A captive audience
Tonight the Stanford Theater screened The Spiral Staircase (1947). The bars of this staircase blasted with off-stage flood lights cast lines and lines of shadows across the face and bodies of everyone climbing up and down our wealthy homestead mansion. Do some people indulge in self-inflicted captivity? We watch a woman being watched walking into her house. When this woman walks into the kitchen she scares the cook to death. Its my favorite part. A second ago we were frightened for her and now, look, she is the one doing the scaring. Sharing the same point of view as the killer, does the horror genre aim to make us feel guilty for the pleasure we audience members take in watching?
Everyone’s (mine, yours, the whole entire cast’s) concern is Helen: She suffers aphasia and the previous three women murdered in town also had ‘disabilities’ or ‘imperfections’ as our killer will later confess. But it isn’t just that. The film teaches us to suspect the womanizer of the film all along, even his mother thought he was the killer, but it turns out to be his step-brother, who is a much worse enemy of the people: he’s a college professor! His unworthy profession has proven inadequately masculine to make his late father, an accomplished hunter and presumable taxidermist, proud. The year is 1947 and against the back-drop of World War II perhaps Hollywood can’t help but depict intellectuals as either eugenicists or psychopaths.
Meanwhile down the street, another coming-of-age film is being screened: Hannibal Rising. This time we learn exactly what triggered our generation’s most cinematic serial killer:
The story begins in Eastern Europe at the desperate end of World War II. For many it was no longer a conflict of nations but one of individual survival – at any cost. A young Hannibal watches from only steps away as his parents violently die…I like the way our attention must be pointed to that personal, private battle of our young protagonist. The subtitle of the film, Behind the Mask, now places captivity in the form of that private mask he must wear for our protection, rather than those more social bars of the mansion’s spiral staircase which instigated the need for protection.
Showing a cunning aptitude for science he is accepted into medical school, which serves to hone his skills and provide the tools to exact justice on the war criminals that haunt him day and night. This quest will ignite an insatiable lust within a serial killer who was not born, but made.You have to admire the way History whips into its opposite. Today, school miraculously provides the means of enacting power. The intellectual is not a sign of weakness, but the instrument of strength itself. It’s exactly what enables us to settle all bets with our past, to become masculine and powerful once more. The young, precocious Hannibal catches the entrepreneurial spirit of the age and turns himself into a killer, but certainly not yesterday’s stab and jab circus show, no, rather a surgical talent with a wall of medical degrees to prove it. Our intellectual today, still a psychopath, but now one who is at the very least his own boss.
Hannibal Rising may have something to teach us about the role of nihilism in today’s academy. Find out more about this by attending Entrepreneurial Week USA on Stanford campus this Saturday afternoon:
Kids can’t start too young to be in charge of their own education, and in charge of their own economic life. Our entrepreneurial economy presents almost unlimited opportunities for kids. . . . With Entrepreneurship Week USA about to begin, and with new technologies seeming to create opportunities for new businesses every day, now is the time to focus on giving our youth the tools for economic success.
Some Must Watch
I can’t help but remember The Spiral Staircase in a single image: Helen’s mouth blurred and absent through the eyes of her potential murderer. She has no voice, and the serial killer who sees her as imperfect envisions her as incomplete. Via editing, his very present and looming eye is replaced by her missing mouth. This speaks volumes.
Half way through the film, we learn why Helen lost her power of speech. Dr. Parry, the man who wants to marry Helen and “take care of her,” retells the story in order to shake his beloved from silence. On her way home from school one day, he recites, a fire engine raced by. Ten-year-old Helen followed it to her own home which was engulfed in flames. Held back by onlookers, Helen wanted to scream, to rush into the house to save her mother and father, but ultimately was unable to help. Her impotence was displaced onto her voice.
In the end, it is not Helen who kills the murderer but rather the stodgy and outspoken matriarch. Helen’s only response is to scream while Mrs. Warren, upright and at the top of the stairs, yells down to her dying son below. “Murderer,” she says, loud and clear, firing not one shot but rather an entire revolver full. Helen’s moment has come. She is to find Dr. Parry, but can only do so by speaking his number into the receiver of an old-fashioned crank phone. “One, eight, nine,” she says, her voice broken and breathless, unused for more than a decade. The operator connects. Our protagonist gathers strength and says “It is I, Helen.” In four words, she takes possession of herself. No one will speak for her again.
Rich wonderfully contextualizes this 1947 film and the contemporary Hannibal Rising with precise and incredibly perceptive analyses. His writings on this Silence of the Lambs prequel and the cultural context out of which it emerges provoke us to rethink the story of Solejman Talovic, the 18-year-old Bosnian refugee who opened fire in a Utah shopping mall the night before Valentine’s Day.
According to Utah reports, Talovic and his family moved to the U.S. in 1998 after living as refugees in Bosnia for five years. Talovic was only four years old when he and his mother fled their village on foot after Serbian forces overran it. Many attempted to leave the village, but only a few survived. Over the course of three years, approximately 200,000 individuals were slaughtered, including 8,000 Muslim men and boys, murdered by Serb forces in 1995. Solejman Talovic left the war, but it did not end when he arrived.
When he turned 16, Solejman’s mother pulled him out of school so he could work instead. On the day of the shooting, he showed up for his regular shift. Perhaps, in a life of dispossession, violence, and displacement, this young Bosnian refugee developed his own case of aphasia. And when he fired his gun into the shopping mall, he repeated the word “murderer” in an act swinging between autonomy and occupation:
“It is I, Solejman Talovic.”
Comment by kiersten — February 25, 2007 @ 2:17 am