Many writers have tried to decipher Carol’s mental state. Is
she depressed? Schizophrenic? Is she ‘sex repressed’, or possessed by ‘demons’
of the unconscious mind as Bosley Crowther reviewing for The New York
Times would have it in 1965. Or, more delicately, was she abused as a
child? The cryptic family portrait we see in her lounge might suggest this. The
film shrugs off definite answers but what is clear is that Carol is terrified
of being ‘broken into’. Her comfortable routine is shattered by her sister’s
oafish boyfriend and his clumsy stuffing of his toothbrush and razor into her
water glass. Sexual imagery here speaks for itself. It is often mentioned in
write ups of the film how openly Polanski exposes the intricacies of Carol’s
demise. But just what does this involve? My interpretation is that Polanski
creates a psychological space with his sophisticated use of the mechanics of
cinema - a space where a woman is terrified of intruders and then he invites us
in. We are with Carol every step of the way, perceiving the world as it is to
her: when she is alone in the house, when she is visited in the night by the
imagined rapist grabbing and pushing in close. We are given the spare key and invited to take up a kind of multiple occupancy of Carol’s mind. Polanski makes us
psyche-cine intruders, able to come and go as we please. It is this that makes
the film so unsettling and perversely enigmatic.
So what of this filmic architecture, how does Polanski build
this cine interior? To me his methods are Lovecraftian. By fragmenting and
dislocating sound and image Polanski creates monstrous and unearthly
reconfigurings of the banal. One observation I made in seeing the film again
was the fracturing of one of the early moments where Carol is walking outside
and passes by a roadworks site. Piles of rubble suggest disintegration and
recall the cracks in the pavement and wall that Carol is fascinated with. One
of the workers, sweating and wearing a soiled vest leers at her and suggests ‘a
bit of the other’. This one scene then splits into tiny shards that resurface
during the remainder of the film. A similar vest keeps reappearing in the flat,
as if it moves of its own accord. It is a sign of Carol’s curious disgust of
male sexuality - one she finally absorbs into her own horrific version of
domesticity. Later and quite separately from the initial workmen scene, Carol
appears even more disturbed on her walk home. Here, within the drums and
percussion of Chico Hamilton’s jazz score it is possible to hallucinate the
sounds of car horns and drilling. The film is shaped by these explosions and
dream logic arrangements. Cinematography (Gilbert Taylor) sound editing and
mixing (Tom Priestley and Leslie Hammond), editing (Alastaire McIntyre), art
direction (Séamus Flannery) are the building materials for Polanski that result
in this psychic folly.
In Poems to my other self(1927)
Albert-Birot pre-empts Polanki’s concerns in Repulsionand
indeed his words suggest one of Polanski’s interior tracking shots. Bachelard
selects this quotation in Poetics:
…Je suis tout droit les moulures
qui suivent tout droit le plafond
I follow the line of the moldings
which follow that of the ceiling.
Mais il y a des angles d’où l’on ne peut plus
sortir.
But there are angles from which one cannot escape
Bachelard is a good way into Repulsion. Architecture as a
metaphor for mental states was Bachelard’s calling card. But can’t we go a bit
further. If the South Ken rented flat is symbolic of Carol’s psyche then surely
we need to address what it means to equate a woman’s mentality with rented
accomodation. I am thinking figuratively here. I don’t want to suggest Carol is
a real woman. But let’s unpack this trope of woman as rented flat. Dido would
sing years later that her ‘life is for rent’, and make Disney-esque laments
about how unsettled and ungrounded as a person she is because she doesn’t
actually own her flat. For naughties Dido homeownership was the ur-state of
being a sorted post personal development woman. Girly independence a thing of
the past or is it for Carrie Bradshaw in Sex in the City 2? She manages to keep her single lady place
on in the middle of New York (‘not the right time to sell’ is the narrative
glue here). This allows her to go through rebellious married woman discomfort
as she boomerangs from the crash pad to her opulent home with Big. For Carrie marriage
doesn’t have to mean submission, but it ‘kind of’ does too. Ambivalence here is
not liberating, just compliance dressed up as dithering. Another post might
attempt to embrace the complexity that is Sex in the City 2 another time.
The South Ken flat is lewd, it’s creaky and unprivate. It’s
got cracks and gaps under the doors. No family home would be like this. It
speaks of the improper. It says: ‘these residents have got it coming.’ These
are the ones that don’t want to sacrifice their freedom to the god of mortgage
repayments. Social pariahs now, and more so since they can be slightly smug
about not making the repayments all those years just to sit on a valueless
property. The tenants can get out quick, they are not contributing to growth.
There is no glory in lining the pockets of landlords, but less so in flaunting
now useless mortgage debt disguised as a good investment. So thanks Bachelard
for making us look at architecture as mind, but lets also think about the kinds
of architectural signals that have become burried in the economic psyche of
late-capitalism. Home owning took off in the 80s and it could be argued that
there were less frowning attitudes towards renting. But still the film is a way
for me to articulate this short hand, the way attitudes towards women are
implicit to the extent that film narratives work because of them. These
attitudes are bound to their economic position.
This use of the rented flat trope is used by Polanski as
shorthand for flighty, economically uncommitted, untethered, transient, more at
risk and vulnerable. How would the story have been if she had been married and
in her own home. The valid excuse for her to kill the men would not have been
madness but moral good. Her economic state would be all tied up in this version
of the story. Cinema is very good as a tool for pointing out just how much
women need an excuse to do anything. They cannot just do it because they want
to or because they have reason to as individuals. As wives or protectors of the
family (male dominated) home their behaviour is validated. The female
psychotic must be explained by madness or dissolved into death. Female violence
at large is inexplicable within patriarchal mores. Polanski wanted to create
the portrait of a psychotic woman and part of his schemata was to present her
as ‘the tenant’. The impermanent the unbound economically, the insignigicant
and not quite a citizen. She is a virgin and a tenant, open territory, no-one’s
yet, not citizen nor girlfriend or wife. She is placeless. As Polanski wanted
to create this horrific affect of inviting us into her psyche, then it makes
sense for him that we are ‘her first’, this makes for a greater ‘affect’ and as
someone described to me his response to the film, a further sense of
‘ickyness’. By icky I mean this implicit, sneaky sense of being a seated cine
sadist. We become complicit in Polanski’s plan for our viewing experience, we
don’t turn away. It’s simple perversion and I’m not knocking a culture for
viewing sadistic material in celluloid fantasy form, or for that matter real
physical sexual sadists but Polanski’s methods for getting us here are notably
underhanded.
