Jim Henson's Spider Babies

Herein lies my first participatory blog for Ye Olde Final Girl Film Club, which will, I understand, make me popular, grant me fame and fortune, and stall my receding hairline. The Eminent Ponderous One has in her wisdom selected cult classic Spider Baby. Rather than going the traditional route and putting together a few well-written paragraphs about why I appreciate the film, I decided to go overboard with a 2,000+ word essay about the familial dynamic of the 1950s and how the film is a reaction to that. Maybe it's not a great idea to defy your readers to enjoy your blog but there are lots of pretty screencaps and I use the word "pompous" so really what's not to enjoy?

In many ways, Spider Baby: Or, The Maddest Story Ever Told was a film far ahead of its time. Undoubtedly a predecessor to the “krazy kannibal klan run amok” that proliferated (I hate to admit that I actually learned that word from George W. Bush) throughout the ‘70s, Spider Baby’s influence continues to be felt in the films of Rob Zombie, among others. If it involves inbred cannibals it probably started from here. And when I say the movie was ahead of its time I mean that literally as well as figuratively—shot in 1964 as exploitation auteur Jack Hill’s debut, its release was withheld for four years, by which time Saucy Jack had already completed one or two other rarely seen flicks. But Spider Baby is also a film that is very much of its time in its representation of the family unit, a reaction to the traditional families and the values they espoused in the whitewashed suburban Rockwellian depictions of 1950s nuclear life.

Nostalgia for the fifties is pervasive to an astonishing degree even today, though at least two generations have grown to adulthood since that particular chapter of American history closed its pages. There is a collective sense that times then were simpler, communities were more closely-knit, traditional family values held sway, and prosperity had reached its peak. When politicians speak of a need to return to old-fashioned values, it is invariably this decade to which they point as an example of good old-fashioned American living.

This perception, romantic though it may be, ignores any number of historical realities of the period. In fact the fifties was only really a paradise for white, middle-class males, whose superior sense of community derived from the homogeny of the segregated neighborhoods. It was only by marginalizing (or at times violently excluding) racial/ethnic minorities, women, gays, non-Christians, the poor, and political dissidents that men were able to build their false utopias of conformity. Economic prosperity extended only to the same, while nearly half of all African-American married-couple families were impoverished and child poverty was almost twice as high as it was at the end of the 1960s. The prosperity that did exist was a result of some of the most aggressive federal assistance programs ever enacted within the U.S., programs which actually favored the blue collar worker at the bottom rather than the CEOs that currently reap the rewards of trickle-down economics.

Clean-cut sitcoms such as Leave it to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, and Father Knows Best were not hard-hitting exposes on the reality of the American family, but idealized manifestations of the perfect family to which the viewer could aspire, similar to the way that Full House was not a photo-realistic depiction of the families of the nineties but was more of a guidepost to how things ought to be. And all this isn’t even mentioning the fact that the “traditional family” was a complete social construct that didn’t even really exist prior to the fifties and only came into play as a result of several intervening factors that forced women into greater dependence—economically and socially—on stable and lasting marriages.

Needless to say, the nation-wide attempt to shoe-horn diverse groups of people into ludicrously specific roles (or otherwise outright ignore them) was relatively short-lived and imploded in the 1960s with the rise of the civil rights movement, another wave of feminism, and the alternative hippie lifestyle. Roles were constantly being questioned, redefined, and re-questioned, and the entertainment media were forced to respond, in their stodgy, reluctant way, with new programming that acknowledged these changes. As metaphor is the weakest language of change, the sitcoms of the era tried to cushion the blow of progressive ideas, catering to the prejudiced and closed-minded as networks are wont to do, by disguising them in magic and surrealism. Hence, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie focus on “empowered” women (or at least women with powers), and The Addams Family and The Munsters focused on recognizably abnormal (visually speaking) families with strange and perhaps even threatening (non-white?) habits which are, to them, perfectly normal.

In theory Spider Baby isn’t all that different from an extended and decidedly more grotesque episode of The Munsters, but for the fact that in the latter, the dramatic tension arises from the possibility that the titular family will eventually become self-aware in regards to their freakishness, while the inhabitants of Spider Baby suspect their aberrance from the start.

In the context of social critique, Cary Grant stand-in Peter (played with naïve charm by Quinn Redeker) gives an opening monologue that is both revealing and facetious. He speaks of “the Merrye syndrome,” a rare condition which causes the afflicted to regress even before the point of birth, which results in “savagery and cannibalism.” Of course writer/director Hill sets up an impossible premise here in that a regression to a pre-natal state would be difficult to portray and would, one imagines, result in either stark nothingness or a 2001-like cosmic enlightenment; Jill Banner and Beverly Washburn play their roles simply as deliciously naughty little girls as opposed to fetuses in the womb. But the idea of “regression” is resonant through the nostalgic lens I wrote about above.

One of the biggest parental fears in the 1950s was of juvenile delinquency—the terrifying notion that all teenagers would, James Dean-like, get into knife fights on the old bridge, drive cars off cliffs, steal, murder, and maybe even copulate. Virginia and Elizabeth are the ultimate juvenile delinquents—so juvenile their mindset is of the unborn, so delinquent the ephemeral thrill of murder and cannibalism is no more spectacular than piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. (Parenthetically, it is certainly worth noting that they are nominally—that is to say, through their names—related to Elizabeth, the Virgin [hence Virginia, the state named in her honor] Queen. I have no idea what this signifies, apart from the fact that they couldn’t as characters be further from British royalty.) Sociologically, this fear of juvenile delinquency arose from the pressure on modern mothers to grant their children (particularly their male children) a great deal of freedom and independence so as to avoid emasculating and infantilizing them. And a free teen—a teen whose life lacks discipline and structure—is, of course, a rebellious teen.

Virginia and Elizabeth, though female, are nevertheless prime examples of independent teens. Virginia in particular drops any pretense at socially acceptable behavior when Bruno promises he will never hate her; thus her “evil” actions are perpetrated without regret when the threat of negative ramifications (discipline) is dropped. And drooling man-child Ralph is the freest of all, lacking the capacity to even understand cause and effect, action and reaction. Paradoxically, he has been infantilized despite the fact that no overbearing mother did or could have any influence on him.

It’s also probably safe to give the “cannibalism” motif in this film the same reading most use to interpret Romero’s employment of the taboo act in Night of the Living Dead: that of the new generation “devouring” the old. Though Romero’s zombies are successful, suggesting that the ongoing generational cycle is a steamroller than cannot be halted for all the exertions and protests of the parent generation, the Merrye clan is effectively halted by a trusted adult, a member of that parent generation. Jack Hill’s (ironic) approach ostensibly pacifies the conservative adults in the audience, although the ending, which I will discuss later, betrays the seeming endorsement of the old-fashioned perspective.

Since the idea of the “traditional” Cleaver-esque family was more or less an invention of the 1950s, as I stated earlier, Peter’s expository speech, in which he states that the sufferers of Merrye syndrome regress “beyond the pre-natal level” and links that level with “savagery and cannibalism,” may be an irreverent reference to the fact that the family unit prior to the 1950s (the ostensible “birth” of the traditional family we hold so dear today) was not as ideal as we imagine all pre-1960s family life to have been. It wasn’t until the 1920s that children weren’t forced into exhausting and dangerous labor. Domestic violence reached an all-time high in the 1930s. Women took the traditional “male” role as breadwinner as husbands and fathers went off to fight in the early 1940s. And following the war, women were resentful of being forced back into domesticity after carving out a place in the work force, and returning soldiers often found it difficult to reassert themselves as the head of the household (see William Wyler’s masterpiece The Best Years of Our Lives for a depiction of this readjustment). The bottom line is that the traditional family is a myth, and Peter’s assertion that “many authorities do not accept the existence of the Merrye syndrome” could be a coy reference to the psychiatrists, government officials, and propagandists who relentlessly attempted to “reassure” the public that the 1950s status quo was a return to form and the way things “should” be, when in fact it was nothing of the sort.

I think the first murder, in which Virginia severs a black man’s ear, is indicative of the cracks in this vision of American average-ness. Functioning in a servile role, the unnamed mailman is played by Mantan Moreland, an actor who specialized in the sort of wide-eyed jittery “Feets don’t fail me now!” persona that most politically-correct-minded folk would deem stereotypical and perhaps even racist. Moreland’s presence bridges the gap between the minstrel shows and blackface routines of a supposedly more innocent time and the era of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Since his character, the only non-white who appears in the movie, is completely incidental to the plot, except as a device by which to set up Virginia’s murderous tendencies, and his death has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the film—I don’t think it’s even mentioned again—it’s safe to assume that the sequence is a commentary on the total marginalization of minorities in the prototypical fifties community.

Ironically, the characters assigned the responsibility of passing judgment on the “normalcy” (or lack thereof) on Bruno & Co. are themselves more than a trifle unsound. Mr. Schlocker, the lawyer with the handlebar mustache, is a pompous bureaucrat who can’t drop the “procedures and regulations” jazz even as he’s being stabbed to death. Emily, played by blonde pin-up material (and failed contender for the Marilyn Monroe bombshell title) Carol Ohmart, is an empathy-stunted ice queen who looks down her nose from the vantage point of her sky-high heels, a takeoff on the independent woman who puts herself (and her career, no doubt) above her quest for a man and a family, who lacks the maternal nurturing demeanor and hides a repressed nymphomaniac just beneath the surface, and whose imbalance is visualized by her reckless swerving from side to side as she drives into the picture. And then there’s Peter, implicitly trusting, non-judgmental, and innocently accepting of the Merrye clan’s quirks; he bumbles through the film obliviously, never doubting Virginia’s goodness and purity until she waves twin knives in his face. Love interest Ann is a foil to Emily, meek and mild and wholesome even when facing amputation. For all their status in the outside world, they are, within the confines of the Merrye house, exposed for their own oddness. On the bell curve of normalcy, which is probably more accurately defined as a superficial lack of deviant characteristics, they certainly find themselves within the range of social acceptability, but they are more so caricatures of normalcy than actual representations of it. Which is, I believe, indicative of what Hill is trying to say.

Spider Baby, in true horror movie form, delivers comeuppance to the “bad” characters while delivering the “good” intact from their evil. Mr. Schlocker is messily eviscerated for his insincerity, and his dedication to order and proprietary matters over the individual (making him the spokesperson for fascism, communism, and corporate dehumanization). Emily is disemboweled by basement dwellers because she is unabashedly sexual, un-femininely aggressive and dominant, and she prioritizes independence over domesticity and exhausting devotion to her offspring. Bruno, Virginia, Elizabeth, and Ralph are the failed results of the post-’50s social experiment known as the non-traditional family, too wild to live in ordered society. The children are free, they are unapologetic, and they are not self-conscious enough to feel shame for their misconduct; they are volatile, in contrast to the whitewashed stability of the All American Family, and they literally explode.

Only Peter and Ann, by virtue of their ingenuousness, are allowed to escape, the paragon of the fifties paradigm, settling down at the end of the film with their child and their white picket happiness. Of course, the ultimate suggestion, whereby their seemingly normal daughter eyes a spider with a familiar glint in her eye, is the film’s final rejection of the American Dream, that which is elaborately and beautifully constructed but which, in the end, possesses all the gossamer fragility of a spider web.