A Secret Proclamation - Myweb.dal.ca

'A Secret Proclamation'
Queering the Gothic Parody of Arsenic and Old Lace
Jason Haslam
Teddy:
Mortimer:
Teddy:
Mortimer:
Teddy:
Mortimer:
Dalhousie University
But I cannot sign any proclamation without consulting my cabinet.
This must be secret!
A secret proclamation? How unusual.
Yes. It's the only way we can outsmart the other fellow.
Who's the other fellow?
That's the secret.
(Arsenic and Old Lace)
Frank Capra's film. Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), based on Joseph Kesselring's
popular Broadway play of the same title, has been largely ignored by critics and
Capra-philes alike.' The film is generally perceived of as existing outside of the
corpus of Capra's other films, such as It's a Wonderful Life, Mr Deeds Goes to Tovi/n,
and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (all of which fall under the rubric of what is
usually called 'Capra-corn'). As Thomas Schatz states, the feeling about Arsenic is
that it is
little more than a serving of canned theater, an entertaining and straightforward recreation of the stage play with virtually none of the style or substance of the earlier
Capra-directed pictures.^
Victor Scherle and William Turner Levy note that 'Capra left the play essentially
unchanged and did not embellish it with any special social significance'.' In his
extensive biography of the director, Joseph McBride goes so far as to state that the
filming of Arsenic signals the beginning of a 'fiight fi"om ideas' which would
continue for most of Capra's career.*
Capra's production does differ significantly from the play, however, and it
certainly contains some of the key tensions pointed to by recent Capra critics tensions that are created by the dramatic portrayals of threats to traditional and
normative value systems. Leonard Quart and Albert Auster clarify the ontological
implications of the tension in Capra's films. Writing of It's a Wonderful Life, they
argue that 'in the style of forties' films, the doubts expressed deal more with the
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nature of identity and self than with social or political abuses'.' Just as It's a
Wonderful Life deals with these identity issues through a conflicted portrayal of
class dynamics, and Mr Smith Goes to Washington both revels in and highlights difficulties surrounding notions of democracy and freedom in America, so too does
Arsenic reproduce notions of the 'normal' American family while at the same time
revealing an anxiety behind the social construction of heteronormativity.* Rather
than signal the beginning of the new stage of Capra's career that is focussed on his
military-produced Why We Fight series, his adaptation of Kesselring's play should
instead be recognized as the final film in his classic period. Consisting of a complex
parody of traditional Hollywood horror films and of the Cothic in general, this
comedy offers its viewer a critique of the conservative social commentary that
exists on the surface of the horror genre. As my use of the piece of dialogue for my
epigraph implies. Arsenic is engaged in a constant series of'secret proclamations'
about the relationship between sexual normativity - and related gender codes and its demonized others. I wish first to examine the construction and undermining of the heteronormative plot in both the play and the film, and then examine
how the film's changes to the original work affect that reading.
I. Familiar Plots
The film follows the antics of a newly married Mortimer Brewster (Cary Crant) as
he attempts to hide the fact that his two seemingly harmless spinster aunts - Abby
(Josephine Hull) and Martha (Jean Adair) - are, in fact, serial killers. In the process
of his attempted cover-up, he has his brother Teddy (John Alexander), so-called
because he believes himself to be Teddy Roosevelt, committed to an insane asylum.
Mortimer also thwarts the nefarious dealings of his sadistic, murderous brother
Jonathan (Raymond Massey) and his cohort Dr Einstein (Peter Lorre). Eventually,
the entire Brewster family is committed or arrested - that is, with the exception of
Mortimer, who walks off to celebrate his honeymoon with his new wife Elaine
(Priscilla Lane) in, of course, Niagara Falls. The ending of the film hinges on the
revelation that Mortimer is not really a member of the Brewster family, and is
therefore not subject to the family history of insanity.
This plot would seem to reproduce, according to both horror and comic tradition, the 'natural' social order. Indeed, Arsenic relies on what Robert K. Martin has
described as the 'politically conservative' Cothic tradition, which focusses on
anxieties held by the dominant social group, whether that dominance is worked
out in terms of class, gender, or, as in this case, sexual identity.'' Classic Hollywood
horror films have been largely regarded as falling into this tradition, and both
Kesselring's play and Capra's movie arisefi-omthis genre, a fact seen in the numerous references to Jonathan's resemblance to Boris Karloff. While it may seem odd
for Kesselring's work to refer to Hollywood jz/ms, that a play should comment on a
film tradition is especially likely when dealing with the Cothic or horror genres.
Rhona J. Berenstein details the connections between various written texts, plays,
and films from the Cothic tradition. She notes, for instance, that Mary Shelley's
Queering the Gothic Parody of Arsenic and Old Lace
129
Frankenstein 'was adapted for the stage a number of times during the 1800s and
early 1900s', before it was transferred to the silver screen.* The film version of
Arsenic, however, simply due to its medium, lends itself to a more explicit connection to Hollywood horror than does the play. Moreover, Capra's production
expands on the connections to this genre by including a series of traditionally
Gothic devices. The opening credits of the movie surround the names of cast
and crew with drawings of witches, cauldrons, and black cats. The setting of the
film - much more expansive and detailed than that of the play - similarly uses
stereotypical Cothic imagery: like the play, the majority of the action occurs in the
ancestral home of the Brewsters, but in the film the house is situated next to a
graveyard (in which some of the film is shot), and the story takes place at
Halloween (as opposed to the September setting ofthe play).
The film highlights, then, the storyline's comedic participation in what Harry
M. Benshoff refers to as the 'clutching hand' thriller, 'a subgenre of horror which
was popular on the stage and screen during the 1920s and 1930s' in which 'a group
of "normal" people find themselves trapped in a mysterious mansion wherein
madmen and monsters abound'.'As Benshoff argues, the plot of these productions
- an eventually thwarted attack on the 'normals' - often involves various coded or
explicit depictions of homosexuality or other non-normative sexual identities. The
'madmen and monsters' can be read as metaphors for the perceived threat of
sexual nonconformity which the dominant culture was constantly attempting to
oppress. Noel Carroll argues that this oppression is envisioned in the traditional
horror film through the portrayal of the monster as unequivocally negative, 'as
threatening and impure'.'" In order to fulfil its conservative ends, horror cinema
must use the monster to produce feehngs of both 'threat and disgust' in the
audience." Judith Halberstam suggests that such oppressive metaphors are part of
the Cothic genre, and as such continue to exist within contemporary horror films,
in which 'the monster, for various reasons, tends to show clearly the markings
of deviant sexualities and gendering'.'^ In Arsenic, the danger embodied in
Mortimer's murderous family is depicted as a direct threat to his own normative
impulses: he feels that his marriage to Elaine is ill-advised given the 'mental illness'
which, as he says, does not just run in his family, but 'practically gallops'. Furthermore, his and Elaine's honeymoon and the consummation oftheir relationship are
almost permanently deferred as Mortimer spends nearly the entire film trying to
deal with what he calls his aunts' 'very bad habit' while also escaping his brother's
clutches.
As in the 'clutching hand' thrillers described by Benshoff, the primary action of
both the play and the film reproduce the Cothic plot of 'the home [that] has lost
its prelapserian purity and is in need of rectification'.'^ The house which the spinster Brewster aunts occupy is portrayed at the beginning of the film as a nostalgic
image of the lost ideal of America. The opening scene of the film shows a riot
during a Yankees-Dodgers baseball game at Ebbet's field, a scene which one
reviewer saw as a staid and 'tiresome note . . . which has no apparent reason for
being in the picture at all'.''' Despite the reviewer's condemnation of this and others
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of Capra's 'camera capers','^ the riot at the baseball field is significantly juxtaposed
with the two following scenes, all of which are linked through the use of somewhat
sarcastic subtitles (which end with the statement 'From here in you're on your
own'). Opposed to the depiction of the baseball riot - a comic take on the modern
dismissal of American tradition and values - the other two scenes show, respectively, Mortimer and Elaine's marriage, and the Brewster sisters' house. The former
scene is meant to be seen as a specifically feminine reconstruction of dominant,
heteronormative values, indicated through a series of knowing glances between
Elaine and another bride (an action mimicked later by the aunts, as they watch
Mortimer and Elaine fiirt in the graveyard). The latter section, meanwhile, constructs the Brewster house and the sisters themselves as the embodiment of these
values. Two police officers, while walking in front of the house, refer to the sisters
as 'two ofthe purest, sweetest, kindest old ladies that ever walked the earth'.
The house and its inhabitants quickly fall in line, however, with Ferguson's 'contested castle', and are transformed into a demonic parody of domestic bliss. At the
same time that the aunts are referred to by Elaine's father - who is also a minister
- as 'pure kindness and absolute generosity', they have one dead body hidden in
their window box, and eleven others buried in the cellar. This move away from
domestic purity is made all the more insidious by the fact that the aunts view their
murders as means towards achieving that very purity. They tell Jonathan that
the murders they commit are 'one of our charities', and they explain earlier to
Mortimer that they poison men who have no domestic lives of their own - who
exist outside the bounds of conventional heteronormative households - luring
them in by offering a room for rent. Discussing with Mortimer their first victim,
they say that 'he was such a lonely old man' because 'all his kith and kin were dead'.
After he dies, though, he looks so peaceful that 'we made up our minds then and
there that ifwe could help other lonely old men to find that same peace, we would!'
The aunts' attempt to reinstate domestic bliss in a post-depression and immediately pre-war America is, in Mortimer's eyes, the exact opposite. For him, their acts
reflect the destruction of what he perceived as the ideal space of feminine domesticity. While Elaine passively forces Mortimer into marriage - simultaneously fulfilling conventional gender and sexual roles - the aunts threaten superficial gender
perfection with their hidden, subterranean activities.
The destruction of dominant gender paradigms is also evident in Teddy's delusion that he is Theodore Roosevelt, which manifests itself in part in recurring
attacks on the staircase, or what he believes to be a battlefield. Pulling an invisible
sword out of an equally invisible scabbard at his side, every few minutes Teddy will
brace himself, yell 'Charge!' at the top of his lungs, and bound up the stairwell.
Unmarried and living with his aunts, Teddy is a completely desexualized male
presence, one that directly contrasts with both Mortimer's heteronormative and
libidinous character, and Jonathan's murderous and violent behaviour. Teddy is,
however, the only constant male presence in the house. He fulfills the male role for
his aunts' household - a fairly conventional role, since, as Michael Renov has
noted, 'The notion that women were family caretakers whose lives were incomplete
Queering the Gothic Parody of Arsenic and Old Lace
131
without their men was a generally accepted one' in 1940s American film and culture.'* Teddy's domestic male presence is even visible in his relation to the aunts'
murders, because he does all of the manual labour involved by digging the graves
- or, as he sees it, the Panama Canal - in the basement. This somewhat conventional masculinity proves extremely unstable, as symbolized in his 'invisible sword',
his lack of phallic power. This lack could be a subtle indication that at least part of
Teddy's insanity has to do with his sexuality because, as John Champagne writes,
cinema engages in the cultural project which characterizes 'women and queers as
"lack"', thus guaranteeing 'the stability of the heterosexual male subject over and
against both the "castrated" female body, and the queer body which has failed to
achieve both its proper gender identification and sexual object choice'.'^ In order
to lead his 'normal' life, Mortimer must first halt, or at least hide, the instability of
Teddy's identity. Believing at first that Teddy is the murderer, Mortimer keeps
ignoring Elaine's pleas to leave for their honeymoon in order to arrange Teddy's
commitment in the Happy Dale Sanitarium.
The most obvious threat to Mortimer's normalcy are his brother Jonathan and
his partner Dr Einstein, who are perhaps the most clearly coded queer villains of
the film and the play. At one point in the stage production, Dr Einstein says to
Jonathan, referring to murdering Mortimer, 'But Chonny, not tonight - we go to
bed, eh?','^ and Jonathan tells his aunts that he and Einstein will share a bedroom."
While in the film the first of these more or less explicit references to the pair as
lovers is replaced with a more generic 'I'm sleepy', and their sharing of one bedroom is only implied, the queer nature oftheir threat is still apparent (indeed, that
these scenes were rewritten for the film points itself to an awareness of a gay coding
in the pair's relationship). The very fact that Peter Lorre played Einstein can also
be seen as a form of queer coding since, to a 1940s audience that is used to reading
subtextually due to the rigours of the Production Code, he would be directly
related to his portrayal of the quintessential Hollywood homosexual criminal in
The Maltese Falcon, released three years prior to Arsenic.^'^ Benshoff takes Lorre's
identification as the'queer criminal' further, writing that Lorre 'seemed to embody
the swishy, neurotic, homosexual foreigner', and that the actor 'managed to make
a career out of suggesting both racial and sexual otherness, and this was noted even
at the time of his films' initial releases'.^' Additionally, Jonathan is consistently
referred to as looking like Boris Karloff, who in fact played the role of Jonathan in
the stage production. (In the film, Raymond Massey is done up in makeup that
serves the formidable function of making him look like Karloff looking like the
Frankenstein monster.) That Arsenic's central villain is a stand in for Karloff can
only serve to add to the queerness of his villainy, since, as Benshoff and others have
pointed out, the Frankensteinfilmsare rife with 'queer connotations'.^^ Benshoff
argues that the 'locus classicus of the queer "domestic" couple can be found in James
Whale's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein', two of the most recognizable of
Hollywood's classic horror films, and certainly the primary source for an audience
recognition of Karloff.^' The explicit depiction of Einstein and Jonathan as engaging in sado-masochistic torture of their murder victims cements their portrayal as
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'monster queers' because, as Benshoff points out, the 'monstrously queer sadomasochistic male couple ..., unlike their domestic counterparts, was not interested in creating life together but rather in torturing one another to death'.^''
Jonathan's obsession with torturing Mortimer is symbolic of the threat posed to
the straight value system by the very existence of queer identities.
Despite the fact that the central plot thus reveals the aunts' household and its
denizens as the normative turned monstrous, a counter movement is enacted in
Mortimer's character, safely repressing the 'abnormal' threats of his family.
Arsenic's central plot, like that of classic Hollywood horror, seems to reproduce the
repression of the sexually deviant monster - a repression which, despite critical
attempts to positively appropriate the monster, is still the 'point' of horror films.
In Capra's movie, Mortimer starts out as one who is vilified by his fatherin-law/minister, but who is transformed into the image of domestic bliss. Indeed,
Mortimer can be seen as the mythical 'cured' homosexual. After seeing Mortimer
unwillingly married at the beginning of the film - he continually hides his face
from reporters who are present, and from the crowd in general - we learn that he
has published a series of books against marriage, including Marriage: A Fraud and
a Failure. Also, before his 'quickie' marriage, he asks Elaine,
How can I marry you? Me, the symbol of bachelorhood? I've sneered at every love
scene in every play; I've written four million words against marriage.
From a direct threat to the heteronormative power structure, Mortimer becomes
the champion of the 'normals', seemingly fighting for truth, justice, and socially
sanctioned straight sex - familiar plots which, in his defence of bachelorhood, he
refers to as 'all the silly tripe I've made fun of for years.'^s Once married to the minister's daughter, he vows to burn all of his books and, at the end of the film, rushes
off to consummate his marriage. Mortimer restores order to the family and to society by arranging for the institutional confinement of his aunts and brothers, thus
aligning himself with social disciplinary practices. The monstrous affront to Mortimer's normative life style is thus safely repressed. Barbara Creed defines the conventional plot on which Arsenic relies, writing that in the classicfilms,'the function
of the monster remains the same: to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability'; this threat is then nullified, and
the normative self is restabilized through 'the conventional ending of the horror
narrative in which the monster is usually "named" and destroyed'.^* The destabilizing of Mortimer's dominant, normative identity seems to be erased, as it is in the
horror films that Arsenic parodies."
II. Familiar Plots II: Parody's Revenge
Arsenic and Old Lace is a parody of horror, however, and this play on the genre has
the effect of pointing out the troubled nature ofthe relationship between the normative and the non-normative as portrayed in the conventional horror film. As
Benshoff and Halberstam both argue, a completely straight reading of the generic
Queering the Gothic Parody of Arsenic and Old Lace
133
horror plot is itself constantly under threat by the simple necessity of portraying
the 'monstrous' non-normativity. Because of the restrictions of the Production
Code, homosexuality could only be hinted at in classic Hollywood horror, removing the definition of sexuality from its relation to sexual acts, and defining it
instead as a form of identity. Benshoff writes that.
The years from 1930 to 1936 saw thefirstflowering ofthe Hollywood horrorfilm.The
codes and conventions of the genre that were developed and exploited during these
years were to become the basis for the monster movie's structure and appeal throughout the remainder of the century.^s
Part of this conventional structure was a series of coded character traits that were
used to depict people who committed 'deviant' sexual acts. Because deviance was
therefore tied to character rather than to action, a certain non-normative identity
was formed. Of course, Hollywood's use of these codes did not arise on its own.
The mid- to late-Victorian period saw a similar transference from act to identity,
most famously seen during Oscar Wilde's trials.^' As Halberstam argues, this
identificatory practice was also at play in early Cothic literature, which 'produced
a catalogue of perverse sexuality'.3" Cothic literature and the horror films that arise
from it help to define and create the very 'abnormal' sexualities which, on the surface, they appear to attack, thus queering their own familiar plots. The parody of
classic horror found in Arsenic serves in part to highlight this dual movement, in
effect redoubling the queer practices of the Cothic genre.
Running parallel to Arsenic's central storyline is a series of parodic scenes which
calls into question any form of uncontested and stable sexual identity. The parodic
undermining of the comic plot takes place in both the play and the film, but in
slightly different fashions due to Capra's changes to the original storyline. Both are
rife with metafictional moments that subvert the cultural authority oftheir respective mediums and the moral statements that are made on the basis of that authority. Near the beginning of the play, the aunts defend Mortimer against the
minister's attack on his profession. Aunt Abby states that 'Mortimer hates the theatre. .. But, as he says, the theatre can't last much longer anyway and in the meantime it's a living'.^' The theatre, presumably including the present play, is
consistently discredited as tripe which should be ignored for the most part, and
actively disparaged whenever possible. In the stage production, Mortimer has to
run out to review a play, and as he leaves he says, 'I can save time if I write the
review on the way to the theatre'.^^ The relation between these general comments
and the specifics of Arsewic itself is made most explicit in the scene in which Mortimer fiilly realizes his brother's monstrosity, since Jonathan is about to perform a
particularly sadistic torture-and-murder ritual upon poor Mortimer. Dr Einstein
attempts to warn Mortimer away:
Einstein:
Mortimer:
Einstein:
At least people in plays act like they got sense.
Oh, you think so? Did you ever see anybody in a play act like they got
intelligence?
[talking simultaneously] Oh, how can somebody be so stup . . .
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Mortimer:
Did you? You ought to have my job for a few nights. Listen to me,
brother, when you get out of prison, you have yourself wheeled over to
the Garrick Theater. There's a play there that's a honey. It's so bad it'll
still be running when you get out. Now in it there's a man - now listen
to this - now he knows he's in a house with murderers - so he ought to
know he's in danger - he's even been warned to get out of the house and does he go?
Einstein:
Yes?
Mortimer: No, he doesn't, he stays. [Jonathan enters from cellar with instruments
case, stands in doorway and listens to Mortimer.] This fellow doesn't
even have sense enough to be scared, or to be on his guard... So there
he is, all ready to be trussed up and gagged. And what do you think they
use to truss him up with.
Einstein:
What?
Mortimer: The curtain cord. [lonathan spies curtain cords on either side of
• window in L. wall. He crosses, stands on window seat and cuts cords
with penknife.]
Einstein:
Didn't he see him get it?
Mortimer: See him get it? No, the sUly chump sits down with his back towards the
murderer... Look, don't you see, brother Heidelberg, in a play - or even
in a movie for that matter - a fella never sees or hears anything... Well,
the big chump sits there . . . waiting to be tied up and gagged! The big
dope!"
Jonathan then places the curtain cord around Mortimer, and Dr Einstein gags the
hapless critic, saying of Mortimer's disparaged actor that, 'You were right about
that fellow. He wasn't very bright.' So, Mortimer describes the actions in the
unimaginative play he saw, and the 'dope' of a character in it, while Jonathan and
he mimic the very scene. In this part of the film and the play, not only is the intelligence of Mortimer himself called into question, but, though the metafictional
parody, so too is the worth of drama in general. The supposedly'normal' hero, who
is constructed as an image of all such figures, is shown to be little more than a dupe
and an un-self-aware object upon which the action ofthe film is unfurled. Further,
the homoerotic and sado-masochistic implications of the scene are all but explicitly portrayed when, in a long shot moving from Mortimer's feet to his face as he
sits tied to the chair awaiting Jonathan's unwanted attentions, the intricate knots
are shown to culminate in an overtly phallic bit of rope work protruding erect from
between Mortimer's legs. Indeed, the entire violent scene can be read as an image
of sexual tension because, as Ed Sikov has shown, in post-Production-Code film
comedy, 'violence and animosity . . . make sense as a kind of displaced sexuality'.^"
Furthering such a reading oi Arsenic, Einstein's attempts to warn Mortimer involve
the two continually touching and slapping each other. This leads eventually to
Mortimer patting Einstein on the ass, saying,'get going little fella', thus engaging in
a homophobic identification of Einstein as lacking in a straight male adulthood or
virility. Mortimer's self-righteous critique of others places him into a position of
physical and sexual vulnerability. Such critiques ofthe normative figure and ofthe
Queering the Gothic Parody of Arsenic and Old Lace
135
comic outcome he embodies are abundant in both the play and the film, including
one point in the film when Judge Cullman (Vaughan Claser), after signing Teddy's
commitment papers, refers to Mortimer by saying, 'I think I may be committing
the wrong Brewster'.
This critique was in some ways more explicit in the play, especially through the
construction ofthe monstrous figure of Jonathan. In both productions, Jonathan's
entire history is described as being one full of sadism and violence. As he says in
the film, he has 'led a strange life', that began with violent behaviour when he
was a child, and eventually moved towards more extreme acts of sadism. With Dr
Einstein, he has toured the world, torturing and murdering people. Most of
Jonathan's violent outbursts, both on- and off-stage/screen, are related to people
referring to his uncanny resemblance to Boris Karloff. In the film, the humour of
this outrage arises solely form the fact that Dr Einstein, after seeing a film (presumably one of the Frankenstein series), operates while drunk on Jonathan in
order to give him a new identity, but inadvertently gives him such an easily recognizable, and obviously horrific, visage. Beyond this, the Frankenstein creature's
monstrosity can be read as being directly related to a queer undermining of
heterosexual procreation, lending to the aforementioned queerness of the
Frankenstein films. In the play, however, with the role being played by Boris Karloff,
Jonathan's disgust at his own features becomes a satiric comment on, for one, typecasting in both film and theatre. Boris Karloff is upset because 'Boris Karloff'
is equated with monstrosity, with horror, and potentially with queerness. The
self-portrayal calls into question the divisions between audience, actors, and characters, breaking down the force of the traditionally conceived moral implications
of the ending, and reasserting the film's non-normative implications.
III. Capra in Old Lace
In addition to the unintentional absence of Karloff (the play's producers would not
release him), the film alters some scenes and adds others which seem at first to
diminish the subversive parody of the play. One of the central changes is in the
nature of Mortimer's revelation at the end. In the play, it is revealed that he was the
illegitimate child of the aunts' cook. After hearing this, Mortimer rushes up to
Elaine, his bride-to-be, and shouts, 'Elaine! Did you hear? Do you understand? I'm
a bastard!', after which they make a none-too-subtle exit with Mortimer saying 'I
do' to Abby's suggestion that he should want to go to bed.'^ jn the film, however,
due to the production code, the word 'bastard' could not be uttered. In order to get
around Mortimer's unsanctioned birth, a father (also a cook) is mentioned. So,
rather than having Cary Crant rush to the window shouting 'I'm a bastard!', we
instead hear him cry, 'I'm the son of a sea cook!'^* This drastically changes the
implications of the original storyhne: rather than escaping the Brewster insanity
due to his illegitimacy and connection to a socially unsanctioned sexual union,
Mortimer instead escapes into the safe and welcoming arms of heteronormative,
populist America, like a good Capra-corn hero.
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Another of the alterations in Capra's film also seems to emphasize Mortimer's
firm placement within the acceptable bounds of American domesticity and sexuality. Rather than simply getting engaged to be married, as they are in the play,
Mortimer and Elaine are introduced in the film as they are getting married. Instead
of waiting for the marriage, then, the film's audience is left waiting for the consummation, emphasizing the explicitly sexual nature of the coupling. In addition,
as I noted earlier, Mortimer is pictured as a fallen bachelor, the author of such
books as Mind over Matrimony. These texts do not appear in the play; in that production, Mortimer is writing a book on Thoreau. While this in itself can be seen as
a coded queer reference,^' the more explicitly anti-heteronormative books in the
film - when combined with his marriage at the very start of the movie - stress
Mortimer's normative reformation into 'family man'. The film appears to highlight
Mortimer's original nontraditional take on sex and marriage solely in order to
make its repression more apparent. One contemporary review made the import of
this change explicit: 'Frank Capra has done little to the original play except expand
the part of a third nephew (Cary Crant) from a compact, satirical sketch of a rambunctious, woman-hating. New York drama critic to a rambling portrait of a
mannered, incredulous young man who loves the girl next door'.'* In the following scene, which takes place shortly after Mortimer and Elaine are married,
the former is depicted as having a very active libido which, although it is
preached against by the minister, is perfectly sanctioned by all of the women in the
film:
Mortimer:
Elaine:
Mortimer:
Elaine:
Mortimer:
Elaine:
Mortimer:
Elaine:
Mortimer:
Elaine:
Mortimer:
Elaine:
Mortimer:
Here's your hat.
Just throw it - 1 don't like that look in your eye.
Why, what's the matter?
Father preached a sermon ahout it only last Sunday.
He did? What did he say? What did he say?
He was against it.
Oh, that was only Sunday. [Chases Elaine around tree.]
But Mortimer, right out here in the open with everyone looking?
Yes, right out here in the open with everyone looking. Let everyone in
Brooklyn over sixteen look!
But Mortimer, you're going to love me for my mind, too.
One thing at a time!
Oh, there's that look again!
. . .You'd better get used to that look; you're going to see it often. It goes
just before this. [Kisses Elaine.]
This scene from Capra's production tries to make unquestionable Mortimer's
straight desire and the aggressiveness it apparently entails, whereas in the play
Elaine initiates the first romantic contact.
Despite the patriarchal, heteronormative affirmations of this section ofthe film,
there exists in another scene a direct parallel that calls into question any completely
straight reading. Here, Jonathan convinces Dr Einstein that Mortimer needs to be
tortured and killed:
Queering the Gothic Parody of Arsenic and Old Lace
Jonathan:
Einstein:
Jonathan:
Einstein
Jonathan:
Einstein:
Jonathan:
Einstein:
137
. . . But tonight we'll take care of Mortimer.
But, Johnny, not tonight, I'm sleepy. We'll do it tomorrow, huh? Or the
next day.
Look at me, doctor. You can see that it's got to he done, can't you?
Yeah, I know that look!
It's a little late for us to dissolve our partnership.
Ok, ok, Johnny, ok, we'll do it. But the quick way, huh? The quick twist,
like in London.
No, doctor. I think this calls for something special. I think perhaps the
Melbourne method.
Not the Melbourne method, please! Two hours! And then, when it was
all over, what? The fellow in London was just as dead as the fellow in
Melbourne.
Capra's insertion of the earlier scene causes a repetition of the emphasis on the
recognition of 'that look'. This reinforces the sexualized monstrosity of Jonathan
and Einstein's relationship. Jonathan's negative reference to dissolving his and
Einstein's partnership echoes Mortimer's worries about his marriage to Elaine:
because they were married at the beginning of the film, they too cannot properly
dissolve their partnership, despite Mortimer's fears that he carries the Brewster
'insanity'. The implicitly horrendous Melbourne method also has erotic overtones,
as demonstrated in the phallic knot work mentioned earlier. The 'end' of this procedure is the same as quicker methods, but Jonathan is interested only in the
process, emphasizing his sadistic desire which, in the logic ofthe horror film, is tied
to homosexual desire.
The repetition of the recognition of'that look' has a second effect as well. A parallel is being drawn between Jonathan and Einstein's relationship and Mortimer
and Elaine's - a parallel that does not function to emphasize the horror of a queer
threat, but instead links the two couples. Einstein points out to Jonathan that they
have not slept in forty-eight hours, and Jonathan and various incidents in the film
keep deferring that occurrence, just as events in the film keep deferring the consummation of Mortimer's marriage to Elaine. There are also several parallels
between the aunts and Jonathan and Einstein (they have killed the same number
of men, for one). The act of men drinking the poisoned wine, constantly sought
after by the aunts, is also never portrayed in the film, and is deferred at several
points, in what is a direct parallel to the consummation of the marriage. Both acts
are meant to bring about what is constructed as an ideal, domestic peace.
Such duplications in the film function, like the parody of Hollywood horror
(and of plays and films in general), to undermine the surface plot concerning the
reproduction of a traditional and coherent domestic space. This undermining is
duplicated in the general panic in the film surrounding notions of any form of
coherent identity. All of the central characters have crises of identity: Teddy
believes himself to be Teddy Roosevelt; Jonathan's face and identity literally keep
changing; Elaine, because of her marriage, gets confused over whose last name she
should use; Mortimer, of course, learns that he is not a 'real' Brewster; the aunts,
while perfectly satisfied themselves, undermine everyone else's knowledge of them
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when they turn out to be serial killers; and even one of the corpses is referred to by
Abby as 'an imposter'. The fluctuations of identity occasionally go so far as to
negate some characters' notions of self altogether: Abby and Martha say that they
once tried to convince Teddy to be Ceorge Washington, just for a change, but that
'he stayed under his bed for days and just wouldn't be anybody'; and Jonathan says
at one point that he wants his next face to be that of an 'absolute non-entity'.
Moreover, Mortimer's and Elaine's 'normality' at the end of the film is not
portrayed as being the solution to these crises. Instead, the 'abnormality' of the
various relationships in the film is what gives them the basis upon which to consummate, and thus legitimise, their relationship. In the film (unlike in the play),
Elaine finds out the truth about the aunts when she goes into the cellar and finds
the bodies. In order to silence her outbursts in front ofthe police, Mortimer kisses
her and carries her away. She then forgets all about the murders, sighing contentedly, 'oh, Mortimer!' The comic ending, the cementing of the normative sociosexual relationship, has as its basis a performance. The performance is in turn
founded on the discovery of the non-normative identities that are the foundation
of the Brewster household, which is, as McBride shows, constantly used as a
metaphor for America as a whole.^' The peaceful and nostalgic air surrounding the
house, what Rev. Harper refers to in the play as 'the gentle virtues that went out
with candlelight and good manners and taxes', is exposed as a facade that covers up
the supposedly non-virtuous 'cellar' of society. This is further supported by the fact
that it is not only Mortimer and Elaine who end up 'happily ever after': Dr Einstein
also manages to walk away with a smile on his face, despite looking on as he is
described in detail by the police chief.
In the end, Mortimer and Elaine's marriage, and the restoration of the 'normal'
Brewster household and the virtues that are seemingly espoused through it, is just
as 'insane' as the actions of the inmates of the Happy Dale Sanitarium, where most
of the family is eventually confined. The straightness of Mortimer and Elaine's
partnership is queered in a fashion similar to Jonathan and Einstein's. This is
emphasized by Mortimer at the very end of the film, when he takes up Teddy's
invisible sword, his illusory phallus, and yells 'Charge!' as he carries Elaine off into
marital bliss. The straight sex implied at the end can only be referred to through
the coded homosexual identification of phallic lack. Just in case this reference is
missed, the only extended dialogue between characters before the 'Charge!' is an
explicitly erotic conversation between Mortimer and the male cab driver who has
been waiting throughout the film to carry the newlyweds to the train station. Kissing Elaine in fTont of the house, Mortimer distractedly talks to the cabbie:
Cabbie:
Mortimer:
Cabbie:
[Mimicking Elaine.] Oh, Mortimer.
[To Cabbie, distractedly.] Oh, we're going to Niagara Falls. Call me a
cab, dear.
[Equally distracted.] Yes, love . . .
This ending, in fact, is another of the changes to the original script. Kesselring's
play ends with the aunts giving Mr Witherspoon (Edward Everett Horton) - the
Queering the Gothic Parody of Arsenic and Old Lace
139
psychiatrist in charge of Happy Dale - some of their poisoned elderberry wine,
continuing their murderous parody of domestic bliss, and undermining the comic
ending surrounding Mortimer and Elaine. This ending, however, did not do well
with test audiences, so Capra shot the new scene described above.''" Once again we
see a change to the original that would seem to straighten out the more daring
stage production, only to have a queer twist added, rendering the completely
straight reading implausible, if not impossible.
But what of the audience of this queer parody? What position are 'we the viewer'
supposed to occupy in relation to this destabilizing of identity? One could argue
tbat the film's queer movements are merely there to be laughed at, and thus
repressed, by an audience whose very laughter places it in a straight position. But,
the narrative logic of the film belies such a reading. Neither the audience nor the
critic is left in a stable position from which to judge the antics of the film. At
several points in the movie, the audience is placed in a role that identifies it with
one or more of the film's queer figures. For example, the humour of the metafictional scene which ends with Mortimer being tied up arises in part fi-om the fact
that the audience, like Dr Einstein, recognize Mortimer's stupidity and the larger
Stupidity of all those characters in horror films who do not run away while they
have the chance. Dr Einstein's fi^ustration is our frustration. The audience becomes
the queer character. Nowhere is this more evident than in the filming ofthe scene
in which Einstein tells Jonathan that he 'know[s] that look.' Picking up on the
German Expressionist technique used so often in classic horror, Jonathan is portrayed in this scene only as a shadow.^' Extrapolating the shadow's origin fi-om its
position on the screen, the audience is faced with itself. Johnny's shadow can only
originate - he can only be 'standing' - within the theatre, existing as a sort of collective embodiment of the audience as a whole. This identification with the queer
monster does not simply allow the audience a momentary sadistic pleasure or a
feeling of horrific discomfort. Rather, because this 15 a comedy, and a self-reflexive
one at that, the film creates a destabilizing humour, one in which we can recognize
the pleasure of differing identifications, and of moving between tbem. Arsenic
and Old Lace invites us all to dress up like Cary Crant and 'Charge!' into the queer
horizon.
Notes
I would like to thank Dennis Denisoff, Michael Eberle-Sinatra, and Julia M. Wright for their
comments on different versions of this essay.
1 Arsenic and Old Lace, dir. Erank Capra (Warner Bros, 1944). Although the film was shot
in 1941, its release was postponed until 1944 under arrangement with the play's producers, who would not aUow the film to reach theatres until after their run on Broadway had ended. The film was shown to some overseas military personnel in 1943; see
Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, revised edition (New York:
St Martin's Press, 2000), p. 444. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are transcribed
from the film.
2 Thomas Schatz, 'Anatomy of a House Director: Capra, Cohn, and Columbia in the
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1930s', in Frank Capra: Authorship and the Studio System, ed. Robert Sklar and Vito
Zagarrio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), p. 33.
Victor Scherle and William Turner Levy, The Films of Frank Capra (Seacaucus: Citadel
Press, 1977), p. 191.
McBride, Frank Capra, p. 469.
Leonard Quart and Albert Auster, American Film and Society Since 1945, second
edition (New York: Praeger, 1991), p. 24.
For discussions of these and others of Capra's films, see, for example, Raymond
Carney, American Vision: The Films ofFrank Capra (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986); Randall Fallows, 'George Bailey in the Vital Center: Postwar Liberal Politics and It's a Wonderful Life', Journal of Popular Film and Television, 25/2 (1997), pp.
50-6; Sam B. Girgus, Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of
Ford, Capra, and Kazan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 56-107;
and Vito Zagarrio, 'It is (Not) a Wonderful Life: For a Counter-reading of Frank Capra',
in Sklar and Zagarrio, Frank Capra, pp. 64-94.
Robert K. Martin, 'Haunted by lim Crow: Gothic Fictions by Hawthorne and
Faulkner', in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, ed. Robert K.
Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), p. 130.
Rhona I. Berenstein, Attack ofthe Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship
in Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 16. I'd like
to thank Michael Eberle-Sinatra for pointing out to me that, in addition to these general connections between stage and screen, lames Whale's famous film was itself based
on Peggy Webling's successful 1927 play Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre.
Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 43.
Noel Carroll, ThePhilosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (NewYoik: Roudedge,
1990), p. 28.
Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, p. 28.
ludith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 4. Halberstam goes on to demonstrate how
these depictions of sexual and gender non-normativity are encoded within a social
matrix that includes demonized portrayals of race, as well.
Kate Ferguson EUis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. ix.
"'Arsenic and Old Lace," With Cary Grant, in Premiere at Strand', New York Times,
2 September 1944, p. 17.
Ibid.
Michael Renov, 'From Fetish to Subject: The Containment of Sexual Difference in
Hollywood's Wartime Cinema', Wide Angle, 5/1 (1983), 24.
John Champagne, 'Psychoanalysis and Cinema Studies: A "Queer" Perspective',
Post Script 14/1-2 (1995), 35. Oddly enough, Capra credits his movie with the popularization of shouting the phrase 'Charge!' at sporting events. In his largely fictional
autobiography The Name Above the Title (Hal Kanter once toasted Capra by saying that
he was 'a legend in his own book' [McBride, Frank Capra, p. 648]), Capra writes.
Batty Teddy Roosevelt's 'ChargeV up the stairs became a catchword wherever
Americans wore uniforms. Later on the Los Angeles Dodger [sic] baseball fans
took it up as a call to action. Others followed, until today, 'ChargeV is a familiar
batde cry for home-team rooters in several sports (Frank Capra, The Name Above
Queering the Gothic Parody of Arsenic and Old Lace
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the Title [New York: Macmillan, 1971], p. 353).
Given the homoerotics - or at least homosociality - of most professional sports, the
supposed appropriation of Teddy's battle cry could not have been more appropriate.
loseph Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), (N.P.: Dramatists' Play Service, 1969),
Act 3, Scene l,p. 73.
Ibid, p. 43.
lohn Belton offers a useful introduction to the creation and transformations of the
Production Code, and also reprints the Code itself (lohn Belton, ed.. Movies and Mass
Culture [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996], p. 135—49). On the queer
coding of loel Cairo, Lorre's character in The Maltese Falcon, see Benshoff, Monsters,
59; Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper &
Row, 1981), p. 46; and Michael William Saunders, Imps of the Perverse: Gay Monsters in
Film (Westport: Praeger, 1998), pp. 8-9.
Benshoff, Monsters, pp. 59-60.
Ibid, p. 49. Benshoff further notes that Shelley's novel is itself
something of a counter-hegemonic classic; feminists and queers alike have
plumbed its depths to underscore a scathing critique of male hubris in which the
attempt to create life without the aid of procreative sexual union results in disaster for a l l . . . this core idea - that of a mad male homosexual science giving birth
to a monster - can be found to greater or lesser degrees in almost every filmic
adaptation, (p. 18)
Also see Michael Laplace-Sinatra,'Science, Gender and Otherness in Shelley's Frankenstein and Kenneth Branagh's Film Adaptation', European Romantic Review, 9/2 (1998),
253-70.
Benshoff, Monsters, p. 49.
Ibid, p. 61.
Cary Grant's status as the quintessential leading man worked along simUar lines,
repressing Grant's own queerness and sexual instability. For a discussion of (the difficulties of defining) Grant's sexuality, see David Ehrenstein, Open Secret: Gay Hollywood
1928-1998 (New York: Morrow, 1998), pp. 28-30. Interesting to note in this regard are
the reviews of Grant's performance in Arsenic. One mentions that Grant's 'energy is
likely to wear one down', and that he 'bounds, bellows, howls, and muggs through practically two hours' ('"Arsenic and Old Lace," With Cary Grant', p. 17), while another
states that Grant does 'everything but bite the camera' (quoted in Charles Wolfe, Frank
Capra: A Guide to References and Resources [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987], p. 258). Berenstein argues that in reviews of horror movies, such condemnations of overacting are
usually aimed at the actress portraying the heroine, and tend to reinforce gender
stereotypes. That Grant's acting receives similar treatment may indicate a recognition
of a queer form of gender confusion in Arsenic.
Barbara Creed, 'Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection'
(1986), in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), p. 40 and p. 58.
Leland A. Poague provides just such a straight reading of Mortimer's transition from
avowed bachelor to straight husband: 'Mortimer's antimarriage tracts are, in the comic
context of the film, just as murderous as Jonathan's scalpels . . . The film is thus not
against intellectuals per se..., but the misuse of the intellect in the service of sterility'
{The Cinema of Frank Capra: An Approach to Film Comedy [New York: A. S. Barnes,
1975] p. 85). Poague has recently written a subsequent study in which he revises the
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conclusions of the earlier text, although he does not deal at length with Arsenic
{Another Frank Capra [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994]).
Benshoff, Monsfers, p. 31.
On the position of Wilde and his trials in relation to Victorian constructions of sexual
and other identities, see Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Dennis Denisoff, 'Posing
a Threat: Oueensberry, Wilde, and the Portrayal of Decadence', in Perennial Decay: On
the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, ed. Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and
Matthew Potolsky (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 83-100.
Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 17.
Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace, Act 1, p. 8.
Ibid., p. 33.
When appropriate, I have provided the stage directions as written in Kesselring's script.
For scenes that were altered in, or added to the film, the 'stage directions' consist of my
own descriptions ofthe on-screen actions.
Ed Sikov, 'Laughing Hysterically: Sex, Repression, and American Film Comedy', in
Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures, ed. Martin Duberman (New
York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 90.
Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace, Act 3, Scene 2, p. 91.
For a history ofthe removal ofthe word 'bastard', see McBride, Frank Capra, pp. 447-8.
For a queer interpretation of Thoreau's writings and politics, see Henry Abelove,'From
Thoreau to Queer Polities', Yale Journal of Criticism 6/2 (1993), 17-27.
'Cinema: Arsenic and Old Lace', Time, 11 September 1944, p. 96.
McBride, Frank Capra, p. 447.
Scherle and Levy, The Films of Frank Capra, p. 192.
In his study of horror films, Andrew Tudor notes that
The studied compositions, elaborate lighting techniques and heavy shadows
developed in the German silent cinema found a home in the new Hollywood
genres of the thirties. This 'German Style' proved highly effective in suggesting a
world in which dimly seen and dimly understood forces constrained, controlled
and attacked its unsuspecting victims.
Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie
(Oxford: Blackwell 1989), pp. 27-8.
Address for correspondence
Dr lason Haslam, Department of English, Dalhousie University, 6135 University Ave.,
Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 4P9, Canada. Email: [email protected]