Speculations: Evil Dead Rise & The Horror of Incest
By George Louis Bartlett
Evil Dead Rise takes us back to basics.
Writer-director Lee Cronin says of the story: "There’s been recent changes in familial circumstances, so it’s actually about… dad not being around.” I expected something hammy, predictable, easy. And I got exactly that: a sparkly reboot-sequel missing the enigmata that put Sam Raimi on the map and his original film in the history books. However, a particular story beat prior to the plot’s inciting incident sets the stage for something more:
Liberal tattoo mom, Ellie, informs her (until now) estranged sister, Beth, a rock music technician, that the father of her three children recently left the family. Soon after, an earthquake strikes the apartment block and opens a hole in the ground that leads to a disused bank on which the building was erected.
The acknowledgement of Dad’s departure triggers a tectonic shift that cracks open the boundary between the human world and the Beyond—a literal gap that is traversed by Danny, the teenage eldest of the three kids, who discovers in the bank’s vault (surrounded by Christian paraphernalia) the franchise’s holy object: the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, bound in human flesh and latched shut by gnarled teeth.
Immediately we have the waning of the function of the Father as responsible for the contraction of the gap between desire and the complete jouissance of the real: the Beyond of the Pleasure Principle. Danny is in awe of the book’s drawings, which depict ghastly Lovecraftian scenes of fleshy abominations (echoing Hellraiser’s: There is no good… There is no evil. There is only flesh.)
But for Bridget, his younger teenage sister, the images bring her to the verge of tears: the impressions create a fissure in the symbolic and skirt too close to the real, igniting anxiety. Anxiety, remember, is an affect. It is always a signal of the real; a signal of the lack at the core of our being.
However, it is only when Danny plays a dusty record accompanying the book (on which a "creepy priest" recites a Latin incantation "like a weird dark prayer" against the advice of elders) that a demonic entity is summoned and possesses Ellie, their mother. "Man," after all, “is the warmest place to hide." On the record’s b-side, the same priest warns of his failure to limit the spread of evil: the old representatives of the Law are insufficient to instate the No! of the Father. Christianity, it seems, has lost its touch. We witness here Lacan’s observation that the "decline of the Oedipus complex is the mourning of the father." The limit-setting Law cannot function and Mother becomes das Ding: "Mommy is with the maggots now."
From here on out, the film follows structural expectations as, one by one, the pure jouissance of the Beyond rises and wreaks havoc, which neither a shotgun-wielding Hemingway lookalike nor a six-pack-donning frat boy (the modern and hypermodern incarnations of the masculine) can stop.
Soon, Bridget, and then Danny, get gotten by the Thing. Meanwhile, Beth struggles to protect the youngest child, Kassie, who, armed with a pair of scissors and a makeshift stake (for piercing, cutting, slicing), lends a hand in the fight against the devouring mother and her spawn. Can Beth enforce the No! of the Father? (An important question, since Beth is carrying what (now possessed) Ellie calls a "bastard baby.") Spoiler: Yes. But how?
The answer comes at the climax of the film, which sees the fulfillment of the monstrous image to which the pages of the Necronomicon first opened: a grotesque and multi-limbed monstrosity brought about by the (re-)consumption of Danny and Bridget into their mother’s flesh. Is this not the figurative depiction of the horror of incest that is prevented by the function of the Father?
Dismemberment (castration), as Beth finds out, is the only way to stop the Thing. Does the famed chainsaw not inflict the cut of the signifier? Let us remember: "The cut made by the signifying chain[saw?] is the only cut that verifies the structure of the subject as a discontinuity in the real."
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Speculations explores interactions between world cinema and the Lacanian orientation within the Freudian Field.
