Axes have been around for a good eight thousand years or so.
Chances are good some woman somewhere killed someone with one soon after they showed up on the scene - but the first female axe murderer that I'm aware of is Clytemnestra -- figure of Greek myth, offspring of perhaps the all-time weird sex scene: that of Zeus (that's the King of the Gods, Zeus) seducing and/or raping her mortal mother Leda while disguised as a swan.
Later that night, Leda goes for seconds with her husband Tyndareus (King of Sparta at the time); this sperm-filled freakfest resulted in four children, borne of 'two eggs': Clytemnestra and Castor were Tyndareus' and therefore mortal, Helen and Polydeuces were Zeus' and therefore immortal. You can perhaps see where our heroine got a bum steer - not only was she not immortal like one brother & sister (and her human brother Castor got to be half-immortal later on too), but her sister Helen was considered nothing less than the most beautiful woman in the world.
Clytemnestra grows up and marries Tantalus (King of Lydia). Hubby #1's second cousin was Agamemnon (King of Argos and/or Mycenae), a nice enough guy when played by Sean Connery in Time Bandits sure, but he kills cousin Tantalus and takes Clytemnestra to be his wife. So again, not a nice deal for her.
And things aren't getting better for Clytemnestra just yet either. Husband #2 Agamemnon goes on to lead the Greeks during the Trojan War - the war to win her sister Helen back from the Trojans, remember - and during this war he has their daughter Iphigeneia sent out to him on the pretext of her marrying Achilles (played by Brad Pitt in Troy, you may recall), only to then kill her as a way of getting the weather to improve.
So it's hard to fault Clytemnestra back at home for hooking up with Aegisthus. This guy's mother was also his sister, and after he was born she abandoned him, forcing him to suck at a goat's titty just to survive. I'm guessing he had some issues also. Anyways, when hubby #2 finally got back home from the Trojan War, Aegisthus gave Clytemnestra the head's up and she decapitated Agamemnon and his new Trojan ho Cassandra with an axe* (I'd like to say she didn't see it coming).
Clytemnestra and Agamemnon had other children besides meteorological human sacrifice Iphigeneia; among these was a boy, Orestes, and the original Daddy's girl, Electra. Now, these two weren't too thrilled about their mother having killed their father (even though their father had killed their mother's first husband), and you can probably guess where this is going -- these two bad seeds get together with mutual sex-toy (and Agamemnon's nephew) Pylades and the three decide to kill Aegisthus and Clytemnestra.
They show up at the couple's place and make short work of Aegisthus. Clytemnestra is told by her servants of his death and declares, "bring me my man-killing axe" - an awesome line that portends more female axe chopping and bloody action. Sadly, things go the other way, she doesn't get her hands on the axe, and Orestes kills her too - but not she before curses him old-school. After killing his mom, Orestes finds himself hounded by Furies. In the end, the only thing that'll set things right is bathing in pig's blood at the Temple of Delphi.
*I should note that some scholars believe axe is an incorrect translation and that Clytemnestra used a sword. Axe is better though, all the way. Let's just go with axe.
Why is that? What is so special about this image, this idea? I hope to reveal something of the answer over the next week or so with a series of posts on a few different subjects having to do with those ladies and their axes --
On the one hand, the axe has a utilitarian role in many women's day-to-day lives; on the other, it's a common weapon in the fantasy of warrior women art. The historic case of Lizzie Borden is of course impossible to escape in any such analysis - indeed, the commonality of the axe as a weapon in murders committed by women is one key to its fascination. The axe as religious symbol, the axe as power symbol, the axe as sexual symbol - why, I'll even toss in some axe-throwing, what the heck.
I hope you will join me in celebrating this potent image of woman and axe.
While researching a future post, I happened across a few pages with excellent coverage of the many fetish or pride flags now commonly displayed at pride parades and other related functions. Some are fairly boring, but many are quite striking and several are even humourous.
I include some of my favourites here (just scroll over the pics for descriptions in the URLs).
In her own words, "the Aunt Peg character exemplified the lusty, intelligent, self-assured older woman".
As Nina Hartley has noted, Aunt Peg, "was the original cougar"; her style was bold, she could really act, and her performances were legendary (onscreen, she insisted on achieving real orgasms for the camera). Dropping out of porn in 1984, after getting shafted on her directorial debut "Educating Nina" (Nina Hartley's first film), Peg/Anderson spent the next decade running a B&B and operating a massage clinic.
Imagine waking up to breakfast with Aunt Peg!
"...even more gratifying than being in front of the camera was the one-woman comedy sex shows I took around the country. I created ten different characters who dispel myths about mature women and sexuality".
As of 1995, she returned to porn, both as an actress and a producer/director. She was also involved in couples therapy focused on 'loving touch'. Sadly, Aunt Peg passed away earlier this month, on January 11th in her bed at home. She brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people and, I think it's fair to say, will continue to do so for a long time yet to come.
In 1996, underground UK publisher Headpress released a rather mysterious collection of short stories entitled The Eyes: Emetic Fables from the Andalusian de Sade. This was reported to be the work of one Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta, and his biography (as it appears in the book, written by translator Lucia Teodora) is worth quoting from:
"Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta was born in the southern Spanish city of Seville circa 1950 and died by suicide in Madrid in 1987, burning himself to death in a small room on whose rent he was nearly three months in arrears. He is known to have spent much of his life outside Spain, in Central and South America and the Philippines; what precisely he did there remains uncertain, and confirmation or refutation of the many rumours, variously unsavoury and contradictory, that circulated during his lifetime will have to wait for the complete decipherment of his coded diaries."
If you're thinking this all sounds a little too good to be true, I'm inclined to agree; this character is simply too well-drawn, a teen who turned tricks with a sleazy bookstore proprietor in exchange for books? Who spent equal time in jail for theft & drug offenses as he did at medical school ("where he learned the geography of the human body and something of its almost infinite capacity for suffering and degradation")?
Aldapuerta eats a foreskin from work and gets caught trying to smuggle a couple of human hands across the border. By 1987 he's looking on his last leg, possibly due to AIDS, and soon thereafter he burns to death in his bed.
Was it suicide? Drug dealers mad about not being paid? "A murderous vendetta carried out by right-wing religious vigilantes outraged by his blasphemous writings and life-style"? If there's one thing for sure about this Aldapuerta, it's that mystery & intrigue follow him at every turn - and then never so much as in the hotbed of intriguing mystery that was his 'apparent death' (apparent because the charred corpse may not even have been his, so the story goes).
Was this Andalusian de Sade really a put-on? It's been suggested the writer may have actually been British poet Jeremy Reed. Whoever wrote this stuff, it's pretty hardcore - that next level of grim human horror. There's even a found glossary in the back of a language, "highly suitable for the composition of ultra-violent sadistic pornography".
And lo, I did discover recently that a chap named Alex transcribed the whole thing and put it online, so that others who never bought a copy might read these scandalous, dizzyingly violent tales and decide for themselves. Thank you, Andrew.
In the last decade, you can add Audition (1999) and Irreversible (2002) to most of these lists (and with good reason) - indeed, the 'art house shocker' is alive and well and starting to push out the older horror flicks that just don't seem that disturbing anymore.
It's a subject that holds a lot of interest for me as a viewer, but I knew that simply compiling yet another list of disturbingflicks would interest no one. Obviously some kind of spin on the same-old was needed and, as you can see by the title of the post, I went with a look at disturbing scenes in not-really-very-disturbing-otherwise-type films; I readily confess this is pretty subjective and you may well disagree with my choices here or feel there are obvious exclusions (if you do, I'd love to read your comment).
Another problem with such a concept is how to determine when an not-very-disturbing film crosses over to being disturbing? Irreversible, as I've said, is on a lot of these disturbing films lists - but there's really only a couple of scenes in the whole film that put it there. In the case of Deliverance (1972), the fate of poor Bobby was so anathema to many viewers that a single scene - perhaps ten minutes or so in all - was enough to elevate the whole film to most-disturbing status. Suffice it to say, I've tried to be fastidious in my view that a movie was otherwise mostly light in tone, although in a few cases it's largely down to genre expectations that something comes across as particularly shocking.
And therein lies the key to this, the context of what is going on both in the scene and in the film as a whole. When most of us pop a slasher movie into the machine, our expectations of what we are about to see are radically different than when we watch a children's film or a standard courtroom drama; the point at which such films might shock us changes accordingly.
So why include a shocking or disturbing scene in an otherwise undisturbing film? Not surprisingly, it's usually to add a note of menace, to code a character as evil or off somehow (one example that stands out in my mind is 1998's The Mask of Zorro; it's not enough that the villain kills Zorro's brother, he has to keep his severed head in a jar to taunt Zorro with later).
It may also be to relate an incident from a character's past, perhaps in order to create sympathy. In the case of Deliverance (and Irreversible, for that matter), scenes portraying transgressions not only horrify but push the plot forwards, give characters something to avenge, a motive for further action. In the case of Looking For Mr. Goodbar (1977), the shock ending alters the rest of the film, punctuating freedom with punishment, recasting what we've seen as a morality tale.
Another reason for such scenes is to convey visually that This Is Serious Business, a well-worn device in war films (increasingly frank in their depiction of war crimes and atrocities) and depictions of other manly-man occupations (1991's Backdraft, for example). We're increasingly seeing this sort of shock/disturbing scene in stories of abuse as well nowadays - usually one scene to try and convey the seriousness of the abuse, a beating or rape making evident what a black eye or timidity might have only suggested in years past.
As we shall see, the cases I'm highlighting are noteable for the fact that they seemed (again, in my opinion) to have struck a wrong chord, to have overshot the mark and stuck out. They are noteable in short because they draw attention to themselves.
A perfect example of this is Nurse Betty (2000), a 'comedy' in which our protagonist has a psychic break and begins to believe that she is the fictional titular character. Someone believing that they are someone else has comedic potential of course, but when you reveal early on that this break was caused by witnessing the torture, scalping, and ultimately murder of her husband, well... it's hard to get folks in a light-hearted mood again. This scene is available on Youtube, for the moment at least, and so I present it here; of course you are best served watching the whole film to get the context within which it appears.
I recently saw the thriller Law Abiding Citizen (2009) and here is a good example of genre expectations being played with; the film has to begin with our protagonist having some great harm done to him, such that he will seek a sympathetic revenge: doorbell rings and he answers, getting smacked in the face with a baseball bat. He and his wife are bound and gagged by two thugs - OK, I thought, par for the course.
But at this point, one of the thugs takes turns lying over husband and wife, getting in close to taunt them and then tenderly sticking his knife deep in their sides, in what I can only describe as a passionate fashion. He is obviously turned on, the conflation of violence and sex is indeed shocking in this context. The man then begins raping the wife and, just when you're thinking this can't get any worse, the couple's very young daughter walks in on the scene and attracts his attention. "Kids love me", he quips, walking off to take her hand. Close-up of our protagonist's eyes, his helplessness horrible to witness.
I was expecting a simple crime drama - which the film, let's be honest, is advertised as. Something about the details of this 'home invasion' sequence made it far more believable, and hence disturbing, than similar scenes in countless other films of its type. Is it just that I'm getting older? Maybe. It really does seem to me however that the portrayal of violence to the body, the willingness to show bodies being hurt onscreen, has dramatically increased in mainstream Hollywood film in the last decade or so (an attempt to come to terms with Abu Ghraib?).
Finally, I'd like to end with an example that relies on words alone, a monologue in a children's film whose disturbing shock still resonates with me twenty-five years after I first saw it in the theatre (there was a little kid in front of me who asked his mother after the speech whether this was true. "No, no", she assured him, "it's just a movie").
Kate: The worst thing that ever happened to me was on Christmas. Oh, God. It was so horrible. It was Christmas Eve. I was 9 years old. Me and Mom were decorating the tree, waiting for Dad to come home from work. A couple hours went by. Dad wasn't home. So Mom called the office. No answer. Christmas Day came and went, and still nothing. So the police began a search. Four or five days went by. Neither one of us could eat or sleep. Everything was falling apart. It was snowing outside. The house was freezing, so I went to try to light up the fire. That's when I noticed the smell. The firemen came and broke through the chimney top. And me and Mom were expecting them to pull out a dead cat or a bird. And instead they pulled out my father. He was dressed in a Santa Claus suit. He'd been climbing down the chimney... his arms loaded with presents. He was gonna surprise us. He slipped and broke his neck. He died instantly. And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus.
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