Abstract
As chapter 2 makes apparent, movies are sites of struggle over contested social meanings. The graphic images of violence against women in Minority Report (2002) are used in service of a story about the limits of the state’s restrictive power, whether in the form of incarceration or surveillance. Déjà Vu (2006) has a similar focus, except in this film the images of graphic violence enacted upon a black woman’s body entail a subtle critique of still not color-blind law enforcement in the American South. At the same time, the film justifies the use of extensive domestic surveillance to combat terrorism. Unlike Minority Report and Déjà Vu, Corpse Bride (2005) centers a woman character and her death in its title, but the bride is actually the “other” woman in relation to the couple in a traditional marriage plot. The tale of the character Emily’s death is used to meditate on marriage and to bring the initially hesitant male character willingly and joyously to the wedding altar. Thus, Corpse Bride renews the importance of marriage and legitimates it for future generations. The films I discuss in this chapter also do cultural work through the murder of teenage girls and women, but in The Lovely Bones (2009) and Disturbia (2007) there are different constellations of issues that circulate in relation to them: family, serial killers, loss, filmic adaptation, and the meaning of haunting/witnessing.
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Notes
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2002).
Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 17.
Pamela McClintock, “Fresh Promo Push Strengthens ‘Bones,’“ Daily Variety 306, no. 12 (January 19, 2010): 12.
Tony Williams, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 16.
Brian Jarvis, “Monsters Inc.: Serial Killers and Consumer Culture,” Crime, Media, Culture 3, no. 3 (2007): 327.
Julie Passanante Elman, “After School Special Education: Rehabilitative Television, Teen Citizenship, and Compulsory Able-Bodiedness,” Felevision & New Media 11, no. 4 (July 2010): 263.
Neil Badmington, “Theorizing Posthumanism,” Cultural Critique 53 (Winter 2003): 13.
Sarah Whitney, “Uneasy Lie the Bones: Alice Sebold’s Postfeminist Gothic,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 29, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 351.
Alice Sebold, Lucky (New York: Scribner, 1999), 33–34.
According to Randal Johnson, editor of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production, “habitus” is Bourdieu’s term to describe “a long process of inculcation, beginning in early childhood, which becomes a ‘second sense’ or a second nature. According to Bourdieu’s definition the dispositions represented by the habitus are ‘durable’ in that they last throughout the agent’s lifetime.” The dispositions, writes Randal, are “not always calculated” but generate “practices and perceptions” (Randal Johnson, “Editor’s Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature, and Culture,” in Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], 5).
This scene is more problematic in the film version than in the novel because, as Pier Paolo Pasolini avers, “images are always concrete” (quoted in Charles S. Tashiro, Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History of Film [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998], 12). In the film, Susie remains 14, while her classmate Ray has matured. I agree with the reviewer Richard Alleva, who opines, “The scene was embarrassing enough in print but the movie verges on the obscene as the twenty-two-year-old Ruth morphs into the fourteen-year-old Susie with the adult Ray on top of her. What was Peter Jackson thinking?” (“Restless Spirits: The Lovely Bones & A Single Man,” Commonweal 137, no. 3 [February 12, 2010]: 18. Other writers, including the anonymous peer reviewer of this manuscript, note that the scene has a queer resonance as written and filmed. Elizabeth Tallent writes, “What does Susie want with her friend’s body? Because her rapist murderer deprived her not only of any future experience of sex but also of her virginity, Susie wants to have sex with a chosen boy, and not just any sex, loss of virginity sex.. .The particular body borrowed by Susie in order to experience the loss of virginity has been carefully constructed as lesbian… Is a lesbian body, by virtue of not ‘belonging’ to any male, more available for appropriation?” (“The Trouble with Postmortality,” Threepenny Review, no. 101 [Spring 2005]: 8).
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Lmagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 63.
John Durham Peters, “Witnessing,” Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 6 (2001): 709; emphases in the original.
Nina C. Leibman, “Piercing the Truth: Mildred and Patriarchy,” Text and Performance Quarterly 8, no. 1 (November 1988): 41.
Frances L. Restuccia, quoted in Margaret Carol Davison, “Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” Women’s Studies 33, no. 1 (January–February 2004): 53. When I streaked by her, my hand leapt out to touch her, touch the last face, feel the last connection to Earth in this not-so-standard issue teenage girl” (Sebold, The Lovely Bones, 37).
Laura-Marie von Czarnowsky, “The Postmortal Rape Survivor and the Paradox of Female Agency across Different Media: Alice Sebold’s Novel The Lovely Bones and Its 2009 Film Adaptation,” Gender Forum 41 (2013): 2.
Danny Munso, “Life after Death,” Creative Screenwriting 16, no. 6 (November/December 2009): 36.
Story details from the Honora Rieper murder are from Ian Pryor, “A Different Kind of Murder: Heavenly Creatures,” in Peter Jackson: From Prince of Splatter to Lord of the Rings (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 130.
Alan Levine, “Bad Old Days”: The Myth of the 1950s (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 124.
Ronald D. Cohen, “The Delinquents: Censorship and Youth Culture in Recent U.S. History,” History of Education Quarterly 37, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 255. Cohen is also quoting
Richard E. Gordon, Katherine K. Gordon and Max Gunther, The Split-Level Trap (New York, 1960), 142.
Robert Corber, “Resisting History: Rear Window and the Limits of the Postwar Settlement,” boundary 2 19, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 137–145.
Hitchcock’s “exchange (or interchangeability) of guilt” is noted in Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” in Film Genre Reader LV, 4th ed., ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 86.
See John Belton, “Introduction: Spectacle and Narrative,” in Alfred Hitch cock’s Rear Window, ed. John Belton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), for a discussion of the reflexive aspects of Rear Window and attendant lore about the film.
See Jane Caputi, “The Sexual Politics of Murder,” in Violence against Women: The Bloody Footprints, ed. Pauline B. Bart and Eileen Geil Morgan (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993), 5.
Although I am aware of the “pornography wars” among feminists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, what I am concerned with here is violent pornography, and I strongly believe that this kind of porn is a privilege and tactic of the dominant. Women are not socially dominant. For a discussion of these issues, see Diana E. H. Russell, ed., Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993);
Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and Fantasy in America (New York: Grove Press, 1996);
Alison Assiter and Carol Avedon, eds., Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism (London: The Pluto Press, 1993); and
Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 6th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 727–741.
Jane Caputi and Diana Russell, “Femicide: Sexist Terrorism against Women,” in Femicide: The Politics of Women Killing, ed. Jill Radford and Diana Russell (Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan, 1992), 19.
Max Waltman, “Rethinking Democracy: Legal Challenges to Pornography and Sex Inequality in Canada and the United States,” Political Research Quarterly 63, no. 1 (March 2010): 218–219.
Jill Radford and Diana Russell, eds., Femicide: The Politics of Women Killing (Toronto: Maxwell MacMillan, 1992), 207.
Catherine MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 86.
Robert K. Ressler, Ann W Burgess, and John E. Douglas, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988), referenced in
Jane Caputi, “Advertising Femicide: Lethal Violence against Women in Pornography and Gorenography,” in Femicide: The Politics of Women Killing, ed. Jill Radford and Diana Russell (Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan, 1992), 215–216.
Diana Russell, “Introduction: The Politics of Femicide,” in Femicide in Global Perspective, ed. Diana E. H. Russell and Roberta A. Harmes (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 3.
Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11.
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© 2014 Joanne Clarke Dillman
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Dillman, J.C. (2014). Family Films Gone Terribly Wrong. In: Women and Death in Film, Television, and News. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137452283_3
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