The Protective Gaze and the Ideology of the Endangered Child

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The Protective Gaze and the Ideology of the Endangered Child Jason Middleton (bio) It might seem counterintuitive to begin a discussion of grown-up horror with a film paradigmatic of a horror cycle so indelibly associated with adolescent characters and audiences: John Carpenter's iconic slasher Halloween (1978).1 But I will suggest that the minimal presence of literal adults throughout the film facilitates a mode of cinematic vision I term the "protective gaze," which gives formal expression to a set of distinctively adult fears and anxieties about child endangerment that took hold during the period of the film's long theatrical run. I will then discuss the Black Mirror episode "Arkangel" (Jodie Foster, 2017) as exemplary of how some recent grown-up horror positions adult mothers as protagonists terrorized by a culture of parenting radically transformed since the 1970s and 1980s by the very fears of child endangerment that Halloween and other early slasher films allegorize. Carol Clover's influential analysis of the first slasher cycle called for viewers and critics to move beyond the "literal" onscreen gender of the characters toward a "figurative or functional analysis [that] begins with the processes of point of view and identification." 2 But in Clover's work and in most subsequent scholarship on [End Page 328] the slasher, where gender has been understood as figurative, the principal characters' age—their status as adolescents—has generally been taken literally. For Clover, the figurative liminal gender of the Final Girl and killer, respectively, works in tandem with the Final Girl's more literal liminal social and developmental status as an adolescent between childhood and adulthood. Taken together, these forms of liminality suggest the centrality of the presumed teenage male viewer for whom the Final Girl's life-and-death struggle with the killer symbolically represents the psychodrama of sexual maturation and gendered subject formation. Her phallicization in the final defeat of the killer stages the achievement of normative adult male heterosexuality. Offering a different perspective on the characters' status as youths, Adam Lowenstein historicizes Clover's Oedipal narrative, arguing that Laurie's age can be understood in the same figurative register as her gender. Lowenstein reads Halloween as historical allegory for the explosive American divorce rate between 1960 and 1980. He points out how the teens in the film actually figure childhood, or even adolescence, much less so than they do adulthood: "their place within the mise-en-scène aligns them with parents more than anything else."3 Parents are either absent or impotent in Halloween. We see Laurie's own parents only briefly at the start, when her father, a realtor trying to sell the long-abandoned Myers house, tasks Laurie with dropping off the keys. He thus unwittingly endangers her, as this errand is the first scene in the film to place her in Michael's sightline. Laurie's caregiving role as Tommy's babysitter casts her as the only competent parental figure in the film, but she is "simultaneously a child removed from her own parents."4 Michael in turn is both a demonized child and, symbolically, a punishing parent. In Lowenstein's reading, the film speaks to the "hypothetical teenage child of divorce" by offering Laurie and Michael's drawn-out union as a "sort of fantastic resolution" to the trauma of a broken home, "two parents who keep coming back together again, who seem destined for each other . . . or two children overcoming their divorce-induced fear of romantic relationships."5 For Lowenstein, the fluid and figurative age of the principal characters responds to the spike in the American divorce rate during the era of the film's production as well as the upheaval of the postwar nuclear family's dominant social status. But what links Clover's psychoanalytic interpretation to Lowenstein's allegorical, sociohistorical one is that in both cases Halloween and other slasher films of the time are seen to assuage anxieties attributed to an adolescent viewer. This essay argues that the liminality of both [End Page 329] Laurie's gender and her age positions her to represent the fears and anxieties of a parent or caregiver in this sociohistorical context. As scholars such as Robin Wood...