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Kitchen
Sink
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Mystery
Envelope
In the early to mid 1980s, in the modest New Zealand
publication Alternative Cinema, three
women filmmakers, at the very start of their careers, tried to figure out how to relate their feminism to their love of popular
fiction, its stories, spectacles and genres. The women were
Jane
Campion, Gaylene Preston and Alison Maclean. Quite an Antipodean talent
pool!
All three, in different ways and at diverse moments in
their subsequent careers, have been drawn to hybrid inflections of the Gothic
in cinema and, more specifically, the Female Gothic.
This is a loose genre in which female characters face – often within dreamlike
surroundings and situations – the archetypal male figures who prompt both fear
and desire in them. In the works of these directors, whether The Piano (1993) and In the Cut (2003) for
Campion, or Mr Wrong (1986) and Perfect Strangers (2003) for Preston, we see a bold mixing
of forms and conventions: horror, mystery-thriller, art cinema and formal
experimentation, underlined by ideas from feminist theory and politics.
Alison Maclean’s 14-minute Kitchen Sink, among the many highly Expressionistic and allegorical films made in the wake of David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) – and, like it, rendered in starkly contrasting tones of black and white cinematography – is an enduring highpoint of Female Gothic exploration in contemporary world cinema (it is included as an extra on the DVD of her 1992 debut feature Crush). Almost wordless (aside from some deliberately banal chatter that provides an everyday punctuation), it cleverly uses the low-budget production formula of “two people in a house”. But not only does it mine the feminist potential of this domestic setting, it also swiftly puts its premise through a series of intense transformations or metamorphoses, all of which stay true to the essential concerns of the Female Gothic. In the following analysis, numbers in parentheses refer to the shots as numbered in Richard Raskin’s shot list (PDF file).
On its broadest thematic or semantic level, we can
observe the changes that are rung on the film’s central narrative idea. The
strange creature identified in the credits only as Man (Peter Tait), whom Woman
(Theresa Healey) digs out of a clogged domestic plughole, goes through a number
of stark alterations in shape, size and nature. He grows from a foetus with already strikingly well-formed facial
features (shots 22-57), to a hairy, King Kong-like adult-sized man (68). After
he is lovingly shaved and trimmed – but also cut (84), which is a classic sign
of female ambivalence – he appears ‘civilised’ (91). Shots 94 (her romantic
gaze at his face) and 95 (zipping up his trousers) clearly tell us that, for
Woman, this sudden gift of a handsome, adult Man is a handy object of desire.
However, we are then presented with a striking plot
ellipse – having shared her bed with him (the night-into-day transition evoked
in 97), Woman has again tied Man up in a white bag (100, 102). Maclean seems to
be making here an ironic reference to the coy “maybe it happened, maybe it
didn’t” temporal transitions typical of classical Hollywood films of the 1940s
– often centring, precisely, around an ambiguity as to whether sex has taken
place. (In true Old Hollywood style, Man seems to have remained chastely dressed
throughout the night!) But the look on Woman’s face in 97 (as well as the
symbolic clean sweep announced in the sheet-changing of 98) cues us, at the
very least, into some regret or second thoughts on her part: it’s the Morning
After dilemma so often hashed out in women’s magazines, TV soaps and film
melodramas.
Of course, Woman is right to worry, for now that this emblematic
male creature has been rejected and ejected, he becomes a figure of menace –
someone who cannot be so easily controlled or disposed of. In a characteristic
horror movie gesture (120-121), he grabs her hand. At this point, as a fight
ensues (120-138), Kitchen Sink skillfully mimics the conventions of the action-thriller, with its quick
editing and dramatic musical underlining. However, with the violence suspended,
erotic romance again enters the picture, and they kiss (144-145), the circling camera
again evoking movie convention. This swirl of ambivalent love and hate, so
typical of Female Gothic, resolves itself in a surreal gesture (rendered in a
simple but highly expressive special effect) that answers the initial tugging
from the sinkhole: pulling Man’s neck hair appears to destroy his life. The
film leaves us in medias res during
this violent act on the woman’s part, which is effectively a kind of triumphant,
Praying Mantis sex-murder.
Discovery, attraction, exploration, repulsion: as in so
much Female Gothic, this Woman’s elemental actions (for the film has no individual
psychology per se) are driven by
curiosity, just as for the archetypal figure of Alice in Wonderland. That the
film emerges from feminist concerns is evident not only in the Battle of the
Sexes scenario it plays out, but also in the particular investment that Maclean
makes in the domestic setting and its props. It is from the unglamorous,
quotidian sink that the figure of both desire and menace emerges – quite
literally, in the first place, as the type of mucky obstruction that irritates
in daily life. Everything in the film involves everyday, domestic objects:
pipes, taps, bathtub, tables, chairs. The only tokens of the world beyond are
the intrusive phone call (55-62) and the little girl at the door (15-18) who
offers (as in a TV game show) a “mystery envelope” – an ironic reference to the
mystery-man stirring in his successive, envelope-like sacks.
Ultimately, it is another instance of everyday
curiosity, occurring upon a body no longer coded as a projected romantic or
erotic ideal – Woman’s fixation on Man’s pesky little, sticking-out hair
follicle – that brings the emotional cycle traced by the film to an abrupt but
satisfying close. There is also a subtle transition between this start and end:
Woman’s distracted fixation on her own hair (47-48), which evokes the
psychological condition of trichotillomania or compulsive hair pulling.
Maclean surely had a classic of cinematic Female
Gothic, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), in
mind when she plotted the découpage of Kitchen Sink. [PS: Three decades
later, Jill Gevargizian’s The Stylist (2021) relays the same debt.] The film stages a rigorous war around the
classical point-of-view structure that we intuitively know so well, as
spectators, from many horror films and mystery-thrillers. The opening phase
(shots 1-45), lasting 2.50 minutes, is firmly anchored around the POV of Woman,
first at the sink, then at the front door, and finally as she extracts the
creature from the hole. Although the camera set-ups showing her at the sink (a
first set-up is cut to form shots 2 and 9; the second set-up gives 4, 6 and 8;
while the set-ups for 11, 13 and 15 appear only once each) vary, the extremely insistent
return to an almost identical framing of the sink (1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 12 and 14)
establishes this image, in emotional if not strictly literal or realistic
terms, as a POV vision from the character’s eyes.
Shot 46, 2.50 minutes in, marks a decisive turning
point in the formal structure. As often in the films of Polanski, Alfred
Hitchcock, Dario Argento or Brian De Palma (to name only four master
practitioners of the hybrid mystery-thriller-horror form in cinema), subjective
POV structures, such as the one just traced in shots 1-45, exist mainly to be
inverted, shifted or broken – i.e., in order to allow some turning of the
tables between characters, with all the symbolic and allegorical potential this
carries. In 46, the woman is no longer, as it were, in control of the camera’s
gaze; it detaches itself from her, approaching her ominously from behind. This
shot will be ultimately answered or completed – fulfilled in the terms of a figural analysis – by shot 142, in
which a similar camera movement approaching her from the back ends up being coded
as a POV from Man’s perspective, a shift cued by his hand at last entering the
frame. (Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson often use this technique.) In-between
is a transitional point in this arc: shot 103 (a set-up carried over into 105,
107 and 108), also from behind Woman as she bathes.
The interruption or disruption to the woman’s control
of the POV which begins in shot 46 segues into a plot device that carries the
same function: the call away from the bath to the telephone that begins in shot
55 and continues until 62. This is a classic thriller trope: think of the
shower taken by Harrison Ford thirteen minutes in Polanski’s Frantic (1987), allowing an occlusion of sound and vision
to take place that boldly signifies the unseen moment of his wife’s off-screen
kidnapping. In both cases, something monstrous – literally, in Kitchen Sink – occurs in the elided
off-screen space, thanks to a deliberately unreal telescoping of time.
The interplay between Woman and Man in Kitchen Sink is properly and profoundly
psychoanalytic – the Freudian level is often avowed and foregrounded in Female
Gothic, with many films in this tradition, from Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) to Whispers in the Dark (Christopher Crowe, 1992) taking off
from a literal dramatisation of the analytic situation. In the Woman’s eyes,
and in her compressed experience as rendered here, the Man wheels through a
number of identifications or projections: baby, adult, lover, attacker. This fluidity
or instability of psychosexual projection is a hallmark of the Female Gothic.
It is also, of course (and as in Gaylene Preston’s work) a heightened, wry
comment on the behaviour of actual men in real-life relationships, flip-flopping
from childishness to aggression, desire to indifference, sensitivity to
brutishness, animalistic to civilised, in their intimate dealings with women.
But Maclean’s version of Female Gothic is also finely
tuned into the ambivalence of all this from the woman’s viewpoint: she enjoys
(for a time) nurturing the male ‘infant’ – he is a passive toy, putty in her
hands – just as she is erotically attracted to the ‘bad boy’ animal within him.
It is precisely the point at which such intimate
attraction suddenly clicks over into life-threatening violence – a violence
that echoes, beyond this one figure, the ideology of an entire patriarchal,
male order – that is so well captured in Kitchen
Sink. And, for a change, Woman gets to win the struggle.
Shot List (PDF file) (compiled by Richard Raskin
with the authorisation of Alison Maclean, originally published in Short Film Studies, 2012)
MORE Maclean: Jesus' Son © Adrian Martin April 2011 |
