Modleski, Tania. “The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory.” 1986. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5^th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 691-700.

Here is a remarkable passage from The Pleasure of the Text, in which Barthes begins by discussing the superiority of a textual reading based on disavowal and ends by casually condemning mass culture:

Many readings are perverse, implying a split, a cleavage. Just as the child knows its mother has no penis and simultaneously believes she has one . . . so the reader can keep saying: I know these are only words, but all the same. . . . Of all readings that of tragedy is the most perverse: I take pleasure in hearing myself tell a story whose end I know: I know and I don’t know, I act toward myself as though I did not know: I know perfectly well Oedipus will be unmasked, that Danton will be guillotined, but all the same. . . . Compared to a dramatic story, which is one whose outcome is unknown, there is here an effacement of pleasure and a progression of jouissance (today, in mass culture, there is an enormous consumption of “dramatics” and little jouissance). [Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), pp. 47-48]

Anyone who has read Christian Metz’s persuasive argument that disavowal is constitutive of the spectator’s pleasure at the cinema will find it difficult to give ready assent to Barthes’ contention that mass culture deprives the consumer of this “perverse” experience. And anyone who is acquainted with the standardized art products—the genre and formula stories—which proliferate in a mass society will have to admit that their import depends precisely upon our suspending our certain knowledge of their outcome—for example, the knowledge that, as the critics say, the gangster “will eventually lie dead in the streets.” Barthes’ remarks are illuminating, then, not for any direct light they shed on the high/mass culture debate, but because they vividly exemplify the tendency of critics and theorists to make mass culture into the “other” of whatever, at any given moment, they happen to be championing—and, moreover, to denigrate that other primarily because it allegedly provides pleasure to the consumer. 692-93

Although Lyotard has elsewhere informed us that “thinking by means of oppositions does not correspond to the liveliest modes of postmodern knowledge,” he does not seem to have extricated himself entirely from this mode. Pleasure (or “comfort” or “solace”) remains the enemy for the postmodernist thinker because it is judged to be the means by which the consumer is reconciled to the prevailing cultural policy, or the “dominant ideology.” Which this view may well provide the critic with “matter for solace and pleasure,” it is at least debatable that mass culture today is on the side of the specious good, that it offers, in the words of Matei Calinescu, “an ideologically manipulated illusion of taste,” that it lures its audience to a false complacency with the promise of equally false and insipid pleasures. Indeed, the contemporary horror film—the so-called exploitation film or slasher film—provides an interesting counterexample to such theses. Many of these films are engaged in an unprecedented assault on all that bourgeois culture is supposed to cherish—like the ideological apparatuses of the family and the school. Consider Leonard Maltin’s capsule summary of an exemplary film in the genre, The Brood, directed by David Cronenberg and starring Samantha Eggar: “Eggar eats her own afterbirth while midget clones beat grandparents and lovely young school teachers to death with mallets.” A few of the film, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, have actually been celebrated for their adversarial relation to contemporary culture and society. 694

Robin Wood has analyzed the film [The Texas Chainsaw Massacre] as embodying a critique of capitalism, since the film shows the horror both of people quite literally living off other people, and of the institution of the family, since it implies that the monster is the family. 695

And in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, video itself becomes the monster. The film concerns a plot, emanating from Pittsburgh, to subject human beings to massive doses of a video signal which renders its victims incapable of distinguishing hallucination from reality. One of the effects of this signal on the film’s hero is to cause a gaping, vagina-like wound to open in the middle of his stomach, so that the villains can program him by inserting a video cassette into his body. The hero’s situation becomes that of the new schizophrenic described by Jean Baudrillard in his discussion of the effects of mass communication:

No more hysteria, no more projective paranoia, properly speaking, but this state of terror proper to the schizophrenic: too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests, and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore. . . . The schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion. [Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” trans. John Johnston, The Anti-Aesthetic, pp. 132-33] 695

Finally, it should scarcely need pointing out that when villains and victims are such shadowy, undeveloped characters and are portrayed equally unsympathetically, narcissistic identification on the part of the audience becomes increasingly difficult. Indeed, it could be said that some of the films elicit a kind of anti-narcissistic identification, which the audience delights in indulging just as it delights in having its expectations of closure frustrated. Of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Robin Wood writes, “Watching it recently with a large, half-stoned youth audience who cheered and applauded every one of Leatherface’s outrages against their representatives on the screen was a terrifying experience.” 697

This kind of joyful self-destructiveness on the part of the masses has been discussed by Jean Baudrillard in another context—in his analysis of the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris to which tourists flock by the millions, ostensibly to consume culture, but alto to hasten the collapse of the structurally flawed building. There is a similar paradox in the fact that Dawn of the Dead, the film about zombies taking over a shopping center, has become a midnight favorite at shopping malls all over the United States. In both cases the masses are reveling in the demise of the very culture they appear most enthusiastically to support. Here, it would seem, we have another variant of the split, “perverse” response favored by Roland Barthes. 697-98

The contemporary horror film thus comes very close to being “the other film” that Thierry Kuntzel says the classic narrative film must always work to conceal: “a film in which the initial figure would not find a place in the flow of a narrative, in which the configuration of events contained in the formal matrix would not form a progressive order, in which the spectator/subject would never be reassured . . . within the dominant system of production and consumption, this would be a film of sustained terror.” Both in form and in content, the genre confounds the theories of those critics who adopt an adversarial attitude toward mass culture. The type of mass art I have been discussing—the kind of films which play at drive-ins and shabby downtown theaters, and are discussed on the pages of newsletters named Trashola, and Sleazoid Express—is as apocalyptic and nihilistic, as hostile to meaning, form, pleasure, and the specious good as many types of high art. 698

It is indeed possible for the tutored critic versed in preparatory film culture to make a convincing case for the artistic merit of a film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as long as art continues to be theorized in terms of negation, as long as we demand that it be uncompromisingly oppositional. 698

However, instead of endorsing Wood’s view, we might wish to consider what these films have to teach us about the limits of an adversarial position which makes a virtue of “sustained terror.” Certainly women have important reasons for doing so. 698

Further, just as Linda Williams has argued that in the horror film woman is usually placed on the side of the monster even when she is its pre-eminent victim, so too in the scenario I outlined at the beginning woman is frequently associated with the monster mass culture. This is hardly surprising since, as we have seen, mass culture has typically been theorized as the realm of cheap and easy pleasure—“pleasure in the pejorative sense.” Thus, in Ann Douglas’s account, the “feminization of American culture” is synonymous with the rise of mass culture. And in David Cronenberg’s view, mass culture—at leas the video portion of it—is terrifying because of the way it feminizes its audience. In Videodrome, the openness and vulnerability of the media recipient are made to seem loathsome and fearful through the use of feminine imagery (the vaginal wound in the stomach) and feminine positioning: the hero is raped with a video cassette. As Baudrillard puts it, “no halo of private protection, not even his own body . . . protect[s] him anymore.” Baudrillard himself describes mass-mediated experience in terms of rape, as when he speaks of “the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance.” 699

Beyond this, it remains for the postmodernist to ponder the irony of the fact that when critics condemn a “monstrous motion picture industry” they are to a certain extent repeating the gestures of texts they repudiate. And the question then becomes: How can an adversarial attitude be maintained toward an art that is itself increasingly adversarial? 700