Indicaciones de la antineumocócica 23-valente:

A key component of the family dynamic in both films relates to the cycles of the deaths of both patriarchal and matriarchal figures in the film. The films’ treatment of patriarchal demise marks a key point of ambivalence in their treatment of the ideology of family. In his analysis of the 1977 film, Rodo- wick notes that the death of Big Bob, a “literal representative of bourgeois authority in the text,” marks a critical moment in a cycle of displacement that sets off the action of the film. The violence in the film is in some sense centrally dependent on this displacement of patriarchal authority. Bob’s death follows the death of Fred (the gas station attendant and father of Jupiter) and opens a space for Doug to avenge the remaining family. For Rodowick, what is notable about how the revenge cycle operates as events unfold is how the violence becomes a part of the Carters, not the monsters. As he describes it, “The film moves towards a resolution, but this will not mean the restoration of order and ideological stability. It is, rather, a movement of equivalence in which the [Carters] will be identified with the ideology of

‘violence’ previously reserved for the monsters.”24 _{It is this critical point of}

blurred identification between Big Bob’s conservative family and Jupiter’s outlawed tribe that creates one significant space for radical intervention.

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and The Hills Have Eyes is no exception. Big Bob’s immolation is part of a violent sequence of action in which Jupiter’s sons invade the Carters’ trailer and wreak havoc upon the women in the family. In this disturbing sequence, the mutants set off the explosion that engulfs Big Bob in flames, creating a diversion that effectively draws Bobby, Ethel, and Lynn away while Mars and Pluto ravage the trailer, bite the head off the pet parakeet, rape Brenda, and ultimately kill Lynn and Ethel before absconding with the baby. For many critics, including Rodowick, such moments would inevitably point to a re- assertion of patriarchal norms and the status quo. In her article “Breached Bodies and Home Invasions: Horrific Representations of the Feminized Body and Home,” Marcia England explores the ambivalent dynamic of the violence of penetration in three films, The Others, Evil Dead II, and I Walked

with a Zombie, concluding that while home invasions and rape might in

some cases be read as a violent transgression of patriarchal spaces and a radical disruption of boundaries, the conclusions of these particular films serve to reinstate patriarchal order, thereby reinforcing “gendered codings of

space.”25 _{In The Hills Have Eyes, both the horror and the theme of patriarchal}

displacement come together in this pivotal scene of penetrative violence. England does not specifically reference The Hills Have Eyes in her discus- sion, but the dynamic whereby home invasion marks a radical intervention within the ideology of family certainly holds true in this film. As England comments, “The home becomes a conduit within these horror stories, one that is permeable to the outside. It is no longer isolated and segregated; it is invaded. It is from this fuzziness that we begin to see the fragility of the constructions of public and private space, of the home and of family, of

society as a whole.”26 _{For England the level of extreme punishment that the}

perpetrators suffer serves to restore patriarchal norms, but for me the radical displacement of the normative family in The Hills Have Eyes contributes to the films’ ultimate critique of the dominant ideology.

The cycle of displaced patriarchal authority and the exercise of violence against women might seem to gesture toward a conservative ending, but the Carter family’s ability (in both films) to adapt to the same level of excessive violence as the monsters ultimately destabilizes the family’s ideological co- herence. As Rodowick puts it in his description of the 1977 Craven film, “In- stead of celebrating the triumph of the bourgeois family, the final moments

of the film only serve to inscribe them in the place of their victimizers.”27

While in the Aja 2006 version, the final shot of the reconfigured family might be seen as the family prevailing in a heroic tableau, the narrative excesses of violence undermine any conservative sense of reassurance. The strict boundaries of gender roles have been disrupted, and the haunting presence

Ideological Formations of the Nuclear Family in The Hills Have Eyes 117

of the sins of the past are ever present, effectively disrupting the ideological link between family, god, and country. The final shot of the Aja film, taken from the perspective of the mutants, signals that the threat is not over, and that the past is still very much present.

Conclusion

A key scene in the 2006 film exemplifies the concept of ISAs and also marks a departure from the 1977 original. As Doug develops as an action hero, he makes the critical decision to track the miners to their town and retrieve baby Katherine. As he emerges from the mineshaft with weapon and dog, he enters the ghost town that was once the village for nuclear testing, with tattered mannequins still in place. The mannequins, inanimate human replicates, are symbolic by their nature, and here their symbolism functions to mimic the everyday life of a bourgeois American family from the 1960s. A young boy and girl sit on the creaking swings in the yard of a house in a deserted middle-class neighborhood— a ghostly replication of normalcy in which mannequins “play” on swings and tumbleweeds blow through a bright desert day.

The mannequins’ symbolic force gestures to ways that we humans in- habit social roles: more like puppets or dolls set in position than individual agents with free will, these figures have been placed into positions that mark them as inanimate leftovers, but they are still somehow are recognizable as “family.” The mannequins manage to be representative and ironic at once, straddling the ground between innocence and danger. These figures were pawns in the nuclear testing, and are therefore (like the mutants themselves) representative of devastation. As inhabitants of this ghost town, they fur- ther signal danger insofar as they are “neighbors” of the mutant miners. Yet their iconic meaning as white, middle-class American children of the 1960s strongly signals a nostalgic pull of normalcy, stability, and comfort. It is in this ironic play between the immediate danger signaled by the plot of the film and the iconic comfort of the symbolism of family that we can

understand the strength of the ISA.28

The nuclear ghost town is an eerie echo of the middle-class 1960s, with mannequins standing in for neighbors and family units. It also holds the iconic appeal of the American Western, situating the miners within the symbolic framework of “Americanness.” Even the living rooms are set up as lifeless tableaux, with kids lounging on the floor before the television set. Yet all these signifiers of normalcy and family exist in a ghost town, an empty and evacuated scene of traces with no visible sign of life. Part of what makes

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this all so scary is the way that the world of the mutant miners mirrors the world of the bourgeois Carter family and their symbols of normalcy. This is more like a fun-house mirror, with odd distortions and horrific violence displacing the banal predictability of the iconic American family. This group looks the part in many ways. In one shocking scene, Doug enters a room and comes across a pair of live little children sitting on the floor watching TV. After so many mannequins, their presence is shocking, as is their clichéd request to him: “Come play with us, mister.” Another shot of the mannequins shows them posed alternatively as family and then (in a quick shot almost beyond recognition) as a couple engaged in fellatio. A shadow of marginal- ity, perhaps a technician’s prank, it nevertheless contributes to the uncanny feel of the ghost village, a place at once familiar and strange, and alienating largely because of the strong appeal of family ideology.

Mannequins point to notions of the sterility and exchangeability of the working classes. When Doug wakes up in the meat freezer, he finds himself surrounded by body parts, and it is only the blood that helps us realize the limbs are not from dismembered mannequins but from human victims. Disassembled, the limbs imply that the parts are in some sense exchangeable, subject to production and reproduction. The bodies have been cheapened through their “use value” of cannibalism and also through their association to the mannequins. As Robin Wood notes, “Cannibalism represents the ultimate in possessiveness, hence the logical end of human

relations under capitalism.”29

While on the surface The Hills Have Eyes rehearses the time-worn theme of a family under siege, thus seemingly reiterating American family values, on another level the films radically revise assumptions about the legacy of the “nuclear family” and its uneasy place in American history. The mechanisms of horror and its relationship to family ideology demand a complex set of reading practices. My response to the films is in line with that of Rodowick, who concludes with a similar mixed response: “In the final analysis, I’m not sure whether I would consider The Hills Have Eyes to be a progressive text or

not.”30 _{For me such ambivalence is in keeping with the complexities of the}

horror film, as well as the ambivalent and often mixed nature of ideologi- cal power. Sociopolitical readings of film must account for the paradoxical complexity of ideological discourses that achieve their power by appealing on multiple, sometimes conflicting, levels. Althusser and Foucault’s theories of discourse, ideology, and subject formation allow a rich space for under- standing the ideology of family values in America and the horror that such seemingly banal discourse carries in its wake.

Ideological Formations of the Nuclear Family in The Hills Have Eyes 119

Notes

1. Wes Craven, The Hills Have Eyes (Troy, MI: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1977).

2. Alexandre Aja, The Hills Have Eyes (Beverly Hills: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006).

3. Rick Worland, The Horror Film: An Introduction, New Approaches to Film Genre (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 7, 15.

4. D. N. Rodowick, “The Enemy Within: The Economy of Violence in The Hills Have

Eyes,” in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Metuchen,

NJ, and London: Scarecrow, 1984), 323.

5. Richard Allen and Murray Smith, eds., Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 16.

6. Henry A. Giroux, Breaking in to the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 3.

7. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York Routledge, 1990), 196.

8. Louis Althusser, On Ideology, Radical Thinkers 26 (London and New York: Verso, 2008); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1990).

9. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was an Italian Marxist whose theories account for the complexity of consent and resistance through the notion of hegemony. He ar- gues that workers acquiesce to the dominant economic order because cultural forces legitimate the value system that makes up that order. Hegemony is that dynamic of manufactured consent via cultural forces that unifies a society despite the oppression and exploitation of certain classes. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison

Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New

York: International, 1971).

10. Althusser, On Ideology, 19, 11.

11. Allen and Smith, Film Theory and Philosophy, 241. 12. Althusser, On Ideology, 1.

13. Ibid., 21.

14. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 95.

15. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror

Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 124, 125, 126, 129.

16. Ibid., 129. 17. Ibid., 160, 161. 18. Ibid., 163, 136, 134.

19. Marc Mancini, “Professor Gore,” Film Comment 25 (1989): 8. 20. Rodowick, “The Enemy Within,” 330, 329.

21. Tony Williams, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Madison, NY: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 13, 22, 129, 130.

22. Ibid., 143, 145, 147, 148.

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Exchange,” in American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, ed. Gregory A. Waller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 180.

24. Rodowick, “The Enemy Within,” 327–28.

25. Marcia England, “Breached Bodies and Home Invasions: Horrific Representa- tions of the Feminized Body and Home,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist

Geography 13, no. 4 (2006): 359.

26. Ibid.

27. Rodowick, “The Enemy Within,” 324.

28. In fact, the ideology of family has in many ways superseded the power of education (identified by Althusser as the premiere ISA) in its ability to fashion social responses.

29. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1986), 91.