Films: 1980s
(1985) A Nightmare on Elm Street 2
Sunday, January 07, 2007
A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge
Director: Robert Sholder
Release: 1985
Whereas Wes Craven's "A Nightmare on Elm Street" explored the blossoming of female sexuality, director Jack Sholder twists the knife a little further in "A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge."
Jesse Walsh (Mark Patton) is a new transplant to the town of Springwood. Plagued by nightmares of a gloved maniac, he stumbles from his parents' new and increasingly overheating suburban home to a school full of peers who want to help, but cannot.
Over the course of several nights, and a burgeoning romance with Springwood neighbor Lisa (Kim Myers), Jesse is psychically torn apart and succumbs to the vengeful spirit of child killer Freddy Krueger.
Jesse and Lisa discover the diary of Nancy Thompson, the former occupant of Jesse's bedroom. In Nancy's journal are the secrets and keys to defeating Freddy. Before they can be fully implemented, however, Freddy slays Jesse's fellow students and teachers with wild abandon, until a final confrontation in Krueger's abandoned boiler room proves Lisa's commitment to Jesse outweighs Freddy's grip on his body and soul.
"Why can't Jesse wake up like everyone else?" his sister (Christie Clark) asks her parents.
Because he's a pawn in a homoerotic script. Jesse is indeed plagued with heavy nightmares, and he wakes in his tight white underwear, in his first scene, to reach down and adjust the organ that will plague him for the rest of Sholder's film.
Sholder and scriptwriter David Chaskin eschew plot and character development for an all out gay panic. Jesse Walsh is always half-clad, slick with his own sweat and moaning about his confusion as he quivers and winces through "Freddy's Revenge."
There are several male-male pairs that illustrates Jesse' conflict.
First there is that of Ken Walsh, his father (Clu Gulager). Whereas Jesse spends most of his panic issuing statements like, "I don't know," and "I'm all messed up," his dad assesses a household problem and declares that what it needs is a "shot of Freon." When mom (Hope Lange), suggests psychiatry for her perspiring, screeching son, Ken objects, recommending a methadone clinic instead. Between his legs, upon the ladder on which he stands, a massive hammer handle bobbles back and forth.
While Jesse's relationship with his father is that of masculinity versus vulnerability, his relationship with schoolmate Ron Grady (Robert Rusler) is that of unconsummated lovers. They meet on the softball field, where Jesse first humiliates himself in front of, then taunts Grady. The buff jock's response is to pull Jesse's pants down and they proceed to roll around with each other in the dirt.
Their macho gym teacher (Marshall Bell) begins what will be a repeated session of punishment, making Jesse and Grady do pushups on the lawn until their exhausted bodies appear to move only at the hips, dry humping the earth, side by side.
"Assume the position," they are told by Coach Schneider. And so they do. Later, in the locker room they talk about wet dreams.
Meanwhile, Lisa is hellbent on turning Jesse's affections her way. Surprising him at home, she and Jesse's mother discover him in his bedroom, grinding to a club track and holding a mock phallus (some kind of wooden stick) at his crotch. Sholder shows us this dance routine in explicit detail. At one point he closes a drawer with his butt, slowly bumping it with his tight jean-clad ass, over and over.
"Cleaning his room" is important to everyone in a "A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2." In Jesse's half-unpacked room, where he wakes from sordid Freddy-wrought nightmares, Lisa makes her first stab at claiming him as a male partner. She effects a complete put-away of his clutter, but while she marks his territory with her organizational skills, she also discovers what he has in the closet. Jesse lives in a room still haunted by the feminine sexual force Freddy Krueger found so powerful before. When she reads Nancy's words to him, it is clear that Jesse is transfixed. The descriptions of a girls lust for a boy is physically transferred to Jesse as he takes the diary from Lisa and finishes reading the adolescent erotica aloud.
He is affirmed by Nancy's words. Whatever Lisa's intentions, to communicate Nancy's strength to Jesse perhaps, what Jesse initially focuses on is the revelation that there is a source for his psychic bisexuality - Freddy Krueger.
Krueger's dream torture is specific to Jesse's condition.
In his second on-screen nightmare, the first of the post-title sequence, Jesse discovers that Freddy resides in the basement of his house. Confronted, Freddy tells him directly, "You've got the body, I've got the brain," and that they have "special work" to do together.
Now that Krueger's role is clear, that of teacher and master, Sholder cuts to biology class. The teacher (Hart Sprager) illustrates and describes the human colon. He also throws a heart on the table, it is a lumpish bloody mess. Falling asleep during the symbolic lecture, Jesse is entwined by a thick snake that crawls up his body, starting at the crotch.
At home, nature is similarly affected by Jesse's diversion from a culturally traditional path. The house, now 97 degrees, drives two love birds crazy. One kills the other and then attacks the Walsh's before bursting into flames. The only resident not sweltering is preadolescent Angela. Father blames son for the conditions. "Animals," he says, "don't explode for no reason." Later, in a separate dream, boyhood objects melt - dripping with goo.
Jesse's reasons for trembling at the point of explosion come clear in another Freddy-dream, in which he finds himself at bisexual hangout Don's Place. There, Coach Schneider, clad in tight leather S&M garb, orders Jesse back to the high school gym, where he runs the lad ragged before ordering him into the showers.
While Jesse showers, Schneider selects a pair of jump ropes from his closet. Whatever the man's intentions, it's graduation day for Jesse. The coach is pummeled with balls, all sorts of balls, bursting from tubes and cubbyholes. The jump ropes bind him and lash him to the wall in the showers, in front of Jesse. Schneider is then stripped bare, towels whip his buttocks bloody and then Jesse disappears in the steam, reappearing as Krueger. It's not a clear coming out (this happens soon enough), but it is first time around. Schneider is killed from behind, slashed open where he hangs and Jesse reappears, coated in the man's blood. The nozzles around them spurt red.
Jesse's fracture is set in motion. At Lisa's party he tries to assimilate. Lisa's father replicates an asexual 1950s environment at first, playing big band records and cooking at the grill - complete with chef's hat and apron. During this fantasy time, Jesse is able to have sexual relations with Lisa. In the middle of the act, however, dad goes to bed and the party goers throw on new music, yanking the event back to the present. Jesse sees Freddy's long gray tongue in place of his own and runs from Lisa.
Grady gets Jesse next. Jesse appears in his bed, urging him to help.
"I need you to let me stay here tonight," Jesse says. "There's something inside of me."
Jesse creates a scenario in which he can disprove his own homosexual yearnings. Jesse will sleep, Grady will watch. If Jesse begins to act out, Grady will stop him by waking him up. As it turns out, Grady is not powerful enough to resist sleep - and in the act of figuratively sleeping with Jesse he is overpowered by Jesse's "thing inside." Jesse comes out at last, transforming into Freddy before Grady, then impaling him with razor-tipped fingers.
Again covered in a man's blood, Jesse runs back to Lisa.
"He's inside me," Jesse explains, "and he wants to take me again."
And he does. Freddy confronts Lisa for the first time, and it is clear that the rest of "Freddy's Revenge" is about the gnarled child killer male and the smooth-skinned female at war over Jesse's body. In the process, Freddy lays waste to a handful of their peers at the party. It is a statistical metaphor, while the parents are literally unable to escape their traditional bedroom Freddy pronounces that the Elm Street kids are "all my children, now." Well, at least one in 10 of them, according to the landscape of neurosis in Sholder and Chaskin's movie.
"A Nightmare in Elm Street Part 2" falls apart in its resolution.
In every way, Chaskin and Sholder paint themselves into a homo-fantasy corner. Jesse has run from his ripe girlfriend into the arms of his chiseled boyfriend. He has killed his metaphorical father in the shower in a violent S&M fantasy. He has even longed for the non-pubescent form of his sleeping sister. What should be left, according to the writer and director's universe, is either escape from society or self-annihilation. They shy from both options.
Instead, the moral-sexual cul-de-sac of "A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge" is abandoned for a deus ex machine in the form of Lisa's love. Traveling through his abandoned boiler room in a kind of mythological sequence (complete with guardian monster dogs, illusory wounds and other beasts), Lisa defeats her now-gay love monster by embracing him and professing her love. Fire erupts from every surface and he is burned away. Jesse reemerges, literally molting and appearing in his original form. Fade to black (except for a somewhat bitter dream sequence at the end - which seems to indicate they are still on Freddy's bus, after all).
"A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge" is particularly brave in the way it tackles graphic and threatening subject matter. As sexual promiscuity broadened its scope during the 1980s to include out homosexual and bisexual relations, "Nightmare 2" sends Freddy into the fray and forces Jesse to "unpack his room."
Like real life, however, what to do with all the stuff he takes out remains unclear and in yet another parallel, the film simply puts its subject matter, slick with blood, into drawers and, yes, closets. Traditional love, in the end, restores the balance (but again, pay attention to the eradicating force of the minor but meaningful final nightmare).
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge, 1985
During this fantasy time, Jesse is able to have sexual relations with Lisa. In the middle of the act, however, dad goes to bed and the party goers throw on new music, yanking the event back to the present. Jesse sees Freddy's long gray tongue in place of his own and runs from Lisa.
