Abstract
The author compares The Brain That Wouldn't Die, a 1960 B-movie with Jennifer Chambers Lynch's Boxing Helena (1993) in order to show how spectators not only take on the sadistic position which has long been thought to be the one position informing Hollywood cinema but tend to shift between different positions, including masochistic positions. Both movies relate the fetish fantasies of a doctor: in both narratives, the protagonists artificially maintain alive dismembered female bodies. In neither movie is the desire that produces these fetish fantasies clearly critiqued. To some extent, the Oedipal conflict might explain the sexual neuroses of the protagonists. However, both movies have the spectator shift the identification process from one character to the other. In Boxing Helena, such shifts in spectator identification are mirrored on the screen, creating a critique of film, film theory, and voyeurism.
Highlights
Vivian Sobchack states that often one cannot differentiate horror film from science fiction, but she does suggest a general difference: science fiction involves the threat of Man and horror involves the threat to individual men [37]
Both The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1960) and Boxing Helena (1993) could be characterized as horror, the former seems to have more in common with 1950s sciencefiction B-movies while the latter aspires to a psychological inner drama with a Merchant and Ivory setting
Released in 1960, The Brain is a product of a period in science fiction and horror film that tends to reinscribe institutional order
Summary
TROISIÈME CONGRÈS INTERNATIONAL SUR LE DISCOURS HUMANISTE. LA RÉSISTANCE HUMANISTE AU DOGMATISME AUJOURD’HUI ET À LA FIN DU MOYEN ÂGE THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HUMANISTIC DISCOURSE. HUMANISTIC RESISTANCE TO DOGMATISM TODAY AND AT THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES Volume 9, 2001.
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