Queers From Outer Space.

Current philosophical investigations into the nature of human existence, and the ways in which the human body can be perceived to have moved beyond its stable biological grounding, provides many new avenues to venture down when viewing films. Cinema is arguably the most effective way to portray potential deviances in the biological make-up of the human, as cutting edge make-up, animatronic creature effects, and computer simulation provide countless different paths of visual potentialities. The creation of the post-human allows us to realise the unlimited potential of our own bodies, whether in terms of physicality, mentality, sexuality, or cybernetics. Cinema provides one of the keys to unlocking the potential within us, allowing us to see into the future towards the multiplicities of human existence. I am going to look at two films, ‘Female Trouble’ (John Waters 1974) and ‘The Thing’ (John Carpenter 1982), to see how they both provide different ways of transforming identity within a cinematic medium.

The underlying theme, which I feel is integral to most theories of becoming post-human, is the issue of identity, and how we are affected by the potential alterations to our bodies, whether theoretical, or seeing their creation on the cinema screen. Are we still the same after absorbing these ideas, or have we fundamentally changed because this knowledge is now implanted within us, and cannot be extracted?

The tenets of identity are potentially very unstable, especially within post-humanism based studies. What is it that defines our identity? Identity can be placed within the mind of the beholder, and also in the mind of others; the identity that you have of yourself may be radically different to that which others have of you in their minds. If fifty people agree on one aspect of your identity and you disagree, who is right? Identity can also be based around physicality; whether you are male, female, black white, tall, short etc. But again these classifications may come under fire. Someone may dispute the description of their own appearance, preferring to be associated with a different term, which may have different connotations to different people and different cultural institutions. Language puts identity at its mercy, as constantly evolving names and categories blur the boundaries between physical classifications further and further. People also define themselves by their actions. People performing great humanitarian deeds and others committing great atrocities will be cast in the pages of history as either a saint or a sinner. But what if something is later revealed that sheds new light on these people decades after they have been ingrained in cultural history? Will their identity change overnight or will it take time for a new historical opinion to be formed, either way, even after our death our identities are still subject to change.

As Judith Butler has identified, we also perform our identities. Sex, referring to the biological differences between male and female physiology, and gender, the traits that define male and female identities in different cultures and societies, are subverted in countless ways across the world in every different section of societies hierarchy. Sexuality also plays a big part in the equation. What happens to straight and gay men’s identity when they prefers to dress as a woman, and what happens to a straight and gay women’s identity when they enjoy dressing as men? As Foucault established in “The History of Sexuality” the medical establishment in the 17th century began investigating and cataloguing deviant sexual practices and behaviour, bringing them to the forefront of popular discourse and simultaneously confining them to ’a shadow existence’ (1976: 35)

‘We are dealing less with a discourse on sex than with a multiplicity of
discourses produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in
different institutions’ (ibid.)

At this point, it is useful to bring Queer theory into the equation. Queer theory has evolved out of the discourse surrounding the ‘mismatches between sex, gender and desire’ (Jagose 1992: 3) and queer cinema ‘explores the perverse and the deviant within the sexual domain’ (Cook 2007: 505). Queer is the tag given to people and situations that don’t fit comfortably into the classical heteronormative standard which most of the 20th century’s cultural landscape has been built on. Capitalist society needs people to stay in comfortable pigeon holes so that it can attempt to control them. ‘Power can only be maintained insofar as it relies on the semiologies of signification’ (Guattari 1996: 143), and when individuals transform their original significations by challenging peoples preconceived ideas of sex and gender, the less power the capitalist machine has over them. This also means that it is harder for other people to fix a stable identity to someone who is destabilising their appearance, which applies not only to people you may see on the street but also problematises film spectatorship as well. Queer identities call into question ‘conventional understandings of sexual identity’ (ibid.: 97) and attempts to resist definitions of the “normal”, by subverting personal configurations of sex and gender through performativity.

‘Queerness has been set up to challenge and break apart conventional categories, not to become one itself’ (Doty 1993 xv)

The more we look below the surface, ‘The Great Family of Man’ (Barthes 1957: 100) seems to be less of a family and more of a multiplicity of disparate individuals all trying to create their own post-human identities within the larger cultural community. Whether in terms of sexuality, race, gender or political views, everybody has a right to be whoever or whatever they want, but the further they stray from the norm of the white, heterosexual family unit, the more restless the capitalist machine gets.

As we have seen, identity is not an easy subject to pin down, and can be altered by any number of outside influences. I believe one such cultural artefact, the film ‘Female Trouble’, provides a number of ways in which human sex, gender, sexuality and identity can be reconfigured, and that in viewing the film, the audiences own identity is reworked as well. I feel the film subverts normal cinematic arrangements of sex and gender paradigms, and provides a counterpoint to established heteronormative relationships which are displayed, viewed and assimilated by popular culture.

The initial and most obvious attempt at subversion is the use of Divine as the main character. Divine is a drag queen also known as Harris Glenn Milstead, appearing in other films by John Waters including ‘Mondo Trasho’ (1969) and the infamous ‘Pink Flamingos’ (1972), and had a strong on and off screen persona that was very visually engaging, from his extravagant make-up and outfits to his over the top and unsubtle acting style. Straying from the more established “dominant male” lead seen in much of cinema, Divine is a antagonistic, confrontational character who speaks and acts with little regard for good taste and eschews most moral standards that most of society bases its actions on. This can be seen in the film when Divine rages at her parents during Christmas for not getting her the right pair of shoes, the out of marriage conception and the hate and disgust directed at her child; all of which causes the audience to be disgusted at her actions, and also possibly at the filmmaker for attempting to make this obnoxious person the initial means of identification within the film. When coupled with the fact that we are presented with a man dressing as a woman, viewing the film becomes a troublesome experience when attempting to assign identities to who we see.

As Judith Butler identifies, ‘bodies are gendered from the start of their social existence’ (2004: 91), and ‘gender is the repeated stylisation of the body’ (ibid.). We are trained from the moment we enter society to only recognise heterosexual male and female identities, as these are the two elements that bring about the reproduction of the human species. Anything deviating from that norm is treated with suspicion, inequality and sometimes confronted with hatred and violence. The film portrays Divine’s gender as completely natural, as the film follows Divine from her youth, beginning with her time in school. But Divine continually rages against all normative structures such as the schooling system, her parents, her child and the father of her child, seemingly reversing the aggressiveness aimed at ‘deviant sexualities’ in the real world.

Butler also says that gender is performed by the body, it is a “doing” rather than a “being”, which implies that what we originally believe to be internally established is an external aesthetic choice on our behalf. The boundary between internal and external is blurred by Divine’s performance, embodying an unfamiliarity which causes fear and uncertainty in those who look, as they are seeing something “other” than the established male/female options which are the basis for society. This fear can also be linked to desire within the viewer, as seeing a cross-dresser can question the internally established role of desire for the opposite sex. A man viewing a man dressed as a woman is simultaneously confronted with both male and female signifiers, such as fake breasts, nail extensions and possibly a wig, but also anatomical signifiers such as the adam’s apple, and the structure of the jaw and hands, which are visibly different in male and female bodies. If a heterosexual man is aroused by the sight of this person, then he will surely have to ask himself whether it is the male, female or the combination of the two identities that causes his desire. It is this ambiguity of sexual identity that causes the most problems for heteronormative identities. The film seems unashamed to present these ideas to us and appears to want to shock us out of the sexual impasse that we appear to have reached.

Female Trouble causes further problems for individuals viewing unstable identities. When viewing cinematic representations, our own identity is put to one side and we are forced to gaze upon the images with a new identity assigned to us. As Laura Mulvey has famously identified, decades of Hollywood cinema has created a viewing mode that forces identification to the male protagonist and assigns the audience a male gaze. This identification makes the woman the erotic object of desire, but also symbolises the difference and lack present in the woman which threatens to castrate the male. Because cinema can be seen to assign a male gaze to the audience, female viewers are re-gendered and forced to look at fellow females in a “unnatural” way. Popular cinema is therefore unwittingly embodying the kind of subversive non-straight ideas that it tries so hard to repress by displaying dominant heteronormative relationships. This has been addressed by queer theorists in the creation of queer spectatorship. Queer spectatorship looks for non-straight ideas embedded within classical film narratives, such as seeing ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (Victor Fleming 1939) as ‘a mytho-epic journey from heteronormative mundanity into queer difference’ (Farmer 2004: 2) and allows people to refashion mainstream cinema to create more wide-ranging and non-normative interpretations, by using gossip about stars sexuality and transcending genres such as the western with queer subtexts.

Female Trouble is not the only film to feature cross-dressing (for example ‘Tootsie’ (Sydney Pollack 1982) and ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ (Chris Columbus 1993)), but it is probably one of the only films that feature a cross-dresser as a main character, rather than a character who cross-dresses as part of the film’s narrative, and it is surely the only to feature such strong and persistent sexual displays. This means that rather than seeing a character visibly switch between genders within the course of a film, Divine embodies both male and female identities. As mentioned earlier, this causes problems for males and females viewing an individual performing their identity. The uncertain desire that it creates threatens stable sexual boundaries, and forcibly places the viewer within a queer spectatorship.

Mary Ann Warren writes that ‘in patriarchal social systems, woman’s sexuality is the property of men’ (1986: 143). This ideology could be seen to be subverted within ‘Female Trouble’, as Divine could be seen to possess both sexualities, therefore having ownership and control over both, so there is no need for another partner of the opposite sex to surrender one of his/her sexes to. This is further embodied in the film in the scene where Divine has sexual intercourse with a man she meets after running away from home. The man is actually Divine without drag, and the scene is edited with the use of stand-ins to give the impression that they are making love, which is only apparent if you are familiar with Divines true identity or if you pay attention at the end credits. Divines desire for her own queer identity results in her having sex with herself so that she does not submit her sexuality to another man, and to dominant patriarchal ideologies.

This also presents a situation where a single human individual is reproducing without the aid of a physically separate partner, similar to the way that single cell organisms multiply with only one parent. These ideas can be read in Elizabeth Grosz’s work in her readings of Lingis. As we effectively see the same body having sex with itself, we can interpret the act as creating a single body, containing a series of intensities continually passing over and through the body, in an act of erotic desire. During this act of self love ‘the subjects body ceases to be a body, to become the site of provocations and reactions, the site of intensive disruptions’ (Grosz 1995: 198). I believe this action transcends the boundaries of onscreen sex and is the most powerfully disruptive moment in the film, as it embodies the threat to the classical values we base our ideas of sex, gender and identity. What are the connotations of seeing a biological man, performing an alternative gender as a woman have sexual relations with another man, who is actually himself, resulting in the production of a child.

‘Female Trouble’ is a queer text, containing queer characters destabilising their sex and gender and refusing to be contained by dominant social ideologies. As I established earlier, the grounds for confirming identity are not stable to begin with, but when watching ’Female Trouble’ we are able to witness many more potential ways in which people outside of the dominant social field perform and willingly deconstruct their own identity. Queerness allows you to break out of normative classifications to let you create your own identity. Whether you are male, female, gay or straight, you can decide to be whatever and whoever you want. As Harry Glenn Milstead performing Divine in real life, and as Divine performs as herself in the film, she transcends the boundaries of normal identification from reality to cinematic representation, forcing viewers to look and try to label her. But whatever identity we try to assign her, he/she will surely refute it and take one more step to blur the boundaries.

John Carpenters “The Thing” (1982) is a remake of a film of the same name released in 1951. It tells the story of a research team living in an Antarctic base who come into contact with a formless alien who has the ability to imitate the physical appearance of anyone it comes into contact with. These films move away from the small town America setting present in other films such as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956) which slowly show the effects of an alien invasion on a small town community, to a confined claustrophobic setting, that puts the few characters and their emotions up against each other, to stop the alien before it destroys everybody.

In the genre of body horror, the narratives told are of ‘human subjects dismantled and demolished’ (Hurley 1995: 205), the audience are placed before a spectacle of seeing the human body manipulated by forces outside our natural realms of reality. Aliens, diseases and monster films all play on the individual’s fear of the loss of identity at the hands of the “other”. The “others” creation and eventual destruction sends the fears that it represents back into the individuals unconscious. These films allows the spectator to recognise the nature and extent of his/her repressed “monstrous” desires (ibid.) created by social and cultural conditioning.

“Female Trouble” works from the basis that identity is formed from a sexual and gender based perspective, and that you are who you appear to be based on whether you are male or female or straight or homosexual. “The Thing” and body horror films in general bases identity around a persons ability to their own sentient thoughts and control over their physical body. In these films, an individual is also constituted by their memories and the past, as the threat of losing these personal territories to an alien invader seems to be the greatest fear imaginable, as seen by the frenzied attempts of Dr Miles Bennell to alert the population to the threat of the pod people in ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’.

This creates a tension between the internal and the external identity of an individual; the physical body under threat by the assimilating alien, losing the ability to control your own motor functions, and the loss of access to your experiences and memories to something imperceptibly inhabiting your outer form amongst friends and family. I feel that the loss of identity can be most effectively established when read with the ideas raised by Henri Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari and Walter Benjamin in mind, in a way that allows the film, and body horror in general, to be viewed in a more creative and engaging way, bringing many more ideas to the foreground that may potentially be lost with its descent into the realms of genre film analysis.

Walter Benjamin, in his essay “On Language as Such, and the Language of Man”, outlines his theory of language. He claims that ‘the linguistic being of all things is their language’ (1916: 63), and that ‘man therefore communicates his own mental being by naming all other things’ (ibid, 64), claiming that God left the creative power of naming to Man after creation. Man’s relationships with the objects surrounding him are based on their language, on their names that are communicable through language. The very title of the film “The Thing” implies something unknowable and unnameable, and from the outset of the film we begin fearing the possibilities of something that is unknown to the language of man. We could interpret “The Thing” as presenting an unknown entity, something not from God, but from the darkest regions of space. Man’s evolution is intercepted by this entity and he attempts to “name” the alien, but is confronted by Man himself (the alien in human form). This combination of human and alien language is what causes fear in the characters and the audience, the inability to name what is right in front of us, presenting something not from God, something God could not create.

Language can also be interpreted as a virus, which ‘is a message who’s only order is to repeat itself’ (Shaviro 1995: 40). Language invades our world with names and descriptions of objects, words desperate to be kept in use, which have infiltrated our everyday lives. The alien life form presumably has no language of its own, or if it does, it is one we will barely be able to comprehend, and during the film proceeds to use our language against us. As the thing mutates itself into human forms, it uses the language present in the human bodies as its own, therefore making it almost impossible for the non-infected members of the team to tell who has been assimilated. This creates an image of two separate viruses battling each Man; of the infected human bodies, and the use of human language, to hide the alien presence while the remaining team members try to destroy it.

In the book “Creative Evolution” Henri Bergson developed a theory that attempted to provide the missing links in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin developed the theory of natural selection: animals and plants growing physically different over multiple generations to adapt with higher functionality to the certain surroundings they inhabit; ensuring the survival of individual species. To fill in the gaps within Darwin’s theories, Bergson developed the idea of “genetic energy”, which is contained within living structures, and the use of expenditures of energy at certain instants to advance its organic form. The energy is then recouped by the organism for the next required expenditure and its next advancement to maintain its survival.

“The Thing” can be seen as the spark of genetic energy that instigates the human form to take a new route containing evolutionary potential. It provides a possible alternative route to human evolution, albeit one forced upon us by outside influences. We begin the film with the alien being recovered by the American team in the form of two seemingly intertwined, mutated bodies, which gives us a hint at the potential threat to our individual human forms. Soon after, we realise the alien has been present in the form of a dog, which proceeds in an venture to assimilate the other dogs on the base. This scene provides us with our first look of the alien, but we soon realise that this is not its true form. The alien reveals itself during it’s becoming-dog, and reveals the multiplicities of its existence; continually forming and reforming different parts of its body, showing itself to be in a continual state of becoming. When we realise that the alien is not limited to a single form, we begin to fear its unknowability and its multiple assemblages. It becomes a ‘demonic animal’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 266), a pack of multiplicities which ‘are transformed by contagion’ (ibid, 267). The idea of contagion is very appropriate here, as the alien is in effect a virus, infecting bodies and creating new human/alien multiplicities, and it is this contagion that threatens the stability of Mans form by the human becoming-alien and the alien becoming-human.

These becomings allow for the deterritorialisation of one subject and the reterritorialisation of the other, entering into a ‘circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialisation even further’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 11). This can be seen in the film during the scene where Macready tests the team’s blood to see if they are human or alien. They are continually deterritorialised and reterritorialised as they realise who is human and who is not, confirming the identity of each individual one at a time.

This duality of alien/human becoming embodied in a single mutated human form could be seen as an anomalous individual, a individual part of a multiplicity that allows man to enter into this becoming. It is this anomalous individual that produces the tension and fear within the film, the possibility of this small pocket of human life becoming-other and gradually infecting the rest of the earth. As one character sits at a computer, we see him realise the potentialities of this becoming as he sees how fast it could spread to the rest of the population.

During the teams attempts to destroy the alien, we realise that each human/alien being is constructed of unlimited internal multiplicities that can be separated at the aliens will to try to escape destruction and survive in a diminished form. These scenes display the potentialities of an alien/human existence, as appendages of a alien/human are able to be separated and lead individual existences, whereas if flesh or blood is separated from a human body, it can do nothing as it does not possess its own cognition. This presents a troubling prospect for the human body and identity. Coupled with the alien form, the human body is able to separate itself any number of times and still remain autonomous, but this then threatens the individuality of the owner of the body. If both arms of a man were to separate and begin sentient existences of their own, would they still be part of the man or would they be separate entities in their own right?

As Guattari identified, cinema has become a ‘fundamental instrument of forming and imposing a dominant reality and dominant significations’ (1996: 164). “The Thing” seems determined to present itself as having a firm patriarchal grip over the last semi-inhabitable corners of the earth. When we first arrive at the Antarctic outpost, we realise that its population is entirely male. The only female presence in the whole film is the automated voice of the computerised chess game Macready is playing at the start of the film. Whereas some films seem to emphasize their diversity by showing both sexes in a variety of different roles, the voice of woman appear to have no place in this societal cross-section. As language has ‘the potential to help establish and maintain social and power relationships’ (Litosseliti 2006: 11), we see when Macready short circuit’s the computer for outwitting him, that woman, or any other potential outsiders are not going to be welcomed easily into this environment.

The process of the alien takeover of the human body can be seen as a process of reproduction; an alien sex act performed on unwilling partners. The central aim of human life is to reproduce itself, ‘but when the customary limits are overstepped, men become monsters’ (Coward 1984: 15). In “The Thing”, the reproductive relationship is reversed; from the dominant male impregnating the female, to this alien “other” mating with Man. The results producing a creation in his own image, an act that only God could perform. But as mentioned earlier, God gave Man the power to name, and as we are unable to name the creature in front of us, and are presented by bodies seemingly created in a Godlike manner, we have to look further for answers. Do these answers lie in the darkness of space, where we can either look for God, or for Deleuze and Guattari’s “demonic animal”, the Devil?

The arrival of the alien presents not a simple signifying threat to Man, but an a-signifying presence, an unknown and unknowable life form that, to survive on earth, needs any biological entity it can find as its own physical template. The aggressive destruction and rebirth of individual identities in this isolated community presents a monstrous and unwanted becoming, as it also means death for the individual. Molecular human consciousnesses enter into a molar aggregate, containing the presence of every form that the alien has previously encountered, be it human, dog, or other unknown entities not of this earth. The alien could be seen to create a body without organs (BwO), it assembles everything it encounters (dog, man, alien life etc), on a single plane, a ‘connection of desires…a continuum of intensities’(1987:179). This is most obvious at the end of the film, where Macready encounters the alien underground. The alien continually sprouts appendages, organs no longer needed to stay inside the organism, a plane of intensities continually becoming anything it desires.

The film creates a post-human body, a body seemingly human on the outside, but populated by unlimited internal multiplicities. The bodies are both human and non-human, possessing all the capabilities of a normal person, but able to potentially achieve so much more than we could ever do with our own bodies. Internal and external identity are blurred, as the research team struggle to identify who is human and who is alien. Attempting initially to decide by external physical mannerisms, language and character, but later resorting to blood tests to examine to internal structure of each other, the discovery of the alien only leads to violence, destruction and death. The only option they can see to stop the alien threat spreading is to destroy it completely, even though that means destroying themselves. The team attempt to turn themselves into a plane of consistency; alien, human and the research base, allowing the desolate landscape to envelop everything to try and revert the scene to an existence before the colonisation of Man so that the alien threat will have no chance to continue.

Looking at these two films, we can see two very different ways in which cinema can destabilise identity even further from its already insecure base. ‘Female Trouble’ shows us how the apparently stable concepts of gender and sexuality can be overthrown by certain individuals, and how the use of queer theory helps us to understand these digressions and place them within a social-cultural discourse. ‘The Thing’ also makes us consider identity from a bodily perspective, but in terms of the connection between the internal and external properties of the human body, placing an imperceptible threat within us and using our outer features to remain anonymous.

The concepts used in the discussion of each film are not mutually exclusive, I feel they are the most appropriate ways to approach each film to get a better understanding of the ideas present in the subtext, but if each film is approached with a different perspective, even more ideas may be drawn out of the texts. For example, reading ‘Female Trouble’ with the ideas of Bergson and Deleuze and Guattari, we could see Divine as the spark which initiates a evolution of our sexual behaviour, so that we are not confined to simple paradigms such as male and female, hetero and homosexual, but are able to transgress these boundaries. Divine could also be seen as deterritorialising us from our normative ideologies, but society cannot seem to cope with this and effectively reterritorialises her at the end of the film where she is executed by the electric chair. Conversely, the alien in ‘The Thing’ could be seen as an identity who is neither heterosexual or homosexual, nor fits into any other kind of sexual category. It is beyond sex, beyond the realms of male and female, taking on any form it can by engaging individuals in an act of reproduction nothing like any kind of sexual act we have seen before. This could be the queerest identity of all, something that has no concept of the binary paradigms we live our lives by. Maybe encountering this alien could provide the first step for the world to move beyond what society tells us is ‘normal’.