Compusion for "Repulsion"

If you enjoyed CineVerse's exploration of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" on Wednesday, perhaps you'd like to know more about what makes the main character, Carol, tick. Here's a quick "dissection" (pun intended) of this seminal psychological horror movie:

WHAT STANDS OUT AND LEAVES A LASTING IMPRESSION ABOUT REPULSION, PERHAPS BEYOND WHAT YOU EXPECTED?

• Threadbare plot
• Minimalistic design: this is a simple black and white, low-budget picture without a lot of frills, tricks or special effects
• Polanski is a master at constructing suspense and unsettling mood via a brilliant combination of techniques:
• Sounds and music: the film employs a clever audio design in which sound is like its own character in the film: bells, drumbeats (like an executioner’s march), an orgasmic cacophony, clocks ticking, taps dripping are examples. Often, extended moments of eerie silence are suddenly punctuated by a shocking sound or music.
• Clever camera moves, like unsteady handheld shots that follow Carol as she moves about, extreme close-ups of ugly faces, the use of a distorted fisheye lens to depict Carol’s growing anxiety, and radical zooms like the zoom into the family photo
• Quiet, drawn out fades used to transition between scenes
• Distorted sets built to express Carol’s unhinged mind
• The juxtaposition of stillness and/or quiet with sudden, violent action and/or sound
• There's an overt use of phallic symbols throughout the movie: the candlestick weapon; the newspaper story about eels; the Leaning Tower of Pisa photo; the straight razor, etc.

THEMES AT PLAY IN REPULSION

• Alienation, isolation and confinement
• Irrational paranoia
• Violation and the crossing of boundaries: Polanski has a penchant for featuring characters who trespass some limit imposed on them by society
• The outsider trying to ward off exterior (or are they interior) threats
• Carol represents purity (clad in white, angelically beautiful) threatened by outside (or are they inside) forces. Her apartment symbolizes her virginity as well as her fractured psyche.
• It’s interesting that she kills a rabbit (a symbol of reproduction) and destroys all the phallic symbols we previously identified
• Carol is a foreigner living in a city that’s unknown to her
• She may also be a homosexual, which is implied
• Carol is living in a more conservative community (London) that can be hostile to her (e.g., the threatening phone call she gets)
• She fights the pressures placed upon her by organized religion to mate and start a family
• It’s interesting that sex and religion are correlated in the film through the juxtaposition of sounds of erotic moaning and church bells.
• The dangers or repercussions of sexual repression
• The blending of fantasy and reality: we’re not sure of the verity of any of the incidents we see—did they really happen, or were they all just in Carol’s head?

POLANSKI’S DIRECTION AND VISION IN REPULSION HAS BEEN CALLED “HITCHCOCKIAN.” WHAT HITCHCOCK MOVIES DOES REPULSION RIFF ON AND REMIND YOU OF?

• The opening credits sequence is reminiscent of the credit sequence in Vertigo and the closeup on the dead eye of Marion Crane in Psycho;
• Repulsion is similar in tone and subject matter and in how it builds suspense to Psycho; Also, like Psycho, the atmosphere is claustrophic and lonely and those who trespass meet with violent ends
• Carol is a kindred spirit to James Stewart’s crippled Jeff in Rear Window in that both are isolated figures residing in urban settings who each share a skewed world view
• Carol is an cold, beautiful blonde, just as many of the main characters in Hitchcock pictures.
• Polanski makes a cameo in this film and other movies of his, just as Hitchcock did

HOW IS REPULSION DIFFERENT FROM PSYCHO?

• In Psycho, we see the murders and their aftermath through the eyes of the victims and their survivors; in Repulsion, we get a subjective view of murder and madness through the eyes of the disturbed killer
• Unlike Psycho, Repulsion doesn’t attempt to explain away Carol’s psychoses through Freudian easy answers or psychobabble
• Unlike Psycho, Repulsion illustrates an existence where there seems to be no distinct delineation between hallucination and reality.

WHAT OTHER FILMS COME TO MIND AFTER SEEING REPULSION?

• The credits that slash across the eye also evoke comparisons to Buneul’s surrealist classic An Andylusian Dog, in which a woman’s eyeball is slit with a razor
• Val Lewton’s low-budget psychological horror movies of the 1940s like I Walked with a Zombie and Cat People, which employ simple tricks like eerie quiet and shadows
• Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend is similar, in that the main characters in both movies are isolated and suffer from hallucinations and feelings of the walls closing in on them and having cracks in them
• Cocteau’s 1946 classic live action French adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, in which the hallway walls are magically endowed with hands
• A film called Jeanne Dielman from 1976
• The last shot of The Shining seems to borrow from the final image in Repulsion
• Nightmare on Elm Street, which also depicts similar nightmares about entrapment
• More contemporary examples are Clean, Shaven from 1994, and Antichrist from 2009.