“Sutured Beasts”: Mermaid Disco Horror in The Lure
The Lure (dir. Agnieszka Smoczyńska, 2017)
Long concerned with how scientific implications manifest in women’s lives, in “Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic: A Political Physiology of Dominance,” Donna Haraway looks at how the natural sciences are often interpreted through the lenses of false equivalency and patriarchal bias in ways that both create and reinscribe dominance over women. She offers observations of primate behavior as means of justifying “oppressive theories of the body political” as an example of this phenomenon in action (11). It’s a practice that Haraway sees as having two significant implications: first, when “social relations” are reduced to “natural objects,” an essentialist notion of the “natural” dominance of men over women becomes entrenched (10). “That union,” she argues, “has been a major source of ancient and modern justifications of domination, especially of domination based on differences seen as natural, given, inescapable, and therefore moral” (7-8). Secondly, she sheds light on how this mechanism becomes a tool in the maintenance of dominant social paradigms: “this anti-liberation core of knowledge and practice in our sciences is an important buttress of social control” (8).
Haraway points toward the way sex was transformed into a “scientific problem” by social scientists who failed to acknowledge implicit differences in the sexual behaviors of primates and humans, viewing primates as “natural objects unobscured by culture” rather than considering the ways culture inherently and inextricably shapes human sexuality (13-14). This manner of practicing the natural sciences became bound up in explaining and justifying capitalist, patriarchal economic and social systems (18). Importantly, she posits that the encoded maintenance of dominance in this approach to social sciences hinged on a “subject-object split” between the unruly natural body that must be both controlled and repressed and the culturally-shaped self that must rein in the body. “The sciences will have liberating functions in so far as we build them on social relations not based in domination,” she declares, arguing that the “claims for pure objectivity rooted in the subject-object split” have been key in keeping the natural sciences from shaping liberatory practices (19).
In the genre-shaping Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Jack Halberstam is also concerned with this subject-object split, although his concern is more aesthetic and metaphoric than scientific. In the introductory chapter, Halberstam looks at how 19th century Gothic literature’s obsession with the bifurcations in conceptions of inside/ outside, male/ female, body/ mind, etc.—i.e., subject/ object—then goes on to shape the ways 20th century postmodern horror film approaches monstrosity. He reads modern film’s engagement with boundary-challenged monstrosity as growing out of Gothic literature’s obsession with liminality and transgression; although the signified of the horrific Other may change, the structure of the Other and the anxiety about its potential to disorder our world remains the same. Halberstam offers skin as a particular surface through which this Othering occurs, both in the Gothic and in more contemporary film—the concern over Dracula’s deathly pallor and the sutured, incongruous landscape of The Creature’s skin in Frankenstein is echoed in Leatherface’s loose skin and Buffalo Bill’s stitched-together skin-suit (6-7). “Skin… becomes a kind of metonym for the human,” Halberstam argues (6-7). This obsession with skin is reflected in the nature of such “sutured beasts”; these monstrous bodies are, he notes, “a patchwork of gender, sex, and sexuality” (1).
The mermaid, a creature of myth, is this kind of “sutured beast,” and so too is Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s 2015 film Córki Dancingu, released by the Criterion Collection in the US as The Lure. The film centers on two “sisters” (although the mechanism of this is never addressed), Golden and Silver, who emerge from the sea one night when Silver becomes smitten with a young blond man singing and playing guitar on the beach.
It’s a peculiar and often charming film, a strange mashup of the technicolor musical, family melodrama, body horror, and mythic fairy tale. The sisters come ashore and end up in the nightclub in which the blond youth plays in the house band, and the skeevy club owner hires them to sing and dance; their finale involves a tank of water into which they dive, letting their tails manifest in place of what might be considered a more traditional “blow off” that punctuates a striptease. There are echoes of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, David Lynch’s Eraserhead, John Waters’ Female Trouble, and Darren Lynn Bousman’s Repo! The Genetic Opera that thread their way throughout the film as it careens back and forth amongst its many poles.
Part of what fascinates about the film is the way it constantly slips back and forth across genres. This genre-slippage and its excessive hybridity, however, cleverly echoes the way the sisters slip back and forth between humanoid form and mermaid form, how they transform from sexy chanteuses clad in sequins into fanged monsters feasting on men’s hearts. The plot clearly invokes Hans Christen Andersen’s tale of the little mermaid who trades her voice for a pair of legs in the name of love. It’s hard not read the film’s self-aware nods at its more saccharine moments as a comment on the Disneyfication of the original myth, which converts the tragic ending of the original tale into a Happily Ever After in which love conquers all. The Lure restores that tragic ending and adds in some satisfying throat-ripping as well—Silver dies for love, while her sister still metes out brutal payback for the bassist’s betrayal of her sister’s love.
Halberstam argues that the Gothic “creates a public who consumes monstrosity, who revels in it, and who then surveys its individual members for signs of deviance or monstrosity, excess or violence” (12). This is made literal in The Lure through the sisters’ burlesque act punctuated by the unveiling of their true nature coupled with the way their presence reveals monstrousness in those around them, from inciting sexually predatory behavior from the club owner, to inspiring the Mother/ Singer’s fantasies of breastfeeding the sisters, to the Father/ Drummer ostensibly having sex with one of the sisters (revealed by the Singer’s complaint that he stinks of fish). The sister sirens may be literally monstrous, but their prolonged presence peels back those subject-object divides in the people around them and reveals the monstrosity arising from various repressions.
Works Cited
Halberstam, Jack (Judith). “Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity.” Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995, pp. 1-27.
Haraway, Donna J. “Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic: A Political Physiology of Dominance.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1990, pp. 7-20.
Smoczyńska, Agnieszka, dir. Córki Dancingu (The Lure). Criterion, 2015.
