"Knives and Teeth": Stanley Cavell on Horror

I'm reading Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: The Viking Press, 1971) at the moment, and I just came across a paragraph on horror films, which follows an appreciation of Hitchcock that takes in To Catch a Thief, Marnie, The Birds, and Notorious. This elegant paragraph, on page 67 and dealing with the power of the projected nightmare, is worthy of quotation:

"In horror movies, sexuality is not suggested but directly coded onto, or synchronised with, the knives and teeth as they penetrate. Here is an obvious reason not to be quick about equating films with dreams. Most dreams are boring narratives (like most tales of neurotic or physical symptoms), their skimpy surface all out of proportion with their riddle interest and their effect on the dreamer. To speak of film adventures or glamours or comedies as dreams is a dream of dreams: it doesn't capture the wish behind the dream, but merely the wish to have interesting dreams. But horror films specifically do infuse boring narratives with the skin-shrinking haunts of dreams."

It's quite something, isn't it? 

An Old Man and a Seafront, Part Six

Bob leaned against the mottled glass wall of the Home’s sole balcony, overlooking the road separating sleeping souls from the dunes. It was a rather optimistic promontory constructed in the seventies when memories and hopes of the gay seaside resort Blackpool had once been and might one day be again still gave out the occasional death rattle, and sometimes, out here, they were almost audible. Bob piled what remained of his tobacco into a rizzla, producing a lumpy, rather unwieldy cigarette. He lit it with the last of his matches, put it to his cracking lips, and dragged in tarry pabulum. As he gazed out towards the murky peat, specks of ash danced away from his face in a desultory frolic, a firefly sarabande retreating rhythmically into night.

The traffic lights to his right seemed permanently set to green, and cars whizzed past, heedless of the lateness of the hour. The odd car that passed him more slowly occasioned a look through windscreens that revealed people close to his own age, in no seeming hurry to reach their destination. Along the pavement on the side of the road closest to him he saw a couple in their twenties, walking hand in hand and barely cognisant of the bear-like golden retriever that pulled against the lead that stretched three feet ahead of them. The woman, colourfully dressed for the summer day just passed, looked upwards in his direction. Though his face was backlit from the reception room behind him and thus to all intents and purposes invisible, he raised his eyebrows in kind. In his younger days those appendages had been thick and expressive in their every moment, often betraying unwilled sentiments so aggressively that he often resented them, but in recent years he had begun to sense recalcitrant gravity attenuating even forced attempts at honest expression. It did not matter at any rate: when she had noticed the ghoul-like figure on the second floor she had abruptly bent down to ruffle and make an audible fuss of her leonine pet’s haunches, as if she had never noticed him in the first place.

Though she herself was nowhere to be seen, Ness’ slippers had been found out on the front this morning. Like George’s. Mable had excitedly spoken of ghosts and eldritch sprites, in a fervour that Bob had been anxious to communicate to Estella, but, alas, he had not had the opportunity. She had not been down to sup for days. Earlier that evening he had knocked on her door with the offer of an Irish Horlicks – her favourite – but she had opened the door incrementally and rejected offer, with a voice whose cadence suggested that much more than a malt beverage was being refused.

Bob looked down to the cigarette he was smoking. There were only a couple of drags left, and the extent to which he had crammed it meant that he now felt queasy, discombobulated. He wondered why this infrequent habit of his had not done him in yet. It had seen to many of his friends. This led him to ponder why he had indulged the habit for such a long time. He couldn’t come up with an answer, so he stopped asking himself the question. 


He thought about Estella. He thought about Rosalind. He thought about himself. With nothing more to think about, he went to bed.

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Robert Neff’s naked form lay plague pallid that night in the traffic light refracted through his bedroom window, his cracked pores sweating out tobacco atop brittle sheets. Spray churned up from the sea to crash up against the panes, though that was impossible.

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The next morning was the day when the St. Annes on-Sea staff treated the residents to their “Monthly Jaunt”. It was August, so, if the last four years were anything to go by, they would again be paying a visit to Louis Tussaud’s wax museum on the Prom. Though Louis’ efforts were hardly as Pygmalion-esque as his great-grandmother’s, Bob decided to keep on the tradition because, in his eyes, the waxworks therein displayed far more personality than the people with whom he spent the majority of his day-to-day life.

The bus, pink in colour, was about the size of those VW panel vans that had been so fashionable in the seventies, but crucially was not one. Pastel-coloured cloth frills adorned the windows like shy, ineffective curtains, and it was hard for Bob to ignore the creeping sensation that he and his fellow inmate were being put on show in a kind of mobile pillory for the aged, with abject desiccation masquerading for the masses of St. Annes as Cliff Richard’s ‘Summer Holiday’. Estella never came out on these things, and Bob had never blamed her, but this was the first time he had worried about her refusal. He feared that she was not only rejected being paraded about on that hopeless bus, but also walking outside the front door of the Home. He now worried about her daily, and about the awful possibility that he was soon to be left alone for the final time before he death forced him to ask the questions he had always wanted to put off. He would shake his head when thoughts like this shaded his mind, and try to look on the bright side of what he had left. As the panel van whisked along Lytham Road, he looked out past the buildings and towards the sea, trying to do that now. Bob had heard that this place had recently unveiled an effigy of Cilla Black, to whom, he admitted to himself, he’d always been a bit partial.

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They had to park in a concrete lot about five minute walk from the building. The wrinkled pilgrimage travelled in a  group, and were herded by a disgruntled man in his thirties called Greg, who visibly miffed at his luck in drawing the short straw so that he was unable to take the afternoon off like the rest of the Home’s staff.  When they arrived at the door, Bob looked up at the tatty, hopeless edifice, and read garish banners excitedly proclaiming the uncanny illusory reality of what could ever hope to be anything more than petrified ghouls. Greg told him to get a move on.

The carpets in the foyer were a sticky burgundy, and the doors into the main exhibition were from grander times. A glowering approximation of Anthony Hopkins in Hannibal Lecter garb leered to their left, in an invitation that would have elicited laughter were it not for the fact that said likeness could only be construed through reading the plaque at the base of the plinth upon which he was standing, and looked more like an alcoholic attendant behind a key cutting counter.

Passing through the doors, he was greeted by row upon row of heavy ghosts, encased in glass that seemed to will the figures inside to self-vivify and attempt an escape, as if that would justify its existence. The likenesses were all as shoddy as the effort at Hopkins, and in this low light the names on the cards were illegible. He read the waxy wrinkles on those models’ faces instead, scanned all those uncanny nooks, artificial indications of attenuated transience accruing a dust filled with optimistic mites still lost in an impossible hope for dead skin. In their exhibit cases the facsimiles gave off an impression of boredom more than anything else, a resignation that had followed its logical course towards its logical end as glass eyes looked out a glass cage. This empty weight bore down on the room and its nothing made Bob nauseous. The air hung heavy, as if diffused with the wax; all inhalation embalmed.

Enough of that. Trying to put the must of time out of his mind, Bob looked for his fellow residents, who were standing about in groups and trying to guess who each statue was supposed to be. He allowed a smile to insinuate itself on his face when he noted the difference between these cantankerous familiars and the frozen facsimiles in their goblet mausoleums: he had been unkind before in his indictment of his fellow travellers as lacking in soul. Personality now shone in juxtaposition with the dead wax; there were smiles and titters dispersed amidst cantankerous confusion and irascible harrumphing, and Bob held onto them for dear life, like a man clinging to a buoy at stormy sea. There were wrinkled hands patting wool-covered shoulders, crusty lips stretched to reveal mottled smiles, and eyeballs evincing viscous veins strung under a patina of gloopy gloss and sleep that were all too human against the perfect pearls inset into these hand-pressed homunculi. He felt his shoulders relax, then. Things seemed better. The waves lulled and clouds parted. Bob felt his age, but at least he felt it.

His eyes wandering, he noted that Greg - who had for the past few minutes been staring at what was quite frankly an insulting attempt at Cilla - was clearly very anxious to turn it down and guide everybody back to the van. In response, Bob began to rifle around in his cardigan pockets for a rizzla, so as to roll a cigarette to accompany him on the return. Evening the dried leaves into the tube with thumbs and forefingers, he caught sight of one Home resident, Conrad, a sanguine specimen with whom Bob had never spoken. He had evidently taken to exploring the exhibition on his own, away from the group.  Conrad was also in the process of rolling a cigarette. They looked at each other. Bob nodded. Conrad nodded. They went back to tending their rollies.

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The next morning, Estella’s slippers washed in on the surf.