A Grand-Guignol legacy: Martin McDonagh's A Behanding in Spokane

Abstract

This article examines Martin McDonagh's most recent play, A Behanding in Spokane (2010), through the lens of Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, deploying the scholarship of Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson on this specific theatrical style. The article links discussions of Grand-Guignol with the amputation suffered by the drama's main character, Carmichael, played by Christopher Walken in the play's first production, and with the case of hands he brings with him on his journey around America. I draw on V.S. Ramachandran's work on consciousness, phantom limbs, and apotemnophilia in order to consider Carmichael's amputation in relation to self-defining narratives, loss, lack, excess and difference, with particular emphasis given to issues of race.

Keywords:

• Martin McDonagh
• Théâtre du Grand-Guignol
• race
• consciousness
• apotemnophilia
• phantom limbs
• V.S. Ramachandran
• Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson

Notes

 1. See Paul Taylor's negative responses to The Leenane Trilogy, Mark Lawson's sensationalising in ‘Sick-buckets Needed in the Stalls’, and John Simon's hostile engagement with The Pillowman, ‘Exquisite Corpses’.

 2. See Mary Luckhurst's robust attack on McDonagh's representation of Irish republicanism and the armed struggle in ‘Martin McDonagh's Lieutenant of Inishmore’ and Catherine Rees' defence of McDonagh's dramaturgy in response to Luckhurst's arguments in ‘The Politics of Morality’.

 3. Aleks Sierz identifies the tactics of offence, sensation and shock as part of a new style of theatre in 1990s Britain. See Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre.

 4. I also have in mind the varying styles evident in such films as Beetlejuice (1998), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Sleepy Hollow (1999) or Corpse Bride (2005).

 5. The story ‘The Writer and the Writer's Brother’ incorporates enactments of child torture and electrocutions, and ‘The Little Jesus’ narrative contains the persecution, crucifixion and the burial alive of a young girl.

 6. Further, this style is somewhat reliant on a form of dark play, as defined by Schechner in The Future of Ritual, 36.

 7. One good exception is to be found in some of the earliest criticism of Beauty Queen, by Rebecca Wilson, who draws attention to this particular form of theatre tradition and practice. See Wilson, ‘Macabre Merriment in The Beauty Queen of Leenane’, 129–44.

 8. See http://www.applause-tickets.com/behanding-in-spokane.asp (accessed 1 September 2011).

 9. Brantley, ‘Packing Heat, and a Grudge’.

10. In a very negative review of the play Fintan O'Toole notes

McDonagh's work always walks a line between the grotesque and the playful, between horror and hilarity. And nobody knows that line as well as Walken does. Every Walken take is a double take. He's one of the very few actors who can have his tongue in his cheek at the same time as his teeth are in your flesh. (See O'Toole, ‘Arch McDonagh Takes a Wrong Turn to Dead-end Americana’)

11. A spectator's knowledge of Walken's major performances is important from Annie Hall (1977) to Deer Hunter (1978) from King of New York (1990) to True Romance (1993) and Pulp Fiction (1994), from Batman Returns (1992) and Sleepy Hollow (1998) to Catch me if you Can (2002) and Balls of Fury (2007). His Captain Koon's gold watch monologue in Pulp Fiction stands out for many. His classic, poignant and brutally intense performance as the solider, suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, who turns to playing Russian Roulette, earned him a best supporting actor Oscar in 1978 in Deer Hunter.

12. In particular, the form of naturalism that evolved in nearby theatres of Paris, in André Antoine's Théâtre Libre (1887).

13. Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, ix–xii.

14. Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, ix–xii, 9.

15. Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, ix–xii, 3.

16. Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, ix–xii, 34.

17. Hand and Wilson's book includes ten Grand-Guignol plays. The Ultimate Torture (La Dernière Torture (1904)), by Andrè De Lorde and Eugène Morel, is set during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 in the French consulate in Beijing and includes a scene where Bornin dies after having two of his hands cut off. A father also prematurely kills his daughter, believing that he is saving her from suffering, but the siege on the compound is broken by French forces, which he misconstrues as the final attack of the Boxer rebels. Savagery, madness, mutilation and racism are evident here. The Kiss of Blood (Le Baiser de Sang (1929)), by Jean Aragny and Francis Neilson, which is also in Hand and Wilson's selection of Grand-Guignol plays, has a character called Joubert, who is desperate to have his finger amputated, the one that pulled the trigger on the gun that he believes murdered his wife. The surgeon, Professor Leduc, cannot find any physical reason for the excruciating pain he claims to be in, and refuses to carry out the mutilation on ethical grounds. Joubert amputates it himself at the end of the first act. Later one of Joubert's staff tells Leduc and Dr Volguine that Joubert has had a second finger removed, this time by operation. Finally, goaded by his wife, Hélène, who pretends that she is a ghost, Joubert chops off his hand with an axe, and dies almost instantly as the play ends. Joubert is compelled to harm and then kill himself because of his part in Hélène's attempted murder, and her drive towards retribution is prompted by her own madness, believing incorrectly that she has gangrene. As Hand and Wilson see it, ‘The Kiss of Blood is a horror play but is never far from the world of farce, above all in the irony of Joubert's failed murder attempt and his attempts at self-destruction.’ See Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 247.

18. Louis J. Kern relates Grand-Guignol to ‘Splatterpunk’, which is David J. Schow's phrase, a form which is a variation on the splatter film, and a sub-genre of horror literature. Utilising

Lthe pulse and heartbeat of its prose pounding with the manic, visceral, electronically-amplified rhythms of punk rock and heavy metal, splatterpunk, like splatter film, is most typically seen as an expression of adolescent angst, of the despair of urban youth, and of the rebellion against paternal authority.

Kern notes:

In both cases, the comic element is a variety of black (or perhaps I should say ‘red’) humour that seeks to invert socially conditioned expectations of behaviour and to parody the logic and smugness of cozy bourgeois sensibilities. It is subversive and at times anarchic humour rooted in violent fantasies of status reversal and the un-masking of cultural hypocrisy.

For Kern,

the violence of splatterpunk is intended to be restorative; the literary devices of fear and pain are ruthlessly manipulated to revive deadened consciences, to fan but faintly smouldering embers of humanity. The frequent metaphor of zombification, expressive of the anesthetized emotions of the ‘living dead,’ those who willfully choose sensory deprivation rather than questioning their pre-packaged reality, is a common theme in splatterpunk fiction. To resurrect deadened consciences, splat lit insists it is necessary to pass through desensitization, to descend into the well of our own personal callousness about the human condition and the everyday violence and suffering of human life in order to experience re-humanization. The mechanisms of re-humanization are fear and pain. (See Kern, ‘American “Grand Guignol”’, 47–62)

19. See Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 70, citing Brophy, ‘Horrality’, 277–9.

20. Of course, Sarah Kane's Blasted (1995) is set in a hotel room, where an explosion allows for another consciousness to enter the space so to speak.

21. Brantley, ‘Packing Heat, and a Grudge’.

22. For Hilton Als, Walken's ‘Carmichael isn't a character; he's Christopher Walken – the same Walken who has hosted “Saturday Night Live” and appeared in countless movies – with his intriguing (and then not) halting speech patterns and his sinister aesthetic’. Almost any Walken performance will be in intertextual dialogue with his many more notorious film roles, as would be the case with most famous actors, but Als's criticism did not hold true for me, because in many ways such awareness adds to rather than diminishes the performance. See Als, ‘Underhanded’.

23. For McDonagh: ‘Chris [Walken] is so ideal in this role, because he's so funny but can turn to that dark side on a dime, and because he can see the niceness in these odd people.’ See Healy, ‘Please, No More Mr. Bad Guy Roles!’

24. Healy, ‘Please, No More Mr. Bad Guy Roles!’

25. In his individual narrative Mervyn tells of drunken visits to the zoo to visit a caged gibbon, when he would put his finger through the bars and the gibbon would pull his finger. Reflections on the life and dreams of a caged animal are followed by the revelations that he drunkenly imagined rescuing the animals, but that it never happened, and when he stopped going to the zoo, he started taking a lot of speed, got caught, and his bail conditions insisted on his working in the hotel.

26. McDonagh, A Behanding in Spokane, 8. (Hereafter all references to this play will be given in parentheses within the text.)

27. Other variations on the same theme include: ‘Maybe a prostitute would get stabbed and I'd have to go rescue her? Or some lesbians would get stabbed’, and he would be awarded a ‘protecting lesbian's medal' for his efforts (21).

28. Als, ‘Underhanded’.

29. Als, ‘Underhanded’

30. Als, ‘Underhanded’

31. Als, ‘Underhanded’

32. Als, ‘Underhanded’

33. Mike Cole's outline of Critical Race Theory from a Marxist point of view is worth considering. He notes the influences of people such as Franz Fanon, whose distinctions between the ‘governing race’ and the ‘zoological’ natives offer particular insights on this work and links in with Mervyn's visits to the zoo. Cole also mentions the importance of civil rights and equal rights activists, particularly the ‘Black Power and Chicano movements of the sixties and early seventies’ as well as ‘radical feminism' in the articulation of such a theory. See Cole, Critical Race Theory and Education, 12.

34. The other answer to his accusation may be found in the Baltimore-based, five-season television series The Wire (2002–08) which does stress a strong criminal element in some predominantly African-American areas of socio-economic, class, gender and race disadvantage. However, the series highlights far more the blight of poverty and significant social injustices in politics, education, media, policing and broader society generally than it ever simplistically aligns blackness or race with criminality.

35. Als, ‘Underhanded’.

36. Hand and Wilson note the significance of the monstrous maternal in many horror movies, noting Barbara Creed's application of Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection in relation to the construction of the maternal figure. See Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 110.

37. Colin Farrell achieved a similar thing by different means in McDonagh's In Bruges (2008) with less irony and framing, but by openly inviting judgement of his character in terms of his racist slights.

38. Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 35.

39. Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 36.

40. Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol

41. Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 37.

42. Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 78.

43. On the one hand, the proliferation of the multiple hands in the case does remind one of the trophies gathered by serial killing psychopaths and, on the other, of the work of Eugène Ionesco and absurdist theatre's excesses.

44. See Brantley, ‘Leenane III, Bones Flying’.

45. Toby notes: ‘I kinda had the feeling I saw that in a TV movie one time. That had Lee Majors in it. But maybe I'm getting it mixed up with the Bionic, I don't know’ (31).

46. Ramachandran notes that patients with limbs missing from birth still experience vivid phantom limbs, ‘implying the existence of scaffolding that is hardwired by genes’. See Ramachandran, The Tell-tale Brain, 256.

47. Ramachandran notes that patients with limbs missing from birth still experience vivid phantom limbs, ‘implying the existence of scaffolding that is hardwired by genes’. See Ramachandran, The Tell-tale Brain, 26.

48. Ramachandran notes that patients with limbs missing from birth still experience vivid phantom limbs, ‘implying the existence of scaffolding that is hardwired by genes’. See Ramachandran, The Tell-tale Brain, 27.

49. Bayne and Levy, ‘Amputees by Choice’, 75–6.

50. Ryan, ‘Out on a Limb’, 24.

51. Sorene, Heras-Palou, and Burke, ‘Self-amputation of a Healthy Hand’.

52. Tellingly, Ryan suggests that the ‘beliefs central to BIID are not delusions, however it is possible to say they have few of the features of the beliefs that are usually categorized that way’, adding that ‘Though psychotic illnesses usually manifest with more than just one delusion, monosymptomatic delusional disorders classically present as a single delusion in an otherwise normal individual.’ Ryan believes that those with BIID should not be seen as suffering from ‘a monosymptomatic delusional disorder’. See Ryan, ‘Out on a Limb’, 23–4.

53. Ramachandran and McGeoch, ‘Can Vestibular Caloric Stimulation be Used to Treat Apotemnophilia?’, 251.

54. Ryan argues that there are many medical instances where healthy body parts are removed; when there is a high cancer risk then prostate glands, breasts and ovaries can be removed. Organ donation is an obvious case and those suffering gender identity disorders are often ‘offered sex reassignment surgery; so that their bodily appearance might better match the sex that they believe represents their true self’. See Ryan, ‘Out on a Limb’, 28.

55. In gender identity disorder or transgenderism the desire is not simply to amputate but to alter, replace and reconstruct.

56. Sorene, Heras-Palou, and Burke note that ‘Elective amputations of healthy limbs have been carried out in the UK in 1997 and 1999. However, after widespread publicity, such surgery has effectively been banned in the National Health Service.’ See Sorene, Heras-Palou, and Burke, ‘Self-amputation of a Healthy Hand’, 593.

57. Some individuals resort to shotgun blasts, knives or chain saws in order to destroy a limb or body part and in other instances, according to Ramachandran and McGeoch, attempts involve freezing the limb with dry ice in the hope that they ‘will damage it to such an extent that an amputation is then mandatory’. See Ramachandran and McGeoch, ‘Can Vestibular Caloric Stimulation be Used to Treat Apotemnophilia?’, 251.

58. Ramachandran, The Tell-tale Brain, 255.

59. Ramachandran, The Tell-tale Brain, 250–3.

60. Ramachandran, The Tell-tale Brain, 254–6.

61. Ibid., 256.2.

62. However, Ramachandran notes that in ‘two-thirds of cases the left limb is removed’, so this allows him to question the ‘disproportionate involvement of the left arm’, but he ignores the percentage of the population that are right handed – as Mervyn does – and instead likens it to somatoparaphrenia, a condition where after a right-hemisphere stroke, the patient not only ‘denies the paralysis of the left arm but also insists that the arm doesn't belong to him’. See Ramachandran, The Tell-tale Brain, 256.

63. However, Ramachandran notes that in ‘two-thirds of cases the left limb is removed’, so this allows him to question the ‘disproportionate involvement of the left arm’, but he ignores the percentage of the population that are right handed – as Mervyn does – and instead likens it to somatoparaphrenia, a condition where after a right-hemisphere stroke, the patient not only ‘denies the paralysis of the left arm but also insists that the arm doesn't belong to him’. See Ramachandran, The Tell-tale Brain, 257.

64. Ramachandran notes: ‘Distortions or mismatches in the SPL can also explain the symptoms of transsexuals’ (Ramachandran, The Tell-tale Brain, 259).

65. The script suggests that the tattoos on his fingers are initially covered by stickers, and when he returns from the apartment the stickers are gone.

66. Night of the Hunter (1955), directed by Charles Laughton and written by James Agee, has its serial killing character, the Reverend Harry Powell, played by Robert Mitchum. Powell has the words ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ tattooed on the knuckles of his left and right hand.

67. For side by side with this BIID condition, Bayne and Levy note there are also those who are labelled ‘pretenders’ – people who consciously fake a disability. Towards the play's end there is the expert readying of a cigarette by Carmichael, thus it might be possible to suggest in performance that Carmichael may have a prosthetic covering to disguise the fact that the amputation never happened in the first place. Most actors will play the role with the help of special effects. Walken's fluid interpretation of the character leaves that possibility open that Carmichael may well be a pretender, as he consistently foregrounds a characterisation that is fundamentally performative. See Bayne and Levy, ‘Amputees by Choice’, 78.

68. In Jacques Lacan's work, the Objet petit a is that which is desired and that which is impossible to realise and is sought always in the other and outside of the self, signifying both lack and excess.

69. Cole argues: ‘As long as CRT centralises “race” rather than class, and as long as it voices no serious challenge to United States and world capitalism, it will be tolerated.’ Along similar lines, McDonagh's play is anti-racist, to my mind, but there is a general avoidance of gender and class conditions and how these interdigitate with issues of race. Cole, Critical Race Theory and Education, 151.

70. Pitcher, The Politics of Multiculturalism, 2.

71. Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 78.

72. See the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.