Author: Maisie Jennings

By Maisie Jennings

Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault. 

Laura Palmer’s body is found on the shore: blue-mouthed, blue-eyed, blonde. Her naked corpse is shrouded in plastic, as if gift-wrapped for the male gaze. David Lynch and Mark Frost’s cult classic television series Twin Peaks (1991) is distinct in its strangeness. What begins as a fairly conventional whodunit is stretched and contorted by dream visions, interdimensional spirits, and the imposition of the supernatural onto seedy, corporeal, small-town America. The charming and unusual narrative structure is characteristic of Lynch, the surrealist auteur. Overlooked, however, is his remarkable use of female victimhood – identifying Twin Peaks and his wider cinematic oeuvre as a lexicon of male violence. 

The elusive nature of Twin Peaks’ plot does not obscure the fact that it hinges entirely upon the debasement and death of a teenage girl. Aligning with classic Lynchian themes, gender-based violence is the evil used to untangle darker threads enmeshed within kitschy Americana. In Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer is homecoming-queen-turned-perfect-dead-girl, and her murder investigation, led by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry S. Truman, unveils the town’s criminal underbelly. The post-mortem shattering of her ‘good girl’ image reveals Laura’s secret life as a cocaine addict and teenage sex worker. 

On one hand, I think Lynch and Frost attempt to critique white masculine hegemonic power: the town’s most important male figures are implicated within the sex and drug trafficking ring that underpins Twin Peaks’ business and industry. On the other hand, it can be argued that the discovery of Laura’s secret diary and the scandalous revelations that fester, or flirt with, in some ways, a moral justification of her death. Her tragic abuse, exploitation, criminal connections, and drug use essentially groom her for this inevitable, logical end. Moreover, her death catalyses a grander, metaphysical battle between forces of good and evil; though she haunts the original series’ narrative in all her pain and beauty, the significance of her death becomes markedly less focused on her own suffering. Nevertheless, Laura’s murder is unequivocally propagated by the patriarchal structures and male dominance that constitute Twin Peaks. In Episode Four, Laura’s funeral is interrupted by her ex-boyfriend, Bobby Briggs – “All you ‘good’ people – you wanna know who killed Laura? You did! We all did…”. 

During the course of the series, it is revealed that Laura was killed by her father, Leland, who had been possessed by an evil spirit named BOB. Leland, while possessed by BOB, had also subjected Laura to years of sexual abuse. BOB, I think, is best understood as a symbolic representation of earthly male violence, rather than a demonic, supernatural entity. In the series, whether BOB is real or not is debated by Cooper and Truman; they decide, however, that he is “the evil that men do”. I believe this statement explicitly refers to how men hurt women, rather than a wider meditation on humanity’s primordial capacity for evil. The terrible violence enacted by BOB belongs far more tangibly in the world of Twin Peaks, than the mythologised Black Lodge: the extra-dimensional stem of all evil and darkness. 

Like Laura, virtually all the other female characters in Twin Peaks are subject to male violence. It occurs so frequently and so intensely, yet it seems to function as little more than a thematic device or motif. In the very first episode, simultaneous with Laura’s murder, the character Ronette Pulaski is beaten and raped with such brutality that it leaves her comatose – after a few episodes, she is omitted from the plot. Although the 1992 feature film and prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me clarifies the violent details of her death, its significance is presented as purely incidental, making the investigation of Laura’s murder a federal case, and prompting the arrival of Cooper. 

The treatment of gender-based violence in Twin Peaks demonstrates a troubling dichotomy. Male violence appears as an integral theme, but the female suffering and trauma that pervades the series is seemingly subsumed by larger points about corruption and morality. It is this latter theme in which Lynch and Frost invest heavily through the antidotes of white masculinity and ‘good’ male characters. When Audrey Horne, the daughter of business magnate and brothel owner Ben Horne, is captured whilst undercover as a teenage prostitute, the series is quick to brush over her drugging and assault: instead, she is used to demonstrate the overwhelming goodness of her male rescuers. Indeed, Audrey’s character is constantly fetishised by a voyeuristic, sexualised gaze. The surveillance of her age, allure, and purity as an 18 year old schoolgirl more or less reduces her to “jailbait” – the forbidden object of Cooper’s desires. 

I’d like to further problematise the depictions of sex work and exploited women in Twin Peaks through the character of Josie Packard, the only woman of colour presented as a main character in the series. As the narrative progresses, it transpires that Josie, the widow of wealthy mill owner Andrew Packard, had been involved in prostitution, gang warfare, and prostitution in Hong Kong (she is also revealed to have orchestrated her husband’s fatal boat accident). Josie embodies the racialised fetishisation of East Asian women, in particular the stereotypical ‘dragon lady’ – an alluring mistress of deceit and deception. Demonstrative of Lynch and Frost’s unforgiving attitude towards sex work, Josie’s death in the second season seems to act as a suitable punishment for her crimes. 
Twin Peaks is indicative of wider examples of how male violence and female subjugation is used across David Lynch’s filmography. Blue Velvet (1986) is focused on a masochistic female sex worker and her various assaults and entrapments, a foil to the innocent high-school love interest of Kyle MacLachlan’s protagonist. Wild at Heart (1990) features the rape of another female character. There is the femme fatale of Lost Highway (1997). Even Lynch’s adaptation of Dune (1984) portrays femininity as a destabilising force. Although, in classic Lynchian fashion, there is thematic significance to his use of gender-based violence, there are enduring problematic aspects found in his ceaselessly brutalised female characters.

By Maisie Jennings

In her diary, Anaïs Nin compares herself to a trapeze artist, suspended between two bicoastal marriages in a spectacular aerial performance across America. It isn’t difficult to imagine her in flight. Photographs of Nin depict a dazzling woman with long, pencilled eyebrows framing the dark eyes of a French film star. I’m always struck by the glamorous minutiae of her appearance, and it seems to me, that, more than anything, Nin embodies the performer tip-toeing across the taught line of the self – of its concealment and expression. 

The image of the balancing act occurs again in her novel, A Spy in the House of Love, part of Nin’s aptly named five book collection Cities of the Interior. It is a book entirely about secrecy; the fragility of its maintenance, and the terror of discovery. Sabina, the adulteress, lives in constant fear that she ‘could fall from this incandescent trapeze on which she walked’. The trapeze bifurcates every part of Sabina’s life like piercing a mirror, and it propels a kind of schizophrenia that shatters her sense of a singular, unified self. In a moment of reflection, Sabina sees ‘no Sabina, not ONE, but a multitude of Sabinas lying down yielding and being dismembered, constellating in all directions and breaking’. 

Nin expresses Sabina’s multiplicity of self through her sexual encounters. Indeed, sex is the sensual arena in which Sabina negotiates her selfhood. With every lover she takes, Sabrina is briefly able to control the splitting of her identity as, like an actress or a spy, she crafts her allure, she becomes desire. For these careful transformations, Nin provides accompanying music to Sabina’s sexual vignettes: Debussy’s “Ile Joyeuse”, “Clair de Lune”, Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”, and Stravinsky’s “The Firebird”. The effect is heady, thrusting, trembling – the sex that Sabina pursues is orchestral and baroque in its intensity, and she surrenders to it. It is what Nin deems ‘a moment of wholeness’ in which Sabina’s self is subsumed by the rhythms and movements of desire. There is an almost atavistic quality to this passion:

‘They fled from the eyes of the world, the singer’s prophetic, harsh, ovarian prologues. Down the rusty bars of ladders to the undergrounds of the night propitious to the first man and woman at the beginning of the world, where there were no words by which to possess each other, no music for serenades, no presents to court with, no tournaments to impress and force a yielding [..] but only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of a woman on a man’s sensual mast’. 

Sabina’s performances of her multiple selves, her dark cape and shadowed eyes, the flimsy gossamer of her trapeze, all dissipate with the ecstasy of sex. In many ways, Nin liberates herself from patriarchal literary conventions, anticipating the Sexual Revolution by embodying her work – she ‘endows words with flesh and blood’ as she subjectivises taboo female sexuality. Here, it is crucial to understand that the distinctly female perspective Nin embodies within her work is her own. To me, Nin’s novels and diaries represent an early form of autofiction – they retain an ambiguously fictional level, allowing the author to manipulate episodes of her own life through the constructed insertion of her self as a character or heroine. In A Spy in the House of Love, Nin writes Sabina to inhabit the portrait she constructs of herself in her diaries. She uses Sabina to reveal aspects of her infidelities, as well as concealing any autobiographical details through the nebulous and labyrinthine distortions of Sabina’s mind. There are only fragments of New York, recollections of an interwar Paris we might connect to Nin’s affair with Henry Miller, and the maritime locations of Provincetown and New Jersey that resist factual readings through Nin’s oblique narrative style. 

After her death in 1977,  Nin was exposed –  a ‘consummate liar’ whose body of work encapsulates her need for meticulous, artful self-invention. In her obituary in the New York Times, she was listed as being survived by her husband, the wealthy banker Hugo Guiler. In the Los Angeles Times, her husband was listed as Rupert Pole, an actor nearly twenty years her junior. Contemporary feminists reviled Nin’s bourgeois proclivities; she was a 20th century Madame Bovary, and, after the publishing of her erotic collections Delta of Venus and Little Birds, a dollar-a-page pornographer.  

I think it is both impossible and irrelevant to attempt to reduce Nin to either the merciless upper-crust adulteress or the impenetrable feminist sexual pioneer. Whether she wrote to seek some kind of absolvement, or to bring into being a new world of feminine erotic literature is also beside the point. For me, Nin is best understood in her own words: ‘We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection’. Certainly, Nin, by careful construction and insertion, explores all the tastes and sensations of a vivid erotic life.

By Maisie Jennings

‘An endearing tale of sisterhood against the odds’ – this was my review of Julia Ducournau’s Raw, a French film about two sisters studying at a prestigious veterinary school, and their mutual gastronomic indulgence in human flesh. Irreverent Letterboxd witticisms aside, the film draws upon a fairly recent, radical tradition of subverting the horror genre through feminist iterations of body horror. 

In Raw, Justine is a naive first-year student, subjected by her older sister, Alexia, and her peers, to a humiliating and debauched hazing. Raised staunchly vegetarian, she’s drenched in animal blood and forced to eat raw rabbit kidney. Soon after, she develops an inflamed rash all over her abdomen; it’s a physical, Cronenbergian manifestation of her new compulsion for meat and flesh. Her transformation is terrifying, visceral, and located with her emerging sexuality. Justine’s cannibal interiority is gendered – she takes on masculine prerogatives of violence, animal bodily pleasure, a lack of inhibition, and sexual appetite. Ducournau addresses the feminist nature of Justine’s cannibalism as ‘a punk gesture against this patriarchy’; this is particularly resonant in Justine’s first taste of human flesh, which arises from a bikini wax gone horrifically awry, resulting in Justine heartily gobbling her sister’s severed finger. It’s a startling reiteration of girlhood. The body horror of the film – its teeth, blood, viscera – is a corporealisation of feminist resistance. 

The body, or biological horror genre is concerned with transforming the human form through grotesque violations of the body. Often, in mainstream slasher films and horror cinema, female bodies function as the site for such mutilations – as a locus of fear and pain. There are long, gratuitous shots of women in peril, sexualised acts of violence, the penetrating blade of a male killer. Body horror, with its emphasis on the consciousness of terror, is able to respond to the treatment of female bodies and pain. 

One of the very earliest instances of this occurs in David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome. The film begins with scenes of graphic sadomasochism and torture, as the protagonist, Max Renn, discovers ‘Videodrome’ – a broadcast of snuff films we would now associate with dark corners of the internet. Max, a sensationalist network director, believes he has found the illicit ‘high art’ for his channel to distribute. In reality, the broadcast causes malignant brain tumours and hallucinations in the viewer, causing a maddening addiction to its sexually violent content. As ‘Videodrome’ distorts Max’s grip on reality, he develops a vaginal opening in his abdomen in which hallucinatory tapes are forced inside. Cronenberg is depicting the way we internalise content literally, through a technological wounding of the body; the way pornography is consumed is likened to the slow, insidious progression of cancer. However, in giving Max this exposed vaginal wound, Cronenberg is also turning the sexualised gaze of the camera away from the initial BDSM snuff videos and towards the pornographer himself. Max becomes vulnerable to penetration; he becomes the subject of violence and terror. Cronenberg’s body horror challenges the exploitation flicks Videodrome is in dialogue with – he is self-reflexively commenting on porn, B-movie horror, and our easy consumption of violence against women. 

In inverting the traditional subjugation of the female body, Cronenberg’s influence on subverting the location of pain in cinema through a feminine transformation pervades an assortment of arthouse and mainstream horror. Returning to the emergence of female sexuality explored by Raw, the preeminent site of grotesque feminine transformation is puberty. This is perhaps an obvious focal point; I think, since the first film adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie in 1976, there could be an entire subgenre of ‘menstrual horror’. The purported mystery and shamefulness of female adolescence is hyperbolised through monstrous encounters with PMS-induced bloodlust. It’s a trope with the potential to be both incredibly demeaning, and remarkably feminist. The difference, I believe, can be negotiated through explicit emphasis on the duality of the female body as an object of subjugation for its assumed weakness, as well as for its perceived threat. This is how body horror can be used as a process of ‘othering’ to identify and explore female bodily experiences and psychological landscapes. 

Films like Ginger Snaps (2000) and Jennifer’s Body (2009), straddling the genres of supernatural body horror and young adult coming-of-age, inaugurate a playful, yet distinctly feminist reimagining of the terrifying metamorphosis of a teenage girl. Both films also centre the importance of female friendships and sisterhood, and, arguably, entail queer interpretation and analysis. They stand as unlikely predecessors of Raw, a film so graphic it caused some viewers to faint at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, crucially, however, they demonstrate the broad spectrum of feminist cinema body horror is able to engage with. It is a genre that is as much transformative and shifting in its content, as it is in its nature. 

By Maisie Jennings

It felt like the perfect time to revisit the writing of Joan Didion during the lazy, early September heatwave. Didion’s elliptical, startling vignettes of the American cultural landscape in the 1960s and ‘70s evoked the sense of a long, sultry summer just about to burn out. So it began — my daily routine of sitting in the garden, chain-smoking, and flicking through the terse pages of The White Album. 

I first discovered Didion two years ago; she would die only a few months later. A friend had lent me a copy of Play It As It Lays (inadvertently stolen, I should admit, as it still sits on my bedside table), and it unnerved me in the acutely exciting way that marks a budding new obsession. Didion’s forensic prose balances the banal and tragic on the blade of a scalpel – cutting through the glamorous veneer of Hollywood, rock n’ roll, and the East Coast. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” is how Didion begins The White Album, a collection of essays that curate the zeitgeist of her native California and explore her own nervous breakdown. In one apt sentence, she exposes the flimsiness of human perception and explores the raw, essential process of storytelling. If stories are largely understood as pieces of description written toward some climax or another, Didion’s writing oscillates boredly along a constant precipice. Her narration exudes a withering apathy towards a period of massive cultural upheaval. 

It’s this distinctly female literary apathy that interested me in my first reading of Play It As It Lays. Maria Wyeth, Didion’s jaded protagonist, is a C-list Hollywood actress — revealing, through flashbacks, a life of beach house parties and barbiturates, a failed marriage, and a hospitalised daughter. She expresses a bored, shallow nihilism; Maria is at the whims of the ‘game’ of life, which she views with the same easy carelessness as her frequent gambling in casinos. It’s clear, however, that Maria’s nullified existence is incited by her manipulation by men. The most disturbing scene in the book occurs when Maria’s husband coerces her into getting a backstreet abortion, which unravels her sense of reality in a blur of nightmares and hallucinations. Didion explores how Maria’s life is totally disembodied because she is denied any control over her own body. 

At the same time, Maria makes no effort to escape her gilded cage, in fact, she endeavours to maintain all the niceties of being a suburban housewife. This is, in part, informed by the privilege apathy requires. Maria is so ambivalent towards suffering, especially her own, because the comfort of wealth exceeds the desire for change. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a similarly beautiful, wealthy narrator pharmaceutically induces a year-long coma in an attempt to reset her stagnated life. Like Maria, the unnamed narrator’s apathy manifests in an inert, disembodied state. 

I think this is a stark contrast to the excessive physicality expressed by disaffected, male literary figures. It must be said that men in fiction are constantly apathetic, and they become literary rock stars to swathes of teenage existentialists. Novels such as The Catcher in the Rye, Fight Club, Albert Camus’ The Stranger, and the literary oeuvre of Bret Easton Ellis all depict brooding, uncaring male protagonists – seeing the world and its establishments as pointless and inconsequential. Obviously, it follows that there’s no alternative other than to get recklessly pissed off. These alienated men exercise their apathy with a masculine heavy hand; they pursue and abandon sexual relationships, seek out violent altercations, kill whoever they please, and occasionally engage in acts of depraved brutality. Rather than being forced into a placated, disinterested state like Maria Wyeth – their apathy is indulgent, selfish, and expressed through physical agency. While Maria’s apathetic outlook is deeply repressive, theirs is an anti-establishment cri de coeur. 

This raises a number of feminist issues. Ostensibly, writing either apathetically as a woman, or writing apathetic women, seems somewhat anti-feminist. Indeed, Didion scathingly criticised second-wave feminism in a 1972 New York Times essay – declaring the feminists of her day as immature and misguided. Moreover, writing about women who do nothing and stand for nothing directly opposes the strong-willed female rebels of feminist literary interpretation. Perhaps representations of female apathy are not feminist at all, not even implicitly, but there is, to me, undeniable value in writing women who are complacent, shallow, and sometimes caustic. Didion didn’t spark revolutions, she observed them, and she didn’t write on behalf of womankind, she wrote for herself. In writing, and indeed reading, about apathetic female characters, the notion of a singular, universal ‘female experience’ is challenged. So, I suppose I’m urging, without a shred of apathy, for you to pick up a Didion book, or two.