In Flux: The Monstrous and Angelic Bodies of Hellraiser and The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

The cinema that is most significant to me shares a fascination with finding, and testing, the human body’s limits. This love started when I was a preteen, after I watched John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London (1981) and its gruesome transformation scene midway through, wherein hands stretch into claws and bones crack into new placements. My hackles rose as well, and I became completely intrigued by metamorphosis, body horror, and films that explored bodily endurance. Cinema could provide me an alternative space for provisional and controlled experiences of bodily hyper-awareness and sensation; these films made me acutely aware of my existence as matter that can be mutated by pain and transformed by psychological, emotional, and spiritual force. What grew from there was a wider admiration for extremes, and an awareness of cinema’s ability to drop me, sometimes uncomfortably, back in my body — my flesh suitcase, if you will. 

I do not claim credit for that turn of phrase. I heard it said by Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge,¹ whose relationship with Genesis P-Orridge (founder of both Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV) is the subject of Marie Losier’s 2011 documentary, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye — the most recent addition to my ‘embodied cinema’ list,² films depicting transformation outside the scope of social mores. By embodied cinema, I mean a cinema that prioritizes affectual and haptic³ experience; that does not allow for a complacent split between mind and body while watching; and that engages critically with the way our bodies translate visual information into sensorial knowledge. Losier’s film is the most acute example of indexing the abstract by means of human flesh that I have yet to see. Made over the course of seven years, the doc is intimate and generous. It collages together archival footage, charming tableau scenes, and home movies — Lady Jaye and Genesis welcomed the camera into their home as a companion, and Losier treats this privilege with kindness. The film eventually became a eulogy of sorts, in the wake of Lady Jaye’s death from complications due to stomach cancer in 2007.

Near the beginning of The Ballad…, we watch as Genesis and Lady Jaye get off the subway and walk hand-in-hand along the platform, guiding us to their cramped and hectic Queens apartment. In voiceover, we hear Genesis say:

You fall madly in love with somebody… and there’s this moment where you just want to consume each other. You say, ‘Oh god, I just wanna eat you up… you and me, just be one fabulous moment of being in love, and not be individuals anymore. 

When Genesis fell in love with Lady Jaye, and she with them, the two did so with such assuredness that they decided to mold themselves in the shape of each other, surgically. They called this the Pandrogeny Project, and it was a fiercely romantic and queer utopian undertaking. It became a declaration of commitment, as well as a decrying of gender as a finite, individualistic, binary expression. As performance, gender and disability scholar Krista Miranda states: 

by reconfiguring their distinct corporeal aesthetics toward the idea, ‘not the ideal,’ of identicalness, the result is the achievement of a ‘conceptually more precise body’ that eradicates their previously separate, and purportedly socially determined, selves.⁴

The most extreme of these reconfigurations were their matching breast augmentations. Genesis recounts the happiness that these surgeries gave the two of them, and remembers looking down at their post-op form and saying, “Oh look, it’s our angelic bodies.”

Genesis and Lady Jaye underwent multiple plastic surgeries and other forms of body modification, wanting to create a new third entity by disrupting their two separate selves. They sought an incorporated form, gradually revealed by the carving away of their respective physical differences, in order to escape the either/or universe in which most human beings find themselves trapped.⁵ Pandrogeny’s raw materials were the bodies of Genesis and Lady Jaye; its purpose was to undermine “theories of embodiment that conceive the body as a fixed, autonomous entity,”⁶ and to survive beyond accepted understandings of corporal form and its signifiers. After Lady Jaye’s passing, Genesis referred to themselves in the plural, indicating the continuing presence of Lady Jaye beyond earthly constraints. An angel, existing in the seam between angelic bodies and spiritual realms.

*

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) thinks of angelic bodies as harbingers of both heaven and hell, pleasure and pain. The film is an adaptation of The Hellbound Heart, a novella also written by Barker, and was conceptualized after the filmmaker visited an underground sex club in New York City known for its hardcore S&M nights.⁷ This sadomasochistic inspiration is most clearly represented in the film by the Cenobites, unearthly beings summoned by dissatisfied wanderers who seek ultimate sensation and risk. The Cenobites stand leather-clad and towering, with intricately disfigured bodies adorned with metal spikes, wire, nipple clamps, and gore. They declare themselves to be “explorers in the further regions of experience; demons to some, angels to others.”⁸

When one of said wanderers, Frank Cotton, buys a shiny puzzle box from a shop of strange wares, he is searching for either hellish or heavenly gratification — he doesn’t care which. What he gets by opening the box is a visit from the Cenobites and their methods of torture. The Cenobites are monstrous bodies in the Gothic tradition (abject bodies that challenge the conventions of presentation in dominant culture),⁹ and the film’s most gripping horror derives from their ability to create similarly monstrous bodies of anyone they encounter. As film scholar Paul Wells explains:

Barker uses the theme of sadomasochism not merely to draw together the issues of eroticism and brutality, but to emphasize the protean nature of the body and identity. [His] sense of the mutability of the flesh, and the combinative sense of organs and tissue, is played out through characters with ambivalent sexual orientations, and the problematics of bodily need. Barker’s bodies are concerned with perspectives outside social orthodoxy, and ‘horror’ comes out of the fear of a perverse yet partially desired experience of a marginalized or unknown ‘otherness’¹⁰ (emphasis my own).

Frank is pulled into an underworld where the Cenobites’ only task is to subject him to an indivisible mixture of pleasure and pain. His body is literally torn apart (with some of the best practical effects I’ve ever seen). But when Frank’s brother Larry, and his wife Julia move into the old Cotton house where his spirit still haunts, Frank is able to escape the underworld and piece together his body, layer by layer. He does this with the help of his sister-in-law Julia, whom he seduces and convinces to kill strangers so that he can incorporate their flesh into his. Frank becomes the ghoul in the attic and the true antagonist of the film, a representation of the:

systematic horror perpetuated by colonialism — psychological abuse, infidelity, rape, murder, and cannibalism — [as well as the] inherently destructive embodiment of capitalistic exploitative patriarchy that is present in the Western understanding of ‘home.’¹¹

However, Frank and Julia’s plan is disrupted when Kirsty, his neice, walks in on a killing; she steals the coveted puzzle box in order to escape Frank’s attack, later using the knowledge of her uncle’s whereabouts to barter with the Cenobites. Upon learning of his escape, the Cenobites hunt Frank down and ensnare him again, tearing his body apart a second time.

Hellraiser is an affect-heavy film; its scenes are visceral and obsessed with the manipulation, degradation, and distortion of bodies. We as viewers, much like the characters on screen, must endure a complex kind of pain, one that attempts to bring  us back to our vulnerable corporeality and provide psychic release. Like The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, here again is a film that treats the body as raw material to express the sublime force of our psycho-emotional, spiritual, and pluralistic selves. In the words of film writer Michael Koresky: 

Hellraiser’s appeal lies not in the vanquishing of sadomasochistic erotic temptation, but in its possibility… in a strange form of reverse wish fulfillment, we want the repressed to keep returning, providing us yet another opportunity to push past our earthbound limits.¹²

Much focus has been paid to Hellraiser’s correlative treatment of blood and eroticism during the height of the AIDS epidemic, having been both lauded as transgressively powerful and critiqued as a moralizing statement on the dangers of sexual audacity,¹³ but my analysis is concerned with the film’s subtle implications regarding the sources of body horror and transgression. True, the Cenobites’ sadomasochistic appetite generates this body horror, but as the film progresses it is moreso Frank’s patriarchal control over Julia’s will, his menacing and sexualized attitude toward Kirsty, and his monstrous corruption of the family home that breeds fear. Thus, “Hellraiser appears to implicitly advocate a radical anti-hegemonic stance that traditional gender norms can be just as horrific as the non-traditional forms of gender performance carried out by the Cenobites.”¹⁴ There are no utopias to be found within the patriarchal order, and no simple dichotomies which persist through our bodily existence. These constructs are subject to vulnerability and the possibilities beyond.

*

As disparate as Hellraiser and The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye seem — one, a cult favourite filled with gory special effects and lurid Gothic horror, the other a playful documentary about two artists in love — both occupy the same realm of embodied cinema. They both grapple with the manipulation of bodies in extreme ways, and do so in deliberate pursuit of greater human understanding.¹⁵ Returning to Wells’ analysis, “the protean nature of the body and identity” and the “mutability of the flesh” are what provide these two films a common ground. To be protean is to be ever-changing and easily adaptable, which are values we typically ascribe to our minds and personalities, not so much to our supposedly fixed bodies. To colonial hegemonic order, a mutable and protean body is a threat.¹⁶ In The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, “the binaries of masculine/feminine, self/other, mind/body, and nature/culture”¹⁷ are troubled by the lovers’ disregard for discreet and compartmentalized visions of bodily selfhood. They would prefer to commune beyond the boundaries set out by the social order. In Hellraiser, the bodies of the Cenobites have ambiguous genders, origins, and morals; they reject dichotomy and resist categorization,¹⁸ which quickly frames them as Other, and to be feared. The indivisible pain and pleasure that they inflict on the human body further antagonizes their role in the film. But eventually, it is Frank Cotton — grotesque body in the attic and nasty patriarch of the Cotton home — who is revealed as the ultimate monster, thus positioning the ambiguous Other bodies in opposition to the preeminent horror of Western, colonial, capitalist patriarchy. Again, a mutable and protean body is a threat.

*

The vulnerability of one’s materiality to the psychological, emotional, and spiritual forces within allows for a generative self-in-progress. But we are also subject to outside forces, which press and incorporate themselves just as strongly. In other words, a body can resist hegemonic structures, but it also recreates them. Social signifiers of identity and perceptions of one’s self as one situate us in the continued colonial occupation of unceded Indigenous land. The settler colonial state requires constant replication, via the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous land and erasure of Indigenous sovereignty¹⁹  — as long as I am on this land, my body (re)produces settler colonialism. Furthermore, hegemonic structures aim to appear stable and assume naturalness,²⁰ and so they demand that bodies be presumed stable and natural as well. The socially determined rules and supremacist dichotomies currently in place serve, first and foremost, the dominant forces in power. Thus, to accept the fixedness of one’s body is to continue in service of cisgendered, hetero, able-bodied and colonial normativity. Antithesis to this would be the dismantling of harmful conventions of bodily subjectivity, leading to an expansion of one’s relationship to selfhood as well as one’s ability to interface with others. Embodied solidarity means recognizing my location within the production line of settler colonialism, and pushing past limits of comfort and complacency which prohibit social and political transformation. I think of scholar and writer Billy-Ray Belcourt’s words in the introduction to his book, A History of My Brief Body; he calls for the “[detonation of] the glass walls of Canadian habit that entrap us all in compressed forms of subjectivity.”²¹ Embodied solidarity could also mean understanding my body as something that is constantly in flux with other bodies, and interrogating that which says bodies are good only if they are definitive. In life, as in film, hegemonic authority is deeply threatened by a selfhood that is plural, exploratory, and open to revision.

Cinema that engages with affect theory, duration, and bodily transformation does not allow us to privilege the mind and leave behind embodied knowing. Instead, it provides us an opportunity to further understand how we relate to the world as material amongst material. By further exploring our understanding of corporeality beyond socially sanctioned limits, to what elements of humanity do we draw nearer? What either/or universes can we escape from? Bodies in flux offer pathways to queer futurities defined by experimentation, evolution, ambiguity, and self-determination.²² There are far richer possibilities beyond the fixed, autonomous body, and this is why we make films about it. In the words of Genesis and Lady Jaye, “we are malleable and committed to being malleable.”²³

1. Flesh Suitcase is also the name of a 1995 film directed by Paul Duran.
2. Other films on this list include, but are not limited to: The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986), Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981), Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), Christmas on Earth (Barbara Rubin, 1963), and the aforementioned An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981).
3. As in, Laura Marks’ theory of haptic visuality, first introduced in her talk “The haptic critic” and given at “La jeune critique aujourd’hui” in Paris, in 1993. For further research, read Marks’ “Video Haptics and Erotics,” Screen 39, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 331-348.
4. Miranda, Krista. “DNA, AND: A meditation on pandrogeny.” Women & Performance: A journal of feminist theory 20, no. 3 (2010): 347-353.
5. Losier, Marie, dir. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye. 2011; United States, United Kingdom.
6. Miranda, Krista. “DNA, AND: A meditation on pandrogeny.”
7. Koresky, Michael. “Queer & Then & Now: 1987.” Film Comment, October 9, 2019. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/queer-now-then-1987/
8. Barker, Clive, dir. Hellraiser. 1987; United Kingdom: Entertainment Film Distributors.
9. Sautman, Matthew. “Domestic Bodies in Hell: The Significance of Gendered Embodiment in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.” Body Studies 2, no. 7 (2020): 66-78.
10. Wells, Paul. “On the side of the demons: Clive Barker’s pleasures and pains.” British Horror Cinema. Edited by Steve Chibnall, Julian Petley. Psychology Press, 2002.
11. Sautman, Matthew. “When Orientalism Raises Hell: Puzzling Through the Postcolonial Anxieties and Usages of Space in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.” The Spaces and Places of Horror. Edited by Francesco Pascuzzi, Sandra Waters. Vernon Press, 2020.
12. Koresky, Michael. “Queer & Then & Now: 1987.”
13. Ibid.
14. Sautman, Matthew. “Domestic Bodies in Hell: The Significance of Gendered Embodiment in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.”
15. In my comparative analysis, I am limiting my scope to the films’ representations of the body as malleable and improvisational. Both Barker and Losier’s films contain meaning and ask questions beyond what is discussed in this essay, and I would encourage further research.
16. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject applies here, as well.
17. Miranda, Krista. “DNA, AND: A meditation on pandrogeny.”
18. Sautman, Matthew. “When Orientalism Raises Hell: Puzzling Through the Postcolonial Anxieties and Usages of Space in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.”
19. Midzain-Gobin, Liam. “Making Sense: Indigenous Peoples, Knowledge Production, and Settler Colonialism.” PhD diss. McMaster University, 2020.
20. Ibid.
21. Belcourt, Billy-Ray. A History of My Brief Body. Canada: Two Dollar Radio, 2020.
22. Miranda, Krista. “DNA, AND: A meditation on pandrogeny.”
23. Ibid.