“Then Look!”: Unborn Attachments and the Half-Moving Image

Abstract

This article explores the emotional impact on the viewer of disturbing and disorienting images of infant-caregiver relationality in four “melo-horror” films: Imitation of Life (Stahl, 1934), Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959), The Brood (Cronenberg, 1979), and Beloved (Demme, 1998). Comparing some of these filmic images with the infant performances of “disorganized” attachment styles captured on videotape by attachment researchers such as Mary Main, the author argues that the filmed audiovisual enactment of relational trauma, whether in the context of scientific research or cinematic art, offers the spectator an opportunity to work consciously and unconsciously with representations of unbearable psychic and psychosocial experience—both her own and that of others—that may hitherto have been thought unrepresentable or simply not thought at all.

Notes

¹ I think of Judy Garland’s ruby slippers and their spectacular intervention in her dangerous family romance in The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939); Moira Shearer, psychotically dancing her way out of relationality in the demented Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger, 1948); and Piper Laurie in Carrie (De Palma, 1976), gasping in horror at the sight of her rebellious daughter’s (pale pink) prom dress: “Red! I might have known it would be red!” Then there is James Dean’s bright red jacket in Nicholas Ray’s 1955 melodrama Rebel without a Cause, its antiparental redness echoed in the nearly sacrificed son’s jacket in Ray’s (1956) Bigger than Life and in the dead daughter’s—and the murderous dwarf’s—cloak in Roeg’s (1973) aptly titled Don’t Look Now.

² Witnesses of Schmideberg’s public ravaging of her mother during the first phase of the so-called controversial discussions with Anna Freud in London in the early 1940s are divided into those (encouraged by Schmideberg’s analyst Edward Glover) who criticized Klein as an unscrupulous mother and analyst, those (mainly from Klein’s group) who viewed Schmideberg as either “a devil” or “ill,” and those who preferred to avert their eyes from the embarrassingly “un-English” spectacle (see Grosskurth, 1986, pp. 281–333; Roazen, 2000, pp. 52–60; Kristeva, 2001, pp. 204–207). The disturbing sight of whatever it was that had gone so terribly wrong between mother and daughter was mercifully taken offstage come 1945, but the image of those returning red boots carries the visual trace of an antirelationality that begged to remain hidden. For a direct flavor of Schmideberg’s extraordinary critique of Klein during the controversial discussions themselves, see King and Steiner (1991, e.g., pp. 92–99).

³ It strikes me now that Bowlby, as Klein’s dissenting supervisee and Joan Rivière’s ex-patient, could be considered, along with Melitta Schmideberg, another rebellious analyst “baby.”

⁴ For a good account of the “strange situation” and Ainsworth’s findings, see Wallin (2007, pp. 15–24).

⁵ For a thorough overview of Main’s remarkable contribution, see Wallin (2007, pp. 25–43). Main and Solomon (1990) remind us of the fundamental necessity of adequate vision when scrutinizing images for evidence of attachment styles: “If the film is of poor quality … it is unlikely that D [disorganized-disoriented] scoring will be accurate. … The observation and recording of D behavior can only be made in conjunction with repeated, slow-motion study of the film” (p. 147). This reminder is central to Duschinsky’s (in press) analysis.

⁶ Main and Hesse (1990) wrote of “movements of approach which have a slow, limp, ‘underwater’ quality” (p. 173) and of unusual vocal patterns with “an ominous, or ‘haunted’ tone or effect” (p. 175).

⁷ See, for example, Berlant (1993), Butler (1990), and Mulvey (1996), not to mention the extremely solid collection of essays on Sirk’s remake put together by Fischer (1991).

⁸ Fredi Washington’s performance as Peola in the 1934 version is nothing less than horrific, capturing with astonishing acuity the specifically ghoulish aspects of the girl’s internal deadness. As Sarah Jane in Sirk’s 1959 remake, Susan Kohner is far more erotically charged while still communicating panic and emptiness throughout. Kohner would, of course, go on to play Sigmund’s wife in John Huston’s (1962) wonderful Freud.

⁹ Roazen (2000) painted a picture of Schmideberg as a sociopathic and vaguely repulsive adult baby, eventually confessing that the kindest thing he could say about her was that she was “mad as a hatter” (p. 56), elsewhere quoting an acquaintance for whom she was “straight out of a horror movie” (p. 55).

¹⁰ As is well documented (e.g., Judith Dupont’s introduction to Ferenczi, 1995), Freud strongly disapproved of the once-loyal Ferenczi’s return to a radically revitalized, literally mind-expanding theory of child sexual assault and sought to stop his own rebel analyst “baby” from delivering his landmark “Confusion of Tongues” paper (Ferenczi, 1933).

¹¹ I still find these images of Lana Turner and Sandra Dee, in humbly integrated attendance at this beautiful, Black, pre-Civil Rights funeral, weirdly shocking.

¹² One can only speculate as to whether Cronenberg consciously meant to evoke Klein. Later in the film we do see posters of Laing and Reich in Nola’s former apartment, and of course Cronenberg went on to make the Freud-Jung-Spielrein-themed movie A Dangerous Method (Cronenberg, 2011), so clearly the actual figures of psychoanalysis are of no small interest to him.

¹³ Cronenberg repeated this question in truly astonishing form in his recent Maps to the Stars (Cronenberg, 2014), in which Julianne Moore’s film star character is repeatedly mocked and confronted by the ghost of the dead film star mother she believes sexually assaulted her in childhood. The scenes of their “dialogues” are among the most disturbing I have ever witnessed in the cinema, whereas Moore’s character’s decision to play her mother’s role in a remake of an old classic reflects a Sarah Jane-like shallowness of vision in its spectacularized collusion with—as opposed to transcendent use of—the screen/mirror of trauma.

¹⁴ A colleague who recently taught the film told me that some students reported having been made emotionally and even physically ill by this scene.

¹⁵ Some other performances I would put in this category are Sissy Spacek’s in Altman’s (1977) 3 Women, Isabelle Adjani’s in Zulawski’s (1981) Possession, and Lisa Gay Hamilton’s (who, coincidentally, plays the young Sethe in Beloved) in Rodrigo Garcia’s (2005) Nine Lives.

¹⁶ As Winnicott (1971) put it, “When I look I am seen, so I exist. I can now afford to look and see” (p. 154). It becomes increasingly, disturbingly apparent in the course of this film that Beloved cannot “afford” to look or see anyone or anything other than her own fantasy of the lost/murderous mother Sethe.

¹⁷ Elise stated (quoted in Fischerova, 2006), “I had to communicate the character non-verbally. I felt that the less I said with words and the more I said with face and eyes and body, the more true it would be to Denver’s character” (p. 37).

¹⁸ For a wonderful—and comprehensive—account of the therapeutically transformational role of loving eyes on “un-mirrored” patients, see Ayers (2003).

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Notes on contributors

Andrew Asibong

Andrew Asibong, Ph.D., is senior lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies and co-director of Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community at Birkbeck, University of London. His research is concerned with the emotional and political metamorphoses of the relational self, via engagement with film and the moving image, although he has also published widely on (mainly French) literature. He is the author of François Ozon (Manchester University Press, 2008) and Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition (Liverpool University Press, 2013).