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Illusions: A New Zealand Magazine
of Film Television and Theatre Criticism, Issue Number
2, Winter 1986, Editor Reid Perkins (Meg and the Space
Invaders pp24-28, 1986, Illusions Co-operative, Wellington).
You’ve a right to be frightened… Relax
and enjoy it… Enjoy the ecstasy of abject terror,” intones
Meg Alexander’s extremely unpleasant pursuer in
Gaylene Preston’s comic thriller Mr Wrong (1985).
In one sense what he’s saying is the product of
a particularly dangerous mind at work, one which takes
the sick reasoning of sexism to its logical end – rape
and murder.
In another sense, however, what he’s
saying, in the context of the genre into which Mr Wrong
fits, contains a lot of truth. For isn’t he merely
taking to its extreme the appeal of the thriller film?
We’ve all seen this sort of film (Psyco, Dressed
to Kill, The Shining …), all savoured the experience
of being scared. There’s something oddly exhilarating
and cathartic about that experience. The heady mix of
danger and security, the frissons of suspense and terror
incongruous amid the warm womb-like darkness of a cinema,
the pulserising, hands gripping the armrest – those
very physical symptoms of the power the screen has over
us. And underlying that, the secure knowledge that it’s “unreal”,
that at the end of 90-odd minutes of this strange game
we allow the medium to play with us, we can step back
into the “real” world, laughing at ourselves
and at the not very clearly understood impulse that drives
us to be entertained in such a curious fashion. Humour
is a particularly relevant factor here – a way
of defusing fear and controlling the inexplicable, perhaps.
Without doubt it plays an important role in the thriller
genre. Hitchcock, it seems, knew this almost instinctively
and deployed it often. I would go so far as to suggest
that the most successful thrillers are in fact those
which, like many of Hitchcock’s films, incorporate
a fair degree of humour as an integral part of the narrative.
Hesitant though I am to go into the
complex and contentious area of humour in general, I
would just like to make one point about its appearance
in the thriller. It often seems to inhabit an elusive
space halfway between the film’s diegesis and the
viewer. As such, it is usually a wry comment on the unstated
agreement between filmmaker and viewer, which, if articulated,
would go something like this: “Okay, you know I’m
fooling you and I know you’re letting me. Neither
of us really knows why we indulge in this curious but
entertaining game, but let’s do it anyway.” It’s
a sort of ironic self-reflexivity, and I believe it only
works if the filmmaker is supremely aware of the conventions
of the genre and can manipulate them adeptly.
The same knowledge arguably applies
also to those films that use a genre to comment upon
some social issue. Take for example Costa-Gavras’s
Z (1968), a thriller which is also a savage attack on
the totalitarian regime in Greece, and Edward Dmytryk’s
Crossfire (1947), which tackles the problem of anti-semitism
in a story about a police investigation into a murder.
Mr Wrong skilfully succeeds at both
self-reflexivity and social comment. In addition, it’s
a superbly entertaining thriller. Its tight and well-scripted
plot exploits many of the clichés and conventions
of the genre, while simultaneously turning an incisive
and perceptive eye on the ideological substructure of
those very conventions. Preston spotlights the inbuilt
sexism of the genre and illuminates its uncomfortable
preoccupations with power, sex and death, and some of
the nastier links between that unholy trinity that permeate
the dominant ethos.*
A feminist thriller may sound like
a contradiction in terms: the combination of a genre
thatplays on (and contributes to) myths about women and
the demythologising nature of feminism is, if nothing
else, a volatile mix. Mr Wrong walks a tightrope without
a safety net. It risks falling on one side into exploitation
and on the other into preachy polemics. It succeeds eminently
in avoiding both. There are some minor issues that I
would like to mention at the end of this article, but
first let’s look at how the film works, both within
and against the conventions of its genre.
Meg Alexander, the film’s protagonist,
initially seems to be set up in the classic victim role – female,
isolated, and threatened by male violence. But, compared
to the victim we usually encounter in such films – glamorous,
passive, prone to various states of undress, ear-piercing
screams and irrational behaviour, Meg is a pleasant contrast.
Notably average, homely, pretty in a matronly, comfortable
sort of way, she’s a nice country cousin come to
town. She wears home knits and ordinary dresses. Hangs
her flesh-coloured undies on the shower rail next to
flatmate Sam’s fishnets and flimsy black numbers.
Keeps her winceyette nightie or pyjamas under the pillow.
Keeps a copy of Supercook on the dressing table, next
to the Johnson’s baby powder and jar of cold cream.
She’s middle of the road, woman on the street,
likeable. Perfect material for audience identification.
Unlike just about any other thriller
victim I’ve ever seen, she doesn’t go to
pieces at the first sign of trouble, either. When things
go bump in the night, no hiding under the covers whimpering
for Meg. No, she gets up, turns on the light, arms herself
with a hefty Venus de Milo statuette (a lovely touch)
and goes to investigate. Sure she’s scared, but
she’s doing something about it. Likewise, her quick
thinking with a cigarette lighter allows her to escape
from her pursuer’s clutches, just as he’s
about to strangle her in her car. Right out of the self-defence
books, that one (or maybe it’s a reminder from
the classes she watches on TV).
It’s worth looking closely at
Meg’s relationships with other characters in the
film. Overall, these stress her isolated position. Halfway
between two worlds, Meg no longer belongs in the country
where she was brought up, and doesn’t yet fit in
the city to which she has moved. When she goes home for
the weekend, her mother is interested in, but doesn’t
really understand, her daughter’s new life. (“You
know it’s amazing. When I was your age my mother
gave me a glory box.”) The romantic scenes she
envisages when Meg informs her she’s been out for
dinner the previous night are rapidly dismissed: “Nice
little table for two?” “No, no Mum, a noisy
little table for five.”
While at home, Meg also visits her
old schoolfriend, Edith. A wonderful example of self-deprecating
humour holding out (with more than a hint of desperation)
against suburban neurosis, frazzled and up to her eyeballs
in nappies, Edith can’t help but let her envy at
Meg’s new life show through. “Edie, seriously.
I’ve bought a Jag.” “You have? Well
you didn’t go south just to blow your nose.”
In the city, we encounter Meg’s
flatmates, Val and Sam. Sam (vaguely reminiscent of the
eponymous femme fatale of Constance) is frivolous and
careless. Out for a good time, she plays the field with
men (Meg: “She’s met a Martin.” Val: “Oh,
poor bugger.”) She constantly loses her house keys,
helps herself to money from the household kitty, and
as far as Meg goes, she’s only really interested
in changing the latter’s hairstyle. Val, older
and more sympathetic to Meg, realises that all is not
well with her cousin. But she’s too busy, never
able to “have a good talk” with Meg, despite
her best intentions.
Meg’s relations with the men
in the film are particularly revealing. Leaving out Wayne,
to whom I’ll come later, most of the other men
Meg encounters range along a spectrum of obnoxiousness
from the shifty car salesman Clive, with his silly sexist
comments (“It’s the price you women have
to pay for changing your minds all the time”),
to the oafish Bruce, and the sinister Man (Mr Wrong,
as I’ll have to call him). Mr Whitehorn, Meg’s
gay, middle-aged boss, plays in some ways a similar sort
of role to Meg’s mother. He holds rather quaint
views on relationships (“I suspect you’re
being courted, Miss Alexander,” “It would
appear that romance is blooming”), and misreads
as a sexual invitation Meg’s plea for him to accompany
her home.
The Man, Mr Wrong, supernatural or
otherwise (it’s not clear which) is a thoroughly
creepy specimen of masculinity. A sample of the views
expressed by him: that women who pick up hitchhikers
are asking for trouble, that attractiveness in women
is provocative, and that women are by extension somehow
responsible for the excesses of male sexuality and violence; “a
goodlooking lady like you could get yourself into a power
of trouble… Someone like you picking up hitchhikers
could be misconstrued, eh?” (Sadly, these are views
not restricted only to fictional characters like Mr Wrong).
Meg having thrown him out of her car (entirely understandably),
he haunts her and ultimately attempts to “punish” her.
(“I must kill you for your unkindness”).
Without a doubt, he constitutes a
real threat to Meg, whether he’s a ghost or not.
But arguably, Bruce who’s undeniably flesh and
blood, poses the same sort of threat, if somewhat less
extreme. You can read Bruce as one of the film’s
many red herrings – twice he lets himself into
Meg’s flat and on both occasions terrifies her – but
he’s equally an interesting comment on the male-dominated
society of which he’s a product. On the first of
Meg’s encounters with him, he’s made himself
entirely at home in her flat. He’s drunk her beer
and fallen asleep in front of her TV. Not only does he
not apologise, but he even treats her like some sort
of waitress in her own home (“You wouldn’t
be making a cup of tea would you?”). On the second
occasion, late at night, he lurches drunkenly in on Meg’s
privacy. Discovering that his former girlfriend Sam is
unlikely to return home that night, he turns his attentions
to Meg, insulting her (“You know, you don’t
look too bad without make-up on”) and attempting
to rape her. When Meg fights back and Wayne turns up
on the scene, he reluctantly shambles off, further insulting
her (“You won’t get far with that tight-arsed
bitch”).
In relation to the male characters,
it’s interesting to look at women’s space
in this film. “All men are space invaders,” reads
my favourite piece of Wellington graffiti, and there
are a few hints of the accuracy of this in Mr Wrong.
Bruce unquestioningly assumes his male right to invade
not only Meg’s flat but more specifically her own
bedroom, her body even. So deeply embedded in society
is the male right to enter, that Meg even feels guilty
when she throws Bruce out. “I wasn’t very
nice to him, was I? Perhaps I should have made him a
cup of tea,” she says to Wayne.† Likewise,
she apologises to Mr Wrong, having asked him to get out
of her car (“Hey look, I… I’m sorry,
I… I would never have picked you up on the first
place, it’s just that I thought you were someone
else”).
Martin, Sam’s new boyfriend,
manifests the same kind of attitude to Meg’s space
and has a similar effect on Meg. Waiting for Sam to change
her clothes, he prowls around the lounge in which Meg
is eating her dinner and watching TV. With his condescending
stance and questions, he makes Meg feel uncomfortable.
She turns down the volume on the TV and when he expresses
disgust at the self-defence classes she’s watching,
she rapidly disassociates herself from such activities,
which are clearly unacceptable to Martin and his ill
(Martin: “You don’t go in for that sort of
thing do you?” Meg: “Oh no, not really.” Martin: “They’re
trained to kill. I think it’s disgusting.”)
It’s interesting to note that
the whole film revolves around a car, a traditionally
male space and male symbol of potency. The implications
of a woman owning a Jaguar – a large and powerful
car (despite what Clive, in full flight as salesman,
tells Meg, “Definitely a lady’s car”§) – are
not lost on Edith. When Meg tells her that both her father
and her boss have asked her to keep her car around the
back, she replies “Oh, they can’t stand the
thought of a woman having a bigger one than their own.
It’s reverse penis envy.”
All of the above points that the film
makes on the male characters, and on the ownership of
space, contribute to the film’s subtle commentary
on the nature of the everyday threats to women. On one
hand, the film establishes the classic thriller situations
of the female victim stalked by a male, but, refreshingly,
it is without the usual excess of blood and guts endemic
to the genre. But there’s also a strong sense running
through the film of the quotidian terrors women face – fear
of being alone, for example. Everyday objects and noises
become imbued with a distinctive eeriness when one lives
one’s life with this undercurrent of fear. For
example, the creaking of Meg’s mother’s washing
line, with ghostly shirts flapping in the breeze, echoes
the creaking fence at the hilltop rest area where Meg
first hears strange noises in the car.
“Why do I take fright at everything?”,
Meg asks Wayne. The fear of fear itself is uppermost
in her mind¶, and just about everybody is out to
help her convince herself she’s going slightly
mad: the garage attendant who implies she’s seeing
things, Mr Whitehorn who suggests she’s being oversensitive,
Mr Wrong who tells her: “You shouldn’t drive
on your own, if you go around seeing things.”
Meg’s paranoia is very neatly
described visually in two similar shots. As Meg creeps
around her car, which is strangely bouncing up and down
(unbeknown to Meg her mother is in the back seat), the
camera rests for a moment on Meg looking at her own reflection
in the highly polished car door. Similarly, when Meg
is alarmed by a stranger (Martin) walking past her window,
she turns off the house lights in order to see who’s
outside, and comes face to face with her own reflection.µ
Two other symbols recur in the film’s
iconography. Raw meat is one: Meg’s father gives
her a leg of lamb to take back to the city. Meg puts
it in the car boot (which her mother, with unconscious
irony, has described as being “big enough to put
a body in”). We learn later that “considerable
amounts of blood which match Miss Carmichael’s
type were found in the [self-same] boot.” Unable
to pass the meat off to the tow-truck driver who has
brought Meg’s car home, Meg takes it into the kitchen.
There follows a close-up shot of Meg’s hand skilfully
chopping up meat. It’s an interesting shot, with
more than a suspicion of menace in it. Meg’s fingers,
despite their dexterity, are alarmingly close to what
is obviously a very sharp knife which she’s wielding
at great speed. We almost expect her to injure herself.
A rose encased in plastic is the other
recurrent symbol. Wayne, “courting” Meg (as
Mr Whitehorn would have it), sends her one such rose,
but this old fashioned symbol of romantic love takes
on more menacing connotations when Mr Wrong starts depositing
them too – at the shop, in Meg’s car (this
complete with the uncomfortable note “Till we meet
again”). There’s also something sinister
about one of the two roses (Wayne’s or Mr Wrong’s?)
toppling from the mantelpiece, as Mr Wrong, foiled in
his attempts to attack Meg, leaves her house, slamming
the door behind him.
For me, the rose encased in plastic
and the meat encapsulate the two extremes of male treatment
of women; the rose symbol of the “protective” (i.e.
restrictive) gilt-cage, hothouse atmosphere of romantic
love, and the raw, bleeding meat, symbol of the dehumanising
reduction to mere flesh of pornography and other forms
of woman-hating. As such, they succinctly summarise much
of the serious social comment which underlies the fun
in Mr Wrong.
Let’s now turn to Wayne Wright – anti-hero
to the genre’s classic male-rescuer-hero, if ever
I saw one. Poor Wayne – he tries so hard, but he
doesn’t stand a chance against Preston’s
wonderful sense of humour and wickedly undercutting tactics.
She’s relentless on him (but in the nicest, most
affectionate way possible). As the boy-next-door type
(he went to primary school with Meg), a computer programmer
with “other ideas” (beekeeping!) he still
lives at home with his mum. He falls head over heels
for Meg (almost literally – she nearly runs him
over the first time we encounter him). But despite being
set up as Meg’s Mr (W)Right, Wayne gets it wrong
every time. Two scenes will suffice as examples.
Meg is sitting on the floor in Mr
Whitehorn’s shop. She’s surrounded by piles
of crockery and crumpled newspaper. Having found the
beginning of an article in an old paper on the disappearance
of Mary Carmichael (whom she recognised) she’s
been frantically searching in vain for the rest of the
article. There’s a high-angle shot of Meg and suddenly
a large booted foot comes onto the screen as someone
stands towering over her. The viewer’s pulse quickens
at the implied threat. But no, it’s only Wayne.
With unwitting irony he tells Meg she looks like she’s
just seen a ghost (she has – Mary Carmichael).
Pointing to the newspaper, Meg asks: “Have you
seen this?” Mistakenly thinking she’s referring
to the rose he’s sent her, Wayne beams and replies: “It’s
a rose.” Meg, oblivious to this, continues obsessively
on about Mary Carmichael.
“… there’s
a particular
satisfaction here for the woman
viewer, who after a lifetime of
seeing women reduced to sheer
terror and victimhood in films
finally gets to see a man
discovering what it’s like to be
on the receiving end” |
Wayne and she have both missed each
other’s points, but the audience has had an amusing
moment and a laugh at itself (expecting Mr Wrong and
getting Wayne) thrown into the bargain.
Anti-hero Wayne
does it again in a later scene. There’s
much tension as Meg races down the stairs in her house,
hotly pursued by the drunken Bruce. She opens the front
door to escape but confronted by something alarmingly
like a helmeted spaceman, she screams and quickly slams
it shut. Guess who? Yes, Wayne of course, who with impeccable
timing has turned up as rescuer, but ends up scaring
the hell out of Meg even further! When the confusion
gets sorted out and Meg enlists his help to evict Bruce,
he gets a second chance to play hero but it’s hard
to take him seriously, with his self-conscious posturing
(“Look, you can walk out or I can help you out,
Okay?”) and his limp joke as Bruce trips over the
dustbin. To make it worse, he then manages abackhanded
compliment to Meg as he leaves (“You’re not
ugly at all. You’re quite nice really.”).
Anti-hero Wayne does it again in a
later scene. There’s much tension as Meg races
down the stairs in her house, hotly pursued by the drunken
Bruce. She opens the front door to escape but confronted
by something alarmingly like a helmeted spaceman, she
screams and quickly slams it shut. Guess who? Yes, Wayne
of course, who with impeccable timing has turned up as
rescuer, but ends up scaring the hell out of Meg even
further! When the confusion gets sorted out and Meg enlists
his help to evict Bruce, he gets a second chance to play
hero but it’s hard to take him seriously, with
his self-conscious posturing (“Look, you can walk
out or I can help you out, Okay?”) and his limp
joke as Bruce trips over the dustbin. To make it worse,
he then manages abackhanded compliment to Meg as he leaves
(“You’re not ugly at all. You’re quite
nice really.”).
But Wayne (and Preston) cap it all
off magnificently. Meg, after an unbelievably eventful
night, finds herself
locked out of her flat. She does, however, have her
car keys. Taking a deep breath, she finally gives in. “Wayne
Wright, here I come.” Mr Wright looks like he’s
finally going to get the chance to come into his own.
We should know better, of course – Preston’s
so skilfully played the genre and played it off against
itself up till now. Meg becomes aware she’s being
followed by another car and the staple of the thriller,
the car chase, eventuates. Taking an enormous risk
to lose her pursuer, Meg runs the gauntlet of a train
at
a level crossing. Signs of relief all round as she
ends up on one side of the passing train and her pursuer
screams
to a halt on the other side. Meg bursts into hysterical
laughter. The audience shrieks with delight as a dazed
Wayne steps out of the pursuing car in total disbelief.
Then, in a coup de grace, using the oldest thriller
cliché in
the book (but every audience I’ve seen the film
with has fallen for it), who should appear in the back
seat of Meg’s car but Mr Wrong. It’s a
great moment for an audience, combining fright, shock
and laughter
as we realise we’ve been very neatly duped by
the director. And loved every minute of it. As Harvey
Clark
wrote in a review of the film: “Audiences not
only love to be frightened, but they love to laugh
at their
own fright. They appreciate being hoodwinked by a clever
director.”1
I mentioned at the beginning of this
article a few issues about Mr Wrong I wished to raise.
These are
in fact views
fellow film viewers have expressed to me rather than
my own qualms about the film. Without wishing to overemphasise
them and detract from what I believe is an excellent
and entertaining film, I think they’re at least
worth a mention.
The first of these expressed views
goes like this: If the film sets out not only to be
a good thriller,
but
also to comment upon the passive victim role traditionally
assigned to women in this genre, isn’t it something
of an anticlimax that Meg is “rescued” by
the aid of the supernatural in the shape of Mary Carmichael?
Admittedly, it’s Meg’s own quick thinking
with the cigarette lighter that allows her to make
a getaway, but it’s Mary who finally finishes
off Mr Wrong. (It’s probably worth mentioning
at this juncture that the film’s ending is a
lot more positive than that of the Elizabeth Jane Howard
short story on
which it is based.)
The second point of contention that
has arisen is that of the revenge ethic. Mr Wrong has
the tables neatly
turned on him by Mary at the close of the film. From
terrorising Meg one moment and telling her to “enjoy
the ecstasy of abject terror” he suddenly finds
he’s in a position of pretty abject terror himself,
as the driverless car, with all doors jammed tight,
careers him headlong down the road to his fiery end.
I have to
admit there’s a particular satisfaction here
for the woman viewer who, after a lifetime of seeing
women
reduced to sheer terror and victimhood in films, finally
gets to see a man discovering what it’s like
to be on the receiving end. And there’s a delicious
sense of female complicity against the Mr Wrongs of
this world and the society that brings them about,
expressed
in the silent exchange of looks between Mary and Meg
in the film’s final shots. (There’s a similar
shared look between Meg and Clive’s typist earlier
in the film.)
Several discussions I’ve had
with men on Mr Wrong have focused on their uneasiness
over
the film’s
apparent justification of revenge. A few mentioned
the Dutch film A Question of Silence, a bitterly ironic
feminist
document, as evoking, albeit far less markedly, the
same kinds of reaction.
I’ve deliberately avoided
including any discussion of these points in my analysis
of the film, because that
I consider them to be of relatively minor importance
to the film’s overall integrity. I have included
mention of them here, however, because they obviously
do, for some viewers, suggest some warring between
the various forces of signification and intention in
the
film. A film, after all, like any text, is open to
multiple readings and interpretations. Consequently,
I would welcome
an analysis of the film that does see these issues
as opening worthwhile new areas for exploration.
And
if I’m not misinterpreting her, Gaylene Preston
makes implicit in her films encouragement to her audience
to actively participate in debate over the issues her
films raise:
“I am an unashamed propagandist. You will always find
within my movies a fairly definite message. I like
movies to be inspirational – but if they get preachy it’s
a bad idea.”
“I’ll go out of my way to be entertaining, to get
an audience to sit down and hook them so they might
think about things the next day. It’s the next day you
want people to think about things. You want them to
talk it over with their next-door neighbour.2”
Footnotes
1 Harvey Clark, “Right on with Mr Wrong,” Auckland
Star, July 27, 1985.
2 Gaylene Preston, New Zealand Filmmakers at the Auckland
City Art Gallery, 5: Gaylene Preston (leaflet).
*Note, for example, the disturbing sexual undertones
in The Man’s speech which opens this article.
†Later, when Bruce rings up to apologise, Preston
injects some delicious irony. As Meg is reassuring Bruce
that
she’s forgiven him (having maddeningly claimed
she overreacted!), the camera pulls back and very, very
slowly pans left to reveal Mr Wrong about to pounce on
Meg. The audience squirms as Meg tells Bruce “Yeah,
well, I’m not used to people in the house when
I’m not expecting them, am I?” It’s
the one time the viewer would willingly have Bruce come
around (after all his previous unwelcome visits) and
Meg is successfully convincing him it’s not necessary
to do so!
§In fact Clive is finally proved right as the “ladies”,
Meg and Mary Carmichael, turn the tables on Mr Wrong
at the film’s climax.
¶“We have nothing to fear except fear itself,” as
she says to herself, bracing herself for the drive
in her haunted car to Wayne’s house.
µInterestingly, there’s an almost identical shot
in an almost identical situation in Melanie Read’s
thriller Trail Run. Rosemary, alone at night in an
isolated house, hears noises. She looks up nervously
and sees
only her own face reflected in the uncurtained window.
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