SUBS AND COES PT. 2

The principles of subordination and coordination also serve to further elucidate many of the complications regarding focal presences that I’ve touched on in earlier essays.

In CREATOR AND CREATED ENSEMBLED HE THEM, I gave various examples regarding the ways in which figures in horror-fiction did or did not share center-stage (and thus the centric will).

I opined that in Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, the titular medical student and his abominable creation share center-stage, which means, in my current jargon, that they are “coordinated.” However, the Universal film-series promotes the Monster to the position of the sole focal presence, while both his creator and all of the other scientists who interact with the Monster are “subordinated.”  The Hammer film-series takes the opposite tack: Baron Frankenstein incarnates the centric will of all his films, and his various creatures are subordinated.

Stevenson’s JEKYLL AND HYDE anticipates this same pattern. No one reading the tale  cares that much about Jekyll, because he is subordinate to the presence of the mysterious Hyde. Of the film-adaptations I’ve seen, only THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL subordinates the peril of Hyde to the tortures of Jekyll.

Though most narratives have tended to emphasize the creator over the created, or vice versa, I’ve always explored some of the situations in which two opponents share center-stage, rather than following the more common paradigm in which a superordinate protagonist faces off against a subordinate antagonist.  However, in the former situations there’s usually some intrinsic connection between the characters of this sort of ensemble. I mentioned in ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE the kaiju film THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS, in which a good giant monster contends with a bad giant monster. However, though the monsters are separate entities, the bad one is the de facto clone of the good one, so that they are almost as intimately tied as Jekyll and Hyde. There are no literal links between the characters of my other example of “opposed centrics,” Hjalmar Poelzig and Vitus Verdeghast of 1934’s BLACK CAT. However, though these two war-weary enemies are not even related to one another as much as are the Gargantuas, the narrative emphasizes their many similarities, to the extent that they seem like symbolic siblings.

Of course, this too is a question of emphasis. Just as creators and creations can take on individual superordinate status, so can siblings. The two films examined here, 1935's THE BLACK ROOM and 1964's DEAD RINGER, contain siblings who are aggrieved with one another, but neither film focuses on both siblings. In BLACK ROOM the “good twin” is subordinate to the bad twin, who then attempts, unsuccessfully, to emulate the good brother. DEAD RINGER takes the opposite tack: it’s a good twin who must masquerade for a time as the bad twin, and the film emphasizes that character’s “Jekyll-like” agonies rather than the menace of the film’s Hyde-figure.

The Jekyll-Hyde paradigm is the most common model for fantasy/SF narratives: the supernormal "creation" is the focus of the story, not the person who created it. However, when there's a particular type of "intrinsic connection" between creator and created, this can result in a greater focus upon the creator-figure. For instance, in the 1956 FORBIDDEN PLANET, the menacing Id Monster is the concatenation of Doctor Morbius's unleashed passions, so the centric will focuses on him, not upon the deadly thing he's created.  

To cite a (deservedly) more obscure example, I noticed upon reviewing Ulli Lommel's 1980 BOOGEYMAN that the viewpoint character had an unusually close relationship to the titular monster, unleashing the evil spirit in much the same way that Morbius releases the Id Monster:

...it's slightly interesting that although Willy is set up to look like another Michael, Lacey is both the person who revives the evil ghost and the person through which it manifests. She's also the one who apparently fantasizes about her brother killing hot women, which isn't totally off-the-beam since he almost does kill one woman. But the fact that she's both the one who unleashes her brother's madness and the malice of her mother's lover makes me wonder if she's not the true "boogieman" of the movie.

The concept of coordination is also one that allows me to break down the way centricity works with large ensembles that may, for a time, include individual members who are out to cause harm to the group as a whole, much as Hyde has a hostile attitude toward Jekyll. Some examples of this narrative strategy would include:

Wonder Man and the Swordsman in THE AVENGERS

Terra in THE NEW TEEN TITANS

Both Plastique and Lashina in SUICIDE SQUAD

Demonia in OMEGA MEN

However, again some sort of “connection” is necessary before such a “stealth enemy” might be considered as being coordinated with the rest of the ensemble. Terra, Lashina and Demonia remain in their respective ensembles for many exploits before their perfidy is uncovered, so that for a time readers may internalize them as being “real members.” However, I've stated in Part 1 that each story’s centric will is separate from that of every other story. Therefore, as long as Plastique, Wonder Man and Swordsman have functioned as members of an ensemble even for the better part of one story, then they are coordinated with the other members of the ensemble,  even if that one story ends with the “stealth enemy” being exposed and ejected.