Richard Gartner, PhD -- Cinematic Depictions

Additionally, in none of the films except The Graduate is the woman portrayed as exploiting the boy. Instead, they seem to be loving, concerned, and even self-sacrificing (Tea and Sympathy), or lonely and emotionally vulnerable (Summer of ‘42 and The Last Picture Show), or even saving the boy's psychological life (Tea and Sympathy and Harold and Maude). The relationship with the older woman is portrayed as basically positive for the boy or young man involved, particularly with regard to his developing sexuality. Even in The Graduate, Mrs. Robinson is a mesmerizing siren who, while selfish and vindictive, offers Benjamin an exciting introduction to sexuality.

Yet, if we consider their situations, each of the women is needy and has a personal agenda that influences her decision to have sex with the boy. The women in Tea and Sympathy, The Graduate, and The Last Picture Show have shaky marriages and/or feel neglected and unappreciated. The woman in Summer of ‘42 uses the boy for solace in her grief over her husband's death. While Maude in Harold and Maude seems to be altruistic in relation to Harold, we can think of her as wanting to share her final days with a young man and perhaps attain a kind of immortality by passing her zest for life on to him. These situations are all exploitative to the extent that the women are satisfying their own needs without a considered regard for the possible negative impact of their actions on the boys involved. This will be even clearer in my discussion of maternal incest in the next section.

But even if we accept the premise of each individual film that in the particular situation being portrayed there was no abuse involved, we must also consider the overall effect of film after film in which sex between a boy and an older woman is seen as positive for him. There is no model for a boy in such a situation to feel it is acceptable not to welcome, enjoy, and get pleasure from the relationship. This is the crucial point here: portrayals in this popular medium only support the idea that boys are happy to be offered sex with older women, and never endorse the view that such situations are or can be sexual betrayals.

Maternal Incest in Film
Virtually all films portraying incest involve a boy and a female relative, whether she is a mother (Fists in the Pocket, 1965; Night Games, 1966; The Damned, 1969; Luna, 1969; Murmur of the Heart, 1971; Spanking the Monkey, 1994), grandmother (Midnight Cowboy, 1968, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, 1985); or sister (Through a Glass Darkly, 1962). Father-son incest is alluded to in Primal Fear and its aftereffects are portrayed in The Celebration (see below for discussions of these movies), but otherwise male-male incest does not appear in any popular film I know of, even though it actually occurs more frequently in real life than female-male incest with male victims. Presumably, moviemakers believe audiences will not tolerate male-male incest in a film that is, of course, ultimately made to be profitable.

Mother-son incest is perhaps the most provocative and titillating incestuous relationship (Gartner, 1999). Incoming-of-age movies like those discussed in the previous section, mother-son incest is presented symbolically in the relationships between older women and boys. Certainly the fascination and shock value of these stories is that the woman involved is old enough to be the boy's mother and is often in a position of power and trust in relation to him.

In Murmur of the Heart, a French film by Louis Malle, Laurent, a 14-year-old boy, lives with his two older brothers, his gynecologist father, and his beautiful mother, Clara, who is considerably younger than her husband. The parents lead nearly separate lives, while the older boys are outrageous, indulged, and nasty. These brothers urinate in their mother's sink on one occasion, compare penis size with one another and with Laurent, and take the younger boy to a bordello for a first sexual experience with a woman, which they humiliatingly interrupt. Laurent emulates his brothers when he can. We see him stealing a record from a store, and he is shown with his priest/teacher in a scene that includes an attempted seduction by the priest. In time, Laurent discovers his mother is having an affair.

When Laurent is found to have a heart murmur, he and Clara go to a spa for treatment. In this second half of the film, the relationship between the mother and son is more fully delineated. Clara had married her husband after becoming pregnant at age 16, much to his bourgeois family's horror. She is bored, yet fascinating. We see Laurent gaze at his mother when she is naked in the bathroom. She gets angry and slaps him, yet her messages are mixed. There is abundant seductive energy between the two, and she passively encourages his erotic interest in her.

Clara's lover visits her, and Laurent listens from the next room during their tryst. At the lover's insistence, she goes away with him. Left alone, Laurent carefully and lovingly spreads his mother's underwear on her bed, recreating the pattern of her body with it and then putting on her makeup. He seems to make up for her absence by simultaneously becoming her and making love to her image.

When Clara gives up her lover, Laurent consoles her. Both inebriated, they make love in an extended erotic scene that includes intercourse. Afterward, Clara says it will never be repeated but will always be remembered as a beautiful moment by both of them. Later, Laurent steals out of the room and spends the night with a young girl his own age. In the morning, when he tries to sneak back to his own room, he discovers his father and brothers have unexpectedly arrived. Clara is at first very flustered because Laurent is not there. When he comes in, the father and brothers laugh uproariously, presumably because they assume he's been with a girl all night. After some hesitation, both Clara and Laurent join in their prolonged hilarity as the film ends.

Murmur of the Heart originally caused a scandal in France, where government money for its production was withheld. But it was a success with many critics, who saw it as a refreshingly nontraumatic portrayal of a taboo act. Braucourt (1971) described the movie's denouement this way: "Suddenly, Clara takes this lovesick, confused young man in her arms. What occurs after that happens in the most natural way possible . . ." (p. 48). Afterward, Braucourt continued, "freed of his obsession with his mother, Laurent is also now able to come to terms with his father and his brothers -- with all men, in fact. And, as for women . . . well there happens to be a pretty young girl staying at the spa who has been trying to get his eye . . ." (p. 50).

When originally shown in the United States in the early 1970s and later revived in 1989, Murmur of the Heart was considered a charming and ironic Gallic questioning of traditional ideas about the bad effects of mother-son incest. Darling (1989) called it "wonderful and charming" in New York Newsday (p. 7), while Musetto (1989) wrote in the New York Post that it was an "enticing and invigorating Oedipal comedy . . . [that] deals with [incest] delicately and maturely" (p. 23). Musetto went on to say, "Malle makes it perfectly clear that neither Laurent nor Clara will suffer any long-lasting ill effects of what comes across as indiscretion rather than depravity" (p 23). Keyser (1975) similarly wrote that the incest act "is presented as a positive, indeed a lovely and touching moment in his life, a stage in a natural cycle" (p. 187). Genet (1971) wrote in the New Yorker that it was a film of "perfect credibility" (p. 133), "an affectionate, touching, and unshocking story of altogether accidental incest" (p. 130; emphasis added).

A smaller number of writers questioned this perception. In a mixed review in the New York Times, Canby (1971) called the film "a slick, almost incredibly charming family comedy about a family that isn't very charming" (p. 1). In the movie, Canby said, "the boy possesses his first and dearest love, Mom, and Mom goes on to other affairs secure in the knowledge that she has not only straightened out her son, but won a permanent place in his heart, probably ahead of all women to come" (p. 1). Writing in the Village Voice, Brown (1989) criticized the movie more sharply, calling Murmur of the Heart "a crowd pleaser [that] uses cuteness to make incest . . . look easy" (p. 70). She added that the film "runs from the implications of its choices. The movie's pace is frantic, almost hysterical; the tone is off[,] . . . excruciatingly grating" (p. 70).

In 1996, I led a discussion of Murmur of the Heart for a group of psychoanalysts who work with sexually abused patients. From the perspective of clinicians in the 1990s, even those who remembered thinking the film was delightful and charming when they saw it twenty-five years earlier, the film is dominated by the dark and distressing psychological forces under its lightly ironic tone. The family is disturbed in insidious ways. The parents know nothing about one another's innermost lives and little about the lives of their three sons, with whom the parents have no capacity or inclination to set limits. The sons are out of control and vicious to one another and to the family's servants. Sexuality in its most corrupt and hurtful forms is rampant in the family's life, as seen in the mother's "secret" affair, which is revealed to Laurent and is also known to the servants; in the priest's sexual advances to Laurent; in the brothers' competitive comparisons of their penis sizes and in their rough and humiliating sexual initiation of Laurent. It is even implied in the circumstances of the parents' courtship and marriage when the mother was impregnated at 16 by the father, a much older, established physician. The family's manic denial of its troubled depths is extraordinary.

Malle believed the incest was nontraumatic for Laurent (Chutkow, 1989), and some critics felt this was demonstrated by Laurent's immediately going to bed with a young girl after he commits incest (Braucourt, 1971; Chutkow, 1989). Despite this belief that there was no trauma in the incest he depicted, however, Malle's artistry did accurately convey the restive edginess of a family in which incest occurs, even though his film's light tone seems to have hidden this agitated, uneasy quality from many of its early viewers. The lack of boundaries and limits in relation to all behavior, including sexuality, makes the incest far from the "accidental" encounter that Genet (1971) described. While Lorenz (1985) was right that there is neither force nor coercion in the incest, this is hardly a safeguard from adverse effects. Indeed, boys who know they were excited and willing participants in sexual abuse, or who feel great affection for their abuser, often feel guiltily responsible for what happened (Dimock, 1989; Gartner, 1999). This makes it even more difficult for them to come to terms with it . And Canby's (1971) ironic but telling statement about Clara having won a place in Laurent's heart "ahead of all women to come" has ominous implications for the boy's later ability to form intimate relationships with women. The clinical and psychological literature on both men and women involved in incest as children demonstrates how remarkably difficult it can be to surmount the negative impact of having literally been an "Oedipal winner" and go on to establish other intimate relationships. The character of these clinical accounts (see, for example, Bolton, Morris, and MacEachron, 1988; Lew, 1988; Hunter, 1990; Mendel, 1995; Gartner, 1999), certainly gives the lie to Malle's perhaps frivolous contention, as quoted by de Leusse (1971), that psychoanalysts would lose patients if boys made love to their mothers rather than dream about it all their lives.

In my view, Laurent's flight from his mother's bed to find a willing sexual partner of his own age does not, as Malle presumably intended, show that he had no ill effects from the abuse. Rather, I believe it reveals how disturbed he is by having achieved his erotic desires with her, and by her allowing and encouraging him to do so. These erotic wishes ferment throughout the movie, developing from the usual flirtatiousness between a young adolescent and his mother, through the anxious recognition of her sexual affair, and on to his exquisitely disturbing open desire for her in the scenes where he spies on her in the bathroom, listens to her having sex with her lover, and longingly lays out her underwear on her bed so it looks like her body, then makes love to her clothes.

Seen in this light, Laurent's instantly leaving Clara after the incest to spend the night with a young girl is not proof that he has been freed of his obsession with his mother. Rather, it serves to distract him from his deed and may set the stage for his resorting to sexually compulsive behavior to soothe anxiety in the future, another common symptom of men sexually abused as boys (Lew, 1988; Gartner, 1999). The night with the young girl constitutes Laurent's attempt to cleanse himself and perhaps even to reassure himself that he still has a penis and has not been castrated by the incest. Like many boys, he is rushing to deny any ill effects from premature sex with a woman (Mendel, 1995; Gartner, 1999), even, in this case, his mother. At the end of the movie, the father and brothers laugh applaudingly at what they see as Laurent's sexual coming of age. The irony, of course, is that they do not know that the mother was the partner. When Laurent and his mother join their laughter, they are making a duplicitous decision to deny once again the family's inner distress and confusion.

In Spanking the Monkey, made over twenty years after Murmur of the Heart, maternal incest is depicted in a very different mood. Ray, a college premed student, returns home for summer vacation expecting to leave shortly for a prestigious internship at the Surgeon General's office in Washington. Tom, his salesman father, meets him at the bus and tells him his mother has suffered a severe fracture. To his dismay, Ray is told he must stay home to nurse her while his father goes on an extended business trip. They drive directly to the airport for Tom's departure. Ray protests giving up his internship, but Tom insists it is now time to give something back and sacrifice his plans. Tom hurriedly gives Ray a long list of instructions. Some are about the mother's needs, but, tellingly, many more are about the family dog's care.

The mother, Susan, is portrayed as difficult, intelligent, attractive, bitter, and perhaps alcoholic. The parents' marriage is revealed as empty, with Tom having affairs on his trips and Susan restless, lonely, and unfulfilled. As the summer progresses, Ray does a great deal of physical caretaking of his mother, including carrying her back and forth to the toilet, standing next to the shower with averted eyes while helping her bathe, and rubbing moisturizing lotion on her legs and under her high hip cast. These scenes are increasingly sensual and disturbing as time goes on. He has little else to do, and when he retreats to the bathroom to masturbate ("spank the monkey") after frustrating or angry encounters with his mother, he is consistently interrupted by the dog.

Ray eventually arranges to go to his internship. He can't sleep the night before his departure, and he and his mother watch television together, lying on her bed and drinking vodka and tonic. This leads to a consummation of the erotic tension between them. In the morning, Ray misses his train, and tension erupts between mother and son. Ray speaks to Tom in Seattle, telling him what happened the night before. Susan denies the incest and Tom believes her, protesting to Ray that he "doesn't need" this kind of problem when his business is doing badly.

The tones of Murmur of the Heart and Spanking the Monkey are strikingly different, giving their audiences very different messages about maternal incest. I have commented on the light, ironic tone of Murmur of the Heart, which implied, especially to its early viewers, that somehow the incest was a normal, if unusual, part of growing up for Laurent. Spanking the Monkey has a much darker tone. The dangerous bitterness of the mother, the hopelessness of the father beneath his devil-may-care salesman's exterior, and the desperate and ineffective attempts of the son to save himself from being trapped by the family's dynamics, are all chillingly conveyed.

In both films, the parents are isolated from one another. In each mother-son relationship, the eroticism is mutual but the mother disavows it. The family denial in Murmur of the Heart is also seen in Spanking the Monkey, but its quality is different. In Murmur of the Heart, the family disclaims or minimizes its stresses. Its members seem to believe the picture they present of a spirited, basically unified family. In Spanking the Monkey, the parents also have a relatively happy front, but the mother, at least, is openly despondent about her husband and her life, while the father is withdrawn from his wife and unable to deal with her emotional vicissitudes, not really caring about them except as they impinge upon him. Yet, when the family's survival is threatened by the son's revelation of incest, the mother denies it categorically and the father is relieved to accept her denial and blame his son for creating problems. Unlike Laurent, Ray is furious at his mother. His reality is dismissed and he then becomes suicidal. This chain of events is much more in keeping with what we know happens in the aftermath of incest and sexual abuse. Anger, confusion, even suicide, are likely sequelae, especially when the victim's reality is disbelieved.

Abuse of Boys by Men in Film
Sexual abuse of boys by men is virtually always portrayed in a very different light than abuse by women. In contrast to the sense that women are offering boys sexual education and pleasure, men are usually seen as humiliating and hurting boys through sexual activity. Sexual scenes between boys and men are usually coercive and brutal, often involving outright rape if a sexual act is completed. After briefly considering movies with scenes of sexual humiliation, I will describe three movies in which young boys are raped by men; one in which chronic institutionalized molestation including rape is portrayed; then two in which father-son incest is alluded to, though not actually described or shown; and, finally, an exception to the rule that male-male abuse is always portrayed as brutal and violently coercive.

Sexual Humiliation
Sexual humiliation by older boys is graphically portrayed in numerous movies, often for humorous effect. In the Swedish film My Life As a Dog (1985), for example, a young boy is bullied by his older brother to put his penis into the neck of a glass bottle in order to demonstrate to other children how a penis enters a vagina. The penis gets stuck in the bottle, which has to be smashed to release it, cutting the boy's genitals and making him bleed profusely. The other children are highly amused, and the scene, while conveying one of many poignant indignities the boy goes through, is comic in tone. Similarly, in Porky's (1981), teenage boys are inspected nude, then scared into running outside naked; and in Powder (1995) the albino title character is stripped naked by other boys. I have already described the sexual humiliation of the retarded boy in The Last Picture Show.

In Prince of Tides (1991), a middle aged man is forced to look at his personal history when his twin sister attempts suicide and he is asked by her psychiatrist to help her understand the family history. Caustic and bitter, he says at one point, "I chose not to have a memory." Among many terrible familial experiences, including a seductive relationship with his beautiful mother, there is a shared family memory, never alluded to, of a hideous multiple rape by three escaped convicts of the mother, sister, and brother. The protagonist eventually feels compelled to tell the psychiatrist about these rapes, finally sobbing out the reactions of the 13-year-old boy who never spoke of his violation. (Arguably, he is then abused by the psychiatrist when she starts an affair with him.) It is clear that the rape is but one of many emotional traumas in his childhood, and that his stalemate as an adult has multiple sources in his early familial experiences.