Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)

director: Roy Ward Baker

Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is one of the goriest Hammer production. Set in a Victorian London with all the right ingredients including thick fog and English accent, the story goes in a very interesting direction.

We can understand the whole thing as a sexual difference story: Dr. Jekyll is a pheminst (a term introduced by Braidotti to name men interested in feminist discourse, being fascinated, puzzled and intimidated by feminist writing. They get in the discoursive game with a perversily provocative purpose: to claim the phalus once more, this time from within the feminist discourse.) This movie shows exactly this dark side of exploring sexual difference in order to "understand" women and to see "what is a woman".

In order to find an answer to his scientific research of what is a woman and what makes her immortal, in order to become immortal himself, Dr. Jekyll gets involved in some "queer business, sergeant - very queer."

His scientific interest in what makes sexual difference takes place in a very empirical way: he manages to find in his subjectivity something more than his subjectivity itself, a strange body at its very center: "Put a woman in your life and one day… you'll wake up and look in the mirror and see a changed man!" This is exactly the Lacanian extimacy, the stranger as an expression of the innermost intimacy (a woman in Dr Jekyll's case) or the Freudian das Ding. Dr Jekyll moves around the thing that is "in itself more than itself." The distance between the subject and das Ding is needed because as Zizek says das Ding is "too hot to be approached closely" and because of getting too close to das Ding "love for the neighbour necessarily turns into destructive hatred." Das Ding is not universal and has a particular place in the life of the subject and in Dr Jekyll's case appears from his interest in exploring and reinforcing a fixed dichotomous sexual difference from a clear masculine positionality. His interest in femininity and its secret for immortality, the object petit a, that is never shown on screen but its extraction is fatal, brings the horror and death of female characters. Getting back to Lacan, the motto for this movie can be: "I love you, but there is in you something more than you, object petit a, which is why I mutilate you."

One obsessive line appear in this movie:"You've got to do bad to do good, ain't ya?" But what does it mean? Even if it seems a simple horror B movie unimportant part of bad dialogue, it's meaning can move us further in the main argument: it is exactly the Lacanian thesis that Good is only the mask of a radical absolute Evil. This mask is "the indecent obsession by das Ding, the atrocious, obscene Thing." (Zizek) Good is just another name for Bad, a Bad with no particular, pathological status. Das Ding becomes indecently present, obsessive, a traumatic body, making Dr. Jekyll free from a pathological attachment to a particular worldly sexual difference that he imposes on his understanding of the world. Good is only a way of keeping a distance towards the evil Thing, a distance that makes it bearable. This particular distance is broken in this story.

What can I say after watching this movie, besides a personal increase of attention on deep obssesions and hidden das Dings, is just beware pheminists working on sexual difference, you never know when they might kill.