SPOILER DISCUSSION

1.The character title cards serve to split the film into three formally distinct sections which respectively correspond to one of the story’s three primarily female characters: Rose, Joan, Kat. Mapping out the patterns inherent to each of these formal strands lets one parse the films and its deeper meanings.

A. The film starts off with following Katherine as she delves into the portentous dream-like world shown to her by the Devil qua Father figure which guides her down a dark path. This section of the film, oneiric in style, is explicitly unnamed, setting the film’s opaque stage and informing the viewer of the ambiguities and supernatural rumblings lying in wait.

This section continues for a while, showing us the slow-motion idyllic image of Rose first, before then cutting to the first of the three character cards, informing us of Rose as a character after her introduction proper. This choice explains the formal nature of the character-cards: they demarcate the film but only appear once the character they’re naming has been explicitly introduced to the viewer.

Yet, this reading reveals a new mystery: Why does the opening section which introduces Katherine not proceed with her character card and instead segues into “Rose” as the first partition? If we take this logic to its conclusion, it would imply that the entire film up till Kat’s title card (which includes the opening oneiric section) is part and parcel of her respective story: the other two girls — Rose and Joan — become sections with the larger story of Kat.

Thus, we’re forced to observe as all the relevant narrative, visual, and thematic strands are introduced in piecemeal fashion before the mystery underlying their interplay is revealed in this final section. In this sense. Kat’s story is treated as a mystery that can only be understood by looking at the two other girls and the manner by which they engage with their respective journeys.

The importance granted to Kat’s point-of-view is cemented by the shot-choice used for her character when her respective title card shows up on the screen. While the other two girls are framed in close-ups (they are one part of an overarching structure), Kat’s character card introduction uses the backdrop of a wide-shot (she’s the perspective unifying every other strand together).

B. This formal move has another effect in that it transforms the first two thirds of the film (Rose and Joan’s stories) into something closer to the structure of The Godfather Part II: we cut between two persons who are in the same “stations” in life as they interact in distinctive manners to engage with their respective milieus. This juxtaposition is also one that the dramaturgy directly reveals vis-à-vis Joan’s comparison to Rose by the latter’s parents and the manner in which they see/don’t see how the two elder girls relate to one another. The twist that reveals that Joan is literally Katherine ties it all back together by showcasing a future which Katherine could’ve gone down if she had emulated Rose vs. the actual journey she underwent.

C. The importance granted to the girls’ respective formal strands makes their absence from certain scenes incredibly apparent. There are two such evocations which immediately come to mind: 1. Near the 18-minute mark when the camera lingers on the phone after Rose leaves Kat back at the dorm and the 41-minute mark where the camera pushes on the phone after the two girls argue with one another 2. At the 59-minute mark when the Dean and the officers happen upon the bodies of the nurses in the house and the camera arcs around the room without revealing any of the carnage.

At first, these scenes potentially appear to be formal issues, albeit ones that could be explained away through a chronological framing: the first instance is one that we know will feature Kat’s presence in the future as she picks up the call and the second instance is one that we know just featured Kat as she’s left the butchered bodies in her wake; thus, the discrepancy is one unified in Kat’s perspective as the out of joint time is put back into a coherent framework.

But another, and more interesting way of piecing the moments together, is to ascribe them not to any of the girls themselves but to the malevolent evil that haunts Kat and pushes her actions forward. This is that dark specter’s presence and its overall impact on the plot drives forward the mystery, refusing to be neatly demarcated within the structure until Kat’s storyline “begins” and reveals the nature of the pieces at play. In this sense, these two moments are an implicit “fourth” demarcation, one belonging to the specter and not the corporeal girls.

D. There’s a neat visual-tie trick Perkins uses to reveal that Kat and Joan are one in the same: both characters are shot from low angle shots looking up at them, accentuating the shadows on their faces and revealing that the object of their gaze lies below – a Hellish allusion. Meanwhile, Rose is never shown looking in this way; even when her character looks downwards, the camera never accentuates that look with a low-angle shot, choosing to shoot her at a more level, normal manner. This visual parlance is a simple way of establishing unity between the two actresses which play the same character and highlighting the discrepancy by which they see the world when compared to Rose herself.

2.With the formal patterns established, the film’s content takes on a new meaning; the girls’ respective issues all become bracketed through the theme: alienation. This reading explains not only their arcs but the nature of their communicative lapses as well.

A. Rose’s communication is one rooted in the moment with living persons who she finds herself unable to fully open with. The primary parties affected are her boyfriend (Peter Gray) and her parents. In regards to the former, the would-be-father to her would-be-child, she nullifies communication between them, making explicit mentions to her lack of “phone”, a tie-in to the ominous such device that serves as catalyst for Katherine’s journey, and ends the conversation by explicitly telling her boyfriend to say: “nothing.” In regards to the latter party, she chooses to omit the truth of her situation and goes at it alone — an implicit “nothing”.

This turn to omission clarifies her communication pattern; she’s unwilling to allow other people into her system, even going so far as to hide the full nature of her plans to her own friend, operating under the belief that doing so would undermine her plans. In other words, people serve as impediments to agency (most exemplified by the presence of the potential child) and it’s her duty, one that she takes on by herself and herself alone, to rectify as much.

B. Joan’s communication is one rooted in the past with specters that no longer exist that she obsessively longs for. The primary parties affected are Rose’s parents and the missing specter, the “Father” from her past as Katherine, whose call she desperately seeks to channel. She ignores any communication from the members of the former party, good and bad, and takes their presence merely as a sign that her attempts to communicate with the latter party will be made successful.

In other words, people are just a means to an end indexed towards an ideal communication which is prioritized above all, and access to that ideal is the only path Joan can see worth pursuing. This is in stark contrast to Rose’s positioning; Joan is absconding the solace promised by the self qua self for a self justified through the Other, one from the idealized past, which promises to make whole once again.

This also serves to explain why Joan’s sections are filled with flashbacks of her previous encounters, moments that she blames as being responsible for her newfound alienation, which she seeks to “undo” through the ritual process of her past.

C. Kat’s communicative issues are rooted in the future as she seeks to find a stop-gap to the suffering she feels at the loss of her parents, a trauma which she knows is the truth even as she desperately prays for its denial. She is desperate to find a foothold in any space that will offer her the communicative space by which to ward off this alienation.

This is why she takes the words told to her — first the Dean’s request to Rose and then the latter’s warnings about the nurses — and loops through them like mantras; these are the scaffolds she has to use to keep herself up in the space of nothing that she feels is surrounding her.

This explains why she takes Rose’s rejection so seriously: the communication for her is a matter of life-or-death and not just merely a stop-gap to pass the time. Rose is positioned as an idealized image, a girl who has it all and can solve all, and Katherine is desperate for that presence to intervene and make things right, but she’s rejected for trying and treated as nothing more than a nuisance.

It’s no wonder then that with no other persons willing to help her deal with the loss she feels due to her parents’ newfound absence, one which she knows will be permanent, she chooses to take solace in the Devil qua Father who at least talks to her (both through visions and in the commands present in the payphone).

Looking at the situation through the lens of Lacan’s mirror image makes this desperate need for Rose’s approval all the more apparent. With no parents left to help Katherine consolidate her identity, she finds herself completely adrift in an abyss of identifiers and needs someone to help set the stage to stop her free-fall. She looks to Rose to substitute in and fulfill this role, casting the older girl as an angelic figure who would be able to help her label and internalize the right values.^[1] Fink, B. (1997). The Lacanian Subject . In The Lacanian Subject. essay, Princeton University Press.

It’s in this state of desperation, that Rose gives Katherine a warning about Satanic practices which is coded, through this mirror-image process, as a truth to obsessively circle. With this image now cemented, the Devil qua Father can take full advantage and push other images, the orders he delivers over the phone, to create a hellish ideal, a unified “ego”, that Katherine now aspires to. ^[2] Fink, B. (1997). The Lacanian Subject . In The Lacanian Subject. essay, Princeton University Press.

This also explains why Bill’s intervention, his attempt at grafting new “images” to this ego, fail. Any of his words which would challenge her ideas are “too contradictory to fuse in any way”. ^[3] Fink, B. (1997). The Lacanian Subject . In The Lacanian Subject. essay, Princeton University Press. His “intervention” takes place far too late and the words which he utters, the ones which are not immediately discarded, are instead perverted and modified as attachments to the ideal ego that Joan seeks to step back into.

As a visual aside, this makes looking into the way mirrors are used an interesting exercise and a way to contrast the paths of both Rose and Joan via their respective issues; Rose looks into mirrors to affirm herself while Joan’s confrontation with these reflective surfaces trigger flashbacks to the traumatic past which took away the state of union she so desperately wishes to return to. The girls’ relationships to their idealized states are made apparent via this juxtaposition.

3.The use of the head as a motif is done expertly by Perkins here as he codes the image throughout the film’s tapestry. At an obvious level, the head is the mind’s domain and the film — a psychological excavation of multiple persons seeking to traverse this space and find a sense of self — constantly frames the characters’ heads and gives importance to them.

At a more granular level, whenever we see close-ups of the coins which Katherine/Joan use to operate the phone from hell, we see the “heads” of the coins and not the “tails”. The Bramford Logo is also a lone head without a body. These explicit images of the head separated from any visible body, are a nasty foreshadowing for the ultimate ritual by which Katherine summons the Devil proper: dismembered heads must be presented to the furnace for the magic to work.

In other words, the subjective journey through the psyche is rendered literal through its violent, corporeal manifestation vis-à-vis demonic ritual and is foreshadowed through seemingly innocuous images throughout. If not for Ari Aster’s current body of work, Perkins would certainly be first on the leaderboard for horror artist using head trauma as visual and metaphorical tool.

4.The cut back to Rose’s arc clearly informs of us of her communication through omission, as she rejects her boyfriend’s attempts at any rejoinder and terminates the connection fully. We immediately understand the manner in which she’s encased herself and know that while she doesn’t mean harm, her icy manner of dealing with things is alienating in its own right.

She goes to the bathroom and then hears a voice channeling itself through the vents and this alien communication, one that she can’t place but is entranced by, calls to her — a siren song in the halls of the school: her character is one that must, through her own efforts, make sense of the unknown in a digestible manner.

We see her exit the bathroom cast in silhouette — the alienation of the moment has filled her up. Then she slowly walks down to the boiler room. While she walks, the sounds she previously heard get louder but flow into the natural stirring of the environments — pipes flowing and the building creaking — making them increasingly harder to parse and make sense of.

Meanwhile, the camera holds on her as she moves and we see her visage, initially visible to us by the lights in the room, become encased in shadows once more as she gets closer to both the noise’s source and the frame itself: indecipherable communication exists just beyond her purview.

Finally, she looks through the door’s slit and her eyes, the part of her head which is most associated with sensual processing, are lit by the flames of the boiler; her gaze is freed from the grasp of the shadowy alienation and instead made to witness sheer terror: communication has fully broken down into a configuration which she can’t conceptualize at even a basic level. Yet, this is the domain that Katherine now exists on. The younger girl throws her body in possessed manner, a newfound devotee at the altar of the Other from beyond,

The scene is not only wonderful as an eerie sign of what’s to come but serves to juxtapose the asymmetry present in the communicative problems that Rose and Katherine experience and how the former’s expertise in dealing her own problems are rendered useless once the latter’s problems reach a critical tipping point.

5. The second character card, Joan, is introduced at the 29-minute mark. We start on an isolated shot of Joan lying in bed; she’s framed against a blackened wall in the foreground: silhouette by proxy. Then we cut to her head in the lower portion of the frame with her name in the center.

When she goes to the bathroom and looks into the mirror, we get a clear view into her head: she flashes back and sees a gun-shot and a silhouetted figure above her. These figures — an officer and a priest (who will be revealed) — are stand-ins for law and religion — order itself — but are presented as antagonist forces which destroy identity. The hiding of the priest’s identity in silhouette casts him as an analog to the Devil qua Father, two agents who impose images to graft onto one’s ego; but the priest is cast as the problem because he intervenes too late in Katherine/Joan’s adolescence.

The framing of Joan against the mirror introduces another layer to the situation (on top of calling back to the aforementioned Lacanian analysis in Point 2): she stares into the mirror which serves as the audience surrogate, casting us in the same space as the antagonist force presented by the cop; in other words, our demarcation of her identity as good or bad and our journey to understand the nature of her interpellation are cast as acts of violence which only reinforce her alienation.

This movement becomes increasingly layered as we cut to Joan’s backside, see her looking into the mirror, and take on her point-of-view: from this vantage point the priest, shot from below as he looks down (like Katherine and Joan are shot), becomes cast as an enemy imposing himself on us.

This dynamic wherein we switch points-of-views is an extension of the scene in the opening where we see Katherine, in silhouette, staring in ambiguous fashion; we’re unable to ascertain if she’s gazing into the audience or out at the world of the film. Here we’re privy to the way she, now as Joan, looks in both directions and can make better sense of the nature of her perspective.

Thus, the forces of order are revealed to have gained their normative standing from subjective coding: what is good is only good because it’s positioned in such a way to the agent perceiving; there is no “inherent” goodness so to speak which stands outside of these perspectives.

With this interplay established, the choice to shoot the circle swirling in the drain becomes a poignant metaphor for the way identity flows into itself and becomes a kind of impossible void to navigate; the different flows engendered by the different positions one finds themselves in battle against one another until the subject determines exactly what their position in relation to this whirlpool is. The shot also explicitly evokes Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho where the drain becomes a similarly coded symbol and a harbinger of a kind of nihilism as identity is revealed to be an effect of the gaze — perspective coded by power.

Now privy to the swirling desires of Joan, her move to the door to answer Bill’s call becomes ominous; this father figure enters the space cast in silhouette and we’re once again forced to figure out exactly what perspectival space to position ourselves in such as to ascertain where the prevailing sense of doom is emanating from.

The conversation starts with trivialities before Joan breaks it down and probes Bill’s motivations for the apparently kind act. She, like us, can’t believe that someone would show this much goodwill and interest to someone without some other motive.

He uses the moment to segue to a conversation about God and asks if the young woman believes in the divine. She says “No.” and immediately turns her gaze away, but Bill persists: he mentions that he looks for God in “the unlikely things that happen.” It’s this mention of coincidence that pulls Joan’s gaze away from her feet on the floor and back towards the purview of the conversation.

Bill takes Joan’s presence as a “little coincidence” because of how her visage reminds him of someone else, ironically her murder victim and Bill’s daughter, Rose. The perverse, twisted punch-line to this whole bit is his declaration: “I guess I saw God in you.” The vessel of the Devil responsible for the trauma and violence that his family is still going through is identified, by him no less, as the marker of the Divine.

But the genius of the narrative is that at this point in the film, we have no reason to think that Bill is the innocent old man we come to know he is, and Joan’s questions to him regarding his wife turn the situation into a tense moment where the threat of violence looms. The trappings of the scene — a nude young woman and an older man imposing in her space while his wife is asleep — call to mind tropes associated with sexual violence and coercion, and there’s a kind of impulsive movement on our part to fear for Joan in this situation; after all, why would any man force himself into the room of a young lady who hasn’t even had the time to dress? We become tense for Joan when in reality we should be scared for Bill.

Finally, he leaves and the ominous score comes back; this informs us that our deduction up to the point is wrong; evil has not left but is now free to roam the surroundings; but we’re left in the dark as to why this is the case. Then we cut to black once again. It’s a poetic capitulation of the scene, playing with both first time viewers and those coming back to investigate the breadcrumbs on further rematches.

Additionally, at a more visual level, explicitly in relation to the blocking, the conversation demonstrates just how alone Joan is. The shots where Bill talks feature him in the background and Joan’s shoulder in the foreground, often blurred out and used as a type of demarcation within the frame; he is always aware of the subject he’s speaking to as he tries to include her within the conversation. However, the shots where Joan is the focus never include Bill; he does not exist in her world as anything else than a tool meant to help her get to the next location on her journey; he looks at her and tries to understand her but she rarely meets his gaze, choosing to look away and focus on her own desires.

Furthermore, the conversation also demonstrates the fluid nature of the film and the manner by which it fractures its chronology to build up connections. There’s a key moment, right on the mention of belief in God, where Joan chooses to stare at her feet which triggers a cut to Katherine’s feet in a bath-tub. Initially, due to our lack of context regarding the underlying events of the film, we take this shot of the tub to be tied to Joan’s previous excursion in the bathtub. Perkins uses the bathroom setting here as a kind of visual trick to keep us from putting all the pieces together.

But then at around the 61-minute mark, during Kat’s relevant section, we see that these are Kat’s feet and the camera pans along the bathroom walls to a reflection of the Devil qua Father. In other words, the connection to God is one that Joan immediately ties to her past, a past wherein she discarded her faith for the immediate comforts promised by the Devil. God is coded as the Devil vis-à-vis her memory and the relevant connections she makes among them.

6. After the conversation with Bill, we cut back to Rose dealing with the aftermath of Katherine’s excursion to the boiler room and the visual syntax of the film becomes more pronounced: now Katherine and Rose are never clearly present within the frame at the same time; the connection between the two girl’s is absolutely shattered as Katherine has made her ultimate choice.

Katherine calls Rose out for the latter’s choice to trick her parents and repeats Mr. Gordon’s warning. The score becomes more ominous as there’s a sense of unease building. Katherine chooses to admit that her parents are dead and then, in response to Rose’s admonishment of the statement, decides to tell the older girl that she “smells pretty.” The whole conversation is off the rails and there’s no longer a consistent logic amongst the parts; this is just Kat going through the motions, repeating the lines from the day in haphazard manner as she’s now secure in her decision to align with the Devil. This is affirmed in the most heinous of senses when she responds to Rose’s comforting words with a warning: “No. You had your chance.”

As a type of counterpoint to the scene preceding it, one that we know occurs chronologically later, we can see the start of the alienation that defines Katherine/Joan. In both scenes, a member of the same family (Rose/Bill) attempts to reach out to the troubled girl and are rebuffed as she no longer desires human companionship.

The aftermath to the confrontation between Katherine and Rose is one that lets us know terrors await. The older girl, smartly at that, chooses to not ignore the younger girl’s curse and instead secures herself against the threat by putting on a light and blocking her door.

We see a push-in on the phone again, the sign of things to come; it’s power now calls the camera towards it.

Then we get a counter-point to the opening: Katherine’s arms are no longer outstretched towards prayer and connection and her sleep no longer allows her to journey to the dream world; instead, she finds herself living in a waking nightmare as her body contorts under the sheets. The spectral has now been fully rendered into the corporeal.

7. It’s no wonder then that this moment precedes the moment where Joan learns that Bill is none other than Rose’s father. This is the moment within the film where the shoe drops and the audience immediately understands that the film up to the point has been split between two points in time; chronology becomes split and there’s an awareness that death is about to take/has taken Rose.

The moment uses all the formal tools built up to hammer home the point and let us know that Joan was the malevolent presence this whole time. She sees the photo and is shot slightly from below. She goes into the bathroom and is isolated in the frame, completely alone. Here, she can hardly hold in her reaction, the giddy joy she feels at having spotted this “little coincidence”, and is framed from a more exaggerated low angle accentuating her perversity. She goes to the mirror and stares at the reflection and we learn that her current identity, that of Joan, is not a tie into the holy martyr; instead, it is nothing more than a stolen moniker taken from a nurse who Joan has brutally murdered.

The use of the mirror in this fashion makes its connection to identity violently explicit. Joan believes that identity is fungible; it’s a good that can be traded for something better. In this case, Joan seeks to cash in her role as Joan for goodwill so she can take the lives of Rose’s parents this time as part of the ultimate trade for the unholy companionship of her past. The contradictory images of the mirror-stage are traded for images that fit in better, allowing access to the ideal ego she aspires to. ^[4] Fink, B. (1997). The Lacanian Subject . In The Lacanian Subject. essay, Princeton University Press.

The scene ends with Joan’s conversation with Linda (Lauren Holly).

The scene is nicely set-up in a cloud of smoke, as the engines of the car release plumes which fully envelop the vehicle where the confrontation will take place. Here, Linda shows her face for the first time. Her conversation with Joan is one-sided as only she speaks; meanwhile, the characters are never framed together, reinforcing that this is a monologue and not a dialogue.

She chastises her husband for his stunted emotional reaction to Rose’s death; he’s stuck in time and sees “God” in everyone, seeing his daughter’s presence everywhere. Meanwhile, Linda is unable to see this. If seeing Rose is a gesture of faith, Linda is a non-believer.

She recalls an instance where this spiritual recognition took hold of her in the past, but the ambiance becomes increasingly eerie, connoting the singular moment as one of terror; the exception to the rule becomes a specter which haunts as opposed to a foundation for something larger and more meaningful; this will be the manner by which Joan experiences her own attempts at finding the solution to her alienation again; the moment has passed and she will never find the peace she so desperately seeks again. But this truth is one we’ll only understand at the film’s end, once the visceral horror has ceased.

Linda looks at Rose and goes against her husband’s words: she can’t see Rose in Joan at all; the two older girls’ identities are not equal in this instance. The moment intensifies the dread but also serves to further the juxtaposition between Linda and Bill’s manners of interpellation in relation to loss: one either sees their loss in new forms becoming open to everything or one maintains their loss as an absence which can never be fulfilled again. Joan’s fate is neatly portended by this logic and her devastating final fate is sealed.

8. Katherine’s strange behavior at the 51-minute mark is the perfect counter-point to her actions at the 14-minute mark. In the latter section, she oddly organized her spoons and there was a feeling of discomfort bubbling under the surface. But in the latter moment, this feeling has become fully actualized and she’s no longer to restrain with the veneer of civility she previously possessed. She’s unable to say grace and instead vomits everywhere: the unholy prevents her from doing anything related to its opposite.

The set-up leading up to this moment establishes the stakes. We have just cut from Joan’s encounter in the diner where she looks at a knife which the camera lingers on, establishing a relationship between girl and sharp tool; then we see her use it to decapitate Bill and Linda. This moment starts with Rose opening up a drawer filled with such instruments and we can surmise she used the same to cut off Rose and the nurses’ heads. Perkins chooses to show and imply instead of revealing outright which augments the tension, but the manner by which he does as much serves as another clue that Rose and Joan are one in the same.

Thus, we know that the violence that was foreshadowed in the first grace will come to roost after this second one is (in)completed.

The aftermath to the scene hammers this despair home. Katherine enters almost a frenzied state, holding onto some final hope: Gordon will come back and let her live at the school and everything will be fine. But this wish is immediately quashed. Her parents are confirmed dead (even though the words of the call are not made explicit) and Gordon is coming to deliver the bad news. Finally, the Devil’s augury becomes reality and Katherine learns that his words were the “truth” the whole time.

She fully breaks, cries, and sinks fully into the dark comforts of the Devil qua Father. She becomes fully isolated in the frame as the other women leave her be.

It’s telling that the nurses tell Rose to dig “down to the Earth”, a hellish metaphorical provocation given the context, not once but twice. The path to hell will be paved and Katherine will finally walk it.

9.The moment before we finally enter the “Kat” portion of the film nicely ties us back to the opening moments. At the 9-minute mark, Katherine goes out and is framed near the trees which serve to separate her from everyone else. She doesn’t see her parents and cries.

Near the 58-minute mark, Rose, now tasked to go and dig a path, goes by the same trees and is isolated from everyone else on campus. It’s fitting that she does this after Katherine has shed a tear at the confirmation of her parent’s passing.

Now the film has entered back into itself and its nature can be made explicit.

10. Katherine’s section is, as evidenced by the opening minutes of the film, the most surreal and dream-like and Perkins uses it to fill in all the missing contextual clues to make sense of the pieces he’s scattered through the previous two sections.

A: First the section establishes the tone, a final confirmation to us of the primary themes. We see Katherine’s feet become the devil (Point 5), see her finally going to the payphone in the hallway and answer it; she hears the voice of the Devil, gravelly and distorted as though it doesn’t belong; it tells her that her parents are not coming and then orders her to “kill all the cunts.” This latter statement sticks out given the feminine focus of the film.

The score becomes increasingly intense and overbearing, overwhelming all other sounds. We see students around the cafeteria, including both Rose and Katherine, isolated amongst one another: alienation reigns supreme.

B: Then the surrealism begins to get more intense. We see Katherine going to her piano performance and see the camera push in on her as she stares at “something” in front of her; the darkness is here and she’s on a crash collision with it.

Her performance itself becomes incoherent. We see her play the piano, but it’s sounds don’t come out; only the score remains. Then, she disappears beneath the piano, as if pulled by some unseen force. But an immediate cut afterwards shows her back at the piano; did she really disappear or was it her spirit fading from her body? The line between the real and fantastical is breaking and Katherine’s grasp on the world around her is no longer in her own grasp; she’s struggling to keep a hold of herself.

C: Then she sees the Devil qua Father fully rendered and we’re shown that the force she’s seen is none other than this. The score takes a partial backseat as Rose’s rumors about the Devil worshipping nurses plays as a voice over: this is the truth that circles the cerebral drain of Katherine’s mind, the only order she can hold onto as everything else has slipped away.

We see her looking at Rose’s photo image again and her uncanny attachment to the older girl is revealed to be a double-edged sword; Rose’s words, proclamations from an idealized figure, become the mantra which grants ultimate power to the hellish visions that plague Katherine; it’s no wonder that she puts all her faith in this malevolence.

D: Then, the ultimate call is made by the figure. Perkins finally reveals a sign behind the phone that affirms the isolation at play. It warns those using the device to limit their minutes for others who may be waiting. But no one is “waiting” behind or for Katherine except for the Devil, so she doesn’t have to limit the minutes of her call; this voice is the only thing she hears anymore and she follows its call down to the basement as it promises to give her a new home, one at the school — a perversion of the Dean’s opposite affirmation.

We see this call answered: Katherine butchers the nurses and prepares for her final victim: Rose.

E: Now we return to the Apollonian moment: Rose gets her picture taken, the image which Katherine desperately wishes to incorporate with her own identity, but its truth is revealed once the shot finishes and we see Rose’s face become a frown; she is not the ideal figure but is merely a young woman playing a temporary part.

Back in this section’s “present”, Rose goes to the bathroom and has her period. She thanks “God” for this failure in conception, the lack of a life being born, because of the freedom it allows for her. But her enthusiastic enunciation is interrupted. She realizes that another presence, one which she assumes is Katherine’s, lurks waiting for her and carefully exits the bathroom, the location where we first met her and where she heard the rumblings in the boiler room. She leaves this room of mirrors which is located in the hallway where the ominous payphone stands.

We see her silhouette walk through the hallway as she’s’ drawn forward by what she thinks is Katherine. It’s at this point where The Shining allusions reach fever pitch: we’re in a hallway with a character walking down to help someone who they can’t see and then they meet their untimely end.

Even the sudden manner by which Katherine seemingly comes out of nowhere to give Rose the final blow calls to the manner by which Jack Torrance does the same.

There’s a wonderful series of silhouette shots here as Katherine is now fully consumed by the darkness of the evil calling to her.

F: Then her darkened body finally sees the light, the shimmers provided by the Devil through the furnace which powers the school, the sight of her “home.” She sits by this unholy luminance with her sacrifices by her side: three dismembered heads.

The officer from her vision (as Joan) now appears and we see Katherine raise her hands in response to his demand and act in a fully disembodied manner: she is the nightmare now. Now the words circling her mind are: “Hail Satan!”

It’s during this tense confrontation that the score becomes multilayered: the cop’s commands are distorted and feel out of place, the eerie ambiance accentuates the heinousness of the moment, piano keys can be heard in reference to Katherine’s performance, and Katherine’s own words start as demonic whisper before becoming a full-on howl.

Another black cut and we’re back with Joan and know with no room to doubt that she is none other than Katherine. The score becomes more ominous and it’s clear that she’s taking this newfound coincidence of finding Rose’s parents in the wild as a sign that her (un)holy Other is coming back for her. After brutally murdering the couple ferrying her across the way, she cleans herself; the score transforms and feels both ethereal and foreboding: the moment has come.

Another cut to black and we’re back to the source of Joan’s trauma: the procedure that took her peace away from her. This perversion of the exorcism ritual is truly special in the slew of possession films following The Exorcist in the manner that it subverts the very idea of possession and its relation to normativity. Instead of the spiritual intervention being seen as ethically necessary as a type of cleansing of evil, it now becomes cast as evil itself, a maneuver which strips away from a young woman the only connection that she perceives as worth of having, a relationship which she’s quite literally sacrificed all her ties to humanity for.

Finally, the film begins to cross-cut between Katherine and Joan, showcasing they are part and parcel of the same fractured person, one longing for wholeness in an abyss which threatens to eat them whole.

The priest, coded as silhouette in Joan’s earlier flashback, is now a figure of “light” as we can identify him as the “moral” one in the situation with our bearings firmly established. The dark figure, the Devil qua Father, shows up and then disappears forever.

11. Understanding the nature of the ending requires understanding the two Apollonian images that it plays around with. The first is that of the Devil qua Father, the darkness that promises wholeness in the place of the lost family. This figure is a shadow, a specter that exists as seemingly natural force that draws one forward in its allure, grounding them within itself as opposed to the pull of the world around.

The second is that of Rose, the one who smells “pretty”, the perfect young woman who should serve as a role model. If the Devil is the one who stands in for the Father, then Rose seems an analog for the Mother and Katherine’s journey is one that oscillates between which of these ideals to choose and crystallize her identity around.

Yet, what the film emphasizes through its respective choice of images for both of these representatives is the logic of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Hedgehog Dilemma. ^[5]Schopenhauer, Arthur. “A Quote from Parerga and Paralipomena.” Goodreads, Goodreads, www.goodreads.com/quotes/8103201-a-number-of-porcupines-huddled-together-for-warmth-on-a. Accessed 11 Apr. … Continue reading

“A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another. In the same way the need of society drives the human porcupines together, only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature. The moderate distance which they at last discover to be the only tolerable condition of intercourse, is the code of politeness and fine manners; and those who transgress it are roughly told—in the English phrase—to keep their distance. By this arrangement the mutual need of warmth is only very moderately satisfied; but then people do not get pricked. A man who has some heat in himself prefers to remain outside, where he will neither prick other people nor get pricked himself.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

Rose and the Devil become coded as pathways to achieving ideal warmth which promises not to hurt oneself. Unable to deal with the loss of love, Katherine desperately seeks a solution that will give her a warmth which won’t disappear like her parents. What she actually needs to understand is that such loss is an inevitable part of the human condition. But she’s young and lost in a sea of pain and no adult figure gives her that consolation.

She latches onto Rose as an idol because she believes that the older girl can offer her the warmth she’s missing; she’s “pretty” and exudes it even through her “smell” so she can act as a balm for the pain. This explains Katherine’s obsessive desire to be taken care of by Rose, one that Gordon catechizes as such through his delegation of this task.

But this perfect distillation of Rose, an image that even the film initially longingly renders as Edenic, is anything but. We learn that Rose faked the smile for the picture; she played a role for a shot but there are troubles looming underneath, human worries which are temporarily cast aside for a moment of control over the self; in other words, the Apollonian is a veneer for the Dionysian that can be instantiated but is never the truth in end of itself; it’s the interplay between these two orders that engender humanity and explain the push-and-pull dynamic espoused by Schopenhauer; we can warm one another because we have passions within us but as imperfect creatures we can’t sustain these furnaces forever and have to “refuel” them from time to time by taking care of ourselves and our own issues.

In Rose’s case, her possible child is the issue that plagues her mind and usurps her ability to care for Katherine, to provide the warmth the young girl so desperately craves and believes that the older girl, the one who she thinks is perfect, can provide.

But by judging Rose by the yardstick of perfection, Katherine damns the older girl; a piece of gossip becomes gospel and a temporary moment of abandonment becomes cast as an ultimate betrayal which can never be forgiven. This is a result of the fetishization of the Apollonian. Katherine would rather retreat into this world through the pathway offered by the Devil, a counterpart to God proper, than deal with the contingencies of life which might “poke” her and cause her pain again. ^[6]Saurette, P. (1996). ‘I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them’: Nietzsche, Arendt and the crisis of the will to order in international relations theory. Millennium: Journal of … Continue reading

However, this retreat is an impossibility and Joan’s attempt to go back to this state is rendered impossible by nothing more than God being channeled through humanity; the exorcist ritual transfigures divinity through corporeality and returns Katherine/Joan to a state where she can find warmth through humanity once more.

Yet, by this point, Katherine has tasted what she thinks is perfection and refuses to compromise. It’s the Apollonian order or bust. Given the chance to connect again, this time with Rose’s parents (Bill in particular), she absconds their help, murders them, and tries to use this newfound rejection of humanity to be warm once again. But only the cold awaits. There are no easy answers to parse in the world of humans, a world which Joan/Katherine has rejected and refuses to live within.

The comparison to Bergman becomes clearest here, especially in relation to one of his major works: The Seventh Seal. If God exists and is supposed to be all-loving, then why is there such a silence? Taking the Devil as a kind of analog here, the answer becomes clear. If the supernatural was to intervene and provide a whole unity, life itself would be worthless because it would entail a rejection all that would make life what it is; it’d be taking the warmth of the hedgehogs without having them around — a nihilistic gesture that undermines its own basis.

If life is worth living, it is because of the humans around that provide warmth, different variations of heat based on proximity and time. The reason that warmth can be appreciated is because of the cold generated by its absence and the possibility of its renewal. If it was always perfectly warm, one would need to do nothing; the hedgehogs would be perfectly inert and might as well not exist. But if it was always cold, they would perish. Community becomes an answer to this dichotomy, a reprieve from the unending silence of God.

For the one who has rejected the very basis of this idea, there’s nothing left but to scream into the void and die. Katherine/ Joan succumbs to her misery and the film cuts to its final black — the void that is her life.