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Article Excerpt
The Projected Man (Ian Curteis, GB, 1966), a "monster" movie, was cheaply made and indifferently greeted by critics on its release alongside Terence Fisher's Island of Terror in the summer of 1966, and typifies that section of British film-making which has received little attention, the "B-movie" or second feature. The anonymous critic of the Kinematograph Weekly, at the time of the film's release, called the cast "competent" and noted that the "plot [was] at least as old as H. G. Wells" (1) but few others commented upon director Ian Curteis's debut film. Or realized that, despite the creaking story, a variation based much more upon Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Robert Louis Stephenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) than upon H. G. Wells, there was something subversive being represented in this X certificate film, something that could challenge the "hard-boiled child of today" (Kinematograph Weekly 20) to which the classification refused entry.
The Projected Man presents a decentered, monstrous figure of masculinity with a particular emphasis on the abjected protagonist working through an oedipal conflict with other key characters against which he is placed. Julia Kristeva's formulation of abjection from Powers of Horror (1982) states that that which is abjected is what is most viscerally disgusting to either the individual or the dominant ideologies of society. It can be both individual and social because it originates within human responses to factors that "normally" cannot be comprehended. Thus, individually, the abject can be seen in bodily excretions and responses to rotting matter, such as a corpse. These reactions, in turn, as they are shared typical responses, help shape a social understanding of that which is abject. Atypical responses to the above are shaped by social comprehension, for example in Freud's work, as influenced by the "death drive" and a sadomasochistic obsession with mental and physical pain. Within the dominant ideology, then, what is abject is linked to what we individually can find horrifically disgusting: necrophilia, menstruation, sadism, masochism, homosexuality and so on depending upon the cultural framework. However, as the dominant ideologies alter and become more or less open-minded, that which is abject within society also alters. Take, for example, two films of the 1960s, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Ronald Neame, GB, 1969) and Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, GB, 1962), both of which represent forms of pedophilia. Each film was criticized for its underage sexuality, and both films represented the girls as school-uniformed minxes, but the 1969 film, whilst it was by no means let off, was subject to much less furor than Kubrick's film of 1962.
The term monstrous-masculine, which I employ in this article to discuss the abjected man of the Curteis's film, is a development of Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine from her 1993 book of the same name. Creed's text is an accessible articulation of feminist concerns surrounding the representation of women in fantasy which concentrates upon the representation of the castrating women in male horror fantasies such as Alien (Ridley Scott, GB/US, 1979), particularly the pre-oedipal imagery of the vagina dentata (toothed vagina) (Creed 2-3). Whilst utilizing Kristeva's abject, Creed's interpretation is, in places, an over-simplification of the theory, but it does, nevertheless, raise a number of questions about female representation which many find fruitful ground for discussion. However, in centralizing its discussion upon the abjection of women by men in the fictions society produces as horrific, the monstrous-feminine does not consider the representation, or place, of the abjected man--what I call, playing upon Creed's original term, the monstrous-masculine. Creed writes:
I have used the term "monstrous-feminine" as the term "female monster" implies a simple reversal of "male monster'. The reasons why the monstrous-feminine horrifies her audience are quite different from the reasons why the male monster horrifies his audience. A new term is needed to specify these differences [...] The phrase "monstrous- feminine" emphasizes the importance of gender in the construction of her monstrosity. (3)
The "'male monster'," according to Steve Neale in his 1980 book, Genre, is primarily a representation of the fear of castration "which ultimately produces...
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