Final Analysis: Candyman

To start, I have really enjoyed this class. This is not me sucking up--it's been totally fascinating to watch quite a few films that would never have occured to me to watch (namely Scream IV, Seeds of Chucky, Feed). And truthfully, I might not have gotten around to Us or Nope so quickly if I hadn't rewatched Get Out for the class. In these lazy summer nights, it gave us something to look forward to and analyze. I also feel like the readings around gender, race, class, capitalism, heteronormativity, body, and disability have made me more literate in both discussing these issues and applying the different lens to films and readings. 

But to finalize my return to Candyman in relation to the readings, just a few things to note: 

1. In her analysis of Kristeva's "Power of Horror" within "Horror and the Monstrous Feminine," Barbara Creed outlines the monstrous feminine as it relates to the child's relationship with his mother ("the mother and child relationship"). She states that much of horror around this relationship comes from the "maternal body is a point of conflicting desires" and for the child to excavate himself from this turmoil, the mother must be defiled in some way. In Candyman, the mother and son relationship is one that is built on a lie. The mother has not told Anthony that he was the original baby who was nearly sacrificed in the fire. Though she kept this secret from him to seemingly protect him from the legacy of the Candyman, she also did not arm him with any knowledge that might have allowed him to steer clear of Cabrini-Green, and his participation in re-animating the monster. Her omission about his origin story makes it more likely that he will recreate the drama that originally surrounded his early life. Though she is not physically characterized as the monstrous feminine, his mother has been integral in the ability for Anthony to be re-consumed by the original Candyman and so is at least partially responsible for his death and defilement. 

2. From a racial perspective, Candyman does embody man of the qualities outlined in "Recentering Black Experience in the Horror Genre..." by Noah Berlatsky. Berlatsky points out that "Blood, vomit, and affluent little girls using foul language (in The Exorcist) all seem pretty tame compared to America's actual record of enslavement, torture, discrimination, genocide, and murder." At the center of Candyman is exactly that--a legacy of systemic abuse and violence of Black people at the hands of whites. The spectre of Candyman is the physical embodiment of hundreds of years of atrocities visited upon Black bodies, and in the 2021 version, this monster is not coming for other Black people--it is coming for the whites who have benefitted from and thrived on the bodies of Blacks. The last image of Anthony morphing into the body of the black man, Daniel, who was burned and torn apart for his relationship with a white woman is what lies beneath the facade--Candyman is a symbol of continued harm done to Blacks over the years--not just with the housing projects of Cabrini-Green but well before that time and in the intervening years. Though Anthony is lost in the creation of this monster, the other Black people in the film are not harmed, and his girlfriend Brianna is alive at the end, when Candyman asks her to "Tell everyone" about what has happened.  

3. As far as capitalism in the film, the seeds of this desire to succeed on the backs of others is very obvious in Anthony's return to Cabrini-Green to mine it for artwork that might bring him fame and provide entre into the (mostly white) art world. In "How Jordan Peele's Us Deconstructs the American Dream and Capitalist Consumption," Ashley Walton first takes apart the mythology of the American Dream, stating that "The American disparity between the wealthy and the middle class keeps growing, and those in the lower-class typically don’t move up the socioeconomic ladder. It’s becoming much more common for people to be worse off than their parents with 40% of Americans just one missed paycheck away from poverty." In Candyman, this is slightly untrue in that at least Anthony has moved beyond his mother's initial life in the Chicago housing projects, a place that has since been gentrified and built over. In fact, the original story that the film was based on the Clive Barker story "The Forbidden" about the housing projects of Liverpool, and the writer was interested in how difficult it can be for families to escape the cycle of poverty. You can listen to a pretty terrible reading of the story here.  

In this film, we see Anthony attempting to climb out of his original cycle of poverty and then returning to the location to use it for his artwork to fuel him into greater fame and success. 

Overall, Candyman turned out to be a very rich film whose textures wove in many of the themes and concepts we discussed and read about in this course.