Episode 10: “Coraline” (Part 2)

Episode

25 Mar

Scary Gender Expressions and Scarier Mothers

Welcome back to part two of Paranormal Pajama Party’s discussion on the children’s horror movie Coraline. Catch up on last week’s episode here.

Tonight, we’re drawing on the works of Judith Butler, Barbara Creed, and Sigmund Freud to explore Coraline’s themes of gender, power, and the uncanny.

If you thought we were done with Freud last week, I’ve got terrible news for you. This week, our pajama party jumps straight into the Oedipal complex. Classic.

Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.
When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims. This episode contains the usual amount of cursing and discussion of gender. Yeah, we’re getting into Judith Butler. This is as good a time as any to say that here at Paranormal Pajama Party, we know that transwomen are women and that feminism isn’t feminism unless it’s intersectional, so haters to the left.
In tonight’s episode, we’re going to talk a bit about the choice to introduce a male character into a female-driven story. Does it make heroines more palatable to a broader audience? As an experiment, I’ve decided to include a male character myself and invite my husband, Bill, to say a few words:
Bill: Hi. If you’re enjoying Paranormal Pajama Party, please give this show a five-star rating and review on your favourite podcast app. It helps other listeners, including man listeners, find the show, which is fine for men to listen to.
Steph: Thanks, honey.
Did it work? Do you like me better now?
Hmm.
“La Belle Dame sans Merci,” by John Keats.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
    Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
    And no birds sing.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
    So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
    And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
    With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
    Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
    Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
    And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
    And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
    And made sweet moan
I set her on my pacing steed,
    And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
    A faery’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
    And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
    ‘I love thee true’.
She took me to her Elfin grot,
    And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
    With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
    And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
    On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
    Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
       Thee hath in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
    With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
    On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here,
    Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
    And no birds sing.
[MUSIC]
Steph: Hi, I’m Steph. And this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
Welcome back to the party and part two of our discussion about the children’s horror movie Coraline. If you missed part one, I recommend giving that one a listen first.
Just to recap, Coraline is a stop-motion film adaptation of an award-winning novella by Neil Gaiman. It’s the story of a curious and brave little girl named, well, Coraline, who discovers a parallel world in her apartment where everything is perfect. Or is it?
The other world is entirely the creation of Coraline’s Other Mother, also known as the Beldam, who’s just like her real mother, only better. Except that she’s a terrifying spider monster who wants to remove Coraline’s eyes, replace them with buttons, and love her forever. Oh, wait, no. She wants to eat up her life. For the Other Mother, those things are the same.
By the way, have you noticed things getting a little weird around here? My sleeping bag is starting to look more and more like a cocoon, and that slumber party guest over there is just made of rats. No judgment, girl – just an observation! Something weird is going on, that’s for sure.
Oh well! Onto tonight’s hot-button issues. …Sorry.
When we left off, we were talking about Sigmund Freud, cultural critic Barbara Creed, and the monstrous-feminine – the idea that patriarchal societies are terrified of women’s bodies, sexuality and power.
Freud believed all children must take an Oedipal journey to establish themselves as individuals and separate themselves from what he called “the archaic mother”.
Creed points out that in horror films, the archaic mother is the often unseen female creator who wants to shove her babies back into the suffocating darkness of the womb. And since we can’t go back there, the closest analogue is death.
The Coraline novella and movie lean heavily into the whole Oedipus thing. Because Coraline is a girl, she has to kill the mother figure and identify with a male father figure because heterosexual norms, I guess. I don’t know, I still hate Freud.
In the real world, Coraline’s father, just like her mother, doesn’t conform perfectly to traditional gender roles in the way Coraline may subconsciously prefer. He’s the one who’s barefoot – or at least monkey-slippered, in this case – in the kitchen. And he’s the one who has slightly more time for her bids for attention and who sings her silly songs in the Other World.
The Other Father stays out of the kitchen but still has heaps of time for Coraline. He’s also a much better musician, singing her a song with lyrics chock full of red flags with lines like, “She’s as cute as a button in the eyes of everyone” and, “Our eyes will be on Coraline.”
It should be noted that his skill isn’t his skill. The Dr Seuss-like piano that he’s playing controls his hands for him, and is – like the Other Father himself – an extension of the Other Mother. We see this best when one of the gloved hands grabs his mouth to button him up (pun intended) when he says something that betrays the Other Mother’s evil nature.
At the end of the movie, on her way to drop the key to the door to the Other World into the bottomless well behind her apartment building, Coraline starts to sing the goofy little song her real father sings early in the film. A lot of the sources I read that analysed the story from a Freudian perspective picked up on this as the moment she identifies with the masculine just before eradicating the Other Mother forever or whatever.
But then there’s the cat.
Immediately after talking at length in episode eight – maybe? I think it was eight – about why cats are always spooky and coded female in pop culture, I have to acknowledge that the cat in Coraline is, in fact, male, but I think there’s a specific reason for this choice.
In the book, Neil Gaiman is pretty cagey about this. The cat is genderless. The pronoun used is just “it” for most of the story. But there is one line that stands out in the novella:
“Standing on the wall next to her was a large black cat, identical to the large black cat she’d seen in the grounds at home.
Bill: ‘Good afternoon’ –
Steph: “– said the cat. Its voice sounded like the voice at the back of Coraline’s head. The voice she thought words in. But a man’s voice, not a girl’s.”
Surprise Bill cameo! See? There’s stuff for boys in this show.
Anyway, the cat – which is the same cat after all, because as we’ve discussed, cats have magical powers and can travel between realms – speaks in a man’s voice and guides Coraline through the Other World, sometimes helping her out in a pinch.
In a significant departure from the usual depiction of cats, the witch in this story – the Other Mother – does not like the cat at all. They’re enemies, maybe because he’s the only truly male creature in her created universe – her polar opposite.
The cat not only guides Coraline but helps her obtain the last item in her quest after she thinks she’s failed. And he’s the one to figure out where the Other Mother has trapped Coraline’s parents, undermining her achievements as a heroine in a pretty major way.
The point is that Sigmund Freud would find all of this very sensible and fitting because A) he held and generated some pretty sexist beliefs and B) it aligns with his Oedipal complex theory quite nicely. As the story progresses, she identifies with and becomes loyal to the male cat, signifying that she is going to make it in our big old patriarchal world after all.
The cat’s not the only one disempowering Coraline as a female lead, though.
In the movie version of the story, director Henry Selick makes a strange choice. He introduces a male character named Wyborne, Wybie for short, to act as Coraline’s foil. In theory, anyway.
When Wybie, like everyone else around her, can’t get Coraline’s name right, her comeback is to call him ‘Why-were-you-born”. And that’s a great question because in a movie about an adventurous little girl who prides herself on her curiosity and exploratory skills, and who is trying to find her individuality and independence, Wybie is a problem.
I promise we’ll get back to the Other Mother soon. I just think it’s important to look at the entire context of the story and ask questions about the horror stories we encounter.
In a review of the Coraline movie for the web magazine Reactor, writer Lee Mandelo makes a fabulous point: “Texts are important to shaping culture, to shaping how people see themselves, the roles they’re allowed to step into, and the way we understand the world. Having coming-of-age stories for girls that are about danger and bravery, trouble and problem-solving matters.”
Henry Selick has said that he added Wybie to the screenplay so that Coraline would have Other Wybie, giving her someone to talk to while she explores the Other World. This seems reasonable enough until you realise, as another source points out, that Selick also directed the Tim Burton-produced films The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. In both of those movies, the male protagonists talk to themselves and even sing to themselves. There’s no reason Coraline couldn’t have done the same or just talked to the cat, who was already there.
So some people, including Mandelo and now me, speculate that Wybie was added because Selick, or maybe whoever greenlit the screenplay, wasn’t sure that a female protagonist could carry the whole movie on her own. Otherwise, in a movie about two powerful females, Coraline and the Other Mother, wouldn’t the natural thing be to give her a female friend to talk to?
It would be one thing to add a male friend just to get some diversity into the cast, which I guess is the charitable way to look at it, or even in a cynical cash-grab targeting parents of boys, too. But Wybie is a problem because he robs Coraline of some of the most important discoveries and moments of bravery in her story.
Wybie shows Coraline the well she’s searching for at the start of the film. He gives her the button-eyed rag doll that the Other Mother uses to spy on her, and he reveals the horrible secret of the Pink Palace: that the children who live there, including his great aunt, disappear. Coraline doesn’t discover anything on her own and Wybie’s leg up on the house’s history puts him in a position of power.
In the Other World, Other Wybie rescues Coraline from behind a mirror where the Other Mother has put her in a horrifying version of time out, whereas, in the book, Coraline stubbornly waits the monster mother out, refusing to cry even though she wants to. Not only does he save her from the mirror, but he sneaks her out of the Other World and literally pushes her back into the real world against her will. Then he sacrifices himself heroically, the way valiant male heroes always get to do. Coraline is reduced to a damsel in distress.
If that weren’t enough, upon her triumphant return to the real world, Wybie is also the one who realises that Coraline is being stalked by the Other Mother’s disembodied, spidery hand and swoops in to save the day. Not only does he once again rescue Coraline at great danger to his chivalrous self, but he’s the one who crushes the hand with a rock, winning the day and defeating the Other Mother at last. Coraline does some shrieking.
It’s just a real bummer. It feels like such a missed opportunity and a cop-out to traditional gender norms in an otherwise really special movie.
And let’s talk about gender norms. Because in the Other World, there are no blurred lines around gender. In the messy real world, Coraline’s mother works and ignores her child while her father cooks and calls his wife “the boss”.
Retired actresses Ms Spink and Ms Forcible, the Jones family’s downstairs neighbours at the Pink Palace, are grotesque versions of the female body. Ms Spink, who wears pink, is all butt, while Ms Forcible is basically just a tall pair of boobs. Worse, they’ve failed to live up to their womanly duties and marry. They’re mouldering alone in the basement together, knitting angel wings for their taxidermied Scottie dogs. And they might be in love? I don’t know, maybe I just want that for them.
Upstairs, Coraline’s male neighbour, Mr Bobinski, isn’t doing much better. While he’s literally blue, that’s the only masculine thing he has going for him. His gut hangs out of his stained singlet and his moustache is stringy.
They’re imperfect to Coraline, who seems to have strong ideas about gender roles and what is right. She would prefer a traditional arrangement with a doting domestic mother and a father who works hard outdoors. She’d like the actresses to be young and gorgeous, and the ageing acrobat to be a charming and successful ringmaster.
And what Coraline wants, the Other Mother will provide. It’s how she lures children into her Venus Flytrap. Ugh. I went too hard on Freud last week, and now everything I say sounds gross. Eugh.
So in the Other World, the Other Father is a gardener who tends to the same flowers that Coraline wanted to plant earlier, with stunning results. And mid-stage performance, Misses Forcible and Spink unzip their gross old lady bodies to reveal beautiful, svelte bodies with symmetrical – and also totally characterless – faces.
Upstairs, Mr Bobinski has accomplished the unbelievable with his mouse circus and transformed into a broad-chested, slim-waisted smooth operator with an even smoother moustache, perfectly curled at the tips.
And if those big, showy displays of traditional masculinity and femininity sound like performances to you, I think philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler would agree.
I’m going to quote from Wikipedia here because I’ve heard their work is pretty difficult to parse and if I read any more psychoanalysis this week, I really think that I might cry.
“Butler’s 1990 book, Gender Trouble, argues that gender is performative, meaning that it is maintained, created or perpetuated by iterative repetitions when speaking and interacting with each other.”
So Butler argues that gender isn’t something we’re born with, but it’s something we learn and then perform through our actions and socialised behaviours, so it’s more about what we do than who we are.
Gender is not the black-and-white traditional binary that Coralline childishly would like to believe that it is. It’s way more complicated than that, and her parents and her neighbours demonstrate that in the real world.
But as one of my sources points out, the Other Mother starts to weave her web around Coraline by first appearing as the perfect 1950s housewife. She cooks, cleans and coddles, and she does it all without ever smudging her lipstick. She’s even wearing black and white throughout her scenes, almost as if to underscore the binaries that she’s willing to play along with to trick Coraline into feeling secure.
Towards the end of the film, there’s this really intense scene in which Coraline needs to fetch an item, which is the eye of one of the ghost children the Other Mother has already sucked the life out… you gotta watch it. Anyway, she has to go into the theatre where the Other Misses Spink and Forcible perform.
Even in the real world, the actresses are shown as women whose whole lives revolve around the male gaze. Even though I think that they are a lesbian couple, their apartment is decorated with posters from their glory days of shows with titles like “King Leer” – spelled L-E-E-R – and “Julius Sees-her”, which is pretty good. In the novella, they spend a lot of time telling Coraline about the men who used to visit their dressing rooms, and all their dogs have human male names like Hamish and Jock.
When Coraline returns to the Other Theatre to find the lost eye, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible are nowhere to be seen. But there is a giant glowing toffee wrapper on the stage and inside, she can see two featureless toffee… foetuses, basically, twined around each other and, of course, around to the eye hidden in one of their rings.
Now that the scales have fallen from her eyes (because, you know, someone’s threatening to replace them with buttons), Coraline is starting to see that perfect gender conformity is a little uncanny in itself. Perfect is creepy. Imperfect is human. And now the actresses are still slender and young, but they’re also horrific.
The Other Mother is one in a long, long list of scary mommies. Mrs Bates from Psycho, Carrie White’s religious zealot mother in Carrie, the New Mother in Lucy Clifford’s fairy tale from the last episode… I could do an entire 20-minute episode that’s just me listing scary mommies in horror. What is it about maternal figures that scares us so much and makes us come back to the trope again and again?
On the one hand, maybe it’s because we’re used to them. In a lot of ways, we as the audience are helping Selick and Gaiman tell Coraline’s story. As we watch the Other Mother’s relationship with Coraline develop and her motives start to be revealed, we’re making connections in our heads, right?
She’s the Other Mother. She calls to mind a lot of society’s othered women, so wicked stepmothers, childless hags, suffocating helicopter moms, single women (yuck), Medusa, and the archaic mother that, as Barbara Creed points out, we see again and again and again in the horror genre. We already have these shortcuts built into our brains.
Barbara might say we keep coming back to the mother figure in horror media because of men’s subconscious fears. So as long as men are scared of castration, it will be creepy when the Other Mother’s hand is severed, but still scuttles along on its own, chasing down its prey. (Also, as long as spiders are scary, that’ll be kind of scary.)
As long as they fear a female creator who doesn’t need a male god, they will be unsettled by the Other Mother’s all-powerful worldbuilding and total control.
And as long as they fear death, which will be always, they’ll fear the feminine. Because death means a return to the endless void we came from before being birthed into this world. The way Barbara sees it, all horror is the horror of the feminine in that sense.
I don’t know. I think I’ve made it pretty clear throughout the last two episodes that I’m not buying everything Freud is selling, but I do think he may have been on to something when it came to the uncanny.
Everybody has a mother, or at least someone they love and trust. And at the core of our beings, our deepest fear is that the one person we thought was the safest in the whole world might turn out to have been a monster this whole time.
[MUSIC]
Steph: You know what that music means, friends. It’s once again time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. But don’t worry! Lights out doesn’t mean you have to go. You can stay here at our lovely little pyjama party forever if you’d like. Now, what colour buttons would you like for your eyes?
To learn more about Judith Butler, arguments that Coraline may not be as feminist as it seems, and gender in gothic fiction, check out my sources in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.
I’ll see you next week for more spine-tingling tales in critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

Coraline’s Oedipus complex

To establish her own identity, Coraline needs to navigate and ultimately overcome the menacing maternal figure of the Other Mother. The forbidding Other Mother embodies aspects of the “archaic mother”, a horror trope identified by feminist cultural critic Barbara Creed. This particular archaic mother seeks to maintain control over Coraline by trapping her in a perfect – and perfectly dangerous – world.

Coraline’s Oedipal journey also involves identification with a father figure, which some academics theorise is symbolised in her relationship with the Cat (who is male, despite everything I just told you about cats).

Why Wybie?

Speaking of men where you didn’t expect them, we’re also talking about the Wybie problem tonight. The movie’s introduction of a male character, Wybie, who doesn’t appear in the book, raises questions about the need for a male presence in a female-driven story. This choice robs Coraline of important discoveries and moments of bravery, and once or twice reduces her to a damsel in distress.

Was the decision to add Wybie to the screenplay a cynical cash grab? An attempt to add gender diversity to the cast? Or is it reflective of a lack of confidence in a female protagonist’s ability to carry the movie on her own? I don’t know, but I don’t like it.

Gender roles in “Coraline”

Gender and its expression is a major theme of the film version of Coraline. In the Other World, Coraline encounters a perfect 1950s housewife version of the Other Mother. Her performance of the archetypal feminine ideal, complete with cooking, decorating, and un-smearable lipstick, lures Coraline into a false sense of security. The Other World presents a stark contrast to the messy real world, where Coraline’s parents and neighbours defy traditional gender roles, or at least Coraline’s childish expectations of how gender should be performed.

The Other Mother isn’t really a tradwife, of course – she’s actually an all-powerful world-building creature of control, and that may be what makes her so frightening to a patriarchal audience.

Scary mommies of horror

She joins a long list of scary mommies in horror media. From Mrs Bates in Psycho to Carrie White’s religious zealot mother in Carrie, maternal figures regularly pop up in terrifying roles. Gender studies scholars might say that this fear stems from men’s subconscious fears of a female creator who doesn’t need a male god to be powerful, and, ultimately, our fear of death. The archaic mother wants us back in the empty, dark womb where we started, but we can’t go back there, so the only alternative is death.

And there’s nothing more unsettling than the idea that the safest person in the world, who loves you unconditionally, might turn out to be a monster all along.

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