Films: 1980s
(1984) A Nightmare on Elm Street
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Director: Wes Craven
Release: 1984
Lock your teenage daughter in the house, her dreams are dirty and dangerous.
The underlying metaphor of Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is not particularly subtle, but it's connection to the intertwined threats of emergent female sexuality and parental abandonment is a richly developed theme.
Craven unfurls a fairly straightforward tale in "Elm Street."
Springwood High students Nancy, Tina, Rod and Glen are having nightmares. Specifically, they're having shared nightmares about a burned killer in a ratty green and red sweater chasing them through a boiler room.
The core of this group is Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), who enjoys a mature and platonic relationship with Johnny Depp's Glen Lantz. The two serve as a protective couple to Tina (Amanda Wyss) and Rod (Jsu Garcia), who are the opposite of platonic.
Things go dramatically wrong when Tina's parents leave and the four teenagers spend the night. Tina and Rod make it a night of sex, while Nancy forbids any foreplay with Glen in the living room, stating "we're here for Tina now."
Their presence is not very helpful. After sex with Rod, Tina is torn apart by unseen knives while she dreams of the burned villain. Rod, considered a rebel within the community, is the prime suspect and he flees to hide from the law.
Enter Nancy's parents ... or lack thereof.
Marge Thompson (Ronee Blakely) is her alcoholic mother, fishing one bottle of vodka after another out of locations throughout the house. Her estranged husband is a lieutenant on the Springwood police force. They are momentarily and uncomfortably brought together by Nancy's presence at Tina's murder.
What follows is Nancy's spiral into self-induced insomnia. Concurrent to this, and the reason for it: Her friends are one by one slain by dream demon Fred Krueger (Robert Englund).
Freddy exacts a real-world revenge from a place between the grave and the subconscious. As Nancy confronts her mother on several occasions (staggered by enforced visits to a sleep clinic), she learns the motivation for Krueger's vengeance and devises a strategy for combatting him in both worlds, dream and waking.
At work throughout Craven's plot, and running through this family/supernatural conflict, is a complex fusion of desire and rejection.
Among the youngsters, Nancy at once wants to be with her boyfriend Glen, but rejects his advances with what is either unnatural maturity (or isolation-forced immaturity). At no time does she exhibit lust, or any apparent sexual feelings. Glen is physically aggressive with Nancy, but acquiesces to all of her put-offs. Conversely, Tina treats Rod like a criminal nuisance, but is aggressively receptive to his advances.
Among the adults, Nancy's mother is clearly troubled by her daughter's sleeplessness and terror, but she is also dismissive of Nancy's stories about Freddy.
For a father chiefly concern with his daughter's well-being, Lt. Thompson makes relatively little effort to involve himself with her after Rod is arrested. Even when she begs him to wake her up in 20 minutes, after Glen's murder when she plans to grab Freddy from a dream, he is dishonest and assigns someone else the duty of watching the Thompson house.
Lastly, Freddy wants to kill Nancy, but he also saves her for last and makes vulgar sexual advances in the process. His relationship with her is much more verbal and prolonged than with any of the other teenagers.
Craven has set up a web of unresolved emotions. They center on the ripe bodies and quasi-personalities of the younger main characters. In her haze of booze, only Marge recognizes the danger from the outside that threatens Nancy. Her methodology is skewed, but it is the only concrete action anyone but Nancy takes in response to Freddy.
In this semi-absent parent situation, and in this polarization of sexual and non-sexual beings, only Freddy seems to represent an id.
His power is seated in the psychology of giving in. Fear of Freddy equals subjugation to Freddy. Additionally, in each of the dreams, the dreamers are openly curious and exploratory. They creep through the dungeon of Freddy's boiler room without balking. There is a subtle flirtation at work, during which Freddy scrapes, significantly perhaps, his razor-tipped glove along long hot pipes. He is the open book, gleefully and fatally peeling back the layers of confusion to reveal the pulsing, wrinkled truth of awakening sexuality (writ graphically on his very body, a used up and leaking version of the near-perfect bodies on which he preys).
Then there is the glove.
Freddy is at once grasping at the Elm Street kids, seeking to rend them with his hands, but also never touching them with his own flesh. His hand is protected from the contact he so craves.
The knife-fingered glove also stands as a powerful symbol of sexual contact, a masturbatory instrument wielded by the sinister force that lives inside the heads of Freddy's victims.
In this aspect, the glove occupies a central scene in the film.
Nancy floats in a warm bath, ensconced in soap bubbles. Her mother, provoked to renewed maternal activity by Nancy's psychic distress, infantilizes her further, cooking her warm milk and turning down her bed. The situation has transformed from an alcoholic and broken home into a childcare fantasy.
As Nancy dozes in the hot water, her legs apart and her eyes shut, Freddy's glove rises from the soap. Cutting fingers fanned apart, Freddy's hand moves through the water, toward Nancy's sexual center.
Before the razor-tipped fingers can touch her, however, Nancy's mother knocks at the door and the grip is avoided. When her mother is again gone into the house, Nancy's dream returns and the glove again splays its digits between her legs.
When her eyes fly open and the shock of the glove is realized, Nancy is submerged, pulled through a narrow slit in the bathtub into a nether world of liquid and darkness. She swims back towards the aperture. Freddy yanks her naked body deeper into the darkness. In a sense, the womb wants her back. In another sense, the threat of Hell as punishment for masturbation is immediate and payment is due.
This is the wet dream manifest as lethal slip-up. Nancy's blissful time alone in the bathtub, and Craven's camera placed between her legs, predicts a fatal outcome for such self-indulgence. The archetypal parent-interrupts-pleasure moment drives the point close to home and so the glove's role in "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is fully defined.
In a sense, throughout Craven's story the teenagers of Elm Street want the danger that Freddy represents. They are initially thrilled to share the fact that their dreams are not only evil, they are communal. The secret society created by their common nocturnal world is the binding power of puberty, but in this case it is sexual development run amok.
Freddy is the touching force on which they obsess, either sneaking upstairs to receive it or staying in the family living room to resist it. Freddy is the confirmation that their sexual powers are real, but terrifying.
Death, in "A Nightmare on Elm Street" is a failure of self control. Nancy, preternaturally gifted in her resistance, controls her sexual power and in the end she conquers it by turning her back on the sex sigil of Freddy rising from her mother's bed (in which she has just died while Nancy fought Freddy). Nancy commits the final act, divorcing her childhood from the mother-daughter relationship, and in the face of her sudden womanhood Freddy dissolves, moaning, trying to slice through his own placenta of sheets.
Craven suggests that escape is not so easy, however. The guilt of mother-daughter separation lingers in a coda scene.
Although Nancy has conquered Freddy - she is forced to pay a price and Nancy's mother is the ultimate victim of Freddy's presence. The sexually powerful daughter leaves the house for her fully restored friends' car. All seems right with the world. The car, however, is now detailed in Freddy's red and green.
Nancy has moved into the world of adulthood, in a sense, she is part of Freddy's world of sex and departed from the iron bars of her mother's warm-milk-and-vodka castle. That's where Freddy retains his power, ripping Nancy's mother back inside in the film's final scene.
Nancy's mother dies twice - her motherhood perishes as martyr during Nancy's emergence from Freddy's power and then again as she is left behind by her escaped daughter.
Craven leaves the viewer with a twisted and ambiguous morality play, a tale of responsibility and punishment that suggests that we are our own gateways to persecution and that Freddy is part of the substance of our reality. Around us, and it is an image echoed in more than one horror film (see Roman Polanski's "Repulsion," for example) the walls stretch towards us and the stuff of the home we thought a fortress becomes the threshold between life and death for real or imagined sins.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
