USER’S GUIDE

HISTORY
DELIRIOUS started life as a printed fanzine back in the heyday of that type of literature. Running for 6 issues from 1992 to 1998, it was ultimately done in by nefarious distributors and the daunting pressures of work and parenthood, until being reborn here. The initial publication of DELIRIOUS on-line was a best-of presentation of six articles from its print incarnation, revised and re-edited, with copious brand-new illustrations and a horde of additional links to make it more user-friendly. Under the right circumstances, one new feature and several new links are to be added monthly thereafter.

THE GIST
The main approach of DELIRIOUS is the treatment of film as dream. This is by no means an original concept: Freud might have been the first to regard film this way in his approach to Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, but everyone and his analyst have since noted the correlation and written detailed works in that vein, including fascinating volumes by Bruce Kawin, Patrick Lucanio and Robert Eberwein. As the product of the imaginative input of more than one mind, however, most movies lend themselves to an analysis of not only an individual’s inner workings but those of a greater community as well, providing a profile of at least one facet of a given culture, society, subgroup, maybe even era. After a few years of such observation and critique, several running themes present themselves as worthy of repeat discussion, sometimes glossed over in the text of DELIRIOUS but perhaps benefiting from further explication here. The following, then, is a brief synopsis of these recurrent motifs common to both psychoanalytic and film theory:

THE NARRATIVE (DREAM) FORMULA. A character leaves one location early on for another, alternate or phantasmagorical realm, a

moving from one state of consciousness to another. Here, he or she meets an assortment of archetypal figures, embodiments of psychological data or facets of the self, frequently in an isolated environment (the uncharted island; castle; haunted house; military/scientific installation). This isolation increases as the dreamer draws farther and farther into him- or herself, as sleep overtakes the sleeper (the tidal wave; shuttered house; avalanche, or orgasm), and buried psychological issues come to the surface, or consciousness, often heralded by a war, party, pageant, or other such eruption, or in the form of subterranean or ambiguous creatures – "things that won’t stay dead;" half-human "missing links;" mutations; or masculine-women/feminine men – to demonstrate their "borderline," unresolved nature, often revealed in flashbacks. As in dreams, where other people tend to stand in for people we already know ("it was my mother, but she looked like Milton Berle"), characters frequently become doubled, not-themselves (doppelgangers; amnesia victims;the undead; "pods"; werewolves; Jekyll-Hydes; the possessed) and must be eliminated, or reconciled with – reincorporated into the self. (Similarly, events may often be duplicated, too, as the mind replaying scenes from waking life in order to solve or resolve them. When this begins happening to an absurd degree, the mind has totally regressed into itself and begun cannibalizing its own contents on its descent into dreamless oblivion.) Eventually,

consciousness returns (the spaceship returning to earth; figures emerging from crypts/underground/inside houses; daylight arriving; lovers reuniting; the police, or conscious "authorities," appearing), and the character finds him/herself refreshed and ready to face the world again. (Sometimes, the film begins with the dream already underway; frequently, a story or flashback will then indicate when it was that Sleep Came Down.) Think "Fall of the House of Usher" and you’ll be on the right track.

THE LABYRINTH. In order to deal with these psychic disorders (the ambiguous monster as half-man/half-bull Minotaur), the

hero/ine, or dreamer, must follow a winding psychological path often full of blind alleys in order to confront the troublesome issue at its core – why the last character introduced in many of these tales is often either the "monster" the dominant personality needs to eliminate or the real, true, "core" personality itself seeking liberation; in Jungian terms, the Self. As Ariadne provided Theseus with the thread that led him back out of his minotaur-maze (similar to the trail of breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel), often someone will provide a similar "answer" or "way out," suggestive of the consciousness (or logic) leading us back out of the dream (or nightmare). Also, since the labyrinth was designed by a jealous father for an enraged husband/father (Daedalus and King Minos, respectively), usually the hero/ine’s task is to resolve an inherited problem, the walled maze a social as well as psychological construct. The whole labyrinth story is an almost letter-perfect analogue to the dream-structure, and also carries resonances of the re/birth process (Ariadne’s thread as

umbilical cord, like the similar rope tied around Craig T. Nelson’s waist as he plumbed the spiritual/biological closet in Poltergeist).

EDEN. Since man’s time in the paradise of Judeo-Christian Eden is often recognized as predating consciousness, its representation in

film therefore signifies a return to that same pre-conscious condition as is replicated in dreams (another, similar "time without time"); thus, any garden, forest, pool, or otherwise enclosed space suggests both this Eden and the unconscious. And since the only place all peoples experience this universal archetype of a so-called Golden Age is in the womb and (provisionally) during childhood, there is a doubling as well between that Eden and the equally carefree, enclosed, supportive and nurturing physical mother. In dreams, we return to her (in some, more visionary experiences, back to the prenatal father/sperm or egg, or, for women, the "regressive masculinity,"

or lost connection to their own "masculine" power), which is why the fantasy film is such an ideal arena for the playing out of unconscious issues revolving around her and the ambivalence we attach to this figure and "her" loss. In fact, any time a flashback or dream is employed in such film, the implication is of a return to some similar "In the Beginning" location, whether it be comforting or horrific in nature.

THE IMAGINARY FATHER, OR SPECTRAL MOTHER. In Julia Kristeva’s TALES OF LOVE, the ambiguous-androgynous figure of

the Imaginary Father (or "not-the-father") is evoked as a similar link (or minotaur) between the child and maturity in its development of a stable, sexual, adult identity; see all the absent fathers of ’50s sci-fi and their often extraterrestrial reiterations, or the evil stepparents of classical fairy tale. He’s less a real, male figure as he is an expression of the love between the child's parents, with which the child comes to identify – why so many monsters in these films (as dreams) seem sexually ambivalent, and why their stories so often contain otherwise seemingly superfluous romantic subplots: they are all replaying primal and adolescent experiences at a similarly transitional moment. This "father," however, may also or otherwise be represented by "his"distaff personality, the (to use Madelon Sprengnether’s term)
Spectral Mother, as in such films as The Uninvited, The Lady in White, and any of the CARMILLA adaptations, who usually functions mainly to convey the often female protagonists of their dramas into a likewise effective, independent, adult power-position. Like the similarly ambiguous dream, the

ImaginaryFather/Spectral Mother must also be found and identified and either bested or united with before the main character may move on to a higher state of consciousness, frequently symbolized by love or marriage, and suggesting a return to a state of wholeness after the character's figurative "divorcing" from reality/freedom/childhood.

REGRESSIVE MASCULINITY (and FEMININITY). As with the Imaginary Father and Spectral Mother, this is a concept rooted in

one gender’s psychology but with resonances in the other’s. As described by Laura Mulvey (in VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES [1989, Indiana University Press]), Regressive Masculinity refers to a condition in women whereby a mythical sense of agency – a form of power traditionally gendered masculine – experienced by the subject as lost to a previous stage of development presents itself to consciousness: the possession of Regan McNeil by a male demon in The Exorcist, as well as War of the Colossal Beast’s Sally Manning’s mission to prove the continued existence of her lost brother. It takes comic proportions in the reverse-inhabitation of a male by females in Being John Malkovich and the sense of wonderment this brings. The figure doesn’t have to be a literal male, however; it can be a lost feminine power as well, as in all the witch-reborn films from Black Sunday on and their postwar predecessors in Bewitched and the Woman Who Came Back, the original Mummy perhaps bridging this metamorphosis with its ancient male character providing a conduit for his female love-object back to an archaic feminine self once regarded as a priestess to the divine. And for men, the

corollary effect prevails, in poems such as Poe’s "Annabel Lee," songs such as Harry Chapin’s "Taxi", Guns and Roses’ "Sweet Child o’ Mine" and Merle Haggard’s "Kern River," and in films from Dr. Jekyll and "Sister" Hyde to Lifeforce, where an equally societally-verboten softer, but no less lethal, feminine presence exerts itself on the male psyche.

OEDIPUS. Freud considered the tale of the king who killed his father and married his mother against his greater efforts the

cornerstone myth of Western civilization, and so based much of his theory on it. This make sense, as the story itself (at least in its most familiar incarnation, in Sophocles’ cycle of plays) unravels like a mystery and an inquiry into the self, initiated by a metaphorical contagion in the land (see many of Roger Corman’s fifties features, especially, as well as the more recent Outbreak and 12 Monkeys). Film analysis might also follow this model, operating as a detective story in which any minute detail may function as a "clue" into its author's intent, all operating on both Freud’s "manifest" – or obvious, personal – layer, and "latent" – or hidden, archetypal or transpersonal – level, taking into consideration the interpreter’s background and interests at the same time. Again, this invites questions of

violent,unknowable and misunderstanding fatherhood (the Texas Chainsaw films; Terminator 2) and comforting, ambivalent and sometimes suffocating motherhood (Corman, again, as well as the more obvious Fatal Attraction-types) and the often conflicting, contradictory and paradoxical reactions to each fermenting in our ever-active imaginations.

All of these are also handy analogues to the experience of film viewing itself, in which we similarly withdraw from the world into a separate, parallel half-world, losing ourselves for a while in the dramas unfolding before our helpless gaze. When at last we see it through and come out the other end into the light of reason and day, we should all hope to feel elevated in some way by the experience and the merging of our communal "projections," as when later we sit down with pen (or keyboard) in hand and try to write about it coherently, if not analyzing it for its personal and cultural messages, at least to help us understand why it moved us as it did.

This, also, is the purpose of DELIRIOUS.
<< home >>