On first viewing “Pet Sematary” could be seen as a story about the damage that the grief of the death of a child can cause a family. But on a deeper reading, it becomes obvious that the film has much to say about gender and how different genders deal with the problems and struggles presented to them in life. The film does not present a universal message about grief applicable to any parent going through the loss of a child. The male gender of the protagonist is not coincidental or without greater meaning. The film presents the subject of grief as a very gendered experience that men and women go through differently. Even the responsibilities of a parent to the rest of the family are gendered. The things that a man is expected to do in order to protect and provide for his family are fundamentally different from what is expected from women. Those responsibilities and the connections to the family are seen as burdens that threaten Louis’s idealized version of masculinity. There is a conflict in how a “true man” is supposed to act and how a contemporary family man is supposed to act. This conflict creates anxieties for Louis that pushes him to make reckless and terrible decisions. The lengths that Louis goes through in order to avoid actually dealing with the complex feelings and emotions that he and his family are going through only endanger them further. Ultimately, Louis doesn’t attempt to revive Gage out of love or grief for his son. He does it to reclaim and secure what he perceives to be his dwindling masculinity.
In order to accurately talk about the gendered arguments made by the film the “hegemonic masculinity” that Louis wishes to hold on to must first be defined. In his article on hegemonic masculinity, Francesca Morettini defines it as an idealized version of masculinity created to secure men’s dominant position in society over women and other less desirable forms of masculinity. This way of performing masculinity creates a “hierarchy” among men where they must place themselves (Morettini). In order to maintain their place within the hierarchy of masculinity men must behave in certain ways around one another. In her article on the subject, the scholar Sharon Bird writes, “Three of the shared meanings that are perpetuated via male homosociality are emotional detachment, competition, and the sexual objectification of women (122).” Louis is a married man with children. If he wishes to be a good father he can’t sexually objectify other women or compete with other men, either professionally or sexually. He must focus solely on his family. Now that two of the ways that hegemonic masculinity is maintained are barred to him Louis perceives himself slipping down the hierarchy. His domestic responsibilities to his family have feminized him in his mind. Louis holds feelings of regret over his domestic lifestyle. This can be observed in the moments when he is reluctant to have the family cat, Church, neutered. Church has become a symbol of Louis’s virility and former wildness that he wishes to hold onto. His regret is also demonstrated when he sends his family to Chicago without him. Once during Thanksgiving and again after Gage dies. Louis unconsciously wants to separate himself from his family. Emotional detachment is the last remaining way that Louis has to maintain his hegemonic masculinity and he is willing to sacrifice everything before he gives it up.
Throughout the entirety of the film, Louis displays a nearly constant resistance to emotional vulnerability. As a male doctor, Louis is a symbol of authority, logic, and rationality. He attempts to solve all of his problems using authority and logic and shuns the emotional and compassionate. Louis has Church nurtured, his symbol of virility so that he won’t have to deal with Ellie’s grief if he is killed on the road. He choices not to travel with his family for Thanksgiving so that he doesn’t have to work out his problems with his in-laws. He sedates Rachel when she talks about her dead sister instead of helping her work through her trauma. Even during the funeral of his infant son the best Louis can muster is a vacant, apathetic stare and then anger and violence when confronted by his father-in-law. When Ellie asks about death after Missy dies Louis decides to ignore his wife’s fear and explains it to her. He attempts to solve all of his issues with straightforward answers that at best only mask the problem and at worst aggravate it. This rejection of emotion, the feminine, comes into play during the deaths of Church, Gage, and Rachel. After each death, Louis is confronted with a choice to either process and grieve over the death with the remaining members of his family or to bring the dead back as what he knows will be monsters. The thing that makes those brought back by the Micmac burial ground monstrous is their interstitial nature. In her explanation of what makes monsters frightening, horror expert Noel Carroll writes, “Many monsters of the horror genre are interstitial and/or contradictory in terms of being both living and dead (55).” When a single entity possesses two seemingly contradictory identities it is interstitial (Carroll). Those brought back to life still bear signs of their death making them both living and dead. They are also possessed by an evil spirit making them two individuals at the same time.
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In the case of Gage, Louis doesn’t revive him only to avoid processing his feelings with his family. He does it also so that he can relive the prime of his masculinity through Gage. Gage is the last public piece of evidence of Louis’s virility and his only son. Because Gage is a boy he has the potential to be the hegemonic man that his father wants him to be. Louis could pass down his masculinity to his son instead of losing it altogether. That dream ends when Gage is killed by the truck. Louis was willing to be feminized by his family if it meant that he could vicariously re-experience his masculinity through Gage. When Gage dies, Louis is left alone with a house full of women that will demand emotional support from him, feminizing him further. This is his biggest fear and one of the reasons he tried to bring back Gage.
The revival of both Church and Gage serves an additional purpose for Louis. If the typical ways of maintaining one’s masculinity have been shut closed to him then he must reclaim his masculinity through extraordinary means. Louis is determined to become the hero of not only his own story but the story of his wife and daughter as well. In Sue Short’s writing on the evolution of fairy tales, she talks about how originally most fairy tales served as warnings about men and marriage but where then appropriated by men to serve patriarchal interests. Short writes, “...men change from violators to live-givers. From largely being presented as a menacing presence, they became saviors - with patriarchal authority justified accordingly (27).” Louis plans to do the same thing with his family. He will be praised as the heroic father and husband who protected and preserved his family through restoring Church and Gage all by himself. He wants to be viewed as the savior when in reality he is the thing his family should be afraid of. In his construction of this fairy tale, where he can be the masculine hero, Louis has forced Rachel and Ellie to be objects in his male narrative. Through their interactions, it is clear that Louis doesn’t view Rachel has an equal partner. Louis is the one who picked the house and decided to move the family. He chooses not to share the secret of the burial ground with her because he believes that she is too weak for it. She is not consulted with about any major decisions even those dealing with her children. Film scholar and developer of feminist cinema theory Laura Mulvey elaborates on the lack of female agency in cinema when she writes, “The presence of a woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a storyline, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation (837).” Although Ellie and Rachel aren’t necessarily erotic objects they are still unable to progress the plot despite having valuable information. If Louis had heeded Ellie’s dreams or if Rachel had been able to deliver Pascow’s warning then the tragedy that Louis created could have been avoided. Louis chose to ignore the concerns of his family and strip them of their agency so that he could pretend to be a hero and reclaim his masculinity.
“Pet Sematary” serves as an example of how hegemonic masculinity is unable to adequately handle complex emotional problems such as death and childhood trauma. By trying to solve all of his and his family's problems with “masculine” solutions, secrecy, and direct action, Louis brought ruin onto himself and his family. If he had been more willing to tackle his issues in a more feminine way, dialogue, and emotional vulnerability, he and his family could have been saved. When Jud Crandall’s said, “The soil of a man’s heart is stonier,” he is just perpetuating myths about masculinity and men that Louis has already internalized. The truth is that Louis was adding stones to his own heart.
Works Cited
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6-18.
Carroll, Noel. “The Nature of Horror.” The Journal p. 51-59.
Short, Sue. “Telling Tales: Fairy Tales and Female Rites of Passage Narratives.” Misfit Sister,
2007, pp. 22-44.
Bird, Sharon R. “Welcome To The Mens Club.” Gender & Society, vol. 10, no. 2, 1996, pp.
120-132.
Morettini, Francesco Maria. “Climate Change and Human Rights.” Global Policy Journal, 27
Oct. 2016, www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/27/10/2016/hegemonic-masculinity-how-dominant-man-subjugates-other-men-women-and-society.
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