In the filmmaking of artist Cecelia Condit, her strange and sometimes frightening films mix a fairytale-like narrative with feminist overtones, which flows with a musicality that is as unnerving as it is catchy. Condit has been a filmmaker since the early eighties and recently her films have attracted a cult following because of their obscurity and dark subject matter while also being extremely thought-provoking and intermeshed with symbolism. Her film that has gained the most traction is Possibly in Michigan, a quintessential film to display her feminist fairytale style with catchy songs and interludes that keep the viewer immersed, almost to the point of disgust.

The result of Condit’s mingling of horror and fairytale in this film is an expression of female empowerment that works to establish this film as a classic example of feminist art that is displayed with aspects of horror in order to forcibly gain back ownership and control of the feminine self. Elements of cannibalism related to castration, the attempt to dismantle the concept of ‘otherness’, and the cannibalistic nature of the camera that connects to the patriarchal male gaze are components of what makes Condit’s film critical to discuss in reference to feminist theory. Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny presents a discourse on male-centered topics that Condit sought to dismantle through her feminist film, while Donna Haraway’s Situated Knowledges and Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasures work in conjunction with each other to provide further recognition and authority to the aspects of Condit’s film that disenfranchise the female subjects through their discussion of the male gaze and the role of women in filmmaking. The film Possibly in Michigan by Cecelia Condit both employs and subverts the normalized perception of Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny by performing the fears of men that Freud establishes in his essay and uses this performance to empower the female characters of the film, thus giving them a happy ending to a story that is situated in a long history of oppression.

The traditional role females play in film is an aspect of Laura Mulvey’s essay that she discusses at length in reference to the negative implications it has on the representation of women along with how it implements the male gaze into filmmaking. The evaluation Mulvey creates about this role is one she relates to an “exhibitionist”, also stating how “women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (809). In this analysis of women’s role in film, Mulvey claims that women are presented in such a way that enhances their sexuality and appeals to those watching so they will be enticed to watch further, and thus the female characters become more objectified as the film progresses. Condit’s film, however, subverts this notion, as she not only provides ironic influence from this traditional role of women in film, but places Arthur as the role of both inflictor of toxic masculinity, but also as a representation of the way the women are observed from an outsider’s point of view as he continuously shadow’s them throughout their trip in the shopping mall. Mulvey expands upon this assessment of the female’s role in film when she claims that they function “as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen” (809). We can thus understand Condit’s intention behind the male gaze in her film as being one that is equally as toxic from Arthur’s point of view as it is from the general viewers. As Condit attempts to present to her audience how the camera itself is an ‘eye’ into the world of the film that enforces its own set of toxic narratives, the argument can be created that the “camera is not only phallic but cannibalistic” as it “entangles the seen with the seer…transporting and transfixing – the viewer without itself offering a source to “cite” the origin of the embodiment or consumption” (Coykendall 340). This ‘consuming’ appraisal of the camera in filmmaking acts as a potential way to understand the metaphor of cannibalism in Condit’s film, as it can be seen to work as a conceptualization of the way traditional filmmaking enforces these toxic gazes to the extent that they create a universally skewed understanding of the feminine role in films.

The performance of the uncanny in Condit’s film allows for an analysis of its implementation in terms of how it is used and subverted. One of the most outwardly apparent instances of the uncanny is the character Arthur and his role as the malevolent cannibalistic stalker of the film since Freud claimed that a living person too can be “uncanny, usually when we ascribe evil motives to him” (14). There are also aspects of the uncanny that relate to the overt depiction of cannibalism in the film since Freud believed that “Dismembered limbs, a severed head a hand cut off at the wrist, feet which dance by themselves – all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them” (14). This idea of dismemberment ties into Freud’s notion of the castration complex that Condit engages with that coincides with her implementation of the male gaze in her film, which can be interpreted through Freud’s statement that: “a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a substitute for the dread of castration” (7). Freud situates this observation by looking at the story of Oedipus and how the removal of his own eyes was a symbolic representation of his own castration. Although Arthur’s eyes are never removed after he is killed, his own malicious male gaze and afterward, the dismemberment of his body, are linked to a similar sense of castration in this way.

Even though Condit’s film clearly presents many aspects relating to Freud’s concept of the uncanny and specifically the male gaze, what is more apparent in her film is her attempt to subvert his concepts by stripping the male of his toxic tendencies through a film that is empowered by the feminine. There is a curious relation to Freud’s ideas about the ‘unheimlich’ and specifically how it is “the entrance to the former heim [home] of all human beings” which Freud constitutes as “the female genital organs” (15). There is a scene towards the latter half of Condit’s film where Sharon had just gone into her home while Arthur stands outside, and Condit narrates the scene saying that: “Arthur longed for the sexual scent that smelled like home. He had used so many masks to disguise himself that he had forgotten who he was, who he’d known. He imagined himself a frog transformed into a prince charming. He felt that the moment he kissed her, he would become the man she would want him to be” (Condit). Arthur exemplifies Freud’s notion of the unheimlich through his desire to enter into Sharon’s ‘home’, with the implication of the ‘sexual scent’ being related to the female genitalia. Condit implements Freud’s theory in this narration but ends her speech by introducing the irrationality of Arthur’s understanding of boundaries which incriminates Freud’s notion as producing toxic masculinity that, in this film’s case, can have a fatal result. Ultimately, by invading Sharon’s ‘home’ and literally entering the ‘unheimlich’ place, Arthur has entered the world of the feminine which rejects, and literally kills him before he has the chance to instill any kind of power over the female subjects. After Sharon and Janice quickly overpower Arthur, they take away the powerful phallic organ that Freud believes “should be guarded by a proportionate dread” and go further by consuming it, enacting on the fears he presents in The Uncanny and using them to empower their feminine selves (7).

Condit subverts The Uncanny in her film by taking Freud’s ideas about the fear of castration and turning it back on the masculine entity of the film, thus making the male dread of castration a viable, visual idea that she depicts in order to empower the female that has long been oppressed by the phallus. As Arthur attempts to overpower Sharon as he breaks into her house, he is acting on his primal desires which are provoked by his ‘appetite’ for carnage, but driven, as he claims, by love. This is a love that has long been proliferated by the patriarchy, and more particularly, Freud, as these men are under the impression that acting on their primal desires is merely wanting to go back to a ‘heimlich’ place that was once familiar to them. Condit exasperates this notion by placing a man, rather, a stalker, into the mix as somebody trying to enact these same desires which shows just how skewed Freud’s narrative was, as it can make these violent male cravings seem normal and even necessary to act on. Condit exploits Arthur’s desires by forcefully stripping him of not only his life but his sense of toxic masculine pride by implementing the fear that Freud discusses in his essay. It is through Condit’s reworking of Freud’s castration complex that she is able to include even further exploitations of this theme to become intertwined in her film and thus for Sharon and Janice to overcome the impending male forces that exist in the world around them.

Another component that is essential in Condit’s attempt to dismantle Freud’s concepts of the castration complex is her inclusion of cannibalism in her film. Best friends Sharon and Janice clearly enjoy indulgence, which can be seen initially through their love of fine perfumes that Condit dedicates a long scene to in order to present the importance of appearance and presentation to these women. Towards the end of the film though, we see them once again indulging, but with quite a different twist, as they are sipping on what appears to be wine, but the viewer can imply is actually Arthur’s blood, while they casually smoke cigarettes with looks of utter indifference on their faces. To their ‘happy ending,’ we see a stark disparity in Arthur’s ending, which is abrupt, violent, and even whimsical as the two women take joy in consuming him, thus their cannibalism acts as “an extreme extension of dismemberment”, which results in “castration and other Freudian metaphors and/or narrative” (Mellencamp 117). As Arthur, the declared “cannibal” of the film, is punished by being consumed in the same manner as he was going to consume Sharon, the viewer is given an ironic ending that resolutely allows both women to bond over their similar ‘disposition’, as it is stated early on in the film that all three characters are connected by their love of “violence and perfume”. Condit gives the women the ultimate power from the very start of the film, and despite persistently being followed, and even shadowed, by Arthur, Condit implements this notion that “women as representation signifies castration” precisely because of “her lack of penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure” (Mulvey 811-815). The male fear of castration is thus linked inextricably to a disavowal of their innate power linked to the phallus, and Condit engages with her aversion to this power by giving the feminine the ability to not only strip the male antagonist of his phallus but of consuming and thus appropriating that power to the feminine self.

The cannibalistic aspects of Condit’s film allow for a focus on a devourment of the other which in turn defeats this notion of ‘otherness’ in the process. From the start of the film, we consistently see Arthur lurking in the background wherever Sharon and Janice are while he wears a cannibal mask. Over time, we see him wearing many different masks which represent male stereotypes such as a donkey, pig, wolf, frog, and prince charming, but Arthur’s inability to retain a singular form connects to how “the more the cannibal remains formless in his entirety, the more interesting the question of how his hospitable formlessness can be programmed, reduced, and, to a certain extent, “realized” (Lampropoulos 422). Without a true identity, Arthur places himself into whatever role he believes will be accepted by the women he desires, and thus “he would become the man she would want him to be”. After wearing countless different masks, Arthur resolutely forms into a cannibal who stalks the women around the shopping mall and back to their houses and can be seen as the most terrifying male persona of all.

Cannibalism has been a popular motif in art and literature to depict how consuming something that is ‘like’ you takes away their otherness. In the art of Salvador Dali, the way he depicts cannibalism relates to “this digestion of the paternal to build of the self mimics the way eating his enemy could help the cannibal steal his forces” (Pouzet-Duzer 87). Even Jacques Derrida uses the metaphors of cannibalism to claim that once “I kill it…it is no longer other” (Deutscher 165). These references of popular concepts relating to cannibalism connect on one hand to the way one devours or consumes an opponent to “steal their forces”, and thus the way that the women consume Arthur so they can take the power he holds as a man and displace it onto themselves. On the other hand, once an individual is cannibalized it can no longer express any form of difference, and thus does not have the power to suppress the feminine as Arthur attempts to. As Janice and Sharon consume Arthur, they are literally taking away his ability to subjugate by becoming one with him, making him a part of the feminine self. The role of cannibalism in the film is peculiar, as it not only disembodies the other, but it takes away its ability to be other anymore and therefore dismantles the association that traditional male narratives have with the female being the other.

Donna Haraway’s discourse on the male gaze is valuable to analyzing Condit’s film through its feminist stance and analysis of objectification. Haraway’s version of the gaze “signifies the unmarked positions of Man and White, one of the many nasty tones of the word “objectivity” to feminist ears” (581). The gaze operates as that which objectifies the feminine ‘other’ and doesn’t allow for them to separate from the domineering stance that the male takes in distancing the female from himself. Haraway also focuses heavily on this ‘embodied’ account of the gaze, as well as the way it is converted through modern technology. She claims that “The “eyes” made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision…Understanding how these visual systems work, technically, socially, and psychically, ought to be a way of embodying feminist objectivity” (583). We begin to see here how the medium of technology, such as film, in this case, transforms how we qualify the gaze in terms of its inability to be passive because of the intentions behind the film that the filmmaker enacts onto the way the camera is situated. In Condit’s case, she begins her film by placing the women in stereotypical roles, buying, and using perfume to enhance their ‘scent’ that is thus received not only by Arthur but perpetuated by the viewer of the film as well.

As Condit implements her subversion of the gaze in her film, we can look further into the qualities of Possibly in Michigan that employ these elements into her feminist narrative. As Sharon and Janice traverse along with the film’s storyline they are inevitably subjected to the male gaze at every point in the film, and at the end, we see how Condit satirizes the way that films expect women to act and look certain ways. After killing Arthur, the women are not afraid of what they had just done, rather it is quite the opposite since, as stated previously, they indulge in drinking ‘wine’ and smoking cigarettes, but one important aspect of this part of the film that is supposed to seem so natural that it is almost unnoticed is how the two women are depicted naked while doing these things. While we expect the women to act unsettled after Arthur’s death, they instead relish in this new source of feminine bonding between them. There is something to be said about “the inevitable masculinity of the gaze” that Condit is evoking through her film as a commentary on traditional narratives that place women as “the source of that gaze as well as its commensurate hostility” (Coykendall 338). Seeing that this objectification is so common in film proliferates toxic masculinity and makes the negative implications of the male gaze normalized and accepted by common society. Mulvey also indicates a similar sentiment in her essay when she states: “As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his life, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence” (810). This disturbing analysis of the way films can be interpreted by their audience creates an understanding between this and Haraway’s concept of embodiment, since the male gaze of the camera perpetuates the viewer’s relationship towards females in a way that resembles Arthur’s character; obsessive, obtrusive, driven by the phallus, and ultimately, expecting certain things of women by the code that these films claim will hold up in the real world.

As Sharon and Janice are finally freed of their male oppressor once they wrap up his bones and toss them to the curb for the garbageman to pick up, they can now enjoy their new life free of toxic male narratives. Although they are able to move on with their lives, Condit clearly indicates that this experience has absolved them of their innocence, as the juxtaposing images of a decaying body and Sharon’s face, as well as her lifting off of a bed of flowers, shows the viewer how this kind of event, among others, has scarred the feminine. Obviously, Condit did not single-handedly dismantle the patriarchy, but her ability to subvert the traditional texts like Freud’s The Uncanny and the world of filmmaking in general lends to a refreshing, comical take on the heavy subjects that she explores in her film. Condit is clear that she isn’t completely bashing all of Freud’s concepts though since she includes many uncanny aspects of her film, but she attempts more than anything to bring awareness to the role that women have in society and the ways that men use toxic or even violent means to have a woman fall in love with him. The viewers of Possibly in Michigan cannot help but sympathize with Sharon and Janice’s situation as two young women enjoying their day at the mall when they realize a man is stalking them, and unfortunately enough, this storyline is one that is too common and real for many women. The horror elements that Condit embeds into her film act as a cautionary motif to both women and men, since just as women need to have each other’s backs in order to dismantle the obstructive patriarchy, men need to reevaluate their intentions and actions towards women to establish a society that functions where all men and women are seen, and felt, as equals.

Works Cited

Condit, Cecelia. Possibly in Michigan. 1983, https://www.ceceliacondit.com/video.

Coykendall, Abigail Lynn. “Bodies Cinematic, Bodies Politic: The ‘Male’ Gaze and the ‘Female’ Gothic in De Palma’s Carrie.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 30, no. 3, Eastern Michigan University, 2000, pp. 332–63, https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2011.0058.

Deutscher, Penelope. “Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray).” Differences, vol. 10, no. 3, Indiana University Press, 1998, pp. 159–84.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Translated by Alix Strachey, MIT.edu, 1919, web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf.

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575-599.

Lampropoulos, Apostolos. “Eating Bodies or Eating Them Well? The Almost Impossible Task of Cannibalism.” Reconstructing Pain and Joy: Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Perspectives, 2008, pp. 415–30.

Mellencamp, Patricia. “Uncanny Feminism: The Exquisite Corpses of Cecelia Condit.” Framework, vol. 32-33, no. 32/33, Sankofa Film and Video, 1986, pp. 104–22.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999, pp. 803-816.

Pouzet-Duzer, Virginie. “Dada, Surrealism, Antropofagia: The Consuming Process of the Avant-gardes.” L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 53 no. 3, 2013, p. 79-90. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/esp.2013.0031.