Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004) & Robin Wood

The “paradox of horror” is a phenomenon that has been widely discussed from the occasional movie watcher to the serious film scholar. At its most basic level, the paradox can be expressed by the question: Why would anyone want to experience art that might scare or disgust him/her? Robin Wood, a film critic and professor, gave his own answer to this paradox through a psychoanalytic approach. Wood was the first to bring horror films into academia by using Marxist critique and psychoanalysis to explore them. In one of his most influential essays, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film”, he tackled the paradox and claimed that the horror genre endures because it provides a necessary outlet for repressed and abnormal impulses. Birth, a 2004 film directed by Jonathan Glazer, is about Anna (Nicole Kidman) who is a 35-year-old widow who is about to finally marry a man named Joseph (Danny Huston) after ten years, but a ten-year-old boy, Sean (Cameron Bright), enters her life, claiming to be the reincarnation of her dead husband and warns her not to re-marry. Examining Birth in conjunction with Wood’s approach will provide a greater understanding of his theory and how it answers the “paradox of horror.”

Horror films, according to Wood, shed light on the concept of “the Other.” He defines Otherness by stating that it “functions not simply as something external to the culture or to the self, but also as what is repressed (but never destroyed) in the self and projected outwards in order to be hated or disowned” (Wood, 199). There are seven different concepts of Otherness that are thematized in horror films: female sexuality, the proletariat, other cultures, ethnic groups, alternative ideologies, homosexuality/bisexuality, and children. Culture and society strive to keep these in our unconscious, which Wood calls “surplus repression,” but horror films provide an outlet for these repressions to be expressed. To Wood, surplus repression is the process whereby humans are conditioned since childhood with certain preconceptions in order to fit within their culture. In America, this “makes us (if it works) into monogamous heterosexual bourgeois patriarchal capitalists” (197). This link to repression is what makes the horror genre popular since viewers get to experience desires they normally and unconsciously repress, thus it answers the paradox. Ideologically speaking, repressions can be presented with a reactionary or progressive aim.

Reactionary films want to restore the repression of the Other. Progressive films challenge ideology by directly addressing these repressed desires, resulting in political intent. Birth is an example of the progressive type. Reactionary horror films typically feature a monster that is pure evil, non-human and a product of a foreign land, sexual deviancy or the occult. The victims in these films tend to be sympathetic. In contrast, progressive horror films have a sympathetic monster that is partly human and a product of the American family or society. In other words, someone the viewers share similarities with. The victims in these films are also represented as not entirely sympathetic. Birth is set in New York and that is where Sean, the only identifiable monster in the film, comes from; he is not a product of a foreign land. Sean, being a ten-year-old boy who is clearly human, is relatable to audiences. At the end of the film his actions are explained as a “spell”, making Sean himself part victim. The “spell” working as a metaphor for Sean’s upbringing, societal views, and other criteria that led him to make those decisions.

The victims in the film are not entirely sympathetic. Anna, although her role is complicated since she is both protagonist and victim, is not represented as a pure sympathetic character. By actually engaging in Sean’s fantasy, Anna loses sympathy from the viewer. Joseph, the most clear victim of the film, attacks Sean and drags him across a room, with his only explanation to the crowd witnessing it being, “He kicked my chair!”. This attack on a ten-year-old diminishes Joseph’s sympathy. The presentation of Anna’s family is also one of the most progressive aspects of the film. Her family, clearly wealthy and bourgeois, is cold to Anna when she needs their help the most. In the scene when Anna talks to her sister and mother alone about the situation her sister tells her that “it is illegal” and her mother claims that she will call the police unless Anna sends Sean home. Instead of trying to help Anna, they simply want to bring in the strongest enforcer of dominant ideology: the law. The ending would also contribute to the progressive nature of the film. Once the viewer finds out that Anna’s marriage was a façade; the perfect, rich, heterosexual and “normal” life that had been portrayed of Anna’s pre-widow years, is shattered. There is no sense of a return to normalcy, the monster is not completely crushed, the Other does not completely disappear or become fully repressed, all of which creates an ambiguity which Wood would find progressive.

The narrative structure of Birth also coincides with Wood’s basic horror formula. For Wood, horror narratives consist of a monster threatening normality. The monster being anything that is repressed, the Other, or normality’s “shadow”. While normality is the capitalistic structure that is represented by social norms and usually consists of heterosexual relationships and everything else that society accepts, it is not necessarily what is right. Birth clearly follows this: Anna is about to re-marry after ten years of being a widow into a “normal” heterosexual relationship until Sean appears and disrupts all sense of normality. In this sense, Sean is representative of Anna’s repression of the love she still has for her dead husband, of loving someone much younger than her, or to its most extreme, representative of her love of a hypothetical son in an unorthodox manner. This blurry line between familial and romantic love is one of the repressed “Other” that the film expresses. Wood identifies that the most essential part of this formula constitutes the relationship between normality and the monster. He believes that this relationship has one privileged form, which is that of the doppelgänger, double, or alter ego. Birth falls into this privileged form since Sean can be seen as the dead husband’s double. Sean threatens Anna’s normality by telling her not to marry Joseph and trying to break her “normal” heterosexual relationship.

The characterization and narrative structure of the film heavily contribute to the viewer’s unconscious pleasures. In many ways, the film is about the highly taboo subject of loving a person much younger including the possibility of it being your own daughter or son. People constantly repress any feelings that they may have for a much younger significant other since it is deemed unacceptable in American society. Anna’s relationship with the ten-year-old Sean, especially prominent when she kisses him outside her apartment complex and in the bathing scene, is the most explicit sign of this repression. Anna herself wants to repress this desire but after witnessing Sean’s collapse before she goes to the theater everything changes. In a beautiful, highly stylistic sequence that boasts with non-diegetic fierce classical music: Joseph and Anna are seen arriving at a theater and as they walk towards their seats the camera slowly begins to zoom in on Anna’s face; her facial expression automatically signaling the viewer she can no longer repress her desire [captures below]. By setting up this scenario Glazer has provided the viewer with a presentation of a highly repressed desire that can account for the viewer’s unconscious pleasure of the film even if they were frightened or disgusted. This pleasure is derived from the exposition of the repressed desires, allowing viewers to experience these scenarios in a safe format.