A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) — dir. by Ana Lily Amirpour
Ana Lily Amirpour's film takes place in contemporary Iran, and has been called the "first Iranian vampire Western." The film centers on a nameless, mysterious young woman; presumably, the "Girl" who does, indeed, walk home alone at night. She dances around in her room, puts on lipstick and eyeliner, before haunting the streets in a black chador, silent and lethal. She flirts with strange, often sexually aggressive men, returning to their homes with them, faking a seduction before baring her fangs and feeding on them, killing them. The film also focuses on a young man named Arash, who becomes involved with the Girl, fascinated and terrified by her, and they embark on a quiet, intimate romance, ambiguous and Lynchian. The film is an exercise in restraint most of all, black and white, unnerving, ethereal music, literal veils and layers upon layers of veiled meaning in eye contact and lingering silences, yet bares its gore when necessary.
Birthplace(s) of Monstrosity
Desire glistens and trembles through this film, unspoken and all the more visceral for it. The inarticulable, intense connection between the Girl and Arash is a source of great tension and self-interrogation. Arash appears as surprised and disturbed by his own desire for the Girl, especially after he comes to realize her violence. In one scene, they sit on his car, overlooking the city, and the dark seems to swallow the world whole, so that only their expressions, their eye contact and lack thereof, their selves in relation to one another, to space, remain. Desire for a non-normative femininity, particularly in a repressive, airtight, conservative culture, resembles, of course, the desire for the abject. He is, as Kristeva defines it, "drawn towards the place where meaning collapses" (Kristeva 2). The trope of girl-as-victim, femininity-as-victimhood, dissolves and with it so does Arash's sense of security, masculinity. Yet he is entranced by the abject, realizes, perhaps, that the abject can own itself and does not exist for his pleasure or accessibility.
Visible and Invisible Monsters
Monstrosity is subverted and satirized, reclaimed and reworked in this film. The Girl feeds solely on men, her vampirism subversive in this way. Creed's text, the seminal work definining the monstrous-feminine in the horror film, focuses almost wholly on lesbian vampires in film, and Amirpour upends the demonized homoeroticism that the usual queer female vampire takes on. Rather, the affective is made anew here, worked to instigate a clever monstrosity, upheaving the abject conception of female blood and its expulsions. In Re-Reading the Monstrous Feminine, Elizabeth Cowie writes, "Affects are our experiences of the world, how we are touched by the world, viscerally as hot or cold, or fainting at the sight of blood, but also as we are touched by the coldness of a stare or the warmth of a gaze that we receive" (Cowie 74). Indeed, the affective is a mode of monstrosity that lives in the body and its various secret exchanges, but in this film's case, the vampire devours the bodies of the usually non-abject, those of heterosexual men, thus reserving her own abjection and affects, her monstrosity claimed rather than enforced. The Girl targets men that, in some ambiguous way, trespass on her sense of morality and self, usually those who inflict violence upon sex workers and work to endanger women. Yet she does not need to explicitly articulate this preference; we see its threads connect all on our own. Thus monstrosity boils over most visibly in the greasy, aggressive behavior of these men, their figures in the dark certainly appearing like monsters, as any young woman walking alone would know, and yet their monstrous shapes do not go on unchecked, for once.
Blood also seems to be a monster in its own right, in this film. Yet the hallmark of blood-as-monstrous, of most vampire films and their visual, colorful power, seems to live in seeing the red. Yet in this film, the black and white aesthetic obscures any view of that symbolic, violent red. Creed argues that the vampire is an example of the "archaic mother-figure, giving and taking life, living for eternity as herself" (Pisters 133). The Girl spills blood with her hunger, yet the blood appears as black. The Girl refuses the maternal archetype, ravages the "mother-figure," her vampirism colorless and therefore abject in its invisibility, its inability to be witnessed or indulge voyeurism. The Girl thus challenges certain essentialist aspects of Creed's notion of the monstrous-feminine, unsealing the concept of femininity, endowing gender with the possibility of ambiguity, motion, fluidity. The erasure of binaries that occurs here, the resistance to Freudian views of the feminine-as-maternal, blood as intrinsically menstrual, is fascinating and powerful. The Girl becomes the monstrous, enters its borders willingly, and trespasses even those. She becomes the monster so as not to be eaten alive by them. In Amirpour's aesthetics, morality is ambiguous, and thus monsters' origins, meanings, "reasons," are ambiguous or even unimportant. The liminal is all there needs to be, the ontological, constant "deconstructiveness" Cohen describes monstrosity as.
