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Warren’s Nietzschean anthropology. Interestingly enough, the film at crucial moments builds Warren’s aesthetics of horror right into the film’s system of representation itself only, as I will argue in a moment, to displace it in the end with a second and alternative perspective. The extent to which the film draws the viewer into Warren’s sadistic point of view is best exemplified in the film’s cinematographically most exciting sequence. In this scene we see Helen climbing the stairs to the mansion’s second floor, in a shot that is later revealed as a reflection in a big mirror located in the middle of the staircase. When Helen stops in front of this mirror, looks intensely at herself, and finally imitates a person able to speak, the camera dollies back along the railing on the second floor until it brings into view the leg of a silent observer hiding behind a statue. The next shot shows us the wide eye of this secret onlooker, an eye in which we behold Helen’s own image in the mirror. Literally defaced in the course of this double process of reflection, however, Helen now appears without a mouth. Warren’s cinema of horror incorporates Helen’s lack of speech as a bodily feature. It projects the female as a mutilated body, as wounded by anatomical deficiency.
Aside from the surrealist iconography, what is remarkable about this shot sequence is the way in which seemingly innocent pleasures of looking are forged into sadistic scenarios while overtly objective points of view are uncovered as the deranged perspective of a killer. Truly provocative, this sequence allows the killer’s Darwinism to gain control over the movements of the cinematographic apparatus. What at first seems like a surprisingly arbitrary backward track of the camera, at closer inspection betrays the extent to which the killer aspires to dominate the film’s means of representation itself. Momentarily elevating the psychopathic killer to a tyrant of the imaginary who infuses realistic images with violent fantasies, the film thus seduces its viewers into rather counterintuitive spectator positions as if to threaten them with the same kind of violence that strikes out against the mute onlooker Helen herself.
“What a pity,” Professor Warren later lectures Helen while putting on his gloves in order to kill her, “my father didn’t see me become strong. . . .
He would have admired me for what I am going to do.” To live up to his father’s notion of what it means to be a man, Warren fortifies his masculine identity through the murderous silencing of women: not hunting but the obliteration of what he considers degenerate vitality constitutes the professor’s mode of proving his manliness. Warren’s male integrity, as Silverman has written in a different context, “is established through the projection onto woman of the lack he cannot tolerate in himself.”43 By associating Warren’s project of male empowerment at various points with special ef-
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fects, the film—similar to Phantom Lady—unmasks the professor’s naturalism as ideology and self-deception. Warren’s quest for wholeness, toughness, and immediacy realizes itself solely through the mediation of modern machines of projection, just like his crusade for intensity and presence is always mediated through the image of the past, a belated Oedipal contest with his deceased father.
Furthermore, in rendering the old matriarch, Mrs. Warren, not only as her son’s antipode but also as the ultimately victorious competitor over the terms of representation, The Spiral Staircase counteracts Warren’s aesthetics of horror. Similar to Professor Warren, Mrs. Warren seems to have privileged access to the mechanisms that inform the very making of the film The Spiral Staircase. Although bound to her bed, she sees in her dreams what we have seen earlier as part of the dramatic action and is therefore able to warn Helen about the murderer’s imminent attack. Like the cinema in the opening sequence, Mrs. Warren’s psychic anticipations interpret the film’s actual story line. In a curious sequence reminiscent of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story The Sand-Man, Mrs. Warren hides a gun from Helen under a piece of cloth on her bedside table. A second shot, however, presents the image of a long tube, introduced by the old lady as her “spectacle case,” even though in the final sequence this object will transmogrify back into a revolver and permit the rescue of Helen from the murderous hands of Professor Warren. This curious proximity between instruments of intensified perception and instruments of shooting, as well as Mrs. Warren’s magician-like authority over their representation and mutual substitution, is highly instructive. It demonstrates the extent to which The Spiral Staircase is not only about the perverse fantasy of a psychopathic killer and his sadistic co-optation of the cinematic apparatus but also, and more important, about the need to make use of cinema to redeem the individual from Warren’s vitalist aesthetics of horror. Instead of killing what a fascist notion of natural perfection deems worthy of extermination, Mrs. Warren’s spectacle-gun looks and shoots to protect the integrity of human life against all dictates of “nature” and family lineage.
It is worth recalling at this point the rather mysterious opening shot of The Spiral Staircase, which provides a seemingly nondiegetic background for the credit scroll. The shot pictures the spiral staircase from a vertical overhead perspective. A woman, struck by panic, is moving along the wall in search of a way to escape something horrific (fig. 23). This title sequence presents a disturbing enigma that of course foreshadows the final showdown involving Helen, Professor Warren, and Mrs. Warren on the old mansion’s staircase, the showdown that results in Helen’s rescue from the
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killer, Professor Warren’s death, and Mrs. Warren’s successive collapse from exhaustion. Significantly, it is only in the context of this later sequence that we learn more about the actual origin of the enigmatic opening shot as it becomes clear that the woman’s horror was rendered through the eyes of Mrs. Warren, who in order to shoot her stepson in the final sequence takes position precisely at the top of the staircase. Interestingly enough, however, the actual shot of the opening does not appear as such in the later sequence.
What we see in the credit sequence might therefore be best understood not simply as a window on coming events but rather as one of Mrs. Warren’s visionary dreams. In retrospectively authorizing the opening perspective as Mrs. Warren’s, the film establishes the old matriarch as the actual anchor of the entire narrative. Read from the perspective of the ending, the credit shot of the beginning introduces the Ethel Barrymore character as the legitimate authority over the diegetic process. In so doing the film endorses Mrs. Warren’s redemptive intervention for the sake of both Helen and the cinematic apparatus as its own project. It valorizes Mrs. Warren’s magic humanism over the professor’s fascist cinema of incorporation and projective horror.
According to the activist-vitalist worldview, which Professor Warren shares with Nazi ideologues, modern civilization and bourgeois society confine the stream of elemental life. The rule of liberal democracy and bourgeois culture, following this position, hampers access to the existentially relevant layers of being. For any authentic being can manifest itself solely in the exceptional clearing of the will to power, in the aesthetico-political intensity of unregulated moments of danger. In its often-precarious amalgamation with the nineteenth-century tradition of biological naturalism, German vitalists embraced the category of the folk, of ethnic and racial identity, in order to warrant the desired community that any Nietzschean emphasis on heroic individuality may potentially thwart. Conservative revolutionaries of the interwar period established folkhood as a quasi-natural foundation of individual strength and existential meaning. It is only through identification with the racially homogeneous body politic that the individual can attain individuality in the first place and draw from the wellspring of community. Biology, in this view, not only becomes destiny, but it suggests strategies of social hygiene that annihilate all those who threaten communal identity through difference and otherness.
A film that delivers the present from the rule of the past, Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase testifies to the fact that the merging of biology and history, instead of shaping a new community, ultimately results in self-destruction.
Professor Warren’s ideology of physical perfection defines community neg-
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Figure 23. Defeating the dark: Dorothy McGuire in Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase (1946). Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
atively: through the isolation and annihilation of “enemies.” Driven by projective anxieties, he scapegoats whoever bears any sign of difference. He silences the other in order to constitute his own voice and suppress whatever could be other in himself. Warren’s position thus becomes that of a radical solipsist, encapsulated in megalomaniac fantasies of power and reality control. True communal experiences, on the other hand, according to
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the narrative of The Spiral Staircase, reside with those who know how to inhabit modern life in ways that eschew Warren’s many phobias and projections. In particular, Helen’s rediscovery of speech during the climactic moments, first articulated in the form of a scream and then practiced on the telephone, manifests the films’ simultaneous endorsement of technological and social modernity most graphically. Whereas telephones in Curtis Bernhardt’s The Tunnel signify the male’s fear of flowing into dissipation, in The Spiral Staircase they feature the imbricatedness of modern subjectivity as a source of meaning and agency. Helen’s entry into language is not simply, as Lawrence seems to suggest, a new trauma, one that holds the female to the unity of sight and sound so as to discipline her body. Instead, in embracing the prosthetic device of the telephone, Helen’s very first words aspire to transgress the boundaries of visible space and thus speak over and against Warren’s cinema of incorporation. Awakening to language as an immediate expert in technological sound transmission, Helen embraces the migratory potential of the human voice— communicative reason—as a catalyst of redemption.
The film’s final image is that of Helen in the mansion’s telephone room as she calls Dr. Parry and whispers the number “189” into the apparatus (fig. 24). The camera then tracks out of the room, leaving the viewer with a shot of the phone’s mouthpiece and of its elongated shadow on the wall.
The shot hails speech technologies and on-the-air sounds as antidotes to the rendering of history as nature and biology. In the final analysis it is not simply the capacity to speak that breaks the spell of Warren’s vitalism but rather the use of modern machines that can liquefy traditional boundaries, unfix the essentialist identification of body and voice, and bring people closer to each other—both spatially and humanly. While Warren aspires to contain the body in the image so as to control social space and eliminate the other, prosthetic speech secures an experience of community and solidarity that transforms modern space into practiced place.
h o r r o r ’s h o r r o r
The newsmagazine Time, in its mainly positive review of The Spiral Staircase, wrote in February 1946 that “Siodmak is no lover of heavy horror, but the West Coast has him typed. He is now regarded with considerable awe by the Hollywood oracles as ‘the new master of suspense.’”44 On its first release in postwar Germany in January 1948, The Spiral Staircase received much less favorable reviews . Most German critics considered the film not an example of masterful suspense but of cheap entertainment and moral
