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FRAMES OF EVIL: Aftermath of North Korean Nuclear Tests
The heated rhetoric around North Korea’s nuclear test has been, for the most part, univocal. Even some of North Korea’s traditional allies, Russia, China, and Cambodia, have all denounced the test and distanced themselves; the U.S., Britain and France have demanded stricter sanctions and severe punitive measures.
Israel, although widely believed to have its own bomb, has declared fears of a “second Holocaust” if the economically impoverished North Korea tries to sell its nuclear know-how to a country like Iran, in exchange for a sizable financial sum. Uzi Eilam, former head of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) conjectured, via The Jerusalem Post on Monday that “Syria, which is also under heavy international pressure, could look at the North Korean example and decide to actively push for its own nuclear capability, taking into account that it would be a great deterrent to alleviate the pressure and get the international community off its back."
How does Monster imagery influence public discourse, and how effectively does it negotiate situations of crisis? How do American audiences come to terms with collective experiences of horror, evil and violence, through, for example, filmic representations of the Holocaust?
Culture and film critic Caroline (Kay) Picart is conducting Talk Show interviews on the topic of Holocaust films and their intersections with horror conventions of story-telling, as well as Gothic modes of public discourse.
KAY’S FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE IN KOREA…
Kay Picart lived in Seoul, South Korea as a professor of English and an artist from 1991-1993, when student riots concerning the military separations between North and South, and sirens frequently screaming out the possibility of a North Korean invasion could happen on any given day. She live under the constant perceived threat that PyongYang could invade Seoul in less than an hour... and the sirens could go off, without warning at anytime.
She experienced first hand how the border between North and South Korea was "peddled" just like any other "touristy" thing to visit--except that she was told repeatedly told not to make sudden movements, or to stare, or do anything suspicious or startling to the other side, who repeatedly watched her through binoculars, as she watched them in turn.
Kay recalls that at that time there was a building that cut across the divisions between North and South that had often been used for diplomatic talks. Apparently, the North one time came in with a larger flag than the South, so the South brought in a bigger one for the next talk. . . the escalating symbolic crises resulted in bigger and bigger flags, until they absurdly were too big to bring into the building. . . at which point sanity took over, and a symbolic “ceasefire” took place, resulting in small flags of equal size.
That Korean experience had significant influence on kay as it happened a few years after the Berlin wall came down, and she was in Berlin a few weeks after it did, gathering fragments from the wall. She has since been struck by the similarity-differences in the stories of these two nations.
SCHOLARS CHALLENGE CLASSIC HORROR FRAME IN AMERICAN FILM
American filmmakers appropriate the “look” of horror in Holocaust films and often use Nazis and Holocaust imagery to explain evil in the world, say authors Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart and David A. Frank. In Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film (Southern Illinois University Press, 224 pages, $65.00 cloth, $30.00 paper, November 2006) Picart and Frank challenge this classic horror frame—the narrative and visual borders used to demarcate monsters and the monstrous. After examining the way in which directors and producers of the most influential American Holocaust movies default to this Gothic frame, they propose that multiple frames are needed to account for evil and genocide.
Until Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, traditional representations and explanations of the Holocaust assumed the gratuitous evil of the Nazis, bracketing them as the “monsters” responsible for the Holocaust. And until Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, monsters were regarded as abnormal, disturbances of the natural order. In this provocative volume, Picart and Frank go beyond this alternative interpretation of horror and challenge the culturally dominant mode that centers on the abnormal monster.
Using Schindler’s List, The Silence of the Lambs, and Apt Pupil as case studies, the authors provide substantive and critical analyses of these films that transcend the classic horror interpretation. For example, Schindler’s List, say Picart and Frank, has the appearance of a historical docudrama but actually employs the visual rhetoric and narrative devices of the Hollywood horror film. The authors argue that evil has a face: Nazism, which is configured as quintessentially innate, and supernaturally crafty.
Frames of Evil, which is augmented by thirty-six film and publicity stills, also explores the commercial exploitation of suffering in film and offers constructive ways of critically evaluating this exploitation. The authors suggest that audiences will recognize their participation in much larger narrative formulas that place a premium on monstrosity and elide the role of modernity in depriving millions of their lives and dignity, often framing the suffering of others in a manner that allows for merely “documentary” enjoyment.
“In this timely study, Kay Picart and David Frank focus on film in a manner that is theoretically informed and insightful.”—Dominick LaCapra, from the Foreword
Caroline J. S. Picart is an associate professor of English and a courtesy associate professor of law at Florida State University. An authority on German Romanticism and horror films, she is the author of nine other books, including the two-volume Holocaust Film Sourcebook. Picart is also a philosopher and a former molecular embryologist educated in the Philippines, England, and the United States. She has received numerous awards and fellowships.
David A. Frank, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Oregon, has published on rhetorical theory, argumentation, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is the corecipient of the 2002 Kohrs-Campbell prize for rhetorical criticism and received the article of the year award from the Religious Communication Association in 2003.
The following is an article about Kay and her analysis of the Gothic in film and media:
Note: Another book, edited by Caroline (Kay) Picart and Cecil Greek, Monsters In and Among Us is forthcoming with the Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in Fall 2007.
A MONSTER PROBLEM
By Kim MacQueen
We should be afraid very— afraid. Monsters have escaped popular culture and now lurk through public policy and education.
There are monsters among us. They haunt our books, our newspapers—and to our unending delight, our movie houses.
Not just in the Godzilla vs. Mothra movies, but really among us-infamous fiends from the global stage (e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot) not to mention from our own neighborhoods (e.g. Manson, Bundy, Dahmer). These ogres could be in the news or around the corner; they could be any of the thousands of official sexual predators whose addresses we now know, thanks to Megan's Law.
On TV, George W. Bush successfully painted Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein as monsters, using the same rhetoric to describe America's enemies as we've always used to describe vampires on Creature Feature. And that, says an FSU critic of film and literature is no coincidence.
Caroline "Kay" Picart, assistant professor of English, studies the darkest sides of culture, the gothic realm of humanity which writers and filmmakers find irresistible. She's logged thousands of hours watching horror films from Frankenstein to Hannibal, and has published several discussions of power, gender and the monstrous in a growing list of journals and books in the last few years.
Picart is among a growing number of scholars now writing quite literally on the monstrous side of pop culture, where icons of evil snarl and titillate almost always in a blur of fact and fiction. Although she's versed in many facets of pop culture, Picart specializes in what she calls "the faces of the monster," focusing on monstrosity primarily as depicted in film.
Early in her career, Picart spent a lot of time demystifying the myth of the Frankenstein monster, only to find the elements of classic gothic "monsterism" spreading up through 20th century horror movies and into historical accounts of modern-day evil-doers like Adolf Hitler. She's since found a lot of these same gothic elements in journalism, not the least of which was President Bush's public policy statements vilifying Saddam Hussein.
Months before it was politically expedient for him to identify the now-deposed Iraqi leader as a monster, Bush took pains to identify Saddam Hussein as evil incarnate. It was evident Bush included Hussein's Iraq in his infamous reference to the "axis of evil" in his 2002 State of the Union address.
"We are vulnerable to evil people," Bush said recently. "And this vulnerability increases dramatically when evil people have access to weapons of mass destruction." No one was surprised when Bush stuck close by this analogy of Hussein as monster as his administration marched toward war with Iraq last March.
"I've started looking at the face of the monster in relation to horror themes in film," Picart explains, "and how journalistic and documentary motifs exploit human suffering in order to fulfill some sort of entertainment value and convince people of certain 'truths' by blurring fact and fiction.""
Why do seemingly straight journalists and documentary filmmakers draw on the gothic? Because it works, she says. The gothic inspires a combination of attraction and revulsion that seldom fails to generate interest in either fiction or nonfiction subjects. Even though we're scared of monsters, we're inexplicably drawn to them for their unfailing entertainment value.
"Monsters most powerfully evoke not only our deepest fears and taboos, but also our most repressed fantasies and desires."
In the introduction to a paper recently published in the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, as well as a forthcoming anthology, Picart and FSU criminologist Cecil Greek write that "the 'monster' or contemporary 'fallen angel' is simultaneously a figure of horror and repulsion, as it is of fascination and charisma; both subhuman and superhuman; and remarkably similar to the 'normal' and strikingly deviant at same time."
Picart and Greek argue that the gothic outlook informs not only public perception of a serial killer but also informs the field of criminology at the same time, helping it to define the very essence of evil and deal with it more effectively.
"The ongoing fascination with the serial killer, both in the Hollywood film and criminological case studies, points to the emergence of gothic criminology, with its focus on themes such as blood lust, compulsion, godlike vengeance, and power and domination," Picart and Greek write.
Gothic criminology likens modern-day serial killers to vampires popularized in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Bram Stoker, as well as to today's Hannibal Lecter. Pseudo-documentary depictions of serial killers in movies like Ed Gein and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer only take poetic liberties with history; their pretense at reality only enhancing their scare value, Picart said.
As any fan of slasher flicks will tell you, Hollywood directors are superb at exploiting the attraction/repulsion fans feel for grisly murders and scintillating stalking scenes. Film students, trained to see beyond mechanics, know precisely why the shower scene works so well in Hitchcock's classic Psycho (1960). As Norman Bates peers through the peephole at the doomed Marion, both the camera and the viewer assume his gaze. We're invited to participate in Norman's voyeurism. We watch Marion suffer in minute detail, and when she's murdered, it's as though we've taken part.
That Picart and other scholars are picking up on these days is evidence that the shock value of such horror flicks is so successful at filling theaters that the same cinematic devices are showing up in films being passed off as either documentaries or something closely akin to them, e.g. "docu-dramas." All the usual pedigreed chroniclers of modern events—documentary filmmakers, journalists and historians-historically trusted to give us the facts and nothing but are using voyeurism and monster-movie techniques to make their subjects scarier or more bizarre than they ever were in life. Critics charge that, at the least, the tactic is distorting the public's notions about history.
No better example is Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg's 1993 depiction of the life of Oscar Schindler, the German businessman credited with saving the lives of hundreds of Jews during WWII. The film is widely regarded as a relatively balanced account of the events of the Holocaust, not a horror movie. Teachers use to help explain the wholesale murder of European Jews between 1939 and 1945. Many applaud their efforts, even regarding them as crucial in the face of a small but insistent number of denials that the events ever took place.
Schindler's List set Hollywood machinery in motion to present such a critically acclaimed, moving account of the Holocaust that more than a few sober critics slipped into describing the film as, at the least, a clever pseudo-documentary—a legitimate blend of fact and fiction.
It's not. As Picart and co-author David Frank write in a new book examining both fictional and pseudo-documentary depictions of the Holocaust, Spielberg leans heavily on conventions of gothic horror films in Schindler's List to assure the viewer's gut-level emotional response. The resulting film deviates markedly not only from fact and survivor testimony but also from the novel of the same name by Thomas Keneally, on which the movie is based.
"Schindler's List is more akin to a classic horror movie than a contemporary or postmodern horror film in that like the classic Frankenstein or Dracula films, it presents its fiends as unproblematic embodiments of Evil, which have to be ruthlessly and ritualistically killed off at the end," Picart and Frank write in the book Frames of Evil: The Holocaust as Horror in American Film, forthcoming with the Southern Illinois University Press in November 2007.
Admittedly, viewers—especially Holocaust survivors—might forgive Spielberg a little poetic license. A major problem documentary filmmakers have always faced in dealing with the Holocaust is that this sordid chapter of the last century so defies the limits of people's imaginations that to adequately describe the event they feel compelled to borrow from the vocabulary of the gothic.
The problem with Schindler's List is that in Spielberg's zeal to make the film as frightening as possible, it flies right through the gothic and into the world of pure fiction. In the movie's shower scene, female concentration camp victims are forced to strip and descend into the bowels of a shower they fear is a gas chamber. Audience members are primed, à la Psycho, to expect to witness murder.
But Picart says that based on survivor accounts, both Schindler men and women were sent to Auschwitz where they died together. Separating the women in the movie only exploits their victimhood to set up a horrifying scene that capitalizes on and eroticizes their nakedness and vulnerability. Spielberg took deliberate pains to insert this scene-it wasn't in the original script. Why then, if the director meant to make a movie ostensibly based on fact, would he have chosen to play up such a sensationalist victimization of women— à la Dracula, Frankenstein and Freddy Kruger?
"That's the question we're asking," says Picart. "How does one consume these images critically, while at the same time presenting an attitude of sympathy and respect for the victims of the trauma?"
The naked (and unsurprising) truth? It's all about show business, she said.
Increasingly, today's money-and-sex-mad pop culture taints everything it touches, from education to entertainment-and too many of us are oblivious to it. The wholesale borrowing between fact and fiction colors everything from 48 Hours to Hollywood terrorism movies to the front page of the best daily newspapers on the planet.
Picart thinks such fusion is inescapable-filmmakers have never been policed by historians and never will be. But viewers don't have to be mindless victims of filmmakers' manipulative tricks if they choose not to be, she said. They can realize that every time they log onto the Internet, watch TV or settle into a theater seat they are likely to have their emotional buttons pushed so that somebody somewhere can make a buck. If viewers filter everything they see (and much of what they read) through that awareness, in the end they'll be better informed.
"Maybe the question is not so much, 'can we ever absolutely achieve an accurate or absolutely truthful conventional representation of trauma?' but instead, 'how should we respond to all these different representations,'" Picart said.
"For me that's where the ethical response can be better managed, instead of trying to seek this ideal. Perhaps in the process of being critics and self-aware voyeurs, we can rewrite the story."
And in the end, keep our own monsters of ignorance at bay.
ABOUT KAY...
Caroline “Kay” Joan S. Picart won the 2006 US Open to the Worlds Pro Am Cabaret Championship in September 2006; with two other partners, she has been consistently ranked second nationally and in the US Open in 2005, when she first started dancing, with two different partners. When not dancing, Kay (as she prefers to be called) is Associate Professor of English and Courtesy Associate Professor of Law at Florida State University, and is the author of 10 books, including Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film: Between Laughter and Horror, published by SUNY Press, and The Holocaust Film Sourcebook, 2 volumes, published by Praeger Press.
EXTENDED BIOGRAPHY OF KAY PICART:
Dr. Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart is currently an Associate Professor of English and Courtesy Associate Professor of Law at Florida State University. She is a philosopher and former molecular embryologist educated in the Philippines (B.S. biology, magna cum laude and M.A., with honors, in philosophy at the Ateneo de Manila University), England (M.Phil., Sir Run Run Shaw Scholar and Wolfson Prize Winner, history and philosophy of science, Cambridge University), and the United Stats (Ph.D., with honors, philosophy, with doctoral minors in comparative literature, and aesthetics and criticism, The Pennsylvania State University).
She is the author of Resentment and “the Feminine” in Nietzsche’s Politico-Aesthetics (Penn State University Press, 1999); Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche: Eroticism, Death, Music and Laughter (Rodopi Press, 1999); The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein: Universal, Hammer and Beyond (Praeger, 2001); coauthored with Frank Smoot and Jayne Blodgett, The Frankenstein Film Sourcebook (Greenwood, 2001); Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film: Between Horror and Laughter (State University of New York Press, 2003); the Holocaust Film Sourcebook 2 Volumes (Praeger, 2004), and Inside Notes from the Outside (Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
Recent projects include: From Ballroom to DanceSport: Aesthetics, Athletics and Body Culture (State University of New York Press, December 2005); Frames of Evil: Holocaust as Horror in American Film (Southern Illinois University Press, forthcoming, November 2006); Inside Edge: Creating Ballroom Champions (Under Review, University Press of Florida); Images and Words, Words as Images: Updating Visual Culture Studies (Under Review, Oxford University Press); and edited with Cecil Greek, Monsters In and Among Us (forthcoming, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press); as well as Documenting Trauma, Documenting Terror (Under Review, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press).
Kay has published articles in film criticism, criminology, autoethnography, law, criminology, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, feminism and philosophy, philosophy/sociology of science, and phenomenology, as well as more than eighty popular pieces on Philippine art and culture as a columnist in various Korean and U.S. newspapers and magazines. She has been invited to be a guest editor of Qualitative Inquiry, and sits on the editorial board of Kaleidoscope and the Kenneth Burke Journal.
Most recently, her work in autoethnography, visual art, and dance have resulted in several videos that have been funded by grants from the Institute of Race and Ethnicity, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, St. Lawrence University, Swarthmore College, and with the technical assistance of the Office of Distributed and Distance Learning, Florida State University. She was trained in ballet, Hawaiian dance, and Philippine folk dance for fifteen years, and has been a student of ballroom since 1990. She developed a radio program, Ballroom With a Twist, which is being edited to final form, in collaboration with RadioTVPhilippines Network, based in Boca Raton via: http://www.radiotvphilippines.net/radio.htm.
Kay has been interviewed on national and international radio (& TV) for her work on ballroom dance/dancesport and Holocaust films (see: http://english3.fsu.edu/~kpicart/honors/radio.html). Her most recent dance-related accomplishments are: US Open to the Worlds Pro Am Cabaret champion at the U.S. DanceSport Council DanceSport Competition in September, 2006; second place in the Millennium DanceSport Nationals in pro am cabaret dancing- June 2005, and capturing second place, in the U.S. Open to the Worlds pro am cabaret competition- September 2005, with three different partners. To see Kay’s competition footage please visit: http://english3.fsu.edu/~kpicart/video.html She is also a visual artist who has exhibited in the Philippines, South Korea and various parts of the U.S. Her art business is called: Kinaesthetics: http://www.kinaestheticssportasart.com
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