Essay 1: Option 2: The Carnivalesque and Grotesque
“Offend one, and you offend them all.”
Tod Browning’s, Freaks, depicts our darkest nightmares, albeit simultaneously shaming us for feeling terrified or appalled. The film aims to evoke social change, to humanize freaks and monsters- those who suffered from mental and physical disabilities. Despite the film’s major flop at the box-office, it poignantly makes a compelling case.
The film’s backdrop is set during the beginning of the Great Depression following the 1929 stock market crash. Much of the story revolves around coupling, particularly revolving around Cleopatra and Hans’s relationship. The couple are like no other; Cleopatra, a trapeze artist, is a “big woman” and Hans is a wealthy sideshow midget. To the dismay of Hans’s well-meaning friends- the other sideshow attractions- Cleopatra manages to seduce Hans with her “big” stature. The pair ultimately get married, but Cleopatra’s duplicitous persona betrays her during the reception.
The freaks, despite witnessing Cleopatra kiss her lover Hercules (another attraction), admit Cleopatra into their family. They begin chanting their ritualized initiation: “Gooble-goble, gooble-goble! …We accept her! …One of us, one of us!” Drunk and feeling ashamed, Cleopatra reveals her true feelings, insults the freaks, and throws the initiation ceremony wine onto the group.
The lovelorn Hans remains with his new wife after she blames the events on the alcohol. The two continue to tour with the circus, although Cleopatra starts to slowly poison Hans. Another performer, Venus, overhears Cleopatra expounding her plot to run away with Hans’ money after his death. Venus informs Hans and the rest of the freaks and soon they develop a revenge plan.
The freaks wait until the circus packs up and sets for the next location to enact their plan. That rainy, storming night on the road, culminates with the freaks banding together by Hans’ orders, crawling through the mud with knives in their mouths and weapons in their hands. After a brief struggle, the gang cuts up Hercules and manages to chase Cleopatra into the woods, reforming her body through mutilation into that of a “Human Duck”— her new identity as a freak.
Despite serving as a cautionary tale for gold diggers, for many viewers, the film was too shocking in its use of real “freaks”- Browning employed real circus actors of the time to participate in the film. For the average American, the nightmare was far too real to categorize as escapism, let alone enjoyable. And perhaps, this is due to the 1930’s “dustbowl sterility and economic emasculation” (Skal).
But the true significance of Freaks- and of Browning’s integrity as an artist challenging dominant ideologies of his time – can only be fully appreciated when considered in the context of the eugenics movement of the era and its impact on the consciousness of those it victimized: namely the lower classes, immigrants, minorities, and people with mental and physical disabilities. Pasteurization, improved sanitation, antiseptics, vaccination and mechanization in food farming and processing increased the supply of food, helping to dramatically decrease infant and childhood mortality, resulting in a growth in family size; especially among the urban poor. Eugenics was America’s response to this specter of rampant population growth in the United States.
The Eugenics Records Office through its own research, concluded that the genetically unfit came from economically and socially disadvantaged backgrounds and quickly came up with solutions such as: immigration restrictions, racial segregation, marriage restriction and sterilization. The Eugenics movement’s hegemony aimed to convince Americans that the white middle and upper classes were genetically superior by claiming that the remainder of society was stratified by varying degrees of genetic inferiority: whites were more intelligent than blacks, native-born Americans more intelligent than immigrants, northern Europeans more intelligent than southern Europeans and so on. The Eugenics movement quickly became known as a social order based on breeding. In Freaks, Browning attempted to challenge this ideology that had engulfed much of white America- he forces the viewer to become comfortable with the unknown, with the uncomfortable.
Much of the reason that Freaks is considered a horror film is due to the extreme racial and geographical otherness of the freaks on display, reassuring white American viewers and circus-goers with confirmation of their own status. Confirmation that was necessary due to the anxieties and insecurities brought on by the economic unrest of Black Tuesday, the skyrocketing unemployment rate, and the drought/Dustbowl. Hundreds of thousands of Americans found themselves homeless with countless others barely managing to scrape by, leaving the American Dreams of a large chunk of the population in tatters.
The films Browning produced during this time very much reflected these anxieties:
“The four archetypes would recombine easily; all had sprung into mass consciousness in response to the trauma of the Great Depression. They contained precipitable, if unintended, metaphors of economic and class warfare. Dracula, a sanguinary capitalist, relocates from Transylvania after draining the local peasants. The bourgeois Dr. Jekyll exploits and destroys a woman of the lower classes. The freaks live in a literally unbalanced social competition- the “big people” against the “little people.” And the Frankenstein monster is a poignant symbol for an army of abject and abandoned laborers, down to his work clothes and asphalt-spreader's boots” (Skal).
A part of the horror lies in the swiftness it took for Cleopatra to transform from “the big woman” to the “Human Duck”. Perhaps this is due to the erasure of reassuring oppositions- “the very definitions we rely on to classify humans, identities and sexes — our most fundamental categories of self-definition and boundaries dividing self from otherness” (Grosz). Individuals most commonly referred to as “freaks”, specifically during the early 20th century, included hermaphrodites, “pinheads” (microcephalics), midgets, and bearded ladies. “Freaks,” vehemently blur the boundaries we have attempted to create with these reassuring oppositions, they are not confined or bounded to a “proper” social category.
The true horror, I believe, lies in the viewer’s realization that this “freak”, this monstrous being is not so distant or unknown to his or her identity, “for it is all that must be ejected or objected from self-image to make the bounded, category-obeying self-possible” (Grosz). In other words, we need the freak to confirm our own static, bounded identities and the certain horror lies in knowing that we may not be as bounded as we think. For example, if the hermaphrodite can transcend traditional gender categories, then perhaps our own genders are more fluid. For many, like Freaks’ 1930 audience, that is a truly horrifying thought.
Grosz, Elizabeth. “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit.” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. Ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson. New York: New York University Press, 1996. 55-68.
Skal, David. “1931: The American Abyss.” The monster show: a cultural history of horror. Np. New York : Faber and Faber, 2001.
