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FILM IN OUR TIME 305
quence. It brings us face to face with the things we dread. And it often challenges us to confront the real-life events it shows with the ideas we commonly entertain about them.
THE HEAD OF MEDUSA
We have learned in school the story of the Gorgon Medusa whose face, with its huge teeth and protruding tongue, was so horrible that the sheer sight of it turned men and beasts into stone. When Athena instigated Perseus to slay the monster, she therefore warned him never to look at the face itself but only at its mirror reflection in the polished shield she had given him. Following her advice, Perseus cut off Medusa's head with the sickle which Hermes had contributed to his equipment.35
The moral of the myth is, of course, that we do not, and cannot, see actual horrors because they paralyze us with blinding fear; and that we shall know what they look like only by watching images of them which reproduce their true appearance. These images have nothing in common with the artist's imaginative rendering of an unseen dread but are in the nature of mirror reflections. Now of all the existing media the cinema alone holds up a mirror to nature. Hence our dependence on it for the reflection of happenings which would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life. The film screen is Athena's polished shield.
This is not all, however. In addition, the myth suggests that the images on the shield or screen are a means to an end; they are to enable— or, by extension, induce— the spectator to behead the horror they mirror. Many a war film indulges in cruelties for this very reason. Do such films serve the purpose? In the myth itself Medusa's decapitation is not yet the end of her reign. Athena, we are told, fastened the terrible head to her aegis so as to throw a scare in her enemies. Perseus, the image watcher, did not succeed in laying the ghost for good.
So the question arises whether it makes sense at all to seek the meaning of horror images in their underlying intentions or uncertain effects. Think of Georges Franju's Le Sang des betes, a documentary about a Paris slaughterhouse: puddles of blood spread on the floor while horse and cow are killed methodically; a saw dismembers animal bodies still warm with life; and there is the unfathomable shot of the calves' heads being arranged into a rustic pattern which breathes the peace of a geometrical ornament. [Illus. 59] It would be preposterous to assume that these unbearably lurid pictures were intended to preach the gospel of vegetarianism; nor can they possibly be branded as an attempt to satisfy the dark desire for scenes of destruction.*
* Cf. pp. 57-8.