Monster House

(Many thanks to Helmut for yet another nod at his excellent blog, Phronesisaical, as well as to to Brian McKey for a couple of nods at Les Faits de la Fiction).

In her book Sex and Real Estate, Marjorie Garber famously argues that our relationship with our houses often mimics or even substitutes for our relationship with actual lovers:

Anyone who doubts the possibility of falling in love with a house—with all that implies of fast-beating heart, sweaty palms, and waiting for the phone to ring—just hasn’t met the right one yet…. In our present-day culture the house often plays the role of lover, partner, significant other—the dream date and the dream mate—the one who will realize our desires and give a purpose to our plans and days.

This idea of domicile as beloved was developed quite literally in Miyazaki’s 2004 animated feature, Howl’s Moving Castle, in which the eponymous castle is animated by a fire demon who has literally stolen the heart of its owner, the wizard Howl (voiced by Takuya Kimura in the Japanese version, and by Christian Bale in the English). The fire demon, Calcifer (Tatsuya Gashuin/Billy Crystal), then functions as the heart and soul of the baroque castle, allowing it to gallop through the countryside as if it were some prehistoric animal. At the same time, however, the castle remains a living space for its inhabitants, and more specifically for the budding romance between the wizard Howl and Sophie (Chieko Baisho/Emily Mortimer, Jean Simmons)—a girl who has been transformed into an old lady by a curse.

Gil Kenan’s Monster House, which opened this past weekend, meanwhile, also features an animated house as one of its central protagonists. No gothic castle, the house in Kenan’s film (his first full-length feature) appears at first as an innocuous, suburban home, inhabited by a curmudgeonly old man named Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi) with a proclivity for stealing young children’s toys. After Nebbercracker collapses in a heap one day and is taken away in an ambulance (“no sirens,” one of the kids in the film observes, “never a good thing”), however, the house appears to take on a life of its own, growing increasingly menacing as the film progresses (Kathleen Turner’s face was motion-captured to provide the basis for the house’s animated features).

Monster House features many unexpected plot twists (several of which will be revealed below), but the basic plot follows the “monster house’s” increasingly unrestrained monstrosity, and the way in which it comes to function as a backdrop and a catalyst for a budding love triangle between the twelve year old protagonist, DJ (Mitchel Musso), his chubby friend Chowder (Sam Lerner), and the precocious honor student, Jenny (Spencer Locke), who accidentally gets wrapped up in the adventure after the monster house tries to eat her (‘ordinarily I wouldn’t hang out with boys with you,’ she informs them haughtily, ‘but since you saved my life I’ll give you an hour’ [quoted from memory]).

With DJ’s parents away on a trip and Halloween just around the corner, the three tweens embark on a mission to fight the evil house, and hopefully kill it before young trick or treaters come knocking. After unsuccessfully seeking the assistance of the police (who think they are crazy), they seek the advice of the local video game fiend, Reginald “Skull” Skulinski (John Heder), who instructs them to find the house’s heart and extinguish it. The kids then attempt to put the house to sleep using a complex contraptn involving a vacuum cleaner and vast quantities of cold medicine, but that attempt fails as well.

Finally, the house proceeds to swallow the kids together with the police car in which they are locked, upon which they then find themselves in the bowels of the building. The house by this point has been clearly gendered as female, and its ravenous appetite combined with its menacing orifices (basically, the entire façade of the house comes apart into jagged fragments every time she/it attempts to eat anything) clearly suggest a monstruous vagina dentata. The sexualized reading is clearly supported within the film, as for instance when Jenny points to the red, bulbous chandelier in the entrance way and suggests that it must be the house’s uvula. “Oh,” replies the pre-pubescent and somewhat naïve Chowder, “So its a GIRL house?” (It may be remembered that, throughout this exploration of the house, the boys are armed with two over-sized squirt guns, which they have a tendency to fire prematurely whenever they are excited [Jenny has a water pistol as well, but it is much daintier].)

The house’s sexual connotations are reinforced even more clearly when the trio, in attempting to extinguish the house’s heart, inadvertently discover its soul—the cement-encased corpse of Nebbercracker’s wife, Constance, who had accidentally fallen to her death 45 years earlier. They had met at a circus, where she was the proverbial “fat lady,” and he fell in love with her. He therefore took her away from the circus, married her, and began to build a dream house for the two of them. At one point while they were at the construction site, however, Constance found herself bullied by some neighborhood kids, and then lost her balance and fell right down to the cellar, where she was immediately covered by wet cement.

The house’s poltergeist, therefore, is clearly a product of ressentiment—having died as the direct result of taunting on account of her size and weight, she now thrives on tormenting local neighborhood kids by stealing and “eating” their toys. In an ironically literal illustration of Wendy Brown’s argument in States of Injury, Constance ends up internalizing the social “injuries” and insults which led, first, to her career as a carnival act and, in the end, to her death, and allowing them to dictate her self-perception virtually in perpetuity (a constancy which makes her name, Constance, particularly apt). DJ and his friends ultimately find Constance’s body, still encased in cement in the basement of the house, and realize that it has been her self-filling hunger which has driven the house’s monstrosity for so long.

This idea of a structure being built around the soul and physical remains of the woman who helped build it is a familiar one, and can also be found, for instance, in Virginia Lee Burton’s 1939 classic, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, about Mike and his “beautiful red steam shovel,” Mary Anne. Together, the accept a challenge to dig the foundation for the new town hall in less than a day. They succeed, but discover that, in their haste, they forgot to create an exit ramp for Mary Ann, and as a result she becomes trapped forever in the basement of the building that is built around her (she ends up becoming the furnace, if I remember correctly).

Meanwhile, an extraordinary real-life parallel to the Constance/Monster House can be found in the figure of Zahra Aboutalib, a woman who arrived at a Moroccan hospital in 1955 to deliver her child. After two days of labor, the doctors decided to perform a Caesarean section, but Aboutalib first fled the hospital in fear after observing another woman and her baby die while receiving the same operation. Even after leaving the hospital, however, she never did give birth or miscarry. She rationalized this, however, by telling herself that the fetus was merely “asleep.” Apparently, as the Discovery Channel explains,

In Moroccan culture, it is believed that babies can live inside a woman’s womb to protect her honour and Zahra took on this belief: the myth of the ‘sleeping baby’.

It was not until 46 years later that doctors finally realized that Aboutalib had had an ectopic pregnancy, miscarried, but had never aborted the fetus. As a result, the nearly full-term fetus remained embedded in her abdominal cavity for nearly half a century, as her other organs grew around and through it.

This theme of the extraction of Aboutalib’s baby from her body 46 years after its death, finally, brings us back to Monster House (note the curious coincidence that Nebbercracker’s wife Constance also died roughly around mid-century, and was finally extracted from the house that had become her grave 45 years later). The first creature which the house consumes, near the beginning of the movie, is a local dog, who urinates squatting down on the lawn. When the dog finally reemerges from the destroyed house during the closing credits, meanwhile, the first thing he does is to urinate again, this time by lifting his leg. The IMGB page for this movie lists this discrepancy as a potential “goof,” implying that dog has changed from female to male. A more obvious explanation, however, would be that the dog’s initial squatting urination was not due to its being a bitch, but rather to the fact it was still a puppy. Therefore, the dog’s entry into, and ultimate reemergence from, the body of the house symbolizes a process of sexual maturation and awakening, just as it does for DJ and Chowder.

Comments

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