Niki de Saint Phalle and Peter Whitehead’s 1973 Film ‘Daddy’

‘A new motto: What have they done to you, poor child?

But now enough of my filthy stories.’

(Sigmund Freud writing to Wilhelm Fliess on 22 December 1897).

Peter Whitehead and Niki de Saint Phalle’s 1973 film Daddy is an angry retort to oppressive regimes, particularly that most destructive one of childhood sexual abuse. But its power lies equally in its ambivalence and, in the end, its profound negativity. While Whitehead and de Saint Phalle resolutely sought to free representations of women from the triad of narcissism, masochism, and passivity, insisting that the feminine is home to the full range of aggressive and sexual drives, they also stripped away even the most facile hopes for a better world. In this, Whitehead and de Saint Phalle joined other creative radicals of the 1960s and 1970s (such as poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, who wrote eloquently about both female resistance and resignation in the face of paternal sexual abuse) in presenting a pessimistic account of late modernity.

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It is no straightforward task to describe this highly complex film, with its dreamworks, flashbacks, and fantastical structure. The principal storyline traces the desires of four characters, none of whom have individual names. There is Daddy (played by Rainer Diez), Daughter (Mia Martin and de Saint Phalle), Mother (Clarice Mary), and Convent Girl (Mia Martin). There are also brief appearances by the Lover/Husband (Rainer von Hessen) and Falconer (Whitehead). The film opens with some of de Saint Phalle’s drawings from The Devouring Mother (1972), followed by the Daughter reading a telegram from Mother asking her to return home because Daddy has drowned. Daughter returns to their castle (where there are spectacular sculptures by de Saint Phalle, including one of her Nanas and a gigantic falcon). She sees a swimming pool (perhaps where Daddy drowned but where, as a child, she had swum naked under Daddy’s watchful eyes). There is a coffin, which she opens. Inside is a gigantic, grey-marble cock, whose balls she gently caresses. She enters the house, opens a book on a side-table, and flashes back to her childhood where she played Blind Man with Daddy. The game consists of the Daughter blindfolding Daddy, turning him around, and then Daddy attempting to catch her. She chants,

Blind Man Blind Man

Sure you can’t see?

Turn around three times

And try to catch me.

Daughter longs to please her father, but he only truly loves his birds. As the Daughter says, ‘I wanted so much to be one of your birds…. How miraculous it seemed that the birds were so free to fly away, to leave you, and yet they always returned as if you held them by an invisible thread’. She recognises that it was possible that, one day, she might fly away but then sadly adds: ‘How was I to know that I was just one of your prey?’

In the section entitled ‘The Monster’, Daddy sexually abuses the Daughter during a game of Blind Man. The daughter’s response is ambivalent: she wants to scream; she promises to ‘lead [Daddy] to many countries’ and to ‘conquer the world’ for him; she commands ‘Down on your knees Daddy, say please say please…. Dirty dirty Daddy’. The Daughter’s abuse is symptomatic of Daddy’s cruelty generally: Daddy also beats and rapes the Mother. When the Daughter dons her Mother’s wig, Daddy punishes her by locking her in a dark cupboard. Daughter swears that when she grows up she will ‘kill Daddy’. On her wedding day, the Daughter blindfolds Daddy, undresses him, and executes him. 

            Part Two obsesses over fantasises of revenge. Daddy is an abject figure now, tied to a wheelchair and totally subjected to the Daughter’s will. The film becomes more explicitly transgressive, including scenes of masturbation, mother-daughter incest, lesbianism, sadism, coprophagia, and prostitution. The Daughter has procured a Convent Girl, who licks a cock-shaped cake while being instructed in how to act like a ‘good girl’. At the Convent Girl’s first communion, she strips naked while men caress her. The Daughter asks Daddy if he would like to see the Convent Girl punished. She then beats the Convent Girl and locks her in a dark cupboard. Afterwards, she teaches the Convent Girl to fake an orgasm, after which they make love. The Daughter tells the Convent Girl that ‘No-one ever made me feel so much like a man before’.

            In the section ‘Daddy’s Just a Girl in Disguise’, the Daughter suggests that Daddy is simply delusional in thinking he has any authority over women. In reality, Daddy envies women’s power. The Daughter dresses him like a woman, makes-up his face, and promises him that she will treat him gently with her brightly-coloured penis. Daddy becomes pregnant and gives birth to monstrous, plastic infants. Daughter muses over the fact that she does not understand Daddy’s love of motor cars, rockets, cathedrals, skyscrapers, and guns. She says goodbye to Daddy, claiming that she has nothing against him personally, but their relationship simply ‘didn’t work’: ‘your slaves have finally freed themselves and we intend to enjoy our freedom…. At last, at last, Daddy is dead’.

           The film concludes with ‘Three Epilogues’ entitled ‘Resurrection’. The first is a bedtime story about a girl who has an opportunity to escape a Monster who has imprisoned her. Instead, she voluntarily returns to him. In the second epilogue, the Daughter plays Blind Man with her Lover/Husband. In the third, she says

Long live Daddy. I killed you, Daddy. Only through me can you be reborn… You are my hero, my bird of death. You are my sun, Daddy. When I close my eyes, I see you in the darkness. You are watching me, protecting me in the darkness. We will be in the darkness forever.  Daddy, I hate you. But little did I know that by killing you, I made you eternal.

Throughout the film, the family and relations between the sexes are seen through the lens of pleasure, suffering, and perversion.

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            An entire essay could be written about the way the film attacks religion and that bête noir of 1960s counterculture, the military-industrial complex (MIC). For instance, there are evocative scenes in which de Saint Phalle creates one of her famous ‘shooting paintings’. She fires at an elaborate white altarpiece decorated with crucifixes, stuffed animals, skulls, and naked dolls. Her bullets hit cans of paint, splattering bright colours over the altar. In another shooting painting, traditional symbols of the MIC, such as the rifle and bomber-plane, are destroyed. As de Saint Phalle observed in one of her paintings of 1961,

I shot against daddy. All men small men tall men big men fat men men my brother society the church the convent school my family my mother. All men. Daddy. Myself. Men. I shot because it was fun and made me feel great. I shot because I was fascinating watching the painting bleed and die. I shot for that moment of magic ecstasy. It was a moment of scorpianic truth. White purity sacrifice. Ready aim fire! Red yellow blue. The painting is crying. The painting is dead. I have killed the painting. It is reborn. War with no victims.

At another point in the film, the Convent Girl performs a striptease during her first communion. The Daughter tells us that Daddy was a devoted Catholic who enjoyed deflowering virgins on the altar and desecrating the host. Finally, as a bedtime story, Daughter recites William Blake’s ‘Chapel of Gold’. This poem is presented not only as a critique of a thoroughly corrupt Church, but also as a rape-narrative. In the words of Blake’s poem,

I saw a chapel all of gold

That none did dare to enter in;

And many weeping stood without,

Weeping, mourning, worshipping.

I saw a serpent rise between

The white pillars of the door,

And he forc’d & forc’d & forc’d –

Down the golden hinges tore,

And along the pavement sweet,

Set with pearls & rubies bright,

All his slimy length he drew,

Till upon the altar white

Vomiting his poison out

On the bread & on the wine.

So I turn’d into a sty

And laid me down among the swine.

The Chapel of Gold has excluded true worshippers. The phallic representation of God-the-Father – the serpent – is rapacious and poisonous, leaving nothing on the communion table of greater value than shit in a pigs’ sty. In Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s film, God-Daddy is forced into the sty, where the Daughter coerces Daddy into eating the Convent Girl’s excrement, calling it ‘gold’. The Chapel of Gold is shit.

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Although these assaults on God-the-Father and the God-of-War are uncompromising, they pale in comparison to the film’s brutal evocation of the war of the sexes and hysteria (presented as the ‘combat neurosis’ of this sex war). Although these two themes are intertwined throughout the film, it is useful to discuss them separately, if only because the artists’ staging of hysteria is much more challenging than their critique of patriarchy.

The film’s assessment of the Law of the Father is fairly typical of early 1970s ideological practices, with its insistence on the violence of heteronormativity. In contrast, Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s attempts at translating unconscious machinations, oedipal struggles, and psychological trauma into a filmic narrative are potentially much more transgressive. In the end, however, their vision fails to do more than circle relentlessly around the site of the original trauma. Neither of the two ‘talking cures’ – prayer and psychoanalysis – prove capable of providing any healing. The Daughter is fated to return obsessively to the scene of her trauma.

The first of Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s critique is of the patriarchal family. Daddy is a fascist: he is virulently anti-Jewish and anti-Arab; he rants in German; he is infatuated with his own military uniform and medals; he is inordinately proud of his family’s rank and inheritance; he kills and stuffs animals. Daddy only truly loves his birds, and, even then, it is because they are his captives, enthralled to his will. As eminent nineteenth-century falconer James Edmund Harting observed in explaining his great passion for falconry,

To see a falcon leave her owner’s hand, take to the air, and, mounting with the greatest ease, fly straight away at the rate of a mile a minute, and then at a whistle, or a whoop, and a toss of the lure, turn in her flight and come out of the clouds to his hand, is to see a triumph of man’s art in subduing the lower animals, and making them obedient to his will.

Obedience is everything. When Mother defies Daddy, she is beaten and raped. When Daughter is disobedient, she is locked in a dark cupboard. Daddy is not capable of distinguishing his desires from those of his young daughter. She is a ‘thing’ to him, a means to his needs and wants. And one of these ‘wants’ is sexual. During a game of Blind Man, he rapes her. Daddy seeks to obliterate the Daughter’s desire, to subsume it into his own, even to the extent of dictating whom she should marry. He is narcissist-omnipotent, master of all she is and could hope to be.

In the film, this incest between Daddy and Daughter represents the ultimate in female victimization. It was an assessment commonly circulating in feminism at the time ‘Daddy’ was being filmed. In the words of Phyllis Chester in Women and Madness, published the year before ‘Daddy’ was released,

While most women do not commit incest with their biological fathers, patriarchal marriage, prostitution, and mass ‘romantic’ love are psychologically predicated on sexual union between Daughter and Father figures.

The conflation of incestuous rape, marriage, prostitution, and romantic love can be seen throughout Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s film. Women sell themselves for gifts or security; sex is not an act of pleasure but something grubby, to be done hurriedly. Marriage between a man and a woman is inherently fraught: the two sexes occupy incommensurate worlds. Violence is inevitable. The exercise of paternal authority in the home underpins male domination throughout society. All that is required of the Good Girl is that she obeys Daddy and then transfers incestuous practices of subjugation to her Husband. Daddy demands virtue and purity; in a time of so-called ‘sexual liberation’, Lover/Husband demands shamelessness and sexual experience. Either way, the Daughter must submit. She can flap and flail her wings of freedom as much as she wants, but she will never truly escape from the clutches of the all-consuming Daddies.

It is possible to situate Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s inspiration for this 1960s critique of sexual oppression within the poetry of Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg. Whether consciously or not, though, a formidable feminist trace also emerges in their film. The two poets closest to the work of de Saint Phalle and Whitehead are Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Take Sexton’s poem ‘The Fury of Cocks’, published a year after their film but echoing Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s brutal assessment about the inescapability of Daddy. First thing in the morning, Sexton announces, the Cocks can be seen

drooping over the breakfast plates,

angel-like,

folding in their sad wing,

animal sad,

and only the night before

there they were

playing the banjo.

In the light of day, the huge feminine sun rises and

its mother trucks,

its engines of amputation.

Whereas,

last night

The cock knew its way home,

as stiff as a hammer,

battering in with all

its awful power.

This, Sexton concludes, is woman’s fate:

When they fuck they are God.

When they break away they are God.

When they snore they are God.

In the morning they butter the toast.

They don’t say much.

They are still God.

All the cocks in the world are God

blooming, blooming, blooming

into the sweet blood of woman.

Sexton’s acknowledgement of the power of Daddies is mirrored in Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s film but, more importantly, so too is the mood of ambivalence. In ‘The Bells’, published in To Bedlam and Back (1960), Sexton addresses the love as well as hatred felt by the child towards her incestuous father. Like the Daughter in Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s film, the child is obsessed with memory: does Daddy remember what he did, or has the Daughter been utterly erased? As Sexton put it in her poem,

Father, do you remember?….

I remember the colour of music

and how forever

all the trembling bells of you

were mine.

Faced with an omnipresent, omnipotent Daddy, ‘choice’ is eradicated. In the struggle to assert a separate subjectivity, all the rebellious Daughter can do is ‘choose’ to be willingly co-opted into Daddy’s world. Therein lies suicide, as Sexton and Plath both eventually conceded. In this, the film echoes Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’, which was published a decade before Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s collaboration. In the second stanza of her poem, Plath declares,

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had the time –

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal

The strong oedipal theme in Plath’s poem – forcefully represented throughout Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s ‘Daddy’ and closely following Freud’s ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, commonly known as ‘Dora’) – are followed by the trope of castration. When Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s Daughter returns home to Daddy’s funeral, she caresses Daddy’s gigantic ‘marble-heavy’ cock, dismembered grey God. 

Systematic cruelty, Nazism, and the ultimate resignation to oppression are also prominent in both the poetic and filmic Daddies. ‘I have always been scared of you’, the poem reads,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygook.

And your neat moustache….

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through

Listening to Plath recite her poem (see the link at the end of this essay), including the final line ‘Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through’, it is possible to hear an echo of de Saint Phalle’s almost identical intonation in the film ‘Daddy’.

            Sexton, Plath, de Saint Phalle, and Whitehead share a pessimistic assessment of the future for women, whether in the ‘unenlightened’ times of Daddy’s generation or in more sexually ‘liberated’ decades of the 1960s and early 1970s. Plath’s female narrator declares herself to be ‘through’, while the Daughter of de Saint Phalle and Whitehead’s film ends up voluntarily blinding herself. The Daughter claims that she hates Daddy’s eyes – but, in the end, the Daughter allows a blindfold to be tied over her own eyes when she plays Blind Man with her new Daddy, her Lover/Husband. Sexton’s ‘Daddy Warbucks’ recalls these themes. ‘Daddy Warbucks’ reads:

What's missing is the eyeballs

in each of us, but it doesn't matter

because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.

You let me touch them, fondle the green faces

lick at their numbers and it lets you be

my ‘Daddy!’ ‘Daddy!’….

But I died yesterday,

‘Daddy,’ I died,

swallowing the Nazi-Jap animal

and it won't get out

it keeps knocking at my eyes,

my big orphan eyes,

kicking!

Until eyeballs pop out

and even my dog puts up his four feet

and lets go

of his military secret

with his big red tongue

flying up and down

like yours should have

as we board our velvet train.

The Daddies of all four artists cannot see. Relationships are simply commercial enterprises (throughout the first part of Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s film, Cole Porter’s 1938 tune ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’, about the joys of marrying a millionaire, plays in the background). After Auschwitz, all enlightenment hopes of the perfectibility of humanity have been destroyed. The MIC and Daddy are literally fucking up society.

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In the early 1970s, any film that dealt explicitly with incest and its impact on the child was considered avant garde. Despite Plath’s bitter assessment of the incestuous Daddy, with his ‘bag full of gold’ and lolling grey cock (‘big as a Frisco seal’), the prevalence of incest and the harm it caused was not commonly discussed at the time these four artists were composing their films and poems. In 1953, sexologist Alfred Kinsey had published data that suggested that father-daughter incest occurred in close to one in 100 families, but this revelation barely caused a ripple, especially when compared with the furore occasioned by his evidence about the prevalence of masturbation and marital infidelity.

It wasn’t until the early 1970s that the feminist discourse on incest, which situated it as sexual abuse produced by a patriarchal culture, came to prominent public notice. In April 1971, psychiatric social worker Florence Rush exposed the extent of incest and other forms of child sexual abuse at the New York Radical Feminist Rape Conference. Her speech was a powerful challenge to Freudian assumptions that accusations of incest arose out of childhood fantasies. Rather than being imaginary, Rush argued that the sexual abuse of children was ‘an unspoken but prominent factor in socializing and preparing the female to accept a subordinate role: to feel guilty, ashamed, and to tolerate through fear, the power exercised over her by men’. However, it took until the late-1970s for her observations, and those of other feminists, to reach a mainstream audience.

Whitehead and de Saint Phalle were able to break down the taboo on representations on incest by immersing themselves in an intoxicating mix of Freudian and Jungian concepts. In ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896), Freud had speculated on the nature of the violence in incestuous relations. He wrote about the ‘singular conditions under which the ill-matched pair conduct their love-relations [sic]’. On the one hand, there is

the adult, who cannot escape his share in the mutual dependence necessarily entailed by a sexual relationship, and who is yet armed with complete authority and the right to punish, and can exchange the one role for the other to the uninhibited satisfaction of his moods.

On the other hand, there is

the child, who in his helplessness is at the mercy of this arbitrary will, who is prematurely aroused to every kind of sensibility and exposed to every sort of disappointment, and whose performance of the sexual activities assigned to him is often interrupted by his imperfect control of his natural needs.

According to Freud, the consequences of childhood sexual abuse were ‘quite extraordinarily far-reaching: the two individuals remain linked by an invisible bond throughout the whole of their lives’.

For artists, Freud’s insights were profoundly useful because he insisted on the reality of incest and gave a prominent place to the role of fantasy. Historians of psychoanalysis have carefully unpicked the trajectory of Freud’s beliefs from his so-called ‘seduction theory’ to the oedipal complex. However, this shift is not as clear-cut as some historians wish to maintain and it is artistically plausible to maintain both positions simultaneously (as, indeed, did Carl Jung).

Freud’s understanding of hysteria – so the basic historical story goes – was that he was initially convinced that hysteria arose as a consequence of the sexual seduction of a child by an adult. In ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896), Freud wrote, ‘At the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood’. He also increasingly identified the main perpetrators as being the fathers, rather than nursemaids, older children, and strangers (as he had assumed in ‘Dora’). This insight was without precedence. It constituted a powerful assault on the idea that hysteria was a hereditary infliction, associated with degenerates.  In other words, Freud noted, hysteria seemed to be inherited because it was prevalent in certain families, but in reality, this was because fathers were doing the raping.

Increasingly, though, Freud began having doubts. By ‘On the Origin of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’ (1914), Freud had given up on ‘seduction’ theory. He explained that:

Influenced by Charcot’s view of the traumatic origin of hysteria, one was readily inclined to accept as true and aetiologically significant the statements made by patients in which the ascribed their symptoms to passive sexual experiences in the first years of childhood – to put it bluntly, to seduction. When this aetiology broke down under the weight of its own improbability and contradiction in definitely ascertainable circumstances, the result at first was helpless bewilderment. Analysis had led back to these infantile sexual traumas by the right path; and yet they were not true. The firm ground of reality was gone….  If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in phantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality.

In his autobiographical study of 1925, Freud mused further about why he jettisoned the ‘seduction hypothesis’. In his words,

The majority of my patients reproduced from their childhood scenes in which they were sexual, seduced by some grown-up person…. I believed these stories…. When, however, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had made up, or which I myself had perhaps forced on them, I was for some time completely at a loss…. When I had pulled myself together, I was able to draw the right conclusion from my discovery…. I had in fact stumbled for the first time upon the Oedipus complex.

This recantation of the seduction theory did not mean that he always disbelieved patients who gave accounts of being sexually assaulted by their fathers. After all, he conceded that ‘seduction during childhood retained a certain share, though a humbler one, in the aetiology of neuroses’.

It is this tension between real sexual assault and fantasized, oedipal urgings that provides Whitehead and de Saint Phalle with the creative tension necessary for their radical interpretation of incestuous desire. The Daughter insists that her father is guilty of incest, yet she constantly needs to ask Daddy if he remembers and she imaginatively invents dream sequences in which she plays with oedipal tropes and scenarios, including killing the Father and marrying the Mother. An archetypical hysteric, the Daughter plays both the male and female in her oedipal fantasies. As Freud observed in The Interpretation of Dreams, hysterics ‘express in their symptoms not only their own experiences but those of a large number of other people’ and ‘suffer on behalf of a whole crowd of people and to act all the parts in a play single-handed’. At the end of this film, the Daughter has even inverted the Father/Mother oedipal roles by impregnating Daddy, causing him to give birth to malformed offspring.

All of these themes are brought together in the film by its depiction of trauma. Whitehead and De Saint Phalle seek to depict the painful, passionate, and somatic dimensions of trauma. The body of the Daughter speaks desire and suffering. The tension between the displacement of trauma in symbols, fleeting images, vague affect, or imaginary stories, and the insistence of a concrete, a real, event is palpable. Trauma resists literal repetitiveness. Rather than the pleasure principle, it circles obsessively around the death drive.

            In these ways, the Daughter is a hysteric in the Freudian sense, that is, as a form of excessive identification, which has a performative-exhibitionist character. As Freud put it in The Interpretation of Dreams, identification is ‘a highly important factor in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms’. Identification ‘is not simple imitation but assimilation on the basis of a similar aetiological pretension; it expresses a resemblance and is derived from a common element which remains in the unconscious’. Furthermore, the genealogy of the pathology is clearly represented, with the Daughter ending up as Daddy predicted, that is, by marrying a man who looks like Daddy and lives in Daddy’s castle. The Daughter has failed in the process of what Jung called individuation. At the end of the film, she continues to represent conflicts in both the external and internal worlds on and through her body. As in Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, hysterics literally substitute corporeal systems for thoughts and feelings that are too unsettling to effectively assimilate.

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Unfortunately, the film’s depiction of transgression and the erotics of cruelty are self-referential and ultimately fail. In the end, Whitehead and de Saint Phalle have created something that is utterly pessimistic and conservative. The fundamental point they make is that transgression cannot be sustained: the Daughter never leaves the Monster-Daddy. She can’t. The Daughter can rail all she wants against being raped by her father, but her ambivalence wins out. Instead of public accusations of incest challenging male domination (as feminists of the 1960s and 1970s had assumed), Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s film suggests the incest actual bolsters male domination: after all, the Daughter loves Daddy. She transforms Daddy’s ownership of her body into her pleasure.

Whitehead and de Saint Phalle insist that oppressive regimes cannot be challenged: patriarchy, religion, and the MIC remain firmly in place, in part, because they are rooted in a universal psyche. ‘Acting out’ merely confirms their power. The Daughter constitutes her subjectivity around a pathological, oedipal narrative, effectively rendering her protest impotent. As Maria Ramas observes in ‘Freud’s Dora, Dora’s Hysteria’ (1990),

Even if we accept the reasonable proposition that the girl seeks to escape the centripetal and confining nature of her relationship to her mother through the socially acceptable and even socially required route of the turn to the father, the father and the phallus are not empty vessels that she can fill with whatever content she pleases – that is, with liberation. They are imbued with social meanings that are, above all, patriarchal and that, therefore, militate against liberation by confronting the girl with new and seemingly more permanent forms of imprisonment and dependency.

The Daughter’s passivity at the end of the film makes her an accomplice to her own destruction. Psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell explains that ‘the imaginary, the semiotic, the carnival’ are not alternatives to Daddy’s law. She notes that some feminists argue that ‘the carnival can also be the area of the feminine’, but Mitchell is not convinced. Carnivalesque acting-out accepts a definition of

the feminine, the intuitive, the religious, the mystical, the playful, all those things that have been assigned to women – the heterogeneous, the notion that woman’s sexuality is much more one of a whole body, not so genital, not so phallic. It is not that the carnival cannot be disruptive of the law; but that it disrupts only within terms of that law.

In part, the limitations of the film are the result of its relentless emphasis on universal archetypes of the feminine, the masculine, the unconscious, and sexuality. The unconscious nature of female sexuality is reified. There is the threat that the hysteric becomes the site of the feminine, setting woman once more outside of discourse. The genesis of incest is firmly situated within the psyche of the Daughter. Furthermore, for all the film's profound complexity and psychic intensity, Daddy doesn’t seem to possess an inner life. He simply becomes the abject figure upon whom the Daughter’s fantasies of revenge is projected. The problem with this is that it naturalises Daddy’s internal world. Daddy’s psyche becomes the norm.

Force and coercion are present, but they are validated. This can be illustrated by turning to the relationship between the Daughter and the Convent Girl. Sexual abuse is addictive: Daughter wants some too. The Daughter adopts sexual cruelty as an integral part of her own identity. She fantasises about treating men as prostitutes, ‘using’ and discarding them just like Daddy does with female whores. She colludes with her Mother’s assessment of male sexuality as being filthy; worthwhile only for its financial benefits. She sexually assaults and punishes the Convent Girl. In other words, merely reversing the identity of oppressor/ed does not challenge the structure of oppression. Resistance is incorporated and neutralised within therapy, serving to bolster abuse.

There is no way out of Daddy’s paradigm. Even lesbian-desire is ultimately about Daddy. When the Daughter is young, Mother advises her that she would be ‘better off getting a girlfriend’. But this is not because women are desirable, but because men are disgusting. In a later dream-sequence, Mother and Daughter kiss, but only after dismissive comments are made about the sexual inadequacies of boyfriends and Daddy. Even when the Daughter and the Convent Girl fuck, they do so in order to either taunt Daddy or repeat Daddy’s abuse. Ultimately, the Daughter’s heart does belong to Daddy. At the end of the film, she kills the Father, but the intimate, incestuous Daddy remains.

Daddy is a pessimistic film. Like the therapeutic encounter itself, there is no escaping the original paradigm, in this case, the psychoanalytic one devised by Fathers Freud and Jung. As Jung argued, in the familial as well as analytic encounter the impact of one person’s unconscious processes on another is unavoidable. Indeed, the film itself enacts the analytic situation, with Whitehead as the analyst. Like Freud in his relationship with his analysand Dora, Whitehead appears in the film, enacting the lesson the Daughter has to learn. In the film, Whitehead demonstrates to Daddy how to hold the falcon, while the Daughter looks on. In other words, the filmmaker steps into the frame to show Daddy how best to control his birds and, conversely, to show one of his birds – the Daughter – that she is fated to always return to Daddy, to repeat the trauma. This is the story of Freud’s Dora as well, a case study echoed throughout Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s film, albeit with the main actors playing multiple characters. In Philip Rieff’s introduction to Freud’s ‘Dora’, he described the ‘Dora’ case in these terms:

The sick daughter has a sick father, who has a sick mistress, who has a sick husband, who proposes to the sick daughter as her lover. Dora does not want to hold hands in this charmless circle – although Freud does at one point indicate that she should.

In Whitehead and de Saint Phalle’s portrayal, the Daughter not only ‘holds hands’ with her oppressors, but passionately embraces them. In the last scene, the Daughter and Lover/Husband run down the hill where she had been raped by Daddy and where they had played Blind Man. As they run, holding hands, the Lover/Husband repeatedly swings Daughter away before drawing her closer. His gestures resemble that of the Falconer and his falcon: the daughter is his bird, free to fly away so long as, at the toss of the lure, she returns, enthralled to his will. With Freud, viewers of the film might wonder: ‘What have they done to you, poor child?’

Further reading:

Niki De Saint Phalle, The Devouring Mother (Milan: Gimpel Fils, 1972)

Niki De Saint Phalle, Traces. Une Autobiographie Remembering 1930-1949 (Lausanne: Editions Acatos, 1999)

Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1^st 1896, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-1962)

Sylvia Plath, reading at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM&feature=related.

This is an edited version of an article I published in Framework in 2011.