This Must Be the Place
by Kelli Weston
Column 3: Frailty (Texas, 1979)
It is roundly understood that the midcentury arrival of the television forever transformed the American household, but the kitchen is where we might trace the timeline of the family’s upheaval. Postwar kitchens broadly possess a few signature features: linoleum floors, utilitarian cabinets, wood or other natural elements, U-shaped or square layouts, integrated appliances, bold colors. Functionality and intimacy united the era’s design principles in the kitchen—once the domain of servants, and thus spatially and socially split from the rest of the house—as domestic maintenance fell to classed women, ushered, after a brief window of professional independence, into the kitchens amid postwar anxiety. The cheap, often desperate labor they had previously relied upon began to decline, but the burgeoning white middle-class, in no small part thanks to the G.I. Bill, could afford the latest technological advancements: vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, microwaves, coffee makers. In that way, war and technology are bound to the American home as we so nebulously conceive of it.
Unlike the famously quixotic portrait of domesticity rendered on television, cinema announced a creeping unease about the family in the wake of war’s scourge and, specifically, the children born of its mire: e.g. The Boy with the Green Hair (1948), The Bad Seed (1956), Village of the Damned (1960). Horror generally divides its “evil” children into born psychopaths or the possessed. The latter incarnation enjoys such a frequent screen presence because it confirms enduring (and unquestionably Puritan) assumptions about children: imminently vulnerable to some wanton, unbidden force, obliged to become its emissary, owed to “original sin” and their natural communion with the metaphysical.
Even before—and demonstrably after—9/11 intervened (to cast a shadow, more chronological than rational, that no academic could resist retroactively mining), horror would link the crumbling nuclear family and its strange, faithless children to the ubiquitous “supernatural” already spilling into our daily lives. Take Signs (2002), The Ring (2002), The Village (2004): all of them wary—as much aesthetically as ideologically—of the digital ascent promised by the turn of the millennium. Among this paranoid chorus, Bill Paxton’s directorial debut Frailty (2001) encountered more tepid success, although it would prove the most politically prophetic.
Much of Frailty unfolds in flashback, as told to an incredulous Dallas FBI agent (Powers Boothe) by the mysterious Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey), who reveals that his brother is the “God’s Hand” serial killer. When they were boys growing up in smalltown Texas, circa 1979, their widower father (Paxton) claimed that an angel had come to him in a vision and anointed them God’s extrajudicial “Hand.” According to Dad (who otherwise goes unnamed), the Meiks family had been enlisted to destroy “demons” treacherously disguised as humans. Fenton (played as a child by Matt O’Leary), the eldest, regards this “mission” with respectable skepticism, while Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) accepts his father’s account entirely and becomes his eager apprentice in the axe killing spree that follows.
Although shot in 2000, Frailty heralds themes that would trouble the era (and its cinema): Christofascist warfare, “cleansing” the region of unsavory figures, the son split between patriarchal fidelity and his own scruples. The film stages a similar generic conflict, between the paternal and filial, with a cheeky reprisal (a murderous Texas family) and subversion of its lineage. It is the father, not the children, who blights the domestic with the supernatural—resists, rather than imports, encroaching modernity—and thereby ensures linear collapse, a return to tradition. By the end, the prodigal son is dead and the last of the Meiks continues his demon slaying, as a sheriff no less. There is one marked difference: his wife (Missy Crider), the only major woman character, who appears sparingly throughout the film, is pregnant. He has managed to escape the unorthodox conditions that he himself was born into.
The serial killer’s origins are always of the foremost dramaturgical interest. The infrastructure, first set by Psycho (1960), usually tucks these mysteries away somewhere in the late acts (mummified bodies in the basement, cannibals reclining at the dinner table): that is, the darker corners of the id (or estate), where, conventionally, the “Final Girl” may stumble upon them. As varied as these properties (franchises, remakes, copycats, etc.) have now grown, we can expect to find certain classical furniture. But a few noted departures make Frailty especially peculiar. It cannot be overstated: there are almost no women in the film and what few appear barely speak; notably, a bedside photograph of the boys’ mother—curiously denied a close-up—and (as if compelled to concede its debt to Psycho right away) a nervous blonde in a white collared dress, Dad’s first victim, who only murmurs a timid “Yes?” before she is whisked off to her death. Otherwise, it’s men who predominantly die onscreen, a feat that does not entirely rescue Paxton’s Southern Gothic melodrama from the gendered questions that, frankly, scaffold the slasher. To their credit, Paxton and screenwriter Brent Hanley manage to sketch something emotionally intelligent (and ultimately prescient) in its place: namely, the psychic turmoil of boyhood in the seventies as much as—though they could not yet know it—the aughts, decades yoked by the perilous transformations of war, as nervous masculinity routinely sails, perhaps more transparently than any other period, to perverse heights.
Never mind the decorative absence of naked, bruised, and pallid female corpses; there is, on the whole, very little violence that we can actually see. And despite several killings, on just two occasions (twin murders juxtaposed near the end) does the film ever rise to the graphic. Elsewhere, we only hear the assaults happening just off frame. Instead, the camera closes in on the terrified brothers, huddled together, or the simmering, righteous gaze of their father. This series of displacements prove instructive: to elude the voyeurism so central to the genre’s impulses topples familiar grammar. This is not, by standard symbolic parameters, sex (although sexual repression, naturally, organizes these operations) but work, as perfunctory as, say, farming or gardening, an analogy the film openly courts: for the Meiks men bury their demons in the lonesome public rose garden that bounds their home.
Their modest two-bedroom cottage, itself formerly gardeners’ quarters in the fifties, offers an unexpected map of the family’s core interiority. At the heart is their small, fitted eat-in kitchen, painted a drab, fading green, complete with laminate countertops, a squarish table, and chrome upholstered chairs. There are few embellishments, save for the striped wallpaper and garish tartan curtains. All clean, boxy lines and casual minimalism, as was fashionable, at least two decades before we find this tormented family. Although it may reasonably pass for a then modern kitchen, its antiquated elements—the lack of vivid color, the freestanding stove, no microwave, no dishwasher—outline not just a class, but socio-emotional condition: they are stuck out of time.
The landscape more obviously forecasts the godlier, pastoral age that Dad psychically clings to: the misty rose garden turned graveyard with its granite, otherworldly custodians (beasts and angels, of course), or the flat, empty plains, above which the clouds part to surrender a gleam of celestial light that illumines the abandoned barn where Dad discovers his axe and gloves, divinely delivered to him. The latter scene conjures the recognizable fabula of the American West, mythical and desolate, a portrait of isolationism. (So few people seem to populate this town or, for that matter, the claustrophobic world of the Meiks: Dad and Adam noticeably have no friends.) The grainy haze that veils Bill Butler’s cinematography renders this geography, in all its romantic grammar, a ghostly dreamscape. For Fenton, this all amounts to a literal nightmare. With a wail, the boy snaps upright at his school desk, awakened from a vision of his father wielding his axe in the middle of their kitchen.
It seems important that Paxton makes the kitchen the centerpiece of their domestic conflict. Visually, he establishes their fracturedness most frequently here. Consider the scene where Dad brings his weapons home: he and Adam, vaguely blurred in the background, marvel over the axe and gloves at the dining table, while Fenton stands, in the foreground, at the stove and turns from them to face the camera with a hollow gaze. Early on, we see the motherless boys generally left to their own devices—walking home alone from school, putting themselves to bed—while Dad works as a mechanic in a nearby town. Fenton takes over the nurturing and other traditionally maternal duties: cooking the family’s meals, washing dishes, looking after Adam. And consider how he frames these responsibilities in voiceover: “Our mom had died giving birth to him, so I basically took care of him ever since I can remember.” He, too, conceives of himself as a mother-substitute.
Upon this intricate canvas of hysterical masculinity, Fenton occupies an ambiguously gendered space: physically androgynous and burdened, moreover, by compassion, sensitivity, and a conscience. Where Dad has previously taken advantage of this coded “femininity,” it proves cumbersome as he embarks upon his wrathful crusade. In another scene, while Fenton washes dishes, Dad beckons him to the table, where the boy (washcloth thrown over his narrow shoulder, somehow a stark image that gestures to the adulthood thrust upon him so early) joins his father. “I know you’ve had some trouble adjusting to everything that has happened this week,” Dad says. “And I’m sorry. But God has willed this, and you must obey God.” Fenton does not merely reject the law of the ultimate Father but also Dad’s own model of filial subservience.
Some scholarship suggests that childhood, as we now understand it, can trace its genesis to the bourgeoisie, who supplanted the apprenticeship system—which catapulted children into the world of adults—with education and thereby prolonged a historically much shorter phase of youth. But the working classes could not so easily desert this traditional arrangement. Their children were still swallowed into the workforce, in other words into the realm of adults. Likewise, Dad insists upon hauling Fenton from the domestic to the outdoors where punitive manual labor further isolates the boy from school and his friends. Tasked with digging a ten-foot hole, Fenton toils determinedly alone and in stubborn defiance, refusing to (as Dad recommends) pray or use gloves. The hole becomes their dungeon, where they bring their captive demons for destruction. But when Fenton finally alerts the local sheriff (who refuses to believe the boy and is still killed by Dad for his trouble), Dad imprisons his eldest son underground, in the darkness and dirt, for a week without food or water, apart from what little Adam can steal for him. For Fenton, the land contains death and yields violence.
Frailty triumphs largely through the ambiguity (and originality) of its premise, hardly dispelled by its third-act reveal. The discovery that demons are real may foreclose on some of the film’s richer possibilities: Fenton is not a traumatized boy, by the movie’s mythos, but a demon himself and the God’s Hand killer, for Dad and Adam’s heavenly project guarantees their mission proceeds undetected by either the authorities or, apparently, their victims’ loved ones. The adult Adam masquerades as his older brother to lure and dispose of the FBI agent Doyle, who is also, as one might have prematurely guessed, a demon. Narratively, then, the tragedy is not so much that a previously devoted father infected both his sons with a taste for murder and blindly shattered a precious bond between brothers, but that this hitherto happy home was ripped apart by cosmic destiny.
But here is the true horror in which the film traffics: if the kitchen, a presumably gendered space, remains the unquestioned emblem of women’s confinement, children, too, find themselves caged in the domestic, and are empirically much more vulnerable to the forces inside than outside the home. An unspoken social contract leaves them at the mercy of their guardians, an accident of birth. They are property. Paxton stages one more crucial scene here (notably the only time the Meiks seem to entertain any guest). When Fenton desperately entreats the sheriff, sitting next to Dad at the kitchen table, to “check the rose garden,” the man dismisses him with a cold, condescending glare. He cannot bring himself to trust the word of a child over an adult (consider how many everyday horrors persist this way), even on the chance he may leave him in the hands of a murderer. “They hit puberty, seem to lose all respect for you,” he sighs, as if Fenton has merely thrown a tantrum, not accused his father of serial murder. “Me and my boys survived it. You will, too.”
