House of Psychotic Women (2012) by Kier-La Janisse
The final part of Chapter 2, in which we close many doors and leave imagined 'others' inside of the rooms they were made in...and hope they don't find their way out.
Welcome.
Before plunging into the basement and facing terrible things headfirst, your calcified curator would like to avert the reader’s bloodshot eyes to the usual bright red warning forward. If everything is too much at this moment or contains any of the following cautions that might make the reader uncomfortable, do not feel obligated to indulge and instead eat a good meal or play a video game. There will always be more letters.
Discussion[s] of: murder, torture, religious horror and abuse, child abuse, physical/psychological/emotional/spiritual abuse, doubles/mirrors/doppelgangers, dated termage, disassociation identity disorder, ableism, objectification, sexism, suicide, attempted suicide, and substance abuse will be included among other topics that could create distress and discomfort.
Our previous newsletter ended on the discussion of the film and topic of martyrs and how women1 are chosen to suffer over their male counterparts. To be martyred is to become a ‘higher’ being, either ‘transcending’ human confines and/or becoming a ‘bettered’ creature, pulled bloody and nearly dead from its ‘lesser’ cocoon of flesh. In the same paragraph, Janisse refers to another popular ideal often seen historically within media and reality: The Cult of Invalidism. In the 18th century, this became popular in the British social culture among the leisure class2, and continues leaving its suffocating film on everything. To put it very simply, there was an aesthetic belief that permanently sickly women were the beauty ideal and definition of ‘feminine’ - of course, defined and approved by men of the time. It is just as prevalent today and thankfully there is a much larger push back on being healthy than shaping someone around being frail, sickly, and other extremely corpse-specific standards physically and socially.3
This concept is important to keep in mind moving forward, hand in hand with another subject already familiarized, doppelgangers. Janisse sets our next film against Martyrs with:
“[…] but as with any doppelganger film, coexistence isn’t possible for long – one always has to die so that another can live.”
A personal favorite sub-genre of horror has always been in the same vein of the books and films wriggling in sci-fi horror, without understanding or without a reason of replacing the self and/or the masses like The Thing (1982) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). For a few years in my mid-teens, I would have disagreed with Janisse on Martyrs being a film with a similar context because I was focused on other elements of the film. Today, I absolutely agree with her outlook on the film having doppelganger themes and ties4 - but there’s something more she has to say too:
“The fractured personalities that result from the adoption of different roles, faces or personas are one of the most prominent aspects of sibling- or family centric horror films; the relationship between the siblings (or pseudo-siblings, as in the case of Martyrs) is often such that one functions as a reflection of the other; they’re not quite doppelganger films but they dabble in the doppelganger lexicon. Otto Rank’s notion of the doppelganger, or ‘double’ in his 1914 book Der Doppelgänger is the template for all subsequent doppelganger studies, stating that, “all instincts and desires that don’t fit the ‘ideal’ image are rejected and cast out of the self, repressed internally, and inevitably return externally personified in the double, where they can be at once vicariously satisfied and punished.” It was a concept that would be revisited again and again throughout the history of horror fiction.”
Though Martyrs is definitely not a doppelganger-specific film, the two lead roles of Lucie and Anna are not traditionally fit in that subject. Like Janisse said, it is more of a reflection between the characters than one having the desire to be the other. Otto Rank, a student of Freud, wrote his essay to explore the psychoanalytic path of the doppelganger. The double represents the self and how - though it is and is not ‘you’ - it (conceptually, theoretically, fantastically, realistically even) can be used as a mirror to reflect and subject the self to facing their fear of death, exploring identity, and the existence of ‘you’5.
Janisse presents Robert Altman’s ‘Feminine Quartet’6 shortly after Martyrs; four films gathered together in a bouquet of psychosis and doubles. Two of them are Janisse’s focus: 3 Women (1977) and Images (1972). Described by her as “[…] the closest Altman would come to making an outright horror film” and both films sharing “[…] striking similarities to Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 feature Persona”.
“[…] Images is the more self-referential of the two, thrashing about between chaos and tranquillity, between light and dark, expression and repression – all the while returning to the literal puzzle “with so many missing pieces” that functions as an analogy for the film as a whole.”
Images is centered around doubles and invalid aesthetic. The characters and stage may seem simple when arranging the table: Cathryn (played without flinching by Susannah York) lives within a labyrinthian home to navigate while she writes a children’s book7. There are a lot of distractions from her writing, such as a friend and a foe over the phone, her husband Hugh (René Auberjonois) who may or may not be having an affair, and being caught in a spiderweb of surrealist terror. Cathyrn and the house itself constantly change back and forth, which may seem disorienting to first - or sixth - time viewers, however this is all part of the play.
Part of Cathryn’s home is old and dusty and dark while the other half has candles, lights, lamps, and bright and modern furnishing. Hugh is himself - and then, quickly - someone else in half a blink of an eye. The dread and anxiety a viewer feels watching Cathryn move through the house and the film are accentuated by the sudden noises added into the film’s score. It’s meant to reflect Cathryn’s state of mind and belief - how can you trust your own home, your husband, your friends, when everything is in a constant state of sudden and randomized change? Janisse goes on to uncover there is even more going on:
“[…] This certainly hearkens back to the Gothic notion of the house being representative of its owner’s mental state (i.e. The Fall of the House of Usher, Miss Havisham’s Satis House in Great Expectations), and is emphasized by the fact that Cathryn has two homes, one apparently in the city, the other in the country in a magical valley that she loves dearly, almost – revealingly enough – as if it is not real.”
On top of all of this, Cathyrn is pregnant. Hugh moves them both to their Irish country home pretty early into the film to ease the stress as much as he can and to encourage her to find inspiration for her book - but it’s short lived. Cathyrn sees her dead ex-lover in Hugh and her dead ex-lover in return sees her and begins to haunt her while she is staying there. The neighbors - another one of Cathyrn’s exes and his daughter also named Susannah8 - make the whole situation even worse and causing all three men to blur together9. Cathyrn encounters her double and her double in horrific ways that lead to believing she has killed them, only to find them to be hallucinations…or perhaps too real. Another key item in the film is a puzzle, that calls the spirit of Freudian theory back from the dead:
“[…]In Freudian dream-logic – and the film does largely function according to this logic – things, or the illusion of things (i.e. images) ‘condense’. Condensation, or ‘compression’, occurs in dreams so that many truths can be conveyed to us in a short period of time. This also relates to the puzzle that appears throughout the film as a recreational activity; a dream is like patchwork, with parts that are lost or missing (but really only forgotten), and when a transformation takes place it is evidence of a mental short cut.”
Dream condensation is also apparent with Cathyrn’s doppelganger, who is very literally the dark to Cathyrn’s light by their costuming and actions. How the camera behaves also influences a viewer’s disorientation, with seamless or quick cuts between both Cathyrns, trying to have them exist both separately from the other and simultaneously despite distance. On the other side of the camera, Janisse tells us about wanting to manifest her own double through a painting:
“My determination to have a sister who was “just like me” (while simultaneously rationalizing her physical absence) had some bizarre manifestations: at one point in my childhood I went with my parents to a yard sale in Belle River, a small town about half an hour outside of Windsor. I fixated upon a portrait of a little girl, painted in a late 19th century style, and used my allowance to buy it. I put it on a shelf at the foot of my bed so that I could always see it. At night, in the darkness, I thought I could see its lips move, and I would lie awake, staring at it for hours, trying to figure out what it was saying. […] I imagined that the little girl told me a story, of drowning in Belle River just after this portrait was commissioned, and that her spirit was now trapped in the painting. I started to bring candy and place it on the shelf at the foot of the picture. But when the candy didn’t disappear, I started to feel rejected and eventually frightened. I brought more candy, toys, costume jewellery, to no avail. The girl in the picture stopped talking to me. I was convinced she was planning something; that she was going to steal my soul while I was sleeping. So I asked my mother to put the painting in the basement, where it still resides to this day.”
Though the childhood painting itself and the story are terrifying to sit with quietly on your own, it enforces the feelings of discovering or creating a double; the molding or stumbling upon of a double is a sigh of relief to know you are not alone and that can bring a form of comfort. However, there is always the tugging dread of being replaced, losing your defining sense of ‘self’, getting scared at the thought of being ‘other’ and not ‘you’, and feeling your grip on anything solid turn from stone to sand. But we can’t linger with drowned paintings and listening to haunting fairy tales, we have to keep running through the hall of mirrors into Altman’s 3 Women. If watching Images was difficult and distressing, 3 Women triples the exhaustion and a top shelf cast of horror actors are there.
In 3 Women, Pinky Rose [played by Sissy Spacek] works in hydrotherapy with elder folks and meets Milly Lammoreaux [played by the ONE and ONLY Shelley Duvall] who is everything Pinky isn’t. Milly - to Pinky - is perfect, beautiful, exuding confidence and Milly takes advantage of that to hold Pinky in her spotlight as a one-person act. Though it comes off as selfish indulgence to maintain a certain social status, Milly and Pinky become roommates and find that they have more in common than originally realized. Pinky watches her other workers at the center she works at with Milly, specifically a pair of twins, and superimposes her relationship with Milly over them. Janisse comments on the twin symbology in the film and gives an overview of historical ties with:
“[…] The twins have a certain mythological resonance as well; in the middle ages, twins were feared as an affront to nature, and would often be exposed to the elements at birth, left to die – largely because of the ‘problem of identification’ that they pose.10 The recurrent image of the twins foreshadows the transformational shift of identity that will occur later in the film.”
Pinky is determined to create a better version of herself by copying the aspects she wants to have from Milly. Milly on the other hand is continuing her show unknown to Pinky of course; Milly’s personality is carefully crafted from cutting and pasting sections of fashion magazines into her decision making and appearence. She wishes to be a ‘successful woman’ and is missing a very key component to it - men. When Pinky and Milly’s creep of a landlord decides to give Milly ‘attention’, she leaps at the oppertunity to validate her hard work and complete her role as a successful woman. While Milly finally feels the last puzzle piece has been put into place, Pinky spirals without Milly’s spotlight attention. After gazing into the pool outside full of chlorine and artistic murals swirling at its bottom, she jumps.
Pinky survives her attempted suicide but also finds herself connected to a third woman, entering a sort of psychic bubble to share while she sinks into the water of the pool. Willie [played by Janice Rule] is a pregnant and anxious woman who speaks mainly through her detailed painting of murals. Her husband owns the complex and is also spending some time with Milly - so she sits and paints, finding comfort in the swirling shapes of the murals11. Willie is the first person to the pool after Pinky’s extreme pull to jump into it and she immediately yells for help - the first time she speaks in the film.
Thankfully, Pinky recovers from her jump and the coma that resulted in it - but of course she has a few adjustments to make to herself and her life. Pinky rejects everything she tailored in her previous life, gives herself he name ‘Mildred’, and mutates inward. Pinky becomes egoistic and with this change we see Milly do quite the opposite, shifting the power dynamic immediately. Without Pinky doting and looking up to her, Milly becomes anxious and starts to fade away. Pinky is accepted by society without much effort, leaving Milly like one of her own cut out magazine exerpts. Milly realizes that her own dreamy version of the ‘ideal’ modern woman is Pinky…and she doesn’t like it.
Another massive shift happens after Willie gives birth to a stillborn baby - Pinky sliding into a passive and childlike state, Milly taking on the maternal role that Willie had in the first half of the film, and Pinky finally finds the ‘twin’ she always wanted not in Milly, but in Willie. From that point forward, the three women are a tightly bound group, without any men as factors in their lives12.
Both Images and 3 Women are films exploring and sewing together a “feminine realm”, 3 Women focuses much more on an external conflict with the world around them than the internal shattering of Images. The world outside may visit the characters in 3 Women but ultimately doesn’t drastically effect them by the end of the film - in Images, it’s implied, dreaded even, that Cathryn will have to regress extremely to live in her imaginary world than exist outside of it again. Janisse concludes the film discussion and comparisons/contrasts with:
“It’s not uncommon for kids to fantasize about being someone else, or to fashion fictional relationships that fulfil a desire for affection. Kids can become attached to people who shower them with attention pretty quickly, and are let down just as easily. My reliance on an idealized version of my sister once she was gone from my life, and my adoption of traits that I associated with her – from her rebelliousness to her feathered hair – was an attempt to avoid feelings of abandonment. While this type of fabrication presents its own set of problems, in genre films the convergence of fantasy and reality is downright dangerous.”
Keeping with that wanting to be someone else, we move to Brian De Palma’s13 Sisters (1973). Danielle [played by Margot Kidder] is one part of a French-Canadian Siamese twin and our main character focus. She is an alcoholic and takes quite a lot of pills so she can distance herself against a past horror that gnaws from the inside. Then she meets Philip [played by Lisle Wilson]. They go to dinner together - or rather, Danielle invites herself to a dinner with him - where she gets absolutely publicly wasted and talks about cities’ aesthetics and how she doesn’t hate men so she can’t be a feminist. Near the end of this mudslide disaster of a dinner, Danielle tells Philip she has a very difficult time getting to know and creating relationships with other people since her sister left. Philip with all that aside still goes home with Danielle that night and in the morning, hears her arguing with her sister who is visiting for their birthday. She wants Danielle to spend the day with her, not with Philip. Feeling as if he’s ruined their birthday, he leaves to purchase a cake for them both, hoping to calm Dominique’s rage at her sister. Though the rage Philip believes is targeted at Danielle is corrected when he returns with the cake and gets quickly stabbed to death by Dominique.
Not long after, Danielle’s offputting ex-husband Emil [played by William Finley] pays a visit as well. Within the next few moments, the audience understands that Emil is a caretaker of her in some sorts; Danielle opens the door and he quickly gets inside to clean up what Dominique has left behind for them both. Danielle doesn’t seem too aware of the stabbing incident, as she tells Emil that Dominique had left and she believes it is because she must have “done something unspeakable”. Another female character is introduced: a depressed reporter named Grace Collier [played by Jennifer Salt] who witnessed the murder of Emil from her apartment, right across the street from Danielle’s. Grace calls the police, who don’t want to look into the very serious crime because of her rightful criticism of their operations in her newspaper stories and that Philip is black. After a heated conversation, they finally agree to come investigate, with Grace right alongside them as they enter Danielle’s apartment. While searching it, Grace finds that Danielle has matching pairs of outfits in her closet and asks if she has a twin. Danielle denies it immediately and firmly. Of course thanks to Emil, the police find no body or evidence, leaving the apartment and Grace behind. Grace takes it upon herself to follow through on her own investigation with a charming P.I. [played by Charles Durning, who really makes the character] at her side.
Both female characters are mirrored through the film by a centralized point - their relationship with men. They are both looked down on and infantalized, being told to adhere to the conforming restraints of '‘traditional’ femininity. Even Grace’s mother takes part in this, belittling her career, pressuring her to get married, and playing down the fact that Grace had witnessed a brutal stabbing with a comment on diet pills. Danielle also finds it a wonderful bruise to poke and pinch at, trying to beat Grace down and out by talking about how she lives alone and how that can effect the mind. Janisse comments:
“Throughout the film the ‘aloneness’ of people is emphasized in order to elevate the bond between twins.”
But Grace is not so easily put in a corner or shut into an attic. Eventually, she finds a film reel that confirms her initial belief that Danielle has a twin - Danielle and Dominique were famous conjoined twins who were psychologically studied for a very long time in Canada at the Loisel Institute. On the reel, the institution’s Director, Dr. Pierre Milius, is being interviewed on the psychological challenges twins must learn to navigate. He believes that Dominique is extremely disturbed, but points out that Danielle - the more socially acceptable of the two - is only seemingly ‘normal’ because of her sister. Further into the reel is where the shoe drops on the audience at the same time it does with Grace: Dominique has been dead for a pretty long while, after a botched surgery to separate the twins from the other killed her.
Grace follows Emil and Danielle to a huge house away from the city, but falls straight into the trap laid out by the couple knowing she would be right behind them. The country house is a private mental clinic that Emil runs and this is where he institutionalizes Grace after telling the staff that she is actually a new patient, burdened by ‘delusions’ of being an investigative reporter. From there, she is drugged heavily and hypnotized into becoming Dominique, convincing her through flashbacks that she had been the unwanted sister, the untraditional and unwanted disturbed ‘other’ half.
We also get a finalized, solid picture of who Danielle was and struggles trying to be. While still conjoined, Danielle really wanted to fit in as an individual; to be a ‘normal’ girl with ‘normal’ girl aspirations like getting a husband and children, but the dreaming of normalcy was the cause of Danielle’s emotional breakage. Danielle believes that if she got rid of Dominique in all aspects, she could achieve her dreams. However, despite the surgery that killed her, she still ‘lives’ in Danielle’s mind and body. Without Dominique, Danielle created a mental copy from the pieces of her sister that still clung to her. It was necessary to fill the empty and terrifying space literally cut off of her by becoming her sister. Instead of two bodies sharing a space, it became two minds sharing - even fighting over - a body.
Janisse closes this chapter with her thoughts on why doppelganger films are so important, as they celebrate darkness in people, and how when she was younger it strongly paralleled her wanting to be her sister Karen. Without Karen really there, Janisse patched together an imaginary suit to wear, made of the CDs and posters left in the preserved crypt of her sister’s bedroom. When Karen actually came back to visit a bit more after having a baby that her father and Janisse’s mother adopted, Janisse realized that the sister she had developed in her mind was only fantastical. Karen was more of a stranger than the sister she had created. Her final sentences seal the entire chapter and her focus on twins, ‘othering’, changelings, doubles, and imaginary wearable fantasies:
“[…]In her absence I had created a fictional sibling, just as I had created ‘The Man with Green Eyes’ out of an Argentinean bit-part-player bearing little resemblance to the monster in my closet. When I finally saw Horror Express again as a teenager, and realized it was the film that had spawned my nightmares, I was surprised to learn that the monster’s eyes were red, not green. A conversation with my mother provided the reason for my confusion: I had seen the film on a black and white television. His eyes were only green in my imagination. A fertile place, indeed.”
And so the basement doors containing haunted paintings, hidden rooms sealing away secret prayers and Karen’s door have been explored and can close at this point in our tour of the house.
As always, we will continue into the third chapter of House soon - but there will be a film or two before we begin delving again.
Reflecting and constructing,
Han
Again, as always, will reaffirm this book is commenting and discussing women in the binary termage - if or when it does not apply to only the social binary, it will be noted as well!
The leisure class is a term used to identify the upper class who never worked. By ‘worked’, I mean anything related to productivity, hence the ‘leisure’ part of the social class. This class also held priests, royalty, and people who only consume and never produce. For a deeper dive into consumptive social classes, I recommend fellow Midwesterner Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. He coined the termage and has a lot of things any budding anarchist or individual learning deprogramming methods and theory would flourish with.
To put it not as simply, in media and forced-upon belief within social structure of the time and continuing today, there is an upper class aesthetic to look ill and be in fashion with it and to act as it. Fainting, dizzy spells, being too feeble or frail to do anything, limiting movement, refusing food [to a point of gaining an eating disorder, at times], being passive and submissive to a fault, acting on having ‘hysteria/hysterical fits/seizures’ were all key things upper class women were expected to take advantage of using in social situations among peers. Being thin, having pale skin, and looking gaunt were also extremely in fashion. A very important note: the key wording here is “looking” and “acting”, not “being”, as these individuals found pretending to be and dressing up as or presenting themselves as sickly or “invalid” was a choice they benefitted from by being able to turn it on or off for their own needs and wants. On top of fitting into something sexually enticing to men and the concept of masculinity by being its extreme opposite, it also invalidates those who cannot simply stop being sick when the time asks for it. [NOTE: Your scribe has been and will always be disabled and terminally ill. I have lived forever with chronic pain and need to use mobility aids. Personally, the cult of invalidism is disgusting and harmful in theory and practice. Many people have spoken, written books, essays, and medical journals on this that and will be provided if asked.]
So as not to ruin or spoil anything for readers who have not yet seen the film, I won’t go further into the plot or why this is and make a proper Martyrs-only post sometime in the future.
Rank’s analysis of doppelgangers can easily be used in his ‘life and death instinct’ theories as well! Other academic resources in Rank’s contemporaries for reading on ‘self’ and/or the double can also be found in Fichte's theory of subjectivity and concept of identity, Freud’s Uncanny theory [where he quotes Rank extensively], and any of the media that Rank studied for his double essay like works from Poe, books on dreaming and sleep-walking, The Iliad, and discussions on identity vs. alterity.
Altman’s films within the series of four are: That Cold Day in the Park (1969), Images (1972), 3 Women (1977), and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982).
Janisse also notes this, but Susannah York wrote the children’s book that her character is writing - a slight nod to the possibility that Cathyrn might not be an author at all, using this as a calming coping mechanism to keep herself steady.
Implied that the child is also a ‘version’ of Cathyrn because of conversations had in the film, and that the actress playing the daughter is named [wait for it] Cathyrn.
This could be prosopagnosia (face blindness), a difficult disorder where it’s impossible to tell people apart by their face alone. However…the entire man changes…so it could more likely be a symptom of dissociative disorder, where delusions and disorientation are extremely common.
Much like changelings and doubles, twins are steeped in ancient history and belief. Before sudden witch hunting and superstitions in the Middle Ages, twins were actually seen as a very prosperous sign and good fortune. With mortality rate among children and the person giving birth to them so high, having twins was exceedingly rare and celebrated. In mythology, twins were strong and had amazing powers together and apart, seen as heroes and linked through the divine blood they shared. [ex. Herakles and Iphicles, Lava and Kusha, Apollo and Artemis, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, Monster Slayer and Born For Water, etc.] It wasn’t until the Middle Ages in Europe that twins were seen with distaste and fear, believing witchcraft was at work or the Christian God was wrathful and cursing the womb the twins emerged from. The main belief of modern Europeans was that twins were results of the mother’s infidelity and could only be explained by having two fathers. By the 19th century, scientific hyperfixation on twins and the genetics leading to their birth were central…and treating them as exhibitions. This of course helped lay another key stone in eugenics and a focal point in Nazi experimentation by the mid-20th century. However, twins are much more common today than they had been since the ancient times in history, and are seen as common and normal parts of society. Horror focuses on the powers twins share from the ancients and the fear of a ‘copy’ from the more modern European belief. [Ex.: the first pair of twins commonly thought of when discussing horror is, of course, the girls from The Shining.]
Janisse comments that Peter Nicholls, an Australian writer and professor of Modernism, said that Willy’s murals focus on “serpentine femaleness that pervades the whole film”, but fails to really focus on the fact the figures are not exclusively representative of one concept. Some of the figures have penises and Janisse believes that the murals do not centralize on the concept of ‘femaleness’ as Nicholls argues, but a complex interpretation of exploring gender and sexuality in an elevated thought rather than keeping a single central concept the only focus.
Willie’s husband mysteriously dies and her child was stillborn, removing men from the equation of the three.
The American director Brian de Palma is a very well known name in the horror genre and film as a medium. Some of his filmography includes Carrie, Scarface, and Phantom of the Paradise.