Sewage Baby Blues

Written for CompLit 394TI: Literary Theory and Criticism (Instructor: Prof. María Barbón)

Viktor Shklovsky, in his 1917 essay “Art as Technique,” discusses the idea of art as a way to reintroduce ideas or images that the audience may take for granted by presenting them in a way that is unusual. At minimum, this could mean rendering them through art, as art is separate from reality, or it could mean further elaboration or distancing from reality, through the usage of metaphor, symbolism, and so on: “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (Shklovsky 20). In the land of “genre” works (in this case, science fiction and horror), dissimilarity from reality is a defining feature. It is in fact what tends to set apart genre works as “low” art, following classical ideas of art as didactic mimeticism. Since horror films, especially those with elements of science fiction and splatterpunk (a subgenre defined by over-the-top gore and sexuality), are characterized by their unrealistic nature, often reveling in absurdity for the sake of it, Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization becomes quite relevant. Through this reading, the ridiculous nature of splatterpunk films can be seen as a way of abstracting familiar concepts, requiring audiences not to take what they see for granted. In many “low” horror films, including the 1990 film The Suckling, directed by Francis Teri, usage of exacerbation, hyperbole, and pushing ideas to their limits ad absurdum can create vivid metaphors and commentary on real life, whether “serious” or not – in this case, on the common conception of the normative family unit.

The Suckling follows a young woman named Rebecca and her aborted fetus, who becomes a mutated, murderous monster. The film begins with scrolling text setting it up as a dramatization of the “real” story of a mysterious massacre which had only one survivor. The final passage reads: “The most brilliant investigators spent years trying to solve this gruesome mystery… but to this day, are still baffled. Could the rantings of a girl, supposedly insane, be true? The makers of this film believe so” (0:00:22-0:00:46). This introduction sets the film both within the framework of a story being told to the reader, and in an almost liminal space between realities, since the entire narrative is in fact fictionalized. We then shift to our protagonist Rebecca, the sole survivor previously mentioned, having a nightmare from which she wakes up only to be in another nightmare, until finally we are taken from the dream realm to the real world. Here, we’re placed in a frame narrative of two doctors at the psychiatric institution Rebecca is staying at discussing her case. The story then begins to be told by one of the doctors to the other – the story as it had been related to the doctor by the authorities, who in turn had been told the story by Rebecca. At this point, between the scrolling text, the nightmares, the doctors, and the police, the audience is several times removed from the narrative, if not more so by virtue of it being a movie – a simulacra of reality, rather than reality itself. From the very beginning of the film, the process of viewing and understanding it as a film (or narrative in general) has been made convoluted through unreliable sources – both within the frame narrative and outside it through the scrolling text – creating a difficult viewing experience.

The film then returns to the past, where the story is told without any further narration or interruption until the very end of the movie, when it returns to the frame narrative. Rebecca accidentally becomes pregnant by her boyfriend, and though she wants to keep the baby, he insists on taking her to a decrepit building serving as an illegal abortion clinic as well as a brothel. Having planned this ahead of time with the boyfriend, the woman who runs the establishment, “Big Mama,” drugs Rebecca and performs an abortion on her. The fetus is flushed down the toilet and into the sewers, where gooey toxic waste drips onto it, causing it to mutate into a huge, monstrous form: the “sewage baby.” Soon after, it makes its way back up the pipes to the house, where it kills off the inhabitants one by one, trapping them in the house by encasing it in a huge fleshy sac, until eventually only Rebecca is left alive. The sewage baby then shrinks back to fetus-size and reinserts itself into Rebecca’s womb. At this point, the film returns to the frame narrative of the doctors at the institution. Unbeknownst to the doctors, two orderlies take the catatonic Rebecca to a back room and begin to rape her, before they’re both killed by the sewage baby. The primary narrative ends here, though there is an additional post-credits scene which will be discussed later.

The nexus for defamiliarization in this film is the idea of the house or home. In traditional Americana culture, the home is tied intrinsically to the family, which in itself holds normative ideas of the suburban nuclear family. The house is meant to signify safety, comfort, familiarity itself, the famil-iarity of family. In The Suckling, the house is completely perverted. Not only is the house in this film visually in disrepair, a symbolic signifier of its impurity, it’s been made into a site of two things opposed to the traditional family unit – sex work, that is, extramarital sex for purposes of pleasure rather than procreation, and abortions, which destroy the potential for this normative idea of “family” at its very inception. Both functions are carried out by female characters – the two male employees are simply security, and one of them is in fact Big Mama’s son. The gender roles of the women who work at the house are thus put on their heads. Notably, in the only sex scene, a businessman client is being dominated (and sodomized) by a sex worker who seems utterly bored by the situation. He is depicted as childlike, e.g. helpless, in his desire, wearing an appropriately ridiculous spinning propeller cap. The entire operation is, as said before, headed by a matriarch rather than patriarch, in a character aptly called Big Mama, who oversees the brothel and performs all the abortions herself alongside an assistant, who’s also a woman. Familiar concepts such as male pimps, sexual intercourse where women are dominated by men, and houses or homes as safe havens for the dream of the nuclear family, are made unfamiliar.

The home is further defamiliarized by being constructed more metaphorically when a different object is superimposed onto it – the womb. The womb can be construed as a home of its own, where the “family” truly begins. Through abortion this safe space is violated, made dangerous to its “inhabitant/s.” In turn, the sewage baby makes the house materially comparable to a womb via the huge flesh sac it traps the house within. When one of the characters does manage to get out of the house and into the flesh sac itself, the landscape we see is utterly alien – as alien as the sewage baby itself has become – and ultimately seems to be so alien and hostile an environment that the lone man who enters it melts to death. Like a “home,” the womb is ideologically constructed to create and nurture life, which will someday leave to live independently. Through abortion, this life is extinguished before it can get a chance to do so. The sewage baby’s murder of the inhabitants of the brothel/clinic-turned-womb could thus be seen as a mirror to this, of the aborted becoming the aborter, in a total switch of roles. The sewage baby’s weapons of choice are its prehensile umbilical cord – once a vehicle for nutrients and life, now a vehicle for death by strangulation – and its sharp claws, which it uses to decapitate, slash, and stab its victims, gruesomely mirroring the caricature of a viscera-covered coat hanger Big Mama uses for the abortions. The sewage baby goes as far as to reverse the mother-child role in the fact that in a way, it both rapes its own mother, and protects her by killing her rapists in the institution, in both instances taking on the role of an (abusive) husband or partner rather than child. All these elements, from the flesh sac to the sewage baby and even the coat-hanger itself, are highly exaggerated reflections of (or perversions of) reality. The known is blown up to such an extreme as to become unknown, monstrous, even ridiculous.

The final nail in the coffin of defamiliarization via perversion of family roles in this film comes from the context-devoid postcredits scene. Here, viewers watch a silent scene of two bystanders watching a largely unrecognizable figure melt from flesh to bone. Through his attire and the fact that he’s outside the house viewers can infer that it’s the businessman who previously attempted escape by entering the flesh sac. The bystanders are a young boy and an adult man, and their reactions are opposites – the boy is utterly indifferent, blowing bubble gum, while the man is horrified. They are also dressed in contrasting fashions, with the boy dressed very casually, with a baseball cap that reads “shmuck, go home and practice,” and a shirt that says “fuck dis” or “fuck die,” with illustrated skull and knife. Next to him is an almost cartoonishly dandy man in business attire, complete with bowtie and plaid blazer. Taken at surface-value, this imagery works as a reversal of expectations in itself, where we might expect a child to be far more easily frightened than an adult. However, this scene could also be read as a reflection of the overall theme of dissolution of “traditional” family values. What the adult perceives as terrifying and abject, the boy does not necessarily enjoy but rather is indifferent towards. It’s normalized to him; familiarized. In an expansive reading, the abortion itself is more normalized to a younger, “hipper” generation than an older, more “traditional” one. The man’s status as an adult is also visually tied to – because it’s partially signaled by – his status as an employee. This is an interesting choice given how the workforce and labor is seen as gendered in our society – for example, the gender imbalance between reproductive labor and “regular” labor, as well as the fact that there’s a division made between the two in the first place. Reproductive labor has historically been seen as inferior to “productive” labor, minimizing women’s work, despite the fact that “productive” labor wouldn’t exist without the reproductive labor underlying it. However, by positioning the everyday worker next to the absurd scene of another businessman melting to death in a sort of mutated womb, assumptions of life’s normalities are put into question.

Shklovsky discusses defamiliarization as increasing the difficulty of perception, and the subjects of The Suckling are made quite difficult. Starting with a confusingly layered frame narrative, this film then takes the idea of abortion and pushes it to an extreme, a sewage baby that kills until it can reenter the womb, an act that could be seen as a form of Oedipal rape. It also uses negative exacerbation, taking something’s opposite and putting it parallel in order to heighten their difference – making the home a place of death, of non-procreational sex, of abortion, a house with a matriarch – while simultaneously making it a womb, its inhabitants being “aborted” by the sewage baby, transposing this image over it materially through the flesh sac. Finally, the point is made metatextually through the in-film observers of the child and the man – as the audience we are, after all, spectators as well. Through theoretical devices such as defamiliarization, rather than classical realism, stories like this work to reintroduce already-ingrained societal ideas in manners that turn them on their head, make them ridiculous, but really, make them new. Ultimately, whether the audience is left utterly horrified or blowing bubble gum in fascinated satisfaction, “schlock” like The Suckling leaves its viewers with ways of seeing the world that are utterly unfamiliar.

Works Cited

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” 1917. Modern Criticism and Theory, Longman, 1988.

The Suckling. Directed by Francis Teri, Hypercube, 1990.

Lucius Pereira Murphy is a senior in Comparative Literature, minoring in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. His primary focus of interest is horror films, mostly those in what’s colloquially called the “B” or “Z” tiers of horror, and how they intersect with and represent deviances from cisheteronormativity. Outside of academia, he enjoys creative writing, drawing, and grunge music.