The television show "American Horror Story: Asylum" takes place in a 1964 mental institution with abysmal conditions (Briarcliff Mental Institution). In addition to themes of religious corruption, mistreatment of patients, sanity versus insanity, and homosexuality, the show focuses on a serial killer dubbed "Bloodyface" who wears a mask made of his most recent victim's skin when brutally murdering his next victim. The story follows main character Lana Winters,a homosexual journalist trying to uncover the horrors behind Briarcliff, who is admitted to the institution in an attempt to prevent her from releasing her discoveries to the world. Lana later befriends psychiatrist Dr.Oliver Thredson who promises to help her escape and reveal the corruption behind Briarcliff. By the end of the season, Dr.Thredson traps Lana in his apartment and reveals himself as Bloodyface. Through a long description of his torturous past, Thredson explains why he murders.
Thredson tells Lana that he was abandoned as a baby and raised in an orphanage. He never knew his mother and in the orphanage he was raised in "they followed all the rules, especially the rules against affection or any unnecessary bodily contact because touch would certainly spoil the child". As he grew up, he felt different: cold and lonely. The only sexual pleasure he experienced was during medical school when he attended a demonstration of an autopsy. Watching the body being cut open provided him with an inexplicable excitement. That, he claims, was why he took on the role of Bloodyface: because this body could not abandon him and reject him like everyone else had. Presented in his story are numerous Freudian theories, mainly that of infantile sexuality, sexual perversion, and repression.
Freud states that a major part of childhood is the expression of sexuality. From erogenous areas to the Oedipus complex, children need to discover sexuality in order to have a better chance of avoiding neurosis in their later years. Thredson lacked this expression. He never experienced a maternal figure and therefore never went through the many stages of the Oedipal complex (a necessary portion of forming the superego). This absence of touch and sexual expression lead to frustration, a frustration that was repressed for many years until his discovery at medical school. The trauma of missing infantile sexual growth resulted in a perverse desire of finding a maternal figure in his later years. All of Thredson's victims were females. He would watch his victims and make sure they had the proper qualities of a mother: kindness, persistence, unconditional love. Due to an intense fear of abandonment, stemming from physical abandonment by his biological mother and emotional abandonment from the orphanage, he convinced himself that the only way to stay with his victims was to kill them. His murders represent a belated form of the Oedipal complex that was unable to manifest when he was a child. He attempts to consume his victims (who all represent a mother-figure) by butchering them. He rips off their skin and wears it as a sign of conquest and then engages in sexual intercourse with the bodies. Lana serves as the only mother who does not attempt to "abandon" him (or attempt to escape) so he keeps her alive and displays the Oedipal consumption by breast feeding and then engaging in sex after calling her "mommy". Because of lack of infantile expression of sexuality and repression of such childhood trauma, Thredson exemplifies the definition of Freud's sexual perverts and over evaluation of sexual objects. However, I wonder if Freud would consider him a degenerate. Thredson is able to carry on two lives: one as a collected and intelligent psychiatrist, and one as the unhinged and crazed Bloodyface proving he is able to function effeciently, so would he be a sexual degenerate?
What I find interesting is the use of Freud's theories to create these television tropes. Your description and explanation of the character in this show matches directly with Freud's theories, which is intriguing because the writer of the show has purposefully created this crude character from the very words of Freud. Your exact characterization of Bloodyface and the way you employed Freud's theories is fascinating by the fact that that was the intention of the writer. I find it fascinating the implementation of Freud's theories to render a fictional figure that is maybe meant to be an echo of our culture that reinforces women to be nurturing and maternal in the first years of a baby's life, lest their child turns into a serial killer like the one featured in American Horror Story. The orphanage might be a representation of the distant father-figure, who is not allowed to nurture a child, because that is a woman's responsibility, after all. Although the story is extreme, it is in it's extremeness that drives the point home. I recognize I am analyzing the writer's intention way too much - but there is never anything created without a purpose. Freud's theories, although they made sense in their time, have been severely criticized by feminist theorists, as we have discussed a bit in class, and have been very much interpreted and re-interpreted to fit our out-dated societal rules of today.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I really don't think Freud works much at all with the category of "degenerate." On the one hand, I don't think he sees our society as biologically degenerating, in the way that some of his Darwinian contemporaries did. On a more fundamental level, I think that even if he acknowledged the existence of degenerates, that wouldn't be the part of psychiatric medicine that interested him--he's just not that interested in inherited, biological conditions.
ReplyDeleteIn this case in particular, there are so many psychic explanations (which you have already mentioned) for the character's behavior that Freud wouldn't need to resort to degeneration theories.
Of course, being set in an insane asylum in 1964, it would be surprising if there were *not* Freudian overtones!