Grindhouse fought for its “R” rating, for originally it was categorized as a for sure NC-17 film. The film itself was cut in places, but it still falls on the edge of these two ratings. Despite it’s rating, the sex, violence, etc. Grindhouse not only works to form a new genre, but it utilizes sex and violence to embellish the vulgarity of the male gaze, venture through the vague arena of gender roles as well as capitalize on the fetishization of destruction on screen.
The new genre is in fact the re-claiming of the exploitative grindhouse B film. In recreating this genre that is no longer active in mainstream cinema, Grindhouse brings forth the exploitative horror and the exploitive thrill drama. Early cinema, as Tom Gunning writes, was planned to “exaggerate the impact of the spectator” (70, Gunning). Some examples include literally gluing the spectators to their seats, and others such as setting firecrackers off beneath them. In this way the excitement on screen gives you the experience of another place and time. In transporting the viewer, the film takes position in a way that the spectator is vulnerable to whatever the film throws at us. Because of this delicate relationship of film and viewer, we are more susceptible to the gore, sex and fetishizations that come from the screen.
Planet Terror contains scenes of Cherry Darling’s job as a go-go dancer in a club that capitalizes on her sexuality. Throughout the film her sexuality seems to be the glue that crops up every once in a while to tantalize our loins and compliments the violent struggle that propels the film forward. McGowan also plays Pam (Death Proof), whose struggle to get out of the car when Stunman Mike is attempting to kill her with his stunt car creates sympathy in us as viewers. It is interesting how she brings us through to the second feature of Planet Terror with that sympathy still intact although she is now playing a totally different character. Rose McGowan’s involvement in both Rodriguez’s film and Tarantino’s helps this film set grab our affections, like Gunning noted about early cinema, and keep us transfixed on the screen before us. Stuntman Mike is the epitome of the male gaze in a dark light, the kind of light that foreshadows death. Anderson writes, “there is also some sort of risk to mike and it may therefore be a genuine sadomasochistic scene” (19, Anderson). His obsession of car chases with women in fear is not unlike the fetish of sex in car crashes like in Crash (dir. David Cronenberg, 1996). In this way these two films have a common thread of a fetish that involves violence, cars, and of course sexuality.
The sexuality in Planet Terror proves altered in compared to Death proof however. Instead of the strong male guided violence, the tables have turned and Rose McGowen wields a gun with her leg forming a new fetish combining both violence and sex. Barton writes, “Through a filmic foregrounding of femininity in terms of body parts, costume, makeup, masquerade, seduction and makeover plots, women far more often then men have been explicitly aligned with the performative” (189, Barton). What Barton means to say is that the majority of the roles that women take in films end up creating a performative role for them. An example in Planet Terror is simply the placing of a rifle on Rose McGowan’s character in order to create the deadly combination of violence and sexuality. McGowan continues to be a source of performativity in fight scenes with the zombies as well as her other role in Death Proof as a go-go dancer. McGowan takes “a more central and more active investigating role to the woman in jeopardy…” (187, Barton). As Barton writes about woman psychothrillers we begin to see how McGowan’s character is not the idle, weak female protagonist that most psychothrillers have. She goes out fighting with her guns blazing, even the one strapped to her thigh and functions as a leg.
Another element of this double feature is the time in which it came out. This backdrop gives it cultural significance, especially for Planet Terror. Bishop writes, “Genre protocols include not only the zombies….but also a postapocalyptic backdrop, the collapse of societal infrastructures, and the indulging of survivalist fantasies, and the fear of other surviving human beings” (21, Bishop). What Bishop is emphasizing on the 9/11 backdrop of 2007 and the anxiety of the U.S. prior his production. However, this film is still relevant to those concerns. The fear of fellow human beings and collapse of societal infrastructures both play toward the contemporary viewer of 2007. We are still recuperating from the 9/11 incident and all sorts of other issues in our government. But the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing plays to our hearts still. So in viewing this film even today, in 2010, we still feel the underlying violent anxiety that zombies bring up from events hinting towards our own experiences.
In combining weapon and woman on Cherry Darling in Planet Terror, Rodriguez violence and sexuality, creating sexual desire for violence. In this fetish way, Darling is what exemplifies the fetishization of destruction in this film. The way the massacre scenes are shot and the color of the film overall glorifies violence in a loving kind of way. Having death and destruction all around the protagonists gives us a feeling of loss and awe at the sheer emptiness when it all falls to silence.
Another aspect of intrigue when it comes to the gun attached to McGowan is that it combines technology and the body. Benson-Allot claims that Planet Terror spurs from a subgenre of exploitation, “the splatter film, a derivative of Italian art horror…[the] film wants to look at what the flesh can do…the various fluid it can ooze, ways it can break and decays it can manage” (23, Benson-Allott). The subgenre that Benson-Allott recognizes is similar to body horror, in the ways that manipulating the flesh in as many ways as one can think of brings out revulsion, but also intrigue in one’s audience. The over-the-top attitude that both these films in Grindhouse exhibit is made with the intention of getting a rise out of the viewer.
This double feature is all about crossing limits and excess. The social commentary here might actually go into how America is a country of excess, the country has overstock in everything and so do these films. The hysteria and brute force involved in the play between Stunman Mike and Pam propels the desperate antics to survive and the terrible end of Pam’s life. The revenge tale makes the film fall back into the Hollywood format of happy endings. Through creating this feminine comeback, the film continues to be primarily about excess and intense feeling. These girls fully expel their frustration with the male gender and all that is evil in the world by chasing this, albeit, bad man off the road and literally bitch-slap him. The beat-down that occurs in the end only helps to conclude the film in excess. The message we are left with as an audience is that no one should mess with these chicks; they will come and get you later.
Similarly, Planet Terror rides on the excess of blood spatter, the gore and vulgarity of consuming flesh, and the raw anger of savagery. When McGowan spins around like a top and shoots circularly with her now rifle appendage, we might sit back and think as an audience “wow that’s awesome” but we also thing “wow, that would NEVER happen in a million years in real life. The hyperreality that this film employs continues through to the soundtrack and the intensity that is thrown at us as an audience. Anderson writes about how the hyperreality and the simulation of stuntman Mike creates a saturated film in Death Proof, but this also applies to Planet Terror. But instead of human emotion that propels the hyperreality forward in the film, it is the graphics, overactive fight scenes and chaotic discord that we witness on screen that creates the hyperreality. In a way the hyperreality no longer is reality in these films. The exaggeration has created a fantasy, one that is over embellished and so, in effect, unreal. The images that unfold on screen before us now show the story that we see as so unrealistic we could never expect it to happen to us in our own lives outside of this story.
Despite the genre distinction, cultural backdrop, fetishization of violence, especially car crashes, and the hyperreality transformation to unreality, this double feature comes out on top as one of the best almost NC-17 films ever. Ironically, all the hype and marketing put into Grindhouse came up without much to show for it self in box office sales. Stuntman Mike is the perfect example of male brutality overcome by feminist payback, and through this character we can see how femininity is first exploited and then reclaimed. Rose McGowan plays both the desperate damsel in distress and the weaponized raging badass figure of feminine power in these two films. Through her shift, our affections are first sympathy and then awe. The involvement of which the viewer is required to partake with these films creates an experience of some sort of thrill ride which might be the aim of the directors. All in all, these films both represent violence, sexuality and its involvement with violence, and the fetishization of destruction which creates the spectacle we receive.
Works Cited
Barton, Sabrina. "Your Self Storage: Femaile Investigation and Male Performativity in the Woman's Psychothriller." The New American Cinema. London: Duke University Press, 1998. 187-216.
Gunning, Tom.“The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Wide Angle vol. 8 no. 3/4 (Fall 1986). Rpt. in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser. London: BFI Publishing, 1990.
