Fascism in the Horror Film
Fascism and the Female Identity
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Fascism and the Female Identity in Horror Cinema: 1935 to 1997
Historically, fascists state sought control of the female mind and body.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Mussolinis Italian fascist regime mandated motherhood for females. Individualism and functional skills were, more than de-emphasized, proscribed.
Furthermore, according to author Anson Rabinbach (Male Fantasies, Volume 2L Male Bodies - Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, 1989), the fascist state places in high order the kind of symbolic language that creates a particular kind of psychic economy which places sexuality in the service of destruction.
Given this definition of fascism in relation to the function of the female in Western society, female characters as early as 1931 were placed under a particular assault from the fascist without.
THE UNIVERSE FRACTURES: PENETRATING THE ANTIFASCIST FORTRESS
Motherhood is the opposite of Carole Ledouxs (Catherine Deneuve) intentions in Roman Polanskis 1965 Repulsion.
Polanski posits a world in which males are inherently expectant of female subservience. As in any fascist state, they are expected to be well-behaved breeders.
Psychologically torn apart by her longing for a chaste life, Carole resists every male advance and societal role thrust upon her in swinging London.
Repulsions chief male character, Colin (John Fraser), enjoys two wives, his married wife and his sexual partner, Caroles sister Helene (Yvonne Furneaux).
Colins presence in Caroles world (the apartment she shares with Helene) is a constant reminder of and pressure from the fascist state. Colin constantly exposes the societal function for which her female body is not being used, teasing Carole and pseudo-analyzing her. He subjects her asexuality to ridicule he also hints at what hed like to do about her purity and untouchability.
The life for which Carole yearns is that of the separate individual, a decidedly non-fascist identity. She does not seek self-determination, but a spiritual life, and a life free of sexual responsibility.
Instead of accepting advances from suitor Michael (Ian Henry), Carole looks out a window onto a chaste spiritual sorority - a convent of nuns. Notably, they wear habits in the manner of Protestants - a persecuted minority under Italian fascism and a nominal enemy of Hitler during the Third Reich.
In her real world, Carole is almost totally withdrawn from her community. She stares into space and will not talk. Caroles antisocial behavior actions become the subject of ridicule by Michaels saloon friends (who roughly speculate on getting her drunk and forcing a four-way encounter). The fascist state increasingly does not approve of or accept her lifestyle.
Into her universe it must break, and break in it does, invading into her apartment three separate times. A phantom rapist pollutes her dream body. Michael breaks in next, concerned for her safety (and she murders him in his patriarchal moment) and then the landlord (Patrick Wymark) breaks in to collect rent money and then rape her (she murders him in her only act of direct resistance).
When Carole defends her antifascist fortress by destroying Repulsions agents of state, that is Michael and the landlord, her universe literally fractures. Giant cracks open in the apartment walls. Hands reach from the paint. 
In the maelstrom of fascist pressure, which Polanski suggests is inherent to the Western urban model, the antifascist is reduced to insanity and is inevitably carried away by the concerned functionaries of a masculine system (in this case, finally and ironically Colin).
A SELF-LOATHING RACE FOR FREEDOM
Three decades before Repulsion, director Lambert Hillyers Draculas Daughter (1936) presents the antifascist female in a self-loathing race for freedom.
A proto-feminist, overtly lesbian character, Gloria Holdens Countess Marya Zaleska is the extrapolation of plot point from one scene of Todd Browning's 1931 Dracula.
In Dracula, Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) keeps three wives. Continuing the theme of polygamy, the fascist state controls its females and subjects them to an endless servitude. They cannot breed, however. Dracula and Draculas wives are inherently antifascist, beings that exist purely to satisfy appetite, which runs contrary to the purely functional role cohabitation of the sexes plays in the fascist state.
The scene postulates Draculas numerous wives, and suggests an entirely different identity for his daughter in Hillyers 1936 sequel. Countess Zaleska claims she is the offspring of the count, but by this she certainly means she is one of his many wives - transformed by his blood, like Lucy (Frances Dade) and Mina (Helen Chandler) in Brownings 1931 film.
In Draculas Daughter, however, Zaleska wants out. Count Dracula has died at the hands of Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Edward Sloan) and Zaleska wishes to return to the land of the living. Unlike Carole, Zaleska wants to be a productive member of her society. She seeks to do so via socialite psychiatrist Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger), who represents the fascist state intact and nearly perfect. Garth is virile maleness surrounded by subservient women.
Of the opposite opinion is Zaleskas servant Sandor, played by Irving Pichel.
Sandor represents a male identity that directly opposes the warrior-man of the fascist state. He is a pouting,
make-up-wearing effeminate male along the lines of Renfield in Brownings 1931 film. Zaleska is of Sandors world. She feeds on men, but more importantly she feeds on women. Hillyer lingers far longer on Zaleskas lesbian urges - and upon the details of undressing her female prey (Nan Grey) to paint her before attacking. It is worth noting her female preys name, Lili, is significantly close to Lilith - the medieval Jewish rejector of male-female sex in the Garden of Eden. Sandor hates that Zaleska wants to leave this life.
A non-revolutionary life is what Zaleska wants, however, She seeks escape from her nonfunctional sexuality. Without the fascist principle of childbearing to define her, Zaleska laments her world of death.
Interestingly, Draculas Daughter ends with assassination. Rather than let Zaleska betray her revolutionary antifascist world, Sandor fires an arrow through her heart. He ends her self-loathing, and also spares her the automaton condition of domestic breeder.
Also ending poorly for the female is James Whales 1935 Bride of Frankenstein.
A more clearly outline fascist plot for womanhood would be hard to find. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is trapped by the nefarious Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger) and pressed to build a new monster - this time a woman to serve as mate to the vengeful Monster (Bors Karloff) built in 1931s Frankenstein (also directed by Whale).
Little does Pretorius expect that he and Frankenstein will build such a perfect antifascist female. The Mate (Elsa Lanchester), when she is brought to life, wants nothing to do with her mandated role as mate. She recoils in horror at both the Monster and at her own visage. The construction of her identity is anathema to life for the Mate. Her rejection has a powerful result. What follows is apocalypse.
THE BATTLE FOR BIRTHS
If Zaleska had succeeded in winning real life in Draculas Daughter she would have reset her function to the motherhood state in which the ideal fascist female exists.
Caroles fate in Repulsion remains less defined. She is either to be institutionalized and has - in one sense - escaped fascism via insanity, or she will become an obedient fascist down the line.
Roman Polanski explores the same fork in the road with another female character in 1968.
The story of Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse (John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow in Rosemarys Baby), drags the fascist female theme from below the surface and drops it writhing on the hot sand. Rather than implied pressure to submit to the state as breeder, Rosemary is absolutely given the job of repopulating a Satanic army. She is selected to breed a new fascist leader.
All of the key sexual roles of the female are institutionalized in the Woodhouse apartment. She is not allowed to work, to spend time out of the building with friends or take pleasurable moments with visitors. Guy and next-door coven leader Roman Castavets concoct their scheme in secret and drug Rosemary so that the Devil may impregnate her with the Antichrist.
Unlike Carole in Repulsion or Zaleska in Draculas Daughter, Rosemary makes a very different choice. Rather than kill her oppressor, or be killed, she encounters her infernal child and accepts it. Here, the female joins the fascist state and the presumption is that the world is changed. Without her resistance, the offspring of fascism will grow and grow powerful.
She is a willing device. Religion and science are eschewed for a new order, a new nation.
God is dead, the witches proclaim at the end of the film, Hail Satan!
AGAINST THE FASCIST STATE: THE FEMALE KEY
The presumption that the subjugation of the female mother leads to a fascist world also implies that the resistance of the female mother to fascism results in its possible defeat.
In the 1970s, director Ridley Scott created a female lead character in horror cinema who could fight back.
Sigourney Weaver navigated her character Ripley through four films and four directors from 1979 to 1997, and never has the mother-fascist-pregnancy dynamic been so explicitly explored.
Each film in the Alien franchise is about fascism, birth and abortion. In each film, birth is prompted by a state-infused seed. In each film, the state-injected child is aborted by antifascist mother-hero Ripley.
Scott and screenwriter Dan OBannon create the military-industrial Company in Alien. It is a direct stand-in for the fascist state. On the far reaches of known space, a cargo ship is rerouted by The Company to the breeding ground of a vicious alien race. The plan is for the cargo ships crew to become impregnated by the parasitic aliens and bring them back to Earth under the stewardship of an android. When they get back, the aliens will be turned into armies.
Pulling no punches, OBannons script names the computer aboard the ship that will carry this brood Mother. The alien itself is explicitly phallic, resembling a giant deadly male reproductive organ.
Ripley succeeds in escaping its touch by blasting it from an airlock - a very literal visual metaphor for the lethal ejection of matter from the uterus. Ripley then crawls back into bed, (momentarily) free from her governments instruction to breed.
The Company, renamed Weyland Yutani, continues to enact its plan for mandated births in James Camerons 1986 Aliens.
Fifty-seven years have passed since Alien. Ripley has been asleep in her escape pods stasis tank. The Company has sent colonists to the world upon which the breeding ground was initially discovered (names LV-426 ... oddly close to abortion drug RU-486?).
Newly rescued Ripley and a crew of soldiers attempt to save them, but they are, of course, only ever meant to serve as retrievable hosts themselves. Ripley becomes a more complicated opponent of the fascist world in Aliens, alternately adopting the orphaned survivor Newt and destroying the ultimate symbol of the fascist mother - the queen alien in her lair, spewing forth dozens of the states hoped-for new weapon.
Abortion and freedom are the conclusion to which Ripley must come by the end of David Finchers Alien 3. Ripley herself has finally been impregnated with an alien by the state. She terminates her own life instead of giving birth, holding the squealing offspring to her belly as she plummets into flames. She is the anti-Rosemary Woodhouse, electing not to follow her biological instincts but to adhere to a personal manifesto that rejects the fascist role of maternity-machine.
The tide of fascism is hard to hold back, however.
Enter director Jean-Pierre Jeunets Alien: Resurrection. The state simply scrapes Ripleys DNA together and clones her in its labs, creating multiple hosts from which they can breed alien warriors. When one of her clones becomes conscious of her Ripley-hood, she fights back. Ripley exterminates herself over and over, finally encountering her hybrid alien-human baby and causing it to be sucked through a pin-sized hole in her escape craft bulkhead. It is an excruciating on-screen reenacting of the abortion vacuum.
This time, Ripley is confronted with the reality of her choice. Her stance has left her robbed of identity (cloned) and face-to-face with the reality of rejecting motherhood, but surviving to witness the consequences of that choice as the all-too-sympathetic creature of the fascist-female union ribbons out into space.
ESCAPING THE CONSTRUCT
There is no escape, these films tell us.
Fascism, the constant 20th Century threat, rears its head in horror cinema in multiple ways throughout the decades since its first modern political manifestation in Italy in the 1920s.
As an acute victim of its social restructuring, the female is a model by which to examine possible reactions to the fascist state.
In horror films the female body is subject to the creative wiles of writers and directors (notably all male in the cases chosen for this essay). Already she is subject to the functional roles into which she is cast.
The theme of her body being subverted, assumed control of, or destroyed in lieu of obedience, generates one of three postulates: that the woman is doomed by, complicit with, or openly at war with fascism.
Men, on the other hand, are portrayed as liberators and escape-artists from the fascist construct. This will be explored in future essays, but for the purposes of fascism and the female identity - the horror film leaves her no way out other than subjugation or death. There is no identity, she is permitted no personal input.
Her fate, if she does not die? An endless recycling of fascist demands upon her body and reproductive organs.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Alien: Resurrection, 1997
The state simply scrapes Ripleys DNA together and clones her in its labs, creating multiple hosts from which they can breed alien warriors.
