SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS GALORE
PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS:
*irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
It irritates me whenever a slovenly
thinker like
Laura Mulvey earns a place in academia.
Still, I recognize that her appeal stems from
pointing out a basic truth, no matter how much nonsense she extrapolated from
it.
In this case the basic truth is that
American cinema, though made to appeal to both male and female audiences, seems
at first glance to center upon the efficacy of male characters and to situate
female characters as decorative display.
In her over-reaction to this truth, Mulvey called for some sort of “new
cinema” which has yet to appear.
What ruins Mulvey’s case is that
she failed to acknowledge the extent to which American cinema harbored female
characters of considerable potency and efficacy—the exceptions, as it were,
that disprove her rule. Further, many
such “femme formidable” films come into being not in pursuit of the ideological
purity Mulvey desires, but in pursuit of the almighty dollar. One such film, in which the female characters
are principally efficacious and the male ones more reactive in nature, is the
1971 exploitation film BLOOD AND LACE.
Though LACE was helmed by one-time
director Philip S. Gilbert, I suspect that the main creative force behind the
movie was writer Gil Lasky, if only because Lasky later mined a similar concept
in a later production, MAMA’S DIRTY GIRLS.
But while GIRLS is just a basic exploitation picture, LACE is unique in being chiefly centered upon the struggles of female characters.
LACE begins with an unseen figure
moving through a house in a Southern-looking community. The intruder uses a hammer to brutally
assault a couple in bed. The murderer
then sets the room on fire. The murdered
woman dies in bed without a struggle, but the assaulted man manages to stagger
out of bed, though the scene ends before the audience sees if he gets clear of
the fire. The killer escapes but leaves
behind the murder weapon.
A day or so later young Ellie Masters (Melody
Patterson) awakes screaming at a local hospital. She’s the daughter of murdered woman Edna
Masters, but it’s not clear if Ellie actually witnessed the scene in the
burning bedroom, or if the film is simply reconstructing what happened for the
audience’s benefit. When Mullins, a
local government official, visits Ellie, Ellie’s conversation with him suggests
the reconstruction angle. Ellie tells
Mullins that she did not witness the murder, or even see the murder weapon, though
she’s dreamed of the hammer (later an important plot-point). She awoke while the house was burning and saw
a man fleeing, whom she presumed to be her mother’s latest bed-partner; an unnamed drifter. In
contrast to what the audience knows, Ellie thinks that the drifter murdered Edna Masters, who often sold her services to anyone able to pay.
Ellie isn’t interested in finding
her mother’s murderer. The young woman hated her prostitute-mother for forcing
Ellie to live in a house of sin.
Mullins, though he’s aware of Edna’s checkered past, offers little
sympathy. Because Ellie’s a minor he’s
obliged to place her with a private home for underage adolescents and problem
teens.
Ellie attempts to flee the area,
but an officer of the local police force catches her at the train station. Detective Calvin Carruthers (Vic Tayback) is
a local, and the two know each other slightly from the days when Calvin ran the
local movie-house, though Ellie’s surprised to learn that he’s now a
plainclothes cop. In her conversation
with Calvin Ellie reveals that her main goal is to find her father. Edna never told Ellie anything about the man,
except that he was Edna’s first lover and that he knocked up her up with
Ellie—which Edna resented because pregnancy made her lose her figure. This may have been the cause of the split,
after which Edna sold her services to every “traveling salesman” and “sixteen-year-old” willing
to pay. Calvin sympathizes with Ellie
but he’s duty-bound to deliver her to the state-sanctioned private reformatory,
run by a widow named Mrs. Deere. Perhaps
hoping to discourage Ellie from running again, Calvin warns her that the
missing drifter hasn’t been found and that he might come after the daughter of
the murdered woman.
Before Ellie arrives at the Deere
reformatory, though, the audience sees that both Mrs. Deere (Gloria Grahame)
and her hulking handyman Tom—who’s sometimes seen with a hammer—regularly
maltreat their adolescent charges. The
night before Ellie arrives, a boy named Ernest escapes, but Tom hunts him down,
kills him and hides his body. Tom tells Mrs. Deere that Ernest escaped. Mrs. Deere’s only concern is that one less
charge means less money from the state, so she conspires to conceal Ernest’s
absence from Mullins, the official in charge of keeping a head count on the
teens.
At first sight Ellie and Mrs. Deere
are clearly fated to be enemies, particularly when Mrs. Deere makes the odd
remark that her late husband Jamison spoke well of Ellie’s late mother. Since Edna was the town tramp, the script
loosely implies that the late Jamison Deere may have used Edna’s services. Could he be Ellie’s
unknown father? And just how did Jamison meet
his death?
Ellie becomes acquainted with
other teens, all of whom acknowledge that Deere works them like dogs. First Ellie meets 16-year-old “Bunch,” but
soon steps on the younger girl’s toes by coveting “Walter,” the studliest fellow
at the reformatory. Bunch tells Ellie
that Walter’s boyfriend. But even before
Ellie learns that this is a lie, Ellie doesn’t seem disturbed by the morality
of boyfriend-stealing. Bunch also claims
that Walter is “Mrs. Deere’s pet,” which assertion contains a measure of
truth.
Ernest’s absence is revealed so
Mrs. Deere is forced to claim that he ran off.
The missing boy gives Calvin an excuse to show up at the reformatory to
investigate, though he’s clearly more interested in Ellie. Hammer-wielding Tom happens to pass a remark
about Ellie to Calvin and Calvin responds by telling Tom not to go near the young woman.
Ellie goes walking with
Walter. She wishes that her mother
hadn’t been such a slut, so that Ellie might have had a normal family with a
proper father. Walter, an orphan who never knew his parents, demurs, for he isn’t sure
it’s so good to know one’s progenitors. “You can look at them and see what
you’re going to be.” Ellie continues to
insist that she wants to be “better than my mother.”
Ellie continues to see evidence of
Mrs. Deere’s iron hand: she keeps her charges on minimum rations so that
she can keep more of the money. She also chains one runaway girl, Jennifer, in the
attic without water for hours. Mrs.
Deere speaks enviously of how Ellie still possesses the charms of youth, and
how her late husband strayed from her in pursuit of prettier women. The widow also speaks as if her husband were
alive in some way—though only later does the audience learn that Mrs. Deere
keeps his body preserved in a walk-in freezer in the basement, and talks to
Jamison’s corpse as if it’s alive.
Tom disregards Calvin’s warning and
offers Ellie a chance to escape, but it’s just a trick to get her alone so that
he can rape her. Ellie escapes in part because “teacher’s pet” Walter tells
Mrs. Deere that he saw the two of them go off together. Later Walter tells Ellie that he ratted her
out because he thought Ellie meant to have sex with Tom consensually, and that
he Walter was jealous.
Mrs. Deere threatens to fire
Tom. Though he still keeps quiet about
his murder of Ernest, Tom blackmails the widow about other charges that
disappeared and who are now kept in the freezer. Mrs. Deere reluctantly yields to the
blackmail.
Meanwhile, just to further prove
that even persons of one’s own age can’t be trusted, jailbait Bunch manages to
seduce Walter—despite his earlier avowal of disinterest in such a young
girl—and to rub the seduction in the face of “older woman” Ellie.
One night a strange figure with a
burned-looking face invades Ellie’s room, though no one else sees it. Could he be the drifter who escaped the fire,
driven insane by his wounds and seeking to kill the daughter, even though the
audience knows he didn’t kill the mother?
When the cops can’t locate runaway
Ernest, Mullins shows up to investigate the reformatory more thoroughly. Tom murders him. Moments later Tom is forced to fight the
burn-faced man. The two fight; Tom is
killed. Mrs. Deere, still pathetically
hoping to conceal her crimes, hauls Tom’s body to the freezer. Vengeful Jennifer locks the door on the
tyrannical harridan, and that’s the last the audience sees of Mrs. Deere.
Ellie flees into the countryside,
where she stumbles across the corpse of Ernest.
The burn-faced man overtakes her, only to pull off a face-mask. Surprise: it’s Calvin!
Calvin reveals that during the last
few days he found the corpse of the drifter, who died after fleeing the
murder-scene. He tells Ellie that he
thought it was strange that she should dream of the hammer when she said that
she never saw it. Because of that
disparity, he deduced—correctly—that Ellie was the wielder of the hammer with
which she killed her mother and her mother’s client.
Calvin tells Ellie that he
masqueraded as a killer in order to spark Ellie's memory of the
true events, since she seemed to have forgotten what she did. He convinces Ellie that if he reveals what he
knows, she’ll face certain execution (guess she’s never heard of the insanity
defense). Calvin offers her a deal:
he’ll conceal what he knows if she marries him.
After a very slight resistance Ellie agrees—at which point Calvin
reveals the kicker: he was Edna Master’s first lover, and by implication
Ellie’s real father. The film ends with
Ellie laughing hysterically, for she’s not only made a deal with the devil,
she’s fulfilled Walter’s prophecy and become just like her mother.
Given the presence here of both a
“perilous psycho” (Mrs. Deere) and a “phantasmal figuration” (Calvin pretending
to be a freakish killer), there’s no question that BLOOD AND LACE is a horror-film. But even whereas there are many horror-films
that end badly for their protagonists, most of them are simply melodramas. LACE is a horror in the mythos of irony, which
possesses a bleak, black comic aspect when one sees the extent to which all the
characters are trapped. Even when the
teens have the chance to escape the reformatory at the climax, none of them
leave. “No Exit” has clearly been
stamped upon their souls.
But is the tyranny more
paternalistic or materialistic? Mullins
and Calvin represent the law that keeps Ellie and the other teens
prisoner. But it’s Mrs. Deere, who
implicitly murdered her cheating husband, who is the prison-warden. Walter, despite being caught in a tug-of-war
between two young girls, is described as Mrs. Deere’s “pet,” and he justifies
this description when he tattles about Ellie’s supposed tryst. In the one long scene between Walter and Mrs.
Deere, he relates to her like a mother, while she treats him indifferently, forcing
him to pay her homage.
Mrs. Deere can’t totally control
the brutish Tom, who may rape or kill on impulse. However, he’s little more than a minotaur who
can’t do anything but prey on the captives others send him. Though he stymies Deere somewhat with his
blackmail attempt, he has more to lose than she does from the revelation of
Ernest’s fate. Mullins exerts some
control over Mrs. Deere’s acquisition of her charges, but initially she’s able
to quell his misgivings by plying him with sex.
When Mullins finally sees the light, he dies as a result of his “deal
with the devil woman.”
Calvin might seem to be an
exception. He’s tough and clever, and
seems to hold all the cards at the climax.
Yet there’s an element of defeat in his victory. Clearly whenever his wife Edna kicked him
out, she made it stick, as Ellie is never even aware of Calvin as a contender
for the role of “absent papa.” He’s
clearly watched his daughter grow up at the movies, and nursed a desire to have
her in place of the unwilling mother.
But though he maneuvers Ellie into taking her mother’s place (wonder how
well that marriage went?), it’s implicit that Calvin would’ve been incapable of
getting her in any other way but to hold a Sword of Damocles over her
head. His manipulations smack of a
desperate need for the lost icon of Ellie’s mother, and his “seduction via
blackmail” could never have transpired had Ellie not stored up such massive
resentment of Edna Masters.
Lasky’s script remains vague about
Ellie’s motive for murder, harping only on her disgust at all the men who
passed through her mother’s portals, and her desire for a real father who
(presumably) would have controlled Edna’s profligacy. This doesn’t seem like a good motive for
murder, though, especially since Ellie also kills a complete stranger. Freud assumes that the Oedipus complex
manifests in girls the same way it does in boys, with the girl-child envying
the mother’s sexual power over the father.
Here, since the real father has been cast out, one may surmise that
Ellie still resents her mother’s ability to entice men. By killing both Edna and the man who intrudes
on what should be the bed of Ellie’s father, Ellie demonstrates that she is
faithful to the absent father’s memory, and that she should take the mother’s
place in the father’s affections. This
is precisely what does happen, though it could not have happened had the mother
not cast Calvin out in the first place, which in turn creates the war between
mother and daughter.
Mrs. Deere is plainly a resurgence
of the tyrannical mother whom Ellie has killed.
The Greek Cronos swallowed his children, reversing the female process of
birth via ingestion. Mrs. Deere doesn’t just eat children; she continued to
torment them within her figurative gullet, for the crime of still being
young. The widow takes her greatest
pleasure in torturing Jennifer, and it’s clear that Ellie would have eventually
received the same treatment. Admittedly,
Mrs. Deere is anti-sexual where Edna was over-sexual. It’s initially surprising that there’s no
evidence that Mrs. Deere has had sexual relations with her “pet” Walter. If Deere is a reflection of Edna, one might
expect cougar-ish behavior from Mrs. Deere as well, given Ellie’s remark about
how Edna was known to every “sixteen-year-old” boy who could buy Edna’s
favors. But then, maybe there’s a
greater irony in presenting Mrs. Deere as a woman capable of using her
sexuality (with Mullins, who also may have slept with Edna) but is
fundamentally faithful to her dead husband.
Ellie, of course, wanted a mother who was faithful to Ellie’s real
father. In effect, the film shows Ellie
proof that mothers are not automatically nicer simply by being more monogamous;
that such mothers can still be real “mothers” to their real and figurative daughters.
All of which, I hope, shows that
despite being crafted by men, BLOOD AND LACE is a film entirely absorbed with
the unique and terrible power of feminine nature.
