Death Line and the sociology of cannibalism

Two years before The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a British film weighed into the 1970s gloomfest with a more socially conscious narrative about an army of dispossessed wreaking their vengeance on the corrupt and the pampered who inhabit the streets of London. No, this isn’t a documentary on the miners’ strikes but Gary Sherman’s 1973 film Deathline (aka Raw Meat in the United States), and as far as British horror goes,  many horror aficionados, from Kim Newman to Edgar Wright postulate this film as one of the best British horror movies of the seventies.

The remark about miners’ strike is not a flippant one: one Rotten Tomatoes reviewer calls this film “the first (or only) ethnographic urban legend horror film”* and as a social commentary it is quite powerful: as striking as the spade through the head delivered to a hapless victim in one of the film’s most memorable scenes. As the film tells us, in 1892 a small group of workers (conveniently for the narrative eight men and four women) are trapped during the excavation works for a tube station; left to fend for themselves by unscrupulous employers who have gone bankrupt and thus cannot afford to rescue them, the workers survive first through cannibalism and then by snatching waifs and strays from lonely tube stations. Paul Weller take note. Although the ‘monster's’ actions are brutal, we cannot help but feel sympathy for his situation. Indeed, the film is effectively the American Sherman holding a mirror up to British society at the time. Through the salacious antics of James Manfred OBE who combs the flesh pits of Soho for his sexual kicks prior to becoming the film’s first victim to Christopher Lee’s darkly forbidding Government official, Stratton-Villiers, warning the working class coppers away from Manfred’s case, there is a sense of darker forces at work above and below the tube-line.  As he investigates Manfred’s disappearance, Calhoun discovers that he is not the first to go missing at Russell Square tube station. Previous missing persons – a man named Cohen and a grocer from Kilburn named Panowski suggest that minorities in Britain do not merit a second glance. However, as Calhoun puts it, Manfred’s disappearance cannot be shut away in a file somewhere. Privilege and justice, in this picture of Britain, go hand in hand.

Death Line is indeed a film about consumption, corruption and exploitation. The monster’s cannibal antics are mirrored in the Manfred’s own consumption of female flesh; his money buys sexual release and provides him with enough arrogance to objectify any lone woman who happens to pass him by as a receptacle for his lust. Thus, when he himself becomes food for the monster and his dying mate, we can’t help feeling some sense of karma.

There is a pervasive sense of grime and disease present in the monster’s lair which sits at the heart of the labyrinth of tunnels nesting beneath the streets of London. The famous tracking shot which pans across a butcher’s shop of human remains, places the spectator knee deep in the filth of maggots and rats taking their rightful place in the food chain. As one of my students put it, the sense of dirt is inescapable and the accompanying sounds, the steady metronomic dripping of water and the monster’s groans of despair, lend a sense of realism to the scene which is missing from its recent remake, 2004’s Creep.

But consumption isn’t the domain of just the cannibals below the surface. Inspector Calhoun is supplied with a constant stream of tea; he stuffs sausages into his sidekick’s mouth and gets pissed in an afterhours bout during which he jokingly threatens the bemused landlord with a summons if he doesn’t continue serving drinks. Pat and Alex, the two young protagonists who become enmeshed in the monster’s need to replace his dead mate, serve up a fried breakfast in scenes of domesticity which ironically mirror those ‘down below’. And of course there is the symbolic consumption: the machinery of capitalism which Moloch-like chews up and spits out the unfortunate souls who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – the disenfranchised who could stand for pretty much any of the impoverished who had so much truck with the successive failures of British government in the early seventies.

As a study in man-made monsters it offers a Frankenstein for the 1970s, the flotsam and jetsam of society whose instinct to survive is defeated by a world that is equally brutal and unforgiving. As Alex says when he and Pat encounter the dying Manfred, “in New York we just step over [the bodies].” Pat’s response, as the archetypal nurturing female, is to default to pity although if she had been alone in the tube station only a few moments before, she too might have dealt Manfred a meaty blow with her patent yellow thigh-highs. There is genuine pity for the film’s monster, as much pity as revulsion: does he deserve to die? The scene in which we see the bodies of his ancestors lying in state on storage racks and buried with a token or trinket taken from other victims suggests that there is innate dignity in even the most atavistic of human creatures. The need to build a past amidst the chaos of the present offers a glimpse into what makes us civilised. Surrounded by the bones of his ancestors, what does the monster make of the world above? What does he see there? Furtive encounters between un-consenting adults, lonely women left to fend for themselves on desolate platforms: no wonder he is unable to make sense of a world which engenders alienation and discontent. Could his mantra of ‘mind the doors’, the only words he hears and which he repeats parrot fashion throughout the film, instead be a comment on borders and boundaries?  The monster’s transgression is not in murder and cannibalism: his mistake is in his attempt to breed anew with a race of people who rejected him in the first place.

*(http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/raw_meat/)

Picnic at Hanging Rock: a principle of uncertainty

“Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time...”

“Each electron, therefore, must be passing through both slits at the same time!” Stephen Hawking- A Brief History of Time

A principle of uncertainty underscores Peter Weir’s 1975 film version of Joan Lindsey’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film that is on the one hand about institutions and the physical and psychological constraints of life in an Australia that is still politically under the stranglehold of a monarch residing on the other side of the world but which is also about the uncertainty of a landscape that is at once profoundly new and yet primitive and preternatural. The narrative tells the story of four Australian school girls and their Maths teacher who disappear on a trip to Hanging Rock on Valentine’s Day 1900. After several days of full scale searching by the authorities, teachers and other members of the school, a heroic (or is it guilt-ridden?) mission by two young men who might have had some sort of encounter with the girls results in the finding of one of the missing pupils, Irma. Note the multiple conditional clauses in the previous sentence: this is a film that refuses, like the eponymous rock itself, to yield its meaning to rational investigation.  The other girls are never discovered and one of their friends, Sara, distraught at the prospect of returning to an orphanage because of non-payment of her fees by her guardians, throws herself from an upstairs window into a greenhouse and kills herself.

The theme of imprisonment pervades almost every scene; the girls and their mistresses struggle with their own sense of institutionalisation in Appleyard College, a school administered by a seemingly ruthless and ultimately corrupt matriarch and which is itself struggling within the financial constraints placed upon it by a combination of failing creditors and the need to dress itself in the affluence to be expected by a fee paying school at the end of the Victorian era. The girls themselves are caged in what Scout in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird calls the ‘starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary’, their burgeoning sexuality kept narratively and visually under wraps in an opening scene in which the girls form a daisy chain in order to tighten each others’ bodices with maximum efficiency.

This scene, with its nascent homoerotic undercurrent, points to Michel Foucault’s notion of a Victorian sexuality that is both incited to discourse (the girls breathlessly recite Poe’s A Dream within a Dream) and yet is also buried beneath an opposing discourse of restraint. The spectator is caught in voyeuristic pleasure (and I am reminded of Leopold Bloom gazing on at the girls in the Nausicaa passage in Ulysses) and the result is an eroticism that succeeds because of the covering up of bodies rather than the revelation of them. Characters are imprisoned by the heat into shaded enclaves. Perhaps one of the most explicit victims of imprisonment is Sara, who is forced to remain behind (presumably for her guardian’s non-payment of fees) and who is cruelly castigated by Mrs Appleyard for not being able to memorise verbatim The Wreck of the Hesperus as well as ridiculing the girl’s own attempts at verse. Longfellow’s poem, in which a the daughter of a ship’s captain is lashed to the mast to prevent her from being thrown overboard by the storm, prefigures perhaps the most startling of images in the film:  that of Sara physically restrained to a wall in order to correct her posture by Miss Lumley whilst the other girls enjoy their daily bout of callisthenics.

But against this background of restraint and imprisonment, the girls’ disappearance can be read as a form of escape. Throughout the film, soft focus photography places the girls themselves firmly within the gaze of a camera which emphasises their youth and their aesthetic beauty in a series of filmic equivalents of Pre-Raphaelite shots. As Miranda begins her ascent onto the rock, her French mistress Mme de Poitiers comments on the classical beauty of Miranda, one of the girls who disappears, referring to her as ‘a Botticelli angel’. This erotic speculation of bodies is also reinforced later on when the two young men who will eventually lead the search for the missing girls watch Miranda, Irma and Marion make their tentative way across the terrain, considering what the girls might look like beneath the layers of cotton which serve to conceal bodies rather than reveal. In the film’s most erotically charged moment, when the girls reach the top of the rock, the girls remove their stockings in slow motion close ups  which fragments their bodies in true Mulveyan fashion and these shots intercut with low angles of the girls dancing in Pagan abandon beneath the midday sun signify both a metaphorical and a physical release. Their barefoot ascent through the dark recesses of the rock are met with indignant horror and revulsion by Edith who later reports that she saw Miss McGraw  running up the rock in her bloomers, another display of release and escape from the confines placed upon their gender and their sexuality.

 

Weir’s film possesses the ambience of something akin to folk horror, only here the thing that is unearthed and awakened is not some relic of a pagan past or a forgotten ritual that will free the inhibitions of its protagonists; instead it is the mystical and eerie presence of a landscape with which a Colonial European settler has not yet (nor will ever) be able to fathom and which will ultimately absorb whose who engage with its mystical being. The rock itself looms over the narrative, shifting position and shape under the transformative light of the unforgiving sun. Languorous shots of the girls seen through apertures and orifices reinforce the sense of voyeurism in the film but in these point of view shots, there is a sense that the landscape itself is the voyeur, watching the human actors as they attempt to penetrate its mysteries.

In a lecture posted on the web, Paul Atkinson and Marcia Pope comment on the use of sound within the film at the point when the girls encounter the rock:

“it crosses an interesting boundary between intra-diegetic sound — sound that is explicable within the framed onscreen narrative, and extra-diegetic sound — sound that comes from outside the frame, such as soundtrack music or a voiceover. The sound is actually identified in the script as the sound of cicadas, but it is much more ominous, and we’re never sure if it is a sound that the characters hear” (see http://velorum.ballarat.edu.au/~patkinson/hx513/cinelec10.htm)

Whether the characters hear the sound is irrelevant: for me, the sound here suggests a heightened Eno-esque ambience reminiscent of Ligeti’s soundscapes from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the suggestion that, like Kubrick’s monolith, the earth itself has a greater consciousness, one that can manipulate the warp and woof of time and space. In an essay in this month’s Sight and Sound (March 2013), Mark Fisher discusses his own audio-essay On Vanishing Land, and talks of how landscapes ‘[demand] to be engaged with on [their] own terms’. For Fisher, we can discover in the landscape a sense of the eerie which, he states:

‘usually concerns agency ...it suggests an intentionality or an intelligence ... [it] is about the encounter with the unknown.”

By this criterion, Picnic at Hanging Rock moves from beyond the uncanny (that which should remain hidden has resurfaced) to the eerie (for Fisher ‘the traces of a departed agent whose purposes cannot fully be known’), and it is in the rock itself that we must look for traces of the eerie. It is apposite that the school mistress that disappears is a Mathematician; even as the girls ascend the rock, she is contemplating dimension and space. In fact, the uncertainty principle at work in the geological formations under which she shelters offer a more [im]precise mathematical dilemma: that the observer can know where something is or where it is going but not both simultaneously. In its depiction of the eerie, it might be argued that Picnic at Hanging Rock is that most Lynchian of films and in its soundtrack especially, one is reminded of many of Lynch’s most nightmarish scenes:  the red room of Twin Peaks, the opening scene of Eraserhead, the seething mass of insect life in Blue Velvet, or the atmosphere of evil that accompanies Fire Walk with Me.

 

In many ways, Picnic at Hanging Rock displays many of the characteristics of folk horror. Is it nature that is disturbed? Or is it the linearity of time and space? Just as quantum mechanics permits the existence of parallel narratives so we must allow for such an event here. The girls’ removal of the trappings and accoutrements of Victorian sensibility suggests a passing into a different age. Time has ceased to be: all time has stopped and they are, quite literally out of time. Their entry into the fissure of the eponymous rock is a re-entry into the earth, a Venus in reverse perhaps.  In arguably Lynch’s greatest narrative of uncertainty, Mulholland Drive, Betty/Camilla disappear into another story, one that might or might not be a dream, beautiful arrangements of electron particles which bounce off into a singularity beyond the narrative into which they were born, only this time instead of the blue box there is only the rock, the rock which has waited like a celestial guardian for a million years for this moment.