Walter Ong has said that “one cannot utter a sound without exercising power.” In his book Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (which was in turn referenced by academic Cristof Migone in his book Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body), Steve McCaffrey quotes Ong. Apparently there’s an agreement, within at least a certain tradition of sound and oration theorists, that making sound equals exercising power. On this, I wonder if any of these men have ever been made to scream.
Is it really always powerful to emit sound? Even when it’s by the direction, or force, of someone else? The relationship between screaming and power is strong, but it’s not consistent, and it often varies along gendered lines. From Hollywood horror to the auterism of David Lynch, the presence of the female scream signifies a power dynamic – often involving violence – between character, actress, director, and audience.
Thanks to the groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey, the idea of the “male gaze” in film (and beyond) is common vocabulary for more than just feminist film scholars. The way that women’s images are exploited onscreen is a recurring conversation in academic and popular culture. But as some scholars have pointed out, we ought to pay the same attention to the way the sounds, not just the images, of female and femme bodies play into the power dynamics of the medium.
To record sound, just as to shoot an image, is to produce it, not merely reproduce it, for an audience. The methodology of recording, as well as its treatment in post-production, determines what will be heard upon playback. The proximity of microphone to subject, among other technicalities, mediates the sound coming from its originary source. In “Speaking, Singing, Screaming: Controlling the Female Voice in American Cinema,” sound theorist and practitioner Liz Greene describes in great detail the way women’s voices have traditionally been recorded in studio settings. Working under the assumption that women’s voices do not bear the same air support and thus power of men’s voices, microphones would be held closer, thus producing a more intimate sound rather than a more resonant one. In these cases, female voices are thereby not enabled to fill a space – literally, in the act of recording, and visually, within the images to which the sound is synced – in the same way that male voices often are. This produces a prevalence of whispering and otherwise soft-spoken female voices in film and music, which Greene poses as an example of the “male ear” (building on Mulvey’s anatomy of the male gaze) that literally hushes women, preventing a filmic sound and image experience from being overwhelmed by a woman’s voice.
Scream Queen
I would argue that this practice in sound recording and mixing even applies when women do raise their voices in film, particularly when they scream. Perhaps due to the gendering of emotions like fear and vulnerability, the prevalence of male screaming in film seems to be lower than female screaming. Comprehensive data on the prevalence and duration of terrified shrieking in film, by gender, would be enlightening, but in lieu of that, consider that the female victims of classic slasher films have birthed their own genre of actress: the “scream queen.”
Despite the regal title, however, female stars of horror movies are exemplary objects of the “male ear” (and gaze) even when sound is recorded by more equalizing on set rather than studio methods. Female screams, even when shrill and enduring, tend not to “fill” space, either visually or within the soundscape. When a scream is accompanied by a close-up of the actress eliciting it, this tends not to be for very long and is usually bolstered by shots of her running or hiding within wider shots. Within the soundscape, the scream is rarely the only sound, or even a dominant one, for more than a few seconds. Typically, non-diegetic music accompanies scenes of heightened terror, as well as other diegetic sounds like footsteps. Through the post-production sound mixing process, the woman’s scream merely becomes another object in the soundscape. Meanwhile, the monstrous, inhuman killer’s cold silence represents his unshaken position of power.
Of course, the horror genre is by nature exploitative, depicting gore and its auditory counterpart, screaming, for the viewer/listener’s pleasure. The character’s terror is designed to be reveled in. And while exploitative pleasure need not necessarily exist along gendered lines, it tends to be, especially in classic slasher-genre films. Mulvey’s seminal work on the “male gaze” outlines “scopophilia,” or pleasure derived from looking, in its relation to the cinema and gender. The audience, typically presumed male by male filmmakers, marketers, and executives, enjoys the subject position in watching feminine spectacle – an object of their viewing, different from the presence of male actors with which viewers identify – on screen. And though when we usually talk about the male gaze, we’re talking about women being served up in beautiful, sexy images for the erotic pleasure of viewers, that’s not the only flavor scopophilia comes in. If there’s anything that decades of horror movies have taught us, it’s that for some reason (probably better explored by psychologists), audiences love watching a sexy woman get brutally murdered.
Film, of course, is an aural as well as visual medium, and as Liz Greene has quoted Kaja Silverman, the “female voice is as relentlessly held to normative representations and functions as the female body” (63). We film scholars, makers, and enthusiasts have not paid enough attention to this. The topic of “normative representations” is in part addressed by Greene’s analysis of how the female voice has traditionally been recorded, but as for the question of “function,” we might consider a phenomenon of “auraphilia,” a term I use here to describe such function.
All of this is to say that just as an audience may derive pleasure from fantastic and feminized images on screen, they may also derive pleasure from fantastic and feminized sounds, whether or not those images or sounds are ones we think of as pleasant. A feminized recorded voice in film, even and perhaps especially when screaming, exists for the auraphilic pleasure of the privileged, silently listening audience. She is made to scream so they may hear. And when the auraphilia happens in the instance of screaming rather than, say, singing, we ought to ask again: is it really always powerful to elicit a sound? Or is being made to scream in a movie, as a woman or femme, more akin to being presented for the consumption of another?
David Lynch, “Twin Peaks,” and Hollywood Sound Tropes
Liz Greene turns to David Lynch’s films Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet in her exploration of the “male ear” and women’s voices in cinema, but I’d like to talk about Lynch’s series Twin Peaks. Lynch’s body of work, especially the decades-spanning multimedia franchise that makes up the Twin Peaks canon, plays cleverly with sound tropes and technique, as well as the wonderfully messy dichotomies of masculine vs. feminine, active vs. passive, and good vs. evil. His use of all of these elements is complicated, ambiguous, and multivalent, which makes it an interesting case study for our purposes. It is not immediately clear if the many instances of women screaming in Lynch’s work simply reproduce sexist Hollywood tropes, call our attention to them, or truly subvert them.
The series is anchored around the murder of well-loved high schooler Laura Palmer, known in town for her charity, warmth, and beauty. Through the testimonies of her friends and neighbors, we come to understand her as a paragon of goodness that exists/existed adjacent to extreme evil, situated similarly to the town itself. Violence against women is a central theme in “Twin Peaks,” including the suffering and death of Laura as well as several other female characters. The nature of this violence is very different from that in a slasher film, wherein female characters tend to be so thinly written so as to keep the audience from developing much empathy for them and thus being able to enjoy the violence, rather than be horrified or saddened by it.
Compared to classic horror and other cinema as indicted by Mulvey and my own analysis, the role of women in “Twin Peaks” is more ambiguous. Female bodies are not hacked up in gory scenes for the spectator’s horror-pleasure; in fact, most of the truly brutal violence happens off-screen. Also, “Twin Peaks” is an incredibly slow show, allowing us to spend far more time soaking in the atmosphere and learning about the wide cast of characters than in moments of intense violence. So while violence against women is prevalent in the show, it’s not really offered up as a pornographic sort of pleasure.
This, in and of itself, is not necessarily feminist or subversive; depicting violence against women as common or fact, even a tragic and reprehensible fact, doesn’t really do much to topple that power structure. But the nature of some of the most memorable screams in the series suggest a subversive possibility.
If you’ve seen “Twin Peaks,” you’ll remember the Black Lodge, the strange, spectral dimension where characters’ personality traits – good, evil, active, passive – are inverted. Laura’s doppelganger, unlike that of other characters, does not escape the Lodge to wreak havoc on others. It’s more a manifestation of madness than evil.
Real Laura is dead when we first meet her, and though we hear of some painful moments and confessions through other characters, she does not get to express her anguish before the audience. Even in a flashback to her murder that takes place in the second season, we only see her face in flashes – and its expression, more crazed than afraid or in pain, suggests a switch to or melding with her doppelganger. We do not see or hear Laura suffer the way we might expect.
Laura’s doppelganger, however, makes herself heard. In the last episode of the original series, regular Laura, trapped in the Black Lodge, says to Cooper, “See you again in 25 years. Meanwhile…” Some time later, he enters another room in the Black Lodge and Laura’s doppelganger, distinguished by her whitened eyes, picks up where she left off. “Meanwhile…” she repeats, then commences screaming. The screaming is more terrifying than terrified, seeming to express a kind of anger or frustration rather than fear. It is high-pitched and grating, and lasts twenty seconds. It is both a shriek and a growl, and it is not accompanied by any other sound or score. When it is happening, it is the only sound happening. Laura’s doppelganger stares at and eventually approaches the camera. She continues screaming, mouth agape and cataracted eyes wild, even after Cooper runs out of the room. The scream is intended for the audience as much as it was for him.
We get the sense that the Laura that exists within the Lodge is the spectral part of her, the small force of good that accompanies the great evil. When Cooper asks her if she is Laura Palmer, she says, “I feel like I know her, but sometimes my arms bend back,” possibly referring to the ropes tied around her by her killer. The “sometimes,” however, suggests a recurrence. In one replaying of this scene that happens in The Return, she removes her face to reveal glowing light within. The Laura that exists in the Lodge is the universal goodness trapped within a net of evil. Her screaming double is the inherent frustration, anger, and necessarily failed attempt at agency that comes with being an eternal victim, an eternal site of pain.
But is it really failed? At one moment in the original series, Bobby Briggs, boyfriend of Laura, blames himself and everyone in town for knowing that Laura was suffering but turning a blind eye. She dies out of everyone’s sight and earshot. Laura’s doppelganger, or perhaps the doppelganger of the spectral force Laura embodied, makes us hear her suffering. We are forced to recognize it, and it’s not easily forgotten. It would be challenging to say one might enjoy her scream the way one might delight in the dramatic screams of a horror movie heroine, because Laura’s are so profoundly disturbing. Auraphilia is disallowed. The screams grip the audience in a very particular way and shake us to our core. Female suffering may be a part of life – even a part of nature – but Laura makes us feel it. She makes us just as powerless as she is.
Laura Palmer’s scream is of such central importance to the themes of “Twin Peaks” as a whole, that it is in fact the last sound of the series. At the end of The Return, after traveling through time in hopes of saving Laura from her fate, only to have her sort of disappear from time and memory, Cooper finds another sort of Laura doppelganger, also played by actress Sheryl Lee: a woman who knows herself as Carrie Page. They return to Twin Peaks together and just when we seem to be at a dead end, the other timeline appears to show through: standing outside the house, we faintly hear Sarah Palmer calling Laura down for dinner. Carrie Page, who seems in an instant to remember everything that befell Laura Palmer, screams in horror. The lights go out and the saga is over.
Despite changing the actual events of the timeline, the roles remain the same – even becoming an entirely different person does not spare Laura from being the one who experiences deep suffering. Cooper, despite going to extreme lengths across different universes, is unable to prevent any evil or pain. It seems female bodies (and souls) are destined to be the eternal sites of suffering, the masculine specters of evil unable to be truly vanquished, even if dark doppelgangers are successfully defeated or re-contained within the Black Lodge. It seems to be that the archetypes that make up the world are simply its unchangeable fabric: female suffering, male heroes pursuing good, and hypermasculine evil. None of the three can ever cease to exist – and so, Laura’s scream penetrates universes, an eternal truth.
Making an evaluation of “Twin Peaks” as a sexist, feminist, or somewhere-in-between work is thus not simple. While it certainly paints the universe as dystopian, offering no escape from the horrific ways women are positioned within it, it does so with awareness and certainly does not invite audiences to revel in these horrors the way we might in classic horror films. The viewer is far more likely to be deeply affected by the disturbing and hard-to-forget finales of the original and revival series, both of which are punctuated by screams that linger in memory for years. Chances are, one does not simply turn it off and go to bed. It would probably be inaccurate to describe the series finales as something one “enjoys,” per se. At the very least, we can credit Lynch for repositioning audiences in relation to female suffering, by subjecting them to its horrors, rather than simply subjecting female bodies and voices on screen to a male gaze and ear.
And maybe, for a work of horror, this is enough. Horror fans, writers, podcasters, film critics, academics, and probably your dad have all pointed out that horror, intentionally or unintentionally, is excellent at holding a mirror up to society and reflecting its most salient fears in the form of parable. It might be that a complicated narrative world, in which feminine life is always subjected to suffering, no matter how hard one man tries to change things, is exactly what our society needs to see – as much now as 30 years ago.
