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Chapter 11 Gender Hyperbole and the Uncanny in the Horror Film: The Shining Katie Model At its simplest, genre is a play of the familiar and the different. Gender poses similarities and differences between men and women. The uncanny, in all its renditions, flickers between familiarity and strangeness. Gender, genre, and the uncanny in various ways all engage, resist, and toy with similarity and difference. The horror film is an ideal site to explore the interrelations of gender, genre, and the uncanny, and their chiasmic exchange. Horror’s grappling with gender and the uncanny has been extensively discussed (see Wood 1978). The pioneering work of Linda Williams and Carol Clover has identified gender slippage as a defining trait of the horror genre. As Clover (1992) notes, ambiguity, instability, or slippage of gender often gives rise to the uncanny by triggering “intellectual uncertainty,” in this instance over sexual identity. While the literature on the horror film has explored in depth the issue of gender slippage, it has devoted little attention to the inverse—gender hyperbole. If gender slippage or ambiguity activates the uncanny by drawing on intellectual uncertainty , gender hyperbole draws on another source of the uncanny—doubling. A hyperbolic performance is in continual play with its referent, or double, the actual or “normal” other, which it exaggerates. When hyperbole takes on gender, the negotiation between the hyperbolized creation and its familiar “normal” referent becomes especially tricky. Since gender, to draw on the work of Judith Butler (1993 and 1999), is itself a performance, we often find that the familiar referent, which shadows the hyperbolic male or female spectacle, seems at times strange. Likewise, the hyperbolic construct at times appears uneasily familiar. The uncanny insinuates itself into the interplay between these two images. Called forth by gender hyperbole in the horror film, the uncanny can contaminate a i-xii_1-262_Gled.indd 146 12/13/11 11:17 AM Gender Hyperbole and the Uncanny 147 film’s overall cinematic mimesis, drawing our attention to the uncanny status of all film images. Instances of gender hyperbole in the horror film hence awaken in us a sense of cinema’s particular strangeness as a mimetic medium dealing in shadows or doubles of the beings and things around us in the world. I have selected Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, The Shining, based on Stephen King’s eponymous novel (1977), as a particularly striking example of the intertwining of gender hyperbole, genre, and the uncanny. While participating in horror’s generic codes, The Shining, like most of Kubrick’s works, also exceeds its genre. It is, in Frederic Jameson’s description, “metageneric” (1992, 4). By featuring Jack Nicholson—whose acting style, as Dennis Bingham (1994) has argued, makes a performance of masculinity—the film immediately raises the issue of gender extremes. The Shining also links directly to Freud’s 1919 essay, “The Uncanny.” As many critics have noted, Kubrick and co-screenwriter Diane Johnson studied Freud’s essay while writing the script for The Shining. The essay leaves its imprint on the film through visual and verbal references. More elusively, the film’s treatment of the uncanny structurally echoes Freud’s essay. Sites of the uncanny tend to hold us in their thrall, leading us to return to them again and again. It is therefore not surprising that The Shining, Freud’s essay “The Uncanny,” and a text on which Freud’s essay turns—E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale “The Sand-Man” (1967)—have all unleashed a plethora of critical literature. As the uncanny by nature eludes our grasp and is a tensile term, it both invites multiple readings and simultaneously frustrates any reading. The circulating familiarbut -different renditions of uncanny texts, in a way, enact the uncanny itself. The Shining, in the hands of numerous critics and scholars, takes on slightly different shapes, and these disseminated variants double back on our understanding of the film. If horror films, as Clover articulates, function like folktales or oral narratives, which have “no original” but “only variants” (1992, 11), then the many essays on The Shining add another cluster of iterations to a story with no single origin. So I turn to The Shining and the works embedded in its nucleus—“The Sand-Man” and “The Uncanny”—indebted to the scholarship on the film and to invaluable past work on gender, genre, and the uncanny. From Freud onward, the uncanny has been linked to castration anxiety, a repressed fear that, in Freud’s view, returns in...

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