外文翻译
Recreational Terror and the Postmodern Elements of the
Contemporary Horror Film
The universe of the contemporary horror film is an uncertain one in which good and
evil, normality and abnormality, reality and illusion become virtually indistinguishable. This, together with the presentation of violence as a constituent feature of everyday life, the inefficacy of human action, and the refusal of narrative closure produces an unstable, paranoid universe in which familiar categories collapse. The iconography of the body figure as the site of this collapse. Henry:Portrait of a Serial Killer unfolds in this postmodern universe. The film, which details the sanguinary activities of a psychotic serial killer, was ready for release early in 1986 but remained on the distributor's shelf until 1989, when Errol Morris, director of The Thin Blue Line brought Henry to the Telluride Film Festival(Village Voice 1990, 59). Among the obstacles the film faced was the unwillingness of the Motion Picture Association of America(MPAA) to give it an R rating .The reason? Its \"disturbing moral tone\" (McDonough 1990, 59). Fearful because an X rating means death at the box office for nonpornographic films, distributors lost interest. Even the director John McNaughton expressed concern over whether the film would find an audience. As he told Variety, \"[Henry] may be too arty for the blood crowd and too bloody for the art crowd\" (quoted in Stein 1990, 59). McNaughton's concern and the MPAA's judgement rested on the film's tendency to play with and against the conventions of the contemporary horror genre. What makes it an innovative and daring film also makes it difficulr to classify. This holds true as well for the postmodern horror film, of which Henry os emblematic.
The boundaries of any genre are slippery, but those of the postmodern horror film are particularly treacherous to negotiate since one of the defining features of postmodernism is the aggressive blurring of boundaries. How do we distinguish horror from other film genre and the postmodern horror film from other horror films? In this chapter I will argue that the contemporary horror genre, i.e., those horror films
produced since about 1968, can be characterized as postmodern. I will formulate a working definition of the postmodern horror genre based on generalizations drawn from the study of films which cultural consensus defines as horror films, though not necessarily as postmodern ones. In the course of delineating the postmodern features of the contemporary horror genre, I will different it from its prior classical incarnation.
THE QUESTION OF POSTMODERNISM
In Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie, Andrew Tudor (1989) charts the development of the Anglo-American horror genre, The primary distinction the draws is between the pre-sixties (1931-1960) and the post-sixties (1960-1984) genre, terms that roughly correspond to my use of \"classical\" and \"postmodern.\" Tudor parenthetically aligns the post-1960s genre with postmodernism and the \"legitimation crisis\" of postindustrial society by which he means the failure of traditional structures of authority (1989, 222). Although Tudor does not involve himself in discussions of the postmodernism per se, he does point out that the legitimation crisis of late capitalism may be the salient social context in which to ground the contradictions of the post-sixties horror genre. But before we can address the postmodern elements of the contemporary horror film, we must tackle the thorny issue of defining postmodernism.
Social theorists represent is as a widespread and elusive phenomenon, as yet unclearly difined, its amorphous boundaries are hard to pin down. Andreas Huyssen portrays it as both a historical condition and a style, \"part of a slowly emerging cultural transformation in Western societies, a change in sensibility\" (repr. 1990, 234). Todd Gitlin associates postmodernism with the erosion of universal categories, the collapse of faith in the inevitability of progress, and the breakdown of moral clarities (1989, 353). Jean-Francois Lyotard characterizes the posrmodern as entailing a profound loss of faith in master narratives (claims to universal Truth) and disenchantment with the teleology of progress (1984, xxiv). Craig Owens indentifies it with \"a crisis of [Western] cultural authority\" (1983, 57).
For my purposes, the postmodern world is an unstable one in which traditional (dichotomous) categories break down, boundaries blur, institutions fall into question, Enlightenment narratives collapse, the inevitability of progress crumbles, and the master status of the universal (read male, white, monied, heterosexual) subject deteriorates, Consensus in the possibility of mastery is lost,universalizing grand theory is discredited, and the stable, unified, coherent self acquires the status of a fiction. Although the political valence of postmodernism is subject to debate, there is much to be said for the progressive potenial of this paradigm shift.
Clearly, the term postmodernism acknowledges a shift from modernism, one not cleatly defined and unable to stand as a separate term. But this cultural transformation was not ushered in by an apocalyptic ending or a clean break. It was and continues to be a matter of uneven development, where, to heed a warning issued by postmodernists, development cannot be conflated with progress. Insofar as we can conceptualize this cultural transformation as a break, it might be more fruitful to speak of it as a stress break, not the result of an originary traumatic event but the cumulative outcome of repetitive historical stresses including the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Cold War, Vietnam, the anti-war movement, and the various liberation movements associated with the sixties: civil rights, blacks power, feminism, and gay liberation. Indeed, the impetus to situate postmodernism as a sixties or post-sixties phenomenon lies in the celebrated (or scorned) association of that period with cultural contradictions and resistance to authority that figure so prominently in discussions of the postmodern today.
THE RELAIONSHIP OF POSTMODERNISM TO POPULAR CULTURE The contemporary horror genre is sometimes criticized in modernist terms for being aligned with the degraded from of pleasure-inducing mass culture. Critics relegate the contemporary genre to the ranks of ideologically conservative culture and excoriate or laud it for promoting the status quo through its reinforcement of such classical binary oppositions as normal/abnormal sexuality. Indeed, in Dreadful Pleasures (1985), James Twitchell portrays the horror film as a morality tale that
demonstrates the dangers of sexuality outside the heteromonogamous unclear family. In contrast, the vexed relationship of the contemporary horror film to postmodernism is rarely articulated. When the contemporary genre is associated with postmodernism it is often to discredit one or both. For Kim Newman, \"the postmodern horror film\" refers to those eighties horror films characterized by camp. This comic turn signals for Newman a degneration, a dying out of the genre's capacity to depict \"the horrors and neuroses of the age\one that has been displaced and dispersed across other genres that are themselves increasingly hybird in form (1988, 211-15). He speaks as a disappointed horror fan for whom \"postmodern horror films\" fail to do what they are fitted to do. Tania Modleski, on the other hand, is no fan of the genre. In \"The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory,\" she classifies contemporary horror films as an expression of postmodernism and concludes that the former illustrate what is most perverse about the latter. This position bears closer closer inspection.
Although in principle postmodernism erodes all binary oppositions, Huyssen locates postmodernism's defining feature in its challenge to modernism's grounding distinction between high (artworld) culture and low (mass) culture. Postmodernism blurs the boundaries between art and mass culture. Ironically, as both Huyssen (repr. 1990 241) and Modleski (1986 156) argue, many postmodernists unselfconsciously reproduce the high culture/low culture opposition in its modernist Frankfurt School form in their own work. They say, in effect, that mass culture produce pleasure, which inscribes the consumer into the dominate bourgeois ideology. In contrast, the decentered text produces jouinssance and takes an adversarial stance against bourgeois society. Modleski aligns the contemporary horror film with the letter form but questions its value for feminism.
Modleski identifies the following as postmodern elements of the contemporary horror film: open-ended narratives, minimal plot and character development, and (relatedly) the difficulty of audience indentification with undeveloped and unlikeable characters. Modleski argues the the decentered, disordered horror film, like the
avant-garde, changes textual codes in order to disrupt narrative pleasure, and that as such it is a form if oppositional culture. (Huyssen notes that postmodernism appropriates and recyles many of modernism's aesthetic strategies, like the ones Modleski indicates.) Modleski aligns the horror film with postmodernism and both with the disription of pleasure for women, given the lengths to which women have historically been denied pleasure, and consequently to question the limits of postmodernism for feminism.
Modleski raises important questions. But her depiction of the contemporary horror films is flawed and therefore her comclusion is flawed. She fails to grasp the ways in which the contemporary horror is pleasurable, not only for a male audience but also for a female audience. Although the horror film is not necessarily critical or radical, it does contain, as Hutssen suggests for postmodernism, \"productive contradictions, perhaps even a critical and oppositional potential\" (repr. 1990. 252)
But before embarking on this exploration, I want to address the apparent contradiction contained in the notion of a postmodern genre. The classical genres are defined as bounded by preestablished rules. Genre theory seeks to elucidate these rules and thus provide unity and coherence to group of films. In contrast, a postmodern work breaks down bounddaries, transgresses genres, and is characterized by incoherence. A postmodern genre would seem to be an oxymoron. So what does it mean to talk about a postmodern genre, especially given that \"genre\" is a structural idea? First, the notion of transgression presupposes existing genres to be transgressde (Cohen 1988). The postmodern horror film transgresses the rules of the classically oriented horror genre, but in doing so it also retains some features of the classical genre such that it is possible to see and appreciate the transgression. Furthermore, the postmodern horror film draws upon other generic codes and structures, in particular, science-fiction horror, of which Alien (1979) is a notable example. Thirdly, since a genre is in part comstitued by audience expectations, a degree of license is granted to the horror film as incoherence and violaion enter the narrative and visual lexicon of the genre audience through repeated viewings. Indeed, the genre audience acquires a taste for the willingness mot to resist it. Consequently, the genre audience greets a
new horror film with the expectation of being surprised by a clever overturning of convention.
Although in practice there is overlap between the classical and postmodern forms of the genre, as there must be, analytically it is fruitful to draw this distinction in order to perceive the changes that have transpired between the emergence of the Hollywood horror film of the thirties and the films of the nineties. In doing so, it is important to bear in mind that the shift from classical to postmodern paradigms does not entail a clean, historically definable break. It is, rather, a process of uneven development in that each film both uses and departs from rules and that this process does not itself follow clear and definite rules.
CLASSICAL AND POSTMODERN PARADIGMS OF THE HORROR GENRE The classical horror film is exemplified in films such as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). The creature feature films of the post-war period-including The Thing (1951), Invasion of the Body Snathers (1956), and The Blob (1958)-share a similar narrative structure, which Tudor lays out. The film opens with the violent disruption og the normative order by a monster, which can take the form of a supernatural or alien invader, a mad scientist, or a drviant transformation from within. The narrative revolves around the monster’s rampage and people’s ineffectual attempts to resist it. In the end, male military or scientific experts successfully employ violence and/or knowledge to defeat the monster and restore the normative order (Tudor 1989, 81-105). The boundary between good and evil, normal and abnormal, human and alien is as firmly drawn as the imperative that good must conquer evil, thus producing a secure Manichean worldview in which the threats to the social order are largely external and (hu)man agency prevails, largely in the figure of the masterful male subject. As Robin Wood notes, the film of the thirties further distanced their monsters from everyday life by locating them in an exotic time or place (1986, 85).
In the fifties, the gothic monsters largely receded into the background, and what emerged was an amalgam of sciencefiction and horror elements known as the creature
feature. This hybrid combines science fiction’s focus on the logically plausible (especially through technology) with horror’s emphasis on fear, loathing, and violence. The fifties films generally locate the monster ina contemporary American city, sometimes a small town, thus drawing the danger closer to home, but they retain the exotic in the monster’s prehistoric or ourer space origins (Lucanop 1987, 36-37). The postmodern horror film is exemplified by films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), The Thing (1982),A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990). Again, drawing on Tudor’s analysis we can summarize the narrative structure as follows. Such films usually open with the violent disruption of the normative order by a monster, which can take the form of a supernatural or alien invader, a deviant transformation from within, a psychotic, or a combination of these forms. Like its classical predecessors, the postmodern horror film revolves around the monster’s graphically violent rampage and ordinary people’s ineffectual attempts to resist it with violence. In the end, the inefficacy of human action and the repudiation of narrative closure combine to produce various forms of the open ending: the monster triumphs (Henry); the monster is defeated but only temporarily (Halloween), or the outcome is uncertain (Night of the Living Dead ,Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Thing, Nightmare on Elm Street). The boundary between living and dead, normal and abnormal, human and alien, good and evil, is blurred, sometimes indistinguishable. In contrast to the classical horror film, the postmodern film locates horror in the contemporary everyday world, where the efficacious male expert is supplanted by the ordinary victim who is subjected to high levels of explicit, sexualized violence, especially if female. Women play a more promotes a paranoid worldview in which inexplicable and increasingly internal threats to the social order prevail (Tudor 1989. 81=-105).
Key elements of the transition from classical to postmodern paradigms are played our in Targets(1968), a self-reflexive film that juxtaposes the gothic monster of the classical paradigm with the psychotic monster of the postmodern paradigm. Target is about a clean-cut, normal-seeming, suburban young man, Bobby Thompson, who
inexplicably Kills his wife and mother, then snipes at freeway motorists from a water tower. (Thompson’s character is based on Charles Whitman who went on a murder spree in Austin, Texas in 1966.) A parallel plot features Boris Karloff as an aging horror film star who decides to retire because he has become anachronistic. People are no longer terrified by his films. Why should they be, when the headlines of everyday life are more horrific? The two narrative lines intersect when Thompson snipes from behind the screen of a drive-in theater at an audience watching the The Terror, a 1963 gothic horror film featuring Boris Karloff. The juxtaposition of these two figures dramatizes how the psychotic killer’s inexplicable violent rampage has supplanted monster of castles and closed endings.
娱乐性恐怖：当代恐怖电影的后现代元素
[美国]伊·彼耐
当代恐怖电影从整体上来说是一个令人难以捉摸的东西，善与恶、正常与变态、现实与幻觉在这里几乎让人难分难辨。恐怖片将暴力表现为日常生活的一种元素，表现人类行为的无济于事，同时拒绝完整的叙事，所以其结果是一个不稳定的、妄想的世界，在这个世界里观众所熟悉的类型分崩离析，而人体被当成了这种分崩离析的发生地。
任何类型片的界定都是不甚明晰的，而对于后现代恐怖片来说这种界定则更加困难，因为后现代主义的明显特征之一就是它的界限的模糊性。那么我们又如何将恐怖片与其他类型片以及后现代恐怖片与其他种类的恐怖片区分开来呢?
我将在本文中论证说明当代恐怖电影——指1968年以后出品的恐怖电影——都具有后现代主义的特征，通过对那些已经在文化意义上被一致公认的恐怖电影(尽管不必被定义为后现代)进行研究和归纳，我将系统地阐述一种对后现代恐怖电影切实有效的界定方法，我将在对当代恐怖电影中的后现代元素进行描述的过程中使之同过去的经典恐怖片作一对比性鉴别。
关于后现代主义问题
在《魔鬼与疯狂的科学家：恐怖电影的文化史》一书中，安德鲁·图德用图表展示了美国恐怖电影的发展过程，他将恐怖电影的发展划分为两个基本阶段：“六十年代前”(1931至1960)和“六十年代后”(1960至1984)，这类似于我所划分的“经典”与“后现代”两大类别。
这就给我们带来了一个棘手的问题：什么是后现代主义?社会理论学家们把它描述成一个广泛存在但又令人困惑的现象，至今也未对它作出明确的界定。安德鲁斯·休森认为后现代主义的存在既是作为一种历史状况又是作为一种类型，是“西方社会中慢慢显现出的文化变革中的一部分，是人们在感受上的一种变化。”托德·吉特琳将后现代主义与一般类型的削弱、对必然规律的信念动摇以及是非分明的道德的崩溃联系在一起，让一弗兰科伊斯·莱奥塔德则把后现代的东西描绘成对主流叙事的极度失望和对目的论的觉醒，至于克雷格·欧文斯则认定后现代主义是“文化策略的一种危机。”
后现代的世界就是这样一个不稳定的世界，在这里传统的(二分的)种类分崩离析，界限模糊，制度陷入困境，主流叙事崩溃，必然规律被破坏，人们通常所见的(可解释为：关于男性的、白种人的，富有阶层的、异性恋者的)题材的基本状况已经瓦解。权威丧失了，那些放之四海而皆准的伟大的理论遭到怀疑，而稳定、统一、协调的自我纯属虚构。
显然，后现代主义这个词承认它是由现代主义这个词转化而来的，但它并不预示着充满悲观的世界末日情绪，甚至也不含有一个清晰的结束意味，如果说我们能赋予这种文化变革一种结束的概念，那么将它称为一种重要的结束则更为有效。它并非某个具有创伤性的运动所造成的结果，而是包括大屠杀、广岛原子弹爆炸、冷战、越南战争、反战运动以及与六十年代紧密相联的形形色色的解放运动在内的不断重复的历史重压的累积性后果。确实，促使人们将后现代主义定位为六十年代或六十年代后的现象的原因在于将这一阶段与文化冲突和对权威的文化抵制联系到了一起，这一联系在今天关于后现代的讨论中显得尤为突出。
后现代主义与大众文化的联系
用现代派的术语来说，当代恐怖电影有时会因为与那种诱导愉悦的低俗的大众文化紧密相联而遭到批评，一些理论家，譬如詹姆斯·特威彻尔就将当代恐怖电影列入受社会肯定的文化之列，对其通过诸如正常／非正常的两性关系这类经典的二元对立的强化来促进现状的做法予以指责或赞扬，他甚至将恐怖片描绘成一个道德故事，用以阐明在一夫一妻制的核心家庭以外的性关系的危险。
当代恐怖电影与后现代主义之间的联系是一个令人烦恼的问题，尽管人们很少将它们联系在一起。而当人们将当代类型电影后现代主义联结在一起时，其用意不是要贬低其中的某一个就是将二者统统贬低。金。纽曼简单地论述了“后现代恐怖电影”，他用这个词来指代八十年代那些庸俗下流的恐怖电影。在纽曼看来，这一类型的喜剧意味标志着一种堕落，一种描述“时代的恐惧与精神病”的能力的丧失，也标志着他所主张的该类型的作用已经转移或疏散到其他类型中去了，而这些类型本身在形式上正变得越来越混杂。他说这些话时就像一个失望的恐怖片迷，而与之相对照的是塔尼姬·莫德里斯基，她并非恐怖片迷，而她将当代恐怖电影与后现代主义联系在一起，则是为了贬低后者，并以这一姿态对恐怖电影进行深一步的审视。
尽管从大体上来说，后现代主义消融了二元对立，但根据休森的说法，后现代主义所表现出的明显特征却是它对现代主义所划分的高级(艺术世界)文化与低级(大众)文化之间的区别的挑战，具有讽刺意味的是：正如休森和莫德里斯基所争议的那样，许多后现代主义者在他们自己的作品里不自觉地以法兰克福学派的形式，重又制造了一个高级／低级文化的对立，他们说大众文化实际上是在制造愉悦而非享乐，从而将消费者嵌入主流意识形态之中，而离心式式的本文则与之相反，它制造享乐并采取一种与资产阶级社会相对抗的姿态。莫德里斯基将当代恐怖电影与后者并列在一起。
莫德里斯基认为以下几点构成了当代恐怖电影的后现代元素，结尾开放的叙事，情节与人物性格淡化至最低限度，以及与之相关的观众对这些没有性格发展、不讨人喜欢的人物的
认同困难，莫德里斯基还论证说散乱无序的恐怖电影就像前卫艺术一样，变革了本文的规则，使叙事的愉悦受到破坏，因此成为一种对立的文化形式。但她作此论证是为了质疑那种拒绝承认女性愉悦的说法，尤其是那种认为妇女有史以来就被拒绝给予愉悦的说法，从而对后现代主义在争取女权运动方面所存在的局限提出质疑。
尽管我认为莫德里斯基提出这些质疑具有一定的重要意义，但她在描述当代恐怖电影所具备的后现代特征方面却是有缺陷的，而且也没有抓住当代恐怖电影娱悦观众的方法所在。后现代主义并不一定要具备批判性和激进性，但当代恐怖电影却如休森所指出的那样“蕴藏了极为丰富的矛盾，甚至可能还有一种极具批判性和对抗性的潜力。”
类型理论总是试图阐释那些预先设定规范的经典类型片的规则，并以此来为一组影片提供统一性和连贯性，而后现代电影却与之相反，它打破了界限，超越了类型，并且不再具有互相之间的一致性。不过后现代恐怖电影虽然超越了经典恐怖片的定位规则，但它也保留了经典恐怖电影的一些特点。从而为背离规则提供了可以理解的背景。实际上，在后现代恐怖电影和早期恐怖电影样式之间存在着一些重合的部分，但在进行分析时将二者区分开来是卓有成效的。
经典恐怖电影和后现代恐怖电影的样式范例
经典恐怖电影以《德拉库拉》(1931)、《弗兰肯斯坦》(1931）和《吉基尔博士与海德先生》(1931)等诸如此类的影片为代表，这类影片一开场便展示暴力对正常秩序的破坏，而这种暴力往往来自于一个采用超自然或异类方式进行侵扰的魔鬼，一个疯狂的科学家，或者是一个不正常的变态者，影片的叙事围绕着魔鬼的横冲直撞以及人们为抵制魔鬼的侵害所做的种种无效努力而展开，最终男性军人或科学专家成功地运用暴力或知识击败了魔鬼，使生活恢复正常秩序。善与恶、正常与变态、人类与异类之间严格遵循善必胜恶的规则，从而产生了一个安全的摩尼教世界观，即对社会秩序的威胁主要来自于社会的外部，而人类的力量(大部分是以占有统治地位的男性主体身份)最终总会取得胜利。
三十年代的恐怖片总是让片中的魔鬼远离人们的日常生活将它们置放于异域时空之中，与之相对照的是：五十年代的恐怖片总是将魔鬼置放于当代美国城市，有时是一个小镇中，如此—来尽管影片保留了魔鬼具有异域时空的前史，但危险已经离家庭更近一步了。以往哥特式的魔鬼隐入了银幕的背后，出现在观众的是科幻小说和恐怖片的混合物，也就是人们所知道的生物电影代表作有《异物》(1951)、《劫尸者的入侵》(1956)和《污点》（1958）这种混合物将科幻小说所注重的逻辑上的(尤其是技术方面的）能言善辩与恐怖片着意渲染的恐怖、厌恶和暴力混合到一起。
后现代恐怖电影以以下一些影片为代表：《活尸之夜》(1968)、《得克萨斯链锯杀人案》
(1974)、《万圣节》(1978)、《异物》(1982)、〈埃尔i姆大街上的恶梦》(1984)以及《亨利：一个连环杀手的肖像》（1990）等。后现代恐怖电影和它的经典恐怖片前辈一样，着力表现普通人为抵抗凶残的魔鬼——比如超自然或异类的侵略者，内心性变态的变态者、精神病患者或是以上种类的混合体——而作无效的努力，最终人物行为的无效性与不再封闭完整的叙事结构来产生了形形色色的开放式结尾：或者是魔鬼取得胜利(《亨》，或者是魔鬼虽被击败，但只是暂时的(《万圣节》)，或者是结尾尚未确定(《活尸之夜》、《德克萨斯链锯杀人案》、《异物》、《埃尔姆大街上的恶梦》)。
在后现代恐怖电影中，生与死、正常与非正常、人类与异己、善与恶之间的界限已经变得逐渐模糊起来，有时甚至让人难以分辨，经典恐怖片相比后现代恐怖电影已经将恐怖注入当代日常生活世界中，而原有的精明能干的男性专家则被一个遭受高水平的，接的且具有一定性别特征的暴力侵害的普通受害者所替代，尤其是女性受害者，女性无论作为受害者还是作为英雄人物在影片中都起到了更为突出的作用。后现代恐怖电影类型强化了这样一偏执狂的世界观，即认为社会秩序普遍受到了一种莫名其妙的日益内在化的威胁。
从经典恐怖片转化成后现代恐怖片的一些重要因素在具有自反省意味的影片《标靶》(1968)中则显得有些过时，这部影片讲述了一个看上去很正常，长相清秀的乡下小伙子罗比·汤普森，竞然莫名其妙地把他的母亲和妻子都杀了，然后从一个水塔上向行走在快车道上的人们射击，(汤普森这个人物是以查尔斯·惠特曼为原型改编的，后者曾经于1966年在得克萨斯滥杀不止。)影片中有一条并列情节线，由鲍里斯·卡洛夫扮演一位过时的恐怖片明星，他因为观众不再为他演的电影感到恐怖而决定息影。既然现实生活中每天的新闻都比电影更令人恐怖，为什么还一定要让这些影片让人感到恐怖呢?
在影片《标靶》中，两条叙事线相互交叉进行，当场普森在汽影院的银幕背后向其中的一个观众射击时，影院正在放映的是由鲍里斯·卡洛夫主演的一部1963年的哥特式恐怖片《恐怖》，这两个人物的并列使人们注意到精神病杀手的莫名其妙的狂杀滥打是如何取代了传统恐怖片中来自城堡中的魔鬼和封闭式的结局的。
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