Sex Death and Psychiatrists: monstrous genre and audience complicity in Asylum and Hannibal

Conference Paper, given 18th January 2016 ‘Asylums, Pathologies and the Themes of Madness: Patrick McGrath and his Gothic Contemporaries’, at the University of Stirling. Sex, Death and Psychiatrists: monstrous genre and audience complicity in Asylum and Hannibal. Evan Hayles Gledhill University of Reading e.haylesgledhill@pgr.reading.ac.uk My paper focuses on Patrick McGrath’s novel Asylum (1996) and Bryan Fuller’s television adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter novels, Hannibal, which ran for three seasons from 2013-15. Looking at the intersection between monstrous content and monstrous form in the text itself I have taken as my starting point Jack Halberstam’s excellent exploration of the monstrous form Skin Shows. This book’s exploration of the technologies of ‘making monstrous’, in both textual and psychoanalytic terms, is ideally suited to texts about monstrous psychiatrists. Let’s begin with a discussion of the form of the text, its means of presenting the monstrous, before exploring the ‘sex, death and psychiatry’ that forms the content. That the form of the tale affects our reading of the content is as clear as our knowledge that the form of the body affects our interpretations of the personality and actions of the individual. How else can we tell who is the monster, and who the hero? This is only possible if a norm has been established against which deviance can be measured. But where does the ‘norm’ come from, and does anyone really conform? These questions are, as it were, ‘baked in’ to the Gothic, particularly through monstrously constructed texts, patched together from multiple narrators and multiple memories, such as Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, and The Turn of the Screw. This paper explores the disruption and exploitation of expectations of genre, and the reader/audience dynamic, in fictions about psychotics, psychoanalysts, adulterers, and murderers – and characters who may very well be all four. Form and function in these gothic works are analysed, exacted, and reconfigured within the texts themselves; like the bodies of the victims, and the psyches of the characters, everything is up for analysis. Just who is taking whom to pieces? Reader? Author? Scientist? Psychiatrist? Or Monster? And how do we know which is which? As Halberstam observes of Frankenstein; ‘the form of the novel is its monstrosity; its form opens out onto excess because, like the monster of the story, the sum of the novels parts exceed the whole.’ i The very text itself is as ‘over-determined’, as pregnant with meaning, as the monster it contains. Frankenstein is one example in a rich tradition of Gothic texts that employ various structural devices to undermine or re-contextualise their main protagonist’s version of events. This may serve to insulate the reader from horror, putting a figurative – or in Frankenstein’s case, geographical – distance between them and the monster. Or framing devices and multiple narrators can protect the author, by providing a moralist ‘gloss’ to justify gore and immorality. Asylum and Hannibal are both ‘self-consciously’ gothic texts, aware of this history of framing and reframing, but what is reframed in this modern gothic is not so much the events, but the characters themselves. Frankenstein and Dracula very clearly identify their monsters, and the framing devices promise some distance between the reader and their corrupting touch. However, in the texts under discussion, the reframing that the multiplication of narrative voices provides takes us into the heart of monstrosity, and makes us question whether we might not have something of the monster in us all. We, the readers, construct the monster just as much as the writer: ‘textual production itself is responsible for generating monsters.’ii Asylum, set in the early sixties, is the story of a brief affair between a psychiatrist’s wife, Stella Raphael, and a psychiatric patient with a violent past, Edgar Stark, and the ramifications of these events for Stella and her family. The events are narrated by the psychiatrist treating Stark, Peter Crane, who is both highly aware of his own mediation, and determined to manipulate his reader as he has, perhaps, certain events within the narrative. McGrath’s novel, according to critics, reads like literary fiction, described by the New York Times as having ‘elegance and discretion’iii, yet it treats its audience like knowing connoisseurs of the gothic, and of horror, with its structural tensions. Crane constantly hints at what Stark did to his wife’s corpse. The build-up of textual hints contributes to a picture of Stark that focuses upon his psychiatric diagnosis, his dangerousness. This tension lead us as readers to expect more and more gore, more lascivious details. Yet, at the final reveal, Stark’s final indignity upon his wife’s body tells us nothing about sex and death, but much more about Stark’s psychopathology as perpetrator, and the perspective of Crane as story-teller. McGrath’s novel was adapted into a film in 2005, which removed the framing device of the psychiatrist’s narration, filming the events ‘straightforwardly’ – yet, with key changes to dialogue and character. Stella’s husband Max is presented as a domineering bully, Edgar a young and rather glamorous Byronic love interest. Without the novel’s narration, the camera becomes the arbiter of reality. A seemingly independent mechanical witness to the certainty of events that simply unfold, having no real meaning beyond family tragedy. What is lacking from the film is a monster. In the novel we have many monsters to pick from. Stark is an obvious choice, as a murderer, and, perhaps, manipulative seducer. Stella herself maybe, as a Medea-like monstrous mother. Or we could view Crane as the monster – a Svengali manipulating events to his own ends. The text never resolves the guilt or pins down the motivation of any of them. Each telling each other only portions of their own stories, and each negotiating the power dynamics of that telling; between asylum inmate and psychiatrist, lover and benefactor. The film loses the complexity of the original, we see only a tragic love story gone wrong - melodrama, not Gothic. While the gothic may always be melodramatic, but melodrama is not necessarily gothic. Hannibal, on the other hand, takes a melodramatic detective thriller and makes it gothic. The source novels for Hannibal are written in third person omniscient narration; the hunter and the hunted, FBI profilers, cannibal psychiatrist, and murderers, each getting their turn as the focus. The audience is not supposed to detect a filter mediating this telling. These books are full of action; the FBI profilers are men of action compared to the complacent psychiatrists. Reflecting the beliefs of the criminalists in Harris’s background research. Though the fictions become increasingly bizarre, as the monstrosity of Hannibal Lecter is revealed, the objective stance of the omniscient narrative voice maintains a distance from the protagonists. The more Harris writes Hannibal, the more central the monster became to the narrative, the more gothic the texts became. As though the monster insisted upon escaping into his own genre, from the thriller to the gothic. Fuller’s adaptation, as the title suggests, centres monstrosity from the start though it also develops from police procedural, into grand guinol epic. The series allows multiple versions of events and emotional responses to be explored in the psychiatrist’s chair from the perspective of the multiple protagonists. We see Will Graham consult with the FBI, Graham in session with Lecter, then Lecter in session with his own therapist Bedelia DuMaurier, alongside scenes of all of them discussing the nature of their work and their personal psychology amongst themselves and with other behavioural and psychological experts. Fuller also adds interludes of dreamlike unreality, which, intercut with the depiction of Will Graham’s experience of disordered time and memory due to encephalitis, undermines the seeming impartiality of the camera’s gaze. The use of techniques such as lens flare, slow motion and fades calls attention to the presence of the camera as mediator. Fuller’s adaptation, like Crane’s version of Stella and Edgar’s affair is a Frankenstein creation, patched together from parts of the original, found parts, and outside influences. Asylum and Hannibal are texts in which characters discuss their manipulations of others, in which the author/creator makes constant allusion to their fictional and constructed nature. As Crane states unambiguously; ‘I was convinced I was the man best qualified to treat her. And while bringing her back to the hospital might seem unorthodox, or even, given the circumstances, positively dangerous, I was in a position now to make it happen.’iv In the third season of Hannibal, Will, Hannibal, and Bedelia frequently discuss the boundaries between observation and participation in events. How much of a victim is Bedelia or Will, and how much a participant in Hannibal’s murderous activities? Are the audience to remain unsullied with the claim ‘it’s only fiction’ when we actively seek out and enjoy the monster and their crimes? These are creators teasing their audience, cross-examining their audience. These are playfully, self-consciously gothic works. They seek to implicate their audiences into the construction of monsters. To return to Halberstam, the text is ‘a monster that must be identified, decoded, captured, and consumed.’v These key words define the content and form of Asylum and Hannibal. Within the main thrust of the narratives the dangerous ‘other’, the mentally unstable murderer, must be identified, captured, and decoded. But there is also a character who wants to ‘consume’ this other romantically, cannibalistically, or to package them for consumption by others as case study or news report – Dr Peter Crane, Dr Max Raphael, Dr Hannibal Lecter, Dr Frederick Chilton. This sets up a disturbingly cyclical production line for the monster; identification by the ‘expert’ leads to capture, capture to decoding, and the decoding is consumed, enabling the expert to become better at identification – or at least, to justify their actions. These characters are not heroic, they are more often parasitical, feeding off the stories of others. The gothic genre seems to bite back at its audience, comfortably analysing at a distance from the threat and the horror, confident in their identification of the ‘other’ as monster. The complicity of the reader is structured into the form. However, the content also ‘bites back’. As mentioned before, Crane taunts us with the gruesome details of Mrs Stark’s murder. When we finally know what happened, we see Edgar Stark’s actions as a searching for monstrosity, that in turn makes monstrosity. Stark carved away at his wife’s face, putting out her eyes. He does something similar to the clay bust of his lover Stella; carving away incessantly, to reveal an inner truth of likeness. Does Crane not do this to his patients through psychoanalysis, leading them through the logic of their delusions to find a kernel of ‘truth’? In Halberstam’s reading; The moment of uncovering […] the moment when the skin is drawn back, the secrets of the flesh exposed, that moment is cinematic in its linking of seeing and knowing, vision and pleasure, power and punishment. The making visible of bodies, sex, power, and desire provokes a new monstrosity.vi It is this ‘new monstrosity’ that motivates Crane’s psychoanalysis. He taunts his readers with the reveal of Stark’s murder, the suggestion of sexual perversion, a superficial shock of body horror. Leading us to imagine Stark as animalistic, brutish; attacking the body of his wife as a sexualised object, not viewing her as an individual. Once the nature of Stark’s attack is made clear it seems more a murder intimately connected to her identity, rather than her body. Why is Crane so eager to link Stark’s crime to a sexualised pathology? To make sex, and the sexualised parts of the body, more visible? Mrs Stark’s violated body is the threat hanging over Stella. It is the titillation offered by the cheap slasher film that allows its audience to gaze upon a naked woman even as that woman suffers and dies. This is horror – a mutilated woman held up for cheap thrills. Crane’s own exploitation of this narrative of exploitation is yet another violence done against the woman in question – a misrepresentation of her reality and self. Edgar carved at his wife’s face until ‘you wouldn’t know what it was, but for the teeth, and a few clumps of matted hair.’vii He reduced and removed her humanity, not her womanhood. This is a crucial difference. This is McGrath’s skill in undermining our expectations of Crane as narrator, making us re-consider events that we had taken for granted, interpretations that had seemed logical and wellevidenced. What McGrath deconstructs, through his exploration of Crane’s reliability as a narrator, is the social structure that privileges men’s perspectives. Sherryl Vint western humanist society makes white masculinity normative by projecting ‘all that is “body” onto the marked bodies of others.’viii The disabled and women, the racialised ‘other’; as these bodies ‘otherness’ becomes more visible, so the white man’s particular viewpoint as a racial, gendered perspective goes unnoticed. Asylum’s plot is driven by men’s need to control women’s emotional responses, and yet have women validate their emotions. McGrath alludes to this repeatedly. All women in this text are brutalised by men, physically or emotionally, except those who adapt to live within the system, quite literally the asylum, as recovering patients or staff wives. McGrath recognises that class experience is also weighted and determined very much by gender. That no one hearing Edgar’s wife’s dying screams in their terraced street came to intervene speaks to an expected level of normalised violence for working class women. Crane is, unlike Dr Raphael, dangerously visible within this system; unmarried, and an aesthete. Prior to Stella’s appearance, he had no motivation to control women’s emotional response, and in fact spends most of his time provoking a man’s emotional response – that of Edgar Stark. Crane suggests he is suspected of homosexuality by Edgar and Stella, but is this his own paranoia? Crane wants to convince us that Stella’s feelings for Edgar are a form of mad obsession, rather than true love. He wants us to be sympathetic to her boredom with Max, but also support a reinstatement of the gilded cage of middle-class propriety by his own hand: I would surely make daily life a cultivated, amusing affair, for she knew she need not fear some ghastly revelation of grubby habits, petty cruelties, unforeseen rigidities; she knew I was in no sense a shabby man. No, she could live with me. She was less sure about sleeping with me.ix Why would anyone choose the potential violence of a passionate Edgar Stark over the comfortable civilization of Peter Crane? As Halberstam observes in the gothic, characters ‘both fear and desire the monster’s monstrosity … they desire it because it releases them from the constraints of an ordered life and they fear it because it reveals the flimsy nature of human identity’.x Stella no longer wants back her human identity, and neither does Stark. To be human, here defined as to be sane, is to be constrained by a system that does damage to them both. Stark went searching for his wife’s humanity, and found only a monster of his own creation. Crane is desperately hanging on to his status as human. By the end of the novel we suspect him of manipulating the narrative, and events within it, to shore up his perspective of himself, and others’ perspectives of him. He is the only one who benefits from the events – a promotion, a fascinating case study, and, almost, an elegant and beautiful wife. In Hannibal, we again see the tools of psychoanalysis used to establish patriarchal control, and to attempt to analyse and mitigate its excesses. The series opens with psychiatry in its role as mitigation. Will Graham is a tortured genius of a criminal analyst, his ‘empathy disorder’ meaning that he understands the psychology of the murderer behind the crimes. Will’s manager, Jack Crawford of the FBI, asks psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter to report on Will’s fragile mental state to ensure that the work is not causing too much damage to his own psyche. The analysts are clearly on the side of the angels. And yet, the audience can hardly be unaware of Hannibal’s true nature as one of the most famous villains of 20th century fiction and film. We are here, as the internet says, for this. Like Crane, Hannibal is dangerously visible: a flamboyant dandy, and an aesthete who prefers the harpischord to the piano, and composes on a theramin, a foreigner in America. Will’s capacity for empathy with the most extreme monsters means that Hannibal has finally found ‘the possibility of friendship’, as he says to his own therapist Bedelia. Frankenstein and monster are bound together in Hannibal, as he attempts to seduce Will into his murderous lifestyle. Hannibal is not, as Crane seems to be, manipulating to retain his place within the patriarchy. No, Hannibal uses his ability to be invisible, as a middle-class white man, to achieve ends very far removed from the structures of society. Under suspicion, he is able to confuse the system by providing other overly-visible white men in his place; planting false evidence to incriminate first Will, made visible by his ‘disability’, and then Dr Frederick Chilton, made visible also through dandified manners and love of attention. Will becomes, morally, a monster and Chilton physically so. Will embraces his monstrosity, under Hannibal’s tutelage, to embody the worst humanity has to offer. They are educated, empathic, cultured, murderers. They are white male privilege personified, elevating itself above the ‘livestock’ everyone else represents. The audience’s investment in their developing intimacy implicitly condones their anti-hero status, as the psychiatrists make clear in their constant analysis on screen. Despite their violent adventures, they remain aesthetically attractive, with barely a scar. Chilton, however, becomes physically monstrous as a punishment, delivered by Will and Hannibal in tandem. The punishment is for wanting to be the wrong kind of monster; Will says ‘the divine punishment of a sinner mirrors the sin being punished […] He wanted the world to know his face.’ Chilton wants power, attention, veneration, making the systems that ‘hide’ white men too obvious. His flaunts mediocrity as success. Chilton is a warning to the audience; ‘do not try this at home’. The psychiatrist who ends up with the promotion, the beautiful wife, and the fascinating case study is a woman. Dr Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas) is, arguably, the least manipulative psychiatrist featured on the show; conservative in her evaluations, she does not rush to judgement. Alana develops from a gentle university teacher, softly feminine in wrap dresses, to a fiercely styled power lesbian, running a maximum security institution. Alana is a gay man’s revenge fantasy, complete with Joan Crawford references.xi Hannibal, as an unexpectedly traditional gothic text, wants to have ‘its cake and eat it’: revelling in its gore and excess, but attempting a little moralising too. McGrath and Fuller layer interpretation and narration through the ultimate arbiter of monstrosity, and thus humanity, in the modern world – the psychiatrist. Halberstam points out that psychological explanations for human behaviour are an effect of patriarchal tradition,xii linking this to Steven Shaviro’s reading of a ‘humanist thrust’ to psychoanalysis that believes “our desires are primarily ones for possession, plenitude, stability and reassurance.”xiii The psychiatrists in these stories show the dangers of these desires taken to the extreme, as they are motivated by power, control, excess and devotion. And by being human; as Stella report’s ‘“Max says psychiatry attracts people with high anxiety about going mad.’xiv In making us readers aware of the manipulation that the text is attempting, and making this itself part of the enjoyable practice of reading, we are drawn into the cycle: identified, decoded, captured, and consumed. i Judith [Jack] Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, (London: Duke Univerity Press, 1995), p.31 ii Halberstam, p31 iii Michael Wood, ‘Mad Love’, The New York Times, 23 February 1997, <https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/02/23/reviews/970223.23woodlt.html> [accessed 12 October 2015] iv McGrath, Asylum, (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 204 v Halberstam, p.51 vi Halberstam, p.174 vii McGrath, p.232 viii Sherryl Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007) p.184. ix McGrath, p.228 x Halberstam, p.112 xi Lara Pudom, ‘Hannibal Finale Postmortem: Bryan Fuller Breaks Down That Bloody Ending and Talks Revival Chances’, Variety, August 29 2015, http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/hannibal-finale-season-4-movierevival-ending-spoilers-1201581424/ [accessed 12 December 2015] xii Halberstam, p.78 xiii Quoted in Halberstam, p.154 xiv McGrath, p.7