The Mutant Child Seer in Contemporary Spanish Horror Film
Jessica Balanzategui
The child has become a central recurring feature of contemporary Spanish horror film, functioning as the embodiment of a long repressed cultural trauma that has finally been unleashed. Because these child characters draw forth previously submerged horrors from the past, they disrupt the smooth progression of narrative time within the films, exposing fissures within teleological constructions of Spanish history. These child figures thus play a particularly important therapeutic function, allowing for recognition of previously elided collective trauma. In carrying out this role, the children of Spanish horror engage with the tension between “childhood” as a formative temporal stage of adulthood, and “the child” as highly charged social category integral to politico-historical structures. As a result, these characters come to embody the disconcerting nexus of “unfamiliar familiarity” at the heart of the uncanny, particularly as it relates to long repressed traumas that threaten to re-emerge. These uncanny creatures, who are typically ghosts or are caught in the process of becoming so, expose the temporal contortions inherent in constructions of childness 1 —a term introduced in this volume to overcome the monolithic use of the terms childhood and the child in describing representations of children and to avoid the loaded connotations surrounding the related terms “childlike” and “childish.”
I suggest that the child-centered dislocations of linearity seen in Spanish horror are triggered by childhood’s over-determined temporal relationship to models of socio-political progress. As Lee Edelman states, the child “remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention.” 2 Edelman suggests that “the pervasive invocation of the Child as the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value” 3 can best be overcome via queer theoretical frameworks that discompose structural binaries and “history as linear narrative … in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself—as itself —through time.” 4 However, if futurity is violently divorced from childhood—as is the case in most Spanish horror films—this linear narrative of historical progress is thrown into disarray, as the child disturbs instead the constrictive temporal structures with which it is usually intertwined. In Spain in particular, a fixation on futurity at the expense of assimilating the past has become a defining condition of modernity, as is particularly evidenced in the period directly following the Civil War (1936–39) and following the long-anticipated collapse of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship after his death in 1975. Hereby, the uncanny child troubles fixations on futurity through (re)activating the past while simultaneously functioning as incubator for a future which will never eventuate. Such child characters expose the extent to which Spain’s suppressed pasts co-exist with the present in ways that threaten ideologies of national progress, buttressed as they are by the vectors of “growing up” and “moving on.”
The extent of the socio-cultural rupture evoked by the Spanish Civil War—in which an estimated 500,000 were killed, and the decmocratically elected Republicans overthrown and violently suppressed—was elided throughout Franco’s rule in favor of triumphal discourse about Nationalist war heroes and the “return” of Imperial-era Spanish glory. Censorship laws were strict under Franco, who strived to control all cultural production in order to regulate national consciousness. Central to this process was the repression of the very recent past, both that of the Republican government and the Civil War, and the subsequent attempt to construct a smooth continuum between the post–Civil War present and pre–Republican Spain. This trend of obscuring cultural trauma continued, albeit in a different guise, during the transition to democracy from the late 1970s onwards, following Franco’s death. The fragile new democratic government oversaw the deployment of extensive public relations campaigns from 1982 to 1996 aimed at projecting abroad “modern” Spanish cultural products—such as the films of Almodóvar—an impulse that Labanyi has described as the “promotion of an outrageous hypermodernity” 5 and that Aguilar has associated with the “deliberate turning-off of the collective memory.” 6 As this period of “hypermodernity” drew to a close, the eerie child character began to emerge regularly in Spanish horror, becoming a prevalent figure during the late 1990s and subsequent millennial turn—a transitional period in which narratives of progress seemed to waver. It is at this juncture that the figure of the child, typically the ultimate symbol of cultural futurity, appears to enforce a reconsideration of the interlacing of past and present.
The spectral children in the horror films discussed in this essay—The Nameless (Jaumé Balaguero, 1999), 7 The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001) 8 and The Orphanage (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2005) 9 —are caught between death and life, past and present. From this liminal position, they enact the resurgence of repressed collective memories from the traumatic post–Civil War period. They therefore extend the links between “childhood” and an adult’s partly submerged personal past into the realm of the socio-cultural. As a passed stage before the advent of adulthood, simultaneously familiar and yet other to adult consciousness, childhood has become intertwined with the submerged traumas simmering beneath the fully-formed “present” represented by the adult. This is largely a result of Freud’s influential claims that “we must insist on the great pathogenic importance of impressions from [childhood],” as there are “intimate links … between the mental life of the child and the psychical material of [adult] neuroses.” 10 Kincaid exposes the extent to which this ideological association of childhood with repressed personal pasts has reached epidemic proportions in the last few decades, most potently in the hysteric discourse of child sexual abuse, as childhood has become the arena upon which the obfuscated traumas of an adult’s past are played out. 11 Yet this association of childhood with traumatic pasts sits in tension with the socio-cultural investment in “the child” as a symbol of “futurity’s unquestioned value.” 12 The a-temporal children of Spanish horror harness this symbolic splintering, traversing the gulf between personal and socio-cultural identities. They ostensibly embody Caruth’s Freudian characterization of trauma as “a breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” caused by an event that “is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself … repeatedly … in … nightmares and repetitive actions.” 13 Yet these child characters come to relish this traumatic breach in homogenous time and meaning, in turn gaining a voice outside of linear norms and the constricting pressures of “futurity.” Exigently bound up with the tragedies papered over in narratives of historical progress, the ghostly children of contemporary Spanish horror embody transgressions of spatio-temporal coherence, which are coded as both monstrous and powerful.
These child figures are monstrous in the Deleuzian sense, as outlined by Bohlmann and Moreland in the introduction to this volume: they become “the pure unformed,” 14 embodying a breakdown in accepted (adult) regimes of meaning to generate new ways of approaching disturbing situations. In the words of Deleuze, monstrosity is a “sense-producing machine, in which nonsense and sense are no longer found in simple opposition, but are rather co-present within a new discourse.” 15 I will uncover the precise ways in which these ghostly children raise a “new discourse” by situating them as incarnations of the “child seer,” a concept Deleuze outlines alongside his introduction of the time-image in Cinema 2 . The seer 16 becomes trapped in the traumatic gap between perception, understanding and decisive action. Yet while entombed in this in-between state of physical and cognitive incapacity, the seer gains a powerful insight beyond the limits of homogenous temporality. 17 Through inhabiting the position of a seer, these children disrupt the flow of linear time, a particularly disconcerting act for a being defined according to the future-oriented process of growing up. Caught in the past while shaping the flow of the present, the child seers in the films discussed manifest a powerful “allegorical moment”—a term coined by Lowenstein to describe an intersection in certain horror films that exposes “our connection to historical trauma across the axes of text, context, and spectatorship … [through the mobilization of] the unpredictable and often painful juncture where the past and present collide.” 18 Lowenstein draws on Benjamin’s discussion of Jetztzeit to conceptualize this moment as a collision which “blast[s] open the continuum of history” 19 in a manner that is both confrontational and liberating.
By evoking an allegorical moment, the child characters under discussion unravel the narratives of national progress which previously worked to mask the cultural wounds of post–Civil War Spanish society. The uncanny children who populate these horror films have their roots in the enigmatic child characters featured in Spanish art films of the 1970s. Evoking a confrontation between past and present, which extends beyond the films’ diegeses, the uncanny children in The Nameless, The Devil’s Backbone and The Orphanage function as mutated incarnations of the child figures within iconic art films The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973) 20 and Raise Ravens (Carlos Saura, 1976). 21 These “mutant” children thus figure a particularly layered instance of Lowenstein’s allegorical moment. They continually drag viewers and protagonists back to a traumatic past, exposing that the apparently distinct relations between Spain’s past and present are much more tangled than apparently undisturbed teleological conceptions of progress, themselves remnants of Francoist discourse, dare to acknowledge.
Before discussing the horror films, I will first turn to Spirit of the Beehive and Raise Ravens, as the quietly subversive child seer first emerges in these celebrated landmarks of Spanish cinema. Deleuze explains that the figure of the child seer surfaces when a powerless and confused child character experiences a disorienting breakdown in the sensory-motor schema, a condition he associates with the liminality of post-war periods. This sensory-motor collapse forces the child to experience a “purely optical or sound situation” 22 that is divorced from the relentless progression of linear time. Deleuze’s theorization of the child seer is particularly fruitful in conjunction with my discussion of national trauma, as the jumbled temporal frameworks of the traumatized child express a re-imagining of narrative time. Through this process, the child seers of Beehive and Ravens foment a renegotiation of the rigid national narrative as promulgated by Franco—a particularly charged process at the moment of historical mutation in which the films were released. These children are not bound to the dominance of what Deleuze calls the movement-image, in which time is subordinated to movement and the physical actions of the characters determine the progression and rhythm of the film. Instead, they inhabit the realm of the time-image, resisting being tied to one linear timeline or coherent narrative.
The children of Beehive and Ravens are trapped within unsavory situations, which they are unable to physically change or interact with: confused and largely ignored in the liminal period that followed the Civil War in Beehive and that preceded the death of Franco in Ravens , they are continually forced to wait and watch rather than act. These arcane moments incarnate Caruth’s “breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world” 23 outlined earlier. Yet the child characters’ penetrative gaze upon these inscrutable situations—not a gaze that seeks to master the situations it confronts, as in Mulvey’s seminal essay, 24 but to take in their fissures and opacity—comes to be the very source of their eerie yet generative power. As Martin-Jones explains, “the child seer encounters something ‘intolerable and unbearable,’ something … beyond their power to act upon…. These are characters directly encountering contemporary social and political mutations, and who are mutating along with these historically shifting contexts.” 25 Both Beehive and Ravens were made and released during a prolonged liminal moment saturated with anticipation and uncertainty towards the end of Franco’s protracted period of illness, which lasted from 1962 until his death in 1975. As Pavlovic articulates, “Franco’s slow and interminable dying and agony … deeply marked the … decade and were accompanied by the gradual and final decomposition of his regime.” 26 Absorbing the agonizing sense of in-betweenness that permeated this cultural context through their contemplative gaze, the child characters in both Beehive and Ravens hover on the threshold of a mutation into something other.
The central motif of both Ravens and Beehive is the child’s huge, staring eyes. The child character is played in both films by Ana Torrent, and her character is also called Ana in each, which solidifies her position as a metaphorical “every-child” around which the anxieties of the period constellate. The emphasis on Ana’s huge eyes highlights her role as a seer whose watchful gaze penetrates the situations she encounters, and her stare serves as the core of each film’s narrative and visual landscape. Yet in both films, Ana is markedly powerless to affect or to change her situation. She usually appears in the frame as a silent observer, unheeded by all but the camera. Ana is unable to act upon the situations she witnesses because many of the things she sees are too painful to synthesize in the present moment, a powerlessness reinforced by her status as a child. Deleuze claims that the child in particular is equipped to become a seer in traumatic conditions because “in the adult world, the child is affected by a certain motor helplessness, but one which makes him all the more capable of seeing and hearing.” 27 In Deleuze’s conception, unendurable situations generate an extended gap between perception, understanding and action that the adult is wont to repress but which the child, being denied full access to context and information, is forced to accept, undermining the totalizing dominance of the sensory-motor chain. For instance, Ravens continually draws back to one of Ana’s memories from her recent past in which Ana’s mother lies on her death-bed, screaming and writhing in agony. Ana’s only response is to stare at her mother in horror before silently backing away, an action that fails to vanquish the disturbing image of her agonized mother. This moment haunts the entire film, repeatedly invading the narrative in truncated form, signaling that Ana remains trapped in the gap between perception and decisive action evoked by the sight of her mother’s suffering (see Figure 5).
Figure 5. Ana (Ana Torrent) observes her dying mother suffer in Raise Ravens (Carlos Saura, 1976).
Ana both literally and figuratively inhabits what Deleuze terms “any-spaces-whatever”: liminal zones that he associates with derelict post–World War II spaces that could no longer be adequately understood or traversed. Deleuze characterizes such spaces as “deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste grounds, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaces-whatever a new race of characters was stirring, a kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers.” 28 The typical sensory-motor chain of action could not be used to effectively navigate these spaces. Both Ravens and Beehive inhabit the any-space-whatever through the liminal socio-political context in which they were developed, which is metaphorized within the diegesis by the child seer’s willing engagement with deteriorating, liminal spaces.
Both films employ the child’s confluence with these any-spaces-whatever to confront the cultural trauma laid bare at the time of their production, and as a means of resisting the linear metanarratives that enable its suppression. While the adult characters in both Ravens and Beehive attempt in vain to act upon their situations, the children choose to welcome these any-spaces-whatever. In Ravens , Ana appears happiest when she plays with her doll in a decaying, emptied out swimming pool, as her adult guardians watch on incredulously. In Beehive , Ana continually visits a disused barn where an exiled Republican soldier hides briefly until her father kills him. Ana is also drawn to an old well—at one point she calls into the well to summon the “spirit” of Frankenstein’s monster, a figure she has become obsessed with after watching Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931). 29 Both the ex-soldier who attempts (and fails) to hide in the abandoned barn and the juddering, decaying monster evoke the adult’s disintegration in the face of the post-war break down of the sensory-motor schema. The mindless, relentlessly forward-moving stagger of Frankenstein’s monster crystallizes the manner in which the adult characters in Beehive cling to ideals of national progress: they utilize triumphal discourse about Nationalist war heroes (applied to Ana’s father in both films) in order to elide the cultural rupture figured by the Civil War. While the adults flounder in their attempts at clutching the movement-image when confronted with the loss of encompassing meaning, Ana draws her power from the loss. This is particularly emphasized in the final scene of Beehive , in which Ana stands at an open window in a white night-dress, whispering repeatedly to the night sky “I am Ana.” She appears like the mysterious specters which haunt later horror films, standing on the threshold of, and summoning , a new, unpredictable situation.
Further linking these child seers with their horror movie successors, in each film, Ana’s consciousness is inextricably entwined with a supernatural other not perceived by the adult characters: in Beehive , the amorphous spirit of Frankenstein’s monster, and in Ravens , the mysterious specter of Ana’s dead mother. These ghostly figures crystallize Ana’s disorienting relationship to linear temporality: both Anas actively invite the intrusion of specters from the past into the present. That they welcome the subsequent temporal disturbance raised by these specters foreshadows the children of contemporary Spanish horror films, in which disruptions of linear time and navigable space come to intrude upon the present in eerie and destructive ways. Ultimately, Beehive and Ravens use the child seer’s affinity with the time-image to destabilize triumphalist narratives of the Civil War and conceptions of the teleological progress of Spain under Franco. Yet there is also a practical motivation behind Saura and Erice’s use of non-linear time. As Saura points out, “for me and my compatriots, to make the stories we wanted to do, we had to use indirect methods. For example, we couldn’t use a linear structure or the ideas would be too clear.” 30 In Ravens and Beehive , the child seer’s ability to access non-linear perspectives functions in coalition with the filmmakers’ need to use “indirect methods” to evade censorship in their critiques of Francoist dogma.
Of course, contemporary Spanish horror films no longer have to deal with such strict political censorship; thus, the child seer’s ability to see beyond linear time is no longer intertwined with the films’ methodological projects. As a result, their child seers no longer hover on the edge of mutation as Ana does: they are already mutants, no longer “growing up” but perpetually in the process of mutating. In the horror films discussed, the children’s physical powerlessness to act upon their situations has been brought to its utmost conclusion and resulted in their demise. However, through their deaths, these child seers manage to escape the confining bounds of linear narrative time entirely. These spectral children expose awful secrets that, like the return of the repressed in Freud’s uncanny, “ought to have remained hidden but have come to light.” 31 Yet in so doing, they evoke Lowenstein’s allegorical moment in which “an image of the past sparks a flash of unexpected recognition in the present.” 32 This occurs within the diegesis of the films through the children’s ghostly raising of the past, and also extra-diegetically as they recall the figures of ‘70s art films, engendering a rupture in the smooth continuum of Spanish historical discourse. In finally raising and acting out the unassimilated traumas of the Civil War and dictatorship, these children dismantle constricting visions of cultural identity, allowing space for their reformation from the rubble of a post-traumatic context.
Like its predecessor Beehive, The Devil’s Backbone is set in the final years of the Civil War. However, unlike Beehive , Backbone is able to confront this period in a direct and retrospective way. The film is set in an orphanage for young boys from Republican families whose parents have been killed or captured in the Civil War. The orphanage itself is detached from civilization in the middle of the desert with an unexploded bomb sitting in the courtyard. The bomb has apparently been defused; however, the children are not fully convinced that this is true. As one of the oldest children, Jaime, says at one point, “They say it’s switched off, but I don’t believe them. Put your ear against her, you’ll hear ticking.” Constantly looming over the children, the bomb hypostatizes the adult’s downplaying of the traumatic effects of the war upon the children, who are figured as vulnerable time-bombs that could mutate into something monstrous at any moment. Deterritorialized from society, this setting functions as the epitome of the any-space-whatever, injected with heightened urgency by the immobile bomb that constantly threatens to detonate.
As well as being haunted by this unexploded bomb, the orphanage is also haunted by a child ghost, Santi, a former inhabitant of the orphanage who disappeared on the same night that the bomb landed in the orphanage’s grounds. As del Toro says of the bomb in the film’s audio-commentary, “all the stories, occurrences are tied around the bomb, this constant looming reminder of a terrible past.” The orphans, deserted products of a political movement all but vanquished by Franco and his Civil War, also exist as rem(a)inders of this past. Thus, through their very existence, these children trouble Franco’s post-war efforts to suppress all remnants of the Republicans’ cause and to set in place a triumphal national narrative. While figuring as a terrible past, the unexploded bomb and the ghost Santi simultaneously portend a disastrous future: just as the bomb constantly threatens to explode, virtually the only words Santi is heard uttering throughout the film are “Many of you will die.” Santi and the bomb thus evoke an allegorical moment that comments on the way the past traumas represented by the film continue to seethe beneath the extra-diegetic present. While the children are able to see the ghost, Santi, the adults are not—a significant point of difference, as Santi’s spectral realm displays the irrevocable contortions that afflict the process of “growing up” within children of wartime.
The scene of Santi’s death, shown in full late in the film, figures as the apotheosis of the seer’s physical incapacity, instigating his mutation. Santi is caught playing near the cistern in the orphanage’s cellar late at night by the aggressive young janitor, Jacinto. 33 In his fury, Jacinto tosses Santi against the wall, injuring his head and rendering him unconscious. In a panic, Jacinto then places the motionless boy into the cistern of amber water. His body immobile, Santi drowns. This water, which appears like an infinite void as Santi is filmed sinking into its depths in slow motion, epitomizes the unnavigable qualities of the any-space-whatever. Through this death, the ultimate extreme of sensory-motor helplessness, Santi is transformed. He becomes what is described in the film as an “insect trapped in amber”: a ghost whose consciousness is fused to the any-space-whatever represented by the seemingly endless depth of the amber water.
The amber that Santi becomes trapped within can also be likened to Deleuze’s “crystal of time,” a cinematic moment in which the sensory-motor link is severed, enforcing a collapse in the distinctions between the “actual” past as a specific point on a chronological line—a “dead” present which has already passed—and the “virtual” past which “coexists with the present that it was.” 34 The crystal of time can be viewed as an aesthetic that mobilizes the allegorical moment, as meaning is formed between temporal and subjective boundaries rather than within them. Santi becomes forever welded to the moment of his drowning so that, through his presence, the past, present, and even the future fold into each other. This is enhanced by the fact that the shot of Santi drowning is shown multiple times throughout the film, including in the opening minutes. This allegorical moment ungrounds the linear progression of historical narratives that position the cultural rupture of the War as an ossified remnant of history. Santi’s death refuses to remain lodged in an immobilized historical past—a present that has passed—but remains forever alongside the present as a past that “is.” Wherever he goes, Santi appears to be underwater, with the blood from his head-wound constantly floating upwards. Sutured to the any-space-whatever of his death, Santi is caught forever as an expression of trauma, embodying the moment between perception and action. Thus, his abject presence impels other characters, and viewers, to experience the frisson of this previously repressed traumatic encounter (see Figure 6).
Figure 6. The ghost of Santi (Junio Valverde) attemps to establish contact with a fellow inhabitant of the orphanage in The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001).
Unlike Backbone, The Nameless is set in the present and contains no overt references to the Civil War or Franco. However, like Backbone , through the mutant child seer, the film becomes fixated on the eruption of a formerly repressed past that overcomes the present. In the film, the uncanny child, Angela, personifies an amorphous, malevolent undercurrent seething beneath Spanish society that actively seeks to trap members of the general public in a perpetual traumatic encounter. Angela cannot be classified strictly as a ghost in the same way as Santi can: in fact, the film revolves around the impalpable enigma of her (non)presence. The opening scene suggests that young Angela has been murdered, depicting the excision of Angela’s remains from a well in an abandoned factory. After this gruesome opening, the film jumps forward five years, demonstrating that Angela’s grieving mother, Claudia, is moving forward with her life after enduring a period of intense mourning. Claudia has separated from her husband, Angela’s father, and appears to be thriving in a successful career. However, in a sudden disruption to this proficient working through of trauma, Claudia starts to receive mysterious phone calls from a young girl claiming to be her daughter—in a small, desperate voice, the child utters “Mummy, it’s me.” In another call, the child impels her mother to come and rescue her from a derelict sanatorium on a beach where their family used to play.
Up until this point, Claudia has been shown repeatedly re-watching a home videotape of her former husband playing with little Angela on this very beach. The video has thus been a comfort for Claudia through its elision of the more recent past of Angela’s gruesome death in favor of memorializing the child in a romanticized past—a mechanism that parallels Franco’s post–War attempts to suppress depictions of Republican rule in favor of constructing a form of continuity with an idealized Imperial past. As Claudia receives this second phone call from the child, the videotape remains paused, flickering slightly, on a shot of Angela’s face smiling at the camera. Looming in the background, behind the face of the “innocent” child, is the dark outline of the building in which she is supposedly currently trapped. This image of the child smiling out at both Claudia and the viewer from the screen invades the diegesis a number of times throughout the film, as the child’s previously comforting look is rendered eerie. The videotape’s continual replaying of a supposedly joyous moment from the past is thus injected with an uncanny power, suggesting that lurking beneath this sepia-hued image of carefree childhood is a sinister secret that has begun to re-emerge, as the past re-states itself within the present. The child is rendered disturbing for she is no longer “the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value” 35 in Edelman’s sense; condensed within the figure of Angela is the realization that while the past may not be fully tangible, neither is it dead nor gone.
As a result, while Angela herself appears onscreen very little, she haunts the entire film. As implied by the images of the child on the videotape, Angela’s power over her mother and the narrative is manifested by the uncanny penetration of her gaze. The film opens with a flurry of disorientating images, including shots of a child dressed in white staring directly at the camera. Such intercuts reoccur throughout the film at unexpected moments, composed of barely discernible images such as a “not dead” sign written in blood. These shots are accompanied by jarring sounds that meld a human scream and a camera shutter, aurally assaulting the viewer while highlighting that the omnipresent eye of the camera is intertwined with Angela’s own gaze. Lazaro-Reboll aptly points out that these images “suggest the interminable replay of Claudia’s traumatic loss.” 36
The child’s mysterious phone calls set in motion a quasi-detective narrative, as Claudia discovers that Angela may not have been murdered after all, but abducted by a Satanic cult called “The Nameless” led by an institutionalized, Hannibal Lecter-esque madman called Santini. From his cell, Santini explains that he was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp while a child—a telling circumvention of Spain’s own grisly past—an experience that damaged him beyond repair. He committed a series of child kidnappings in Spain in the early 1980s, a period that marked the final stages of the nation’s transition to democracy, in turn heralding Spain’s successful advancement from despotic regime to “modernity.” The kidnapping of Spanish children, receptacles for the future, by a malevolent cult leader at this juncture thus destabilizes historical narratives that emphasize the rapid progress of this period. Santini suggests that he abducted children for his cult because they do not yet have a secure sense of identity and morality—members must “reject the idea of name. As long as they’re the nameless ones they can reject human morality.” The Nameless is thus the ghastly product of an unassimilated childhood trauma, which in turn threatens to engulf Spanish “childhood” wholesale: the mutant child seer is overtly figured as the vehicle for the release and perpetuation of a long-simmering trauma upon Spanish society.
In the final minutes of the film, Claudia finally thinks she has found her lost child at the cult’s mysterious headquarters—a now abandoned hotel where Angela was conceived. Here Claudia is unexpectedly confronted with her ex-husband, who reveals that he has always been a member of the cult, for which he had claimed their daughter at birth: “a pure child to be perverted from the beginning.” Thus, the film constructs a toxic vision of contemporary Spain in which from the moment of their birth, children are mutated by dogma force-fed to them by oppressive fathers. There is no escape for the child in this allegorical collapsing together of Spain’s Franco-era past and the supposedly “liberated” present.
Despite this bleak twist, the film momentarily seems to have reached an exultant conclusion with the long anticipated reunion of mother and child. Claudia’s ex-husband introduces her to the now teenaged Angela and instructs the child to kill her mother. While it appears initially that Angela will comply, she suddenly breaks down in tears when her mother symbolically reinstates her identity by repeatedly calling her “Angela,” and shoots her father instead. Yet just as it seems that the film has reached a cathartic resolution with the embracing of mother and child, Angela tells her mother to stop calling her Angela. She states, “I have no name,” and suggests that she exists to perpetuate her mother’s traumatic loss (“you’ll suffer more this way”) before putting a gun to her own mouth. The film then cuts to black and ends with the sound of a gunshot.
It is first signaled to the viewer that there may be something horribly wrong with the triumphant reuniting of mother and child when Angela opens her eyes while embracing her mother, focusing a cold stare directly at the camera, behind her mother’s back. While portending her malevolent intent, Angela’s gaze is threatening in that it appears to suddenly transgress the boundary between the “real” of the viewer and the fictional world of the film; as the other suddenly stares back, the viewer’s imagined mastery over the film collapses (see Figure 7).
Before shooting herself, Angela says to her distraught mother, “I’ll call you again sometime.” Thus, in the final seconds, the neat resolution, and in fact the entire quest narrative established throughout the film, is overturned. It becomes impossible to discern if this girl truly was Claudia’s daughter, and the film closes with the suggestion of a desolate future in which Claudia will endlessly be tormented by a chain of “nameless” children posing as Angela. At the end of the film, both Claudia and the viewer become trapped in a perceptual gap incarnated by the child’s subversive ambiguity. This affect can be elucidated using Deleuze’s conception of “indiscernibility”: “we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because … there is no longer even a place from which to ask.” 37 The child in The Nameless forces the adult to inhabit this position of indiscernibility, as the final scene suggests that Claudia will be forever entombed by the any-space-whatever of traumatic loss. Angela ultimately employs the aesthetics of trauma to co-mingle “nonsense and sense,” 38 setting in place a new discourse. By collapsing secure boundaries between the “real” space of the viewer and the fictional world of the film before abandoning both the protagonist and viewer in a position of narrative indiscernibility, this monstrous child enforces a new consideration of linear narrative structures, disallowing the suppression of trauma through teleological modes of progress.
Figure 7. Angela (Jessica del Pozo) confronts the audience with a knowing look over her mother’s shoulder in The Nameless (Balagueró, 1999).
The child seers in The Orphanage are nowhere near as actively malevolent as Angela; however, they do engage the protagonist and viewer in the sensation of being fused to the any-space-whatever in their exposure of a gap between perception and action. The film in many ways functions like an echo of Backbone , and in fact del Toro produced the film. The Orphanage is set in the present in a building that was once an orphanage, but has become the home of a former inhabitant: the now middle-aged Laura and her family. By featuring a haunted former orphanage which is now an imperious house, the film suggests that the traumas of Franco-era Spain continue to reverberate beneath the façade of contemporary Spanish society—a construction heightened by the fact that Laura herself was once one of these orphans, and by the film’s return to the “home” of her childhood, she remains unable to break with this past.
The seer of the film is Simón, Laura’s adopted son. Young Simón is afflicted with HIV: he’s the helpless victim of a disease passed down from the preceding generation, again evoking a vulnerability to adult malaise which comes to be figured as a threat. Like Santi, Simón’s death is brought about by a situation of sensory-motor helplessness within an any-space-whatever. Laura unknowingly traps Simón in a cavernous cellar hidden beneath the house early in the film after placing some heavy bars against the cellar’s door, which is concealed beneath new layers of wallpaper. Thus, the secrets of the orphanage’s past have literally been papered over in the quest for a fresh start. Simón’s parents do not hear his screams for help in the huge house, leaving him powerless to do anything but wait in the cellar to be found. Once Laura finally finds him, he is already dead.
Simón effectively shares the fate of a “friend” he has made within the orphanage: the ghost of Tomás, who was an inhabitant of the orphanage during the same period as Laura. An illegitimate child afflicted with a facial deformity, Tomás was concealed in the cellar by his mother, a nurse at the orphanage. One day, the other children (with the exception of Laura, who had recently been adopted) discovered Tomás, and lead him to a nearby cave by the ocean before running away. Tomás remained frightened and alone within the cave as the tide came in. Unable to comprehend his situation in time and thus physically powerless to escape it, echoing Santi, Tomás drowned. Tomás’s grieving mother, traumatized and furious at the other orphaned children, placed poison in their food—they too were killed by a violent event before they were able to recognize it taking place, and like Tomás, they are now ghosts forever trapped in the any-space-whatever between perception, understanding and action. In a dramatic moment in which a medium 39 encounters these ghosts, the children cannot be seen but are heard shouting “we are sick! Please help us, why are we sick?”
Laura was not aware of Tomás’s existence during her time at the orphanage, and she does not realize that all her childhood friends are dead until she uncovers their remains within a boatshed on the orphanage’s grounds. She initially insists that Tomás is imaginary, and despite growing up in the building, she is oblivious to the existence of the cellar within which Simón is trapped. In a cyclic process, Simón’s trauma is caused by his mother’s inability to identify the concealed traumas of her own past. Although Laura ostensibly “solves” the mystery of Simón’s disappearance at the film’s climax, discovering Simón’s body in the cellar, she is unable to act upon it, for he is already dead. Laura subsequently takes her own life: like Simón, she becomes a ghost, forever inhabiting the any-space-whatever.
Immediately prior to her discovery of Simón’s body, Laura experiences a particularly uncanny moment of collision between her childhood past and her present, which is extended to the viewer via filmic repetition. The opening scene shows Laura as a child playing a game with her friends at the orphanage: Laura incants “one, two, knock on the wall” with her back to the other children, who quietly creep up behind her, freezing whenever she turns around. Even this opening scene, filmed in a bright wide shot on the orphanage grounds, seems eerie: the children, shrouded in shadow, stalk up to Laura from behind and stiffen like dolls whenever she attempts to catch them in the act. This childhood game metonymizes the ways in which suppressed pasts are mobilized by the figure of the child throughout the film. Stockton points out that while “childhood” is representative of the past of adulthood, “it is precisely who we are not and, in fact, never were. It is the act of adults looking back” 40 ; in The Orphanage Laura’s childhood friends trigger her own “looking back,” forcing her to (re)experience a past she herself was not cognizant of during her own childhood.
Initially these dead children seem to be static remnants of recent history, figured through sepia-toned photographs of the children and through their dusty, aged porcelain dolls. However, through their ever-intensifying hauntings, this seemingly ossified past lurks ever closer to the present, threatening to engulf it—as crystallized in the scene immediately prior to that in which Laura finds Simón’s body, which echoes the opening shot. Laura dresses in a replica of her old orphanage uniform and starts to play the game of her childhood in an attempt to compel the ghosts to materialize. This time, the game signals the impending conflation of Laura’s childhood and her present. She nervously chants “one, two, knock on the wall” as the ghosts creep up behind her, the camera now depicting her obstructed view of the children through a tight close up on her face. The audience now shares the horrors of an unknown other just beyond our field of vision stalking ever closer, as the ghosts appear like fixed shadows whenever the camera whips around to catch them in motion. One of the film’s final scenes shows Laura’s own ghost sitting on a windowsill with all the other ghostly children—both Simón and the orphans—suggesting that Laura’s childhood past and her adult present have now well and truly folded together, following the initial frisson of this collapse in subjective and temporal boundaries.
Similarly, the uncanny gaze of the child seer is marked by the lack of distinction between Simón, the lost child, and Tomás, the ghost from the past, who wore a mask while alive due to his facial deformity. Throughout the film, both children are seen wearing the sack mask, obscuring any ability by Laura or the viewer to differentiate them. Thus, the mask simultaneously erodes the boundaries between the two boys as singular identities and between past and present. Simón consciously invites this indiscernibility by dressing in the dead Tomás’s clothing and dwelling in what he calls Tomás’s “little house”—the cellar in which Tomás spent the majority of his short life.
Thus, the child is figured in The Orphanage as the locus for previously concealed traumas of the past, refusing to let the adult protagonist blindly paper over recent history. The surfacing of this trauma enforces a break-down in narrative progress, as both Laura and the viewer remain with the ghostly children in the any-space-whatever outside of linear development as the film draws to a close (see Figure 8).
Figure 8. Simón/Tómas (Roger/Príncep/Óscar Casas) disturb the boundary between their singular identities—and that between past and present—through the adornment of the dead child’s mark in The Orphanage (J. A. Bayona, 2007).
Ultimately, Santi, Angela and Simón/Tomás are “insects trapped in amber,” seemingly inconsequential, powerless beings who have been abused, murdered or mistreated in the recent past. As a result, they come to embody literally and allegorically the unassimilated traumas of post–Civil War Spanish society. The cultural rupture of the War has typically been uneasily patched over in the quest to maintain unified conceptions of national identity, a mechanism perfected and institutionalized by the Franco regime. Even in contemporary Spain, a time in which memorials are finally being constructed to recognize and to honor the Republican dead, the traumas of war and the oppression of Franco are neutralized through being positioned at specific points on the continuum of history: as tragic moments of the past, immobilized and defused by the progression of time. However, the uncanny child’s over-determined relationship to temporality ensures that these spectral children resist being tied to a frozen past that is irretrievably distanced from the present. Instead, they raise allegorical moments that “blast open the continuum of history.” 41 The uncanny child in these contexts points to the danger inherent in misrecognizing history as a present that has long-since “passed” instead of as a past that “is.” Through their position of powerlessness, these child characters become fused to the any-spaces-whatever in which they died or disappeared, incorporating such fissures in spatio-temporal coherence into their beings and drawing supernatural agency from this fusion. Thus, through their deaths, Angela, Santi and Simón come to inhabit permanently the any-space-whatever, maintaining an existence outside the bounds of linear time. This process underlies their mutation from helpless children to powerful specters: it is these children’s status as insects trapped in amber that ultimately lends them their uncanny force, as they escape the confining bounds of teleological progression and return to bring about its destruction.
1. Kathryn Bond Stockton also employs the figure of the ghost to discuss the potential children have to destabilize models of linear development. She uses the term “ghostliness” in her examination of the gay child’s “sideways” growth, stating that there is “ghostliness surrounding children as figures in time…. Children grow sideways as well as up … in part because they cannot, according to our concepts, advance to adulthood until we say it’s time.” The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the 20th Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 2–6.
2. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 3.
3. Edelman, 3–4.
4. Edelman, 4; emphasis in original.
5. Jo Labanyi, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War,” Poetics Today 28.1 (Spring 2007): 95.
6. Paloma Aguilar, “Justice, Politics and Memory in the Spanish Transition,” in Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies , eds. Alexandra de Brito, Carmen Gonzaléz-Enríquez and Paloma Aguilar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11.
7. The Nameless , DVD, directed by Jaumé Balaguero (Madrid: Filmax SA, 1999).
8. The Devil’s Backbone, DVD, directed by Guillermo del Toro (Madrid: El Deseo S.A., 2001).
9. The Orphanage, Blu-ray DVD, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona (Barcelona: Esta Vivo! Laboratorio de Nuevos Talentos, 2007).
10. Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories,” in The Uncanny , ed. and trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Group, 2003), 3–8.
11. James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
12. Edelman, No Future, 4.
13. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4.
14. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 107.
15. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense , 106.
16. Deleuze argues that the child seer character first emerged in Italian neo-realist films as a response to the massive cultural rupture of World War II.
17. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image , trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), xi–8.
18. Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema and the Modern Horror Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 9.
19. Walter Benjamin, cited in Lowenstein, 86.
20. The Spirit of the Beehive, DVD, directed by Victor Erice (Madrid: Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas S.L., 1973).
21. Raise Ravens, DVD, directed by Carlos Saura (Madrid: Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas S.L., 1976).
22. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 5.
23. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4.
24. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18.
25. David Martin-Jones, Deleuze and World Cinemas (London: Continuum, 2011), 73.
26. Tatjana Pavlovic, Despotic Bodies and Transgressive Bodies: Spanish Culture from Francisco Franco to Jesús Franco (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 70.
27. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 3.
28. Deleuze, Cinema 2 , xi.
29. Frankenstein, DVD, directed by James Whale (Los Angeles: Universal Entertainment, 1931).
30. Carlos Saura, cited in Marsha Kinder, “Carlos Saura: The Political Development of Individual Consciousness,” Film Quarterly 32.3 (1979): 16.
31. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny , ed. and trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Group, 2003), 241.
32. Lowenstein, Shocking Representation, 14.
33. Jacinto is a former inhabitant of the orphanage who has been inexorably damaged by his experiences of war. He thus represents a parallel realist figuration of the child deformed by wartime turmoil.
34. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 79.
35. Edelman, No Future, 4.
36. Antonio Lazarro-Reboll, Spanish Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 250.
37. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 7.
38. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 107.
39. The medium is played by Geraldine Chaplin, who also played both the adult Ana and Ana’s dying mother in Raise Ravens. That Chaplin performed both roles in Ravens constitutes an often indiscernible folding together of the child’s traumatic past and her future. Chaplin’s role in The Orphanage thus establishes a conscious link to the earlier film, and echoes the depiction in Ravens of a woman eternally trapped by her childhood trauma.
40. Stockton, The Queer Child , 5.
41. Benjamin, cited in Lowenstein, Shocking.