Michelle Citron's Home Movies and Other Necessary
Fictions, the fourth volume in the Visible Evidence series, is a most powerful
and painful text. At its core is the story of coming to terms with a terrible
secret, hidden and inaccessible like a germ in the memory. A time bomb waiting
to spill its virulent contents into waking consciousness and illuminate a horror
we refuse to recognize or accept. Michelle drags this secret out into the open
and names it incest, yet she does it in a way which respects the plasticity
of memory, the limitation of words, while all the while pointing to the wisdom
of the body, and the power behind representation. From the title and quotations
preceding the sections to the dialogue between the, personal narrative and the
critique of the medium in the first section, the text is tightly constructed
and on the whole emotionally compelling. Most importantly though, it is one
person's story about a personal holocaust that asks important questions about
the nature of memory, psychosomatic illness, and the sexual censorship in our
culture. It tells the story of incest, so that others can take courage from
that honesty and begin to tell their own stories.
In the first section there is a dialogue between the personal and the social
regarding home movies and their ability to act as surrogate memories for the
family. These home movies "signify..."authenticity": an objective recording
of an actual event captured by the home movie camera" (17). But this is only
part of the story, home movies, more often than naught, record the stories we
want to tell, and leave out those things that we prefer to remain unacknowledged.
"This information outside the frame is a constant reminder that home movies
are highly selective in what they show" (19). In the personal narrative Michelle
lets us in on the techniques she uses in the film Daughter Rite, with faux documentary
and use of these home movies to "bring into relief yet another fiction: the
separation between documentary, experimental, and narrative fiction film" (16).
Her fascination with film as she sees it relates to her desire to become the
father, to control the power of representation, or "stand outside the scene
- in the space of safety ... where (she) can't be touched" (6).
What follows this dialogue is a narrative within a fiction. The narrative. is
in the form of an autobiography detailing the "unspeakable" or nasty horror
of her incest at the hands of her matemal grandfather. The fiction is the story
of two Doras; who function as two parts of a whole sundered by the same nasty
horror. And only when as Judith Herman suggests the ghosts of folk memory tell
their stories can they rest in their grave (3 1) and escape the 'hysterics of
reminiscences' (32). One of the most important passages in the book relates
to the retreat of Freud from his hypothesis concerning childhood sexual assault,
it bears repeating:
Symptoms are signs that
can be read. The are communications of the body that bypass words and
consciousness. It was Freud who hypothesized what was being communicated - information
concerning
childhood sexual assault, abuse and incest. But this theory was too disturbing.
As has been well argued
elsewhere, the implications of his work - the widespread sexual abuse of children
from respectable middle
class families - couldn't be tolerated by Freud or the medical status quo. His
work was met with silence.
No one wanted to hear what he had to say. Freud reinterpreted the case studies
into a theory of the
unconscious that reread the symptoms not of real sexual trauma, but as signs
of repressed fantasies and
desires. The idea became one of the cornerstones of psychoanalytical theory.
Whether you believe Freud
replaced the external reality of incest with the psychic reality of fantasy,
or just expanded his ideas to
include the psychic reality, the consequences where the same. Actual incest
was denied; fantasy much
easier to tolerate than the possibility of widespread incest was accepted (33).
This is not the only time Freud changed
his theories because of potential social distress over sexuality. In both cases
he effectively transferred the responsibility for mental disease from the systemic
or environmental causes to the individual patients unconscious. Wilhelm Reich,
the author of Character Analysis, a psychoanalytic landmark, and one of Freud's
brightest students, was ostracized from the psychoanalytic community because
he refused to backpedal in regard to similar sexual issues, while Freud saw
fit to alter his original hypothesis in deference to social concerns.
These, issues of recognition and disavowal point towards an understanding of
the title, "...necessary fictions that allowed us to see and explore truths
that could only be looked at obliquely" (6). These necessary fictions represent
ways in which in quotidian life we deal with the unspeakable, the paradoxes,
and hypocrisy we encounter as we move through our day. Without which, we would
find socialization intolerable, every eye me met would be a liar, a murderer,
a cheat, or worse. What is important to recognize is that these necessary fictions
are fictions, and when enough stories are told which are directed at pulling
the facade off and revealing the dis?honesty that perpetuates the myth of reality
or truth, the fictions will no longer be necessary. Memory is a plastic entity,
the subtitle of this paper refers to a sensational book that helped to fuel
the debate on recovered memory and it's relation to ritual abuse. "...Absences
and confusions are the hallmark of all remembrances. Memory is an incomplete
and fragile process" (49). The reason it was so easy for Freud to alter his
hypothesis of childhood sexual abuse. to adolescent sexual fantasies rests in
the malleability of the medium. Memory is little understood and less accepted
in waking consciousness as being representative of authentic experience. Michelle
makes it very clear that even though her experiences were "corroborated by family
members" she approaches them (the necessary fictions or stories which connect
the dots of her memory) with a sane pinch of both skepticism and fear." " Their
ambiguity, their uncertainty, should always be honored" (140).
One of the most appealing aspects of the text is in the Necessary Fictions section
where she tells five stories, three of which relate her "body memories" which
brought about the recollection of her experience of incest. In each instance
of psychosomatic illness there is a direct connection to death. In the first
she surreptitiously discovers the immanent death of a friend through AIDS, which
triggers severe asthma. In the second she seeks to kill herself because of the
metaphoric death of name loss because of matrimony. Her only reason for going
through with it is the dream of her grandmother's wish to see one of her grandchildren
married before her death. The third is directly related to her experience of
sexual assault and her inability to tell her story, which translated into fecal
retention.
What is most striking about each is the ending. They each deal with divergent
times in a life. Consequently their observations are tempered with the environmental
influences evident at those moments, The first, which actually relates her coming
to awareness of the incest ends with, 'The story is ... I've been sexually abused
as a child (107). The second details a fear of flight, which through an encounter
with a hypnotist helps to elucidate an unconscious response to the question
of that incest. Her connection to death is traced to her "seamless" relationship
with her Grandmother, it ends with, "The story is...I've been mothered too tight"
(113). This also has a direct correlation to her relationship with her mother,
and the lack of a mother's perspective in the film Daughter Rite. The next relates
her experiences in college, her engagement, and her attempt to kill herself
because of a "nervous breakdown", it ends with, "The story is...I'm crazy" (127).
The story of her sexual abuse is seen in the next necessary fiction. This relates
her experiences with fecal impaction and the secret she could not tell. It ends
after relating the oral rape by her Grandfather with, "There is no story- (136).
The last fiction is as close to a "happy ever after" as one can get in regards
to the subject matter. It ends with an optimism that is probably lost on many,
but nonetheless well established throughout the text.
"The story is..."(140).