Justin Phillip Reed
LOGIC & OPTICS: GOTHIKA (2003)
The camera single-tracks the psychologist’s elasticity from her doom. The hues are blue: the inmate uniforms. Seven gates and two swinging steel doors semicolon the distance between Miranda and her preoccupation, Chloe, who is being overfed sedatives. Chloe’s “embellishing” her rape story. To Miranda, the distance seems far.
In this horror, the men are believable. They are the arbiters of belief. The phallologicians. They tend to correct; correction is tenderness, is a courtesy: “There was no girl.” “She died four years ago.” “You killed Doug.” “We are your family now.” “You’re in crisis.” “This image is tailor made for your mind.” “You better start thinking of some answers.” “Delusions.” “Hallucinations.” “Frequent derailment.” “Incoherence.” “I have to tell you something very difficult,” the film says in the direction of someone who seems not to know. “How do you know it was the Devil?”
The first ghost is possession itself. Every night, a man arrives, anonymous, and, without a trace, takes what he wants from Chloe. No, the trace is on Chloe’s face; they say she did it to herself. Chloe is Miranda’s patient. Another man wants to fuck Miranda, but Miranda is his boss’s wife. “Until then she’s mine,” another man bites into a telephone: he’s the boss; Miranda is his wife; Chloe is his ward; he’s the Chief of Medicine; he’s a doctor discussing a prisoner; the prisoners all are women. He rejects a lawyer’s transfer request, then instructs Miranda to throw water on a mirror, invites her to participate in metaphor. I have to tell you something, says the film. She calls herself the mirror; he calls himself God. God is married to a mirror, the film provides, as God prods her mouth with tongue then leaves to strangle a white girl chained in the basement of a farmhouse they own. He shares this weekend recreation with his best friend the sheriff, who is white and possesses this closet of God. God and the sheriff kill women together.
Miranda metaphors herself secure: this is a prison; it operates in frames; she: in observations. It is safe to swim during a lightning storm. All the other doctors are men, if you can believe it. Chloe is embellishing her rape story again.
The second ghost is surveillance. The ultimate dom, it determines the motions of everyone. There is the white girl that Miranda sees attacking her, and then there is the nobody-but-Miranda that the CCTV sees tossing her own body from wall to wall of her cell. “There was no girl.” The sheriff and Doug show love to each other through exchanging video of what they do, which determines what sense Miranda can make of what she and an ax have done to Doug. The video determines that there was indeed a girl. Many girls.
The white girl ghost achieves in her deathly restlessness a certain omniscience. She watches from within glass surfaces, leaves the message NOT ALONE in breath and blood and Miranda’s skin, knows exactly where and to whom what happened to her is happening now. If Miranda can abide the violence the ghost inflicts upon her, she’ll come to this knowledge also. As recompense for her ignorant complicity in the husband’s murder spree, she’ll have to see herself dismember him, live and screaming; she’ll have to work hard toward the other side of detention. The dead white girl can open a prison door, but Miranda must swing the axe. The distance expands and contracts.
A camera carves into space what an overtiming prose writer at a mic makes of detail: I have to tell you something else that I’ve been giving my attention. “You can’t trust someone who thinks you’re crazy.” Chloe defines double consciousness for Miranda. “You are not a doctor in here, and even if you tell the truth, no one will listen.” The camera pans in the design of Miranda’s spiraling. The camera
has a man’s hand on it, a man’s hand
in the script in her mouth. Miranda says
“I’m dreaming” nine times in twenty-one seconds:
every three seconds she fails to correct
her reality. She’s slaughtered
the husband. She’s bathed in his blood.
In the mirror the white girl jumped out.
The white girl’s vengeance puts Miranda in cells;
what the men believe keeps her there.
The sheriff tries to kill her in the jail;
the cops are life-sized. This horror
is water on a mirror. The film
is a frame from the edge of which men
whisper in their observations,
their collaged and ineloquent synopsis;
it culminates in conjunctions of gas and light.
The men must be believed when they tell you
something you seem not to know.
JUSTIN PHILLIP REED is an American poet, essayist, and amateur bass guitarist. His preoccupations include horror cinema, poetic form, morphological transgressions, and uses of the grotesque. He is the author of two poetry collections, The Malevolent Volume and Indecency, both published by Coffee House Press.
