Page - 52 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

52 Psychosexual development in puberty Synopsis A group of aliens from another star has landed in the (fictional) New Zealand coastal city of Kaihoro. Their goal is to kill everyone there and bring parts of the corpses back to their star for their intergalactic fast -food franchise. They proceed to murder all the inhabitants – brutally and with great satisfaction, slashing their bodies, bludgeoning their heads with a large hammer and pushing the brains spill- ing out back into the skulls. Four agents from the New Zealand government are assigned the task of stop- ping these aliens. In wild orgies of violence, the aliens are mowed down with knives, tanks and automatic weapons. Through this massive use of violence, the government agents finally vanquish them. Discussion The special quality of this film’s ironical slapstick -cruelty gave it cult status – a new genre, so to speak, since it constituted a parody of gory splatter -films. (A “splatter -film” can be described as a horror film where excessive violence and blood are the main focus, with the plot relegated to a subordinate role.) For its fans, the film attained cult status not only through its many bloody effects but also through its offbeat humor. Peter Jackson himself plays a double role in the film – a mad scientist and an extra -terrestrial. For the film’s production, masks were formed out of salted dough and baked in his mother’s oven, and the weapons used were cheap toys. The film was shot with Jackson’s friends on weekends between 1983 and 1987. But how does the film connect to the working through of early emotional con- flicts in adolescence? The main mechanism here consists of depicting threatening and repulsive inner images so that the viewer can experience the requisite disgust and repulsion. In this way, impulses incapable of being processed are instead pro- jected outwards onto another person – a psychic mechanism Melanie Klein called projective identification: in this case, the protagonist’s disgust is now experienced by the audience. We can assume that the objects of fear or disgust are primitive, archaic processes; when in Jackson’s film victims’ stomachs are slashed open and their innards spill out, he renders concrete the young child’s wish to penetrate into its mother’s body in order to destroy new babies there or find the father’s penis it fantasizes inside her body. Since the wish to clear out the mother’s body is so great, only men’s bodies are shown in the film – there is not one woman. This serves to conceal the hidden aggression against the mother’s body. The idea of acquiring the father’s (or mother’s) strength through cannibalism is realized through eating the victims’ brains. The “aliens” represent that split portion of the adolescent’s self which is indeed alien to him. At the same time, the adolescent can distance himself from his fears through macabre humor, reveling in the horror and terror he sees adults experiencing: he is superior to them. The fear of brain damage through masturbation is represented in the film when the inhabitants’