The Creature from the Black Lagoon

Clover's work on urbanoia in the horror film provides an interesting look into The Creature from the Black Lagoon. From the outset, the film provides an obvious binary between rural and urban. Urbanity, signified through David, Mark, and the rest of the crew, goes forth into the Lagoon, intent on a "revenge" of sorts against the wild, rural, Gill-Man. The creature has claimed the lives of several assistants, and in the name of (white) science, the expedition marches on to find the monster and rebalance social order. It's pretty straightforward: city=good, country=bad. And not only is the country monstrous because it primitive, it is monstrous because it is feminine. The dark, murky, concave lagoon offers imagery that is all to similar to that place men just can't seem to figure out. In this case specifically, the land is the exotic Amazon, full of danger and mystery, just like the female body. It is only through the female character, Kay, that the men are able to enter this unknown world, as the monster only persists because of its fascination and desire for her.

But in some ways, this seems to be too easy of a reading. What Clover also points out is the ways in which the city metaphorically rapes the country in these films, and that was the overwhelming feeling for me when I watched this film. Gill-man, up until the encounter with the scientists, probably was living a relatively peaceful life. It is only when the men literally excavate, or "rape", the land and find the fossil when this calm state is disrupted and the monster starts the attacks. And even in the face of his violent strikes, I really never empathized with the male scientists. It seemed that in preoccupying the narrative with the males in crisis, the film presented a compromising side of masculinity and the faults that arise out of it. David and Mark were so involved in protecting the woman from an unknown threat, a threat out of their realm of knowledge, that they became just as primitive as the monster they were trying to capture. In the last moments of the film, David, the "soft" male of the two, who wanted merely to capture pictures of the creature at the beginning, took a 180 and battled the creature with something as phallic as a knife. By the end, I felt more disgusted with the men of the film than the monster. Representative of civilization, The Creature of the Black Lagoon seems to show the worst side of both patriarchy and capitalism when dealing with the "other".