Itsy-Bitsy Spiders and Other Pieces of the Real in Dead Calm

The function of the tuché, of the real as encounter—the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter—first presented itself in the history of psycho-analysis in a form that was in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of the trauma.

—Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts

The logic of the horror which functions as a screen masking the void can also be illustrated by the uncanny power of the motif of a ship drifting along alone, without a captain or any living crew to steer it. This is the ultimate horror: not the proverbial ghost in the machine, but the machine in the ghost: there is no plotting agent behind it, the machine just runs by itself, as a blind contingent device.

—Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies

About three-quarters of the way through Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm (Australia, 1988), when valiant young Rae Ingram (Nicole Kidman) has subdued her kidnapper below deck and is sailing toward the rescue of her lost husband John (Sam Neill), we may be inclined to think that running into a psychotic American (Billy Zane) in the middle of the empty sea is the luckiest thing that could have happened to her. Insofar as Hughie Warriner's threat to John pulls Rae out of the deep depression into which she fell following the death of her small son Danny, Hughie is indirectly responsible for motivating Rae to live—to fight against, rather than toward, the death-in-life (the dead calm) she had been inducing with tranquilizers and dreams of her dead child. ¹ Read thus, the film depicts the triumph of life over the death drive, the organism's insistence on following its own internal course to quiescence rather than succumbing to an arbitrary shortcut delivered by either grief or a crazy young American man. ²

As plausible as this reading is, however, its redemptiveness obscures an important dimension to Hughie's appearance on the grieving couple's yacht. Though his invasion of the boat and the menace Hughie presents to the couple certainly fulfill the generic requirements of the thriller, there is nevertheless something excessive about him, something disturbing, beyond the mere danger he poses. ³ This Hughie oddly resembles another one, the popular Paramount cartoon figure "Baby Huey," a gigantic baby duck whose misadventures derive from the discrepancy between his size and his actual infantile innocence and dependence. In Dead Calm, the resemblance is occasionally laughable, but more often it makes Hughie uncanny: a toddler psyche in dangerously adult form, the crazed stranger initially seems to invade the Ingrams' small world from outside, but once there, he behaves in ways distressingly familiar, in both senses of the term. He plays the part of a child; that is, he inserts himself between the Ingrams in a nightmare version of the danger that a real child might pose to marital harmony.

In this childlike capacity, Hughie actually seems to have returned from within the couple's history rather than to have come from outside that familial dynamic. But how to explain this return? One would quite naturally expect any parent who has lost a child to wish for that child's recovery, but no one would wish for the physically grown but emotionally infantile and conscienceless monster who shows up on their ship, the Saracen. ⁴ And yet, if he is not to be read as a simple manifestation of the Ingrams' wish for Danny's restoration, who is Hughie, and what relation can this horror bear to a lost loved son?

Slavoj Zizek's comments on the "radically ambiguous" function of horror in aesthetic contexts may help explain the significance of Hughie's strange familiarity. Contrary to what we might imagine, Zizek argues, the nightmare vision in a horror movie, say, does not necessarily designate the...