ARTS
All-American horror
Peter Ackroyd
Poltergeist ('X', selected cinemas)
poltergeist has been inspired, at least in part, by Stephen Spielberg, customarily referred to as the 'boy wonder' of
Hollywood; since he is responsible for
Jews, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E. T. (coming
in December), for once the description
seems appropriate. He has combined infan- tilism with spectacle in ways that only a seems appropriate. He has combined infan- tilism with spectacle in ways that only a multi-million dollar industry can provide, just as he has recreated in contemporary terms the splendours and the excesses of the conventional fairy story. Poltergeist, directed by Tobe Hooper but co-produced and co-written by Spielberg, contains a number of the boy wonder's `special effects'. Clouds are propelled across the sky like smoke under glass; an in- tense light suffuses the screen and we see the upturned faces of adults, slack-jawed With admiration at the sight; small children are snatched away by alien forces, only to emerge safely through a hole in the sky, or Whatever. I am sure that bulky theses have already been composed on the an- thropological, sociological and theological structure of Spielberg's films — 'Spielberg and the Sacred Search: A Study in Initia- tion,, 'The Twisted Metaphor: Spielberg's Romantic Imagery', 'The Eye and the "I": a study of Camera Angles in Spielberg's Cinema', you know the kind of thing. And to fact his films provide almost too fruitful a hunting ground for those in search of parallels, contrasts, themes and signifi- cance. But if all such elements are there, they are highly' visible only because they have been incompletely assimilated; they can be taken out and examined because they are loosely tied within the matrix of each film. Poltergeist is an example of what can go Wrong with such a method. It opens in a conventional American setting, with an or- dinary American family settling down in a new house. Their domestic life is, in the °Pening sequences of the film, so carefully detailed that it reaches close to parody in the manner of a 'pop art' canvas. Although It is closely rendered, it is treated in a cold and somewhat dispassionate fashion — and !.!le know that, as always in a Spielberg film, is about to be violently destroyed. That is Why children are so important to him in these films: they represent all those childish fears and wishes which he is about to pre- sent upon the screen, and only when the detritus of modern American life has been cleared away 'can they — and he — reach out to the enchanted kingdom of dreams or nightmares. So it is that we see suddenly a television set which has been left on late in-
to the night; a little girl sits in front of the flickering, grey screen. She is listening to something, and then she says 'Hello.'
They are here at last, spectres which emerge from the screen and send objects in- to whirling orbits, the 'television people' who are both poltergeists and, it turns out, the spirits of the dead. The girl herself is sucked into their displaced world, and can only be heard when the television set is swit- ched on. It could be said that we have here an example of Spielberg's distrust for, or anxiety about, the electronic world which is being created around us; and that to create spirits out of television is simply to present in emblematic form the powers and dangers of that 'electricity' which his American family use without understanding its nature. There is certainly an element of such fear, in this picture, but very quickly the poltergeists become only a vehicle for a number of extraordinary special effects. Objects and people float in mid-air; trees come alive and eat small children; houses implode. In conventional films of horror or science fiction, such events are narrated in a
straightforward manner — there is no am- biguity about the effects presented, or the responses expected from the audience. But Poltergeist is a more self-conscious picture, adding a layer of 'significance' to its reper- toire of stock effects by trying to explain the source of the wonder which the au- dience are supposed to be feeling.
The American family call in a medium in order to 'clear' the house and, with a background of somewhat soupy music, she describes that 'other plane' from which the spirits have descended: 'It's all the things we don't understand ... there's a wonderful light and all the answers to all the questions you want to know are inside that light.' It seems rather crass, an amalgam of quasi- spiritualist double-talk and a vague pietism. A uniquely American mixture, no doubt, and certainly enough to make one doubt the source of 'inspiration', behind the picture.
But it is a mark of the film's weakness that it should couch its argument in these terms: it shows a desperate anxiety to believe in some other form of life, without knowing of what it might consist. The spirits of the dead inhabit a television set only because the film-makers themselves have no notion of what a 'spirit' might be. At first they seem to be playful and even benign beings, trailing clouds of electronic glory behind them, but then in a sudden change of emphasis they become creatures of the 'Beast'. So juvenile a conception can- not be sustained for very long, and Poltergeist quickly degenerates into a number of conventional 'horror' scenes —
graves open, devils appear, corpses disport themselves on the lawn. The original story is lost in a mist of excess, and the film closes in a spectacular but unconvincing manner.
Previous page
