Medusa in the Mirror

Abstract

In her influential 1992 study of American horror films, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover observes that, while studies have been made of Alfred Hitchcock’s ambivalence toward his female characters, no such study has been made of Brian De Palmas.¹ Certainly, however, a critical consensus on the misogynistic sensibility of this still-active director (his latest films being Redacted, his multimedia 2007 film about the current Iraq War, and his 2006 adaptation of James Ellroy’s 1987 noir novel The Black Dahlia ) would appear to have been reached. In an essay on Carrie (De Palma, 1976), Shelley Stamp Lindsey excoriates the director for his demonization of Carrie’s emergent female sexuality: “Carrie presents a masculine fantasy in which the feminine is constituted as horrific … the film presents female sexuality as monstrous and constructs femininity as a subject position impossible to occupy.”² Abigail Lynn Coykendall offered a more nuanced and complex but, ultimately, incoherent reading of Carrie, one that makes the fatal critical error of collapsing the film’s sensibility with that of its source material. In an important essay on masochism in the monster film, Aviva Briefel encouragingly challenges Lindsey’s schematic reading but essentially draws the same general conclusions about the significance of the film.³

Where is the ebullient woman, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives … hasn’t accused herself of being a monster?

—Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”