Black Treacle Magazine (Issue 3) (3 page)

Session
9
takes place in the abandoned Danvers State Psychiatric
Hospital. The film was shot at the actual facility, and a more
sinister pile of 19th -Century brickwork would be difficult to
imagine. A hazardous material disposal team is tasked with clearing
the gargantuan asylum of asbestos. Owner of the Hazmat Elimination
Company is Gordon (Peter Mullan). He needs the contract
desperately, or his company is going to go under, and so promises
to do in one week a job that should really take three to do safely.
He and his wife Wendy have a newborn, Emma, who has had an ear
infection for some time, and Gordon is clearly exhausted and
worried from the moment we first see him. Meanwhile, Mike (Steve
Gevedon) stumbles across old archives in the basement of the
asylum. In one box he finds a collection of reel-to-reel tapes of
the psychiatric sessions of Mary Hobbes, and Mike rapidly becomes
obsessed with listening to the recordings. Mary suffers from
Multiple Personality Disorder. She has three alters: the childlike
Princess, the watchful Billy, and Simon, a presence the other two
personalities greatly fear.

Shortly before
Mike makes his discovery, the question of why the asylum shut down
arises. Mike explains what happened, and this is where the film’s
central concern with memory becomes clear.

MIKE

Patricia
Willard. She was committed here in the 1970s by her parents. Manic
depression, that sort of thing. Typical adolescent crap. But in the
1980s, this new kind of therapy took off: Repressed Memory Therapy.
See, these shrinks figured that, with these new techniques they’d
designed, they could release hidden memories of traumatic events in
your life. Rape, incest. So Patricia, with the help of her doctors,
recalls that when she was ten, her father raped her. But not once.
No, he’d do it three times a week. And he didn’t just rape her. He
came into her room at night, wearing a black robe. He’d take her
and drive her to a wooded area where her grandparents are her
mother were. And they all had black robes on. They’d take them off
and group orgies would ensue. And then, they’d bring out the
newborn. She was forced to watch as her mother would cut this
baby’s heart out with a stone dagger. She’d drink the blood. Others
would eat the flesh. Her grandfather her father would fuck her
repeatedly. She was forced to have abortions and they’d cook the
aborted fetuses--

GORDON

Enough!

SECURITY
GUARD

This happened
here?

MIKE

Oh yeah.
Satanic ritual abuse syndrome. Was big in the 80s. Destroyed a lot
of families. Patricia was ready to sue hers. Was all set to go to
trial and [...] she dropped the suit. [...] Well, her parents
discovered a physical examination she’d undergone about a year
prior. Turns out, she was a virgin. None of it happened.

At the precise
moment where Mike refers to “traumatic events in your life,” Gordon
is staring at the word “HOME” on his cell. The true meaning of this
moment only becomes clear in retrospect. At the end of the film, we
learn that, the evening of landing the job, Gordon returned home to
celebrate. There was an accident, and a pot of boiling pasta
spilled onto his leg. Gordon lost control, and killed his wife and
baby daughter. At this point in the film, we do not know that
Gordon has done anything. But even more importantly, Gordon himself
does not know. He has repressed the memory, just as he similarly
represses the memories, as the film progresses, of killing everyone
else. And these murders, in turn, occur at moments where the
original memory threatens to surface. One repression leads to
another, until the destruction of Gordon and everyone he holds dear
is complete.

In this scene,
then, the film is playing a complicated game of memory, horror, and
authentication. Mike’s narrative is horrific, and the montage of
shattered found objects and predatory insects that accompanies his
deadpan narration builds that horror to a crescendo, until Gordon
(the man who has committed an act of horrific domestic violence)
cries “Enough!” But then we have the debunking moment, where Mike
exposes his horror tale as a tissue of lies. The memories were
false. We are horrified by the story, then relieved that these
terrible events never occurred. Only they have. A memory is being
repressed even as Mike speaks, but it is the memory of the killer,
rather than of the victims. The other crucial distinction, it seems
to me, is one of kind. Domestic abuse itself is not being debunked
by
Session 9
, but the addition of gothic trappings is. The
point seems to be that the banal murders human beings commit every
day are bad enough. Casting the events as Satanic rituals
trivializes the abuse itself, as if it were somehow not adequately
evil without the further motivation of devil worship. There is also
an ironically comforting construction here: devil worshippers are
less disturbing than a man who killed because of an everyday
kitchen mishap.

In his seminal
studies of the horror film, Robin Wood writes,

Insofar as
horror films are typical manifestations of our culture, the
dominant designation of the monster must necessarily be evil: what
is repressed (in the individual, in the culture) must always return
as a threat, perceived by the consciousness as ugly, terrible,
obscene. Horror films, it might be said, are progressive precisely
to the degree that they refuse to be satisfied with this simple
designation – to the degree that, whether explicitly or implicitly,
consciously or unconsciously, they modify, question, challenge, and
seek to invert it. (192)

He further
argues that the monster in the horror film is the representation of
the Other, and that the “progressiveness of the horror film depends
partly on the monster’s capacity to arouse sympathy” (192). The
reactionary horror film, then, would cast the monster as utterly
Other, completely inhuman, entirely evil, without any connection
whatever to humanity.
Session 9
dramatizes the opposition
between human and inhuman Other/Monster by recognizing the Satanic
cult as an attempt to blame the crimes of sexual abuse and murder
on a group that is clearly not us. These people, the
rationalization goes, may look like your mother, your father, your
grandparents and your mailman, but they are, in fact, devil
worshippers, and are revealed as such by the recovered memory. They
must be devil worshippers, because their actions would make no
sense otherwise. No human being would rape or murder children
without the outside promptings of supernatural evil. The film
demolishes this comforting us/them illusion through the Everyman
figure of Gordon.

At the same
time, this is not to say that there is no supernatural agency in
Session 9
. There might well be, though on this subject the
film engages in a form of undecidability in the vein of
The Turn
of the Screw
or the films of Val Lewton. This is where the
figure of Simon enters the game. We first encounter his voice when
Gordon, being given the initial tour of the asylum, is left alone
for a moment in a dark corridor (at the end of which is Mary
Hobbes’ cell). A shadow passes over Gordon’s face, and a sinister
voice says, “Hello, Gordon.” As Gevedon and Anderson point out in
their commentary on the film, one might read this as the moment
where Gordon becomes possessed (and that night he kills his
family). Mike hears this same voice on the Hobbes session tapes,
and it is the Simon alter that killed Mary’s family. So a reading
of Simon as a kind of demon is supported by the film, and
therefore, it might be argued, we are right back with the Satanic
cult reading of evil. Simon, however, is not that simplistic a
figure. Mary’s alters reside in specific parts of her body. The
Princess lives in the tongue (because she “talks so much”) and
Billy lives in the eyes, because he sees everything. In the final
seconds of the film, only the audience hears the recording of the
psychiatrist asking Simon where he lives. Simon replies, “I live in
the weak and the wounded.” He cannot be localized in a specific
body part, and given a function associated with that part. For this
reason, Simon is qualitatively different from the Princess and
Billy. But there is more: with this statement, Simon claims to
dwell not just in Mary, but in anyone with her symptoms. He is not
so much an alternate personality as a condition. He is certainly
not just a demon from hell descending on the otherwise pure.
Instead, he is the evil that comes from within. He is the
manifestation of the desperate violence of the weak and the
wounded. As with all good horror movie monsters, he is as much a
metaphor as a character.

Simon
describes Mary’s brutal murder of her family as the camera pans
over the pictures of Gordon’s family that have been assembled on a
cell wall in a macabre, blood-stained collage. This is the moment
where we realize his wife and daughter are dead, though the scene
itself suggests that it is in fact Phil (David Caruso) who is the
murderer. In a few short minutes, however, we will know that Gordon
is the killer, and that it is this moment, when he sees the
pictures, that the memory comes so close to the surface that he
slaughters the rest of his crew. Thus, the two sets of repressed
memories – Mary’s and Gordon’s – approach revelation, both for the
characters and the audience, at the same time. The return of these
memories is the climax of horror. The film moves toward these
revelations, and when the now-dead Phil says, “Gordon, I need you
to open your eyes. Wake up, and remember,” that is the cue for the
worst moment of all: the sound of Wendy and Emma being killed as
the camera once more pans over their cheerful pictures. The
movement in a horror film is, of course, toward ever greater
horror. In
Session 9
, the more memories surface, the worse
the horror, and these memories, unlike the ones in the Patricia
Willard scandal, are authentic.

Horror is
truth, truth horror.
Session 9
deploys all the traditional
vocabulary of the horror movie to make us fear the truth in memory.
When Mike finds the Mary Hobbes tapes, they are in a box marked
EVIDENCE (i.e. “truth”) in the room that contains the building’s
print and audio memories. His opening of the box is juxtaposed with
scenes of Gordon cutting his thumb and Hank (Josh Lucas) cursing as
asbestos dust lands in his eye. There is no causal link between the
opening of the box and the accidents, but we are invited to see
one. Setting the truth free is dangerous. (The truth shall make you
bleed.) Mike is using a hooked knife to open Pandora’s Box.

The Danvers
asylum is more than a repository of bad memories. It is a decayed
American microcosm, an incarnation of a rotten, disintegrating,
dangerous dream. Early in the film, Bill (Paul Guilfoyle) gives
Gordon and Phil a tour of the asylum. With its extensive
facilities, the asylum was, Bill says, “a self-contained town.” For
example, he points out, the asylum had its own bowling alley and
church. The image conjured by these details is one of small-town
USA, the Norman Rockwell image of a lost American Arcadia, so often
the subject of nostalgic yearnings for a return to the imagined
goodness of the past. Consider, for instance, the golden-hued,
slow-motion shots of overalled boys running through fields in
Michael Bay’s
Armageddon
. The nightmare that the asylum
clearly was makes nonsense of this nostalgia. Seconds earlier, Phil
was gazing in horror at the hydrotherapy baths, and it is clear
that the treatment of the inmates in this establishment was little
more than a form of legalized torture. In
Session 9
, any
memory of the past that is not one of utter horror is a lie. As if
to emphasize the idea of false national myths, as Bill makes his
“self-contained town” speech, the characters walk by an office door
in whose window is an American flag. The window is shattered, and
the flag has a large, jagged chunk missing.

If the dream
of the American past is inauthentic, so is the dream of the future.
The torn flag is visible in the background in another scene. In
this one Hank tells Gordon’s nephew Jeff (Brendan Sexton III) about
everyone’s “exit strategies.” The hazmat disposal game is dangerous
and stressful, and Hank terrifies Jeff with a graphic description
of what happens if even single speck of asbestos gets into a lung.
In order to deal with the stress, each of the men has an exit
strategy, a dream of self-improvement that will take him away from
this dangerous and underpaid work. Mike, for instance, is always
reading, with the idea of completing his law degree. Hank himself
has pie-in-the-sky fantasies about casino school. Only Gordon has
no exit strategy, and Hank correctly foresees disaster. Anderson
has commented that Gordon’s story in particular represents “the
American dream gone awry.” Gordon is Scottish, and thus, Anderson
explains, is the immigrant come to the States for the better life,
only to be destroyed by that lie. Of course, Hank too is destroyed
by his dream: driven by greed upon discovering a cache of old
coins, he returns to the asylum at night and is lobotomized by the
prowling Gordon. Furthermore, all the men are driven to work
dangerously fast by the promise of a ten-thousand-dollar bonus. The
dream of advancement through work is as lethal and false as the
myth of the golden past. The presence of that shattered flag during
Hank’s monologue is a visual reminder of the fact that Hank is
telling himself and Jeff comforting lies. (Interestingly, the flag
was not the work of the production design. It was already there in
the Danvers asylum, ready for Anderson to exploit.)

The asylum
also represents the future, for Bill and for the town. Bill
comments that “the land is priceless” and wishes he could tear the
asylum down and “put up a Wal-Mart.” He can’t, though, because of
the heritage status of the building. Put another way, he cannot
erase the physical memory that the building represents. Instead,
the asylum will house the town’s archives (read: its memory) and
administrative offices (its brain). In other words, the asylum will
move from being a self-contained town to containing the actual
town. “Reclaiming the dark past to build a brighter future,” Bill
says, when in fact it is the dark past that is doing the
reclaiming.