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| A woman walks, 'tween shadow and light. |
The
gaze in horror films is a terrifying thing – a sign of imminent danger. Imagine
a scene in a crowded restaurant. When the camera is neutral, a mere recording
instrument taking in a whole group of people, it is no threatening presence. Now
a girl leaves the party inside and walks out into the shadowy street. The
camera follows her, tracking her long enough to shed off the veneer of
neutrality. It is now very interested in her – morbidly interested – so the logic
of cinema demands that something ‘happen’. She’s firmly in the gaze, trapped in
the unwritten rules of the game, her fate sealed. They say that film is a very
male-centric medium; naturally women have to bear the brunt of our objectifying
desire.
Something
very interesting happens in The Leopard
Man (1943, one of the horror films Jacques Tourneur made at RKO for
producer/writer Val Lewton). Clo-Clo, the exotic Spanish dancer at a nightclub,
walks home after an eventful day. A leopard is on the loose and the police are
looking for it. It’s a graceful example of the archetypal Val Lewton proposition:
a woman walks alone between shadow and light (the most famous example is in Cat
People). The camera matches pace with Clo-Clo as she walks, playing the
castanets. She’s stopped by the tarot-reader who asks her to pick a card.
Clo-Clo reluctantly agrees. She picks the Ace of Spades – the death card. The
setting dictates that something happen to her in this very scene – the rules of
the horror genre and Tourneur’s belief in the supernatural coincide to mark Clo-Clo
for tragedy – but something strange happens. The camera stops tracking her once
it chances upon another girl, Teresa, looking out a window. Clo-Clo greets her
and leaves the frame; the camera’s gaze is now fixed upon Teresa. The very next
shot is a cut to the interior of Teresa’s home as she closes the window.
Teresa
is frightened by the news of the leopard. Her mother wants her to run an errand
to the grocer’s shop but she’s afraid to step out. Mother can’t be dissuaded so
Teresa has to go across the arroyo to fetch cornflour. This time however, the
camera’s insistent gaze on her doesn’t mislead. Teresa is killed by the leopard.
So why
does Clo-Clo escape what’s coming to her in the first instance? Is it because
she’s happy; unperturbed by the knowledge of the leopard at large? The male
gaze in cinema requires that the girl react to it. It is only because Clo-Clo
is confident – self-contained, without the need for a protective man (the running
joke is that she only wants a rich man for his money) – that the gaze has to be
transferred onto Teresa (who’s reacting out of fear).
The
Leopard Man is then a precursor in many ways to classic Hitchcock themes. Think
of Vertigo: James Stewart tries to
model Kim Novak after a lookalike he was in love with, who he believes is now dead,
only so that he can consummate their relationship posthumously. The objectifying
gaze is what excites him – even inspiring the camera into the most fantastic
360 degree shot of their fatal embrace. Conversely Kim Novak’s ‘actual’ death
is sealed only when she participates in her objectification.
Or think
of Psycho: another film where we
follow a lone woman. The very constant gaze on Janet Leigh during those first
37 minutes – especially when it becomes openly voyeuristic (peeping through a secret
hole in the wall) – marks her out for premature death. The audience is an
implicit instigator in the world of horror: the death of the woman is our
sought-after release.
Which
brings us to ‘a very British Psycho’.
In Peeping Tom, the underlying tension
between death and sexuality is literalized. Carl Boehm’s pet project is to film
the dying expressions of his female victims. The terror in their eyes fascinate
him, leading him to commit the murders – a detail reflected in all the deaths
in Leopard Man.
One
can even go so far as to say that Tourneur’s film predicts De Palma’s reworking
of Psycho in Dressed to Kill – the aggressor and the psychiatrist are no longer
separate personalities, they are alter-egos. Only the first of Leopard Man’s three murders is committed
by the animal – Dr. Galbraith, the town’s museum curator and animal
psychiatrist, does the other two. Transference isn’t limited to the shifting of
gaze, it is evident here in the interchangeability of personas. At various
points, Tourneur establishes the equivalence between the key characters. Kiki
Walker has her double in the cigarette girl, Clo-Clo and the leopard; Teresa/Consuela/Clo-Clo
are the victims and Galbraith assumes the leopard’s role. The doctor’s attempts
at understanding animals has leapt off the deep end: if Cat People can be
simply summed up in cat/people (alternate states of being), this film proposes
leopard/man.
