Longlegs

There are a number of details to note that seem significant to understanding the thematic and quasi-autobiographical intentions behind the movie. First, the movie opens in 1974, the year of the director’s birth, and the main part of the movie takes place heading towards 14 January 1993 (even though Bill Clinton was not inaugurated until the 20th, thus meaning that the film contains a deliberate slight anachronism), just after the death of his father Anthony Perkins, a man whose professional persona was really stuck in a kind of frozen portrait of a sexually ambiguous serial killer (and Anthony Perkins also said that his own sexuality may have been influenced by the fact that he was sexually abused by his mother). The fact that the first murders were of the “Camera” family seems very relevant in this regard (those first murders are supposed to have occurred on 14 July 1966, a date whose most notorious real-life event was undoubtedly the Richard Speck mass murder of eight women, one at a time, over the course of one night, but perhaps this is coincidental). And it should not be forgotten, one supposes, that as a child the director himself played a young Norman Bates.

The director has also stated that, as a child, his father’s sexuality was to a degree concealed from him by his mother (in the film, the mother’s life is spent concealing its most important aspects from her daughter, supposedly as a form of protection), suggesting that all of this played into the construction of the kind of uncanny sexuality of the Longlegs character, which is ambiguous, and in some way both obvious and yet suppressed. This characteristic, “obvious and yet suppressed”, also seems to relate to that character’s relationship to the murders: not undertaking them actively or directly, but obviously the agent of these killings, a vehicle mediating between the evil tendency itself and its expression within familial contexts (always perpetrated by the father, but as himself possessed or occupied by a tendency that is greater than him and that comes to him from the outside). On a larger scale, or at a level that is more external to the specific events of the film, Bill Clinton looms over proceedings in a way that suggests the filmmakers want us to view him as a satanic occupant of a white house (also Nixon), but, perhaps, in a way similar to that just described in relation to the more internal or domestic context, that is, as a vehicle of an evil tendency that is no longer explicit (behind a kind of theatre of familial conventionality, as might be ascribed to Nixon or Reagan), but rather implicit, suppressed and rationalised…yet still obvious.

Finally, concerning the use of dolls, which the filmmaker has stated is inspired by the “twin” doll given to Jon-Benet Ramsey (based on a photograph of her) by her mother as a Christmas gift to be opened on the day of her death (but which was left unopened): this, too, reinforces the sense that the film is intended to conjure a sense of the uncanny, of hauntings and automatisms that come from the outside and occupy the individuals who behave in relation to those tendencies in an almost mechanical way, despite themselves rather than due to their own “innate” evilness. One could undoubtedly relate this not just to Freud, Hoffmann and the Sandman, but to the significance of these themes and ideas concerning the uncanny in, for example, a movie like BLUE VELVET, where, situated “near the ear”, the characters seem animated by songs sung in voices and with words that come to them from some kind of mysterious, cosmic outside. In short, the film does have quite a lot going on, though whether it coheres as a whole is perhaps an open question. Certainly it is an attempt at something.