This chapter considers the notion of the monstrous and its relationship to childhood in Terry Gilliam’s Tideland (2005). There is a small strain of the fantastic that plays upon the powers of horror but skirts the edge of mainstream. Sometimes these films meet with stupendous financial success – as in the case of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) – but more often they turn out to be astounding (critical and/or financial) failures, as in the case of Tideland. At the centre of both films is a young girl who confronts all-too-real horrors by delving into a fantasy world that becomes more vivid and sustaining than those daily terrors. While del Toro’s film has won awards the world over, Gilliam’s film has been dismissed as ‘disturbing and misguided’ (Rosenblatt 2006) and ‘a no-man’s land … between the merely bad and the indefensible’ (Scott 2006). Many critics missed Gilliam’s skillful exploitation and subversion of horror conventions with which he confronts adults with the shocking reality of childhood innocence.
Despite their many similarities, the two films differ on one key point: sexuality. While there are whiffs of sexual elements in del Toro’s film, particularly with the ogre known as the Pale Man who savours the taste of innocents, Gilliam confronts sexuality more frankly and from a child’s point of view. The story of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), daughter of two junkies – one of them an ex-rock-star father whose affection borders on the inappropriate – features a child mostly on her own surrounded only by her collection of doll heads and a handful of adults who lack any semblance of responsibility. While there are many horrific moments, in the latter part of the film Gilliam teases his audience into a fury with the suggestion that an unacceptable sexual encounter is about to erupt between Jeliza-Rose and an adult (albeit an adult with developmental disabilities). The contrast of his mature body coupled with her undeveloped shape heightens the difference. The genre of horror still maintains a strong conservative thrust and the transgressive use of sexuality in Tideland unduly disturbs many critics and audience members.
The position of children in twenty-first-century culture is a contested one. French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard has argued that ‘the child is no longer a child’ (2002: 103). As technology advances, the child ceases to be a product of its parents and is instead re-invented as ‘a technical performance’ and a ‘mini-extension’ of themselves, in short, a clone, not a child. When we hear the raptures of the new parents swooning over their new little echo, we comprehend the narcissism of that self-nurturing. We project the image of the self-less love of the parent for the child, while hiding the helpless and utterly vulnerable love of the child for the parent. The anxious cry – ‘Think of the children!’ – illuminates the well-known clash between the Puritan heritage of the United States and capitalism’s ubiquitous advertising, which attempts to sell a variety of products via the lure of sex.1 Both the popular and the academic press have made much of this phenomenon with alarmist stories, but the essential tension between the opposing forces seem to have become intractable.
Typically, nanny culture – by definition – looks for macro solutions at the governmental level, absolving the individual of any need to act. Gilliam’s film attacks nanny culture at its most tender spot: the seemingly ever-present anxiety over the sexual exploitation of children. While crime statistics demonstrate that children are far more likely to be endangered by family members than anyone else, the sexual endangerment of children has become a seemingly omnipresent fear in the wake of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, and the advent of the internet, often seen by alarmists as consisting of little more than a system of doors allowing child-porn predators access to innocent children the world over. While fears for children’s safety are understandable enough, terror about sexuality – a natural part of life – has grown from the legacy of Puritan culture to an anxious seesaw between the sexualisation of images of children and the horror at what that sexual provocation might invoke: the child molester.2 Gilliam confronts this taboo head-on, making use of this terror in the story of Jeliza-Rose and allowing her to become the monstrous one despite our expectations that only the adults will prove monstrous.
Like del Toro, Gilliam realises in his film’s heroine the Hobbesian potential of the unsupervised child. Like the gnarled tree that anchors both films, dark horror lurks watchfully over the childish antics of the heroine.3 The blasted nature of the tree embodies the decrepitude of age, which seeks to abuse the child – a rotting corpse poised over the innocent body of the child in both films (and prefigures del Toro’s giant toad and Gilliam’s strange brother and sister). This horrific impulse drives the twin narratives of childhood resilience and creativity. Gilliam uses such motifs to assail the viewer and to create fearful expectations as the film unfolds. In doing so, he plays with generic expectations, creating a horror film with recognisable tropes, but one in which they do not lead to expected conclusions. For example, dismembered bodies (like Jeliza-Rose’s doll collection) can be playful one moment then exploited as horrific the next. Every trope initially frustrates the horror fan’s expectations of blood and gore; then, each undergoes an unexpected transformation to horrify yet still more, if in a generically unexpected way.
For example, the dead body of Jeliza-Rose’s father passes from the horror of death to normalcy as part of her ‘home’ and then back to horror as he undergoes taxidermy. The shifting camera angles, the gruesome images, the foreboding music tell us we are in a horror film, but the monster’s identity keeps shifting. Is it horror? In the end, the simplest generic definition still works the best: as Douglas Winter wrote in his introduction to the influential collection Prime Evil (1989), ‘horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the western. It is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special shelf in libraries or bookstore … Horror is an emotion’ (1988: 2). It is the emotion Gilliam seeks to provoke even as he keeps the audience off-balance by veering away from generic conventions.
Gilliam introduces the DVD with a black-and-white sequence that immediately signals its ties to the horror film. It evokes the tacked-on prologue of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), clearly intended as a safety valve, in which the tuxedo-clad Edward van Sloan steps from behind a curtain (as if this were live theatre) and delivers the following ‘friendly warning’ to the audience:
Mr Carl Laemmle [the producer] feels it would be a little unkind to present this picture without just a word of friendly warning. We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein … I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now’s your chance to … uh, well, we warned you.
Gilliam follows a similar tack with his prologue. Rather than the dapper tuxedoed spokesmen, he looks to be speaking from an undisclosed location in a subterranean bunker. Evoking the Frankenstein warning, he hectors his audience into thinking that it is their short-comings that will affect their pleasure:
Hello, I’m Terry Gilliam and I have a confession to make: many of you are not going to like this film … If it’s shocking, it’s because it is innocent. So, I suggest that you forget everything you learned as an adult … Try to rediscover what it was like to be a child, the sense of wonder and innocence, and don’t forget to laugh. Remember, children are strong, they are resilient … I was sixty-four years old when I made this film. I think I finally discovered the child within me. It turned out to be a little girl.
Like Laemmle’s preamble, Gilliam’s warning serves as both a legitimate ‘warning’ and a provocative tease. The anticipatory expectation of viewer resistance is couched in a disparagement of that same audience. Just as the Frankenstein warning implies a failing of our nerves if we cannot take the strain, Gilliam suggests the largely negative critical reaction comes from a failure to retain what our culture glorifies about childhood: its innocence, and the strange fact that, for all our worship of this special state, we are shocked by its reality. After unbalancing the viewer with the counter-intuitive notion of children as resilient rather than the victims we are accustomed to in media portrayals, Gilliam then sets up an unsettling gender construction: namely, that he has found his inner child to be a little girl. He emphasises his age to increase the disparity and conjure up the image of the ‘dirty old man’, playing on our prejudices with practiced ease. Gilliam refuses to sentimentalise the ‘girl in dire situation’ motif, even as he describes it.
Tideland’s power rests on the casting of Jodelle Ferland as Jeliza-Rose. Gilliam details the difficulties in locating a suitable child for the role, complaining that girls of the appropriate age had already been too highly sexualised and jaded by the acting process (and, presumably, by their parents) to be able to portray the innocent young heroine. The character of Jeliza-Rose carries the film, as it must, for not only is she in virtually every scene, but her voice in conversation with her doll heads is our link to the story. Gilliam begins the film with a black screen: we hear a few plaintive notes and then Jeliza-Rose reading from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the touchstone of both novel and film. While the script by Gilliam and Tony Grisoni closely follows Mitch Cullin’s novel (2000) they manage to better locate the horror around the innocence of the child by eliminating much of the unrealistic monologue and instead taking advantage of film’s ability to show us things that a novel must merely describe. Jeliza-Rose is a neglected child with no schooling beyond television, and even though much of that TV-time focuses on PBS, the diction of Cullin’s heroine never fits. Phrases in the novel like ‘inauspicious entryway’, ‘seared metal’ and ‘a lemon phosphorescence’ pull the reader out of the story in the first two pages. Taking away that first-person narration, Gilliam explains, adds to our fears about what will happen to Jeliza-Rose. This discomfiting feeling of fear permeates the film and, even more so than the novel, exploits horror film conventions.
One of the chief problems, as Gilliam and Grisoni discuss on the commentary, is ‘the lack of genre box’ for the film. As Linda J. Holland-Toll argues, ‘a text which transgresses convenient barriers and resists pigeon-holing creates cultural dis/ease simply because it cannot be easily contained’ (2001: 3). But the film draws from traditional and recognisable aspects of horror, even if it does not create a typical or traditional horror film. This slippage proves to be an essential part of the genre, for, as Holland-Toll observes, ‘one cannot expand the definition of horror fiction and equate it with any manifestation of cultural dis/ease without rendering generic distinctions meaningless’ (2001: 6). Gilliam crosses and re-crosses the boundaries so frequently that the audience may understandably lose the safe comfort of those generic expectations.
Because we have nothing else to hold onto, we navigate our way through the narrative with the help of horror tropes. All the other horror elements – familiar, almost expected conventions of the genre – pave the way for the greatest dis/ease of them all: the spectre of sex associated with a child. Gilliam, despite his disavowals from the introduction onward, knows that this is the taboo that unsettles his audience most of all. Far from shying away from this taboo, Gilliam plays with its limits, especially during the kissing scenes, conscious of flirting with boundaries that must not be crossed. He is well aware of the panic surrounding paedophilia.
After the initial black screen, the film moves dreamily from an apparent underwater scene, which, once the blue light and bubbles fade away, we realise to be the long grass of the prairie location. Although the recitation of Lewis Carroll’s words makes clear that we are already down the rabbit hole, the visuals fool us into complacency as we follow the dreamy golden images of the swaying grass and the leaping grasshopper. There is a slight disjunction with the first shot introducing the doll heads that are Jeliza-Rose’s bosom companions. The disconcerting mix of childhood emblem and decapitation adds to the undercurrent of dis/ease, to use Holland-Toll’s neologism for ‘the disturbing effect and sense of unease’ which texts like this generate (2001: 253, n.2). Still, we can set it aside initially because of the happily singing Jeliza-Rose who strides through the golden sea of grass (although, if we listen closely to the words of the song her father has written for her, the sense of dis/ease may return). Even the precipitously overturned wreck of a school bus can be accepted because it mirrors the golden colour of the field. Within its shell, Jeliza-Rose plays with her doll heads, introducing them to the fireflies gathered there, immediately turning the insects into fairies in her imagination.
The sudden roar of a train violently invades the scene. Gilliam prepares us for the horror to come, even though he allows us to hope it is all play, just as Jeliza-Rose screams not in terror but delight. Gilliam does not let that hope live for long. In quick succession, as the credits roll, the camera introduces us to Jeliza-Rose’s ageing rock star father and decrepit mother, both junkies. The angled shots around the rock’n’roll club where we see her father perform jump suddenly from a wailing guitar to the red coughing mouth in what Gilliam identifies as his ‘favorite cut in the movie’. The first horror is domestic. The loyalty between Jeliza-Rose and her father, Noah, works against her mother, ‘Queen Gunnhild’ (an almost unrecognisable Jennifer Tilly), and centres around his altar to Jutland, complete with Viking ship. Noah’s fascination with the bogmen of Denmark offers a shared context for father and daughter. Jeliza-Rose proudly demonstrates her understanding of Jutland, but the bogmen also fuel a fearful image in the child’s mind, as she quickly appropriates the figure of the bogman as her own peculiar boogeyman, first seen as her father’s transformed shadow crouching menacingly behind him as he leaves her bedroom.
However, for most of the audience, the true horror is the sight of this young girl cooking heroin for her parents before helping them shoot up. Gilliam and Grisoni discuss at length the power of the scene, disparaging the cachet of heroin and arguing that, had it been alcohol, the effect would be lessened (had it been insulin, no one would complain about a child handling needles at all). Perhaps most disturbing is Jeliza-Rose’s practiced efficiency with the whole process. When she later sits on her insensate father’s lap reading Alice aloud, we see how she dotes on her father despite his frequent and hazy absences, which are at least better than the shrill volley of attacks and subsequent remorse from her mother. Gilliam notes that the story is ‘totally about a daughter in love with her father’, and that key lies at the root of much of the horror of the rest of the film. A child neglected and abused looks for connections and nurturing wherever she is able.
Yet horror lurks around every corner. When Queen Gunnhild inevitably and messily dies, Noah and Jeliza-Rose flee towards Jutland, making it only as far as his childhood home on the Texas prairie. We first glimpse the monstrous in the child when Jeliza-Rose realises that her mother’s death means that she and her father can eat the forbidden chocolate bars jealously guarded by Queen Gunnhild. While she may not wholly understand the finality of death, as they pile her mother’s favourite things on top of her prone body, Jeliza-Rose clearly understands the danger of fire when Noah attempts to light his wife’s corpse in a Viking funeral pyre. Gilliam’s off-kilter angles and deep shadows enhance the sensation of horror both in the absurdly gruesome scene and during the nightmare bus ride that follows.
When they reach their initial destination, the music swells with anticipation as they cross the golden grass to the home that seems to nestle as a kind of sanctuary in the distance. But as they reach the steps, the music dies away and instead of a ‘home’ we contemplate a house that conjures up the derelict look of the family home in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). The dust, protruding nails and general dilapidation prepare us for the horror within, first glimpsed on Jeliza-Rose’s face as she stares in disbelief through the open door. As graffiti on the living-room wall announces, it is a ‘fucking shithole’ with visible water damage, broken furniture and the detritus left in the apparent wake of disaster.
As Noah settles down to partake of his habit, Jeliza-Rose explores the upper story where the sense of dis/ease again grows. Despite Gilliam’s frequent jokes on the commentary that he has never seen an Alfred Hitchcock film, we expect to find Mrs Bates around every corner of the dilapidated house or in the derelict bed. The narrative veers between Carroll’s gentle nonsense and dark horror tropes. Standing in for Carroll’s elegant white rabbit in a waistcoat we see a pesky squirrel who leads to the discovery of the attic trapdoor to a hidden room. On the commentary, Gilliam gloats about the horror set up in the creepy attic room, which is somewhat different than the book. While in the novel Jeliza-Rose calls to mind Alice’s time in the hallway with the ‘Drink Me!’ bottle, the film takes us back to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre house.
Like the cast of a slasher film, Jeliza-Rose and the doll heads debate whether to enter the dusty cobweb-bestrewn chamber. While the bold sophisticate doll called Mystique favours charging forward, the mostly frightened Sateen Lips expresses Jeliza-Rose’s own fears that there is something dangerous lurking in the darkness. Gilliam admits that Sateen Lips is ‘the true Jeliza-Rose and that’s why I chose her [the doll]’. Presumably, that’s why, in one of the eeriest moments of the film, the doll’s head – left behind to watch for trouble – rolls to the side and morphs into Jeliza-Rose’s head with blinking eyes, just before Gilliam cuts to Jeliza-Rose screaming herself awake. It is a pure moment of dis/ease. Gilliam follows that moment with further horror-tinged visions, which either expand Cullin’s text or simply add new elements altogether. While the discovery of her grandmother’s old clothes, make-up and feather boa also appear in the book, it is Gilliam’s film that reshapes this scene to emphasise the horror ambience of dis/ease.
In Cullin’s novel, Jeliza-Rose and her intrepid doll head probe the dusty attic to find ‘three cardboard boxes and a large trunk’ (2000: 53). A moment of suggestive dis/ease appears upon the opening of the trunk, when Jeliza-Rose spots ‘three blond wigs, all tangled in a clump, which frightened’ her and cause her to say ‘It’s a head’ while backing away (2000: 54). After reassuring words from her trusty doll head, Jeliza-Rose quickly returns to her exploration of the trunk’s contents. In the film, the scene proceeds with a good deal more horrific rhetoric. Approaching the trunk, Mystique taunts Jeliza-Rose, ‘Scared?’ The unsettling angles Gilliam employs throughout this sequence set the audience off-kilter, just as the tinkling music adds to the growing tension. The ambience of darkness and shadows creates a sense of dread. Jeliza-Rose attempts to stop Mystique from reaching for the trunk’s latch, warning her that it might be ‘a dead thing’. As the music swells, the tension heightens. Opening the trunk, Jeliza-Rose screams, as what appears to be a body falls out. It is a good scare moment, one that the director says serves as ‘a simple way of shocking us back into reality.’ Upon closer inspection, Jeliza-Rose says disdainfully, ‘it’s just a pile of clothes’. Initially, ‘reality’ seems to be the world of sense and comfort: what we mistook for a body proves to be innocuous. However, we are also reminded that reality for Jeliza-Rose includes two dead parents and no hope in sight. The horror is far worse than her cavalier search conveys. Gilliam expands the sense of surreal horror by having the inside of the truck stretch elastically, recalling once more Carroll’s rabbit hole as well as C. S. Lewis’s wardrobe. When the shadow of the squirrel returns, Jeliza-Rose wonders if ‘that’s what happened, they turned into squirrels’, then proceeds to do so herself, chattering with ‘paws’ held up in front of her. Rather than wonder, the scene provokes the dis/ease of the uncanny.
These dichotomies pull the viewer in opposing directions. Like Gilliam’s injunction, ‘Don’t forget to laugh’, our discomfort produces both dis/ease and laughing disbelief. When we see Jeliza-Rose curled up with her father, who is gradually decomposing after a fatal overdose, the situation easily provokes the horror of revulsion. Yet there are also humorous realisations: at last he is spending most of his time with his daughter – her ideal situation. The corpse transforms from abjection into a combination of comfy chair and doll head. He is no less present than he apparently had been for much of her life, providing in death the same low level of comfort as in his normal heroin-induced nod. Just like her doll heads, Noah’s limp body offers the same passive comfort and sounding board for Jeliza-Rose’s on-going self-revelatory monologue. The multitude of voices she employs suggests slippage into a kind of schizophrenic fugue state, so that it is easy to doubt all her experiences.
The appearance of a mysterious black-clad figure reinforces this doubt about Jeliza-Rose’s sanity, as played against the expectations created by the horror conventions. Again the viewer is torn between the common horror trope that Jeliza-Rose herself invokes – ‘a ghost!’ – and the speculation that none of this is really happening. Her apparent recognition of Dell (Janet McTeer) as the ‘ghost’ of a dead person clashes with the apparent lack of recognition of her father’s death. Gilliam comments that he does not understand the viewers’ confusion with Jeliza-Rose’s reactions to death, and surmises that they were led astray by genre convention, because ‘she just doesn’t respond the way children in movies respond’, implying that she does respond more naturally as a real child would (and that viewers find the real and perhaps ‘innocent’ reaction all the more horrifying). Ironically, we feel dis/ease where the child feels none because of our greater experience with death. Jeliza-Rose feels no dis/ease with her dead father’s body, but she feels distress, according to her limited experience, at what she perceives to be a ghost. Her father’s dead body is familiar, while the living body of the ‘ghost’ is a stranger. Horror for the girl operates differently than it does for the audience.
Shortly after the first sighting of the ‘ghost’, Jeliza-Rose plays at being dead when her blood-red lipstick slips and creates a crimson gash across her cheek. ‘I’m really dying this time’, she tells her constant companion Mystique; ‘This is not a vacation,’ she says, echoing her father’s terminology for his heroin haze. Mystique, who appears to be giant-sized from where she perches above the mirror, tells her, ‘Dear, you’re already dead, a ghost, a spook!’4 While the narrative appears to be teetering on the edge of a breakthrough to alleviate dis/ease (has she at last realised the finality of death?), Jeliza-Rose immediately bounces away from the ugly reality of her father’s death and of her abandonment to narcissistic enjoyment of her beautiful ‘ghost’ self. Death becomes not simply acceptable, but perhaps desirable. The sight of Jeliza-Rose appropriating her father’s dead body as the latest doll in her collection – putting the blonde wig on his head, rouge on his cheeks and more of the crimson lipstick on his face – brings us back to the uncomfortable tension of laughter and horror signaling dis/ease.
In the book, Jeliza-Rose discovers that there are worse things than death when she encounters Dell’s taxidermy shed. The shocking revelation provides a gruesome shift in the narrative, away from death and toward some sense of life and hope. While staring at the ranks of stuffed critters, Jeliza-Rose makes a firm decision:
This was where Dell kept Death at bay, where she saved silent souls from going into the ground. But I didn’t want to end up like those creatures – frozen and on a shelf; I didn’t want to be stuck like that forever. Might as well go into the ground, I thought. If you can’t run around and yell and cut muffins, you might as well be dead. (2000: 174)
Jeliza-Rose consciously chooses life – and, thus, real death. Better death, real death, than that grasping fear of ever letting go. The child recognises the horror inherent in suspending the last step into death that brings comfort to adults like Dell.
Gilliam negotiates this character by taking advantage of a number of horror tropes. In addition to her ghostly appearance and the intercut scenes of her dancing by the burning hives, the film brings us into the taxidermy shed much earlier – and consciously mixes sex and death like any good slasher film would. Gilliam marshals the allusion to Psycho (1960) with all its repressed sexuality, introducing Jeliza-Rose to both the suspended death that Dell creates and the forbidden rites of sex. While Cullin has Jeliza-Rose glimpse Dell’s exchange with the delivery boy in the bushes beside the house – ‘she’s a vampire’, her doll head informs her – Gilliam moves the scene into the taxidermy workshop to amplify the gruesome connection between sex and death, in turn moving Jeliza-Rose to the position of surreptitious voyeur, à la Norman Bates (2000: 117). He also doubles the horrific scene with a second sexual discovery when Jeliza-Rose comes downstairs to find Dell astride her father’s corpse.
Gilliam manages the scene with a range of horror touches, from the emphatic shadows to the off-kilter angles, contrasting Jeliza-Rose’s delight in company with the dis/ease Dell brings. The two whimpering doll heads offer the usual ignored horror film advice not to go down those stairs, while wondering what Dell can possibly be doing down there. Jeliza-Rose glimpses her astride Noah’s body between the balusters. She recoils, but also seems drawn inexorably down the stairs. Gilliam brings us in close for a tender kiss from Dell as she tells Noah they will never be parted again and that she loves him so, even as she pokes his distended tongue back down his throat. When Dell notices the child haltingly approaching, she brandishes the slasher film’s favourite weapon: a large shiny bladed knife. The expected moment of violence is deflected, however, as Dell explains the details of her handiwork, a far more devastating weapon when wielded against the child, as it forces her to acknowledge her father’s absence.
The violence is delayed but not avoided as Dell sinks the blade’s point into Noah’s chest. The delayed horror trope appears, but instead of death, the knife’s penetration reads to both Dell and Jeliza-Rose as a healing, making Noah ‘all better’. For Dell, healing means that he will never leave her again; for Jeliza-Rose, healing means something more complex. In the novel, she finally cries, giving in to grief even if Dell refuses to comfort her. In the film, however, Gilliam does not quite allow the tears to well, robbing the audience of some relief from the horror. Instead, he inserts a housecleaning scene that provokes an incredible level of dis/ease through its appropriation of the happy singing-and-dancing montage popular in romantic comedy films. The cheerful scenes of the misbegotten threesome whitewashing the wreckage of the miserable house provokes laughter at its absurdity as well as a continuing sense of dis/ease at their inability to alleviate the horror beneath the thin veneer of white.
Most of the sexual horror connects to the figure of Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), whose name conjures up both the nineteenth-century novelist and his string of tragic children (perhaps also to the nurturing Dickon of Frances Burnett’s Secret Garden, 1910–11), as the film hinges on a sexual scene between him and Jeliza-Rose. Gilliam knows the sight of an adult male actor performing an explicit scene with a real child would be a taboo for the audience. He mentions that he cautioned the cast and crew that they needed to be ‘innocent’ while shooting the film. Gilliam manipulates the emotional scales minutely. In the first scene, the playfulness of the two characters is quite captivating as Jeliza-Rose makes Dickens ‘pretty’ with the blonde wig and the lipstick. The camera pulls out from a close-up and back for a long shot which, co-writer Grisoni notes, increases the tension. We see how alone these two mismatched figures are, and we are reminded that Dickens may have a child’s mind but an adult’s body. Returning to a close-up suffused with white light, Dickens relates with pleasure the paedophilic encounters with Jeliza-Rose’s grandmother and his distress at her death. In the midst of this comes their first kiss. Gilliam shifts the centre of power between the two, keeping the audience off balance. Jeliza-Rose reacts with a childish laugh while wiping away the ‘silly kiss’, yet returns for a second one. Gilliam allows the audience’s tension to grow, fearful that things will go too far, before literally blowing them away with an explosion from the nearby strip mine. While the explosion has the effect of the monster jumping out of the shadows, the initial fright is quickly replaced by relief that the scene is over.
‘It’s in the world of horror films but it’s never going where they go’, Gilliam says in preparation for the final gruesome mixture of romance and horror. Jeliza-Rose, convinced that her growling stomach means that their kisses have made a baby, returns to Dell’s house to see her ‘husband’. She wears an impromptu wedding dress made from her dead mother’s nightgown and ample make-up. The wailing winds, spooky shadows, crazy camera angles and mute gazes of the stuffed creatures combine to create an atmosphere rife with dis/ease. Jeliza-Rose’s discovery of Dickens in the taxidermy shed lacks the force of the sudden revelation of Dell’s terrible power to keep death at bay. Instead Gilliam uses the black shadows, red light and Psycho-esque ambience to drench the scene with dread. We see Dickens from below, with menacing angles and shadows to suggest to the viewer that something sinister is about to occur. The caged squirrel warns Jeliza-Rose to ‘get out, get out while you can’, and its anxiety transfers to the audience with the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre setting as a background. Dickens’ violent reaction to Jeliza-Rose’s surprise appearance once more tilts the mood toward danger, as he reacts with a startlingly intense anger, though the reversal becomes clear quickly: he has been frightened by her.
They enter the house for the final time while watched by the camera from within, as if it mirrors another Norman Bates lying in wait for his victims. The off-kilter angles and flickering lights present a typical horror setting, enhanced by the whistling wind, dead animals and labyrinthine corridors. Dickens has promised to show Jeliza-Rose his ‘secret’. While this mystery turns out to be dynamite, the audience clearly expects a sexual encounter. As Jeliza-Rose lies down on Dickens’ bed, the tension grows. Gilliam makes use of the audience’s horror to lead up to – and just as quickly turn away from – the feared moment of contact. While the scene ends less explicitly than the novel’s version, it might shock the audience even more because the uncomfortable sexual scene has been shrouded in horror motifs. The red and blue lighting, mirroring Jeliza-Rose’s lipstick and Dickens’ deep sea adventures, also add weight to the scene’s tension as Dickens moves above Jeliza-Rose (duplicating Dell’s previous position). Gilliam takes us up to the edge of unacceptable contact and then whisks us away for a truly (recognisably) horrific sight: the real bogman, Dell and Dickens’ mother, preserved by Dell’s imperfect art. While her peaty and crooked appearance should be horrific, it comes as a relief: here, at last, is a real horror moment and not the feared sexual encounter.
Gilliam is not content to leave it at that, however. The whirlwind return of Dell leads to the violence long awaited, and the small room erupts in noise and fury, finally resulting in Dell crushing Glitter Girl, an act mirrored by Jeliza-Rose when she gets tossed across the room to smash her foot audibly into their mother’s preserved face. The sudden onset of silence hits with a shock: at last a horrifying moment. Yet it is as likely to provoke the laughter of release as the squirm of dis/ease.
The sheer weight of horror motifs leaves the audience wanting an appropriate horror resolution, to recognise the monster. Dell identifies Jeliza-Rose as the true monster. It is she who unnerves Dickens, who injures mama, who throws away Dell’s protective boyhood. On the commentary, Gilliam and Grisoni joke about Jeliza-Rose being a serial killer, noting that everyone around her seems to die, but leaving her mostly untouched by the carnage. While Cullin’s final paragraph allows a kind of amnesia to begin setting in, Gilliam’s film leaves both Jeliza-Rose and the audience in a more ambiguous state. The fireflies reflected in her eyes meld with the night sky in an unsettling image of eyes without a face. Has she been rescued – or will the monster claim more victims? Gilliam gives us no easy reconciliation.
We tend to want children to be helpless victims, in part because it means that we must protect them. Wrapping our lives around them is supposed to be an accomplishment in itself, and not just a sign of our selfishness in desiring dependent admirers. In the end, del Toro’s suffering victim, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), we can accept; the triumphant monster, Jeliza-Rose, however, we cannot forgive: her resilience, her fearlessness, and her sexuality give the lie to the need for parental protection. Her innocent monstrousness highlights the schism between our idealised child and our recognition of the ruthlessness that survival in this world requires.
Notes
1 ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children!’ All Simpsons fans will recognise the catchphrase of gossipy minister’s wife Helen Lovejoy. While a humourous exaggeration, Lovejoy’s panicky catchphrase has touched a nerve with those who would like to see the end of the so-called ‘nanny culture’, where even adults have been reduced to the status of children who must be protected. The phrase perhaps comes from dialogue in the opening of Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964). In the film, Mrs Banks – the erstwhile suffragette and mother of the recalcitrant children – is reduced to pleading with her departing nanny with a heartfelt, ‘Think of the children!’ So universal has the phrase become in this fictional universe that the cry gets picked up by even the unlikeliest of characters (such as the unscrupulous and homicidally vindictive bartender Moe Szyslak in ‘Natural Born Kissers’, season 9, episode 25) whenever a moment of crisis appears – regardless of its relevance to that crisis. The term ‘nanny culture’ was first popularised in Britain to characterise government control of the media as well as a range of laws to protect people from their own stupidity (see Wells 2000) and the tendency in the United States to include small print warnings such as ‘these are professional stuntmen, don’t try this at home’ in advertisements.
2 On the commentary track of the Tideland DVD, Gilliam recalls with frustration how his twelve-year-old son would not leave the house to go to the nearby shops because he perceived even their relatively affluent neighborhood to be a dangerous place. Many link this to the so-called ‘CNN Effect’, which posits that the 24-hour news channels play up threatening and emotionally volatile topics to increase the number of their viewers; see Robinson (2002: 25–45).
3 On the commentary track of the DVD, Gilliam and Tony Grisoni joke that they sold their tree to del Toro for his film.
4 Gilliam admits they cheated with a larger doll head for the shot.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean (2002) Screened Out. New York: Verso.
Cullin, Mitch (2000) Tideland. Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions.
Foucault, Michel (199) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books.
Holland-Toll, Linda J. (2001) As American as Mom, Baseball, and Apple Pie: Constructing Community in Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Robinson, Piers (2002) The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention. London: Routledge.
Winter, Douglas E. (ed.) (1988) Prime Evil. New York: New American Library.