THE ENTITY
It has always struck me that the general tone of life in America is one of hysteria. When I said this once to my cousin, who lives in Texas, she maintained that, rather than hysterics, Americans are ‘survivors’.
If someone claims to be a survivor merely on the basis that they haven’t died, I would say that this is also a symptom of hysteria – but watching The Entity, I suddenly understand that the two ideas are not incompatible.
The Entity is ‘based on a true story’, which already screams hysteria. As with most ‘true’ stories it is not easy to believe.
Barbara Hershey is great as Carla Moran, a single mother tormented by sexual assaults from an invisible creature, a situation that leaves her caught between rival professionals interpreting her ‘symptoms’ in contrasting ways. There are the psychologists, who think the assults are hallucinations whose origins lie in sexual abuse experienced by her as a child; and the parapsychologists, who are quite excited by the idea that ‘the entity’ is real.
There is not much in the way of Gothic mystery and murk. Nobody talks about incubi or spirits returning from the grave, let alone calls in a priest. Even the investigators who think (hope) the creature is real just see it as a phenomenon. The only thing we can be (fairly) sure of is that it is male.
Everyone seems very pragmatic, not least Moran herself, who gives the impression that this is just the kind of thing women have to deal with every day – not just the invisible rapist but the invasive scrutiny of (as most of these observing professionals are) men. The only scene in which she gives way to hysteria is when she is tricked by the creature into feeling aroused, and smashes up her bedroom.
In one telling scene an older man she is seeing walks in on one of the thing’s assaults: from his point of view we see her breasts manipulated by invisible fingers – though it could equally well be the creature’s point of view (and it is also ours). That this marks the end of the relationship – he flees never to return – is perhaps not surprising, but it may be more than just the outlandishness of what he has witnessed that has freaked him out: perhaps he has been confronted by a disagreeable aspect of his own desires.
Not that director Sidney J. Furie, whose most notable previous contribution to the genre was 1961’s Doctor Blood’s Coffin (pretty bad) necessarily intended this ambiguity, but he may have been aware of a certain resonance between his own role as director and that of the characters obsessively dwelling on the heroine – the parapsychologists even set up a replica of her apartment in a warehouse, like a film set, all the better to keep an eye on her.
In this way the creature becomes a malign manifestation of the male gaze, its invisibility suggesting the paradoxical blindness of that gaze. But perhaps Moran is also playing her part, her disavowal of the sexual abuse she (may have) suffered at the hands of her father sustaining a force whose assaults she endures like a true American survivor, secure in the belief that it is something completely outside herself.
The image of the screaming hysterical woman is central to horror, which thrives on undermining our sense of a stable identity, and often does it through this motif. The Entity doesn’t follow this trajectory because Moran mostly retains her self-assurance; you might even say that it is bolstered by these events.
The manifestations continue, we are told, after the events of the film have ended: ultimately, the phenomenon belongs to Moran rather than to the investigators; her symptoms made real perhaps, and crucial to her identity as a survivor.
Which is not to say that I think she’s ‘asking for it’. There is a view that this film is a kind of feminist statement creating a kind of metaphor for the experiences of many women whose accounts of sexual assaults haven’t been believed. But Moran is taken seriously to a great extent, so that doesn’t quite work.
Rather I think it’s fair to say that there is a lot of denial here, not just within the central character but in the observers also, and perhaps even in the director himself – enough, perhaps, to force the oppressive masculine force that is being disavowed into becoming an objectively real, yet invisible and undefined, ‘monster’.
NIGHT WATCH
Night Watch isn’t an American film but it’s based on American writer Lucille Fletcher’s play (a Broadway hit) and stars Liz Taylor, who was practically American. It is her only venture into the Gothic, unless you count The Driver’s Seat (which is far from traditional), and it is not easy to see nowadays, though it came up on a decent print at the BFI’s Film on Film festival this year.
Initially it appears to be a classic demonstration of the way female hysteria is treated in a certain familiar horror/mystery scenario, but the script (adapted by Tony Williamson from the play) seems to take a delight in throwing a spanner in the works.
Liz is Ellen Wheeler, a wealthy woman who keeps having nightmares about the death in a car crash of her ex-husband and the girl who was in the car with him (Linda Hayden) – it was only the discovery of the girl’s corpse that made her aware that he had been cheating on her.
It doesn’t help her fragile state of mind that she suspects that her current husband John (Laurence Harvey) and best friend Sarah (Billie Whitelaw) are having an affair. Then, during a thunderstorm, she sees a dead man in the window of the spooky old house across the way, sitting in a chair with his throat cut.
It isn’t initially the case that no-one believes her: these, it seems, were the days when the police could be called (‘Hello Inspector’) and would immediately turn up mob-handed just because someone thought they saw something. (Of course, it may help if the ‘someone’ in question is rich.)
There is, however, still a limit to grumpy inspector Bill Dean’s patience, and after the neighbouring house proves to be as empty as it looks he soon arrives at the point where he’s rolling his eyes whenever Ellen calls – at one point to report another corpse, this time a female one.
By now the seasoned viewer of this kind of thing will be watching the glances exchanged between John and Sarah and feel pretty sure that they know what’s going on. Sarah talks endlessly about a married lover called ‘Barry’ – who is probably John – and the idea seems to be to ‘lose’ Ellen in an expensive Swiss clinic and run away together. Just before she’s due to leave we find John asking Ellen to sign some important papers, always a bad sign.
It would almost be dull except for the skilled performances (Liz especially) and a sense that this is not to be taken entirely seriously, most apparent in the scenes with eccentric neighbour Appleby (Robert Lang), who at one point is apopleptic with rage that to assuage Ellen’s suspicions the police are going to dig up his flowerbed. What do they expect to find, he wonders, ‘an earthworm with a revolver?’
When Liz discovers that her ex-husband’s cigarette lighter has been placed in a drawer, she comes close to saying outright that she is being gaslighted, which is a bit on the nose for this sort of thing. After all, who else could have put it there apart from her husband and/or best friend? Surely not the Spanish maid, ‘hilariously’ unreliable as she is?
But it transpires (SPOILER ALERT) that far from being driven to insanity, she has already arrived and made herself quite at home. At the end she lures John and Sarah into the old house and slits their throats, thus manifesting the symptoms of her hysteria in reality, but only after they have been dismissed as imaginary by anyone that matters (including glib psychologist Tony Britton).
She was a maniac all along then, gaslighting herself: a clever maniac. Once a final call to the police about the corpses over the road has been greeted with polite and insincere assurances from the inspector, she heads off to that clinic, leaving Appleby – who has seen through her scheme and has to be placated – to take care of the house and ensure that the corpses (the real symptoms of her real insanity) remain hidden.
The effect is blackly amusing: a ‘happy ending’ that leaves our heroine, who we thought had been falling to pieces, looking ridiculously self-assured – another ‘survivor’. Just totally insane.
Or maybe not? She has taken control of the classic situation of the disbelieved heroine by making disbelief work for her. Perhaps, indeed, this really was a kind of cure. Just not the sort you get in even the most expensive Swiss clinic.
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