Significant Othering – Harry Heuser

29th Jan 20243rd Apr 2024

Lying Down/Sitting Up: “Significant Othering” in Cat People (1942)

Cat People (1942) is a legendary and much-loved B-movie […] that, as Geoffrey O’Brien has argued in “Darkness Betrayed,” his notes on the Blu-ray release of Jacques Tourneur’s fantasy film, “manages, over multiple viewings, to break free from its own legend.” Despite the fact that viewers—professional critics, academics and horror film enthusiasts alike—“have sifted every shot and every situation of this seventy-three-minute feature,” O’Brien adds, a “fundamental mysteriousness remains, a slippery unwillingness to submit to final explanation.”

There is no danger of that slippage into certainty happening here. My mind, too, has a “slippery” nature. It is resistant to, and indeed incapable of, any thought amounting to an “explanation” that could possibly be taken for a “final” solution—a terminal reasoning that, bearing my Germany ancestry in mind, has demonstrably shown to bring about and justify no end of horrors.

A lack of understanding: Irena and Oliver

Cat People was produced at a particular time of uncertainty—and of particular uncertainties—about democratically enshrined equalities, about the limits of reason and the extent to which the stirring of irrational fear could be instrumental in the unfolding of millionfold death. It is fantasy that, rather than being escapist, gets us to the core of uncertainties about the state of humanity, the doubtful definition and futurity of which, a year after the raid on Pearl Harbor and the end of US isolationism, many a cat got many a tongue.

Cat People is “fantastic” in the way the term was proposed by Tzvetan Todorov. In his seminal study The Fantastic(1973), Todorov argues that the phrase “I nearly reached the point of believing” constitutes the “formula” that “sums up the spirit” he calls “fantastic.” Perhaps, that thought, being proposed so declaratively and summarily, itself sounds rather too conclusive. Subverting such reasoning, the “fantastic” exists only because it resists any summing up. To grasp it in this way is to deny it. Its existence is predicated on its elusiveness, on its perceived indeterminacy.

25th Nov 202330th Jan 2024

Flesh/Fur: “Significant Othering” in Island of Lost Souls (1932)

The index for volume 94 of *Essays, Poems and Reviews*, collected by George E. J. Powell. Aberystwyth University

Some years ago, researching the life of the Anglo-Welsh dilettante and collector George Powell of Nanteos (1842-1882), I set out to piece together whatever archival material I could get my hands on to gain access to the heart and mind of an eminently queer Victorian, a man who is now mainly known, if at all, as a friend of—and bad influence on—the poet Algernon Swinburne.

Powell bequeathed “all [he] possess[ed] of bigotry and virtue” to Aberystwyth University, where I teach art history and where, as part of my “Gothic Imagination” module, I screen films in the gothic mode on Wednesday afternoons. For the third entry in “Significant Othering,” the current series, I chose Island of Lost Souls (1932), a pre-code Hollywood creature feature loosely based on The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells.

4th Nov 20238th Nov 2023

Mirror/Lamp: “Significant Othering” in The Old Dark House (1932)

The last time I approached that Old Dark House – the titular edifice of a 1932 Hollywood thriller directed by the queer English filmmaker James Whale and founded on a novel by the English social critic J. B. Priestley—my eyes were not focussed on any particular visual detail. I was remarking generally on the house as a concretization of Priestley’s views on the condition of Britain after the so-called Great War, as the film and its source, Priestley’s Benighted (1927), are often understood: Interwar Britain as an empire haunted by its past and a kingdom lacking a vision as unifying as the largely unchallenged rule of its alleged heyday.

Never mind the map. Now entering gothic territory

Not that British moviegoers, let alone US American audiences, would have considered this perspective, partially obscured by the retitling of the property, as being essential to the experience of the fun house-ghost train atmosphere the film conjures. Sure, the house, with its shadowy corridors, massive oaken doors and branching staircases, is as ill-lit as any old Gothic-fictional castle; but the unenlightened ones at the heart of this picture are its denizens, the backward, dim-witted and intractable Femms in whose midst we, along with a small group of unfortunate travelers, find ourselves.

23rd Oct 20238th Nov 2023

Apart/in Parts: “Significant Othering” in The Lodger (1927)

In conjunction with “Gothic Imagination,” a visual culture module I teach at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, I host an extracurricular festival of films by way of which to skirt the boundaries of the gothic beyond the landmarks and hallmarks of the Gothic as genre.

The Alfred Hitchcock-helmed silent romance thriller The Lodger (1927), a loose adaptation of a short story (1911) and novel (1913) by the suffragette Marie Belloc Lowndes, has featured in each of these series of film screenings—“Treacherous Territories” (2019), “Uneasy Threshold” (2021) and “Significant Othering” (2023). Approaching The Lodger anew, “Significant Othering” concentrates on the gothic or gothicized bodies that—in whole or in parts—figure in the sprawling landscape of movies in the gothic mode.

None of the prime embodiments of the literary Gothic materialize in the films screened. The modally gothic does not depend on the presence of Frankenstein’s creature, Jekyll and Hyde, or Dracula; the multiplicity and hybridity that characterize those familiarly strange bodies are alive—make that “undead”—in the mutations of the gothic mode beyond the permutations of the genre.

As The Lodger drives home, what makes bodies what we might call gothic—although others may argue otherwise—is their otherness or, more precisely, the othering of them.