VULCAN VOLKAN DEMIRKAN-MARTIN
At the time
Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, 2003) was released, critics were noticing an increase in films about child abuse. For example, Amy Taubin described the 2005 Sundance Film Festival as ‘a festival obsessed with childhood sexuality and underage sex’ (2005: 62). Films concerning this ‘obsession’ can be roughly categorised according to their themes: films about adolescent sexual contact (with each other or with adults), such as
Kids (Larry Clark, 1995),
Thirteen (Catherine Hardwicke, 2003),
Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, 2005),
Twelve and Holding (Michael Cuesta, 2005) and
Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2005); films about adolescent rape, such as
Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001),
Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002) and
The Woodsman (Nicole Kassell, 2004); films about false accusations of abuse, such as
Pretty Persuasion (Marcos Siega, 2005); films about sexual contact between queer boys and adult men made by queer filmmakers, such as
Happiness (Todd Solondz, 1998),
L.I.E. (Michael Cuesta, 2001) and
Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2005); and finally, films about the rape of adolescent boys by older men, including
Sleepers (Barry Levinson, 1996),
The Reckoning (Paul McGuigan, 2002),
The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004) and
Mystic River.
1
It is worth asking why child molestation has been such a popular subject in contemporary cinema. The over-representation of abuse, rape and murder of children in films suggests the existence of more than merely concerns about violence and harm. James Kincaid claims that ‘these stories are not told simply to solve a problem but also to focus and restate the problem, to keep it alive and before us’ (1998: 6). He further focuses on this paradox by describing the perverse pleasure we get in retelling these stories and their details: ‘We take a good, long look at what they are doing…. We reject this monstrous activity with such automatic indignation that the indignation comes to seem almost like pleasure’ (1998: 7). If, on the one hand, these films serve as a warning to parents, they also, in stark contrast, display our society’s extreme curiosity about this topic.
These films also portray children as passive receivers of adult (often male) desire. The fetishisation of childhood innocence is a valuable asset of contemporary Western societies. Yet many historians suggest that childhood is a relatively new concept (see Levine 2002: xxvii) and the construction of it in eighteenth-century European societies is an unequivocal result of the diminishing need for their labour rather than the exploration of their innocence. Like other products of contemporary popular culture, films about child abuse repeatedly position children as an innocent, desireless species that ‘maintain[s] its separation from the concerns of adulthood…and as somehow apart from the everyday economy of labour, meaning and value through which humans live, learn and grow’ (Faulkner 2010: 107). Like Kincaid, Joanne Faulkner concludes that ‘what requires scrutiny is the public’s investment in the image of childhood’ (2010: 108). What is presumed as part of a child’s innocence is a supposed ignorance of sexual desire. Ellis Hanson maintains that ‘the erotic innocence of children is founded on the presumption that they cannot possibly understand or experience sexual desire except as a trauma’ (2003: 374). In actual fact, research suggests that pleasurable sexual contact can take place most often between pederasts and boys, sometimes between male children and older women, and rarely between young girls and adult men (see Waites 2005: 27).
2 However, an account of such sex is beyond visual representation in mainstream film; if filmmakers were to attempt to make such a film, they would be unlikely to secure funding. If they were to be financed, their films would be guaranteed only limited release, censorship and moral condemnation, because such films are not treated as mere representation, but an (im)moral document that endorses child abuse.
3In films concerning child abuse, like in real life, homosexuality and paedophilia have regularly been conflated, and moral panic, precisely homosexual panic, is an essential part of these films. Harry Benshoff proposes that gay men were represented as non-sexual sissies in film until the 1950s. As gay men started to become more visible in social life, the representation became more aggressive: they were now represented as sexual psychopaths who actively queer younger men: ‘Implicit in these films and essays is the idea that “normal” young men (who engage in “normal” homosexual experimentation during adolescence) would only turn into “true” homosexuals if older “true” homosexuals continued to lead them astray’ (1997: 122). It is no surprise that most gay rights advocates vehemently deny any link between (gay) sexual orientation and paedophilia. Nevertheless, ‘The antihomophobic “solution” is not to insist that homosexuality has nothing to do with child abuse’, suggests Kevin Ohi (2000: 195). He explains:
The link between child molestation and homosexuality may well be…a homo-phobic illusion, but the effort to challenge the political ideology underlying this link – an ideology of sexual oppression in general – is better served by a thorough examination of structures uniting homophobia and abuse paranoias than by a simple debunking of this homophobic illusion as counterfactual. (Ibid.)
Ohi calls for an examination of ‘structures uniting homophobia and abuse paranoias’ rather than repeating that they have nothing in common. One way to examine such structures is to examine films like
Mystic River in which the concept of child abuse lends itself into amalgamation with moral, especially queer and homosexual, panic.
The Cellar: Sexual Politics of Mystic River
Mystic River is based on the bestselling Dennis Lehane novel which, according to Rand Richards Cooper, is ‘a piece of high-gloss crime fiction with serious literary ambitions’ (2003). The film opens in the summer of 1975, Boston. A crane shot briefly studies a working-class neighborhood. Three boys – Dave, Sean and Jimmy – are playing hockey on an empty street. While they are scrawling their names in the wet cement of the pavement, a car pulls up and two men who hold police badges tell the boys they are damaging public property. They order Dave to get into their car and abuse him in a cellar until he runs away. Years later, when Jimmy’s (Sean Penn) daughter is brutally murdered, there seems to be one suspect: Dave (Tim Robbins).
With its careful politics and casting,
Mystic River is the definitive film about child rape. The film presents its didactic seriousness through spoken narrative: the characters continuously summarise what is happening in the film so that we do not miss any details, and an abundance of flash-backs keeps reminding the viewers of what happened before.
4 The film adopts a stance that demands careful viewing, functioning less as a piece of entertainment and more, in fact, as a moral lesson. It seems that not only the filmmakers but also the reviewers and award-givers have agreed that
Mystic River makes crucial and pointed statements about key social issues.
5 In my reading, I acknowledge that the film’s celebration by audiences and critics alike may be framed as indicating that the only acceptable representation of paedophilia in mainstream film is as ‘abuse’ or ‘rape’. However, by focusing on Dave’s character and interrogating the representation of the ‘cellar’ in the film, I argue that the film’s denial of living space to Dave and his entrapment in a cellar is coterminous with an intolerance of not only paedophiles but all queer bodies.
One early, short scene is a kernel of Mystic River’s ideology. The scene starts with a shot of the stairs of a dark cellar. Next, we see a man descending the stairs, and a close-up of his legs. Fade out. From the man’s point of view, we then see a young boy (Dave) wake up and squint disturbed by the light. From the boy’s point of view, we see two men walking towards him. Then, from each man’s point of view we see Dave; he looks scared and begs, ‘Please, no more.’ Fade out. With a sound bridge, his voice echoes and transitions into the sound of wolves. Dave is now in the forest nervously looking back. He starts to run.
The scene evokes nightmarish dreaming rather than reality, with echoing sounds and fade-outs. Although there is an overwhelming suggestion of anal rape in Dave’s pleading, in actual fact, the viewer does not know what exactly happened in that cellar. Did the men rape Dave anally or did they make him penetrate them? Did they do it together, in each other’s presence? Was it only oral sex that was performed on Dave (or by Dave) or was it masturbation? ‘Please, no more’ could refer just as equally to any of these acts or scenarios. In this scene there is no actual representation of rape but rather an implication.
Fig. 1: The young Dave (Cameron Bowen) cowering in the cellar, in Mystic River (2003).
This scene only suggests what happened in the cellar not simply because depictions of child rape are unacceptable in mainstream film, but the ambiguity in the scene is also a directorial preference. Of course if it were depicted, the rape scene would be censored. As Jon Davies notes, films that deal with taboo subjects ‘legally cannot show the very acts that they build their narratives around’ (2007: 371). One concern of filmmakers and censors may be that some members of the audience may enjoy watching this. It has been discussed, especially by feminist critics, that rape scenes in films may unexpectedly arouse audiences or at least may be found entertaining – especially when shown out of context from the rest of the film.
6 Thus, the point of not showing these scenes may be the attempt to withhold such ‘perverted’ pleasures, but it may also invite some members of the audience to invest erotically in such scenes and write their own versions. Although painful sodomy is indicated, the scene’s ambiguity ensures that some audiences will read the screen differently.
Since the book does not describe the scene of rape in such detail, the director reveals his storytelling preferences in the way he shoots this scene. As such, the scene can also be read as the fantasy of the director; or in other words, it displays how Eastwood fantasised that this rape took place. If there were a code for displaying anal rape without showing anal sex, Eastwood would have shot the scene using this code; since there is not one, he tries to withhold erotic investment in the rape by not showing its details, instead employing distorted sound and fade-outs that make viewers understand it is precisely painful sodomy that took place. Indeed, the cellar scene is pivotal to ensuring that the audience sees the grown-up Dave as a sexually ambiguous and dysfunctional man; in retrospect, they will not find it hard to imagine what happened in the cellar.
Filmic representations of child rape do not take place in a normal house or bedroom; these acts need to be pushed into spaces we do not associate with cleanliness. In such films rape usually takes place in a claustrophobic space, particularly a cellar. For example, in
Sleepers four children are raped in the cellar of the reformatory.
The Butterfly Effect has a father abuse his own and other children in the cellar of his house. In
The Reckoning, the space of abuse is a tower but it is as dark as a cellar. In
Running Scared (Wayne Kramer, 2006), the room in which children are raped and murdered resembles a cellar; there are no windows, just a locked door. In
Mysterious Skin, children are not raped in a cellar but the film begins in one: an abused child locks himself in the cellar due to rape trauma. This motif is repeated so many times that the space of the cellar becomes one of the leading tropes in such films.
The cellar is located, just like the sewer, in the underground. Underground means out of sight, but it also connotes illegal action. We do not see a house attached to this cellar, which makes it look more like a medieval dungeon and completely removes it from the notion of a ‘normal’ environment. Since rape is an illegal act, it must be practiced in an abnormal environment. Yet confinement itself can be read as the mise-en-scène of forbidden desires, both because prisons are known to be places where illegal or ‘immoral’ action takes place, and because the confined space, removed from the everyday conscious world, so easily maps the Freudian topography of the unconscious.
In Mystic River the cellar not only lacks a house on top of it, but it is also in the middle of a forest, a place where there is no civilisation, rules or laws. Colin Flint rightly observes, ‘whether it is the neighborhood or the nation-state, people adopt cognitive maps as to what should belong there and what needs to be expelled’ (2004: 2). The reality of rape, which is expelled from the domesticity of the neighbourhood, is pushed away so strongly that once a child is taken from the neighbourhood, he becomes irrecoverable. David Sibley, drawing on both Mary Douglas and Julie Kristeva, adds, ‘disease is a more potent danger if it is contagious. The fear of infection leads to the erection of the barricades to resist the spread of diseased, polluted others’ (1995: 25). As Sibley points out, there are barricades and boundaries, and if a person falls onto to the other side he is ‘damaged’. Once you cross the physical borders of the neighborhood and enter those of the cellar you become ‘damaged goods’. Pointedly, the young Dave is not found after his kidnapping, as if the society left him there once the border was crossed. The audience is also informed that it took an entire ‘four days’ for Dave to come back from ‘uncivilisation’ – the geography of the forest and the cellar. ‘Four days’ sounds like a metaphor for the vast distance Dave has covered – as if Dave has been literally taken underground and it took four days to return to the surface. Not surprisingly, he remains dirty upon his return; once he is ‘dirt’, it is not possible to be clean anymore. Threatening to spread his disease of failed heterosexuality, the ‘dirty Dave’ is subsequently imprisoned in the family home. In the ideology that underlines Mystic River, there is no possibility of purification when a boy is taken into the cellar. As the adult Dave often repeats, he was murdered that day. As much as the cellar can be read as a symbolic space of exclusion it also marks a real, geographical exclusion of some members of a society.
Following Dave’s kidnapping,
Mystic River asserts that men like him will only rape particular boys. The film lays out and emphasises the differences between rape-able and non-rapeable boys. In the abduction sequence, Dave is saliently depicted as the clumsiest child in the group. When the ball he hits goes into the sewer instead of the goal, Dave attempts to claim he is so strong that he could not control the ball. His friends make fun of him; he is not strong but rather unskilled. As they finish their game and start graffitiing their names on the fresh cement, two men who claim to be policemen arrive at the scene. Since the children are damaging public property, they want to take one of them, initially Jimmy, to the police station. However, they decide he is the ‘hard-case of the group’, i.e. the toughest, and it is harder to convince him to go with them. The men then base their decision on whose house is the farthest, but the decision is actually made on the basis of who is the most subordinate and easiest to take away. Although later on Sean says, ‘It could have been any of us’, it is no accident Dave is picked.
The selection of Dave is justified, also, by a superimposition. Superimposition is a technique in which two or more shots/images are printed onto the same strip of film, thus making them simultaneously visible over each other. Ellis Hanson argues that
superimposition is the queerest of cinematic inventions. It refuses dichotomies and delights in improbable associations. It makes strange bedfellows of disparate images, such that we can scarcely tell a juxtaposition from a caress, an accident from an intention, a person from a ghost, a reality from a fantasy, or a dreamer from a dream. (2003: 384)
With superimposition, following Hanson, it becomes nearly impossible to tell the difference between two different things, here between the victim and the molester. There are two scenes in which Dave’s face is imposed on the molester’s face; one as a child and another as an adult. These superimpositions serve to tie together the affinity of seemingly disparate characters. The latter superimposition is carefully positioned: it comes right after Dave is portrayed as the unsuccessful player in the group, which confirms there was something wrong with Dave already: he was meant to be picked. The superimposition allows the nuanced suggestion that the raped is as guilty as the rapist. At the beginning of the film, the adult Dave’s face is initially imposed upon the molester’s face; this superimposition opens up the possibility that Dave ended up like his molester (whose sexual orientation is not explained in the film). Child-abuse paranoias are often homophobic paranoias. If a male child is raped, he is expected to become homosexual at its worst or a failed heterosexual at its best. From his social conditioning, Dave should know that even if the men did not rape him, being ‘taken away’ by two grown-up men must grant emasculation. The film’s characters agree: ‘Looks like damaged goods to me,’ says one of the men in the crowd gathered in front of Dave’s house after the child has come back home. In its sexual ideology, Mystic River is utterly conservative and impotent of imagining any possibilities other than essentially homophobic ones in its script, cinematography or direction.
Dave’s Monstrous Body
In classical horror films, especially those with vampires, the climactic scene often depicts the destruction of the monster. In
Monsters in the Closet (1997), Benshoff likens monsters to gay men in the closet: ‘The figure of the monster can frequently be equated (with greater or lesser degrees of ease) with that of the homosexual’ (1997: 4). Fantastic genres in general can be read as geographies of queer desire (again, see Benshoff 1997). Various kinds of monsters’ similarity to Otherness – other sexualities, gayness and queerness – have been discussed significantly in
Monsters in the Closet,
The Celluloid Closet (Russo 1981) and
Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan…and Beyond (Wood 2003) and the film
The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 1995). Monsters have sometimes been represented as sympathetic and identifiable, and sometimes as ‘a social threat which must be eradicated’ (Benshoff 1997: 256). In
Mystic River, Dave is characterised as a generic monster with influences from the ever-living zombie, full moon-obsessed werewolf and the lustful vampire.
When we first see the grown-up Dave, although he is seemingly heterosexual, there is an overtone that his heterosexuality is superficial. It is unclear whether Dave is employed; he seems to be heading back home after he walks his son to school every day. He exists, but it looks like he is not aware of his existence and hardly completes day-to-day jobs as if he is the living dead. He walks slowly, talks slowly, and most of the time looks like he is not alive but a zombie – a mindless existence. Robbins’ ‘successful’ representation of Dave as semi-alive is most akin to a performance of failed heterosexuality, which reviewers agree is an accurate portrayal of a man abused as a child. But in a teratological sense, this dysfunctional and traumatised portrayal is conventional.
Soon the narrative requires a change in Dave’s positioning as a monster. One night, Dave comes home late covered in blood; in fact, he looks as if he is bleeding. Taken from his wife Celeste’s (Marcia Gay Harden) point of view, this shot shows Dave aimlessly looking at his hands. Celeste observes his bloody hands and torn shirt. Speaking in panic, Dave tells her that he has beaten a man who tried to rob him. She looks suspicious, as if she does not believe a word he says and questions him: ‘You said you swung at him first?’ From the following day, she keeps on checking the newspapers, but is unable to find anything about the incident (‘There is nothing about it in the papers. I checked three time’). What is revealed the next day, however, is that Jimmy’s eighteen-year-old daughter Katie has been violently murdered the night before and her body found at the bottom of an animal cage in the abandoned zoo close to the neighborhood. The adult Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) is now a detective who takes on the case, and Jimmy starts an investigation himself. Only one person thinks she knows the murderer already: Celeste. From this turning point, Dave starts to behave oddly, almost like a mad man in contrast to his previous calm, repressed self. He watches vampire movies, says he thinks about vampires and werewolves all the time, and starts to believe he is one of them: ‘Once it’s in you,’ Dave tells his wife, ‘it stays.’ What is ‘it’ that stays in him? Whether it is being a criminal, paedophile or homosexual, whatever he thinks has stayed in him makes him act inhuman. Not only does Dave act like a character out of a horror film, but Mystic River’s style plays on horror archetypes:
Its ‘realism’ belongs to the nightmare. The atmosphere is deliberately grim. We don’t feel the sun until the end of the movie. Tim Robbins is consistently shot to increase his menace and emphasize his six-foot-five-inch frame in cramped spaces. (Chamberlin 2004)
As Carloss James Chamberlin notes, the film becomes dark after the first hour. Most scenes are shot at night and the use of light is minimal, with Dave’s face often lit from underneath, making him look dangerous and monstrous. However, it is not only the style of the film that is reminiscent of horror films. Dave becomes both
obsessed with and
like a character from a horror film. Not only does Dave talk about monsters, but Robbins’ acting also changes completely once the formerly repressed Dave starts having emotional outbursts. The make-up adds to the monstrosity/vampiric effect; there is so much white powder on Robbins’ face that we barely recognise him. His paleness now looks like a corpse who has just woken up. In this make-up and lighting, he looks more like a vampire than any other monster.
According to Nina Auerbach, the vampire genre actually owes its birth to the homoerotic relationship of the authors of the two foundational texts: Lord Byron’s Fragment of a Tale (1816) and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) (cited in Dyer 2002: 70). From Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922), which depicts an effeminate vampire who has a homoerotic relationship with his male guest, to Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire (1976), which was not allegedly filmed until 1994 due to its self-conscious references to homosexuality, gay men and lesbian women have frequently been portrayed as vampires – or the depiction of vampires have reminded the audience of homosexuality (see Benshoff: 271). It is in fact possible to comprehend the entire vampire genre as a discussion of homosexuality. Dyer writes:
What has been imagined through the vampire image is of a piece with how people have thought and felt about homosexual women and men – how others have thought and felt about us, and how we have thought and felt about ourselves. (2002: 73)
Dave’s fascination with vampire films is as important as his increasing similarity with the monster. As Milly Williamson points out, ‘the vampire has more often fascinated us rather than terrified us’ (2005: 1), and it is obvious that Dave is not terrified by watching vampire films. In another sense, fandom of vampire films is a queer pleasure in itself. In Linda Williams’ article ‘When the Woman Looks’, she studies female audiences’ relation to looking – especially to looking at a monster. One of the conclusions she reaches is that
the female look…shares the male fear of the monster’s freakishness, but also recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference. […] In other words, in the rare instance when the cinema permits the woman’s look, she not only sees a monster, she sees a monster that offers a distorted reflection of her own image. (1996: 22)
Queer audiences’ fascination with vampire films, monster films and heroes with supernatural powers could be read in the same way: the appalling figure of the monster frightens the spectator, but his/her freakishness resembles the gay spectator’s own. The zombie metaphor is asexual and impotent, but Dave then undergoes a monstrous transformation from the zombie toward the werewolf and vampire figures. The werewolf is sometimes, though not commonly, represented as sexual – for example, in
Underworld (Len Wiseman, 2003). The vampire, however, is explicitly sexual – for example in
Interview With the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994) and especially in
True Blood (2008–14). Today, especially for queer audiences, ‘the vampire has become an image of…a glamorous outsider, a figure whose otherness we find versions of (sometimes ambivalently) in ourselves’ (Williamson 2005: 1).
7Therefore Dave’s, like queer audiences’, fascination with such films and stories symbolises a personal revelation. Dave watches each vampire movie self-consciously; to see his resemblance to the vampire, which is a frightening but also likely to be a fascinating experience. However, the story is also about the other characters’ finding out the ‘vampire’ in Dave, which they wrongly assume to be a heterosexual vampire.
As Dyer (2001) explains, the vampire kisses to kill. The attack usually takes place at night in a bedroom, with the victim in a state of sexual expectation, often aroused. This sexual expression is mostly a queer but occasionally a heterosexual one in the genre; when it is a heterosexual expression it is employed as a symbol of uncivilised and violent male heterosexuality (Dyer 2002: 87). Although Kate is not raped before her murder, the way the scene is shot enhances the feeling of rape or sexual assault; a young, beautiful woman running in the forest in the middle of the night, who is then beaten to death with sticks, evidently phallic tools. Her body is found lying in an animal cage in a deserted zoo. When the camera turns to display her body in her small dress, the characters and some audiences will possibly conclude she was raped before being murdered. The use of restricted narration also limits the characters’ and viewers’ knowledge who assume Dave’s sexual awakening comes in the form of violent male heterosexuality. Only later in the film, we find out that when he came home covered in blood, Dave had killed a pederast, a murder discussed further, below. Dyer interrogates vampirism by how it can represent queer sexuality and experience: ‘In most vampire tales, the fact that a character is a vampire is only gradually discovered. […] Much of the suspense of the story is about finding out…’ (2002: 78). While the film’s characters (particularly Sean, Jimmy and Celeste) are trying to find Kate’s murderer, they wrongly assume that they uncovered Dave’s deeply repressed and monstrous sexual self.
Zombie, werewolf and vampire figures are all parasites; zombies, like werewolves, eat humans, and vampires are bloodsuckers. Yet there is a significant difference between a zombie and a vampire: a zombie does not know how to die and is a tearful figure of pity, while a vampire wakes up from death to live glamorously as an immortal. Through Dave’s murder the film encourages us to read Dave’s character as a monster that has to be killed before the order can be restored. Dave can be read as a zombie who refuses to die (although he ‘died’ on the day of his rape), therefore Jimmy kills him. His brief encroach on the vampire territory does not challenge this reading; according to Dyer, the narrative structure of the vampire tale ‘frequently consists of two parts: the first leading up to the discovery of the vampire’s hidden nature, the second concerned with his/her destruction’ (ibid.). As the characters expose Dave’s sexual self, they also plan his eradication. In another film, this could have simply been represented as a coming out of the closet narrative; however, in Mystic River’s retrograde ideology about molested children, the pollution can only be eliminated by the destruction of the monster.
After a series of misleading clues that come one after another, Jimmy comes to the conclusion that Dave murdered his daughter. His ultra-masculine friends, ‘the Savage brothers’, put Dave into their car and take him to the Mystic River. East-wood uses a parallel cut that links this scene to little Dave’s being kidnapped by the molesters. This is also a metaphor for Dave’s two deaths: the former of his psychological self, and the latter of his physical self. When they reach the banks of the Mystic River, moonlight hits Dave’s face, making him look even paler than he does in the rest of the film. Although Dave continuously denies that he murdered Katie and confesses to the killing of a child molester, Jimmy makes him believe he will let Dave live only if he tells ‘the truth’. Dave hesitantly accepts that he has murdered Kate; he is stabbed, shot and, finally, thrown into the river just as the police catch the real murderers. These two scenes of murder and capture are intercut with each other.
After the murder, there are three positive changes in the plot that indicate a sense of relief and the restoration of order in the community. First, the real murderers are caught. Then, in the first and only sex scene of the film, Jimmy Markum makes love to his wife, Annabeth (Laura Linney).
8 Finally, detective Sean Devine’s long-missing wife suddenly, and without any reason, comes back home with their child. Thus, everyone except Dave’s wife is more or less happy. The film applauds the death of the half man, the unliving and the raped. In the ideology that underlines
Mystic River, these figures are disposable and their elimination brings relief to the neighborhood, not unlike the relief that is brought by the murder of the paedophiles and the pederast in the film. ‘We bury our sins here’, says Jimmy as he is murdering Dave. In this film, the molesters and the molested are both thrown into the waters of Mystic River.
At the extra-diegetic level, there is another change that shows how reluctant Eastwood is to punish Jimmy. It is implied that Jimmy has already escaped punishment for at least one murder, and although Sean pretends to shoot him with his fingers at the end of the film, it is possible that he will get away with Dave’s murder as well. Eastwood thought the novel’s ending was too explicit about Sean’s pinpointing of Jimmy as suspect, so in the film he decided to be more vague about the ending (see Macklin 2005). In the same interview he also carefully does not comment on whether he thinks Jimmy will be captured and maintains the possibility that he will not, a silence that implicitly serves as Eastwood’s wish for and affirmation of Dave’s murder.
The ending of
Mystic River delivers multiple messages. To some extent, it criticises the prejudice of society against men who were raped as children; the moral of the film is just because someone is abused, it does not mean that they will become an abuser. However, although it is emphasised that chaos cannot be overcome through violence, Dave Boyle’s murder is also framed as a necessity. As the film asserts both with Dave’s characterisation and with use of super-impositiosn, if he lives, Dave will always be suspect in every (sexual) crime that takes place around him. Through his murder Dave is punished not only for his misperformance of masculinity but also as a failed heterosexual. His denunciation of the sexless zombie he has been and his flourishing interest in the lustful vampire is not permitted. In Dave’s characterisation, these currents can be traced: a misperformance of masculinity (being unmanly), a violent heterosexuality (the supposed rape instead of consensual sex) and failing at homosexuality (if he remained ‘damaged goods’ he would not be a threat to women). Hence, Dave is punished for being unreadable as a man just like he is unreadable as a monster (zombie or vampire?) – unstable, unusual and socially unuseful. Isabel Pinedo argues that ‘it is only when the monster is truly dead and subject to decay that it ceases to threaten the social order’ (1997: 22). In the masculine world
Mystic River is depicting, queerness is so unacceptable that Dave’s murder is portrayed as inevitable and it is represented as a horror film cliché, ‘destruction of the monster’.
The Space of the Cellar: Paedophilia and Pederasty as Disease
There are common tropes associated with child abuse that we may look for in analyses of mainstream films concerning male sexual contact with children. Child abusers are typically represented as murderous villains or sadistic serial rapists, and they are reduced to two dimensional characters; for example, the merciless, boy-hungry guards of Sleepers, the cruel paedophile rings in The Lost Son (Chris Menges, 1999), the incestuous evil father who rapes his children in Just Evil (James Ronald Whitney, 2000), the rich local nobleman who is also a pederast and a murderer in Reckoning, the immoral paedophile counsellor in The Weather Man (Gore Verbinski, 2005) and the paedophile couple in Running Scared. In its most extreme, the child abuser becomes a monster, like Freddy Krueger, the protagonist of A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) and its many sequels.
The two child abusers in Mystic River are similarly reduced to cartoon characters and they are lost in oblivion in the course of the film. One of them is said to have been killed while running from the police and the other one was arrested and ‘went the noose route in his cell’. Only towards the end of the film do we learn the molesters’ names were Henry and George. Were they married men? Did they have children? Were they a homosexual couple? Did they have sex with each other? Did they prefer boys to girls or did they like children of either sex? As Kevin Ohi puts it, ‘an account of the paedophile’s point of view is so impossible that the minimal empathy necessary even to identify a paedophile becomes a confession of errant desire’ (2000: 204). Hence, it is sufficient to represent the paedophiles only in terms of their destruction, in contrast to Jimmy, who is spared such an ending.
The murdered pederast is also represented as a clichéd character. Towards the end of the film, when Dave confesses his murder of the pederast to a non-believing Jimmy, a flashback depicts the murder: the pederast is in his car, his eyes closed to indicate his enjoyment of the oral sex he is receiving. This is revealed to be Dave’s point of view when he opens the car door; he then starts to punch the man and throws him out of the car. The adolescent boy is visible in a single shot before Dave tells him to run away; his blond, probably dyed hair (compared to his dark eyebrows), his childish face and absence of facial hair are visual codes that connote his homosexual identity. Gilbert Herdt argues that commercial sex between younger and older men can be read as a social event that brings older and younger men, and richer and poorer men into union (1997: 72). For example, a young boy might want to use the money to escape homophobic parents. It is not clarified whether the boy is in the car out of pleasure, for prostitution, or both; however, it is clear that the boy is running away from Dave rather than the pederast. Yet the boy’s possible pleasure in such an act is unthinkable in this film’s politics; where one might see psychological/ sexual/financial fulfillment, Dave’s characterisation means that the film is only able to imagine pain, abuse and repugnance. Although the sexual act is presented as consensual, the young boy is portrayed as a victim of the pederast, who, as we learn later, had ‘three priors’. Dave asks, ‘Who cares if a child molester is killed?’ This is obviously a rhetorical question; nobody cares.
Mystic River blurs the lines between consensual and non-consensual sex, monstrosity and homosexuality, monstrosity and queerness, paedophilia and pederasty, paedophilia/pederasty and homosexuality; all of these pairs are conflated and reified in the film. David Sibley discusses that in stereotyping there is no interaction with the ‘other’; it becomes an arrested, fixated idea about the stereotyped (1995: 18). The paedophiles and the pederast characters in Mystic River are in fact stereotypes, represented as perverted men hungry for boys. Like the paedophiles themselves, the space they occupy is also stereotyped in this film. It all starts with a ball gone missing in the sewer. Years later Dave tells his son, ‘If we could get that manhole cover up, could be a thousand balls there’. The ‘manhole’ is no doubt as metaphorical as the sewer it figuratively covers. A sewer represents extreme dirt; the cellar in the film is dirty, and so is the car the molesters drive. It is full of mud and used handkerchiefs, possibly with semen on them. The film attempts to exclude not only the paedophiles/pederasts themselves, but also all of their acts, their victims and the spaces they inhabit. The dirty men are not from our neighbourhood; they are outsiders. Once they take one of us, that person is no longer one of us. This rejection is not simply about ‘our neighbourhood’, but on a wider scale it is also a rejection of paedophilia/pederasty in ‘our civilised culture’. Such films act as a warning that pederasty/paedophilia have to be pushed strongly to somewhere outside ‘us’. In the present age, the only acceptable representation of paedophilia in mainstream film seems to be as ‘abuse’ or ‘rape’.
In this chapter I have argued that the central, if sidelined, plot in Mystic River is the rape scene, which can be called that only because the depiction connotes rape although there is no actual representation of rape. The characters in the film, like the audience, take for granted that painful anal rape took place in the cellar and in Mystic River such rape cripples the victim for life. The abusers in the film are cruel and stereotyped, and the audience is given very brief information about them so that they are not humanised. When the film depicts a pederast having sex with a teenage boy, he is treated just like the abusers by the narrative; the audience is not given any information about him and he is viciously beaten to death. In effect, in the ideology of the film there is no difference between victims, abusers, pederasts and paedophiles: all deserve to be murdered.
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