3

Raising animals: Between the basement and the kennel in The Woman

Figure 3.1 Bite (The Woman, 2013, Dir. Lucky Mckee, USA: Modernciné).

She bites off his finger. She bites off his ring finger. She swallows the flesh but spits out the ring. Her first gesture when realizing her new situation as the restrained captive of the man who abducted her is to violently refuse the very sign of a hetero-patriarchal economy of exchange. It is not worth eating.

Teeth should not be this sharp; mouths should not be this filthy – it is not right, surely. The dreamlike title sequence of The Woman ambiguously shows The Woman in the woods, possibly having been raised by wolves, since we see a baby with a wolf carefully licking blood from her fingers. We also see her stealing, even murderously stealing, the den of a wolf when she needs somewhere to ‘hole up’ and nurse her injured flank. This mouth is not afraid of wolves. This mouth is not afraid of the unclean and improper. This mouth derides the sign of its own restraint.

Abjection’s creed

To turn to what remains Julia Kristeva’s most well-known work in the Anglophone world, Powers of Horror, is to find the symptomatic repetition of what Jacques Derrida has called the question of the animal. That is to say, ‘the animal’ is not her subject in the sense that it so self-consciously is for Derrida: it is not her subject, but rather it is her ground. The subject that she develops is psychoanalysis: ‘the animal’ is a concept that she repeats. The following long citation is from the opening pages:

The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder.

The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our personal archaeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before existing outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, ‘with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling’.1

This citation now surfaces in the narrow field of investigation that has sought a conversation between psychoanalysis and animal studies. If we turn to a text written almost thirty years later, we find that ‘signification is what determines the human species’.² To put it bluntly, this is an index of Kristeva’s commitment to maintaining human exceptionalism as necessity in the post-Lacanian theory of subjectivity, to which she has significantly contributed. It is to render rather more forcefully Kelly Oliver’s argument in her book Animal Lessons, an argument that revisited a range of scholars in light of Derrida’s work to further flesh out the ways in which their works police the conceptual divide between the human and the animal.³ What is particularly salient about Oliver’s substantial intervention in the still burgeoning interest in the resources of continental philosophy for animal studies is her demonstration that women scholars have also repeated this division.⁴ The scholars in question for Oliver are Simone de Beauvoir and Kristeva, well respected as theorists of feminism and the feminine respectively. They are both also – we should note as Oliver does not – part of the dialectical tradition.5 Oliver is keenly observant of the problematic ways in which sexual reproduction negatively understood as the metonymy of animality muddies the prospective clean transcendence of woman to the political sphere in Beauvoir (a trajectory that man nevertheless assumes that he can achieve). The seemingly hopeless abject taint of the latter’s phrasing – ‘the species gnaws at [woman’s] vitals’ – prefigures Oliver’s revision of her extensive extant work on Kristeva, now to bring out the connected issue of the feminine and the animal.⁶ On this connection, the long quotation above is instructive. The major invocations of abjection in the art world through major exhibitions in New York and in London in the early 1990s may have reduced it to a fear of border crossings without regard for the anxieties prompting such fear.⁷ Closer readers of Kristevan abjection in the humanities – prior to Oliver’s book – would certainly have noticed the second aspect of the confrontation with the abject – that which pertains to what she names our ‘personal archaeology’ or our subjectivity as the attempt to ‘release the [“stifling”] hold of maternal entity’ by means of the ‘autonomy of language’. What Oliver’s work incites us to re-read is the division presented here between the subject’s relation to the maternal and the social relation to the ‘threatening world of animals’. As with her tracing of the negatively troped animal figures that ‘dog’ the emancipatory desire for the transcendence of the ‘second sex’ in Beauvoir, Oliver causes us to notice that the fragile state of abjection is an animal ‘territory’ onto which ‘man strays’. In other words it is not the proper state or estate of man (even if this estate is always the fictional property of, as Derrida would say, ‘the subject that calls himself man’). While an abject anxiety might be mobilized in myriad subsequent contexts of border collapse, including that of the fictions of sexual identity or the nation state (and the phrasing – border collapse – is also to pass judgement on what should constitute a border), Kristeva names the foundational forces of abjection as double: the maternal and the animal.

Kristeva’s 2010 article titled ‘The Impudence of Uttering’ confirms the enduring conservatism of psychoanalysis vis-à-vis ‘the animal’ when she writes that ‘signification is what determines the human species’.⁸ This article came to attention when searching for any evidence of any impact of the proliferating continental embrace of the animal question in her work.⁹ There, Kristeva purposefully invokes the union of language, culture and polymorphous perversity linked to creativity as that of the ‘human species’.10 She thinks this movement through the poetic work of Colette and Proust (and this is seductive, not least because the more mature Kristeva now writes on ‘feminine genius’ and remarks on her own insistence that women are capable of sublimation in distinction from Freudian orthodoxy).¹¹ But readers should remain alert to her maintenance of the succession from nature to culture (from ‘desire-pleasure’ to ‘jouissance’) as that which humans alone can traverse. This is underlined when Kristeva briefly remarks upon the ‘nuptial dance without words’ of cats as ‘a displaced image of the envied parental coitus’.¹² That this striking image has a feline impetus makes it all the more noticeable that she bypasses works such as that of Derrida. The ‘animal sensoriality’ of cats is wholly given over to the image of parental coitus: accessing the pleasure of cats is a veiled access to the primal scene. In this world, cats are purely vehicles for human desires (desires that they clothe in a palatable fashion). This continued conservatism should be noted given that some readers misread Animal Lessons as simply bringing Kristeva into the fold of animal studies; for example Barbara Creed’s essay ‘Animals, Art, Abjection’ included in a contemporary collection of new writing on Powers of Horror, as well as some of Oliver’s own subsequent writing that rather softens the critique that she herself made possible.¹³ Christopher Powici, in contrast, suggested that the infrequency of psychoanalytic resources within the broadest realm of ecocritical scholarship is consequential upon Freud’s remark, in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, that ‘the extermination of “wild and dangerous animals,” and the extensive breeding of “tamed and domesticated ones,” is a defining characteristic of a highly civilised society’.¹⁴ Powici goes on to caution that ‘psychoanalysis may be seen as complicit with the very ideologies and practices that ecocriticism challenges’.¹⁵

Raising animals

This chapter raises animals as our subject, as a subject that is not reducible to a symptom, that is not reducible to a figure – although animals may also figure as symptoms and as figures (and this is to recall Derrida’s reminder that there is no sure way for readers to know whether his real encounter with the little cat is not also an allegorical invocation of Alice in Wonderland).¹⁶ We need to raise animals to our attention now, in our time – the time of the sixth mass extinction – when they are disappearing at an ever-increasing and ever-more systemic rate.17 However, to raise something to attention also speaks to an anthropometric scale and sensorial form of attention as it reveals something before us, or stands it before us, presented for our visual attention. The vertical and the visual come together in the way that we typically imagine human evolution: we are all too familiar with the ascent of man, diagrammed as the vertical ascension of a white man walking into the future, away from his more horizontal, hairy, dark, hominid ancestors. That diagram finds its psychoanalytic support in Freud’s well-known footnotes to ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, in which he writes that the ‘dimunition of the olfactory stimuli seems itself to be a consequence of man’s raising himself from the ground, of his assumption of an upright gait’.¹⁸ These footnotes suggest that to the extent man becomes a standing animal, an erect animal, he becomes one that visually surveys his domain rather than smells a terrain. And on this terrain, humans are those who raise animals, who practice animal husbandry in the particular agricultural sense as well as – and this is not necessarily fundamentally separate – in a philosophical sense of the management of concepts. Impressively unrelenting, this movement of elevation ascribed to the human is ingrained within the form of dialectical procedure as an overcoming, Aufheben, and in French, relever – to raise up.

In raising animals, I want to augment Oliver’s caution regarding the double abjection of the animal and the feminine in Kristeva through the prism of Lucky Mckee’s 2011 horror film The Woman, a film that offers an acute if troubling meditation on these concepts.¹⁹ While horror might sound like an unlikely place in which to meditate on any concept, the genre has frequently invited just such philosophical work (and not least in questioning the morality of the family in such classics as Texas Chainsaw Massacre).²⁰ Indeed, in his own excursion into the genre, Cary Wolfe remarks on horror film as the ‘mass cultural heir of the Greek tragic drama’.²¹ Barbara Creed’s classic work of feminist film theory, The Monstrous Feminine, from 1993 notably invoked horror with the work of Kristeva as that which offered the possibility of the feminine as a power before the law of the father.²² Drawing on rape revenge and cannibal horror genres, The Woman viscerally opposes the patriarchal nuclear family as it both exposes the banal structure of domestic violence that holds that family in place and embodies the psychic terrors drawn through sex and species difference on which it feeds.23 That the film draws on genres liable to entrench the misogyny on which they trade allows, in this instance, a substantial departure from that outcome not merely in the denouement but with sympathy for the titular Woman throughout. To some it might seem heavy-handed to cast the male lead in The Woman as both brutally patriarchal and a lawyer – to position one as the expression of the other. Others might feel interpellated by that very union.²⁴ Yet in our times when ‘monsters’ do indeed walk the earth, when the so-called Leader of the Free World did not have his campaign for that position derailed by the film exposing his crude discussion of the sexual benefits of fame, a discussion infamously centring on his boast that he could ‘Grab ‘em by the pussy … do anything’,²⁵ and, amongst numerous other horrors, he went on to appoint a man credibly accused of sexual assault to the Supreme Court of the United States: in these times I love The Woman.²⁶

The Woman further allows for reflection upon the canonical feminist theorization of gender of the 1970s and 1980s and its critical appropriation of Claude Levi-Strauss’s anthropological equation of culture with the exchange of women between men.²⁷ I will thus take seriously Kristeva’s own admission that her reflection upon the feminine will offer ‘no solace’ (since, as she particularly emphasizes, it structurally cannot offer an alternative representation – or alternative to representation).²⁸ This is absolutely not about culturally constructed notions of what is ‘feminine’ and what is ‘masculine’. I will come back to this crucial structure of exchange in particular, given that Kristeva upholds it as necessity alongside her otherwise notable amendments to Freud. The consolidation of units of exchange points also to the definite article that the films very title announces – The Woman. Technically, there are several women in The Woman (Belle, the mother (Angela Bettis); Peggy, the pregnant teenager (Lauren Ashley Carter); Darlin’, the little girl (Shyla Molhusen); Genevieve, the teacher (Carlee Baker) and the eponymous Woman (Pollyanna McIntosh)).²⁹ While cinematic attention is particularly given to the feral woman captured in the woods by the film’s leading man – who chains her in the cellar, ostensibly framed as his family’s civilization project, philosophical attention is arguably solicited with regard to the absolute quality or even archaic type that the ‘the’ instils. Given the schematic cast and locations, we are also encouraged to see the country house in which the film is set as The House, the family as The Family and perhaps to pursue a spatial analysis of metaphysics as a gendered oikos or home economy.30 Yet, as I will argue, what sediments these categories is the implication that they are distilled in relation to the concept of The Animal.

‘Have you fed the dogs yet?’ This anxious question is frequently repeated in The Woman. Along with the agitated demanding sound of barking, somewhere, we are given to understand, there are hungry dogs, close to but never inside the house. They do not patrol the grounds of the house. They are not taken for walks. They do not accompany the father-lawyer, Cleek (Sean Bridgers), on his military-grade weaponry-equipped nocturnal hunting trips. The dogs never leave what I’m referring to as the kennel out of convention, but more descriptively it is a caged part of a large shed. Thus anything but the most rudimentary signs of the domestication of dogs are scarce. They are not the ‘humanized animals’ that we call pets with the grid of species that Wolfe suggests as the provisional means by which to account for the various typologies orchestrated by The Silence of the Lambs.³¹ They are not on guard: but has anyone fed them? If the category of companion species can be described as a mode of relating that situates those who eat with others (company describes those who gather around bread, ‘cum panis’, as Donna Haraway suggests), that companionship has been subjected to very tight controls.³² While everyone in this family knows about the dogs, refers to them as ‘the dogs’ without invoking any individual names and the daughter Peggy volunteers to feed them, we only ever see Cleek and his son doing so (and with a cruelty reducible to a strict law of exchange: accept food or get beaten).³³ The shots that show this enclosure – until the closing sequence – remain shy of who or what is being fed, beyond two leashed German Shepherds, in the ‘kennel within the kennel’ at the rear of the enclosure. The sound of barking is not contained to the shed but can be heard all around the property, including in the cellar in which the Woman is restrained, pairing the liminal spaces of kennel and cellar. Both spaces belong to the house but are peripheral to it; both come with locks and chains and weaponry. The force with which these spaces are fortified contrasts with the depleted maternal figure within the house itself in which Belle flinches at the mere sound of Cleek’s raised voice. The kennel and cellar may be secretive spaces, but all family members are psychically bound to them in various relations of fear and fascination. Unlike the inhabitants of the kennel, all family members are shown the Woman and we are shown their various reactions to her, her condition and their own role in maintaining it. When Cleek takes his family down into the cellar to see their ‘civilization’ project – the Woman – he warns them not to get too close because she ‘likes to bite’ and shows them his severed finger. ‘We can’t have people going around the woods thinking they’re animals’, he says, ‘it isn’t right, its not safe’. While Darlin’ reacts curiously to this threat of devouring by both bending her finger as if she too had lost part of it and smacking her lips as if she were the one biting a finger off and swallowing it, Cleek explains that this is a secret project that they would all share in looking after and keeping hidden, adding that ‘its just like the dogs’.34 This name – the dogs – houses secrets.

Figure 3.2 Introduction (The Woman, 2013, Dir. Lucky Mckee, USA).

Secreted away from the public, the family members know about ‘the dogs’. They are raising them after all, even as this familiar name fetishistically grasps what the kennel actually houses. (The fetish works in the classical manner of disavowal structured as ‘I know, but I don’t know’, naming what is foregrounded in the kennel but maintaining the cover-up of what unnamable difference lies to the rear.) Relatively restrained overall as a horror film, The Woman saves its biggest shock – in line with genre expectations of mounting horror and escalating violence – for the penultimate revelation for the audience of just what has been going on with the dogs for all this time. ‘All this time’ might index the duration of the film, but perhaps a wider conception of time as such, with the dogs taking on a phantasmatic sense of a perpetually ravenous beast that must be fed to be contained but whose hunger can never be sated, whose jaws are always open. The peripheral spaces themselves – kennel and cellar – metonymize dangerous mouths. If an anxiety-laden duty surrounds the kennels – a duty that has nevertheless become quotidian – fear and fascination envelop the cellar and the captive that it restrains. Belle, the mother, is fascinated with her strength, almost on her side, but fatally fails to help the Woman when she has the chance (being unable to overcome her terror of Cleek). Peggy is aghast at the situation and brave enough to at least intervene when the Woman is being brutally washed with a power hose, and she is the one who will finally release the Woman when there is no other force for help possible. Like his father, Brian (Zach Rand) evidently understands that this ostensible project of ‘civilization’ would not exclude her sexual abuse, immediately asking, ‘do we really get to keep her?’ The civilized woman is a kept woman, in this conceptual history. Later Brian takes sadistic pleasure in her captivity, spying on his father’s late-night visit and rape of the Woman, and subsequently returning to inspect her to the point of torture himself. It is Peggy that puts a stop to his cruel investigation of her breasts. Meanwhile, Darlin’ places her new toy radio outside the cellar door so that the captive might enjoy some music, like she does.

A/basement

‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ is not only the tale of the erection of man; it is also that of the hostility of women. Freud writes: ‘women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence … the woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it.’35 The reversion of ‘women’ to ‘the woman’ is ironically apposite, given Cleek’s explicit framing of the Woman as the family ‘civilization project’. In this context it refers to the task of civilization leading men – those he deems capable of sublimation – away from the family (the law of which their fraternity nevertheless shepherds). Sublimating his sexual drive into the work of civilization ‘estranges’ the man from the home. It is not even that women are themselves simply more interested in family and sexual life than what culture might avail. Rather, in Freud’s phrasing, they ‘represent the interests of the family and sexual life’.36 As such they are cast as signs, always and already.

Caught in the woods, the Woman is covered in filth and, inextricable from the ostensible ‘civilization project’, she must be made clean. Cleek’s manifest narrative identifies species boundaries as the prime offence in need of correction: he names her as ‘going around the woods’ mistakenly ‘thinking that she is an animal’, implicitly requiring rescue. He also identifies her as stinking – and we should recall that part and parcel of the becoming-erect of the human subject, for Freud, lies in the repression of smell – the repression of the proximity of filthy, animal, bodily odours.³⁷ But in so far as a white actress is effaced by dark dirt and chained in a cellar, the film risks a spectral figure of racial difference in the Western, and in particular, the North American, imaginary. That imaginary violently organizes race within a hierarchy given literal and symbolic freight in the historical practice and continuing legacy of slavery. This figure is at one with the European history of soap as that which sold the transition from dirty to clean as coterminous with one from black to white.³⁸ While Kristeva suggests that ‘[t]he body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic’, the force field of the concept of nature draws the black, along with the woman and the animal, into its static holding pen.³⁹ Attempting to redraw the edges of the Woman, without any abject ‘bleed’ of categories, firstly by cleaning her – and it is instructive that this apparently simple task is always in excess of its ostensibly basic remit – does not raise her to the status of ‘fully symbolic’ (as her unclean bloodied face in the film’s conclusion will announce). When the Woman is cleaned, Cleek enlists his family making them complicit with the task. It viciously encompasses the power hose (applied by Cleek himself) followed by water that is close to the point of scalding (applied by Belle): both approach a skin-stripping level of cruelty. If the removal of the blackening filth results in her being rendered more properly white, the Woman’s elevation in status is yet minimal. She remains a captive that Cleek’s family are expected to accept in all the abasement that such captivity proposes.

In the shade of the Enlightenment, and somewhat infamously albeit within parentheses, Freud casts the sexuality of women in racist tones, by means of both denigration and colonial exploration:

We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a ‘dark continent’ for psychology. But we have learnt that girls feel deeply their lack of a sexual organ that is equal in value to the male one; they regard themselves on that account as inferior, and this ‘envy for the penis’ is the origin of a whole number of characteristic feminine reactions.40

Responding to Freud in her book exploring the colonial imaginary within psychoanalysis – a book that took Dark Continent for its very title – Ranjanna Khanna notes the transference that Freud himself performs: transferring the ‘shame’ that ‘we need not feel’ onto the girl and the woman. They are the ones more properly shameful:

Perhaps fearing her difference, he makes her other, obliterating the specificity and difference of her body by turning it into a fetishized metaphor of the unknown: ‘dark continent,’ and it is defined as lack … Although the Other [in Freud] is not intrinsically racialised or sexualised, it does seem that travel and exploration are the instigators of a theory of the Other.⁴¹

Khanna observes that Freud magnifies the colonial, mysterious ‘aura’ of the ‘dark continent’ through his retention of the term in English. The term, as she notes, first ‘came into use in H. M. Stanley’s explorer’s narrative about Africa: Through the Dark Continent’ – a narrative laden with that author’s own anxieties about women. ‘The ‘dark continent’, she continues, ‘connotes a great deal, but denotes nothing: it is indefinable, and it is primitive, but it allows its explorers a heroic narrative of discovery and a feminisation of the land’.⁴² The Woman, we recall, was captured in/rescued from the woods, a terrain that we only otherwise see Cleek explore.

The abasement of the Woman delivers a shock both to Belle and Peggy and to the ‘sex/gender system’ that became second nature to second-wave feminist thought.⁴³ Gayle Rubin’s canonical essay from 1975, ‘The Traffic in Women’, first articulated this system through appropriating the language of exchange and that of signification drawn from Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan in order to foster not a prescription for what is called gender (as necessity) but a description of a particular system (as contingency).⁴⁴ The political hope was thus that a ‘revolution in kinship’ might prompt a wholly other system.⁴⁵ In so doing this would further dismantle the compulsory heterosexuality also and not so surreptitiously articulated by this exchange of signs.

Asked to give an account of the term ‘gender’ as an entry in a Marxist Dictionary by a group of German feminists in 1983, Donna Haraway felt that Rubin’s ‘sex/gender’ system was so sedimented in Anglo-American feminist theory for this to be her expected theoretical anchor. Given the authoritative stature of a potential work of reference and that her task was rendered yet more complicated by the editors proposed translation of this Dictionary into not ‘merely’ four European languages (English, French, Spanish and German) but also Russian and Chinese, a task of translation that itself begged the question of the universality of all the various discourses leading to Rubin’s usage, Haraway produced what we might call a critical genealogy of the term instead. Its current and deceptively simple usage not withstanding, even – perhaps especially – the German term ‘Geschlecht’ drew on ‘sex, stock, race, and family’.46

While noting that Haraway’s genealogy is not ‘post-gender’ in the misconstrued temporal sense of ‘post-feminist’ but most certainly is post a dialectical economy of sex and gender (or nature and culture), we should pause on her attention to the acute historical discrepancy in the formation of symbols versus objects of exchange upon which black feminists such as Hortense Spillers and Hazel Carby insisted.⁴⁷ In the development of the ‘sex/gender system’ as a central focus of feminist analysis, white feminists did not see the glaring difference in which they were implicated, summarized by Haraway thus: ‘Free women in US white patriarchy were exchanged in a system that oppressed them, but white women inherited black women and men.’⁴⁸ In this divided system, as Carby underlines, it follows that white women gave birth to humans within a symbolic economy, but ‘black women gave birth to property … to capital itself in the form of slaves’.⁴⁹ Haraway details the consequences of this structural difference:

Slave mothers could not transmit a name; they could not be wives; they were outside the system of marriage exchange. Slaves were unpositioned, unfixed, in a system of names; they were, specifically, unlocated and so disposable. In these discursive frames, white women were not legally or symbolically human; slaves were not legally or symbolically human at all.⁵⁰

Abruptly faced with the filth-covered and shackled Woman in the cellar, one not even given a name, and one clearly at the disposal of both father and son, Belle and Peggy are faced with an unspeakable crisis in the categories of exchange, sign and property in which they are enmeshed.51 As tokens of exchange themselves, they are yet called on to maintain the actual captivity of one whose category falls outside legal redress, even as the titular definite article promises some kind of restoration (and that this expectation is conceivably finessed by the fact that McIntosh is a white actress and thus the confrontation with the historical divide between black and white women is not more fully acknowledged). Kept underground in this liminal space that itself might be thought of as ‘unclean’ or even ‘unconscious’ compared to the interior or ‘conscious’ space of the house ‘itself’, the Woman is kept in the dark. Yet the crisis of category, and of ethics that those categories claim to license, is brought to light in ways that cannot but recall the structure of the uncanny. This uncanny return is prompted not least since they have already been participant in keeping one of their own kind in captivity – as we will come to learn. Significantly, in the case of this other prisoner, this captivity has been without promise of the so-called civilization. The latter crisis in kind does recall the attempt to secure species by means of the grid of which Wolfe wrote, this time in reference to that of ‘animalized humans’ (to which the last section of this chapter will return).⁵²

La Bête et le Souverain

Above or beyond the law, alternatively in violation of it, the political figures of the beast and the sovereign seem to form two distinct poles while sharing what Derrida calls a ‘troubling resemblance’, this ‘being-outside-the-law’, this ‘reciprocal haunting’.⁵³ Indeed this uncanny proximity cannot but be heard in the French title of Derrida’s seminars, La bête et le souverain, where the difference between est and et (‘is’ and ‘and’) is inaudible. The potential substitutability of the beast for the sovereign is a murderous substitution: where ‘man is a wolf to man’, he is a lethal threat. Such is the thicket of animal figures especially wolves or The Wolf in political discourse that Derrida can weave between Rousseau, Freud and Little Red Riding Hood in a matter of lines. The ‘recurrence of the lexicon of devourment’ is common to all: political theory, psychoanalysis, fairytales.⁵⁴ Derrida cautions us not to ‘forget the she-wolf’; for example she that suckled the twins Romulus and Remus at the foundation of Rome.55 His French pauses on the gendered inflections of La and Le: the female beast and the masculine sovereign – ‘so what? So who?’ – repeating this inflection frequently across the seminars, although perhaps without enough development (enough to pique the interest of feminist readers; not enough for the majority of his readers to make it unavoidable).⁵⁶ Derrida’s use of ‘what’ and ‘who’ here recalls the much earlier interview ‘Eating Well’, in which he first explicitly addressed the ‘question of the animal’ and the death sentence it ultimately commands between those designated a ‘who’, or a ‘thou’ and a ‘thou’ who ‘shalt not be killed’, while the implied ‘what’ is pushed outside of ethical consideration and may be put to death without criminal offence (as elaborated in the previous chapter). Just as ‘the animal’ was diagnosed as the conceptual corral that we must undo, ‘the beast’ in his seminars does not engage with living animals in any detail but does refer us to the consequences of our bestial imaginary for the living. Kristeva’s abjection of the animal and the woman sits awkwardly with Derrida’s acknowledgement of the she-wolf, awkward because of its resistance to representation.

This mouth must be cleaned up, must be taught to eat properly, to eat cooked food and to say the words ‘thank you’ (the enunciation of the latter as a form of contractual agreement produces a scene which, of all her degradations at the hands of Cleek, is singularly unbearable).⁵⁷ This mouth must be taught to exchange food for words in acceptance of the dominant means of signification. Cleaning up the cellar under Cleek’s instruction, the family follow that instruction but with varying degrees of compliance and hesitation regarding the oddness of this sudden order. Only Darlin’ is excited: perhaps there are mice and she should fetch some cheese. Belle makes cookies for her children: on request they are gingerbread men. ‘Would the animal lady like to eat a little man?’ Darlin’ asks her, generously: her thought of a gift contracts into a classical Freudian exchange of signs that condense oral and genital, cannibalism, identification and impregnation. Darlin’s own identification here aligns her with the power to impregnate by means of the companion gingerbread men (she wants to give her a baby), but Belle blocks contact.⁵⁸ Affirming the Law and the straight lines of identification in Oedipal orthodoxy, she dismisses Darlin’s wish, saying that it is her father who is euphemistically ‘helping’ the Woman.

While the core image of Powers of Horror that sticks in the academic imagination might be Kristeva’s opening reference to the skin on the surface of milk inducing the urge to vomit, the book’s third chapter on ‘Filth and Defilement’ obliges us to return to the cultural primal scenes of the Freud of ‘Totem and Taboo’.59 That text, as indicated in the previous chapter, vacillates on whether our ancestors were animals or the Father, incrementally crafting the way to installing that Father at the origin with animals only ever serving as His substitutes. ‘Filth and Defilement’ also makes the encounter with the feminine and the animal unavoidable. At the very end of his text, Freud consolidates the beginning that ‘Totem and Taboo’ dramatizes; quoting Goethe, he writes, ‘in the beginning was the Deed’.⁶⁰ Kristeva observes that by this ending, one could be forgiven for forgetting that two crimes announce the origins of culture in Freudian legend: the murder and cannibalism of the father and incest with the mother. The latter ‘disappears’ even though the attempt to explain the severity of incest dread had driven Freud’s investigation into the paucity of anthropological accounts of culture and even though it is the apparent motivation for the foundational patricide.⁶¹ Immediately, Kristeva is clear that she does not dispute Freud’s account of this patricide and its privileged setting as the ‘keystone to the desire henceforth known as Oedipal’.⁶² This is crucial to note since Oliver sometimes gives the impression that Kristeva’s attention to the mother diminishes the investment in the father that Freud consecrates, rather than strictly redresses his lack of attention to this other structure. Rather, Kristeva expands upon what she considers to be the ‘two-sided formation’ of the sacred (‘sacred’ given that this formation of law is bound up with that of religion). These two sides, however, are radically different in kind and in consequence. There is:

One aspect founded by murder and the social bond made up of murder’s guilt-ridden, atonement, with all the projective mechanisms and obsessive rituals that accompany it; and another aspect, like a lining, more secret still and invisible, nonrepresentable, oriented toward those uncertain spaces of unstable identity, toward the fragility – both threatening and fusional – of the archaic dyad, toward the non-separation of subject/object, on which language has no hold but one woven of fright and repulsion?⁶³

Both sides hold negative affects, but as she continues, ‘[o]ne aspect is defensive and socializing, the other shows fear and indifferentiation.’⁶⁴ Paternal murder founds the law, the law that begins with a ‘thou shalt not kill’, and hence the possibility of a social world, defending against murderous lawlessness: maternal incest threatens a relapse. What is both a temptation and a problem for feminist readers is that while we may desire the end of the law as authorized by the Father, this framework holds that this other aspect cannot offer a replacement: it is nonrepresentable. It is important to be clear about the structure that Kristeva nevertheless upholds. She writes:

If the murder of the father is that historical event constituting the social code as such, that is symbolic exchange and the exchange of women, its equivalent on the level of the subjective history of each individual is therefore the advent of language, which breaks with perviousness if not with the chaos that precedes it and sets up denomination as an exchange of linguistic signs.65

There is thus a distinction between the category of ‘women’ qua tokens of exchange (a sign amongst other signs given order by the paternal signifier) and the feminine that can produce no sign of its own. Moreover, this invocation of the social code ‘as such’ as the exchange of women between men inextricable from the advent of language, and hence the exchange of linguistic signs, speaks not only to the Freud that Kristeva more frontally addresses but also to the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss.⁶⁶ Lévi-Strauss even wrote, ‘women themselves are treated as signs, which are misused when not put to the use reserved to signs, which is to be communicated.’⁶⁷ Lacan countersigned this sexual contract, agreeing that the ‘communication’ of women between set groups of men would ‘guarantee that the voyage on which wives and goods are embarked will bring back to their point of departure in a never-failing cycle other women and other goods, all carrying an identical identity’.⁶⁸ In Kristeva’s psychoanalytic lineage, if there are to be signs, if there is to be signification as such, replete with transcendental signifier secured by the name of the father in the train of thought sedimented by Freud’s totemism and consecrated by Lacan, then the equivalence of women and words must be endorsed. Unlike Rubin, Kristeva does not counter Lévi-Strauss.

The long citation previously discussed – from the opening pages of Powers of Horror – sketched two axes: the social abjection of animals and the subject’s abjection of the maternal. Yet at the point where Kristeva introduces the ‘two-sided sacred’ with the caveat that ‘What we designate as “feminine,” far from being a primeval essence, will be seen as an “other” without a name’, animals have sunk below even this non-status seemingly not able to be raised even as nameless.69 The two powers that Kristeva directly invokes, powers that ‘attempt[ed] to share out society’, are masculine and feminine. ‘One of them’, she says, is ‘apparently victorious’ but through its very ‘relentlessness against the other’ reveals that it is ‘threatened by an asymmetrical, irrational, wily, uncontrollable power’.⁷⁰ The symbolic is not strong enough to ‘dam up the abject or demoniacal potential of the feminine. The latter, precisely on account of its power does not succeed in differentiating itself as other but threatens one’s own and clean self’. It is a locution that appeals to us, calls out to us, speaks almost in the manner of leftist appropriations of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in which the slave, or bondsman, whose very work – compelled though it might be – promises to eventually enable him to rise up in triumph over the master, or lord, whose might is ironically belied by his non-labouring body.⁷¹ For Kristeva, however, this asymmetrical, irrational, wily, uncontrollable power cannot absolutely overcome the one whose name and whose economy of exchange ‘is defensive and socialising’, despite being ‘no less virulent’.⁷² To the Anglophone ear, ‘wiliness’ perhaps conjures up a seductive animal style, the cleverness of an animal primed to outsmart rivals, threats or prey. Thus while the noun ‘animal’ does not appear in the section on the ‘two powers’, the phrasing perhaps bears its figural trace. However, where the concept of ‘the animal’ is at work, that is to say in metaphysics, in dialectics, animals will struggle to exceed that figural implication. Indeed the battle conducted between master and slave in Hegel’s dialectic is precisely over ‘nothing’ but ‘prestige’, and as such it elevates the master who is willing to sacrifice his life over nothing above the animal body of the slave.⁷³ While it is the frontal argument of Totem and Taboo to position patricide as the origin of culture and/or as the Law, it is Derrida who pursues the logical implications of this for non-human animals. Not only can animals never rise to symbolic status within the Law themselves but they can never commit an ‘infraction of the law’: animals are never criminals.⁷⁴ Just as Derrida has asked what would happen to fraternity should a sister or an animal enter it, we might also ask what would happen to psychoanalysis if we were to follow ethological curiosity and allow that non-human animals may produce other laws, not necessarily commensurate with human law? Will our Case fall when it no longer sits in place as the Case? What if the choice is not in the either/or form between a matter of raising all abjected others to the same status – a politics of representation, or of locating a pure force of resistance outside of representation, but that the field of our encounters demands other architectures?

Where there is food, there is also a polluting object. At the ‘boundary between nature and culture, between the human and the non-human’, Kristeva tells us: ‘all food is liable to defile.’75 Cleaning up means dealing with the dirt and the ‘frailty of symbolic order’.⁷⁶ The sudden organization of the cellar is absolutely under Cleek’s direction, from cleaning the space to cleaning up after the Woman; this undertaking in ‘civilization’ raises the game of both ‘mere’ housework and maternally identified toilet training. Brian is seconded to both of these dirty and feminized tasks. He is quietly if resentfully compliant in the cellar: in the kennel, feeding the unseen inhabitant of the cage within the cage he accidentally puts his hand in her shit. In resentment and disgust, he calls her a ‘bitch’.⁷⁷

Feeding the dogs and cleaning up after this ‘bitch’ in the enclosed, sectioned-off spaces, Brian is yet contaminated by shit. Legible as the metonymy of the attempt to control corporeal orifices, these spaces will never be clean. Resentful of his delegation to cleaning duties and especially of the accident that sullies him with shit, in echo of his own sphincteral training, Brian returns to the breast. He returns not to nourish himself on food but to exact punishment upon the Woman, refusing the breast as that which provides milk and was mastered by the signifying substitutions of language. Brian obliges the breast to surrender blood.

Mouthing off

We are primed to expect the defensive structures that architecturally and psychically map out the space of the house and its abjected out-buildings, the cellar and the kennel, to be breached. We are primed to expect this breaching to emerge from the interior – to be a breaking out more than a breaking in. It is a horror film – bolting a door will never bolt the danger out but always lock it in. Narrative expectation has focused upon the Woman, and while she is on one level a stranger, her ‘naming’ in the form of the definite article invites us to expect and to desire an eruption of the feminine within this patriarchal fortification. Perhaps she will even ally with ‘the dogs’, whose agitated barking she has heard.78 While that desire is indeed given dramatic expression, a ‘sucker punch’ comes from a surprise source.

‘Anopthalmia’. The medical term is so unfamiliar, and the eruption of violence that accompanies its utterance is so ‘eye-catching’ that it is easy to miss. Belle prompts its first usage when she loses her temper at long last with Cleek: she is completely incensed by his refusal to agree that Brian has done any wrong and deserves any punishment. In the ensuing argument Belle defends the rights of the Woman specifically as those of a ‘human being’ while suddenly making reference to what is ‘going on with the goddamn dogs’ as ‘enough to put [Cleek] in prison’. He responds, highly cryptically for the cinematic audience, by simply saying the word ‘Anopthalmia’, followed directly by ‘Your shame’. The Greek term has yet to make sense in the narrative, but retrospectively, the metonymic chain is made to cluster around her shame: the dogs; congenital blindness; the mother. If there is a threatening secret, it is all her fault, he says. As we will see, that shame is anchored in a fault.

In Kristeva we find a distinction within her understanding of language: the distinction between mapping and laws. She speaks of a ‘primal mapping’ that

shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improper-dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted.⁷⁹

This arises from ‘maternal authority’, and it ‘is the trustee of the mapping of the self’s clean and proper body; it is distinguished from paternal laws within which, with the phallic phase and acquisition of language, the destiny of man will take shape’.⁸⁰ In Kristevan psychoanalysis these impressions map territory but do not write the law. The law distinguishes and organizes discrete elements – including paradigmatically as we have heard, women and words – and represses any maternal authority that would take matters into its own hands. Rites attempt to manage the border: the border between the semiotic of the body and the word of the law: from rite into right. Not simply ‘filth’ but ‘defilement’ comes to be what Kristeva calls the ‘translinguistic spoor’ of our ‘most archaic’ boundaries with the mother, the abjection of which is given salve through ritual.⁸¹ Again animality leaves a figural trace or ‘spoor’ in her prose: animality is not her subject. With perhaps an ambivalence towards both the scholar on whom she has published extensively and also towards the animals from whom she would learn, Oliver notes that it is ‘the animal that puts the teeth into her notion of the abject-devouring-mother’, holding on to this bite even as she knows that what puts bite into this animal is a figure of carnivory.82 This bite, that always exceeds need, returns us to the Woman’s initial response to her captivity: to refuse to circulate the sign of her own conscription.

In a film as primal as this, and with the severance of Cleek’s finger swallowed as inconsequential flesh and his ring rejected early in its narrative, we expect that a carnivorous appetite will resume. In that troubling resemblance of beast and sovereign, Derrida reminds us that both stand outside or above the law: ruling the household Cleek feels utterly immune from incrimination, up to and including murder. Thus, he cannot tolerate being told that he ‘can’t’ do anything and repeats the word in rising tones as he strikes Belle to the floor. Domestic violence is orchestrated precisely around Cleek’s absolute intolerance of not ‘being able’, the precise quality that, as Derrida notes, the virile figure of carno-phallogocentrism claims to possess (‘man’ is always the one who can speak, can reason, can mourn, etc.).⁸³ In the very next scene a second woman is struck down. Cleek views the spontaneous home visit conducted by Genevieve, the schoolteacher (at which she raises concerns regarding Peggy’s pregnancy), as an affront to his authority. This affront is all the worse since it is made ‘within his own home’, as he remarks. This is a home in which women do not step out of place, and in which there can be only one ‘Teacher’. The word ‘can’t’ and the flare of anger it triggers repeat when Peggy tries to stop Cleek’s subsequent assault upon Genevieve. Holding Peggy up by the scruff of her neck, thus making a mockery of being able to stand upright, Cleek again scathingly repeats, ‘I can’t?’ as the camera makes a 360-degree pan around them (a still rare shot connoting mastery of all that can be seen since the enabling cinematic apparatus remains hidden, albeit one now finessed by digital rather than cumbersome analogue technology). From here the film’s rapidly shifting final sequence of punishment and retribution, all of which involve forms of cannibalism, is given full rein.

The dogs are really barking now, and their agitation is heard across the film’s cuts between Cleek dragging the schoolteacher towards the kennel, Belle coming around in the kitchen and the Woman pulling at her restraints in the cellar. In the montage of reactions to the rising sense of panic, Darlin’ asks, ‘Mama, what’s happening to the doggies?’ She is the only one to ever refer to the dogs with affection. The film immediately cuts to the terror of the teacher about to be fed to them, allowing for the persistent impression that these are ‘only’ brutalized dogs.

The second time we hear what likely is a still an utterly mysterious word, Cleek derisively asks the teacher, now thrown to the dogs – literally and figuratively – whether she can say ‘anopthalmia’, repeating the word with scornful enunciation. Stressing each syllable, Cleek identifies his powers of elocution with the circulation of discrete units, with signs, with the paternal signifier as that which organizes the social. The word itself identifies the blindspot of sexual difference.84 ‘A study of dreams, phantasies and myths’, Freud writes, ‘has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated’.⁸⁵ As revoltingly voyeuristic as he has been throughout, and in counterpoint to anopthalmia, Brian seemingly addresses the dogs saying, ‘let’s see what you can do.’

On the one hand, the film rapidly cuts between all simultaneous action taking place with each protagonist in such a way as to magnify the tension and the horror (this is a genre that is hardly going to respect the law ‘thou shalt not kill’). On the other hand, one of the most psychically challenging matches on action occurs when the Woman is finally freed (by Peggy) and, of the two spaces that Belle could possibly stagger towards, she chooses to go to the cellar drawn by its open door as the apparent cause of the chaos. The Woman now reveals the family’s other secret. Raised as one of ‘the dogs’, raised in the same ravenous state, raised entirely to eat, to anticipate live food without regard for what is ‘good’: the eldest daughter has been kept crouched and snarling at the back of the kennel. This is the locus in which the concept of sexual difference is cinematically concatenated with the concept of the animal. This abject beast-woman initially seems well described according to Wolfe’s species grid – here gravitating towards the pole of the ‘animalised human’.⁸⁶ That said we have already noted that ‘the dogs’ scarcely occupy any developed domestic role dogs usually inhabit. If ‘animalised human’ is not descriptor enough to account for the beast-woman revealed in the kennel within the kennel, neither is the ‘animalised woman’ that Carol Adams introduces when she modifies Wolfe (in a manner coincident with her sociological understanding of sexual politics; i.e. analysis must include ‘gender’).87 What has to be grasped is the way that the specific figuration of anopthalmia, while shocking, also makes systematic use of the discourse of disability in tandem with sexual difference construed according to Freudian orthodoxy in order to constrain this creature to the horizontal animal plane.

In its match on action, The Woman pairs this obscene instrumentalization of the animal and the feminine as the beast-woman is set upon the teacher with Peggy setting the Woman loose only for her to run straight into Belle. The sheer shock of the condition of the eldest daughter in the kennel is matched with that of the Woman’s actions. What is most difficult to stomach is the evisceration each performs as the action at a distance under the instruction or perhaps the wish of another (the instruction of Cleek; the wish of Peggy). The match between these scenes is striking in that it obliges us to see Peggy’s actions as deliberately aggressive towards her mother – as if she harnesses the Woman as an attack dog, wishing for her death – a latent possibility significantly at odds with the manifest narrative of desiring to save her teacher and letting loose this unknown force as the last resort.

In terms of the narrative, we can understand the Woman taking revenge on Belle, the woman who failed to help her when she could have made a stand, appalling as this scene is, especially if we want The Woman to revolutionize all the women. But in light of both Kristeva and Freud and the identification that ingestion awards, including paradigmatically through cannibalism, it makes sense that when the Woman kills Belle – this diminished mother – she eats her face. She eats her face and takes her place. This sense making, we have to acknowledge, is the work of exchange, of substitution. It is the removal of the mother by the Mother. Countering the non-appearance of anything more than that which is ‘like a lining’ in Kristeva’s frame, Derrida’s attention to the lexicon of devourment as that which inheres in the law, rather than that which is expelled as its abjected fear, opens a path to the hungry heart of the law:

Devourment, vociferation, there, in the figure of the figure, in the face, smack in the mouth, but also in the figure as trope, there’s the figure of figure, vociferating devourment or devouring vociferation. The one, vociferation, exteriorizes what is eaten, devoured, or interiorized: the other, conversely or simultaneously, i.e. devourment, interiorizes what is exteriorized or proffered.⁸⁸

While the Woman barely utters any words throughout the film, in contrast to the extraction of ‘thank you’, she recognizes Peggy’s pregnancy with the word, with her vociferation of ‘mother’. That is the term that is carried, the one that she circulates.89

Suddenly the kennel is no longer a space in which a bloody spectacle can be secured on one side of the cage only nor designated as that over which men have authorial direction. The Woman appears in the door to the kennels with her face returned to being filthy, now not blackened but reddened with consanguineous blood drawing a maternal line.⁹⁰ She swiftly fells Brian with a sharp piece of metal. As her teeth were strong enough to sever Cleek’s finger earlier in the film, now her bare hand can penetrate his torso and pull out his beating heart. Taking a cursory bite out of this heart, which event, for the sake of the vengeance-driven horror, is visible and mortifyingly comprehensible to the father who dies in and of his punishment, the Woman then lets the now truly heartless father collapse.

If devourment and vociferation give the figure of the figure that is a face to the Woman and brings her, la bête, into a substitutive position with both Belle and Cleek, another creature remains virtually muzzled. Consistent with ‘the dogs’, the film gives no diegetic name to the sightless creature that, sniffing the air, follows the Woman out of the kennels on all fours. It is unclear how best to refer to her. The credits and novel refer to her as ‘Socket’. She has no eyes, only sockets. The name contracts to the singular: Socket. Perhaps ‘Anopthalmia’ is her proper name, rooting her in congenital blindness, but ‘Socket’ is a pet name, a diminutive, suggestive of a sock puppet. The sucker punch is a boxing move that the boxer doesn’t see coming because it lands instead of the one that was only a bluff (perhaps he was too busy suckling at the breast, like a baby). Here it turns into a ‘socket punch’. This singular wound inflicted upon the eyes summons imagery for which the psychoanalytic mainstay of castration is unavoidable. Fixing the sign of castration to that which cannot be overcome – blindness as congenital fault – works very hard indeed against any conceptual shift.⁹¹ Wolfe once levered Derrida’s revaluation of ‘being able to suffer’ as the weak ability that would confound the old hierarchy of ability versus privation and thereby affirm a new and generalizable condition of the living. In his acute argument this would allow for the ‘disabled’ to become newly inscribed as those that might expose the humanist fantasy of exhaustive vision, and thus ‘see’ the truth of vision now revealed as necessarily partial.92 The Woman, however, contracts the beast-woman to being strictly incapable of sight. Blind, animalized, castrated: she can never stand upright; she will never command moral uprightness or rectitude, never survey a domain but will remain in the stink of terrain. ‘Her shame’ comes out of the kennels, levelled by fault, by shame, by what Luce Irigaray called the ‘blindspot in an old dream of symmetry’. That ‘Socket’ emerges slowly and with curiosity into the fresh air, a space and a feel that we can assume she has never before encountered, that this signals a gentler pace, heads into another form of decoy for those following the threads of disability, animality and the feminine.

Figure 3.3 Pet (The Woman, 2013, Dir. Lucky Mckee, USA).

Two gestures in the closing sequence rapidly choreograph the domestic theatre of raising animals. Released from the cellar, the Woman’s vertical ascension into the light and into her bloody substitution of her self for the face and the heart of the family contrast with Socket’s off-leash ostensible freedom. With two spaces of containment sundered and two captives liberated, together with the visceral shock that one of ‘the dogs’ was another daughter, one might expect them both to transcend their conditions. However, only the ‘animal’ in the cellar returns to light, a process already given a toehold with the scalding water: she is lightened as she ascends. But when the Woman encounters Socket, she sees her not as someone to be returned to humanity but as something to be domesticated. This new family is forged – just like the old one – with the sacrifice of animal kinship, as Oliver notes.93 Economically, with one swift disciplinary strike to Socket’s head – issued with the hand holding the heart rather than the one with the improvised sword – the woman and The Woman retain Socket within an immanent pethood. The sign ‘pet’ contains the abject threat of Socket, a sign accepted with the reward of the heart, albeit a heart that is now downgraded to the status of ‘scraps’. As cast-off scraps, the heart no longer carries the charge of totemic substitution but organizes domestication as a lower order.⁹⁴

The second gesture, also achieved economically in an otherwise speechless scene, occurs when the Woman approaches the house, with Socket now ambling along at her heel. Darlin’ rushes out to greet the Woman, to Peggy’s palpable terror (and we should note that Darlin’ has been consistently addressed with this diminutive ‘pet’ name throughout the film – never as ‘Darleen’). But Darlin’ fearlessly offers this guest a drink of water in perfect hospitality: she has never recognized the Woman as a hostage. She gulps it down but pays no attention to the blood smeared all over her face and hand, offering her bloody finger to Darlin’. The very girl who had mimed Cleek’s injury in the cellar as both victim and perpetrator now licks the blood and smacks her lips. Where unruly bloody issue might more habitually call up the threatening pollution of abject menstrual blood and the stench of that image cannot be erased given the mother’s demise, this blood, we know, is that of Darlin’s father. This blood is that which has been made to flow; it is the blood of cruelty.⁹⁵

Consanguineous, the Woman, Darlin’ and Peggy head off into the woods, their new family replete with pet. As such we must raise doubts as to this feeding of the limits of the Family. Oliver’s caution that the potential trophe (nourishment) that Derrida affirms within limitrophy can always lodge instead in a trophy such that ‘nourishment is always at some level also conquest’ stands here.⁹⁶ Even if the architecture of the House is sacrificed along with its paternal and maternal figures, the question of the Animal recurs.

Coda: Non-powers of horror

As if in oblique acknowledgement of the murderous character of the film’s denouement, the bloody nature of the new Family, and the limited degree to which the structure of that Family shakes the structures of violence that it ordains, The Woman has a secret ending.97 After all the credits have rolled, and thus in a location ambiguously inside and outside the film, an animated cartoon-like fairy tale sequence returns us to Darlin’, as if the mobile psychic journey of the polymorphous little girl was or should have been central all along. On a quest, in a little boat at sea, Darlin’ sees signs of life on an island that draws her curiosity. As she does within the body of the film, Darlin’ greets those that others fear, fearlessly. In this post-scriptum she can give another category-defying entity – a tree-woman-beast living being – flowers, without having to lay them outside a locked door or having her gift forbidden by another. In this case no blood flows, but the two creatures greet each other with a smile.