[Editorial] I’ve Never Been a Muse Before…’ Female Agency in Sightseers (2012)

This article contains discussion and spoilers for Kill List (2011), Sightseers (2012), A Field in England (2013), High-Rise (2015) and Midsommar (2019).

We are big fans of the Good For Her horror film here at Ghouls, with narratives providing rich female protagonists who find solace and power in the horror they face.

As in this list of good for her horror movies, good for her heroines are fascinating because they are able to be flawed, sometimes immensely so, resulting in some of the most striking imagery and slippery ideology the genre has to offer. Who can forget Midsommar’s (Aster, 2019) picture-perfect closing image of Dani (Florence Pugh), crowned with flowers and a Mona-Lisa-style expression that captures the anguish and dark triumph of her situation? 

Ben Wheatley’s films offer the perfect breeding ground for such imperfect characters. In regularly working with on-screen collaborators Reece Shearsmith and Michael Smiley as well as off-screen with his screenwriter wife Amy Jump, there is a distinct ‘feel’ to a Ben Wheatley film - ready to tell you a joke in one instant and throw viscera at the screen in the next. Wheatley’s work in horror is a morally grey space, but also a predominantly male one, whether in the hit men of Kill List (2011), the war-escaping misfits of A Field in England (2013) or the competing testosterone rage of the men in High-Rise (2015), these are all men out of control. However, this is not to say that Wheatley’s female characters do not possess rich qualities and potential for exploration, as will be explored. It is in Sightseers, however, that Tina (Alice Lowe) takes the central role and becomes the focal point of the journey.

The film follows Tina as she leaves her mother, Carol (Eileen Davies) behind to embark on an ‘erotic odyssey’ with her new boyfriend Chris (Steve Oram). What starts as an otherwise normal caravan holiday is soon interrupted by Chris’ dark impulses, unfolding into a frenzy of jealousy, stolen dogs and murder. A viciously funny comedy, the deadpan performances of both Lowe and Oram, along with Wheatley’s knack for merging genres means Sightseers operates as an excellent example of the collision of comedy and horror. It includes the typical British caravan holiday with quirky roadside attractions alongside a serial-killing odd couple, embroiled in a toxic love story, managing to deliver on both the comic and more gory elements.

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Wheatley’s Witches

While the main characters of Sightseers, Tina and Chris, were created by Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, they sit neatly within the broader world of Wheatley characters. In the Making Of feature on the Blu-ray release, Wheatley briefly discusses how the script captured many of his sensibilities, even though he did not write it and points to the wider idea of Auteur Theory as capturing those elements that a filmmaker is drawn to even outside of his own conceptions, as opposed to a truly singular vision. Amy Jump is credited on the script as assisting Oram and Lowe with bringing the characters to the screen. Although Sightseers is a more overtly comic work than his other horror productions, that same voice is present, weaving the violent and mundane.

The male-dominated spaces of Wheatley horror are punctuated by female characters that are often objects of suspicion and even considered otherworldly. They are given dual roles, with the potential to guide or derail the male characters. Kill List’s, Fiona (Emma Fryer) is arguably the most obvious example of a woman positioned as witchy within the context of Wheatley’s films. Whether carving the symbol on the bathroom mirror, appearing in ethereal fashion below Jay’s window or in discussions of her sex life with Gal (Michael Smiley), she is presented as having abilities and motivations beyond the other character’s understanding. Shel’s (MyAnna Buring) laugh at the climax of the film has prompted some viewers to assume her complicity in the film’s events, an example of a conspiratorial woman responsible for the downfall of a man. An alternative interpretation (and one I align more closely with) is that she is reacting to the sad inevitability of the situation, which also imbues her with a tragic psychic vision that extends beyond the material world.

In A Field in England, there are no women present. Sara Dee is credited as the voice of The Field, again elevating the feminine to more than corporeal. The group do reference women, with Jacob (Peter Ferdinando) stating that their group lacks their ‘civilising influence’. He also confides in Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) his fear that he will be turned into a frog by a woman who has bewitched him. Whitehead clarifies that his infections are due to ‘too much venereal sport’, puncturing the idea of the woman as a witching influence. In his dying breaths, Friend (Richard Glover) insists that a message of hatred is passed to his wife, drawing approval from Jacob. In the absence of women, Whitehead takes on a feminised role, insisting that he will ‘become the field’ and operates as a vessel for the runes O’Neil (Michael Smiley) draws out of him. The mystery around those runes places Whitehead closer to nature and the feminine than the others.

High-Rise, by virtue of being an adaptation, is slightly more difficult to unpick, although the influence that both Charlotte (Sienna Miller) and Helen (Elisabeth Moss) hold over events in the titular building is clear, with both Laing (Tom Hiddleston) and Wilder (Luke Evans) driven to shape their lives around them.

Sightseers centres on Tina as a woman in her mid-thirties, although she clearly suffers from arrested development thanks to a controlling home environment. When the audience views Tina on her own terms, she is a tragic figure, until she begins to find her way in life. The film also offers Chris’ perspective including a vision of her as a vampire, and his dreams warning him of the danger she presents. In Wheatley’s films, male characters lower women to the status of witches due to their own fragility. Although he has already committed several murders that he can write off as necessary actions, Tina’s reckless murder of a runner sees him erupt, declaring her a witch. He states, ‘you did this to me’, abandoning any responsibility for his self-justified murders such as a Daily Mail reading walker or litterbug. 

Writing on Wheatley’s film work, Lowenstein (2016) argues that they ‘constitute a cinema of disorientation: we often wish we could find our way back to the familiar cinematic spaces and genre codes to which we are accustomed, but Wheatley has gleefully erased the map and set the house on fire’.’ This is all the more apt in the case of Sightseers as a road movie in which our central character is on a voyage of discovery from which there is no return. Alice Lowe’s Prevenge, similarly offers a subversive take on the revenge film, furthered by her directing, writing and starring in the film all while heavily pregnant. In both Sightseers and Prevenge, Lowe easily dispenses with the idea that her characters need to be ‘likeable’, instead celebrating their abrasive, difficult qualities. Our sympathy for Tina (and Ruth in Prevenge) is constantly challenged but the humour and dark humanity that Lowe unearths keep us connected to the characters even if at times we may watch them through our fingers in discomfort.

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A Brilliant Holiday

Throughout the course of the holiday, Tina grows in confidence with her ties to home becoming ever more remote. At the outset, she seeks closeness despite her mother’s clear aggression towards her. Her mother attempts to keep her from leaving with horror stories that she won’t be able to get her favourite pasta sauce - deliberately infantilising her. Tyree (2016) draws parallels to Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) in which someone is compelled to murder through a corrupted matriarchal relationship. Of course, Tina’s progression to murder is about her throwing off the constraints of her mother, which doesn’t fit with Norman Bates’ desire to incorporate Mother into his violence. Tina is an unwanted child, declared ‘an accident’, yet her mother will not allow her to leave. In the same way, Chris cannot cope with her surpassing his violence and seeks to trap her into a suicide pact.

As the film progresses, Tina’s growing knowledge about the wider world begins to adjust her viewpoint with a later letter stating ‘I hope you can be happy for me’ to her mother. No longer seeking permission for her own life, Tina adapts her home comforts to new ones, including knitting her own crotchless underwear to express her sexuality. In her newfound freedom, she does not initially register Chris’ murderous tendencies, settling into her role as his muse. However, as the sheen wears off, the role of the muse becomes less desirable. Tyree (2016) writes that ‘Tina's transformation from Chris's self-appointed ‘muse’ to the author of her own life story casts her budding pleasure in murder as a liberatory act’. That Chris resorts to murder when things do not go his way permits Tina to behave in the same way. Two separate versions of Season of the Witch on the film’s soundtrack further the idea of Tina’s evolution, with the second instance swapping to a female vocalist, indicating the power shifting in Tina’s direction. Tina is seen to become more comfortable in making demands, claiming her own agency and desires.

After taking control of her pasta sauce and sexual preferences, Tina’s most direct wrest of control comes in the form of Banjo the dog. Having stolen the dog, she renames him Poppy, in memory of her own dog killed in an example of Tina’s absent-mindedness. Again, Tina is rewriting her own life on her own terms, shedding the role of the muse to become an author herself. It is through her control of Poppy that her confidence grows. When confronted with Chris being a willing participant in a hen do kiss at a restaurant she uses the same tone and language with him as with Poppy. Her style of murder remains chaotic throughout. 

Meanwhile, Chris has grown ever more fearful of her chaos, sensing that like everything else in his life (his references to low-level bullying as a cause for leaving work indicate a certain kind of fragility) he has lost control of her and as a result, seeks to denigrate her. At the heart of any ‘good for her’ horror is the idea of growth and while Tina’s journey into being a chaotic serial killer is not strictly aspirational, there is a kind of joy in seeing her refuse to become trapped in another controlling environment. This is aided by the sense that without his influence, she may not have seen murder as an option. Chris has engineered his own downfall by attempting to control a woman who refuses to be controlled.

The film’s climax sees the pair head to a viaduct after the caravan has been destroyed. Invoking the ‘together in death’ of doomed lovers like Bonnie and Clyde, their final act of suicide is intended as a final act of rebellion against a world that has not been particularly kind to either of them. The viaduct makes a fleeting appearance in one of Chris’ earlier visions in which Tina is seen being led away in handcuffs wearing the same clothes as she is in the finale, suggesting that Tina may be held accountable for her crimes. Despite this, the film leaves us with the image of a quietly triumphant Tina, looking down on Chris’ body, free from anyone else’s control. 

References

Lowenstein, A. (2016) A cinema of disorientation: space, genre, Wheatley. Critical Quarterly, 58: 5– 15. doi: 10.1111/criq.12253.

Sightseers (2012) Ben Wheatley [Blu-ray] Studiocanal

Tyree, J. M. (2016) Murder, considered as one of the fine arts of Women's Liberation: notes on Sightseers. Critical Quarterly, 58: 36– 40. doi: 10.1111/criq.12261.

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