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Steps and Axes: A Return to the Maternal Order in The Stepfather
Sigmund Freud's use of the word "unheimliche," which translates literally as "un-homelike" but more colloquially as "uncanny," where something familiar becomes suddenly strange and inexplicable, is a comment element in most horror films. People we love and trust suddenly slinging hacksaws, sites of comfort becoming the most terrifying places we can imagine, mirrors replacing our reflections with images of monstrosity, etc., these are all uncanny aspects that the horror genre uses to creep us out. And it works, even in bad horror films. The issue of domestic space in The Stepfather is rife with elements, both visually and symbolically, of the uncanny in that it turns the home, a place of psychological and physical comfort for most people, into a place of unspeakable horror.
"Houses (both Blake's first and second marriages) function...as claustrophobic spaces within which desires and tensions are exacerbated" (Erens 355). The setting of the home functions not only as the crime scene for every murder and is essential to Jerry's work in real estate, but also as a symbolic fantasy ground for traditional American ideals, with Jerry as the Law and head of the household and with his wife and daughter, who functioned perfectly well on their own before he came along, as cooks, cleaners and photo opportunites that further his psychotic disillusionment of "perfection." It is noteworthy that the movie begins with an iconic autumn view of white suburbia, the seemingly calm house where Jerry has just massacred his latest family and is straightening up toys and chairs that have gotten tipped over in the fray, dispelling the notion of not only the suburban house as a bastion of normalcy, but also highlighting Jerry's obsession with order and tidiness. "His need to dominate the household, to control each situation, and to maintain a sense of order (a word he uses frequently) drives him to seek the perfect family, to make them part of his perfect world, a world utterly in his control" (Erens 360).
When Stephanie (the stepdaughter and film's protagonist) saws down the birdhouse that Jerry created (which seems fairly obvious in its symbolism), the illusory microcosm of the American Dream collapses with it, as does the patriarchal order of the family, restructuring the Law of the Father as powerless and unnecessary in regard to the resilient female bond between mother and daughter. As Audre Lorde notes, "For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered" (Sister Outsider 111). In the case of The Stepfather however, the master's tools do indeed dismantle the master's house in both literal and figurative ways. The American ideal is continually propagated throughout the film, from Jerry whistling "Camp Town Races" everytime he kills somebody, to the American Eagle Real Estate Company he works for, to the pictures of eagls on the wall of the staircase where Stephanie eventually stabs him, all motifs which resonate loudly with Robin Wood's conclusion that "indeed the monster has now become the American Family and that the elements so carefully repressed in American life--sexuality, and particularly female and childhood sexuality--have all returned to haunt us" (Erens 354).
If looking at a house as a character in its own right, issues of space and structure become particularly relevant to the tensions and psychoses of the family ideal. The doorway acts as a portral of anxiety when Ogilvie, a private investigator, is searching for Jerry in order to avenge his family's death and to prevent others from meeting a similar demise. Ogilvie, the viewer is led to believe, will save the mother and daughter from the venemous Jerry, thus reinstating the patriarchal order and probably marrying Stephanie in order to save her from her sexuality. But Ogilvie dies, like the groundskeeper in The Shining, right at the point where he could have become useful, thus forcing Stephanie and her mother to fend for themselves.
Going back to the house's implications, the windows in this case function as eyes, which return both the spectator's voyeuristic gaze and create the illusion that stability and happiness reside within. The cellar is a symbolic nether region, a place filled with sharp, dangerous tools and also where Jerry vents repressed anger about his own father and the families who have "disappointed" him. The attic (and this is probably stretching it a little, but eh) is an elevated space that Jerry falls through in his fight with Stephanie and possibly represents an inability to achieve the status of perfection he has created, or, like the cellar, it might be another area of repressed memories and anxieties, illustrated by the childhood toys that are collecting dust. Jerry's death on the stairs, perpetrated by Stephanie as he tries to crawl up to the second floor, again points to the impossibility of attaining the American ideal, and that the mother-daughter relationship has the capability of disawoving the destructive elements that seek to control them.
It also seems critical that the domestic space of the bathroom, which is one of particular vulnerability in horror films, thanks to Psycho, is the area where Jerry first attacks Stephanie, shattering the mirrored door with Shining-like bravado. The mirror, which faces Stephanie with Jerry on the other side of it, offers her a distorted reflection of her own monstrosity. Jerry and Stephanie are doubled earlier in the film, as the first dissolve of Jerry's face becomes Stephanie's and again in the end where she becomes the only character besides Jerry that is capable of murder. As Linda William notes, "The monster is a particularly insidious form of the many mirrors that patriarchal structures of seeing hold up to the woman" (22). The shattering of the mirror then both reveals and destroys associations of the monstrous in Stephanie, with the threat of her sexual development, that which is truly monstrous to Jerry, ultimately triumphing.
Sources:
Patricia Brett Erens "The Stepfather: Father as Monster in the Contemporary Horror Film"
Linda Williams "When the Woman Looks"
Both of those are from the book Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film edited by Barry Keith Grant 1996 University of Texas Press. |
