Films: 1980s
(1982) Poltergeist
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Poltergeist
Director: Tobe Hooper
Release: 1982
Tobe Hooper puts on some fairly respectable shoes in the making of "Poltegeist," although the net result of his collaboration as director with screenwriter and producer Steven Spielberg is far less intense than his previous work.
Gone are the rich otherworldly colors and the realistic violence of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," (1974) and in its place ... a cool pastel suburbia of Californian America, plagued by spirits that provoke a more or less philosophical wonder and then destroy an American suburban haven.
It is not that "Poltergeist" is not well made. The film is, in fact, suffused with creative camera placement and interesting lighting (particularly Hooper's use of strobe). It is well-written, if difficult in places, and the film lacks no measure of talented, effective actors. Still, "Poltergeist" teeters, a conflicted film and an uneven text.
The Freelings, according to Spielberg's script, are the premier family of a cookie-cutter housing development in well-to-do California. Their home is sterile but spacious, their landscape is beaten into submission but sunny, and their children are beautiful and precocious. Even their dog possesses a Lassie-like intelligence.
Into this fairy tale existence come ghosts.
More specifically, at first, into this fairy tale existence comes television. Through the set, youngest daughter Carol-Anne (Heather O'Rourke) hears voices. What they tell her is unclear but the Freeling's house is soon rocked by a very perceptible intrusion.
Tableware, chairs and family members are subject to unseen forces. What is at first a kind of trippy fun for mother Diane (JoBeth Williams) and a bit of a scare for father Steve (Craig T. Nelson) becomes a life-threatening nightmare as their boy Robbie (Oliver Robins) is torn from his room by an apparently carnivorous tree and Carol-Anne is abducted from the physical world.
The Freelings are thrust into a twilight world of concealing their problem and depending on ghost hunters from the nearby university to find and reclaim Carol-Anne, who can now only speak to them in gasping cries from the television.
"Poltergeist" enters interesting territory at about this point, poised on the edge of disaster at every turn.
For the most part, it recovers from the perfectly ludicrous Robbie-eaten-by-the-tree scene. As a sequence in "Poltergeist" the hungry tree blows the verisimilitude of the previous low-grade ghostly activity so far out of the water as to tip the film toward comedy. A growling tree coupled with a tornado in the hills of California should have stopped "Poltergeist" cold.
Hooper sidesteps the need to address the problem of how the characters should react to the event (hightailing it out of town and abandoning the house forever would be the standard human response) by injecting the overwhelming event of Carol-Anne's abduction. "Poltergeist" shifts suddenly back into its low-key mode and the apocalyptic event is never again mentioned.
And it continues.
While Hooper executes parts of Spielberg's story very well, notably the early appearance of phantoms on the stairs and Steve's gradual realization that Cuesta Verde is more than a simple housing development, there is nothing he can do to suppress the goofiness of the googly-eyed monster scenes that Spielberg wrote into the script of "Poltergeist."
Within the misshapen construct, however, is a fantastic journey through maternity. "Poltergeist," much like the Freelings, survives thanks to its females.
Beatrice Straight creates a nuanced character out of parapsychologist Dr. Lesh. She forms a crucial character link with Williams' Diane, developing the spiritual awakening of the mother which is the true backbone of the film.
For her part, Williams describes a truthful and powerful arc as a middle-aged mother discovering that she passionately believes in an unseen world and a spiritual life. Diane's journey is subtle and multifaceted.
Lesh helps her "come out" and supports her belief in the spiritual world (a journey Steve does not allow her to make earlier in the film), and later psychic Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein) helps her reconcile Christianity with new-ageism. More importantly, Diane is also on a journey toward restored femininity.
At the beginning of "Poltergeist," Diane is the housekeeper, the cook and the foggy sexual interest for football-Sunday/breadwinner Steve. As the spirit-world invades their home, Steve is supplanted and emasculated. He slumps against the kitchen wall in shock as Diane explores the possibilities of the haunting.
She becomes his caretaker, dabbing his mosquito-bites, and later managing the crew of parapsychologists that set up camp in the Freeling's living while Steve guzzles Budweiser. She consoles him at one point, in his new role, by explaining to the others that it has been "hard on him" and saying that he has been "wonderful" with the kids. The male-female role is reversed.
Furthermore, Spielberg's script steers Diane directly into the mouth of rebirth. As the plan to rescue Carol-Anne comes to fruition, it is Diane who must travel into the metaphorical womb that is accessed by the children's closet. Steve ties a virtual umbilical cord around Diane, and then becomes her midwife by holding that cord and assisting her journey to the other world. When she and Carol-Anne emerge they are covered in afterbirth. While Carol-Anne is virtually unchanged, in fact wiped of memory, Diane is physically altered.
She emerges as a full woman, hair streaked with silver and at ease. Steve asks her how she feels, and she says "really good." She is prepared to make their home anew, even in the wake of the nightmare that was their house. She cares for herself for the first time on screen, luxurious bathing and making choices about her appearance.
But it is here that "Poltergeist" makes a sinister left turn. Diane is stripped of her power. Her newfound independence compromises everything the Freelings think they've achieved.
A long tracking shot of Diane in the bathtub, intercut with Robbie afraid of a clown doll, indicts Diane for traveling too far, and for taking personal time for pleasure.
Perhaps inevitably, the beast that lives in the Freeling's house attacks Diane directly, molesting her in the marital bed and rolling her about the bedroom. She is sexualized, clad in panties and a football shirt as she is rolled across the ceiling, her legs splayed.
What follows is a prolonged brutalization of Diane, while the children are assaulted by the clown doll and the closet. She is thrown into walls, down stairs, into the rain, submerged in a mud pit of corpses and electrocuted over and over.
When she finally makes it back to Robbie and Carol-Anne, the flickering light of the closet portal has been replaced with an enraged vagina, a tube of tissue from which a reverse-umbilical slithers to snatch back its brood. No woman, "Poltergeist" seems to posit, may have both her spirit and family at once.
Diane must physically reestablish her link with her children, forming a human chain of hands to pull them from the vortex and back into the conventional world from which she strayed.
Hooper navigates Spielberg's script aptly, but when it is considered it is a story fraught with male neurosis and reactive, suppressed anger at women. Steve is exasperated with Lesh when she talks intelligently, saying he doesn't care about her investigation. He is later confrontational with Tangina, and in a constant orbit around Diane - seeking her approval but disengaged from her revised role until the "beast" sets her right. It is an unsettling dynamic.
It is up to Steve, then, in Spielberg's script, to rush home from the office (in no less than a pickup truck) and save everybody. His maleness is suddenly potent again, as the ghosts have reset the balance to patriarchy. He gathers the family into the traditional family station wagon, and wheels them away. Reestablished, he lets them into a hotel room and is the last character on screen, depositing the TV set on the balcony. He will have no more interference.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Poltergeist, 1982
While Hooper executes parts of Spielberg's story very well, notably the early appearance of phantoms on the stairs and Steve's gradual realization that Cuesta Verde is more than a simple housing development, there is nothing he can do to suppress the goofiness of the googly-eyed monster scenes that Spielberg wrote into the script of "Poltergeist."
