c.1997 N.Y. Times News Service<
Oedipus blinded himself when he learned that he had slept withhis mother. Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe's much-wed 18th-centuryheroine, rejects happiness when she discovers that her thirdhusband is her brother. The lovers of D.W. Griffith's ``A Baby'sShoe'' become priest and nun upon learning that they are siblings.
That was in 1910. In 1996, the reunited lovers of John Sayles'``Lone Star,'' after finding out that they have the same father,continue their affair.
If a dozen movies, television dramas and memoirs are anyindication, incest, one of humanity's last taboos, is taboo nolonger. Incest is the plat du jour in the '90s marketplace, thesudden Zeitgeist zapping a jaded American audience. What's more,the new permutations make this societal crime seem almost ordinary.Gee, one almost hears someone say, doesn't every family have thisskeleton in the closet?
In addition to the Sayles movie, the plots of several upcomingmovies—``The House of Yes,'' ``This World, Then the Fireworks''and ``The Locusts''—turn on incest. And the buzz on ``The Kiss,''Kathryn Harrison's new memoir for Random House, is not about thebook's overall quality but about the author's revelation that shehad sex with her father, not as an unwilling child but as a womanof 20.
``Incest has such incredible currency today largely because ofambush television and mid-afternoon shame programs,'' said James B.Twitchell, a professor of English at the University of Florida, whowrote ``Forbidden Partners: the Incest Taboo in Modern Culture''(Columbia University Press, 1987). ``In a highly competitiveentertainment world, this is one that will quickly grab you.''
Incest as a literary theme first erupted at the beginning of the19th century as part of romantic interest in intense relationships,Twitchell said. Byron, Shelly and Poe all wrote about the subject.
``Nothing could have been more intensely hyperbolic than thebrother-sister relationship,'' he said. ``It was essentially anidealized sibling incest, and there is some reason to believe thatByron's incestuous relation with his sister, Augusta, was really acover-up for a homosexual relationship, incest being more palatablethan homosexuality at the time.''
An obvious reason behind the current trend, he said, is thewomen's movement, the notion of a victim class exploited by a malepower structure. ``But there is a much more efficient reason,''Twitchell said. ``The major consuming audience of film, televisionand books is still in emotional adolescence, and to this audienceincest is absolutely riveting.''
Whether the incest theme is a sign of society's decline or amarketing device, it is as old as the biblical injunction againstit. ``Incest is in the foundations of Western drama,'' said TomGunning, a professor in the cinema and media program in the artdepartment at the University of Chicago. ``But to discover afamilial relationship and go, `So what?' That's relatively new.''
``Chinatown,'' Roman Polanski's 1974 film with Jack Nicholson,and Faye Dunaway as a victim of incest, played out tragically. Thevictim herself is killed. By ending in tragedy, most storiesreinforce the notion of divine retribution.
There is, however, no thunderbolt at the end of ``Lone Star.''Gunning sees the seeming nonchalance of the lovers as more of anallegory about Anglo- and Mexican-American relations than a trueendorsement of incest. ``The idea is that they're all in ittogether—whites and Mexicans—and can't sort it out,'' he said.``It's a metaphor for the racial situation.'' Beyond the Pale
But Thomas Doherty, associate professor of film studies atBrandeis University, said the appearance of incest in entertainmentwas an outgrowth of ``greater sexual explicitness in general.''Doherty is at work on a book titled ``Pre-Code Hollywood:Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934.'' ``Ifone talks about what is still beyond the pale,'' he said, ``thereis only child molestation, bestiality and incest.''
Hollywood toyed with the theme of incest before the 1930 MotionPicture Production Code, he said. Still, movies like ``Scarface''in 1932, with Paul Muni as the hood with a lust for his sister, and``Unashamed,'' with Robert Young as a jealous brother who kills hissister's husband, used heavy hints, not explicit sex.
The use of incest as entertainment, particularly when it ispresented as morally neutral, troubles David Beatty, actingexecutive director of the National Victims Center, a nationalnonprofit organization in Arlington, Va., that helps victims ofviolence.
``In most cases when you're talking about incest, there isnothing romantic about it,'' he said ``What you're talking about istwo victims. If we start accepting incest as a literary motif, welose public outrage, and when we lose that, we start to condone it.I find it very troubling.''
Troubling, if not trivializing. Linda Katherine Cutting's``Memory Slips'' (HarperCollins, 1997) details the lifelong woundsher minister father inflicted on her as a child. Ms. Harrison'sbook, which she says she wrote quickly in a ``white heat,'' seemsalmost self-indulgent next to Ms. Cutting's memoir. Yet Ms.Cutting, a concert pianist, has done little promotion for the book,said Jane Beirn, director of publicity for HarperCollins. ``It'stoo hard for her to relive the tragedy of it all each time,'' shesaid.
Ms. Cutting, who once tried to kill herself, did not think ofwriting a book until she met a psychiatrist who had lost most ofhis family in the Holocaust. His message: ``Stay alive so you cantell.'' Bearing witness, she writes, has enabled her to ``restorehonor to the memory of others who have survived as well as thosewho haven't.''
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