 Playboy (magazine) 275–6 Pleasance, Donald 163, 189 Polanski, Roman 17, 224, 236, 240 Poston, Brooks 232 Powell, Michael 26, 290 Power of Play: Learning What Comes Naturally, The 20, 29 n.20, 260, 263 n.4 Prince, Phil 290 Prisoner: Cell Block H 8 Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann, The 280 Private Collection, A 42 Probyn, Elspeth 144, 155 n.30 Prosperi, Franco 232 Psycho 26, 134 n.28, 290 Punishment of Anne, The, see The Image Quadrant (company) 170, 203 Quarry, Robert 234 Quiet Revolution: State, Society and the Canadian Horror Film, The x, 182, 200 Railsback, Steve 228 Rains, Darby Lloyd 280 Rancho Notorious 101 Rape and Marriage 151 Rape Squad 293, 300 Rape Victims, The 143 Ravager, The 289 Raw Meat, see Death Line Ray, Man 43 Read, Jacinda 55, 65, 66 n.6, 74, 86 n. 18, 139–40, 152–3, 154 n.6, 154 n.8, 154 n.10, 154 n.13, 155 n.36, 155 n.39, 155 n.43, 156 n.51 Redfield, William 94 Reed, Oliver 166, 190 Reed, Robert 145 Reel People 281 Reid, Ella 77 Reitman, Ivan 162, 166, 170, 175, 181, 191–2, 197, 204, 210, 211 Renaissance 36 Renaud, Chantal 173 Resnais, Alain 44

Index Resurrection of Eve, The 280 Return of Frank James, The 101 Revenge for a Rape 141, 145–8, 150, 150 Rich, David Lowell 141, 148 Ring, see Ringu Ringu 59 Riot on Sunset Strip 231 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 44 Roberts, Robert 222, 233 Robinson, Jeremy Mark 38, 46 n.7 Robinson, Mark 40 Roddy, Jan Peterson 208, 215 n.13, 215 n.19 Rollin, Jean 35 Rolling Stone (magazine) 223, 226 Rollo May 275 Romero, Eddie 71 Romero, George A. 1–3 Rosen, Ruth 279, 284 n.24 Rothman, Stephanie 8, 71 Rozakis, Gregory 95 Rubin, Jerry 229 Run, Angel, Run! 231 Russell, Diana E.H. 288, 308 n.3 Russell, Ken 6, 38 Russo, Vito 81, 87 n.34 Sagal, Boris 146 Sanders, Ed 19, 226, 237, 240, 241 nn.4–8, 242 n.20, 242 n.25 Sargeant, Jack 300, 309 n.28, 310 n.32 Satan’s Sadists x, 18–19, 221–2, 234, 235–6 Saxon, John C.W. 180 Schaefer, Eric 37, 46 n.1, 230–1, 241 n.11, 241 n.13 Schmidtmer, Christiane 82, 83 School 36 Schubart, Rikke 58, 61, 67 n.19, 67 n.23, 185 n.63 Schumacher, Joel 148 Schwartz, Nancy 144, 154 n.18, 154 n.23, 155 n.32, 152 n.35 Sconce, Jeffrey 4, 28 n.8, 85 n.8, 309 n.11 Scorsese, Martin 91, 302 Scott, Ridley 92 Screck, Nicholas 238 Scum of the Earth 26, 289 Search and Destroy 190 Searchers, The 101, 107 n.25

Index Sebring, Jay 224 See How They Run 141 Sex and Fury 55 Sex and the Single Girl 278 Sex Wish 290 Sex World 26, 292 Sexton, Jamie 4, 28 n.11, 65 n.2 Shackleton, Allan 237 Shamata, Chuck 195, 206 Shankland, Tom 261, 265 n.19 Shebib, Donald 163, 184 n.35, 189, 191, 205 Sheen, Martin 256 Sheffield, Jeremy 261 Sheldon, David 20, 246 Sheriff, The 141, 148–9 Sherman, Gary 3 Shiffen, Arlo 222, 233 Shindō, Kaneto 55 Shinohara, Tōru 57 Shiraishi, Kayoko 63 Shivers ix, 14, 16, 161, 174–8, 176, 177, 184 n.45, 185 n.48, 185 n.50, 201, 209–10, 212 Showgirls 148 Shuman, Mort 256 Shurayuki-hime, see Lady Snowblood Siegel, Don 4, 10, 91, 111, 124 Sign of Aquarius 222, 233 Silent Witness 143 Silva, Henry 190 Silver, Jeanne 305 Silvera, Joey 295 Simkin, Stevie 29 n.17 Simonson, Archie 143 Sisters 302 Slade, Joseph 291, 309 n.15 Slagle, Brandon 238 Slick, Grace 275 Slouching Towards Bethlehem 277 Smale, Gale 254 Smith, Alexis 256 Smith, Mark 252 Snuff 19, 222, 236–7 Soja, Edward 276 Something’s Happening 232 Spahn, George 223 Spanish Tragedy, The 97 Spasms 190

325

Speed, Carol 77, 79 Spielberg, Steven 99 Spinelli, Anthony 26, 281, 292 Starr, Monique 296 Starrett, Jack 231 Stellar, Carolyn 254, 261 Stone, Jean 281 Story of Joanna, The 26, 290–1 Story of O, The 290 Story of Sin, The 36 Stranger in a Strange Land 277 Straw Dogs 11, 193, 204 Strickland, Peter 140 Stroud, Don 20, 206–7 Studio 54 277 Sugich, Michael 233 Sweet Captive 281 Sweet Savior 222, 233 Swope, Tracy Brooks 145 Sykes, Brenda 148 Takers, The 234 Tale of Genji, The 56 Tamblyn, Russ 19, 235 Taming of Rebecca, The 290 Tarantino, Quentin 6, 51, 240 Tate, Sharon 17, 224, 233, 236, 240 Taxi Driver 91, 302 Telefilm, see Canadian Film Development Council, The Terminal Island 8, 71, 78 Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The 2, 236 Theatre of Blood 3 Theatre of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal, The 36 Thou Shalt Not Kill . . . Except 2238 Through The Looking Glass 26, 291 Time to Kill, A 148 Tōei 52, 54, 57, 59, 67 n.15 Toolbox Murders, The 290 Toumarkine, Doris 280 Trapped 190, 198 Treglia, Laura 3, 6–7, 51–69 Trenchard-Smith, Brian 3 Trop, Elaine 233 Trudeau, Pierre 15–16, 167, 183 n.21, 201 Trump, Donald 10, 12, 24, 116, 132 Tuck, Greg 278–9, 284 n.21, 284 n.23 Turan, Kenneth 271–2, 272 n.1, 283 n.3 Turner, Tierre 254, 261

326

Index

Ultimate Degenerate, The 289 Unwilling Lovers 290 Update on Crime in Arizona 102, 108 n.27 Vaccaro, Brenda 190, 195, 206 Valérie ix, 171–3, 172, 203 Van Houten, Leslie 225 VanBebber, Jim 239 Vatnsdal, Caelum 205, 215 n.7, 215 n.9 Verhoeven, Paul 148 Vibrator Nation 278 Vimenet, Pascal 38 Vincendeau, Ginette 39 Viola, Joe 71 Vogel, Amos 4, 28 n.10, 72–3, 85 n.5, 86 n.14 Vogue (magazine) 278 Voskanian, Robert 20, 246 Vygotsky, Lev 259, 263 n.3 Walker, Johnny 10, 29 n.10, 308 Walking Dead, The 8, 73 Wallner, Herman 251 Wallthal, Henry B. 99 Walters, Barbara 278 Walters, Suzanna Danuta 55, 66 n.5, 66 n.7 Ward, Anna 278, 284 n.19 Washitani, Hana 58, 66 n.10, 66 n.13, 67 nn.16–17 Watanabe, Fumio 60 Water Power x, 25, 27, 287, 289, 292–3, 300–9 Watkins, Paul 232 Watson, Charles ‘Tex’ 224 Waugh, Thomas 16, 29 n.19, 202–3, 214, 215 n.4 Wedding in White 163, 189, 191–2, 194 Wentworth 8 Wertheim, Ron, see Shiffen, Arlo Weston, Armand 290 Whatling, Clare 75, 80, 86 n.21, 87 n.32

Wheatley, Helen 144, 155 n.31, 155 n.33 White Album 223 White Slaves of Chinatown 289 Wicke, Jennifer 272, 283 n.7 Wielebska, Kamila 43, 47 Wild Angels 231 Wild Riders 234 Williams, Linda 26–7, 29 n.32, 290, 292, 309 n.13, 309 n.20 Williams, Linda Ruth 26, 29 n.31, 291–2, 309 n.19, 309 n.22 Williamson, J.W. 215 n.13 Willoughby, Marlene 304, 306 Wilson, Dennis 223 Wilson, Scott 210, 216 n.25 Winchester 73 101 Winner, Michael 1, 4, 10–11, 91, 93–4, 101, 111, 146, 302 Winter Heat 290 WiP, see Women in Prison Wishman, Doris 72, 289 Witney, William 231 Women in Cages 71, 78, 80, 83–4 Women in Prison 4–5, 7–8, 54–5, 57, 61, 64, 71–88, 83 Women’s Liberation Movement 275, 288 Wood, Robin 3, 28 n.7, 175, 185 n.46, 302, 310 n.31 Woynarowski, Jakub 38 WRC-TV 143 Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko, see Black Cat Yotsuya Kaidan, see Ghost Tale of Yotsuya Yu, Wang 2–3 Zalcock, Bev 73, 75, 79, 85, 86 n.16, 86 n.22, 87 n.30, 87 n.36 Zappa, Frank 302 Zarchi, Meir 12, 139, 204, 293 Zelizer, Julian E. 279, 284 n.26 Zito, Stephen F. 271, 282 n. 1, 283 n.3