Tracing the image #2: The rebirth of 'The Descent'
Whenever you watch a movie, you're also probably watching just about every other movie you've ever seen. The images that flash by trigger associations in your brain -- some of them deliberately planted by the filmmakers, others not. Still, you've got all these images and memories banging around in your head and they're going to connect with something no matter what.
As I wrote in my review of "The Descent" and subsequent postings, director Neil Marshall quite deliberately conjures up memories of other movies (especially, but not exclusively, horror movies) to evoke emotions and effects that have lingered in viewers' imaginations.
Take the "rebirth" of one character, who emerges from the ground coated in blood, like a baby from the womb. This image resonates with memories from a number of terrific movies. Before I get to a more detailed discussion, the usual **SPOILER ALERT** is in order -- not only for "The Descent," but several of its antecedents, including "Deliverance," "Carrie," "Evil Dead 2" and "The Third Man." OK, let's give these movies a hand!
First let's take a look at the shot itself, and the build-up to it. It's preceded by a couple of images as breathtaking as any in the history of horror: a climb up a subterranean stairway of bones toward the light, a painful, desperate ascent out of the darkness of the underworld. (There are a couple more shots between the spectacular frames I've chosen here.)
When Sarah breaks through the earth's crust, as it were, emerging back into the world from the underworld of Hades, the shot is brilliantly overexposed -- as your eyes would see things when coming out of the dark into the light. The shot begins with a narrow depth of field, flat and with the background washed out, but as it adjusts to a normal exposure, more and more of the surroundings come into view and it becomes fully dimensional. It's as if the the world is opening up for Sarah, the atmosphere itself expanding and becoming breathable again after the constriction of claustrophobically narrow, dusty and airless underground passages.
Sarah grasps the air and then gasps for it. Coated in blood as she emerges, she really does look like she's being (re-)born out of the earth. (But, of course, as we know, Hades is extremely reluctant to let anyone leave his underworld domain. One way of looking at the movie, if you read it through Greek mythology, is that all the characters are dead before they enter Hades.)
This is the first image that flashed through my mind when I saw Sarah's hand come up out of the ground, one of the greatest shots in all of cinema, from Carol Reed's "The Third Man": Harry Lime (Orson Welles), a terrible sinner thought to be dead, trapped in the sewers of Vienna, from which he will never emerge. I've written a lot over the last 20 years or so about the ways filmmakers have used plumbing (sewers, pipes, drains, toilets, showers, baths...) as metaphors for the human body and the human psyche -- the return of the repressed, often having to do with the cleansing or repression of guilt. In "The Third Man," Harry Lime is pure Id, opportunistic, solipsistic, concerned only with his own survival. He's a witty, crafty and intelligent shark in a black hat. Now, I'm not saying at all that Sarah is Harry Lime, but if you think of movies as a labyrinth (see "The Shining"), you must remember that the dead ends are just as much a part of the whole maze as the through-paths. Could Sarah be, in some respects, the unwitting villain of the piece? It's interesting to speculate about one movie in light of another it recalls. I'm doing a little critical spelunking here, and I'm not sure where this route leads, but I don't want to close it off...
This nightmare image from John Boorman's "Deliverance" is explicitly about guilt and the return of the repressed. The evidence of what Jon Voight and his pals (Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox) did upstream is submerged under the water behind a new dam. But the memories are not. You have to wonder which haunts the survivors more: the knowledge of their guilt (even if it is "justifiable homicide") or the remembrance of their emasculating humiliation. Both, of course. In this image it's the hand of a dead man that rises from below the surface, which suggests provocative implications for the character of Sarah in "The Descent." If you see the original ending, you may wonder if she is a "survivor," or if the evidence of her and her compadres' crimes (murder, betrayal, adultery) will remain forever entombed below the surface.
The effect of the grabber-ending of Brian DePalma's "Carrie" has never been surpassed. It, too, is a nightmare born out of guilt and fear, as Sue (Amy Irving), who has tried to be kind to Carrie (Sissy Spacek) only to have her efforts backfire spectacularly, resulting in multiple deaths, dreams of tenderly laying flowers on Carrie's grave, only to be grabbed by Carrie's bloody arm and pulled down into hell. It works so well for many reasons: DePalma shot some of the walk to Carrie's house/grave backwards, to give it a disconcerting dreamlike quality (watch the red VW bug reverse down the road, echoing the arrival of Sue's boyfriend, and Carrie's prom date, Tommy (William Katt) in an earlier shot from the same position. Also, there's a turbulent mix of emotions: Sue meant well, but she knows Carrie thinks she (and Tommy and Miss Collins, the sympathetic teacher played by Betty Buckley) was in on the scheme to humiliate her. How might this relate to "The Descent"? Think of Sarah as "Carrie," whose righteous anger is unleashed in the hellish flare-lit caverns, consuming the innocent and the guilty trapped within chambers as hellishly inescapable as Carrie's flaming high school gym.
Horror cinema is rife with images of undead corpses rising out of the earth, but few as stylish and sprightly as this one from Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead 2." If you've seen the original ending posted earlier (and please note that I've added "The Descent" as its own category here, because you guys have generated the most fascinating and illuminating discussion of the film in Scanners comments), you know that there's a strong suggestion that Sarah is, in fact, deceased and has joined her beloved daughter in the land of the dead (aka Hades, which is not actually a synonym for "hell" but simply the underworld where the dead go).
I favor a reading of "The Descent" in which Sarah's life actually ends with the darkness chasing her down the hotel corridor, and the rest of the film is in her head -- cathartically processing her inchoate feelings of grief, fear and rage at the moment of her death so that she and Jessica (Paul, her apparently unfaithful husband, is conspicuously absent from her thoughts) can be together again. Sarah's homicidal fury at Juno is rooted in betrayal -- feelings that Juno betrayed her with Paul, and that she betrayed Beth by abandoning her to die (after accidentally inflicting the mortal wound). Whether those feelings are justified is ambiguous, but they're not the point; the point is that Sarah feels them, and the movie identifies strongly with Sarah.
If you look at the movie this way, Sarah's rebirth out of the earth is not unlike a corpse returning from the grave. She thinks she "escapes," but once purged (figuratively and literally, by vomiting) she finds Juno sitting right next to her. Is this an image of guilt and fear, not unlike Jon Voight's dream in "Deliverance" or Amy Irving's in "Carrie"? When Sarah awakens, she's not at home in bed with a lover or a mother -- she's alone back in the cave. But she's not alone for long: The familiar, comforting image of Jessica and her birthday cake soon reappears....
Comments
Jim, this sort of analysis might see Neil Marshall snickering behind his hand.
But what the hell.
I enjoy it.
So let's carry on.
Regarding the rebirth sequence et al, let me float an observation here regarding the point of view technique used (and not used) in final 10 minutes.
After the intense stare-down between Sarah and Juno, where the camera cuts back and forth to indicate Sarah's point of view, that technique is not used again until the final sequence where we see a back/forth cut from Sarah's eyes to her daughter and the birthday cake.
Reason?
Here's my theory.
From the time Sarah cripples and abandons Juno, she (Sarah) enters a dissociative, hallucinatory state (is that possible?) which essentially transports her consciousness outside herself, thus making her view her own world in dreamlike, third person fashion (her own world being an important qualifier, dissociation by loose definition being a defence mechanism that removes the individual psychologically from the impact of debilitating trauma).
In other words, from the time of Sarah's final fall (purposeful symbolism here, Neil Marshall?), when she appears to awake and enter the Light, everything she experiences is being filtered through her traumatized/dissociative/hallucinating consciousness.
Evidence of this condition can be found in the rebirth sequence (seen, oddly, from the side, in bright overexposure, as you mentioned), the manic run down the hill (a long range shot), and the hysterical flight in the SUV (where we never see the road/highway from Sarah's point of view, but from front/back/side). During this entire sequence of scenes, Sarah appears to have no intellectual connection at all with what is occurring.
Total dissociation.
It's only at the very end when she stares into the abyss that she reintegrates, the sad irony being that, at this juncture, she goes completely insane and dies.
How does that stack up?
Aye? Nay?
Posted by: John Swift | August 30, 2006 12:36 AM
Well, you know what they say: "Trust the art, not the artist." The aware artist understands that once a work is finished and put it out there, it no longer belongs to her/him. It belongs to the people who experience it. As I've always said: If it's up there on the screen, it's fair game for interpretation and discussion. And, as a matter of fact, I like yours!
Posted by: Jim Emerson | August 30, 2006 02:04 PM
>Well, you know what they say: "Trust the art, not the artist."
Jim, I agree entirely.
That said, however, I still can't decide if a) Neil Marshall incorporated all of this fascinating ambiguity on purpose because he's a skilled, thinking man's writer/director, or b) it was a lucky accident.
Speaking of lucky accidents, I read somewhere online that he initially wanted to title the film The Darkness, but some legal wrangle precluded this. So he went with The Descent instead.
Might be an apocryphal story. Or maybe not.
Whatever the case, I'm looking forward to Marshall's third feature project because I think it will truly demonstrate what he's made of.
Posted by: John Swift | August 30, 2006 05:44 PM
I just wanted to say that I have been greatly enjoying reading over the intelligent discussion of this intriguing film. And that it's a credit to it's power that simply viewing these posts rekindles that vague sense of dread that makes me unsettled at the sight of darkened corners in my suburban pre-fab.
Anyways, I wanted to insert my own little observation here, and if this has been stated previously, I apologize. After seeing the film at the theater, recovering as the lights brightened and credits rolled over the eerie photograph of our unfortunate adventurers, I noticed that the first Crawler credited actually was given a name: Scar. I confirmed this my looking up the credits on IMDb. This could simply be a physical attribute of the creature, but I would like to think of it as a comment on the function of the Crawlers as a manisfestation of psychological scarification.
Just a thought.
JE: The first thing I thought of was Scar, the Comanche raid leader in "The Searchers." But I haven't thought about where that might lead...
Posted by: Ann | August 30, 2006 06:39 PM
To John and Jim:
Good points, both of you. I really have nothing to contribute, except to remind you about the emergence of the Joker's chalk white hand from the noxious chemicals in Tim Burton's Batman. When I first saw Deliverance (after Batman incidentally) I was reminded of that shot, so I just assmued that Burton did it as an homage. Now, maybe he and maybe he didn't, but one thing is for sure. Years later Burton made a very obvious reference to Deliverance in his film Big Fish, so I think the chances of a deliberate connection between the "rebirth" shot in Deliverance the "birth of the Joker" shot in Batman are pretty good.
JE: I'd forgotten all about that! Let's also not forget about John Boorman's further elaboration on this image: The Lady in the Lake offering the titular sword in his superb "Excalibur." Or, as it was described in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail":
ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king!
DENNIS: Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcicial aquatic ceremony!
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: Oh but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!
ARTHUR: SHUT UP!
DENNIS: Oh but if I went 'round sayin' I was Emperor, just because some moistened bink lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
ARTHUR: SHUT UP! WILL YOU SHUT UP! [Grabs Dennis]
DENNIS: Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
Posted by: Damian Arlyn | August 30, 2006 07:25 PM
The whole thing is a metaphor for the Iraq War and the betrayal endured by the public.
Posted by: David Arroyo | August 30, 2006 09:29 PM
Jim,
The commentary on this film has so far been excellent, but this article particularly intrigued me.
While the visual motif of the emergent hand certainly has parallels in other films, its use in this film is nearly the reverse of those.
Boorman and De Palma utilized that motif as a metaphor for the shadows of the subconscious. The hand emerging symbolized the crimes of the protagonists, the Jungian shadow that they had been exposed to in its purest form. The shot of Juno in the car better explores that similar trend of irrepressible Id.
However, this film uses the hand-thrust image as triumphant, the re-emergence of the protagonist. Not only does she take a large breath, but the film does too, allowing a burst of sunlight, a deep shot that includes the woods miles behind, and plenty of screen space for Sarah to invade. I was reminded of Twelve Angry Men, where the constrictive setting of the jury room is finally punctuated with a freeing wide shot of the court steps. I'd argue that the shot has more weight as cinematic technique, an amazing way of visually releasing Sarah from her journey.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with subtextual interpretation, especially when you find a way to throw Evil Dead II into the mix. Bravo.
P.S. One shot that floored me was the first significant appearance of the crawler (the one with the flashlight beam). I can't remember the last time a creature reveal was so confident and eerie.
Posted by: James | September 1, 2006 12:19 AM
First, thanks to everyone for some great conversations on this film! I finally saw it last night, and got white knuckles from the first half alone (which carried me through the good, but inferior second half). I'm not a filmmaker, but I'd guess one of the reasons the second half is less effective is that, to give the women a fighting chance, the action moves to more open and more well-lit spaces - so the claustrophobia diminishes somewhat as the blood starts spurting. Eh, well.
But as much as I like the reading that turns the film into a inward, psychological manifestation of one character's anger, there's one major plot point that wouldn't gel: (*spoilers*)
When Sarah kills Juno, it's partially out of a misunderstanding; she believes that Juno is responsible for the deaths of the other characters in a way that the viewer knows she is not (or at least not entirely). Juno killed one character by accident, and she surely wasn't responsible for the deaths of the others - but Sarah thinks she is. I can't think of any reason why Sarah's psyche would create a revenge drama in which the revenge is only half-justified, but also half-misplaced. Do subconscious minds generate narratives in which their urges are fulfilled by acts of semi-self-conscious ignorance?
Posted by: Brad | September 1, 2006 05:15 AM
re: the rebirth sequence
As for comparisons, don't forget the buried alive Bride's escape-from-the-grave scene in Kill Bill Vol. 2 (ie, the hand thrusting up from underground, the emerging head and torso, the gasping for breath, the squirming out of the ground).
There's an uncanny similarity between that version and Marshall's.
The only distinction I can see between the two is that Tarantino shoots his version face on, while Marshall shoots his from the side.
Note: speaking of similarities, the climactic scene in The Descent
where the bloody-faced Sarah stares down Juno is also very similar to the intense Bride/Elle confrontation in Kill Bill Vol. 2.
Posted by: John Swift | September 3, 2006 12:35 AM
Jim,
You might find it interesting to do a segment on faces in the film, since the way the filmmakers use them is interesting, as well:
- the red-covered face of Sarah, as she emerges from the pool
- the key lack-of-face of her daughter's ghost, always (apart from the British ending) conspicuously off-screen
- contrasting with the only shot of Juno's ghost, which is all face
- the face was the body part destroyed in the car accident
- the face of the beasts, which are emphasized many times
- the final image: a photograph of all smiling faces
Just a thought.
Posted by: Brad | September 4, 2006 10:32 PM
Hi Jim,
I thought I had exhausted myself on this film earlier but this last posting got me thinking. The emmerging hand visual motif also recalls "Shock", Mario Bava's last film. Lots of hand imagery in that (masterful) movie, including a ghostly hand that appears to be coming out of the lush green of a lawn. The hand latter appears to have been a common garden rake.
Its interesting to put Shock beside the Descent as both deal with female central figures who have been broken down by deathes of loved ones and their respectives atempts to "move on" are, um, "tweaked" by the uncanny.
--Allan
Posted by: Allan McPherson | September 5, 2006 07:50 AM
Another visual reference to being reborn out of the earth can be found in, if we can stoop to referencing TV shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
At the end of season 5, Buffy dies closing a portal to a hell dimension and, unknown to her friends, goes to heaven. Believing her soul has gone to the above mentioned hell dimension, and desperately needing a guardian for the city which has now been overrun by demons, her best friend Willow casts a resurrection spell at Buffy's grave. Believing the spell to have failed, and being besieged by demons, she abandons the graveside to protect herself.
Buffy, having been torn from heaven, awakens in her coffin and has to break out of the coffin and dig her way up through the ground, emerging first with a hand and then head and torso, finally gasping for breath as she emerges. When she does, she's alone, and shortly thereafter confronted by demons herself. She has been "reborn" into what can only seem like hell to her after having been in heaven.
This image serves as a motif throughout the series, with recently reborn vampires emerging from the ground in a similar manner, drawing a parallel to what has just happened to Buffy: She's been reborn, but she's not what she once was, is missing something vital because she's been denied the peaceful rest she had rightfully earned, also a parallel to what happens with the reborn vampires of the series.
Posted by: Gilda | May 2, 2008 03:55 AM