Deadly ambivalence or the family romance in Dead Calm
1993; Salisbury University; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research
ResumoBelow the thunders of the upper deep, Far, far beneath in the ubysmal sea. His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth. . . . Tennyson And then a Plank in Reason, broke. And I dropped down, and down And hit a World, at every plunge. And Finished knowing-then Emily Dickinson Couched in the suspenseful mode of the thriller genre, director Phil Noyce's 1989 version2 of Charles Williams's 1963 novel Dead Calm3 catapults the viewer on a voyage into the uncertain regions of the mind and deep into the shadowy origins of fear and desire. As the action moves toward its climax, the breathy heartbeat rhythm of Graeme Revell's soundtrack functions subliminally to suggest that the film narrative can be read as a sudden diving to a pulsing core of the human condition. What is uncovered at this metaphorically informing site is a precarious and deadly paradox implicit within the desire to live. Such a paradox reveals, on the one hand, the impulse to love and to care, especially where that caring buoys up concern for the self, and, on the other hand, the concomitant desire to kill or to transgress into another's territory in desperate attempts to maintain one's own boundaries as intact and impermeable to the ultimate threat of physical morality. The film is structurally divided into three parts: the initial section, in which John Ingram (Sam Neill), a naval captain, arrives home to discover that his wife, Rae (Nicole Kidman), has been involved in a car accident in which their infant son has been killed; the second and major section, which involves John's and Rae's recupera holidaying on a yacht, the Saracen, which is interrupted by the arrival of Hughie (Billy Zane) who, it transpires, has murdered his crew mates, and has now abandoned his literally and metaphorically sinking ship to take over the control of the lngrams' boat, and of Rae, John having gone to investigate the situation on board Hughie's boat, the Orpheus; and the third section, which sees Hughie's final attempt to punish Rae, and his ultimate destruction at the hands of John. These three sections are interrelated thematically and symbolically as well as structurally, and reveal much of what I would argue is the disturbing subtextual or even unconscious patterning at work within the diverting genre of the thriller. As its title suggests, Dead Calm is a film which offers a deceptively simple narrative surface that in fact gives way both within the diegetic world of the film's characters and beneath the pressure of critical N interpretation, particularly when viewed through the lens of psychoanalytic paradigms. The dramatic impact of the film narrative is far more tightly sustained than that of Williams's essentially pulp fiction for three main reasons: first, the film constructs a narrative texture in which the complexities of motivation are implicitly suggested rather than being spelt out in the reductive terms of a pop psychologising; second, the film confines its dramatic action to the triangle of John, Rae and Hughie, while the novel introduces two other characters who complicate and obscure this fundamental triadic interaction and crisis; and, third, the film frames and contextualises the confrontation with Hughie with an earlier crisis experienced by the lngrams. The processes of parallelism implied by this framing device serve to construct an impression of the Ingrams not only as the arbitrary victims of a crazed outsider, but as more complicit in that drama; the scene with Hughie thus functions within the narrative to dramatically represent the return of the earlier crisis, and of their tortured personal paradigms and repressed psychic material. Embedded in the film's first section is the notion of a social and emotional world which has been essentially intact-or at least one which is perceived by its inhabitants to have been intact-and which has now been rent and shattered by the event of the car accident. …
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