Harry Gómez-Morón Castro

The role of the Cinema of the Grotesque in Narrative Cinema

and their relation to the Cinema of Attractions

Thesis Statement:

According to Tom Gunning, the Cinema of Attractions is cinemas ability to show something,

be exhibitionist and “display its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world

for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator.” In this essay I’ll analyze the use of

these exhibitionist practices and relate them to what is called the Cinema of the Grotesque,

which will encompass the different uses of morbid and abnormal characters and

characteristics in films to generate feelings of disgust and at the same time empathy on the

viewer. This paper will examine examples of films from directors such as David Lynch,

Alejandro Jodorowsky, Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others and relate them to writings by

Ruth Perlmutter and Mikhail Bakhtin to further expand the understanding of what is “The

Cinema of the Grotesque” and it’s effects.

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Essay:

The forms of the grotesque and those of cinema are inherently related. As it is explained by

Ruth Perlmutter in his essay “The Cinema of the Grotesque”1 the chief qualities usually

associated with the grotesque through the ages- distortion and dehumanization- are an

essential part in the context of cinema. Trying to define what is grotesque would be

complicated, given that it is the communal concept of normality what defines what and who

is grotesque. Nonetheless, through the ages it is because of depictions in different art forms

that we got to understand what constitutes normality and how to distinguish it from

abnormality. The excessive expressions of unspeakable human acts and hidden human

desires add content and form of violence and violations through these abnormal characters

and characteristics, which have served cinema to generate feelings that go from disgust to

empathy or both. This paper will encompass the different uses of these morbid and

abnormal characters and characteristics in films to generate feelings of disgust and at the

same time empathy on the viewer, further expanding the understanding of what is “The

Cinema of the Grotesque” and it’s effects.

1Perlmutter, Ruth. "The Cinema of the Grotesque." The Georgia Review 33, no. 1 (1979): 168-93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/
41397699.

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First, it would make sense to understand the grotesque as a structural component in a work

of art, in the specific case of this paper, a film. Mikhail Bakhtin articulated throughout

Rabelais and his World this concept as `an “aesthetic of degradation, which functions to

materialize the abstract; embody the “spiritual”; and displace the high gestures of ritual and

ceremony, forcing them back into materiality.´2 With this said, we can understand cinema is

an exceptional medium for depiction of this, given that it demands the viewer to question his

mental construct of what is accepted through visual representations of the external or

internal reality of the film’s author.

Tom Gunning argued in “The Cinema of Attractions Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-

Garde” that the 1900’s emergence of great amusement parks provides a rich ground for

rethinking the roots of early cinema.3 As he explains, the basis of “the Cinema of

Attractions” is cinemas ability to show something, be exhibitionist and “display its visibility,

willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the

spectator.”4 This motive of pure exhibitionism shared by attractions and cinema of soliciting

a spectators attention to produce an effect is key to understanding the origins of the

grotesque as an aesthetic category in cinema as well. Dream Land’s Lilliputian Village or

Midget City was an attraction in one of the first big turn of the twentieth century amusement

2Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. https://monoskop.org/images/7/70/
Bakhtin_Mikhail_Rabelais_and_His_World_1984.pdf.
3 Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde." In The Cinema of Attractions
Reloaded, edited by Strauven Wanda, 381-88. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. http://www.jstor.org/stable/
j.ctt46n09s.27.

4 Ibid.

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parks: “Dream Land” in Coney Island, New York. Dream Land’s Lilliputian Village serves as

a good first example on this relation between cinema, attractions and the grotesque. This

attraction was an artificial city in which midgets would live “normal” lives given that it

worked as a full-on city with everything from micro-businesses to a fire department.5 But

rather than that city as a whole being an attraction one could argue it was the midgets

themselves and their uncommon stature, what possessed the characteristic of spectacle. And

it is in fact with the popularization of presenting these characters on the screen that people

wouldn't have to go to a show in specific in order to admire their abnormality, marking the

decline of side shows and carnival “freakshows.”6 This leads us to understand that since

amusement parks encapsulate the notion of cinema, and abnormality is an element of

attraction of the amusement, then abnormality is an element of cinema as well. Cinema,

attractions and “the grotesque” cannot be analyzed separately given that it would make each

of these elements one-sided, flat , strip them of their rich content and untangle their

intricate history.

The logical film reference to this would be Tod Browning’s 1932 movie Freaks, because it is

in this movie that the abnormal characters are brought center stage and in a rather

melodramatic American style film, we get to experience a sense of empathy for them not

due to their physical deformities but rather their complete humanity. 7 Ruth Perlmutter

5 Coney Island: The Technology of the Fantastic. https://summerssce10.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/koolhaas_coney-island.pdf

7 Freaks. Directed by Tod Browning. United States of America: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932. 35mm.

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argued this story hinges on the notion of acceptance, or more specifically, self acceptance

of the freaks, which make a living as spectacles. But it is in their insistence on our

acceptance of them, that we come to the realization that we are also freaks.8 This question

of self realization brings up the grotesque elements into a system of representation rather

than pure visual spectacle, attracting at first with the visual attraction that Tom Gunning

suggested, but later having a symbolic, spiritual and reflective effect on the watcher.

Going beyond the exhibitionism, Perlmutter suggests grotesque motifs can be used not only

as spectacle but rather as social satires without the need of invented creatures, given that the

grotesque is mostly found in human monstrosities.9 Alejandro Jodorowsky in The Holy

Mountain manages to represent in one particular scene a flagrant criticism to socio-political

conventions and conformity with the use of the grotesque. In this scene we see an armless

midget sized man kicking the pieces of a broken statue, while wearing an army hat.10 This

symbolism with the grotesque characteristic of that figure serve to represent societies’

struggles to overcome the government, as well as the collective anger of the vox populi.

But the grotesque, as spectacle and symbol in cinema, is not necessarily found in abnormal

characters or characteristic as I’ve been explaining, many times it is the cinematic view of

the mundane what makes normal things transform into grotesque experiences. Mikhail

8Perlmutter, Ruth. "The Cinema of the Grotesque." The Georgia Review 33, no. 1 (1979): 168-93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/
41397699.
9 Ibid.

10 The Holy Mountain. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. United States: ABKCO Films, 1973. 35mm.

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Bakhtin suggests that one of the things François Rabelais writes a lot about is food ingest.11

Because it is the decomposition of things to be injected by the human body, when close

attention is payed to this through the eye of cinema- or shall I say a man with a movie

camera- we find something that goes beyond the common. As Bakhtin said, when eating

“the body transgresses its own limits: it swallows, devours, rends the world apart, it is

enriched and grows at the world’s expense.”12 But Bakhtin even goes as far as to say that

this practice of opening to the world with our mouths and ingesting done collectively is of

intricate importance, and that banquet imagery in Rabelais work serves as a collective

element of victory in which sadness is incompatible. Yet, paradoxically, Pier Paolo Pasolini,

through cinema was able to add the grotesque element of coprophagy making a banquet

scene a more complex grotesque collective not only for being feasting in a group, or also

because what is being devoured is human feces, but because part of the people feasting are

kidnapped children.13 With cinemas visual politicizing power, Pasolini portrayed the

Marquis de Sade’s vision 14 of kidnapped children not just as objects to be tortured and

dominated but as victims of political and deviant sexual -pardon the redundancy- sadism.

But going back to Bakhtin’s idea of understanding the mundane as a grotesque artifice, it is

probably David Lynch the one who through cinema was able to develop a style of his own

11Bakhtin,
Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. https://monoskop.org/images/7/70/
Bakhtin_Mikhail_Rabelais_and_His_World_1984.pdf.

12 Ibid.
13 Salò, Or, The 120 Days of Sodom. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Italy: Produzioni Europee Associati, 1975.

14 De Sade, Marquis. The 120 Days of Sodom. Wilder Publications, 2008.

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defined as “Lynchian aesthetic” by mastering that duality presented by Bakhtin. David

Foster Wallace wrote an article in 1996 titled “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” in which he

attempts to define the term “Lynchian.” In this article he states David Lynch’s aesthetic

bases on “the unbelievably grotesque existing in a  kind of union with the unbelievably

banal.” 15 Further developing this idea, Schuy R. Weishaar wrote in The Grotesque In Theory

And Contemporary American Film that Lynch’s films often rely on the grotesque in their

evocations of the uncanny, and both are ultimately aimed at disclosing or enacting a rupture

in the identity or "self of the individual subject.” 16 Most of David Lynch’s filmography can

be analyzed to find these grotesque motifs of the mundane, such as the extreme focus on

red-colored lips in Mulholland Drive17 to generate a sense of unsettledness to the enigmatic

duration and close attention to the coffee drinking and cigarette smoking routine on Twin

Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. 18

Following this, one of the most interesting examples that would lead us back to Tom

Gunning’s idea of the Cinema of Attractions19 would be David Lynch’s short film

“Premonitions Following an Evil Deed .”20 Allister Mactaggart dissects the grotesque origins

Foster Wallace, David. "David Lynch Keeps His Head." Lynchnet. September 1996. Accessed December 12, 2018. http://
15

www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere.html.

Weishaar, Schuy R. Where Light in Darkness Lies: The Grotesque in Theory and Contemporary American Film. Ann Arbor:
16

UMI, 2010.
17 Mulholland Drive. Directed by David Lynch. United Sates: Universal Pictures, 2001.

18 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Directed by David Lynch. United States: New Line Cinema, 1992.
19 Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde." In The Cinema of Attractions
Reloaded, edited by Strauven Wanda, 381-88. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. http://www.jstor.org/stable/
j.ctt46n09s.27.

20 Premonitions Following an Evil Deed. Directed by David Lynch. U nited States: Fox Lorber, 1995.

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of this movie in his book The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory,21 not

only by explaining what we see on screen (police officers walking towards a dead body,

languid images of three women seated on a bench alongside a tree where a doe is tethered ,

a ’scientific’ experiment/torture being carried out by alien figures upon a naked woman

submerged in a water tank and an old couple opening the door to the police awaiting for bad

news) but also the reason this movie was made, which was to commemorate the centenary

of the Lumière Brothers first ‘motion pictures.’ Using the restored original Cinématographe

Lumiere Camera, David Lynch proves the viewer that his films rely on early cinema and

alternative conceptions of the possibilities of film. Therefore, David Lynch is differing from

mainstream cinema’s reliance on linear narratives and genre conventions. The non-linear

sequencing of the events, along with the spectator’s desire to fully understand what is

presented in the different segments of the short film, which are both banal and grotesque,

generate an uncanny “aesthetic of astonishment”22 as Gunning would put it or as nowadays

one would simply call: Lynchian.

The Cinema of Attractions and Narrative Cinema are both at play when talking about the

Cinema of the Grotesque. This is because the grotesque can be considered an element of

attraction, which can serve a narrative, or more importantly be the seed to a series of

expressions that can only be possible through filmmaking. I asked my friend and (future)

screenwriter Jenna Zacharia on how she uses grotesque elements in her narratives.

21 Allister Mactaggart, The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory (Bristol: Intellect, 2010).

22 Gunning, Tom. ”An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the [In]Credulous Spectator” Oxford University Press, 2009.

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According to Jenna, the grotesque is a device which allows us to see the way in which we

project our own inner flaws into others. Her latest script, “The Showman’s Daughter”23 -

which was awarded the Rena Down Memorial Screenwriting Prize- is about a circus, and

makes use of the element of the grotesque freak show. In this story there is a moment in

which the main character’s friend, Josef, who was in training to work with the lions has one

of his arms ripped off partially, and it is for this reason he is forced to work with the circus’

freak show. For Jenna, portraying people whose bodies are physically deformed, or

different in some way, is very effective in stories given that when you start to empathize

with them and see them as complete humans, the viewer starts to realize it was itself who

was incomplete/horrible to begin with. In her own words “I see myself as the monster for

viewing them as something different than myself.”24

In relation to this, one could argue the grotesque is an element all about connecting the

viewer with its most basic humanity. The examples I’ve brought up so far are mostly aimed

to an adult audience, but going back to the origins of the amusement parks and carnivals it

would be important to understand this started as a family attraction, and I’d like to give as a

last example a family movie for all ages to understand the pedagogic aspect of the grotesque.

Academy Award winning film Shrek25 directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson

serves as a very interesting example of a movie that utilizes grotesque elements as

23 Zacharia, Jenna. “The Showman’s Daughter.” Unreleased film script, 2018.

25 Shrek. Directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. United States: DreamWorks Animation, 2001.

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showering, farting, living in a swamp, eating and burping to stigmatize the main character,

Shrek the ogre, as grotesque. But is through the narrative aspect that we later start

empathizing with him and realize how regardless of these “monstrosities,” Shrek is a

character to be loved and ends up being loved regardless of these superficial things, teaching

the viewer that beauty stems from within. In one of the most memorable dialogues of the

film, Shrek describes himself as an “onion.” The onion being the perfect metaphor to

understand what or who is grotesque, because regardless of the smelly, repugnant exterior,

it contains layers. These layers being the different meanings and ideas that are represented

through grotesque elements in cinema.

Finally, as a summary, it would be important to restate that what is grotesque is defined

through time, given that it represents what defies the conventions of what’s normal, but the

presentation of such elements in narrative filmmaking can be analyzed separately as an

object of attraction, even thought paradoxically the first thing it produces is repulsion, the

grotesque elements come along several different meanings with the purpose of raising

questions on the viewer’s concepts of normality, or many times, reflecting on the viewers

own grotesque elements.

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Bibliography

Perlmutter, Ruth. "The Cinema of the Grotesque.”

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Rabelais and His World.”

“Coney Island: The Technology of the Fantastic.” https://summerssce10.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/koolhaas_coney-island.pdf

Blase, Rachel. “THE CHANGING SOCIETAL VIEW OF FREAKS: POPULAR CULTURE, MEDICAL DISCOURSE, AND
PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES IN 19TH AND 20TH CENTURY AMERICA.”

De Sade, Marquis. “The 120 Days of Sodom."

Foster Wallace, David. "David Lynch Keeps His Head.”

Weishaar, Schuy R. “Where Light in Darkness Lies: The Grotesque in Theory and Contemporary American Film.”

Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde."

Allister Mactaggart, “The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory.”

Gunning, Tom. ”An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the [In]Credulous Spectator.”

Zacharia, Jenna. “The Showman’s Daughter.” Unreleased film script, 2018.

Filmography

Freaks. Directed by Tod Browning. United States of America: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932

The Holy Mountain. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. United States: ABKCO Films, 1973. 35mm.

Salò, Or, The 120 Days of Sodom. Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Italy: Produzioni Europee Associati, 1975.

Mulholland Drive. Directed by David Lynch. United Sates: Universal Pictures, 2001.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Directed by David Lynch. United States: New Line Cinema, 1992.

Premonitions Following an Evil Deed. Directed by David Lynch. United States: Fox Lorber, 1995.

Shrek. Directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. United States: DreamWorks Animation, 2001.

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