Old Times in Werewolf of London
2011; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoNightmares of Past -Entry, Universal Pictures employee contest to name Werewolf of (1935) Other variations occur which relate to questions of time. The trait of inversion may either date back to very beginning, as far back as subject's memory reaches, or it may not have become noticeable till some particular time before or after puberty. -Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Theory of Sexuality Introduction FILMS ABOUT MEN WHO TURN INTO ravening wolves are ripe for an approach to horror genre, pioneered by Robin Wood, that sees films staging a return of repressed, eruptions (in case of werewolf films) of primal carnality that must be contained and eradicated before societal status quo can be restored and reaffirmed (Wood 7-22). Werewolf films can be construed as dramas about men regressing, but also as ones about young men moving forward. Walter Evans sees films about individuals caught up by powerful urges they can neither understand nor control, and wracked by bodily transformations that include hair growing in unexpected places, telling stories about traumas and discoveries of adolescence (54-55). This second interpretive template can be fitted to many entries in subgenre, perhaps none more snugly than I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). Evans focuses on The Wolf Man (1941), with its affable and pitiable protagonist, Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), writing that the monsters are generally sympathetic, in large part because . . . they themselves suffer change as unwilling victims (55). Another unwilling victim of his own sexual awakening, I argue in this article, is central character in Werewolf of (1935). Universal's first attempt at a werewolf film has not been construed as a coming of age story for, perhaps, a couple of reasons: its protagonist has been widely regarded as unsympathetic, and confusions and terrors of adolescence implicitly dramatized by film are those, specifically, of a gay man.1 This dawning is all more convulsive because it is a second adolescence, and so this film depicts, simultaneously, a moving forward and a going back, with latter sense calling to mind genre's relationship to repressed and its return. That film has a gay subtext seems to me, although very few have written about it, obvious. 2 Perhaps this overtness is one reason it is hard to find an extended queer reading of this film; it may seem that there is little work of interpretation to do when so much lies on surface. An online reviewer of Werewolf of (hereafter WWL) calls this subtext almost impossible to ignore (Erickson). One starts to get a sense of film's obsessive thematic preoccupations from even a thumbnail sketch of story, which opens with botanist Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) hiking in Tibet in search of a rare flower, Mariphasa lupino lumino, and finding it just before he is attacked and bitten by a werewolf. Glendon returns home to England and meets another botanist, Doctor Yogami (Warner Oland), who, Glendon learns, is one who bit him in wolf form back in Tibet. Yogami warns Glendon that both of them are now infected, and he implores Glendon to share his specimen of rare plant, flower of which contains only known antidote to werewolfism. Glendon refuses, transforms, kills, and ultimately is shot dead. Along way, he and Yogami, bound by their terrible secret, vie and tussle for possession of a flower that Harry Benshoff has called the key signifier of homoerotic male couple's lycanthropy in Werewolf of London (47). Beyond its bare narrative outlines, film supplies ample encouragement for viewers to construe two men's secret to be that they are only superficially werewolves and actually lovers. There is Glendon's relationship with his wife, Lisa (Valerie Hobson), which from outset seems troubled and distant, nothing like intense chemistry he and Yogami share from their first scene of dialogue together (Photo 1). …
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