Title: Abjection and Disgust in a Ritual of Defilement: N.Nikolaides’ Singapore Sling Nikolaides, Simon. The Claquette of Singapore Sling. 2012. Photograph. Athens, Greece1. 1 Photo of the actual claquette that was used in the film. It was taken and given to me by the late director’s son, to use in my papers. Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of: MA in Cultural Studies Student Name: Maria Daskalaki Student Number: 200641173 Module code and title: Dissertation ARTF5910M Supervisor: Barbara Engh Date of submission: September 3rd , 2012 Word count: 14.988 University of Leeds Department of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is a potentially endless part of the dissertation, since I feel I owe so much to so many people, that I would not even know where to begin. But for the sake of brevity and consideration of the readers’ time, I would just like to thank my BA professor Nikolas Kontos for his delightful teaching and encouragement to pursue postgraduate studies. I also owe a lot to my professor and supervisor Barbara Engh who has been remarkably inspiring, helpful and supportive throughout this MA course. The entire department of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies has also been precious this year. I would additionally like to express my gratitude to the late director’s Nikos Nikolaides’ wife and son, Marie-Louise and Simon Nikolaides for their cooperation and the helpful material that they provided. Of course I could never neglect my family’s, friends’ and partner’s support which has been precious and finally, I am grateful to late Annie Redman King for her Scholarship, without which I would not be writing this very dissertation. ABSTRACT After reviewing the theory and history of Disgust which has only taken off since 1990, this paper will set to explore why and how N. Nikolaides’ Singapore Sling is disgusting and it will follow a revision of the theory of Abjection as well as its further appropriation and developments. Furthermore, there will be an attempt to correlate Disgust with Abjection and by some means enrich the theory of the latter. The theory will be then applied to film and will be used in order to explore in what ways Singapore Sling could be considered abject(ive) and a ‘ritual of defilement’. Table of Contents Introduction......................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Disgusting Singapore Sling........................................................ 6 From Core to Moral Disgust The CAD Hypothesis Organisation How and Why Singapore Sling is Disgusting Chapter Two: Abject(ive) Singapore Sling....................................................... 16 The Theory and origins of Abjection Abjection and Disgust: The Common Ground Filmic Representationality of Abjection How is Singapore Sling abject(ive)?.............................................................. 24 1. Unstable Borders and Areas of Ambiguity; the Composite..................... 24 Boundaries between Living and Dead Boundaries between Love and Destruction Boundaries between Clean and Unclean Boundaries between Male and Female The Composite 2. Images of Pollution and Disgust............................................................... 32 3. The Maternal and/or the Female Body..................................................... 34 4. Other Abjective Qualities......................................................................... 38 Fetishism/Perversion The Liar, the Criminal The Abject Always Returns 5. How is the Film Itself, Abject?................................................................. 42 Chapter Three: A Ritual of Defilement............................................................ 43 Conclusion........................................................................................................... 49 Figures................................................................................................................. 53 Bibliography........................................................................................................ 72 List of Illustrations Stills from Singapore Sling Figure 1 The Mummy-Father 52 Figure 2 The Chauffeur’s Hand Pleading For One Last Time 52 Figure 3 The Detective With a Bullet in his Shoulder. 53 Figure 4 The Detective in The Mother’s Clothes and Make-up 53 Figure 5 The Mother is Feeding the Detective Chewed Food. 54 Figure 6 The Paraphilias 55 Fig. set 2: Vomiting as a Part of the Family Dinner 57 Fig. set 3: The Gun Changes Hands and Gets Hidden in a Sex Scene 58 Fig. set 4: Viscera and a Pulsating Heart 60 Fig. set 5: The Bourgeois House and Clothing 61 Fig. set 6: The Water Surrounds Death 63 Fig. set 7: Placing the Clean and the Dirty Together 65 Fig. set 8: Blood 66 Fig. set 9: The Detective Unfed, Unwashed, with Cracked Lips and Bleeding 68 Fig. set 10: Masturbation with a Kiwi Fruit 69 Fig. set 11: Accentuated Feminisation of Internal Organs 70 1 Abjection and Disgust in a Ritual of Defilement: N.Nikolaides’ Singapore Sling Introduction Singapore Sling: The Man Who Loved a Corpse (1990), is a film that was aiming -according to its creator Nikos Nikolaides12- to represent Greece of the decade that preceded it. The 1980s came after the end of the seven year dictatorship in Greece (1967-1974) and hopes had been raised then, regarding the establishment of a socialist regime. Those hopes have been often characterised as collective illusions, because communism seemed as an absolute effect of a cause. People were under the impression that Greece would turn into a socialist paradise. Especially after the United States lost the Vietnam War those delusions as well as the collective chimera were intensifying beyond control and politicians of the time were encouraging them (Tsakoniatis 37). Therefore the 1980s in Greece were a time when the country started negotiations with foreign nations in Europe, borrowed money and gave it to the people. Education and Health were free for all, taxes were next to none and therefore the Greeks, partly influenced by the rising European Union and partly due to their idiosyncrasy at the time, quickly turned the socialist promise into a capitalist funfair of uncontrollable spending sprees (Tsakoniatis 37). 1 All the quotes from interviews that feature in this paper were originally given in Greek and are translated into English by me. Some of them lack the actual source, interviewer name or date, because they were given to me in digital, scanned form by the director’s wife and therefore that data was not properly included for all. This particular claim is found in the interview by Nikos Kavvadias, cited in the bibliography. 2 Biography taken from the official website: Nikos Nikolaidis, the multi-award winning director and writer, was born in Athens on the 25th of October 1939. His directorial debut began with the short film: Lacrimae Rerum 1962, and his official entrance into world of filmmaking was in 1975, with the feature film Eurydice .Β.Α 2037. Aside from film directing, Nikolaidis has worked for a record company and has put his signature on more than 200 television commercials. He is the only Greek filmmaker to have been awarded five times as "Best Director" at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, yet never for the "Best Film" category. He passed away on the 5th of September 2007. 2 More specifically, in the 80s the Greek society is getting familiar with envy, competition and the concept of ‘social status’. New money, consumerism and the struggle to become ‘civilised like the others’ are the reasons why the lifestyle started to get westernised. This led to a diversity that is today experienced as inequality. Moreover, the Greek home turns from a space of food preparation to a space of food consumption, since Greece is introduced to pizza and the food delivery service (Vailakis). There is next to zero taxation on the big businesses or the wealthy, and tax evasion of the lower middle class is met with tolerance. Everyone is happy in the 1980s, because no one knows that due to lack of taxation the country is borrowing more and more money. The people are content and the political system survives because the citizens can enjoy a state that does not impose, but works in order to merely meet the minimum requirements (Vailakis). The 1980s are a period in which the contradictions and conflicts are not resolved, smoothed or suppressed, but emerge as a central component of the political and social scene. There is political pluralism on one side and failure of political understanding and prevalence of the two-party model on the other. There is artistic experimentation and personal style but kitsch poetry as well, gyms and frozen pizza, social benefits and homophobic ‘macho’ video tapes, communication technologies and populism in the media (Papanikolaou). It is a time when nationalism also flourishes, as is evident in the statement of the President of the Hellenic Republic from 19851990, Christos Sartzetakis, that ‘Greece is a nation with no siblings’3, which was met with agreement and enthusiasm. The neo-conservatism that emerges once more during the 1980s, touches Greece as well. 3 Therefore, departing from the commonly accepted and scientifically unshakable […] concept of the nation, the conclusion which I publicly expressed during the Easter of 1985, that we, Greeks, are a nation with no siblings, indicates an indisputable and tangible truth […] and indeed no nation on earth is related to us, we have siblings nowhere, unlike other nations and peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons, the Romanic people, the Slavic people or the Arabs. Since all of them comprise not one nation, but families of nations; with the exception of Jewish people, who are also a nation with no siblings (Sartzetakis, 1994) http://www.sartzetakis.gr/points/thema1.html 3 Hence when during such a period which is perceived as luminous, a director creates a film that discusses ‘hell on earth’, confinement of the mind, mutilation of emotions and a life of nightmare, he is treated as an unwanted pariah. However, he is now more topical and timely than ever, since the people born during the 80s are currently experiencing the climax of the ongoing fermentation described above. A fermentation always aided by ‘a European Union that has, until now, reproduced and strengthened social and economic inequalities throughout Europe and extended forms of intra-European racism through discriminatory economic regulations and austerity measures’4. The ‘80s Greece’, through the indexing of large or small social and political issues, ideological currents and artistic events of the period, –implicitly yet clearly- gave prominence to all those parameters which foreshadowed with a mathematical and almost incredible precision, what Greece is today (Vailakis). Consequently, despite the unwelcoming reception of the film at the time, since it discusses various subjects in highly controversial manners, Nikolaides’ vision proves insightful when analysed in a crisis-ridden Greece of 2012. His words resonate like a warning from the past: When I was shooting “Singapore Sling”, I was under the impression that I was making a comedy with elements taken from Ancient Greek Tragedy . . . Later, when some European and American critics characterized it as “one of the most disturbing films of all times”, I started to feel that something was wrong with me. Then, when British censors banned its release in England, I finally realized that something is wrong with all of us.5 The contextualisation of the film was important for this paper to move forward, as it illuminates Nikolaides’ motivation to create such an angry film. It was a statement against 4 Statement of Solidarity to the Greek Left by Chantal Mouffe, Costas Douzinas, Drucilla Cornell, Ernesto Laclau, Etienne Balibar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Butler, Jacqueline Rose, Jaen-Luc Nancy, Joanna Bourke, Jacques Ranciere and Wendy Brown http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/statement-by-balibar-brown-butler-spivak-on-greek-left/ 5 From the director’s official website: http://www.nikosnikolaidis.com/mainenglish/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=54&Itemid=15 4 nationalism and homogenisation as well as his own sense of confinement stemming from the feeling that people were trying to trap him inside a stereotype6. The contextualisation also delineates the premise behind the selection of this particular work of art, as I belong to the generation experiencing the aforementioned climax. Additionally, Singapore Sling proudly stands as a masterpiece on its own and what is interesting, is that it attempts to represent the formerly neglected female psychopath. ‘An excess that has rarely been seen before, a woman whose violence, cunning and monstrosity are almost unparalleled in the women who form her cinematic predecessors’ (Jermyn 251). However, this is not to proffer that this particular representation of the contemporary woman’s conflicting roles offers a positive image that should be sought out by a feminist appropriation project. In Barbara Creed’s words ‘I am not arguing that simply because the monstrous-feminine is constructed as an active rather than passive figure that this image is ‘feminist’ or ‘liberated’. The presence of the monstrousfeminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity’ (“Monstrous” 7). To return to the selection rationale, the film discusses decidedly controversial subjects, through a stunning cinematography which attracted my attention and admiration. Especially after encountering Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the film -in my mind- was transformed into an elaborate orchard of abjects and disgust, waiting for the grotesque fruits to be harvested and brought to light. In chapter one, after reviewing the theory and history of Disgust which has only taken off since 1990, this paper will explore why and how Singapore Sling is disgusting. In chapter two, there will be a revision of the theory of Abjection as well as its further appropriation and developments. The issue of film for example, has often been overlooked by scholars who read Kristeva, and her own writing on film is also scarce as she is mostly interested in the impact that a text has on the reader. Furthermore, in chapter two 6 It was stated in the “They’ve put us all in a supermarket” interview, 1990. 5 there will be an attempt to correlate Disgust with Abjection and by some means enrich the theory of the latter. This is because although Kristeva develops her own kind of theory of Disgust in Powers of Horror, she avoids mentioning any others that have preceded it and seems unaware of them, even though she is familiar with Freud’s. The theory of abjection will be applied to film and will be used in order to explore in what ways Singapore Sling could be considered abject(ive). The qualities which render the film a ‘ritual of defilement’ will be demonstrated in chapter three. Analysing the film based on the theory of abjection is the primary goal of this paper. In forming a part of the first chapter, the CAD hypothesis will be the main guiding line. The CAD triad hypothesis, was proposed by the cultural anthropologist Richard A. Shweder and his colleagues, who discovered that ‘contempt, anger and disgust are typically elicited, across cultures, by violations of three moral codes . . . The proposed alignment links Contempt to Community (violation of communal codes), Anger to Autonomy (individual rights violations), and Disgust to Divinity (violations of purity)’ (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, and Haidt 574). All three emotions play an important role in locating disgust and abjection in and around the film, since in it, the ethics of Autonomy, Community and Divinity, are constantly being attacked and undermined. Singapore Sling7 is a manifold film consisting of horror, black-comedy and film-noir among other genres. It is about a private detective (Panagiotis Thanassoulis) who arrives at a mansion on a rainy night looking for a woman called Laura that has been missing for years and is suspected to be already dead. This suspicion is inherent to the subtitle ‘A Man Who Loved a Corpse’, which in its turn gave rise to reactions to narratives that were never part of 7 The film took its title after a cocktail whose name was found in the journal of the detective in the film as a clue. After the Daughter in the film reads it out loud, she decides that they should name the man ‘Singapore Sling’. The fact that the film itself is a cocktail of several genres, often leads reviewers to express the correlation between the film and the actual cocktail. 6 the plot8. The mansion is owned by a Mother (Michele Valley) and a Daughter (Meredyth Harold) who open the film digging a grave for the chauffeur they have just murdered, under pouring rain and the wet sounds of non-diegetic instruments that dampen one’s core. The detective is watching them from a distance, unable to react, as he has been shot under circumstances that are never disclosed. When the Mother and Daughter finish their ritual, the viewers learn that they systematically kill their servants, burry them in the garden and plant decorative plants on them, in a continuation of a tradition initiated by the Father of the family who is now supposedly dead. His death is surrounded by uncertainty, since judging by the Daughter’s point of view and the Mother’s occasional paranoid clues, he lives on in the form of an un-dead mummy (Figure 1). Therefore when the detective rings their bell and the Daughter finds him collapsed on the doorstep, the audience can easily presume that what is to follow, will not be pleasant. Indeed, the psychopath duo drags him into their incestuous, dangerous, gory sexual games that among other things involve murder, emetophilia9, hardcore bdsm10, rape and urolagnia11 (Figure set 1). And so the disgusting narrative begins. Chapter One: Disgusting Singapore Sling From Core to Moral Disgust Charles Darwin described Disgust as ‘something offensive to the taste’ and classified it among the most powerful and fundamental human emotions (250). It has got ‘an animal 8 Some people mention explicit acts of necrophilia in their reviews, or even cannibalism, which never actually takes place, but the connotations were apparently strong enough to create a false impression. 9 A paraphilia involving individuals being sexually aroused by vomit. 10 BDSM stands for Bondage and Discipline, Sadism and Masochism. 11 A paraphilia involving individuals being sexually aroused by urine. 7 precursor, called distaste, and it has a non-moral primordial form, called core disgust . . . which is best described as a guardian of the mouth against potential contaminants (Haidt, “The Moral Emotions” 575). Indeed, most evolution-psychologists agree that ‘disgust is revulsion at the prospect of oral incorporation of an offensive object. . . The offensive objects are contaminants’ (Rozin, Haidt, and Mccauley 757-758). What is served by Disgust, many psychologists argue, is the denial of death; the repression of the knowledge and certainty of death found only among humans. Indeed, a strong correlation has been found there between disgust and the fear of death, during research on terror-management theory. Rozin et al have also argued that disgust arises when people are confronted with their animal nature. Although humans eat, excrete and reproduce like any other animal, culture defines the ‘decent’ way to perform these actions and the ones who ignore the prescriptions are thought to be disgusting and animal-like. What is more, blood and soft viscera seem to elicit disgust exactly because they remind us of our connection to animals (Rozin, Haidt, and Mccauley 761). Disgust then is the avoidance of contaminants. All animals that had the behavioural tendency to avoid objects and situations that put them at risk of disease, gained an adaptive advantage. Therefore, although the specifics of Disgust are shaped by culture, there is indeed a biological pattern to our revulsions, rendering Disgust a part of human nature (Curtis and Biran “Natural History” 660). The regulation of bodily functions that protects humans from confronting their animal nature is often inherent to ‘the moral codes of cultures and religions . . . where they appear to function as guardians of the soul against pollution and degradation’ (Haidt, “The Moral Emotions” 575). It thus seems, Rozin et al claim, that disgust ‘originated as a rejection response to bad tastes, and then evolved into a much more abstract and ideational emotion. In this evolution, the function of disgust shifted: A mechanism for avoiding harm to the body became a mechanism for avoiding harm to the soul’. Although elicitors of Disgust have 8 become widely diverse, what they have in common is how ‘decent’ people keep them all at bay; a kind of behaviour that turns Disgust into a moral emotion and a powerful form of negative socialisation. (Rozin, Haidt, and Mccauley 771). Many philosophers have attempted to define morality more closely and for ‘Westerners, at least, sociomoral disgust can be described most succinctly as the guardian of the lower boundary of the category of humanity. People who “de-grade” themselves, or who in extreme cases blur the boundary between humanity and animality, elicit disgust in others’ (Haidt, “The Moral Emotions” 857). What began as an avoidance of actual parasites evolved to serve an aversion to social ones, which consequently brought about their punishment and exclusion based on a set of virtues that a culture considers essential. The CAD Hypothesis Organisation To expand the CAD Hypothesis, let us revisit the premise which holds that contempt, anger and disgust are elicited across cultures through the violations of the following moral codes: Community, Autonomy and Divinity respectively12. The ethics of Autonomy are attacked when individuals are physically or psychologically abused, or when fairness, freedom of choice, equality and human rights are harmed. When I first encountered the hypothesis, what appeared as fully possible was that it is not only anger that is elicited when the ethics of Autonomy are undermined. I sought correlations between anger and disgust, which proved to be a standing postulation. Indeed, Rozin, Haidt, and Mccauley claimed that ‘studies which ask people to recall times they were disgusted, elicit stories that often focus on moral violations, and that involve high levels of anger as well’ (762). Furthermore, Catherine Cottrell and Steven Neuberg maintain that both anger and disgust are ‘elicited when people encounter a physical or moral contaminant, suggesting that intergroup disgust [and anger are] 12 The initial letters of each emotion and its respective moral code are conveniently the same, which led to the name of the hypothesis. 9 likely to occur when an out-group promotes values and ideals that oppose those of the ingroup’ (773). Another means by which anger and Disgust are related, is through the connection of their moral codes. As Lene Jensen claims, ‘Christian concepts have become redefined to an extent where they only vaguely resemble the ideals of traditional Christianity. Instead, people bestow “something like a sacred status” on individual autonomy’ (72) which automatically links autonomy to divinity. Similarly, upon reading that the ethics of Community focus on the interests of collective entities such as family, country, society, traditions, and that any harm to social order and harmony elicits contempt, I searched for correlations between contempt and disgust. William Ian Miller in his Anatomy of Disgust, called ‘contempt a close cousin of disgust, which works with disgust to maintain social hierarchy and political order’ (Haidt, “The Moral Emotions” 575). In his own words: Disgust surely has some close affinities with other sentiments. In routine speech we use contempt, loathing, hatred, horror, even fear, to express sentiments that we also could and do express by images of revulsion or disgust . . . There is no doubt that the most intense forms of contempt overlap with disgust. Darwin called this extreme contempt “loathing contempt”. (24-32) Lastly, the ethics of Divinity are founded on Divinity/purity violations, which elicit Disgust when people commit ‘sin’ or do not protect the soul or the world ‘from degradation and spiritual defilement’. When they do not respect their obligations to God’s authority, the scriptural authority, or Nature’s Law, people are considered disgusting. The CAD hypothesis is very useful when explaining the moral differences across social classes and cultures and it also helps in ‘understanding such things as the culture wars that currently put liberals and progressivists (whose morality is limited to the ethics of autonomy) against conservatives and 10 orthodox (with a broader moral domain, including community and divinity) (Haidt, “The Moral Emotions” 576). How and Why Singapore Sling is Disgusting13 In Singapore Sling, one cannot miss the extravagance of gory imagery and challenging narrative. The incestuous, murderous, bourgeois Mother-Daughter duo constantly undermines all three moral codes discussed above. They frequently bring the audience to a state of utter disgust pervaded with fear and ‘we have a name for fear-imbued disgust: horror’ (Miller 26). Indeed, it is a horror film among other things, which pays no respect to any constructed moral codes. But how exactly are the ethics of Autonomy undermined in it, for example? To begin with, the women of the house rape, torture and murder their servants or anyone who enters 13 There are numerous reviews on the film and most of them seem to revolve around two prevailing concepts; that of uniqueness and that of Disgust. Here are a few examples in English (although those two main concepts are also found in German, Spanish and Greek reviews): Simultaneously hypnotic and repulsive, "Singapore Sling" is an absolutely one-of-a-kind film-watching experience’ (Kate Tenebrous http://tenebrouskate.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/singapore-sling-1990.html). This is one of the most unique films I've ever seen, and I'll probably remember scenes from it till the day I die . . . A mix of utter revulsion and sensuous, wayward eroticism (http://www.myduckisdead.com/2010/06/singapore-sling-1990.html). “Singapore Sling” is one of the most brutal, sick, unpleasant, and stomach-churning films to be made. That it is artfully shot, well-acted, philosophically poignant, and mannered only seems to add to the discomfort levels. There are no films like this one (Witney Seibold https://witneyman.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/singapore-sling-1990/). While the weird sex is often repulsive and sometimes hard to watch, I can’t say some of it wasn’t damn well executed. Singapore Sling is a cheeky and nasty little film I found unique and thoroughly mesmerizing (http://goregirl.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/singapore-sling-1990-the-dungeon-review/). 11 their mansion for that matter. This symbolically connotes the massive lewdness that takes place on the bodies of servants all around the world, or even on certain ideas. It undoubtedly attests to the lack of any concept of human rights, fairness, individuality or equality and therefore is a downright confirmation of the ethics of Autonomy being violated. Consequently, the women’s actions lead to emotions of anger and Disgust. The ethics of Community suffer an analogous affliction, since there is no respect to any authority, political or divine, and by murdering people they act against the preservation of the community. Moreover, at the family table food and vomit play an equal role, since the two women eat to the point of vomiting without being affected (Figure set 2). The Mother forbids smoking inside the house when apparently murder and rape are encouraged, and she arrogantly proclaims: ‘Honesty is the first virtue I demand in this house . . . you must be a virgin to be accepted here’. Therefore by engaging in a murderous, incestuous relationship and by ridiculing traditional family values, Nikolaides has them corrode the constructed ideals and traditions of the Family and the social order and harmony. In fact as Anna Powell suggests, horror elements are commonly used devices in order to threaten this symbolic construct; this abstract ideal of the nuclear family and its validity (137). In addition, regarding the Mother and the Daughter being hard-core fetishists, Louise Kaplan when elaborating on fetishism suggests that the first principle of the fetishism strategy defines fetishism as a mental strategy that enables a human being to transform something or someone with its own enigmatic energy and immaterial essence into something or someone whose form of being makes them controllable. (5) Kaplan also noticed that Karl Marx’s theory of surplus labour tightly resonates with that principle: 12 a human being transforms other human beings, with their own enigmatic energies and vitalities, into things that are material and tangibly real. Through the process of providing surplus labor value for the capitalist, the worker is transmogrified into a commodity. (qtd in 6) This juxtaposition effectively reflects the relationship between the bourgeois and the fetishist. In the case of Singapore Sling, those two coincide in the characters of the Mother and the Daughter, who act as enemies of both Autonomy and Community. By abusing each other and the man, they undermine Autonomy and on a symbolic level, they also attack the culturally structured ideals of Community. Through both extreme sexual acts and exploiting and killing their servants, they personify two of society’s threats against Human Rights: Sexual abuse and Capitalism. Finally, the ethics of Divinity which are directly connected to Disgust are degraded to such extent that one can only assume that Nikolaides enjoyed every moment of degrading religion. Before proceeding to providing examples which illustrate this kind of transgression, here follows Daniel Kelly’s elaboration on the domain of divinity: Purity norms, which are central to the moral codes of many traditional or religious cultures, are said to regulate the domain of divinity. In such cultures, transgressors of purity norms are thought to be defiling their selves or very souls, either by showing disrespect toward God or the gods, or by violating the sacred, divine order. Purity norms are present but more peripheral in the moral codes of secular cultures, where they are often justified differently, usually by appeal to the so-called natural order. Consequently, transgressions of purity norms in secular societies are often thought of as unnatural acts or crimes 13 against nature . . . Purity norms also address the specifics of which sexual activities are permissible and what is forbidden, deviant, or “dirty”. (121) In Singapore Sling, there is an on-going role-playing game between the Mother and the Daughter, in which the Mother plays the Father and the Daughter plays Laura when she first arrives at the mansion14. The game always begins with Laura introducing herself and the ‘Father’ asking her: ‘How long has it been since you last confessed?’ before ‘he’ proceeds to force her to perform fellatio on a fake penis. The purity norms of the Western culture have always condemned sexually deviant activities, which certainly abound in the film, in a wide inventory of perversions15. However, deviant sex is not the only means by which Nikolaides playfully turns his back to purity norms. He also has the women burry their chauffeur’s body without giving him a proper burial, but they throw a ceremonial wreath at the body in a joking manner nonetheless. Incest is supposedly against Nature’s Law and therefore a crime and finally, when the Daughter is shown having sex with the mummy-Father, they exchange the following words: Daughter: How cruel, Father; how cruel… Heaven will punish us. Father: My little darling, heaven is the last thing that concerns us in this world. Religion has now been blatantly mocked and this supposedly accounts for explicit expressions of Disgust since it is our response to our demotion from our supposed position of godlike stature (McGinn 74). It is interesting how core and moral disgust converge within the phraseology employed by religion: The good is “pure” and “clean”; evil is “filthy” and “foul”. We must be “pure in heart” and not succumb to “moral corruption”. The body is our “temple” and must be kept “undefiled”. Our soul must remain “spotless”. We must not let ourselves be “contaminated” by “rotten” doctrines. (Colin Mcginn 218) 14 Laura is the young secretary that the detective has been looking for Paedophilia (the Father took the Daughter’s virginity when she was eleven years old), urolagnia, emetophilia, torture, rape and hints of necrophilia. 15 14 Additionally, ‘the idea of “want” tied to sin as debt and iniquity is therefore coupled with that of an overflowing, a profusion, even an unquenchable desire, which are pejoratively branded with words like lust or greed’ (Kristeva “Powers” 123). Therefore lust and greed seem to be directly related to violations of divinity. The Mother and the Daughter being sexually insatiable and eating until they regurgitate, embody both lust and greed to an exaggerated extent, and subsequently to a disgusting extent. Naturally, Singapore Sling was not perceived as disgusting by the audience based solely on its violation of moral codes. Curtis and Biran, after reviewing and matching research conducted by several evolutionary psychologists, came to the conclusion that there are five broad categories of objects or events that elicit disgust: Bodily excretions and body parts, certain categories of ‘other people’, decay and spoiled food, particular living creatures, and violations of morality or social norms (20-21). The last category has already been explored but the film covers the first three as well. ‘Bodily excretions and body parts’ abound in Singapore Sling for example, since the women urinate on the man while raping him, they vomit on him and on the family table, and they disembowel their servants after they kill them. Colin McGinn, when commenting on internal organs and their impact, says: We can stand the thought of these soggy monstrosities when they are ensconced safely inside the body’s fragile envelope, but once they are brought out into the open— in surgery or trauma—disgust beats its drum loud. Few things are more revolting to us than disembowelment, when the intestines are exposed and ripped from the still-living body; but the mere sight of a pulsating bloody heart is enough to turn most people’s stomachs. (24) Interestingly enough, a pulsating bloody heart is exactly what features in the film at some point surrounded by other organs (See Figure set 3), leaving the audience with a turned stomach. What is meant by ‘other people’ is ‘in poor health, of lower social status, 15 contaminated by contact with a disgusting substance, or immoral in their behavior’ (Curtis and Biran 21). Judging by the contemporary standards of what is considered immoral or ‘contaminated’, the incestuous lesbian couple could be argued to belong to the category of ‘other people’ and qualify as elicitors of disgust. Additionally, since they come in contact with food of ambiguous consistency that they disgorge on their own table, they cover the category of ‘spoiled food’ along with being contaminated by contacting a disgusting substance. ‘Other people’ supposedly includes those of ‘lower social status’ but the Mother and Daughter clearly belong to the bourgeoisie, as indicated by their house, their clothes and the way that Mother speaks. The house is heavily decorated in baroque style, with elaborate patterns and various fabrics around; mirrors with intricate framing, layers of satin and lace, numerous pillows and extravagant furniture (Figure set 4). Their flowing gowns remind of post-Victorian, rich suffragettes and the Mother speaks first in French and then translates herself into English, clearly embodying the degrading bourgeois in a satiric manner. Although filth is usually connected to poverty, the ones who are represented as filthy and sick are the wealthy family. Nikolaides’ choice to put the bourgeoisie in a disgusting position is all but coincidental, since he would often express his contempt towards the idiotic morals and habits of the declining aristocracy. When the Mother and the Daughter are depicted by torturing, raping and murdering the ones below them, it is a direct critique on how ‘lowness’ is considered a threat by the high, who are aware that they owe their position to the contrast provided by the low. Moreover, the connection between filth/cleanliness and the bourgeoisie has often been commented on: ‘Frenchmen from the 18th century onward began to manifest intense disgust at a new range of objects, they began using the emotion to motivate a variety of new sanitary and cosmetic behaviors and to justify new social distinctions between the washed and the unwashed’ (Stearns 24). Miller adds: [The Christians’] disgust made 16 vulgarity a moral issue, and a Marxist might wish to claim that such philosophies were merely supporting a new class-based social order by elevating bourgeois social tastes into moral demands (193). The Mother and Daughter’s bodies emit fluids indiscreetly and always seem on the verge of erupting, manifestly defying and transgressing the censures of bourgeois norms, morals and manners. They seem to have leapt out of Rabelais, since the urine, vomit, masturbation with a kiwi fruit and disembowelment, ‘transform the erotic into the emetic’ (Kipnis, 225). ‘Control over the body has long been associated with the bourgeois political project, with both the ability and the right to control and dominate others’ (Kipnis 226) and therefore the representation of such uncontrollable bodies raises particular political discussions. As Stallybrass and White put it, the bourgeois subject has ‘continuously defined and redefined itself through the exclusion of what it marked out as low–as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating . . . [the] very act of exclusion was constitutive of its identity’ (191). ‘So disgust has a long and complicated history, the context within which should be placed the increasingly strong tendency of the bourgeois to want to remove the distasteful from the sight of society’ (Kipnis 227). Conclusively, through the depiction of the uncontrollable, disgusting –albeit aristocratic- body and its atrocities, dominant Ideology with its exclusionary devices, becomes the object of severe criticism within Singapore Sling. The fact that the film has been rejected or banned, also reflects the impulse to remove any ‘disgusting’ elements that are perceived as ‘contaminants’ that threaten the body of Ideology. Chapter two: Abject(ive) Singapore Sling The Theory and origins of Abjection 17 The term ‘abjection’ originates from the Latin abjectiō which means to ‘cast away’, ‘throw down’, ‘reject’. It was adopted by Julia Kristeva in the 1980s to mean among other things ‘the jettisoned object, [that] is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses’ (“Powers” 2). Before a further reviewing of the term begins, it is important to highlight its incipient relation to Disgust, since ‘Disgust is manifested as a distancing from some object, event, or situation, and can be characterized as a rejection’ (Rozin, Haidt, and Mccauley 757-758). Therefore both Abjection and Disgust derive from the motivation to expel. Mary Douglas in the 1960s was one of the first to write on ‘dirt’ rejection. She claimed that ‘if we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place’ (36). Dirt according to her is not an isolated event, but inherent to systems and their order, as it is their by-product. When ordering and classification of matter implies rejecting elements that are not appropriate, there will be dirt (36). In her theory of pollution, Douglas locates social structure at the centre, as the base from which Disgust develops. This entails that Disgust and what is disgusting are socially delineated. The idea that Disgust seems to require enculturation has indeed proven to be accurate by scientists who have worked on Disgust since Douglas’s writing. However, Kristeva uses Douglas and then departs from her. With her theory of Abjection, she attempts to facilitate the understanding of our fear of being disgusting and of the experience of Disgust. She makes use of Douglas’ anthropological work to ‘contend that abjection also plays out on the social level body’ (Farrar 21), since the body, Douglas suggests, ‘is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious’ (6). It is the body’s ideas of pollution and purity through which the body gives itself a fragile status, since it is those ideas that ‘codify ambiguous boundaries and reify indeterminate identities in to manageable differences’ (Farrar 21). In Douglas’ words: 18 Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created. (4) Consequently, as it happens with Disgust that is culturally circumscribed, what is considered acceptable, clean, ‘good’ and civilised in a culture, is separated from what is regarded as abject, dirty, evil and uncivilised, through the means of the Law, morals, taboos or even space. Our entire social system, through its prescriptions of hygiene and propriety, is structured around confining the abject, keeping it ‘away from the space of the self’ (Farrar 21). According to Kristeva, there is a pre-symbolic stage in our lives, defined by intense feelings of horror and repugnance when we approach certain situations, people or objects that are considered abject and are inherently undesired. This implies that the connotations surrounding the abject are decidedly negative, since it is what an individual abjects/rejects due to its horrific qualities. The corpse for example, as stated by Kristeva, ‘is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object’ (“Powers” 4). However, this kind of rejection according to Kristeva is what forms the Ego, since the procedure of abjection is translated into the Ego’s strife for autonomy. More specifically, our mother expels us and we have to expel our mother at some point in our lives, in order to enter language and the symbolic as autonomous individuals. This is ‘the first intimation of the interdiction against incest. . .Our feeling of revulsion when we come into contact with the objects that we find disgusting (except under specially defined circumstances), keeps taboos in place’ (Lechte 10). The abject is ‘both that by which the child is separated from the mother and the mother 19 herself’ (Markotic 828). In order for the child to cultivate a sense of self, they have to learn about what is other than the self; to learn about the abject and what is impure. ‘To become social, the self has to expunge certain elements that society deems impure: excrement, menstrual blood, urine, semen . . . vomit, masturbation, incest and so on’, even though these elements Kristeva maintains, can never be fully eradicated; they haunt and threat the subject’s identity (McClintock 71). However, ‘the abject is not only the product of subjection . . . but the very process through which the individual self achieves the status of becoming what Sigmund Freud has defined as ego and is at once repulsive and attractive’ (Wilkie-Stibbs 319). In short, ‘Kristeva’s abjection offers the opportunity to theorize an aesthetics of disgust founded upon ambiguity’ (Meagher 30). Abjection and Disgust: The Common Ground According to Jonathan Haidt, even though the elicitors of Disgust developed from core to sociomoral Disgust, the reactions to it have not been subjected to much change. All forms of Disgust embody an impulse to ‘avoid, expel, or otherwise break off contact with the offending entity, often coupled to a motivation to wash, purify, or otherwise remove residues of any physical contact that was made with the entity’ (“The Moral Emotions” 857). The theory of Disgust, begins with Darwin who related it to food rejection16 and Rozin, Haidt and McCauley developed it to mean a ‘phylogenetic residue of a voluntary vomiting system. . . Disgust is a mechanism for avoiding harm to the body’ (638-650). Vomiting is inherent to Abjection as well, according to Kristeva: ‘Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me . . . Loathing is perhaps the most elementary Disgust literally means ‘distaste’ from des- “opposite of” + gouster “taste” http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=disgust 16 20 and archaic form of abjection’ (“Powers” 2). Vomiting as a means of protecting the body, clearly brings Disgust and Abjection together. Abjection is an extremely strong feeling which is at once somatic and symbolic, and which is above all a revolt of the person against an external menace from which one wants to keep oneself at a distance, but of which one has the impression that it is not only an external menace but that it may menace us from the inside. (“Powers” 135) The ambiguity between the external and the internal menace, is an issue raised within the discourse of Disgust as well, since the latter not only protects us from contaminants (external menace), but also keeps us at a distance from our animalist side (internal menace), as mentioned in chapter one. Interestingly enough, the abject confronts us, Kristeva upholds, ‘with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal’ (“Powers 12 Kristeva’s italics). Another common element is the prototypical elicitors of Abjection and Disgust. Several evolutionary psychologists suggest that the stimuli which trigger the latter ‘include waste products of the human body, poor hygiene, violations of the body envelope, and death. Disgust appears to have a cultural domain and can be elicited by immorality and violations of social rules’ (Miller; Rozin et al. in Curtis 18). Elicitors of Abjection according to Kristeva are ‘vomit and shit, decay and death. Such images tend toward a representation of the body turned inside out, of the subject literally abjected, thrown out’ (Foster 112). When it comes to the cultural domain, crime is also considered abjective since ‘it draws attention to the fragility of the law’ (Kristeva “Powers” 4). Violations of social rules are not explicitly stated as abjective by Kristeva, but Judith Butler has taken the theory of abjection further, to critisise Ideology and how it relieves its fear of disintegration by stigmatising certain groups or practices as ‘abject’. In her own words: 21 this exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects”, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject […] the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside of the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation. (3) Tina Chanter seems to concur: ‘I do not think [Abjection’s] scope should be restricted to a description of the infant’s rejection of the mother. On the contrary, I see abjection as inherently mobile, and as descriptive of a mechanism by which various others are stipulated as excluded’ (“Revolt” 158). In the sphere of the socially constructed rules of heteronormativity for example, homosexuality becomes abject(ed) and it resonates with how it is often considered as contagious and threatening ‘filth’ or disgusting. Disgust, similarly to Abjection, ‘has an unfortunate habit of bringing condemnation down on people for what they are, not just for what they do’ (Haidt “The Moral Emotions” 858). Finally, Abjection and Disgust share the common element of simultaneous repulsion and fascination. The chora17 must be abjected when the child enters the symbolic, or it will keep threatening the borders of identity that have just formed. However, the abject also fascinates to an overwhelming extent, because regardless of having expelled the maternal chora, the self longs for a reunion with it. ‘One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims -if not its submissive and willing ones’ (Kristeva “Powers” 9). Similarly, there is the ‘macabre allure of disgusting objects; they invite our attention and seek to keep it. Simultaneously, the object draws the senses in, magnetically, and also repels 17 Chora: The earliest stage in your psychosexual development (0-6 months), according to Julia Kristeva. In this pre-lingual stage of development, you were dominated by a chaotic mix of perceptions, feelings, and needs. You did not distinguish your own self from that of your mother or even the world around you. Rather, you spent your time taking into yourself everything that you experienced as pleasurable without any acknowledgment of boundaries. This is the stage, then, when you were closest to the pure materiality of existence, or what Lacan terms "the Real." At this stage, you were, according to Kristeva, purely dominated by your drives (both life drives and the death drives). http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/psychterms.html 22 them’ (McGinn 46). Even the dead body which is the utmost of Abjection and Disgust, exerts a certain fascination: People find themselves mesmerized by the dead body, drawn to it against their will, even as their stomach turns queasy . . . Disgust is not boring. It has a kind of negative glamour. And the human psyche is drawn to the interesting and exceptional— the charged object, with its magical potency. . . We gaze between our fingers, stimulated and appalled simultaneously. . . Necrophilia, coprophilia, and fetishism of various stripes are cases in which aversion is eclipsed by attraction. The disgusting becomes wholly or mainly attractive, with the aversive element in retreat or silenced we are all fascinated by what disturbs us most, by our own responsiveness to the gross and repugnant. (McGinn 48-49) Conclusively, Kristeva essentially developed her own theory of Disgust, since for her, ‘all present and objective experiences of disgust. . .can only have a phobic effect, because they recall that abject (because originally repressed) maternal body which lies behind all difference of subject and object’ (Menninghaus 374). Filmic Representationality of Abjection The abject is considered to be ‘unspeakable’ because it is outside the discourse domain and practically invisible. Therefore representing it, poses a serious challenge for any artist, especially since it always orbits the ‘taboo’. As a consequence, the abject ‘has to be stylistically downgraded’ (Berressem 31) and is usually employed by artists who intend to ‘provoke horror and thus regenerate an affective relation to art in place of a relation that had become too cerebral’ (Lechte 11). Indeed, it is horror films which illustrate many characteristics that are inherent to the abject: 23 Firstly, the idea that the abject is both repellent and fascinating. Secondly, the notion that the abject is always present; although horror films usually expel the abject by the ending, its existence has nevertheless been acknowledged and may indeed return. Thirdly, there is the idea of ritual, that the formulaic nature of horror exists as a tolerable means of exploring, and finally rejecting, the abject. Finally, there is the link between the feminine and the abject, both as configurations in opposition to the paternal symbolic, and through woman's unclean functions of menstruation and childbirth. (Jermyn 254 my italics) For Kristeva, what causes abjection is what ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules’ (“Powers” 4). Horror therefore emerges when the boundaries that maintain the social order are threatened. Such boundaries according to Katherine Goodnow and Barbara Creed, are the ones between the living and the dead, human and nonhuman, clean and unclean, love and destruction, male and female. Subsequently, when those unstable borders and areas of ambiguity are detected within a film, they can serve as a steeping stone for locating the abject (Goodnow 28-29). Especially when there are several of them combined together, the horror is intensified. Creed places emphasis on the concept of the border, as she considers it to be central to the composition of the ‘monstrous’ in the genre of horror film and ‘[a]lthough the specific nature of the border changes from film to film, the function of the monstrous remains the same - to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability (“Monstrous” 10-11). Despite reminders of borders and their fragility being certainly powerful sources of horror, by themselves alone, they do not provide a sufficient account of the abject. In Kristeva's analysis, the abject covers as well all images of pollution (Goodnow 32). Naturally, the horror film does not fail to employ imagery that directs to the abject, as in the genre, there is a persistent obsession with the depiction of how disgusting the physicality of the body can be, 24 with all its excrements, discharges and obviously its final stage -the corpse. Creed confirms and expands: [M]odern horror texts are grounded in ancient religious and historical notions of abjections - particularly in relation to the following religious ‘abominations’: sexual immorality and perversion; corporeal alteration, decay and death; human sacrifice; murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the feminine body and incest. These forms of abjection are also central to the construction of the monstrous in the modern horror film. . . The horror film abounds in images of abjection, foremost of which is the corpse, whole and mutilated, followed by an array of bodily wastes such as blood, vomit, saliva, sweat, tears and putrefying flesh. (“Horror” Screen 46-48) Conclusively, in attempting to locate abjection within a film, there are certain indicators that ought to be taken into account: volatile borders and zones of equivocation, images of pollution, the relation of the abject to the maternal and the feminine, the eternal return of the abject, and other elicitors such as the hypocrite criminal among others. How is Singapore Sling abject(ive)? The reason for the suffix –ive being within parenthesis, lies in the qualities of the film which render it both Abjective and abject. Abjective in the sense of attempting to represent the abject, and abject because the film itself possesses characteristics that classify it as a byproduct of rejection. Regarding the abject’s representation, as mentioned above, there are several pointers. 1. Unstable Borders and Areas of Ambiguity; the Composite 25 In order for an individual to develop psychically, the borders between oneself as subject and others as objects, need to be clearly defined and established (Meagher 31). The abject ‘draws [us] toward the place where meaning collapses’ (Kristeva “Powers” 62). This is the reason why Goodnow and Creed argue that horror and the abject emerge when those boundaries of identity and the social order are being threatened, under the menace of the collapse of meaning and the eradication of the self. Furthermore, Kristeva explains that what causes abjection is ‘[t]he in-between, the ambiguous, the composite . . . when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death’ (“Powers” 4 my italics). When for example the clean and the dirty are placed together, or when innocence and violence appear side by side, the composite appears (Goodnow 37 my italics). Let us then explore those fluid boundaries and the composite, within the scope of Singapore Sling. 1.a Boundaries between living and dead The oscillation between life and death in the film, begins in the first scene with what seems to be the dead body of the chauffeur who albeit cut open, vainly manages to raise his arm for a last plead for salvation (Figure 2). The moment when the hand of the disembowelled body unexpectedly extends begging for help, presents a strong image of a transgressed boundary. An additional ambiguous border is the Father of the family himself, who appears to be an active mummy. He thus becomes the archetype of the un-dead, the living corpse, condemned to eternally vacillate between the living and the dead and to remind us of the fragility of the borders. When the detective is tortured and raped by the Mother and the Daughter at the beginning and he is being deprived of food and water, he personifies the ‘corporeal expression of abjection through a body [that] is itself precariously balanced between life and death’ (Wilkie-Stibbs 321). 26 1.b Boundaries between Love and Destruction The whole relationship between the Mother and the Daughter, seems to be dangerously balancing between love and destruction, since there is supposed to exist a family bond between them as well as a sexual relationship. However, there is so much violence and torture involved, that destruction always seems to await somewhere near. Indeed, the climax of the destructive Mother-Daughter relationship is reached by the Mother’s murder by her child. An interesting depiction of (making) love tied with lurking destruction, is a smooth, choreographed sex sequence among the three characters, in which a gun is discretely changing hands from one character to the other while each one is trying to hide it (Figure set 5). Love also seems to be the motivation behind the Daughter’s advances towards the man, as she has convinced herself that she is the beloved Laura whom the detective has been looking for. But this does not stop her from inflicting pain on him or shoot him, which indicates destruction interfering with love and blurring the boundaries. 1.c Boundaries between Clean and Unclean It has been demonstrated so far, that ‘cleanliness’ has powerful denotations and connotations. It can be used both metaphorically and literally and still convey its importance. As far as the film and the literal meaning of cleanliness are considered, the most striking example of the boundaries between the clean and the unclean being threatened, is the family table. The first time it appears on screen, it gives the impression of a spotless, affluent space of food consumption, but when the women sit down to eat, their eating ritual transforms it into a locus of utter disgust and filthiness. Another example is the bathtub in which the decrepit man is placed to be cleaned, which reflects ‘[t]he desire within modernity to transcend corporeality, [which] inevitably results in the condition of abjection’ (Mohanram Par. 35). Radhika Mohanram goes on to suggest that 27 the Victorian insistence on the trope of hygiene and the colonisation of water that enables [that] trope, is precisely to ward off the threat of abjection that besets bourgeois subjectivity and its desire to transcend corporeality. The flow of water and its cleansing properties that can deodorize and disembody can thus control abjection and disperse its threats. Water is the natural ally of strong subjectivity within modernity and postmodernity. (Par. 36) This leads us back to the bourgeoisie that shaped the distinction between the washed and the unwashed, aiming to transform it into a device of social division and discrimination. The figurative meaning of cleanliness is yet again represented as undermined by the supposedly clean bourgeois family. They are engaging in ‘dirty’ if not the dirtiest activities. The Daughter’s ‘purity’ is defiled when she is eleven years old and her Father takes her virginity, and generally what is socially constructed and considered as ‘dirtiness’, takes place inside the mansion. Water as an element is considered to have cleansing qualities in general, but in Singapore Sling, it surrounds death. They wash the man in a bathtub but he almost gets drowned, the burials are always performed under rain, there is a sex scene where the Daughter is being choked by water and finally, the Mother is killed inside a bathtub filled with water18 (Figure set 6). 1.d The boundaries between Male and Female Alison Goeller, among several other theorists of gender, has concluded that ‘the inability to detect the gender of the body is [a] source of anxiety since gender is one of the major signifiers of human identity (287). Indeed, ‘for Kristeva the ultimate excitement and the ultimate anxiety are caused by not knowing how to classify someone or something’ (Oliver 5). Therefore when the borders between male and female ‘contained in the social and 18 The scene of the Mother being murdered in the bathtub by the lovers that have conspired is remarkable because it opens a dialogue with the circle of the Mycenae. It evokes (an adapted) version of the murder scene where Clytemnestra is murdered by Orestis and Electra, directly referring to the ancient drama and the cursed House of Atreides. (Tsakoniatis et al 140) 28 symbolic order’ collapse, the imminent instability becomes a source of horror and abjection (Goodnow 40). Additionally, horror can reside in the reminders of the differences or the similarities between males and females. For Kristeva the menstrual blood for example, is considered horrific partly due to its differentiating qualities. As far as the differences are concerned, their loss ‘occurs by way of the male creature being assigned a passive state normally assigned to women. He is completely under her control, ‘feminized’ and with his life and death at the mercy of her vacillating mood’ (Goodnow 42). The detective in Singapore Sling arrives at the mansion with a bullet-shot in his shoulder (Figure 3). This connotes that he is already bleeding and helpless in an inadvertently passive, malleable state which is made worse in the hands of the Mother and the Daughter. Nikolaides places him in a vulnerable position, constantly threatened and with his life depending on the women’s will or mood. The detective is thus bleeding and at their mercy, ‘feminised’ by them to the point where he replaces the Mother after her death and is now wearing her clothes and make-up (see fig 4). Deborah Jermyn claims that ‘[c]lothes, makeup, hairstyles and accessories, all take on huge significance in film, and within the female gothic as a whole, as the stuff that women use to construct their identities (264-265). Although the detective is not technically a woman, his feminisation to the point of cross-dressing could be argued to symbolise Irigaray’s suggestion that femininity is a performance that women give in certain social contexts as a masquerade which is necessary for their ‘survival’ (76). ‘For Irigaray, women learn to mimic femininity as a social mask’ (McClintock 62) and this masquerade discusses the problematic of femininity as a social, artificial construction. The blending of male and female in Singapore Sling could therefore be considered as potential elicitor of horror. Another instance of the masquerading is the Daughter pretending to be Laura, a harmless secretary. But her failure to actually become Laura by copying her, 29 illustrates the futility of this notion of the construction of femininity. As the female foil, [the Daughter] still represents the unacceptable face of femininity which must be defeated. As the abject she must be expelled, destroyed for her symbolic castration of the men she attacks, her violence and, particularly, her sexual excess. [She] represents deviant female sexuality . . . for her . . . lesbian desire and for masturbating. While the film must ultimately show her as unbalanced, and she must be punished for this, it also exhibits fascination and abject pleasure in her sexuality. (Powell 265) The Mother and Daughter’s lesbian desire is an area of representation in which the boundaries between female and male collapse, due to the long history of the lesbian woman being ascribed male qualities or even being identified with men. Freud played a major part in this categorisation, by maintaining that ‘[o]nly as a man can a female homosexual desire a woman who reminds her of a man’ (qtd. in Irigaray 194). In his account of fetishism, after discovering that lesbian sex extensively employs fetishist activities, he even goes on to equate the lesbian with the man, in order to support his assertion that it is only men who fetishise (“Fetishism” 190-205). Subsequently, ‘[i]f women are provisionally admitted into fetishism, it is not as bearers of our own insistent desires, but on strictly male terms, as mimics and masqueraders of male desire’ (McClintock 62). As a consequence, the Mother and the Daughter who exhibit both fetishist and lesbian desire, cause those fabricated boundaries between male and female to collapse, paving the path to Abjection. Additionally, the detective remains silent throughout the film, with the director giving the audience an insight into the man’s thoughts through a voice-over. Although the voiceover in film-noir is an indication of authority over the plot, the man is kept passive, submissive and silenced. Hence, according to Christine Wilkie-Stibbs: 30 If language is perceived as the mode of empowerment and is related to accession to identity and subjective agency through the paternal authority, and if language is named in patriarchy as the space from which acculturated subjects may speak their lives, the loss or lack of it marks out the subject as powerless, silent or silenced, by extension “feminized,” and as a potential victim to be exploited, expunged, exterminated. (329) On account of the man’s silence, his feminisation is yet another means by which the boundaries between male and female are disturbed. While the speechless man lacks articulation and expression within the film, the Mother and Daughter who suggest lesbian desire, personify the groups who are rendered ‘speechless’ in reality and practically ‘abjected’. Especially in a world that is linguistically constructed however, those groups that are according to Judith Butler ‘unviable (un)subjects – abjects, we might call them – who are neither named or prohibited within the economy of the law’, can disorganise culture from within (qtd. in Berressem 29). Furthermore, by providing a family grouping where the Father is essentially absent and the Mother is in charge and having sex with the Daughter, the boundaries between male and female are transgressed once more. The alternative family grouping and their deviation from the culturally conditioned femininity, offer potential spaces for women characters and viewers to act out their repressed desires in fictional form. As it is a horror text, the activities of this released libido are manifest in dark and disturbing shapes (Powell 155), through the psychopath characters. The psychopath characters function within a house in which women would be ‘normally’ confined in real life, but in this case becomes a space of pure evil. The female psychopath according to Jermyn is ‘woman's abject since she crosses the borders other women are forced to maintain, lives out their fantasies about escaping their place in the symbolic, and, in her 31 defeat at the end, represents women's necessary attempts to expel their desire for the abject’ (255). 1.e The Composite When death interferes with what is supposed to save us from it, the composite comes forth. One of the composites in Singapore Sling, is placing the clean and the dirty together. The most illustrative instance is the scene where the Mother and the Daughter disembowel Laura over the kitchen sink. The sink is normally a space of cleansing and within seconds receives Laura’s bloody viscera and is converted into a space of utter Disgust and death (Figure set 7). The setting of the film is itself a composite, since the mansion which typically connotes excess protection, becomes the siting of horror. The detective seeks refuge in a domestic environment which is traditionally a quotidian locus of safety, but gets raped and tortured instead. When the Mother, who is the symbol of love and protection, rapes and tortures her Daughter, she provides us with an additional composite. Another composite paradigm is the Daughter, who personifies innocence and violence appearing side-by-side (Goodnow 38), through the way she speaks. She is a stutterer, she has quirks, ticks, she stammers, splutters and she hiccups while she speaks. All these give her an infantile, seemingly innocent status which is not consistent with her vengeful and murderous personality. She also exposes her vagina several times. Since this is taking place within a horror film, it makes one ponder how society, by referring to the vagina with words such as ‘gash’ or ‘slit’, turns the woman’s genitals into a composite. Society linguistically ascribes to them characteristics that connote threat to life, whereas at the same time comprehends and recognises the literal life-giving qualities. Finally, to join Abjection and Disgust together once more, McGinn notices: Death may be a necessary condition of disgust, but it is not a sufficient condition. . . It is death in the context of life that disgusts. . . Disgust occurs in that ambiguous territory between life and death, when both conditions are 32 present in some form: it is not life per se or death per se that disgusts, but their uneasy juxtaposition. . . Disgust occupies a borderline space, a region of uncertainty and ambivalence, where life and death meet and merge. (87-90) 2. Images of Pollution and Disgust In order for a film to be considered abjective, along with boundaries that have collapsed there have to be images of pollution as well. To remember Hal Foster, images of ‘vomit and shit, decay and death’, evoke abjection because they serve as a representation of the body thrown out – literally abjected (112). In Kristeva’s words, ‘[c]ontrary to what enters the mouth and nourishes, what goes out of the body, out of its pores and openings, points to the infinitude of the body proper and gives rise to abjection’ (108). In general it is hence agreed that ‘[a]bjects tend to centre around bodily openings through which exchanges with the environment are materially regulated and channelled’ (Berressem 42). When these exchanges become excessive (for instance when there are uncontrollable flows and fluxes such as bleeding or diarrhoea), or when they are reversed as in the case of vomiting, abjects are created. (Berressem 43). As indicated above, faeces and vomit are usually interrelated. That is because as Miller has observed: The mouth and the anus bear an undeniable connection. They are literally connected, each being one end of a tube that runs through the body . . . Once food goes into the mouth it is magically transformed into the disgusting. Chewed food has the capacity to be even more disgusting than feces . . . The sight of chewed food, either in the mouth or ejected from it, is revolting in the extreme. . . The true rule seems to be that once food enters the mouth it can only properly exit in the form of feces. This helps account for why vomit may be more disgusting than feces. (96) 33 Singapore Sling abounds in such images. One case in point is the Daughter vomiting on the man while she rapes him. But a moment which stands out is at the family table, when the women chew their food, make it visible to the audience by pulling it out and they even throw up because of eating too much. The Daughter is clearly excited when she vomits, but the Mother seems disgusted by it, causing her to be sick as well but without hesitating to do so on the table. She even chews the food and feeds it to the man (Figure 5), placing the scene among what I believe is one of the most disgusting ones in the film. Those images of filth and vomit are abject in account of being unruly and disorderly as well, since they disturb the system, the order and the rules of cinema which are established through agencies of order such as setting, costume, tempo etc (Johnston 23). Blood is another substance that pours out of the body giving rise to abjection. Kristeva describes it as ‘a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together’ (96). Blood is an indication of the boundaries between inside and outside having collapsed, since it presupposes rupture on the skin that serves as our protector from viewing what lies inside us. It functions as a border that keeps our intestines and blood inside and gives a sense of wholeness of self. Therefore cuts in the skin connote a collapse of that border: ‘It is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one's 'own and clean self but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way’ (Kristeva 53). Needless to say, in a horror film such as Singapore Sling, cuts in the skin could not be missing. In fact they go beyond mere ‘cuts’ and appear in the form of gashes and disembowelment, with the guts pouring out of the body. Some regular bleeding takes place as well, albeit also grotesquely represented. The Mother is murdered and bleeding from the mouth and the Daughter bleeds when the detective rapes her with a knife in place of a penis towards the end of the film (Figure set 8). 34 Apart from vomiting and bleeding, the abject also resides in the images of the Mother when she urinates on the man while raping him. In that scene the detective’s body is filthy because he has been left unfed and unwashed for days. In combination with his cracked lips, stale sweat, light bleeding and dismantled virility, he offers one more image of abjection (Figure set 9). Additionally, the Daughter is shown masturbating with a kiwi fruit that gets eventually mashed and smeared all over her body (Figure set 10). The scene is shot in grosplan of a magnified pornographic disposition with Rachmaninoff’s music heard in the background, creating a mixture of feelings spiralling into an explosion of baroque sensuality. Singapore Sling has often been characterised as pornographic due to the explicit sex scenes, which enhances the film’s transgressive nature and thusly accounting for its abjective qualities. More specifically, Slavoj Žiežk sees pornography ‘on account of its very ‘shamelessness’, [as] probably the most Utopian of all genres: it is properly ‘Edenic’ in so far as it involves the fragile and temporary suspension of the barrier that separates the intimate/private from the public’ (227). Thus pornography transgresses the boundaries between the private and the public. 3. The Maternal and/or the Female Body When Kristeva analyses Abjection, she detects greater abjective potential in mothers and therefore a higher possibility in them to cause horror or be more oppressive than women in general. This is because the mother is associated with birth and therefore discharged bodily wastes and also due to her authoritative status that is different from the regular female’s. ‘This authority stems from two sources. One is the mother’s power to reproduce: a constant threat to conventional order and control’ (Goodnow 43). As Kristeva observes: ‘Fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power’ (“Powers” 77). ‘The other is the authority the mother held before the law of the father took hold. This is an 35 authority that does not always coexist comfortably with conventional/patriarchal law and order’ (Goodnow 43). Kathleen Rowe puts it slightly differently: ‘The grotesque body is above all the female body, the maternal body, which, through menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation, participates uniquely in the carnivalesque drama of ‘becoming,’ of inside-out and outside-in, death-in-life and life-in-death’ (33-34). However, besides its celebration of fecundity and creation, the grotesque body is the abject body and thusly bears notions of pollution, decay and death as well. In Singapore Sling, the maternal body is indeed dominant, oppresses, inflicts pain and is characterised by an excessive and disgusting corporeality that places the Mother in the position of the ‘monstrous-feminine’. Creed suggests that those images of woman as the monstrous-feminine shock and repel, but they also enlighten. They provide us with a means of understanding the dark side of the patriarchal unconscious, particularly the deep-seated attitude of extreme ambivalence to the mother who nurtures but who, through a series of physical and psychic castrations associated with her body and the processes of infant socialization, also helps to bring about the most painful of all separations, necessary for the child's entry into the symbolic order. “Monstrous” 166) The necessary separation that Creed mentions is referring to Kristeva’s theory according to which the mother that has nurtured the child so far, must be eventually left behind so that the child achieves a sense of self. However, the maternal bond is so strong that the separation takes the form of a rigorous and exhausting effort. ‘It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling’ (Kristeva “Powers” 13). Nikolaides remains quite loyal to the narrative of the violent 36 separation from the Mother, placing the two women in a relationship of hostility. The Daughter exclaims at some point ‘honestly some day I’ll kill her’ and she manages to do so indeed, with help from the man. At this point, the man has even become infantalised19 and the Daughter has not entered language properly, either. For as long as they remain outside language they both remain children, thus designating the Mother’s death as a parting point for both her ‘offspring’. Violence seems to be a presupposition for Kristeva, since ‘[t]he child can serve its mother as token of her own authentication’ but there is ‘hardly any reason for her to serve as go-between for it to become autonomous and authentic in its turn’ (“Powers” 13). Butler takes it further and observes that the Mother’s reluctance to ‘let go’ and the sexual abuse she imposes, stems from the exploitation of child’s love and dependency that has been established: No subject emerges without a passionate attachment to those on whom he or she is fundamentally dependent (even if the passion is ‘negative’ in the psychoanalytic sense) . . . the formation of primary passion in dependency renders the child vulnerable to subordination and exploitation . . . subordination proves central to the becoming of the subject. . . [Sexual abuse does not] simply [mean] that a sexuality is unilaterally imposed by the adult, nor that a sexuality is unilaterally fantasized by the child, but that the child’s love, a love that is necessary for its existence, is exploited and a passionate attachment abused. (“The Psychic Life” 7-9) From Latin infantem – ‘not able to speak’ . From in- “not, opposite of”+ fans, prp. of fari “speak” http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=infant&allowed_in_frame=0 The detective never speaks and Mother tries to make him speak. ‘Speak’ in this context means both to ‘utter words’ and to ‘confess’. She tries to teach him the vowels, of which he manages to utter ‘o’, probably in a language play asking for water (eau /o/ in French means water). 19 37 The Mother’s preservation of her Daughter’s childish behaviour that leads to a hostile relationship, is consistent with Albert Ellis’ find in the 1960’s which has since been confirmed, that ‘childish, demanding, hostile individuals engage in self-defeating sex acts such as incest or exhibitionism’ (98-99). An interesting detail in the film that brings childishness, incest and oppression together, is the scene in which the Daughter is forced to bend on a table while her Mother penetrates her and asks her to quote ‘The Servant’s two basic rules’. The rules used in the film are adapted from Isaac Asimov’s ‘Three Laws of Robotics’20 from his short story Runaround. Grerg Bear notes the following regarding Asimov’s robots: ‘[They] are often childlike, but their programming failures usually arise through inherent contradictions in the Three Laws, or unexpected mutations . . . The robots themselves, by and large, remain innocent, like perpetual children’. Another function of the Abjection of the Mother for Kristeva, is the eroticisation of bodily fluids/wastes, which for Menninghaus is a ‘symptom of a particular manner of articulating the relation to the maternal body’ (377). Menninghaus grounds his observation on Kristeva’s words: Devotees of the abject . . . do not cease looking, within what flows from the other’s “innermost being,” for the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside the maternal body. For—in the miscarriage of identification with the mother, as well as with the father—how else can they maintain themselves in the Other? How, if not by incorporating a devouring mother, for want of having been able to introject her, and joy in 20 Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. (8) The Servant’s two basic rules: 1. The servant may not injure his master or through an action allow his master to come to harm. 2. The servant must protect his own existence as long as such protection does not interfere with the first rule. 38 what manifests her, for want of being able to signify her: urine, blood, sperm, excrement. (54) Those bodily wastes being related to the female body with it ‘gaping orifices and biological flux’, is according to Yael Shapira part of ‘the historical arsenal of misogyny, a way of grounding women’s “aberrance” in their distasteful corporeality and thus naturalizing it’ (53). Especially when they are correlated with gluttony, lust and unruly behaviour, ‘grotesque female bodies have served as a kind of battle cry, an announcement of danger and a call for punishment and containment’ (Shapira 53). It is therefore not a coincidence when in Cinema such bodies culminate in being brutally destroyed. An act that serves the restoration of morals and the punishment of the corrupter when they suffer a physical death, as is the case with the Mother and the Daughter. Finally, an abjective combination of the feminine with the disgusting, could be Laura’s insides being emptied in the sink, since ‘[e]ven in cases where bodies are taken down to component parts – livers, nerves, tendons – they emerge as feminized, beautiful, delicate’ (May 169). The feminisation of the organs is in fact enhanced when the Daughter removes Laura’s earrings and necklace during the disembowelment, and puts them on the organs (Figure set 11). 4. Other abjective qualities a. Fetishism/Perversion For Kristeva, the abject is related to perversion: ‘The sense of abjection that I experience is anchored in the superego. The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but rather turns them aside, leads them astray, corrupts; uses 39 them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them’ (“Powers” 15). ‘Perverse’21, Menninghaus and Freud agree is ‘the absence of disgust in a context where reactions of disgust and repression are normally expected; it is the untimely persistence of infantile libido, the breakdown of the civilized devaluation of smells, excrement, mouth and anus’ (194). As mentioned above, the persistence of infantile libido is clearly reflected in the Daughter’s behaviour, whereas the Mother’s perversion mostly resonates with the corruption and denial 21 Michel Foucault claims that when sexology and psychiatry emerged in the nineteenth century, they undertook the labelling of ‘perversion’ as such, since it did not exist as a term up to that point. According to him, the theories around the invention of sexuality were based on power and control manifested in repressive laws (34). Julie Peakman argues against Foucault: we can argue that if we look at those behind the abstract power which he puts forward as responsible for the creation of laws, those who were the real arbitrators of sexual licence/freedom during the eighteenth century were the aristocracy, the very class which harboured that most transgressive of sexual groups, the libertines. If they were responsible for exercising control and making laws, why would they make controls that they so wanted to transgress themselves? (7) What Peakman fails to address though, is the tendency of the aristocracy to enjoy the fact that they can be above the Law if they choose to, whereas the lower classes cannot. Or that by pressuring for a law against a practice to be created, the aristocracy maintains a ‘holier than thou’ position so that they will not be judged and will be thought to abstain from such practices. ‘Perverse’ is a problematic term in general, and it is worth considering Becky McLaughlin’s estimation: Like any paradoxical concept, perversion is especially elusive because it slips so easily into what is often considered its opposite: the natural, right, or normal. The reason for this slippage is that when we use the term perversion, we generally understand it as a deviation from something, and yet perversion, in its sexological sense, was observed by Freud to be primary while ‘normal’ sexuality was considered secondary. In fact, if perversion is defined as a deviation from the natural or instinctual, then the truly perverse is ‘normal’ sexuality since it entails learned practices that take shape only after the erotic field of what Freud called the ‘polymorphously perverse’ body has been divided up into erogenous ones . . . What Freud does not merely imply but directly asserts is that perversion is natural, while sexual ‘normality’ is artificial, and yet ironically the label of ‘unnatural’ is always reserved for perversion (53-54) This is the reason why I find myself in agreement with Robert Gray when he says: All sexual activities that are perverted by virtue of the fact that they disrupt the cohesiveness of society, assuming social cohesion is a natural function of human sexual activity, would be immoral. But it should be noted that this judgment is logically independent of the judgment that those activities are perverted. One might, therefore, make the suggestion, since 'perversion' has acquired such a strong pejorative connotation in our society, that the term be dropped from our sexual vocabulary all together. Other clearer and less emotive terms may just as easily be substituted for it. (199) However, for the sake of clarity and avoidance of confusion, since the theorists use the term and relate it to Abjection, I use it as well. 40 of a rule or law. Finally, since they are both fetishists, they engage in ‘psychic processes of abjection’ (McClintock 72), which include disavowal22 as a means of rejection. b. The liar, the criminal In her theory, Kristeva locates Abjection in the behaviour of [t]he traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior….Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. (“Powers” 4) This quotation by Kristeva paints an impressively accurate portrait of the women in Singapore Sling. They betray their guest by failing to protect him since they torture him instead, and they lie to him about Laura. They kill their servants with absolutely no sign of remorse and they rape them shamelessly. They pretend to be the innocent hosts who will take the detective under their wing23 but between them they call him their prisoner and plan to kill him. Under their elaborate clothing, they hide the horror and the abomination that lies underneath; two abjective hypocrites playing on the etymology of the word. It derives from the Greek hyporkrisis which means ‘acting on the stage’, which is precisely what the women do in their sexual role-play. c. The Abject Always Returns 22 According to Freud, fetishes emerge when men are confronted with the female genitalia which to them seem mutilated and this causes utter fear because they think it could possibly happen to them as well. The fetish then substitutes the ‘lost’ penis and therefore represents the disavowal, the denial of the castration potential. (“Fetishism” 198-204) 23 The Mother explains to the man: ‘I’m the owner of this house. Last night in the storm you rang our doorbell and because of your condition we decided to offer you our hospitality.’ And the Daughter adds: ‘Very kind of us’. 41 ‘The abject is something rejected from which one does not part’ (Kristeva “Powers” 4). For Kristeva, when subjectivity is being constructed the jettisoned elements can never be fully eliminated. Theorists seem to converge on the potential power of the Abject’s haunting quality. Mohanram describes it as ‘haunt[ing] the contours of its culturally orchestrated subjectivity and the mediated physicality like a ghostly image, threatening its very clarity’ (Par. 35). Ruth Johnston argues ‘that the abject, which never ceases to haunt the bourgeois subject, is integral to its representation’ (36). And Kelly Oliver offers an eloquent condensation: ‘The process of abjection is never completed. Rather, like everything repressed, it is bound to return. Although language and culture set up separations and order by repressing maternal authority, this repressed maternal authority returns’ (xxxiii). In Singapore Sling, the maternal body which is the abject par-excellence, is killed by the Daughter and the detective, but returns when the man assumes the Mother’s position after she is dead. He wears the same clothes and sits in the same chair, with a fake penis-knife, in an apparent attempt of Nikolaides to identify him with the Mother. The Daughter is called to kill the maternal body twice in order to obtain a sense of self, since up to the point when she shoots the man she still believes she is Laura. In a scene where the detective has started to dig a grave in the yard, it is safe to assume that something will be discarded/abjected. The nondiegetic music that plays in the background is De Wert’s Tirsi Morir Volea with Giovanni Battista Guarini’s madrigal text24 whose last stanza reads: 24 Italian original version (Zbikowski 84): Tirsi Morir Volea Tirsi morir volea, Gli occhi mirando di colei ch' adora, Quand'ella, che di lui non men ardea, Li disse: "Ahime, ben mio, Deh non morir ancora Che teco bramo di morir anch'io." Freno Tirsi il desio, Ch'ebbe di pur sua vita allor finire, E sentea morte, e non potea morire; E mentre il guardo suo fisso tenea Ne'begli occhi divini, E'l nettar amoroso indi bevea, La bella Ninfa sua, che gia vicini Sentea i msssi d'Amore, Disse con occhi languid' e tremanti; "Mori, cor mio, ch’io moro.” Cui rispose il Pastore: "Ed io, mia vita, moro." Cosi moriro i fortunati amanti, Di morte si soave e si gradita, Che per anco morir tornaro in vita. English translation: Thyrsis Wished To Die 42 Thus the happy lovers died / a death so sweet and pleasant / that in order to die again, they returned to life. It is a song on the notion of orgasm identified with death, or orgasm-induced death. Eros2 5 and Thanatos2 6 are two distinguished figures in Greek and Roman mythology, that at times coincided when ‘Eros with crossed legs and torch reversed became the commonest of all symbols for Death’ (Cook 1045). This could be a premonition of how the detective, carried away by his love for Laura, will end up dead. Additionally, the song touches upon the concept of return and reflects the fascinating –albeit morbid- aspect of the abject which can never be fully expelled. Whether Nikolaides’s selection of this musical piece is intentional as far as ‘the return of something abject’ is concerned, one can never be certain. What cannot be doubted though is the harmonic coordination among the image, the music, the lyrics and the ostensible subtext. 5. How is the Film Itself, Abject? One of the most common responses to Singapore Sling, was utter Disgust which was expressed in reviews quite explicitly, using phrases such as ‘I wanted to throw up’ or ‘stomach-churning’. ‘In terms of Kristeva’s notion of the border, when we say such-and-such a horror film ‘made me sick’ or ‘scared the shit out of me’ we are actually foregrounding that specific horror film as a ‘work of abjection’ or ‘abjection at work’-in both a literal and metaphoric sense’ (Creed 48). The film has often been characterised as ‘radical’, and as Thyrsis wished to die/ gazing at the eyes of his beloved/ when she, whose ardor equaled his/ said: "Alas, my love/ do not die yet/ since I long to die with thee."/ Thyrsis curbed the desire/ which by then had almost ended his life/ he felt death near, yet could not die;/ and while he kept his gaze/ fixed upon those eyes divine/ and drank from thence the nectar of love/ his pretty Nymph, who felt / love's heralds near/ said with languishing and trembling looks: / "Die my heart, for I die."/ At which the Shepherd replied:/ "And I, my life, die."/ Thus the happy lovers died / a death so sweet and pleasant,/ that in order to die again, they returned to life. Eros from the Greek ‘Έρως’ (Love) was the mischievous god of love. http://www.theoi.com/Ouranios/Eros.html 26 Thanatos from the Greek ‘θάνατος (Death) ’ was the god or daimon of non-violent death. His touch gentle, likened to that of his twin brother Hypnos (Sleep) http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Thanatos.html 25 was 43 Foster accurately observes, ‘[r]adical art and theory often celebrate failed figures, especially deviant masculinities, as transgressive of the symbolic order’ (115), as is the case with Singapore Sling. Unfortunately though, when a work of art is considered progressive or radical, it becomes immediately and inescapably suspicious because it threatens one closely guarded category of our social order or another. And since ‘political and social stability do not exist in isolation, censorship has at times been extended to protect the underlying values that sustain [that] political and social order’ (Stieg 24). Singapore Sling was banned in the UK, rejected by the Greek Centre of Cinema and national television refused to air the commercial for the film due to its controversiality27 (Tsakoniatis et al 39). It was literally abjected from theatres and homes, and Nikolaides himself associated it with what has proven to be a powerful image of abjection: ‘Singapore Sling is a personal explosion; a fairly violent one. I would characterise it as ‘filmic vomit’ that no one is obliged to sit and be showered with’ (Interview to Kavvadias 108). Chapter Three: A Ritual of Defilement An additional concept that Kristeva borrowed from Douglas, is that all civilisations establish ceremonies or rituals that serve people to refrain from direct contact with filth. Or when that is inevitable, to constrain its aftermath or at least purify the people or places that are potentially dangerous. ‘Every culture, Douglas argues, develops purification ceremonies to erase the effects of possible contamination. The nature of the ceremony, and the occasions About the latter instance, Nikolaides replied: ‘Yes, but if they hadn’t, it would make me think of my film in negative terms’ (Tsakoniatis et al 43). 27 44 when it is seen necessary, reveal what is feared and where safety is felt to lie’ (Goodnow 47). For Kristeva, rituals reflect any effort to delineate the boundaries that surround the abject and ‘[protect] “the Symbolic” from the pollution or chaos embodied by the abject’ (Jonte-Pace). As she says, ‘[t]he various means of purifying the abject-the various catharses28-make up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art’ (“Powers” 17). With regard to ancient Greek tragedy, catharsis also means deliverance, liberation and relief that the audience reaches when justice is restored after the hero has been tormented29. Menninghaus agrees, that Art is a technique of suspending disgust, of transforming repulsion into attraction; it makes enjoyable what otherwise gives rise to shame and disgust. In its very mode of overcoming disgust, the work of art releases a “formal— that is to say, aesthetic—yield of pleasure [Lustgewinn],” and this specific yield of pleasure is even said to entail a liberation from tensions within the entire psychic economy. (221) ‘Rituals of defilement allow safe, controlled contact with what is abject but nonetheless attractive (attractive in large part because it is abject). This is the function that Modleski and Creed pick up in their argument that horror films are rituals of defilement’ (Goodnow 48-49). They argue people always wish to assure that the abject is at a safe distance and within limits, but to do so, the dangerous material must be viewable. For example people check the colour of their urine, etc. ‘Film in itself provides evidence that the polluting abject is ‘out there’: viewable. In addition, . . . it offers under controlled conditions the thrill of contact with the forbidden and the impure’ (Goodnow 50). This contact takes place within a protected environment that insures safety, since there is always the certainty that it is just a film on the 28 29 From the Greek ‘katharsis’ (κάθαρσις ) meaning ‘ purging, cleansing’. http://arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/colloquy/journal/issue011/ballengee.pdf 45 screen and the actors do not suffer or die in real life. You know that the duration of the experience is fixed and that you can walk away or hide behind your fingers any time you wish to. ‘The individual is allowed to come close to what is abject, and is permitted the thrill of doing so, but is at the same time protected’ (Goodnow 50). In Creed’s words: the horror film brings about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous-feminine) in order, finally, to eject the abject and redraw the boundaries between the human and non-human. As a form of modern defilement rite, the horror film works to separate out the symbolic order from all that threatens its stability, particularly the mother and all that her universe signifies. In Kristeva's terms, this means separating out the maternal authority from paternal law . . . In this sense, signifying horror involves a representation of, and a reconciliation with, the maternal body. (“Monstrous” 53) Singapore Sling indeed offers a protected contact with the abject, even when Nikolaides has his female protagonists directly address the audience and drag it into their filthy Hell. Other than that, the camera never does point-of-view shots, it is mostly static, rarely following movement, with very gentle short pans and tilts and the shots are mostly medium, contrasting Rachmaninoff’s intensity. It is very often behind columns, behind objects as if it is hiding and secretly watching. It ‘never devolves to a character’s point of view; instead it insists upon spatial configurations rather than character temporality. . . . and accentuates the artificiality and theatricality’ (Johnston 27). During the final scene, the camera stays hidden and plays on the viewers’ expectations. By ‘hiding’, it creates an even more ominous, uncanny atmosphere, putting the audience in a position of someone watching a woman who is probably about to get hurt, but always from a safe distance. 46 Since the bourgeois murderers are eventually killed, catharsis in the ancient tragedy sense is also achieved, through the film as ritual which eliminates the threat that the female psychopath poses. However, an inherent quality of the ritual is to re-establish contact with the abject and therefore expel it once more. Therefore even if the female psychopath is defeated and currently harmless, ‘the desire for the abject has been acknowledged and will be resurrected, since the abject is never finally defeated’ (Jermyn 255-258). The safe-guarded contact with the abject in combination with the latter’s defeat at the end, is exemplified by Creed: By not-looking, the spectator is able momentarily to withdraw identification from the image on the screen in order to reconstruct the boundary between self and screen and reconstitute the self which is threatened with disintegration. This process of reconstitution of the self is reaffirmed by the conventional ending of the horror narrative in which the monster is usually ‘named’ and destroyed. (“Monstrous” 65) An additional form of catharsis is reached, through the depiction of the excessive grotesque body. Quoting Bakhtin on Rabelais: ‘This is why the material bodily lower stratum is needed, for it gaily and simultaneously materializes and unburdens. It liberates objects from the snares of false seriousness, from illusions and sublimations inspired by fear’ (qtd. in Kipnis 227 my emphasis). Furthermore, [t]he presence of bodily wastes in the horror film may invoke a response of disgust from the audience situated as it is within the symbolic but at a more archaic level the representation of bodily wastes may invoke pleasure in breaking the taboo on filth- sometimes described as a pleasure in perversityand a pleasure in returning. (Creed “Monstrous” 51) 47 Additionally, McGinn’s reasoning demonstrates how if there is knowledge that one finds disturbing, it seems reasonable to keep it in the background and away from full consciousness30. Otherwise foregrounding it would lead to experiencing it as offensive. On the other hand, ‘alternatively, discoursing on the disgusting can be experienced as a revelation or liberation . . . as with a sense of relief that the repressive pressure has been released’ (164-166). Perhaps not catharsis per-se, but a type of liberation, is when the ‘soul’ of the spectator when ‘[c]onfronted with abominable actions . . . breaks through its anaesthetized state in the banal everyday, or in gloomy boredom, and feels itself to be “alive”, because [it gets] agitated by strong sensations of great emotional amplitude’ (Menninghaus 8). Conclusively, the images of pollution and impurity depicted in Singapore Sling, can be argued to provide the audience with several kinds of relief and liberation. Finally, several theorists agree that humour offers a significant path to catharsis. ‘Humour. . . is the release of repression of what disgusts us’ (McGinn 63). Menninghaus puts it even more eloquently: The sudden discharge of tension achieved in laughter, as in vomiting, [is] an overcoming of disgust, a contact with the “abject” that does not lead to lasting contamination or defilement. On the other hand, laughing at something, as an act of expulsion, resembles in itself the act of rejecting, of vomiting in disgust. Disgust, which undergoes a countercathexis (or a sublimation), and laughter are complementary ways of admitting an alterity that otherwise would fall 30 Nietzsche expresses the same point with depictive enthusiasm: The aesthetically insulting at work in the inner human without skin,—bloody masses, muck-bowels, viscera, all those sucking, pumping monstrosities—formless or ugly or grotesque, painful for the smell to boot. Hence away with it in thought! What still does emerge excites shame. . . . This body, concealed by the skin as if in shame . . . hence: there is disgust-exciting matter; the more ignorant humans are about their organism, the lesser can they distinguish between raw meat, rot, stink, maggots. To the extent he is not a Gestalt , the human being is disgusting to himself—he does everything to not think about it —The pleasure manifestly linked to this inner human being passes as baser : after-effect of the aesthetic judgment. (Quoted in Menninghaus, 81) 48 prey to repression; they enable us to deal with a scandal that otherwise would overpower our system of perception and consciousness. (10-11) Powell adds that ‘humour, self-reflexivity and intertextuality at particular moments . . . emphasize our sense that this is only a film and aid our disavowal process’ (152). Within Singapore Sling, the instances of humour, self-reflexivity and intertextuality are several. The Mother gets hit by a shovel and falls into the pit by mistake, the Daughter at some point sits on a squeaky toy, and in a comedic manner by being oblivious, they almost drown the man while washing him (to mention a few of the slapstick instances). Self-reflexivity is not so perceptible since references to the film’s own artificiality are never explicit. The Mother and the Daughter break the fourth wall at times, some scenes are repeated two or three times, and there is occasional luck of auditory fidelity31 or sound that is not synchronised with the image. The editing with jump-cuts manages to suggest a sense of discontinuation; an unrealistic flow of narrative which brings different times together (e.g. with the use of flashbacks) and upsets the linearity of events. There is a scene for example, where the Daughter is drinking coffee at the kitchen table, among flowers and sparkling china. At the same time the viewers can see the Mother violently leading the young secretary (Laura played by the Daughter) into the same kitchen. Intertextuality plays a prominent role in the film, since Nikolaides’ work is a manifest and explicit homage to Otto Premingher’s Laura, with so many visual and acoustic references that leave no space for doubt. Moreover, Nikolaides himself admits to using elements of film noir and ancient Greek tragedy. 31 By fidelity . . . we are speaking of whether the sound is faithful to the source as we conceive it’ (Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell. Film History: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. Print. Page 278) 49 ‘Liminality’32 in anthropology, refers to a point in a ritual characterised by ambiguity, because those who participate have not yet completed the transition from the pre-ritual status to the desired post-ritual status. Similarly in Singapore Sling, remaining loyal to the ancient Greek tragedy customs, the audience is kept at a liminal stage feeling pity and fear until the morals are restored and Aristotle’s catharsis 33 is achieved. Conclusively, Singapore Sling despite its challenging character if not because of it- allows for several parallels to be drawn and thus classify it as a ritual of defilement, offering ‘that catharsis par excellence’. Conclusion Rachmaninoff’s music is heard throughout the film and his compositional style is characterised by ‘brutal gestures and an uncompromising power of expression [which was] unprecedented in Russian music’ (Norris). Piano concerto No3 is his most difficult and challenging piece, both for the listener and the performer. Similarly, Singapore Sling was unprecedented in Greek cinema and still remains unique and challenging. It is a film entirely shot inside a house34, which contrasts the urban landscape of regular film-noir and therefore From Latin limen “threshold” http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=liminality&searchmode=none 33 In his Poetics, Aristotle gives an account of Tragedy: Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions. (Translation by S. H. Butcher) 34 In his 1919 essay, Freud analysed the uncanny as the unheimlich, the unhomely, and located the strangeness of its effect within the home itself, ultimately locating it in the womb, the first home, and the tomb, the last. The power of cinematic language juxtaposes spaces and images which disturb the familiar with strangeness and the uneasy intimations of fear and desire. The uncanny is closely associated with place, or with the projection of unconscious unease into a fantastic topography. (Mulvey 150) Mulvey’s account of the uncanny describing the journey from the womb to the tomb, eerily and interestingly enough could be used to describe the detective’s journey. The film begins with him in a dark and wet setting and he is himself soaked and covered in blood. So when he manages to drag himself to the porch of the house, it is as if he has exited a womb as an infant (a subject that does not speak), only to end up in the tomb in the end of the film and complete the journey. He is a slave to ‘desire a desire, or rather an unconscious need, to close the circle of their physical development, and to do this by reaching the two extreme limits of childhood and of destruction’ (Reader 166). 32 50 intensifies any claustrophobic, isolated and paranoid world view. When the detective enters the house, he enters hell like an alternate Orpheus. His Eurydice is dead, and her doppelgänger is evil. He descends towards the true heart of darkness that is found there. Any sense of morals is annihilated and everyone is allowed to act without taking the pretences of justice –earthly or not- into account, clearly reflecting the Greece of the 80s. Nikolaides’ morally untinted approach is implying that even in the so-called ‘civilised world’, if someone removed the scarecrow of any Law, people would be confronted with the true consistency of humans. A frantic struggle for extermination of one another would be unleashed, in lack of inherent or truthfully acquired morals. Singapore Sling, although hardly ever considered a political film, conveys a very clear message against greed, confinement and oppressive societal institutions. In the director’s own words, the film is the documentation of a man’s effort to intervene in the lost space; the space without hope . . . The whole film is a reaction against societal institutions and this does not only emerge from the conflict between mother and daughter. The hero of the film himself, just because he wishes to re-live the dream, accepts to enter a twisted game and accepts to believe things that logic dictates as inexistent. This, is a reaction; not to admit the chasm between reality and imagination is a reaction, because they have taught us to maintain a distance between them and not to confuse them. Therefore acting otherwise goes against societal institutions. (Interview to Yannis Chalaris for ‘MEN’ magazine, 1990) Indeed, Singapore Sling refuses to accept reality as dictated by logic. Ideology prescribes that people who perceive the world in such manner are perverted or problematic. So when the causality between reality and logic is challenged, Ideology itself is challenged, along with its 51 preservation of intellectual immobility through societal institutions. This immobility for Nikolaides, is even reflected on how (techni)colour becomes restricted by reality and vice versa. That is the reason why he chooses black and white cinematography which offers a way out and his commitment to black and white is profoundly conscious35. The lack of linearity in time and narration, which consequently attacks causality, could in fact be considered as a sarcastic comment on the unrealistic expectations of the political change-over after the fall of the Junta. People expected communism to be established after the dictatorship in a cause-andeffect manner, which eventually not only proved unfounded, but led to disgustingly excessive greed as well. With regard to Disgust, it has been advocated so far that what began as a biological impulse to protect the body, gradually developed into moral disgust. The cultural mechanisms behind this tendency to remove potential contaminants in order to re-establish order, reveal how our social ordering works and how people function with and within it. Apparently, those mechanisms can also be used to analyse and explain how and why certain phenomena are considered disgusting, as was the case with Singapore Sling in this paper. The theory of abjection can similarly be used to highlight the notion of the abject within film, as a concept that disturbs order. ‘The challenge to any existing order (social order or literary canon) lies often in drawing upon past texts in a way that is novel, that refuses to accept the customary 35 Singapore Sling is in black and white. It is not coincidental that such a personal film was shot in black and white colour. Could it be because all the women I ever loved were black and white? Or because the rain, the humidity, the storm, the threat and some invisible fear shadowing the background, sent by the autumn leaves dragging on the windows, are all uniquely impressed upon the black and white film in a way that coloured film will never achieve? Or could it even be because only a black and white hero like Singapore Sling has the courage to sink into Laura’s arms knowing deep down inside he will find nothing but his own death? Or could it be, finally, because I stubbornly refuse to unravel the borders between the real, the dream and cinema? For all this, I have come to believe that black and white is the richest film when it comes to underground colours . . . I believe colour is a technicolor rape of our vision; the triumph of lower-middle class marketing aesthetics. . .; an obscene intervention upon our black and white unconscious. (Nikolaides qtd. in Tsakoniatis 41-42) 52 ways, and that displays a ‘defiant productivity’ (Goodnow 2). Singapore Sling is undoubtedly defiant, and plays with film-noir in an atypical, avant-garde way. Regardless of Nikolaides’ excellent cinematography, his loyalty to the idea of the abject as directly associated with the maternal is clearly a lingering construct of patriarchal Ideology. Woman’s representation ‘in popular discourses as monstrous is a function of the ideological project of the horror film - a project designed to perpetuate the belief that woman’s monstrous nature is inextricably bound up with her difference as man’s sexual other’ (Creed “Monstrous” 83). Allegorically speaking though, if a country is considered the ‘Mother-land’, abjecting ‘her’ seems to be one of the healthy ways for a nation to acquire a sense of self. For as long as it clings on her in an ‘idyllic’, nationalist relationship, it remains essentially infantalised while harbouring the illusion of a ‘clear’ and consistent national identity. Moreover, the representation of abjection is surrounded by doubt, since its very representationality is questionable. ‘If it is opposed to culture, can it be exposed in culture? If it is unconscious, can it be made conscious and remain abject’ (Foster 114)? It is perhaps questions such as those that account for the limited literature on abjection with regard to cinema. Nevertheless, I find it important for such a powerful concept to be expanded to the discourse of film in an effort to overcome the limitations and enrich it. Especially in combination with the theory of Disgust as overviewed in chapter one, Abjection emerges as a remarkable instrument of film analysis which was employed in this essay. Hopefully this paper has managed to demonstrate a substantial amount of qualities which render Singapore Sling abjective and disgusting, but at the same time ritualistic and liberating. The possible approaches to this film are numerous as it offers itself up for several interpretations, so I hope that my own basket of aberrant harvest will whet the readers’ appetite despite its abject flavour. 53 Figures Fig. 1 The mummy-Father Fig. 2 The chauffeur’s hand pleading for one last time 54 Fig. 3 The detective with a bullet in his shoulder. Fig. 4 The detective in the Mother’s clothes and make-up 55 Fig. 5 The Mother is feeding the detective chewed food. 56 Figure Sets Figure set 1: The Paraphilias BDSM Hard-core BDSM 57 Urolagnia Emetophilia 58 Figure set 2: Vomiting as a part of the family dinner 59 Figure set 3: The gun changes hands and gets hidden in a sex scene 60 61 Figure set 4: Viscera and a pulsating heart 62 Figure set 5: The Bourgeois House and clothing 63 64 Figure set 6: The water surrounds death The detective almost drowns while being washed The chauffeur’s burial under the rain 65 A BDSM sex game involving drowning The Mother is killed in a bathtub filled with water 66 Figure set 7: Placing the clean and the dirty together 67 Figure set 8: Blood The detective’s bleeding hand Laura’s blood down the sink 68 Mother’s bleeding death The Daughter bleeding after getting raped with a knife by the detective Tasting the detective’s blood 69 Figure set 9: The detective unfed, unwashed, with cracked lips and bleeding 70 Figure set 10: Masturbation with a kiwi fruit 71 Figure set 11: Accentuated feminisation of internal organs 72 Bibliography Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Samuel H. Butcher. Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 2012. Electronic. Arnett Jensen, Lene. "Habits of the Heart Revisited: Autonomy, Community, and Divinity in Adults' Moral Language." Qualitative Sociology, 18.1 (1995): 71-86. Print. Asimov, Isaac. Robot Visions. New York: New American Library, 1990. Print. Baudry, Jean-Louis, and Alan Williams. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus." Film Quarterly 28.2 (1974): 39-47. Print. Bear, Greg. "All the Robots and Isaac Asimov." Greg Bear: The Official Site. N.p., 2004. Web. 18 July 2012. <http://www.gregbear.com/index.cfm>. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Free, 1973. Print. Berressem, Hanjo, and Monika Mueller. "On the Matter of Abjection." The Abject of Desire: The Aesthetici
ation of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Ed. Konstanze Kutzbach. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 19-48. Print. Berthold, Dana. "Tidy Whiteness: A Genealogy of Race, Purity, and Hygiene." Ethics & the Environment 15.1 (2010): 1-26. Print. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "sex" New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997. Print. 73 Chanter, Tina, and Ewa Pło nowska Ziarek. Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis. Albany: State University of New York, 2005. Print. Chanter, Tina. The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008. Print. Cook, Arthur Bernard. Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print. Cottrell, Catherine A., and Steven L. Neuberg. "Different Emotional Reactions to Different Groups: A Sociofunctional Threat-Based Approach to "Prejudice"." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88.5 (2005): 770-89. Print. Creed, Barbara. "Horror and Monstrous-Feminine. An Imaginary Abjection." The Dread of Difference. Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas, 1996. 35-65. Print. Creed, Barbara. "Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection." Screen 27.1 (1986): 44-71. Oxford Journals. Web. 11 May 2012. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Curtis, V. A. "Dirt, Disgust and Disease: A Natural History of Hygiene." Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health 61.8 (2007): 660-64. JSTOR. Web. 04 May 2012. Curtis, Valerie, and Adam Biran. "Dirt, Disgust, and Disease: Is Hygiene in Our Genes?" Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44.1 (2001): 17-31. Project MUSE. Web. 04 May 2012. 74 Darwin, Charles, and Paul Ekman. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. De Silva, W. P. "ABC of Sexual Health: Sexual Variations." BMJ: British Medical Journal 1999), 318.7184 (n.d.): 654-56. JSTOR. Web. 03 May 2012. Doane, Mary Ann. "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator." Screen 23.3-4 (1982): 74-88. Oxford Journals. Web. 04 May 2012. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger; an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Praeger, 1966. Print. Ellis, A. "Sexual Manifestations of Emotionally Disturbed Behavior." The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 376.1 (1968): 96-105. JSTOR. Web. 03 May 2012. Farrar, Margaret E. "Health and Beauty in the Body Politic: Subjectivity and Urban Space." Polity 33.1 (2000): 1-23. JSTOR. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. Foster, Hal. "Obscene, Abject, Traumatic." October 78 (1996): 106-24. JSTOR. Web. 03 May 2012. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. London: Penguin, 1976. Print. Freud, Sigmund, and Henry Alden Bunker. "Psychopathic Characters on the Stage." The Tulane Drama Review 4.3 (1960): 144-48. JSTOR. Web. 11 June 2012. Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. London: Routledge, 2001. Print. 75 Freud, Sigmund. "Fetishism." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Comp. Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. Trans. James Strachey. Vol. 21. London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1975. N. pag. Print. Freud, Sigmund. "Freud, The Uncanny." Imago (1919): n. pag. Freud, The Uncanny (Part I). Web. 18 July 2012. <http://people.emich.edu/acoykenda/uncanny1.htm>. Goeller, Alison. "Interior Landscapes: Anatomy Art and the Work of Gunther Von Hagens." The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticiation of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Ed. Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 271-91. Print. Goodnow, Katherine J. Kristeva in Focus: From Theory to Film Analysis. New York: Berghahn, 2010. Print. Goodnow, Katherine J. Kristeva in Focus: From Theory to Film Analysis. New York: Berghahn, 2010. Print. Guins, Raiford, and Omayra Zaragoza. Cruz. Popular Culture: A Reader. London: SAGE Publications, 2005. Print. Haidt, Jonathan. "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment." Psychological Review 108.4 (2001): 814-34. Print. Haidt, Jonathan. "The Moral Emotions." Handbook of Affective Sciences. Ed. Richard J. Davidson, Klaus R. Scherer, and H. Hill Goldsmith. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 852-71. Print. Helyer, Ruth. "&quot;Refuse Heaped Many Stories High&quot;: DeLillo, Dirt, and Disorder." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 45.4 (1999): 987-1006. Print. 76 Žiežk, ,. Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 2008. Print. Irigaray, Luce. The Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Print. Jancovich, Mark. Horror, the Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Jensen, Lene Arnett. "The Cultural Development Of Three Fundamental Moral Ethics: Autonomy, Community, And Divinity." Zygon® 46.1 (2011): 150-67. Print. Jermyn, Deborah. "Rereading the Bitches from Hell: A Feminist Appropriation of the Female Psychopath." Screen 37.3 (1996): n. pag. Oxford Journals. Web. 2 May 2012. Johnston, Ruth D. "The Staging of the Bourgeois Imaginary in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1990)." Cinema Journal 41.2 (2002): 19-40. Print. Jonte-Pace, Diane E. Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts. Berkeley: University of California, 2001. Print. Kaplan, Louise J. Cultures of Fetishism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print. Karlyn, Kathleen Rowe. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1995. Print. Karpman, Benjamin. "The Sexual Psychopath." The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 42.2 (1951): 184-98. Print. Kavvadias, Nikos. "Singapore Sling (ἀσπρόμαυρη ): πού ὀ ἄνθρωπος πτ ἀγάπησε ἕνα ." ῶ μα Oδός Πανός 55 (1990): 98-109. Print. (translation: Singapore Sling (black and white): The Man who Loved a Corpse”. Panos Road 55” 77 Kelly, Daniel R. Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2011. Print. Kipnis, Laura. "Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler." Popular Culture: A Reader. Ed. Guins Raiford and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz. London: SAGE Publications, 2005. 223-40. Print. Kore Schröder, Leena. "Tales of Abjection and Miscegenation: Virginia Woolf's and Leonard Woolf's "Jewish" Stories." Twentieth Century Literature 49.3 (2003): 298-327. JSTOR. Web. 04 May 2012. Kristeva, Julia. "Julia Kristeva." Ed. Lucienne J. Serrano. Women Analye Women: In France, England, and the United States. Ed. Elaine Hoffman Baruch. New York: New York UP, 1988. 128-47. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Print. Kutzbach, Konstanze, and Monika Mueller. The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticiation of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Print. Lay, Frank. "Violence, Transgression, and the Fun Factor: The Imagined Atrocities of Will Self’s My Idea of Fun." The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticiation of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Ed. Konstanze Kutzbach. By Monika Mueller. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 291-310. Print. Lechte, John. Key Contemporary Concepts: From Abjection to Zeno's Paradox. London [u.a.: SAGE, 2003. Print. 78 Levy, Donald. "Perversion and the Unnatural as Moral Categories." Ethics 90.2 (1980): 191. JSTOR. Web. 12 May 2012. Lewis, Michael, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. Handbook of Emotions. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford, 2008. Print. Markotic, Lorraine. "There Where Primary Narcissism Was, I Must Become: The Inception of the Ego in Andreas-Salomé, Lacan, and Kristeva." American Imago 58.4 (2001): 813-36. Project MUSE. Web. Marks, Harry M. "Review: [untitled]." Rev. of Dirt and Diseases: Polio Before FDR. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 26.1 (1995): 154-56. JSTOR. Web. 04 Apr. 2012. Masquelier, Adeline Marie. Dirt, Undress, and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Body's Surface. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. Print. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. McDonald, John, and Wilson Bradford. "The Treatment of Sexual Deviation Using a Pharmacological Approach." The Journal of Sex Research 37.3 (2000): 248-57. JSTOR. Web. 03 May 2012. McGinn, Colin. The Meaning of Disgust. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print. McLaughlin, Becky. "Staging Perversion: The Restoration’s Sexual Allegory of (Un)civil War." Sexual Perversions, 1670-1890. Ed. Julie Peakman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 51-71. Print. Meagher, Michelle. "Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust." Hypatia 18.4 (2003): 23-41. Project MUSE. Web. 04 May 2012. 79 Menninghaus, Winfried. Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation. Albany: State University of New York, 2003. Print. Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. Print. Mills, Jennie. "Rape in Early Eighteenth-Century London: A Perversion ‘so Very Perplex’d’." Sexual Perversions, 1670-1890. Ed. Julian Peakman. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 140-67. Print. Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Mohanram, Radhika. "White Water: Race and Oceans Down Under." Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4.3 (2003): n. pag. Print. Mueller, Monika. "“A Wet Festival of Scarlet”: Poppy Z. Brite’s (Un)Aesthetics of Murder." The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticiation of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Ed. Monika Mueller and Konstanze Kutzbach. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 255-70. Print. Mulvey, Laura. Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. Print. Nagel, Thomas. "Sexual Perversion." The Journal of Philosophy 66.1 (1969): 5-17. JSTOR. Web. 03 May 2012. Nichols, Bill. Movies and Methods. London: University of California, 1985. Print. "Nikos Nikolaidis - Official Website." Nikos Nikolaidis - Official Website. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 July 2012. <http://nikosnikolaidis.com/>. Norris, Geoffrey. "Rachmaninoff, Serge." Grove Music Online (n.d.): n. pag. Oxford Music Online. Web. 23 Aug. 2012. 80 Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2004. Print. Oliver, Kelly, and Benigno Trigo. Noir Anxiety. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003. Print. Olivier, Bert. Philosophy and Psychoanalytic Theory: Collected Essays. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009. Print. Paksepp, Jaak. "The Affective Brain and Core Consciousness: How Does Neural Activity Generate Emotional Feelings?" Handbook of Emotions. Ed. Michael Lewis, Jeanette Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. New York: Guilford, 2008. 47-67. Print. Papanikolaou, Dimitris. "1980-1989: Η δεκαετία όπου όλα µπερδεύτηκαν ." Rev. of Η Ελλάδα στη Δεκαετία του '80: Κοινωνικό, πολιτικό και πολιτισµικό λεξικό. Ta Nea Online [Athens] 12 June 2010, Culture sec.: n. pag. Ta Nea Online. Ta Nea, 12 June 2010. Web. 2 May 2012. (translation: “1980-1989: The Decade When Everything Got Mixed Up”. Review Of “Greece in the Decade of the ‘80s: A Social, Political and Cultural Dictionary) Peakman, Julie. "Sexual Perversion in History: An Introduction." Introduction. Sexual Perversions, 1670–1890. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 1-50. Print. Peakman, Julie. Sexual Perversions, 1670-1890. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Peschier, Diana. "Religious Sexual Perversion in Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Literature." Sexual Perversions, 1670-1890. Ed. Julian Peakman. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 202-20. Print. 81 Peters, Gary. "Review of Barbara Creed. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993, 182 Pp." Rev. of The MonstrousFeminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 3.2 (1994): 108-12. Print. Powell, Anna. "Blood on the Borders - Near Dark and Blue Steel." Screen 35.2 (1994): 13656. Print. Reader, Keith. The Abject Object: Avatars of the Phallus in Contemporary French Theory, Literature and Film. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. Print. Robert, Gray. "Sex and Sexual Perversion." The Journal of Philosophy 75,.4 (1978): 189-99. JSTOR. Web. 03 May 2012. Rozin, Paul, and April E. Fallon. "A Perspective on Disgust." Psychological Review 94.1 (1987): 23-41. Print. Rozin, Paul, Clark R. McCauley, and Jonathan Haidt. "Disgust." Handbook of Emotions. Ed. Michael Lewis, Jeanette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. New York: Guilford, 2008. 757-75. Print. Rozin, Paul, Laura Lowery, Sumio Imada, and Jonathan Haidt. "The CAD Triad Hypothesis: A Mapping between Three Moral Emotions (contempt, Anger, Disgust) and Three Moral Codes (community, Autonomy, Divinity)." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76.4 (1999): 574-86. Print. Shapira, Yael. "Hairball Speaks: Margaret Atwood and the Narrative Legacy of the Female Grotesque." Narrative 18.1 (2010): 51-72. Project MUSE. Web. 04 May 2012. 82 Singapore Sling. Dir. Nikos Nikolaides. Perf. Meredyth Herold, Michele Valley, Panos Thanassoulis. Marni Film, 1990. DVD. Skipp, Jenny. "The Hostile Gaze: Perverting the Female Form, 1688–1800." Sexual Perversions, 1670-1890. Ed. Julie Peakman. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 117-39. Print. Smith, Jadwiga. "Phenomenology of Emotions: Aurel Kolnai’s on Disgust and Jacobean Drama." Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Ed. AnnaTeresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2005. 259-74. Print. Stallabrass, Julian. Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986. Print. Stearns, Peter N. "History of Emotions: Issues of Change and Impact." Handbook of Emotions. Ed. Jeanette M. Haviland-Jones, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Michael Lewis. New York: Guilford, 2008. 17-31. Print. Stieg, Margaret F. "The 1926 German Law to Protect Youth against Trash and Dirt: Moral Protectionism in a Democracy." Central European History 23.01 (1990): 22. Print. Tsakoniatis, Mimis, Marie-Louise Nikolaides, Simon Nikolaides, and Yannis Soldatos. Nikos Nikolaides. Athens: Aegokeros, 2007. Print. Urbach, Henry. "Closets, Clothes, Disclosure." Assemblage 30 (1996): 62-73. JSTOR. Web. 03 May 2012. 83 Vailakis, George. "Βιβλία : ΗΕλλάδα στη Δεκαετία του '80." Rev. of Η Ελλάδα στη Δεκαετία του '80: Κοινωνικό, πολιτικό και πολιτισµικό λεξικό. Imerisia [Athens] 12 June 2010, Culture sec.: n. pag. Imerisia.gr. 12 June 2010. Web. 05 May 2012. (translation: Review Of “Greece in The Decade of the ‘80s: A Social, Political And Cultural Dictionary) Vincent Korff, Sybil. "The Mirror and the Cameo : Margaret Atwood's Comic/Gothic Novel, Lady Oracle." The Female Gothic. Ed. Juliann E. Fleenor. Montréal: Eden, 1983. 15363. Print. Weisman, Celia Y. "Review: [untitled]." Rev. of Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art. Woman's Art Journal 17.2 (1996-1997): 59-60. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2011. Wenner, Lawrence. "The Unbearable Dirtiness of Being: On the Commodification of MediaSport and the Need for Ethical Criticism." Journal of Sports Media 4.1 (2009): 85-94. Project MUSE. Web. 04 June 2012. West, Amy. "Reality Television and the Power of Dirt: Metaphor and Matter." Screen 52.1 (2011): 63-77. Oxford Journals. Web. 18 May 2012. Wilkie-Stibbs, Christine. "Borderland Children: Reflections on Narratives of Abjection." The Lion and the Unicorn 30.3 (2006): 316-36. Project MUSE. Web. 03 May 2012. Wundram, Ina Jane. "Nonreproductive Sexual Behavior: Ethological and Cultural Considerations." American Anthropologist 81.1 (1979): 99-103. Print. Yùdice, George. "Feeding the Transcendent Body." Postmodern Culture 1.1 (1990): n. pag. Print. 84 Zbikowski, Lawrence Michael. Conceptualiing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.