'Gender Morphology' in Kitchen Sink by Alison MacLean (1989)

The film begins as a woman cleaning her sink comes across a dark hair protruding from the plughole, pulls at it, and gradually pulls out a small hairy creature which lies inert on the floor. Through a series of events this creature is transformed into a full-size adult man, covered in hair. The woman shaves the man, revealing human features and white skin, and puts him in her bed, then when he does not awaken puts him in a plastic bag. However he awakes inside the bag while she is in the bath, and after she frees him with the same razor she used to shave his body, they have a brief and violent struggle which then leads to an erotic embrace in the kitchen. The woman finds a black hair growing from the man's neck, gives it a tug and finds it unravelling just as the hair did from the plughole at the start of the film.

This film articulates a woman's feelings of loss and loneliness in a house by herself; allusion is made to an absent, estranged or perhaps dead lover. The film could be read as another retelling of the old 'woman needs a man to make her complete' theme, but the tale's telling subverts this narrative tradition.

It is a film that lends itself to a symbolic reading, due to its surrealist tone, inexplicable chain of dream-like events and reliance on imagery and mood. The black and white cinematography and the stark mise-en-scene add an expressionist quality to the film, and like German expressionist films such as Nosferatu it deals in the currency of desire, of fear, of lust and disgust on a symbolic level.

The symbolic reading is one in which complicated sexual and psychic forces interact. The visceral, uncompromisingly physical, hairy man-beast that the woman inadvertently brings into existence fills her initially with revulsion and horror, which later develops into sexual attraction. The centrifugal forces of lust and disgust, the focus on physicality and visceral urges, represents a bursting-through from the dark repressed centre of the 'abject', as Julia Kristeva termed it. It becomes the woman's world. This is emphasised by the structure of the film. Mundane interruptions (a girl guide knocking at the door, the phone ringing)are not inserted as reassuring reminders of an externally-located reality. By their banality and irrelevance they focus attention on the more real, yet surreal, world of the woman's emotions and the physicality that is the narrative and visual focus of the film. We are made closely aware of the woman's emotional reactions to the events that take place by frequent close-ups of her facial expressions, and the music builds a sense of heightened drama. The preoccupation with the corporeal (excessive hair, the textures of skin, the shock of gushing blood when the razor slips, guttural noises instead of speech, 'primal' emotions such as lust and horror) reinforces Kristeva's recommendation that feminism re-centre the abject, the bodily, as central to not only womens' experience but that of all of humanity. Yet the film transcends easily-made binary oppositions of female-as-bodily.

The beast-man is himself configured as a parody of stereotypical masculinity - muscular, hirsute, inarticulate, a comic-grotesque 'other'. The film situates man-as-object, woman-as-subject in a subversion of the norms of classic Hollywood narrative. Woman 'creates' man; she transforms him from a wild beast into the image of a human male. She is the subject to his object. Yet the film complicates thhis easily-exploited paradigm of binary oppositions (whatever they may posit male and female) - man is incoherent, bodily, instinctive - but so is woman. When the the man touches the woman's hair and begins to caress her, she responds, and her responses to the events of the story are 'gut' reactions. Her world in the story is one of physicality and instinct. Yet, the film does not easily slot into psychoanalytic paradigms either.

The shaving sequence could be read as a parody of what the Victorians thought of as woman's 'civilising influence'. Woman shaves away man's animalistic image to reveal a smooth-shaven human skin. She un-beasts the man, makes him into an 'acceptable' image and also into an object of desire. This too is a subversion of the strategies of classic cinema narratives which 'make' women into sex objects. It seems that the film's focus has moved away from the dark centre of the abject as the man and woman embrace in the kitchen.

However, this whole process is subverted when the woman's exploring finger discovers a fat black bristle emerging from the man's neck. She tugs at it, and the process of unravelling, of drawing out some dark unknown entity, begins all over again as the hair grows longer and longer. The film ends with a keyhole mask of the point at which the hair is leaving the man's skin, and the close focus is immediately reminiscent of the plughole at the start. In this cycle of excavation, the abject cannot be suppressed.

AM 1997