Parental Trauma: The Moral Defence, The Uncanny and The Abject
‘That thing upstairs is not my daughter.’ (The Exorcist)
Annie: ‘Don’t you swear at me, you little shit! Don’t you ever raise your voice at me! I am your mother! Peter, do you understand? All I do is worry and slave and defend you. And all I get back is that fucking face on your face.’ (Hereditary)
How do horror fiction and film present the relationship between children and their parents (mothers and/ or fathers)?
Introduction
Steven King’s The Shining (1977) and Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation (1980) depict Danny as a victim of his abusive, uncanny father Jack. Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) threatens Peter with their abject mother Annie, an unstable matriarch capable at any moment of devouring them both. In Fairbairn’s Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, he argues that since children are dependent on their parents, they find it intolerable for them to be ‘bad objects’. The ‘child would rather be bad himself than have bad objects,’ and so ‘internalize[s] and represse[s]’ these objects to the unconscious by becoming ‘bad’ in order to justify his parents’ behaviour and cling to the idea that they are good.[1] He calls this the ‘moral defence.’[2] In this essay, I will examine how children in the texts employ the moral defence as a means of repressing parental trauma and explore how this repression leads to eruptions of the uncanny and the abject.
The Shining
The Moral Defence—
The most pronounced distinction between King and Kubrick’s Shining’s lies in their presentation of Jack Torrance. King’s novel form facilitates exposition of Jack’s childhood, which helps to explain his actions as an adult. Whilst pondering his alcoholism and abuse of Danny, he recalls that at age seven, as punishment for damaging a car, ‘his father… had descended on little Jacky, roaring… reddened [his] behind… and then blacked his eye.’[3] Kubrick, meanwhile, seems to deliberately exorcise these details, depicting a cruel Jack, apparently motivated only by resentment.
Jack’s troubled childhood is essential to King’s sympathetic depiction because it reflects his adoption of the moral defence. Jack’s treatment of Danny constitutes a ‘desperate attempt to deal with [an] internalized bad [object],’[4] by becoming one himself. Immediately after recalling being beaten by his father, Jack remembers ‘Danny’s broken arm’, with the structural proximity of these recollections suggesting a connection between them.[5] Manchel argues that Jack’s actions stem from being ‘overcome by [his] Id,’[6] his unconscious, and this is clear enough, as he asserts: ‘Dear God, I am not a son of a bitch. Please.’[7] Jack’s conscious mind reels desperately against his unconsciously driven actions as his perception as ‘a really nice guy,’ battles his Id’s desire to repress his bad object by hurting Danny.[8] Kristeva asserts that the ‘repression of contents’ to ‘the unconscious’ ‘effect[s] within the subject modifications… of speech,’[9] and for Jack, the most obvious of these is his slip into his father’s language. As Jack pursues Danny at the novel’s conclusion, he tells him: “I want you to come and take your medicine like a man… Come here you pup!”,[10] words that directly echo those his father uttered whilst beating his mother (“I guess you’ll take your medicine now. Goddamn puppy.”)[11] Moreover, it is clear that this is symptomatic of an apologetic moral defence when he claims that ‘he could begin sympathise with his father,’[12] indicating the success of his conversion of bad to good object.
Suffering at the hands of Jack’s abuse, Danny adopts the moral defence too. Wendy remarks that ‘he loved his mother but he was his father’s boy,’ [13] and this deification of his father implies an over-compensation for paternal trauma. Fairbairn notes that morally defensive children are often ‘reluctant to admit that [their] parents are bad objects.’[14] Although Danny acknowledges his abuse, asking Wendy: “Did he hurt George Hatfield like the time I spilled all his papers?”, it comes through a displacement of the ‘hurt’ onto another and is followed by a simple “Oh” suggesting that (in Wendy’s words) ‘the subject [is] closed’[15]— he does not process his trauma. Danny even strays into delinquency— a term Fairbairn uses to describe children who adopt the moral defence (‘delinquent children’[16])— when he enters room 217. Jack points out that “if he’d have done as he was told, he never would have gone up to that room,” to which Wendy asks: “are you implying that being half-strangled… was a fitting punishment…?”[17] Though Jack denies this, we might infer that Danny believes it to be a fitting punishment, and thus his trespassing becomes a justification for the similar punishment inflicted by his bad object father.
The Uncanny—
While King focuses on Jack and Danny’s means of repression, Kubrick portrays the effects of this repression. Kubrick referred to a copy of Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ during the filming of The Shining,[18] where he writes: ‘this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind which has becomes alienated from it only through the process of repression.’[19] As such, it is no surprise that the most explicit symptom of the ‘process’ of repressing paternal trauma in Kubrick’s film is the eruption of the uncanny.
Kubrick’s central personification of the uncanny is Danny’s imaginary friend Tony. In a scene deleted from the European version of The Shining, Wendy tells a doctor that ‘Danny first discovered Tony after the boy was injured by his father,’[20] suggesting that the manifestation of Tony is directly tied to this traumatic event. Tony is first introduced after the opening interaction between Danny and Wendy:
Danny: Do you really want to go and live in that hotel for the winter?
Wendy: Sure I do. It’ll be lots of fun.
Danny: Yeah, I guess so.
…
Wendy: What about Tony? He’s looking forward to the hotel I bet.
Danny (wagging his finger and imitating Tony’s voice): No I ain’t, Mrs. Torrance.[21]
Danny’s initial question betrays his disbelief that Wendy might want to live in the Overlook, while his superficial acceptance of her reassurance betrays his hesitance. Hoile suggests that in Tony, ‘Danny has created a double to… protect his ego by channelling all his negative thoughts about his father’— specifically his father’s choice to move them— into someone supposedly distinct from himself.’[22] That Tony is Danny’s ‘double’ becomes clear later, when he speaks to Tony in the mirror:
This scene presents Tony as a doppleganger, or alternate self. Freud writes that an ‘extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny… pervades the conception… of a ‘double”[24], and Tony epitomises this. Danny represses his resentment for his father and these feelings return to him in the familiar yet alienated figure of the double. Like King’s Danny, Kubrick’s finds his father’s abuse intolerable and turns to repression.
In the mirror scene, Tony tells Danny that he does not want to go to the hotel. As Danny repeatedly questions his reasoning, the camera slowly zooms into the mirrored face (Tony), cutting his real body (Danny) out of the shot.[25] Anya Stanley writes that Kubrick’s ‘crawling zooms uncover information’[26] about his characters, and here the technique implies a slow resurfacing of his repressed fear of his father, which soon eclipses his superficial acceptance of the move. Tony answers Danny’s questions by showing him images of blood pouring from the Overlook’s elevator interjected with the Grady twins:
Blood connotes violence, and so the elevator shot implies an outpouring of Danny’s repressed memories of abuse. This violence is tied to the twins through Kubrick’s cutting, and Hoile argues that this is indicative of ‘Danny’s fear for the safety of himself and his other self, Tony,’ when faced with the prospect of isolation with his father.[28]
As the film progresses, its uncanny elements increasingly centre on Jack, reflecting Danny’s growing awareness that it is his father, not the hotel, that he fears. This is most evident when Danny enters their room to find Jack sat alone:
In this shot, Kubrick gives an insight into Danny’s perception of his father. Danny’s distance from Jack conveys the sense of alienation central to Freud’s uncanny, while Jack’s reflection represents the repressed ‘bad’ image which now returns to Danny. Danny asks Jack a question which amounts to an admission of his fears: “You would never hurt mommy or me, would you?”[30] Kubrick’s implication is transparent: in the isolation of the Overlook, Danny’s true perception of his father has emerged, making Jack an uncanny figure of horror for the child.
‘Remember what your father forgot’—
Both versions of The Shining end with Danny overcoming Jack by bringing about his death. However, it cannot be said that in both texts Danny overcomes the trauma associated with his abusive father, and this is evidenced by the contrasting ways in which King and Kubrick’s Dannys defeat Jack.
In King’s novel, Danny triumphs over Jack by ‘remembering what [his] father forgot’: that the boiler in the basement has become too pressurised and is “going to explode”.[31] Danny escapes the hotel while Jack is incinerated. Danny’s realisation is symbolic: in the boiler, King metaphorizes the unconscious, full of repressed trauma and ready to overcome the conscious mind. Jack’s repression of his traumatic childhood overcame him, leading him to abuse his own son in an attempt at moral defence. As Manchel argues, Jack is ‘overcome by his Id,’[32] his boiler blows, but the same will not happen to Danny. Significantly, Danny tells Jack: “You’re it, not my Daddy… Go on and hit me. But you’ll never get what you want from me.”[33] Here, Danny confronts the reality that his father has hit him in the past, and may do so again, but equally recognises that Jack’s actions are driven by unconscious defence mechanisms— his “it” (Id)— rather than conscious ‘badness’. Unlike Jack, Danny understands that in adopting the moral defence a victim of trauma will “never get what they want”; the boiler will always blow. In the epilogue, Halloran says to Danny: “You’re missin your Dad, aren’t you?... You don’t like to talk about it around your Mom, do you?” Danny responds: “No. She wants to forget it ever happened,” but admits that he “can’t” forget.[34] Jack’s death has taught him that the repressed always returns, no matter how you try to forget, and we feel confident that Danny will heed Halloran’s advice to “cry over what happened… because that’s what a good son has got to do.”[35]
Kubrick’s Danny, however, defeats his father by leading him into the topiary maze and leaving him there to freeze.[36] Kubrick insisted that ‘horror stories can… show us the archetypes of the unconscious.’[37] Since Kubrick substitutes King’s death-by-boiler for a death-by-maze, we can read the maze as an archetype of the unconscious. Accordingly, Danny’s triumph over his father is no triumph; it represents a repression of paternal trauma into the depths of his unconscious. We watch— transfixed by the Steadicam’s ‘fluidity’— as Danny draws his father deeper and deeper into ‘the labrynthine recesses of’ his mind.[38] Danny backtracks to hide from Jack and avoid truly processing his trauma, the motion itself an implication of Danny’s regression.[39] In this light, Jack’s shout that Danny “can’t get away”, seems eerily accurate.[40]
Unlike King’s Danny, who can explain his father’s ‘badness’ in terms of his own abuse, Kubrick gives his Danny no such explanation. As Manchel notes: ‘whereas King stressed this positive aspect of Jack’s personality, Kubrick eliminates it completely.’[41] Kubrick’s Danny, unable to cope with his bad object, has no choice but to repress him ever further. In the novel, Danny’s last encounter with his father is one of love (‘Danny’s heart flamed within his chest’; “Doc… remember how much I love you”[42]), but in the film, he is left with an image of murderous madness, frozen forever in the recesses of his mind:
Hereditary
The Moral Defence—
In Hereditary, the figure of horror is not the bad father, but the bad mother. In Klein’s The Psychoanalysis of Children, she explains that:
Fear of an object seems to have its earliest basis… in the child’s growing knowledge… of [their] mother as someone who either gives or withholds gratification, and thus in [their] growing knowledge of the power of [their] object.[44]
Consequently, the child splits up the ‘mother-imago into a good one and a bad one,’ a gratifying and withholding mother.[45] When nurtured, the child feels love for their good mother, but when neglected by the bad mother, the child feels ‘anxiety’ and ‘rage’.[46] This horrifying split is symbolised in the film by Annie’s dollhouse art portraying her aged mother Joan’s attempts to breastfeed her daughter Charlie:
Here, the figure of Annie represents the good mother, while the decrepit Joan represents how the child might perceive the bad mother, incapable of nourishment.
Benson-Allot describes Annie as a ‘bad mother’ who does not ‘nurture [her] children in the socially prescribed ways,’ but nonetheless asserts that Aster aligns ‘the spectator’s sympathy with’ her by exploring her ‘mistakes in the context of... damage inherited from previous generations.’[48] In this way, Aster’s Annie is reminiscent of King’s Jack, as both are made ‘bad’ by their own damaging childhoods. Like Jack, Annie has a bad object, as she admits in a therapy meeting that she was “pretty much estranged” from her mother but claims that she (Annie) “did love her” anyway. [49] Fairbairn describes a specifically maternal form of the moral defence tied Klein’s notion of the bad mother, in which a neglected child ‘comes to feel… that he is not really loved… by his mother, and… that his own love for his mother is not really valued and accepted by her.’ Incapable of believing his mother is a ‘bad object’, the child instead sees his own love as ‘bad’, and thus ‘tends to retain his love inside himself.’[50] Annie fits this description as, feeling neglected by her mother, she withholds her love for her own child. We see this on the morning of Joan’s funeral, as Steve’s (Peter and Charlie’s father) attentiveness, is juxtaposed with Annie’s aloofness. While Steve checks on the children, bringing Peter his suit and insisting that Charlie stop sleeping outside to avoid catching “pneumonia”, Annie sits alone in the car.[51]
Interestingly, Fairbairn notes that the feeling that one’s love is worthless is often accompanied by a defence in which a child ‘adopts the attitude that what he has given or created is worthless.’[52] Fairbairn suggests that ‘women of [this]… mentality sometimes lose all interest in their children after they are born,’[53] and this sentiment is displayed by Annie. One night, Annie dreams that she walks into Peter’s room to find him crawling with ants, insinuating (due to the connotations of ants with refuse and decay), that she considers him worthless. This is emphasised when Peter wakes up and asks her “Why are you scared of me?” to which she responds: “I never wanted to be your mother,” before admitting that she “tried to stop” the pregnancy.[54] Annie’s allusion to her attempted miscarriage conjures the primordial image of the bad mother who wields the power to destroy the dependent child at any moment. Moments later, the pair are covered in liquid and set alight:
This shot is an anaphoric reference to Annie’s earlier admission that once, whilst sleepwalking, she had covered herself and her children in paint thinner and lit a match.[56] Here, Peter is reduced to a foetus covered in amniotic fluid, his life entirely in the hands of his destructive mother.
The Abject—
The abject is a concept introduced by Kristeva in her essay Powers of Horror. In it, she suggests that the abject is ‘neither subject nor object’ and thus, things that ‘beset’ us with ‘abjection’ gesture towards a realm ‘ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable,’ and draw us ‘toward the place where meaning collapses.’[57] In other words, the experience of abjection reminds us of the Lacanian Real, a pre-linguistic realm of plenitude experienced before the father expels us from the mother’s body— a realm radically excluded from our symbolic order.[58] The abject is thus tied to the period of time in which the child experiences the world only in terms of the good and bad mother.
Benson-Allot writes that Hereditary is ‘deeply invested in exploring how men experience abjection,’[59] while Matt Zoller Seitz suggests that ‘the regular eruptions of weirdness, surrealism and nightmare spectacle’—namely, abjection— seem ‘to be in response to whatever the characters are refusing to really address.’[60] Following this, I would argue that the maternal neglect felt by Annie and Peter reawakens the primordial trauma of the bad mother, which has been radically excluded from their minds. In Kristeva’s terms, their ‘lives are based on’ continued ‘exclusion’ of this primordial trauma,[61] but just as the repressed returns in the uncanny, the excluded returns in the abject.
The first eruption of the maternal abject comes when Annie looks through her mother’s belongings. It seems that this evokes memories of her mother’s neglect, which return in the form of an abject apparition:
Kristeva writes that ‘abjection’ is ‘essentially different from “uncanniness,” because it ‘is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar.’[63] Aster uses lighting in this shot to intensify the abjection we feel, as darkness obscures Joan’s face, making recognition all but impossible. Later, Annie’s abjection reaches a climax when she discovers Joan’s bloated and beheaded corpse in the attic.[64] Kristeva labels ‘the corpse… the utmost of abjection… that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything,’[65] and therefore Joan’s cadaver signifies to Annie nothing but the radical exteriority of the maternal Real, and by extension her horrifying neglect by the bad mother.
Kristeva writes that he who ‘has swallowed up… a maternal hatred… instead of maternal love… could have a sense of the abject’ and may find ‘solace’ in a father ‘existing but unsettled, loving but unsteady, merely but an apparition that remains.’[66] This description is eerily reminiscent of Peter, who turns to his father for protection from his bad mother. Annie screams at Peter:
Don’t you swear at me you little shit... I am your mother! All I do is worry and slave and defend you. And all I get back is… disdain and resentment.[67]
And after silently watching this unfold, all that Steve can muster is a meagre “stop right now.”[68] This outburst of maternal hatred, along with the paint thinner episode, cause Peter’s maternal trauma to resurface. Just as Danny’s increasing recognition of his father’s cruelty causes him to perceive Jack in an uncanny light, Peter’s ‘disdain and resentment’ for his mother turn her increasingly abject. At the film’s climax, Peter awakens in his room, and Aster presents us with the film’s most abject shot:
Again, Aster employs distance and lighting to obscure Annie, as he did Joan, while her position, lingering in the outermost point of the room, suggests a sudden emergence from mental exclusion.
Possession—
The film concludes with Peter’s possession, signalled by a dazzling blue light flowing over his body.[70] Kristeva argues that we experience the abject in the sublime, evoking the example of ‘when… a stained glass window shed[s] purple beams,’ with purple beams obviously recalling the film.[71] The blue light connects his possession to abjection through the sublime. Additionally, Benson-Allot suggests that Peter’s ‘eventual possession’ can be attributed to his desperation to ‘talk about his feelings,’ [72] or in our terms, his need to stop excluding his maternal trauma. Kristeva writes that a subject ‘experiences abjection only if an Other… possesses [them],’ and that ‘all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being… is founded,’ ‘a reality that, if [they] acknowledge it, annihilates [them].’ [73] In light of these statements, it seems Peter’s possession signifies a confrontation with his desire for the maternal love he has been denied. His possession is really a recognition that his primordial need to be loved by Annie has possessed him since the beginning, dictating his actions. Like Jack, Peter has been possessed, and his conscious-self is annihilated.
Conclusion
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1927.[74]
To conclude, if The Shining is a tale of uncanny fathers, then it deals with the familiar made threatening. Jack utters the old-established cliché: “Wendy, I’m home,”[75] with a smile, as he kicks down the door to their room, and the father is transformed from returning guardian to alien invader. Certainly it is a terrifying image, but it is ‘in reality’ nothing new.[76] Hereditary is something altogether different. The all-encompassing terror that the child feels towards the bad mother predates language; it is unknowable and unthinkable, captured only in moments of wordless abjection. Kristeva writes that ‘fear of the archaic mother’ is subdued through ‘patrilineal filiation.’[77] Like Peter, we submit to the father in utter, indescribable fear of the mother. Peter finding his father burnt alive due to the actions of his mother serves as a warning[78]: the father may be threatening, but we all exist at the mercy of the mother.
Endnotes
[1] W. R. D. Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 65.
[2] Fairbairn, p. 66.
[3] Steven King, The Shining, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2011), p. 118.
[4] Fairbairn, p. 65.
[5] King, p. 118.
[6] Frank Manchel, ‘What About Jack? Another Perspective on Family Relationships in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 23 (1995), pp. 68-78. (p. 70).
[7] King, p. 123..
[8] King, p. 118.
[9] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 7.
[10] King, p. 469.
[11] King, p. 247.
[12] King, p. 421.
[13] King, p. 58.
[14] Fairbairn, p, 65.
[15] King, p. 15.
[16] Fairbairn, p. 64.
[17] King, p. 293.
[18] Christopher Hoile, ‘The Uncanny and the Fairy Tale in Kubrick’s The Shining’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 12 (1984), pp. 5-12. (p. 5).
[19] Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1910). pp. 129-253. (p. 241).
[20] Manchel, p. 74.
[21] The Shining, dir. by Stanley Kubrick, (Warner Bros., 1980), online film recording, Amazon Prime, <https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B00GKX2QP8/ref=atv_dl_rdr?autoplay=1>, [accessed 24/04/2022]. 04:18- 04:52.
[22] Hoile, p. 7.
[23] The Shining, 09:46. [References to Kubrick’s film will be abbreviated thus, while those to the novel are abbreviated as ‘King’].
[24] Freud, p. 236.
[25] The Shining, 09:40- 09:53.
[26] Anya Stanley, ‘All Steadicam and No Play: Movement in The Shining’, Crooked Marquee, <https://crookedmarquee.com/shining-40th-anniversary/>, [accessed 24/04/2022].
[27] The Shining, 10:10-10:25.
[28] Hoile, p. 8.
[29] The Shining, 39:14.
[30] The Shining, 41:43.
[31] King, pp. 475, 477.
[32] Machel, p. 70.
[33] King, p. 475.
[34] King, p. 495.
[35] King, pp. 496-497.
[36] The Shining, 01:55:20.
[37] Jack Kroll, “Stanley Kubrick’s Horror Show.” Newsweek, (1980), p. 99. Quoted in Manchel, p. 70.
[38] Stanley.
[39] The Shining, 01:47:34-01:50:27.
[40] The Shining, 01:49:44.
[41] Manchel, p. 74.
[42] King, p. 475.
[43] The Shining, 01:55:20.
[44] Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. by Alix Strachey, (New York: Grove Press, 1960), online edition, <https://archive.org/stream/psychoanalysisof007950mbp/psychoanalysisof007950mbp_djvu.txt>, [accessed 24/04/2022]. [No page numbers provided].
[45] Klein.
[46] Klein.
[47] Hereditary, dir. by Ari Aster, (A24, 2018), online film recording, Netflix, <https://www.netflix.com/watch/80238910?trackId=255824129&tctx=0%2C0%2CNAPA%40%40%7C25c4d376-fa7b-4fcb-9e49-f309215b3fa6-152594744_titles%2F1%2F%2Fheredi%2F0%2F0%2CNAPA%40%40%7C25c4d376-fa7b-4fcb-9e49-f309215b3fa6-152594744_titles%2F1%2F%2Fheredi%2F0%2F0%2C%2C%2C25c4d376-fa7b-4fcb-9e49-f309215b3fa6-152594744%7C1%2C>, [accessed 24/04/2022]. 13:09.
[48] Caetlin Benson-Allot, ‘They’re Coming to Get You . . . Or: Making America Anxious Again’, Film Quarterly, 72 (2018), pp. 71-76. (p. 72).
[49] Hereditary, 23:31-23:35.
[50] Fairbairn, pp. 16-17.
[51] Hereditary, 2.40-3.44.
[52] Fairbairn, p. 19.
[53] Fairbairn, p. 19.
[54] Hereditary, 01:11:00-11:12:14.
[55] Hereditary, 01:12:37.
[56] Hereditary, 53:00-53:45.
[57] Kristeva, pp. 9, 1, 2.
[58] Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. by Bruce Fink, (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. 324. [‘First there was the primal expulsion, that is, the real as outside the subject.’; ‘the real—as that which is excised from the primordial symbolization.’]
[59] Benson-Allot, p. 73.
[60] Matt Zoller Seitz, ‘Hereditary’, RobertEbert.com, <https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/hereditary-2018>, [accessed 24/04/2022].
[61] Kristeva, p. 6.
[62] Hereditary, 12:29.
[63] Kristeva, p. 5.
[64] Hereditary, 01:37:03.
[65] Kristeva, pp. 3-4.
[66] Kristeva, pp. 5-6.
[67] Hereditary, 58:00- 58:15.
[68] Hereditary, 59:58.
[69] Hereditary, 1:48:20.
[70] Hereditary, 1:56:55.
[71] Kristeva, p. 12.
[72] Benson-Allot, pp. 73-74.
[73] Kristeva, pp. 10, 5, 2.
[74] Quoted in Oxford Essential Quotes, eds. by Susan Ratcliffe, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
[75] The Shining, 1:38:20-1:38:21.
[76] Freud, p. 241.
[77] Kristeva, p. 77.
[78] Hereditary, 1:51:35.
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