Monsters in America

by W. Scott Poole

  While signaling audiences with a recognizable mythology of the serial murderer, Dexter’s writers also revise and question that mythology. Did Harry recognize something inherent or, more likely, did he create something through investing Dexter with his bloody and unforgiving code? Dexter may be a monster but he is a Frankenstein’s monster, cobbled together out of his stepfather/creator’s own darkness. Perhaps monsters are made in our society more purposefully than we realize. In fact, perhaps our own beliefs about monsters and their intractable nature help to produce the monsters we fear the most.68

  By the fourth season of the show, which aired in the fall of 2009, the cracks are showing in Dexter’s persona and in the audience’s sympathy for him. At the time of this analysis, the show’s writers have radically called into question Dexter’s suburban lifestyle in an especially dramatic fashion, simultaneously suggesting that the murderer as celebrity is so deeply problematic that a miniature apocalypse is the result of our cultural romance with the murdering maniac.

  Dexter forces its audience to have the experience of realizing that they are fully and completely sympathizing with the sum of all fears; a being who kills with no remorse and whose all-consuming self-regard allows him to decide who is innocent and who must be executed. Dexter implicates us in the crimes of a murderer. At a time when the President of the United States could refer to himself as “the decider” in matters of war and peace, Dexter used his code to decide who gets to live and who gets to die. The audience’s total identification with Dexter asks how much we are all humming along to the executioner’s song.69

  The fascination with the serial killer sat at a very complex nexus of cultural nerve endings in late twentieth-century America. This newest American monster truly became a meaning machine that glossed attitudes toward sexuality, crime, mental illness, and celebrity culture. The excitement of the narrative grew from the clear lines it drew between good and evil and the lurid shock value of the most gruesome of the serial murderer’s escapades. Moreover, these monsters might be part of your everyday experience. Media interviews with neighbors and acquaintances of accused killers invariably told the same tale. He was “quiet and shy.” He was perhaps a loner but “seemed normal.” The monster was within, the stranger was beside us, and the call was coming from inside the house.

  Maniac murderers as a growth industry in popular culture blurred the line between fiction and reality, changing with the transformation of American society over a forty-year period. A clear line of development can be seen between Leatherface and Dexter, one that mirrors social and economic changes in American society. The meaning of the maniac killer changed dramatically from the proletarian murders in Texas, Crystal Lake, and on Elm Street, to the sophisticated killers of Wall Street and South Beach. The American monster had come to the suburbs, not as an invader like Michael Myers, but as a permanent fixture. Along the way he became a fully Americanized psycho, willing to go a bit further to get the penthouse or the McMansion, but sharing the same values as the white middle class and those who imitated it.

  The origin of the monster did not change over this long period of development. Norman Bates, Leatherface, Jason Voorhees, and Dexter all share a common tale of family dysfunction. In this way, the serial killer as monster spoke to the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. These narratives found their greatest resonance at a time when the nature of the American family became a battleground, when family values became a rallying cry, and gender and sexuality became the center of political rhetoric. If Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s worried about the last house on the left, they soon worried that monsters might be living in the bedroom at the top of the stairs.

  Six

  HAUNTED HOUSES

  She doesn’t need a psychiatrist, she needs a priest … Jesus Christ won’t somebody help me!

  —The Exorcist

  Mark glued the Frankenstein monster’s left arm into the shoulder socket. It was a specially treated Aurora model that glowed in the dark, just like the plastic Jesus he had gotten for memorizing all of the 119th Psalm in Sunday School class.

  —Stephen King, Salem’s Lot

  In late December 1973 film patrons lined up around the block in every American city to watch some of the most terrifying images ever put on film. Using a documentarian style that created both a sense of cinema verite and of claustrophobia, director William Friedkin’s The Exorcist dragged America, literally kicking and screaming, into the bedroom of a teenage girl and forced them to face the devil.

  The Exorcist invites us into a bright, well-lit, Georgetown townhouse, the home of movie star Chris McNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and her daughter Regan (Linda Blair). Chris is starring in a film being made at Georgetown University about campus protest and the Vietnam War (that she laughingly describes as “the Walt Disney version of the Ho Chi Minh story”). The household is busy with the demands of McNeil’s career and social life while Regan, her adolescent daughter, seems well adjusted in school, has an artistic bent, and wants a pony. All in all, this does not seem the setting of an American monster tale.

  But strange things begin to happen to Regan. An Ouija board moves on its own. Regan’s bed shakes violently, and she uses foul language at the most inappropriate moments possible. At one point, she interrupts one of her mother’s fashionable dinner parties. Standing in her nightgown and voiding her bladder on the carpet, she pronounces doom on one of the guests, an astronaut who is about to begin an orbital mission. “You’re going to die up there,” she snarls.

  McNeil goes first to the medical establishment, certain they will find some somatic explanation for her daughter’s behavior and the odd events that surround her. Neurosurgeons put the young girl through a battery of torturous examinations. Regan worsens and her upstairs bedroom becomes a chamber of horrors. She displays enormous strength, hurling a doctor across the room. Her skin has turned a garish green, covered with gashes and scar tissue, while her eyes have become feral and inhuman. In one harrowing scene, she masturbates with a crucifix.1

  Unable to find a medical solution, Regan’s physicians suggest to Chris that she find a priest to perform an exorcism, noting that “the power of suggestion” might help the young woman. McNeil revolts at the idea of finding a “witch doctor” but finally turns in desperation to Father Damien Karras, a young Jesuit with training in psychiatry. Karras receives permission from church authorities to conduct an exorcism with the help of an older priest, Father Merrin, who has experience with the ritual.

  The ensuing struggle with the demon that possesses Regan administered a series of brutal and visceral shocks to audiences. The high production values of the film, unusual for a horror film in the early 1970s, made the makeup and special effects especially convincing. Perfectly paced, Friedkin’s film created massive unease, followed it up with shock, and moved to a climax of fear and, for some, the feeling that the ending had left the devil in charge.2

  The Exorcist released right after Christmas 1973. Horror author Stephen King remembered that a terrified America could not get enough and began “a two month exorcism jag.” At one New York theater in early January, patrons waited four hours to purchase tickets. Showings of the film became spectacles that reflected the action on the screen. First time viewers fainted, ran out of the theater, and vomited. Others reported weeks of sleepless nights. Catholic priests, and soon Protestant pastors, received requests for exorcisms from frightened moviegoers, convinced that they had become possessed. One ticket-buyer for an early showing of the film told an interviewer that he or she “just wanted to see what all the throwing up was about.”3

  The Exorcist Movie Poster

  Friedkin’s brilliant direction and the film’s revolutionary manipulation of cinematography and special effects accounted for some of the extreme audience reaction. Perhaps even more significant than these factors, The Exorcist touched on both the transformation of the American family and the place of religion in American society. Linking family breakdown to supernatural terror proved a
powerful concoction in 1973–1974 at a time when both family and religious faith became an arena of profound cultural contest.

  Families and kinship networks have, for more than five millennia, served as a central organizing principle in human societies. Powerful patriarchal forces in traditional civilizations, including government, religion, medicine, and education, have viewed the family as the first line of defense for male privilege. The combination of intimacy and authority that exists within the household provides the opportunity to inculcate societal conceptions of gender, sexuality, and morality, as well as to examine and police behaviors deemed abnormal or dangerous.4

  Struggles for the liberation of women and sexual minorities in the 1960s raised numerous questions about the nature of family life in America. Second-wave feminism called for a radical redefinition of family life. A powerful and energized conservative response emerged by the late 1970s. Spearheaded primarily by religious leaders, the conservative movement fought back against what it perceived as an “attack on the family.” Unwilling to accept the transformative changes that rocked American society, conservatives mounted a highly successful sexual counterrevolution in the 1980s.5

  Underlying this titanic cultural struggle, anxieties over the body and its processes presented America with a new set of monsters. As the most intimate aspects of Americans’ biological experience became battlegrounds of the culture war, monstrous images came crawling out of the womb. Fear that the patriarchal family had risen from its grave to wreak terror, or the anxiety that rapid changes to the family would twist and corrupt America, became the basis of both horror films and popular urban legends. The human body itself, especially the female body, came to be seen as a monster or at least a monster-birthing machine.6

  Monstrous Moms and Scary Babies

  Women’s bodies became the literal source of horror during the beginning of the culture wars. The Exorcist used the emerging sexuality of a teenage girl as a metaphor for diabolical evil. Brian De Palma’s film version of the Stephen King novel Carrie did something very similar. At the onset of menarche and with a growing interest in boys, Carrie becomes a conduit for powerful forces that lead to a blood-drenched dénouement. Women’s sexuality and reproductive abilities became the focus of numerous horror films throughout the 1970s, exposing America’s nervousness over contraception, abortion, the sexual revolution, and the changing nature of the family.7

  Sexually powerful women proved especially frightening to family values advocates as the sexual revolution came to full fruition in the 1970s. Freedom to experiment with sex and to imagine a life with more than one sexual partner became, especially for women, an extension of the politics of liberation born in the ’60s. Ready availability of effective forms of birth control as well as wide dissemination of knowledge about sex dimmed the possibility that sexual pleasure could lead to terrible consequences.8

  Given the intimate nature of the subject, statistical formulations of just how sexualized American life became during the 1970s are impossible to offer. Interviews done by sex researchers with a disparate sampling of American women do suggest that sexual experimentation, and improved sexual experience, became more common than ever before. One housewife in her mid-thirties described to interviewers how “a bunch of us girls on the same block started reading books and passing them around—everything from how-to-do-it sex books to real porno paperbacks.” She noted that while some of the men complained about the “garbage” their wives were reading, her own husband “was always ready to try out everything.” Even the willingness to talk about sex to interviewers proved that once seemingly invincible social barriers had collapsed.9

  The willingness, even eagerness, of women to talk about their own sexuality registered the gains of the women’s liberation movement in life’s most intimate arena. Sexual guides like The Hite Report and My Secret Garden celebrated a woman’s sexual pleasure and the uniqueness of her sexual experience. Many women in the 1970s began to describe both giving and receiving orgasms as a celebration of personal agency and autonomy. One woman described how oral sex gave her “sort of the Amazon mentality—all powerful woman.” Another said that giving her partner fellatio meant that she was “exerting power” and that “the giving of pleasure is a powerful position.”10

  New technological innovations contributed to the new relationship American women had to their sexuality and their sexual partners. The introduction of Enovid-10 in 1960, better known as “the pill,” provided a safe and highly effective means of preventing conception. Mary Calderone, a feminist on the frontlines of the growing sex education movement, saw the pill effecting a decisive separation between sexual pleasure and pregnancy. By the 1970s, for the first time not only in American history but also in human history, a combination of scientific progress and dramatic social change made it possible to decouple sex and reproduction entirely.11

  The emerging New Right coalition wanted the party to stop. Conservative rhetoric in the 1970s and 1980s focused on the dangers of the sexually empowered woman who acted on her own agency. The new monster was a female monster, supernaturally productive of a brood of monstrous offspring. Conservatives feared that the family home had become a haunted mansion of female desire run amok, of monstrous reproduction free of patriarchal constraints. The untethering of reproduction from sexual experience transformed the American mother into an American monster.

  Conservative critics of feminism explicitly portrayed sexually liberated women as unnatural monsters. Notably, they often conjoined sexual power and the ability to reproduce as an especially fearful mixture. Toni Grant, in a mix of pop psychology and conservative politics entitled Being a Woman (1988), warned that men had become only “a means of procreation” that would be used by breeding women and then “discarded in black widow spider fashion.” Grant luridly described the independent woman as a “devouring, consuming monster” and suggested that the growing divorce rate meant that men were fleeing for their lives from these omnivorous vagina dentatas.12

  Monstrous women threatened, according to conservatives, to destroy the American economy as well as the American home. Conservative commenter Allan Carlson described the dangers of the “displacement of the patriarchal family by the matriarchal state.” Author and Republican activist George Gilder’s 1986 attack on feminism, entitled Men and Marriage (originally entitled Sexual Suicide), argued that women had become “masculine” even as men had become emasculated. This monstrous gender-bending would have consequences in the marketplace as well as the bedroom. Men, faced with the devouring female, would “lose their procreative energy and faith in themselves and their prospects.” Markets, Gilder asserted, would go into decline as America’s economic energy became focused on “welfare programs and police efforts required by a culture in chaos.”13

  The Reagan years saw both a rapidly growing inequality of wealth and the slashing of social programs that provided a safety net for the poor. Ironically, the “welfare queen” became a common trope used by conservatives who wanted to move from a critique of feminism to a warning about the dangers of the maternal state. While James Wilson warned of the “feral, pre-social” state of “the ghetto,” other conservative critics suggested that monstrous African American women, breeding huge numbers of fatherless, violent creatures, represented an apocalyptic danger. Gilder warned that “the worst parts of the ghetto” featured “a rather typical pattern of female dominance.” As scholar, fiction writer, and filmmaker Joshua Bellin points out, conservative writers imagined the typical African American woman as “a spectacularly fertile teenage incubator,” a monstrous womb that poured forth crime, poverty, and addiction as well as an army of angry African American men.14

  A number of horror films in the 1970s and 1980s mirrored, usually unwittingly, conservative critiques of women’s liberation and transformed rhetorical monsters into literal ones. David Cronenberg, the Canadian auteur of a number of disturbing body horror films, created a powerful nightmare of anxiety over female reproductive power in his 1
979 The Brood. Nola Carveth’s husband has her committed to an institution that employs a new method of psychiatry in which patients give literal form to their anger through cellular changes in the body. Carveth’s feminine rage becomes a dark energy fueling an asexual conception and producing dwarf mutant children who begin killing and maiming all they come in contact with. In one especially unsightly scene, Nola, the monstrous mother, is portrayed animalistically licking blood and effluvium off of one of her recently produced egg sacs.

  Nola’s husband is portrayed as the sympathetic figure in contrast to his monstrous wife. Even before Nola begins breeding little monsters, she is presented to us as callous, foulmouthed, and generally unpleasant. Her psychological problems are rendered as both severe and unsympathetic. Cronenberg suggests that she is suffering from the ennui of the liberated woman who has it all and yet still cannot find a way to be happy and mentally stable. Her search for personal growth shows her to be such an angry feminist that she produces monsters that destroy her family.15

  Notably, Cronenberg has described the film in highly personal terms, explaining that it emerged out of anger over his divorce and the subsequent child custody battle. He has also described the scene of Samantha licking the membrane as no more disturbing than “a bitch licking her pups.” Horror historian David Skal has suggested that Cronenberg considered his subject “to be a bitch on any number of levels” and quotes a contemporary London Observer review that concluded the film “has something pretty terrible to tell us … about the fears of North American males.”16