Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman
I admit it: I'm a movie
poster fan, especially if it's designed to promote a chiller or a
thriller. Itself a work of art, such a poster often gets to the heart
of the film's basic claim, or theme. By “theme,” I mean both the
central idea the movie conveys and the primary, or core, emotion it
elicits, for, in art, the mind and the heart are as one when thought
and feeling agree. That's not to say there's such agreement
throughout the film. Typically, there isn't. By the end of the movie,
though, the mind and heart typically unite, supporting one another,
and, through feeling, thought becomes belief.
Some contend that our
personal and social values are the sources of our beliefs, and they
may be right, but I believe—ironic this particular word should
appear in my thoughts as I'm writing about thought, emotion, belief,
and, now, value—that, without the marriage of thought and emotion
at some point, belief will not take root, and belief, arising from a
value we or our society holds as true, often without individual
examination, will be based solely on one or the other, thought or
emotion. Such a basis is weak and susceptible to surrender.
So, anyway, back to the
topic at hand: movie themes as they're expressed in posters promoting
chillers and thrillers.
In
Beyond Good and Evil,
Frederick Nietzsche wrote, “Whoever fights monsters should see to
it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze
long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” The
mirror in the horror movie Oculus
could represent Nietzsche's abyss. But what, exactly, is this
abyss—and how is one to prevent one's becoming a monster if he or
she fights monsters? There are monsters aplenty in the film, as there
are monster fighters, but none of the slayers appear to survive
against the abyss. Could the title of the movie suggest an answer to
the questions its symbolic mirror poses?
Let's
begin our investigation of these questions with a consideration of
the posters designed to promote the feature film. There are three in
English, and one in Italian.
In one
of the posters, a boy (10-year-old Tim Russell, we learn in the
movie) and a redheaded girl (his 12-year-old sister, Kaylie) stand,
facing away from a large mirror in an ornate, but rather grotesque,
metal frame. Tim wears a red-, black-, and green-striped shirt;
Kaylie, blue denim overalls over a light-blue sweater. Her hair is
slightly disheveled, and both children look frightened—indeed, they
seem near panic. Neither of them is reflected in the mirror, although
Tim is tall enough for the back of his head to appear in the
looking-glass and Kaylie is tall enough for the back of her head and
her shoulders to be reflected in the glass. Instead, the mirror
displays the opposite wall, showing a photograph or a painting (the
image is blurry) above wall molding. Centered above the children,
across the wall and the mirror, is the word “OCULUS,” in white
letters; beneath it, also in white letters, in letter case, is the
sentence, “You see what it wants you to see.” Presumably, the
“it” in the sentence refers to the mirror.
In
another poster, a close-up of the Kaylie is shown. She is older than
she is in the first poster (23 years old, we learn in the movie). Her
hair is neatly combed, falling to the sides of her face. She wears a
natural-pink shade of lipstick, but no other makeup. A pair of small
hands, one arising from either cheek, cover the locations in which
her eyes would normally appear. The hands are the same color as her
complexion and appear to be natural parts of her body. Below her
chin, the sentence, in white font and title case, reads, “You see
what it wants you to see.” Beneath this caption is the word
“OCULUS,” in white font and capital letters. If the eyes are the
mirrors of the soul, the girl has no mirror into her soul, for her
eyes are missing, stolen, perhaps, but not by an external agent, for
the hands which cover the locations in which her eyes would normally
appear are parts of her; they grow from her own face.
The
third poster shows the mirror, its frame now green in color, rather
than leaden gray, but otherwise unchanged. It stands on a bare wooden
floor, in profile. Kaylie, age 23, steps from the surface of the
glass, wearing a dress the same color as the mirror's frame and
surface. Only the parts of her body—her face, upper torso, left
arm, right leg, and part of her left leg—that have emerged from the
looking-glass are visible, as if the rest of her does not exist. The
mirror appears to be a portal between two worlds or dimensions. In
the darkness of the room, behind the mirror, the centered same word
and sentence appear as are shown in the previously described posters.
Both are in the same color and font styles: “You see what it wants
you to see,” followed by “OCULUS.” This poster seems to allude
to Lewis Carroll's novel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What
Alice Found There, thus casting Kaylie in a role similar to that
of Alice, who enters Wonderland through an enchanted mirror.
In the
fourth poster, Kaylie, age 23, stands in a room with a bare wooden
floor. Her neatly combed hair is in a ponytail, and she wears a
patterned dress. (She is shown from behind, down to her shoulder
blades.) The mirror, in its ornate, but grotesque, gray metal frame,
stands against the far wall. Although Kaylie gazes into it, the glass
reflects someone else: a cadaverous, dark-haired girl with a ghostly
pale complexion. She wears a white dress. Her left arm is at her
side, its palm facing forward. Blood wreaths her neck, stains the
bottom front of her dress, and is smeared across the palm of her
hand. Across Kaylie's back, in white capital letters, “OCULUS”
appears. Below it, also in capital letters, but in a smaller, yellow
font, is the phrase, “IL RIFLESSO DEL MALE” (“THE REFLECTION OF
EVIL”). If the mirror lets Kaylie see what it wants her to see and
reflects evil, the implication appears to be that, in viewing
herself, Kaylie sees the evil within herself. Is the image in the
looking-glass a sort of portrait of Dorian Gray, then, an image of
herself that decays as a result of the evil deeds she commits while
Kaylie herself remains young, healthy, and beautiful?
The
allusions to Alice and to Dorian Gray complexify and enrich the
possible meanings of the posters, as does their apparent reference to
Nietzsche's metaphor of the abyss. The movie's plot,
of course, will suggest whether and to what extent any of these
possibilities may apply to interpreting the theme of the film.
After Alan Russell, his wife Marie, and their children
Tim and Kaylie move into a new house, Alan buys an antique mirror for
his office. Shortly thereafter, he sees his body decaying, and he
begins to have an affair with Marisol, a female ghost or incubus who
has mirrors in lieu of eyes.
Gradually, he and Marie go mad. Marie withdraws, as she
becomes paranoid. The family's dog vanishes. Kaylie, seeing her
father with Marisol, tells her mother, and Marie and Alan argue. When
Marie tries to kill their children, Alan locks her up. The food
supply dwindles, and Kaylie, seeking help from her mother, finds
Marie chained to a wall inside the house.
Tim seeks help from the neighbors, who refuse to assist
him, believing he's making up a story about his parents. Kaylie's
telephone calls are answered by the same masculine voice.
Alan frees Marie, and they attack the children. Alan
kills Marie when she has a lucid moment. Aware that the mirror is the
source of their parents' madness, Tim and Kaylie attempt to smash it,
but hit the wall, thinking they are hitting the mirror. Like their
parents' behavior, theirs, too, is controlled by the mirror.
During a rational moment, Alan tells his children to
flee the house, before forcing Tim to shoot him, However, their
escape is cut off by ghosts. Police arrest Tim, who sees his parents'
ghosts watching him as he is escorted from the house.
After eleven years, Tim is released from the mental
hospital in which he has been confined after “murdering” his
father, no longer believing supernatural powers were associated with
his parents' deaths. Kaylie, who works for an auction house,
researches the antique mirror her father bought. Allowed to take the
mirror home, she keeps it in a room in which it is monitored by
surveillance cameras, an anchor suspended from the ceiling ready to
smash the looking-glass at the flip of a switch. Before destroying
the mirror, she plans to obtain evidence that it was responsible for
Alan's death.
The siblings argue about Kaylie's plans. When plants
begin to wither, they check the surveillance cameras' footage and
discover they have performed deeds of which they have no awareness.
Tim is now a believer in the mirror's supernatural powers, but the
children's escape attempt is frustrated by the mirror's influence.
Kaylie stabs an apparition of her mother in the neck, only to realize
she has wounded her fiance. Attempting to telephone the police, she
reaches the same mysterious masculine voice that answered her
telephone when she was twelve years old. When Tim switches on the
anchor, it strikes Kaylie, killing her. Tim is arrested and, once
again, blames the mirror for his actions. As he is led away, he sees
his sister's ghost standing with the spirits of his parents. The
mirror has claimed another victim.
The
authorities blame Tim for the deaths of Alan and Kaylie, but Tim
blames the mirror. How should the series of fantastic incidents that
occur in their new house be interpreted? According to Tzvetan
Todorov's The Fantastic: A
Structural Approach to a Litearry Genre, the fantastic either
remains fantastic—essentially, inexplicable—or is resolved as
uncanny (natural, if unusual, and explicable in terms of scientific
knowledge) or as marvelous (paranormal or supernatural in origin). Is
Oculus fantastic,
uncanny, or marvelous? The authorities view the events as uncanny;
they are bizarre, but they are explicable; psychiatrists can explain
them as effects of Tim's psychosis, which produced hallucinations.
Tim, like Kaylie, believe the incidents that happened inside their
new house were marvelous, having been caused by the mirror's
supernatural powers. Depending upon one's belief system, either
interpretation is possible within the framework of the movie's plot.
Let's
examine the film's incidents from the stance that they are the
results of madness, which means that not only Tim, but also Kaylie,
Marie, and Alan were psychotic (and probably paranoid); they all
hallucinated, seeing and hearing things that were present only in
their own minds. Everything they believed actually happened occurred
only in their own minds. As the text in one of the movie posters
suggests, the mirror was not evil; it was merely a mirror. It did
nothing more than exhibit a “REFLECTION OF EVIL.” The images it
displayed were images of madness, of psychosis and paranoia. The
mirror was, in Nietzsche's terms, an abyss. In gazing too long into
this abyss, it also gazed into them.
What
is the nature of the abyss? The answer to this question depends on
who one asks, but it might represent, among other possibilities,
despair (“the sickness unto death,” as Soren Kierkegaard calls
it), death, existential meaninglessness, or absurdity; the inability
to sustain a definite self; or a feeling of psychological impotence.
But the abyss, in Nietzsche's formulation of the abysmal, is related
to monsters: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the
process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough
into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” This
association between the monstrous and the abysmal raises the
question, what is the monstrous or, more specifically, what is a
monster?
Historically,
a monster was an omen created by God to warn of his impending wrath
against sinful conduct. However, in more recent times, the monstrous
has come to have psychological, rather than theological,
significance. Today, many say people contend against personal or
inner “demons,” metaphors for the inner conflicts that result
from unresolved emotions.
It is
by fixating, or becoming obsessed with, such feelings that one allows
the “abyss” to gaze into oneself. People obsessed with vengeance
may commit acts of vengeance; those fixated upon self-pity may become
clinically depressed; people who dwell on fear may become paranoid; a
person who ponders irrational behavior may become insane. An
obsession with a particular type of abnormal behavior can not only
cause such a behavior in oneself but intensify it, causing it to
become extreme.
What
monsters do the characters in Oculus
see and hear? Their adversaries suggest whom they view as threats, as
“monsters.”
Alan
sees himself as being in a state of decadence; he sees his body as
decaying. The body's physicality suggests he sees his flesh as the
source of his decadence, a possibility borne out by his affair with
the ghost or incubus Marisol. His personal demon is his emotional
unfaithfulness toward his wife. His lack if fidelity causes him to
view Marie as an enemy, rather than his spouse; he sees her as a
monster whose relationship to him is emotionally unsatisfying.
Perhaps
he feels trapped in his marriage. His purchase of an antique mirror
suggests he is seeking self-awareness associated with his past. What
has led to the emotional distance he feels between Marie and himself?
Whatever he sees in Marisol is his own image of her; she has no eyes,
no mirrors to a soul, because she has no soul. She doesn't exist,
except as a delusion he has created out of his need for an
emotionally fulfilling relationship. The mirrors of her “eyes”
reflect only his own ideas about women, his own fantasies about what
a woman should be and how she should behave.
Not
surprisingly, her husband's own emotional distance makes Marie
withdraw, and, afraid that her relationship with Alan is
disintegrating, she becomes paranoid. She appears to blame her
children for her failing marriage, because it is at them that she
directs her rage. She argues with Alan, but she never attempts to
harm him physically; instead, she tries to murder Tim and Kaylie.
Consequently, Alan chains her to a wall—but is fettering her
intended solely to protect his children or does chaining her also
ensure that the distance between them is certain, affording him more
time to fantasize about Marisol?
It's
interesting that the Russell family's neighbors do not believe Tim's
wild tale of his parents' insanity, nor so the authorities. Like the
psychiatrist who treats Tim after his arrest for his father's murder,
the neighbors may think Tim's ravings the products of insanity.
Was
Tim's murder of his father an attempt to protect his mother from
Alan? His parents argued. His father's emotional detachment from
Marie obviously disturbed her greatly. She'd become withdrawn and
paranoid. Finally, she'd snapped, attempting to kill her own
children, and Alan had responded not by getting her the help she
obviously needed, but by chaining her to a wall. In Freudian terms,
the Oedipus complex may have had much to do with Tim's “accidental”
killing of his father. The boy might also have been motivated by his
concern for his and his sister's safety. If Alan treated their mother
in such a manner, he might well treat them in the same way.
Kaylie
seems to have a problematic view of men, perhaps as a result of her
father's treatment of her mother. They are distant emotionally, and
her father seems to be emotionally unfaithful to Marie, an insight on
Kaylie's part that causes her to imagine that her father is actually
having an affair with Marisol and report this act of infidelity to
her mother. When she calls for help, the same masculine voice always
answers—her animus, Carl Jung might suggest—but no help is
dispatched.
Men
are not rescuers. They are more likely to be monsters than knights in
white armor. Later, mistaking her fiance for an apparition of her mother, Kaylie will stab him. Does she fear that the example of her
mother's withdrawal and paranoia concerning her father will also
destroy her relationship with her fiance or does she fear her fiance
will be distant and emotionally unfaithful to her, as Alan also been
to Marie? In her mind, it seems clear, the guilt of her parents is
interchangeable; they are both dangerous monsters.
During
the movie, the characters have rare, brief moments of lucidity.
During one such moment, Tim and Kaylie realize that their own twisted
perceptions of others is causing psychological, interpersonal, and
even physical mayhem. They attempt to break the mirror, that is, to
escape the lens through which they view the other members of their
family. However, their attempt to break through the filters they have
created is inept, even absurd, and they remain captives of their own
skewed perceptions and interpretations of events.
Eleven
years later, Tim is believed to be well again and is released from
the mental hospital. However, Kaylie is still deluded, believing the
mirror has supernatural powers. The siblings argue, and Tim, whose
madness seems only to have been dormant, again comes under the sway
of his psychosis, as he and his sister imagine the houseplants are
withering. Checking surveillance camera footage, they discover
they've performed acts they cannot recall having done and blame their
fugue states on the mirror.
Kaylie
tries the same pitiful defense mechanism she employed eleven years
ago. She telephones for help, but reaches the same mysterious
masculine voice that answered her telephone when she was twelve years
old. Instead of seeking help from the neighbors, Tim switches on the
anchor suspended from the ceiling, but it strikes Kaylie, killing
her.
Arrested,
he blames the mirror for his actions, just as he'd done eleven years
ago. As he is led away by the police, he sees his sister's ghost
standing with the spirits of his parents. In his mind, the mirror has
claimed another victim—the sister he himself killed, even as he had
killed his father, who'd killed his mother. Truly, the mirror has
been a “REFLECTION OF EVIL,” the evil of the family's own
personal demons.
Although
the idea that all the members of a family might go mad at the same
time, their delusions, hallucinations, and behaviors reinforcing,
sometimes complementing, and interacting with one another, is
far-fetched, to say the least, such is horror fiction, a melodramatic
genre that is, by both definition and convention, over the top. For
those like me who are skeptical of psychoanalytical claims (and of
psychoanalysis itself), Freudian and Jungian interpretations of human
behavior, as represented in Oculus
by the actions of the characters, are likely to seem too neat and
tidy and too over the top to be satisfying.
For
us, there are other possible explanations, some of which, as we've
suggested, are despair (“the sickness unto death,” as Soren
Kierkegaard calls it), death, existential meaninglessness, or
absurdity; the inability to sustain a definite self; or a feeling of
psychological impotence. There are also artistic possibilities for
interpreting the meaning of the abyss. While Jean-Paul Sartre
maintains that “hell is other people,” the director of Oculus
might amend the philosopher's premise to suggest, as Tennessee
Williams, who warned against looking in mirrors, put it, “Hell is yourself.”
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