Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium

2. Cape Fear and Trembling: Familial Dread

29 2 Cape Fear and Trembling Familial Dread You’re scared, that’s OK. I want you to savor that fear. You know the South evolved in fear—fear of the Indian, fear of the slave, fear of the damned Union. The South has a fine tradition of savoring fear. —Private eye Kersek, in Cape Fear (1991) = P RIVATE EYE KERSEK’S OMINOUS description of fear in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991) invokes a dread rooted in the history of slavery, colonialism, and the faded Confederacy. Here fear is everywhere: in New Essex, the small town in the deep South where our narrative family, the Bowdens, live; in their lavish house with its elaborate facade and Spanish moss, reminiscent of the plantation houses of the antebellum South; and in the swamps and mists that surround the Cape Fear River, to which they flee. Kersek expresses a pleasure in the savoring of fear, a fear that attaches to particular national historical repressions, and whose specific objects are Native American, Black, and Northerner. From William Faulkner to Carson McCullers, the Southern Gothic mobilized tropes of stolen land and bartered bodies, hidden burials and family secrets. Embedded in the past, Confederate and Union crimes repeatedly haunt 30 Apocalyptic Dread the narratives of the American Gothic, and in the disavowal of these traumas, historical memory becomes dread itself. The two cinematic adaptations of Cape Fear (1962, 1991) are a dialogue with their different cultural and historical production contexts, with the second film showing the return of the repressed desires, fears, and violence, whose threat was contained in the original.1 John McDonald’s novel The Executioners (1957) was the source material for both films, and all three versions tell the story of the Bowden family, who become threatened by Max Cady, a white ex-convict who has just been released from prison after serving a lengthy term for rape (see table 2.1). Cady has a prior relationship with the father and lawyer, Samuel Bowden, who either as witness or negligent defense attorney in the respective film adaptations is responsible for Cady’s imprisonment. Upon his release from jail Cady is determined to take his revenge on Bowden’s family. Cady stalks, harasses , and threatens the family, and in both screen versions presents a particular sexual threat to the Bowden daughter. The story climaxes with a final battle between Cady and the family, which in two of the versions ends in Cady’s death. In Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), Detective Kersek’s musings on historical dread (“the South has a fine tradition of savoring fear”) are addressed to Samuel Bowden (Nick Nolte), as they lie in wait to trap and kill Max Cady (Robert De Niro), who is stalking Bowden’s family. Kersek suggests that fear is the necessary catalyst and justification for the illicit violence required in the defense of the family. Similarly, in J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear (1962), Bowden (Gregory Peck) does not hesitate to use his wife and daughter as bait to catch Cady (Robert Mitchum), because, as he proudly notes, they come from “pioneer stock.” Both films suggest that the defense of the (white, nuclear) family is parallel to historical actions of violent appropriation and displacement of the “Other” in American history, whether of Indians, African Americans, Unionists, or Northerners. Bowden’s use of his wife and daughter as bait also recalls the paranoid racist fantasies of white women in peril from rape, whether by Indians in the captivity narrative in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), or by Unionist ex-slaves in The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915). Through the apocalyptic figure of the monster Max Cady who embodies the Bowden’s sexual dread, Cady foregrounds what Louis Gross calls “the singularity and monstrosity of the Other; what the dominant culture cannot incorporate within itself, [it] must project outward onto this hated/desired figure” (90). Both films relive earlier historical traumas of American violence, but mediate and displace historical memory through sexual dread, as embodied in the figure of Max Cady, and both films implicate the family as morally hypocritical and therefore doomed to failure in the mastery of these traumas.2 31 Cape Fear and Trembling Table 2.1. Principal Differences between Book and Films The Executioners (1957) Cape Fear (1962) Cape Fear (1991) Author: John D. MacDonald Director: J. Lee Thompson Director: Martin Scorsese Screenplay...