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The Night the Prowler
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So often, the self is an enclosed and solitary thing. But a transition can occur
whereby an individual enters society and establishes relations with others. It
happens when he or she catches their reflection in a mirror – i.e., for a
moment, they can step outside and see themself as someone else. This pivotal moment
occurs often in films crossed by various shades of the fantastique and the Gothic. An individual can never be analysed
separately from Others, for it is with them that he or she develops a particular
configuration of need, demand and desire. All of us are caught in our image as
created and projected by others – a veritable Lacanian nightmare!
A particularly thoughtful and complex use of this
mirror-phase image appears in Jim Sharman’s The
Night the Prowler, a Gothic psychodrama scripted by
celebrated Australian novelist Patrick White. Felicity (Kerry Walker) is
confronted with a mirror image not only literally, but also symbolically – in
the form of a dying man (Harry Neilson) who has withdrawn from contact with
others. In her aggressive rebellion against the norms of a middle-class family,
Felicity sees that she, too, may be drying up emotionally. Thus, in the final
scene when the police ask her about the old man – “Did you know him?” – she
replies, “I knew him ... as I know myself.” Her mother (Ruth Cracknell), by
contrast, is constantly looking in the mirror, but never seeing herself as she
really is.
The family is the fundamental social unit. The Night the Prowler is among the most
ambitious Australian films involving family relationships. Felicity’s sexuality
has been denied and repressed by her parents, leading to the other extreme: an
inverted neurosis. Fantasy turns (to again use the language of psychoanalysis)
into phantasy; scenarios loom up and
swallow individual “subjects” whole.
Felicity longs to be raped by “a real man”, a prowler
in the night. Later, she herself becomes a prowler: the intrusion of the
repressed into the homes of a middle-class neighbourhood. It may weary you to
read this, for so-called
art films written and directed by men about the supposed rape fantasies and
“dangerous desires” of modern, young women can be a dubious proposition.
This
case, however, is different. The link
between the family and Felicity’s unleashed violence is made through repeated
emphasis on certain objects: she cuts her 16th birthday cake with a
knife; later, as a prowler, she slashes and defaces a family portrait.
But Felicity’s violence is futile, for who is to
blame? Each member of the family has, in a way, been forced into a role that
conceals the free expression of desire. The film reverberates with many
hinted-at sexual possibilities: Felicity desires her father, the mother imagines
herself for a moment being raped.
It is a pity that, toward the end, the film changes
direction abruptly, so that Felicity’s dilemma is presented as being purely
individual (“I know myself”), and no longer related to the family seen as a R.W.
Fassbinder-like personal/political unit. In this, The Night the Prowler is a slightly blinkered product of its
particular time, place and sensibility. Perhaps Sharman needed a vision wider
than the one White could give him as source material, on this occasion, to
encompass any larger possibilities.
© Adrian Martin December 1979 |
