Kasi Lemmons’s film Eve’s Bayou uses its content and from to interweave micro-narratives, grand narratives, as well as meta narratives to bring new perspective to themes of death, spirituality, religion, family matters, psycho sexual relationships, and finally the core concept of the id. In this film, every conflict and its subsequent tragedy is caused by humans acting upon their desires with or without remorse. Through its dialogue, religion is reshaped as a human rationale for all the pain they die with, voodoo and spirits are discussed as the skeptical chaos that inevitably transpires whether people believe in it or not, and gender roles are reevaluated from a new lens. A contribution to societal discourse that could not be done without the use of the post modernistic psychoanalytic form of its content.
Although Eve is the primary protagonist of this film, the story is told through a few perspectives and the plot is propelled by a plethora of characters. For instance, Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Louis Batiste is a supporting character, but the audience receives glimpses of his life behind closed doors and even after his death. He is a mostly humble town-doctor who also provides sexual favors for some of his patients out of what is initially thought to be lust, but turns out to stem from a yearning to be a hero. At first, his character is mostly informed by the words of Eve’s mother and older sister. Through their perceptions of him, he is portrayed as a ‘cheating bastard’ powerless to his own lust. However, once Eve reads the letter he left her aunt, the audience is subconsciously forced to reevaluate their own perceptions of why men cheat, succumb to lust, or why they fall short of adequacy and how that affects their actions. In a sense Jean Batiste embodies or is at least somewhat reminiscent of a stereotypical silver tongued traditional lady’s man people are used to seeing in films with the likes of John Wayne or even films such as Double Indemnity. However, the former is told from a male perspective and typically appeals to the male gaze. Meaning the story sidesteps deep three dimensional characters for sexual arousal to keep male audiences happy. Eve’s Bayou is anything but that. Women are never dressed in unnecessarily provocative manner. Nor are they undressing themselves for the excitement of cheap thrills. Instead, the audience is invited to take a look at the painful consequences of romantic and sexual experiences. To further that, the oedipus complex is also examined, or rather its inverse. According to Ruth Doughty and Christine Etherington in Psychoanalysis Part One, “The Electra Complex…suggests that while boys [aged 3-6] experience penis castration [Fear that because he has a penis that he might lose] girls of the same age experience penis envy…She must learn that like mother, she too, lacks the penis” which forms their perception of love through their parental relationships because “she turns to Mother for Identification, and Dad for nurturance” (Doughty and Etherington 113). This may offer some explanation for why the eldest daughter Sicily felt compelled to make somewhat romantic advances with her father Jean. At first, through Sicily’s retelling of the story to Eve, Jean is the proprietor making all the moves in an act of sexual abuse. However, by way of the Rashomon effect, a letter left behind by a deceased Jean flips the narrative, pitting Sicily as the confused and possibly perverted instigator. At first, Jean is easily dislikable and seemingly irredeemable. Fueling into the audience’s preconceived notions of the simple ‘good guy vs. bad guy’ to crudely put it. By the end of the film, the audience is instead pressured into reevaluating the gray areas of morality and the ambiguity of sexual desire as well as the uneasiness of its reality. To make a bare minimum understanding of the matter, the text elaborates “Oedipus and Electra complexes have potential to result in a host of “dysfunctional” behaviors…Promiscuity, and confused sex/gender roles” (113). This element sort of disillusions what’s known as the id. As it shows that a desire can be undesired. In a way, Jean and her daughter Sicily both perpetuate and contradict the id. Both characters feel compelled to act and powerless not to act on desires that they wish they did not possess but cannot help the way they were made.
Moving onto the religiosity encaptured in the film, Author, Tarisha L. Stanley has this to say in a journal article titled The Three Faces of Eve’s Bayou, “Although it was denied for years..Even when converted to Christianity..African slaves subscribed to hybrid of West-American and Anglo-American spiritual beliefs of which the conjure woman is one” on the matter of spirituality’s role in their story (Stanley 150). This is in reference to the clairvoyant visions and palm reading abilities that certain characters like aunt, Mozelle, and even Eve at times possess. This adds a layer of insensitivity to Jean’s character when he passes all that “voodoo nonsense” as delusional superstitions. Not only is he invalidating his partner’s feelings but disrespecting her beliefs that trickled down to her for generations in this contextual issue. The all-to-common occurrence of men suppressing women’s suspicions, most frequently blaming their symptoms on a simple case of female irrationality has been a motif in film for as long as narrative structure has been present in the visual medium. However, this film is an example of what Doughty and Etherington describe as “formulas growing a little subtler …Whereas early melodramas followed formulas that depicted female distress and excessive emotions and entrapment in time and space..” in their chapter on rituals, conventions, archetypes, and formulas (Doughty and Etherington 349). With this in mind, Eve’s Bayou can be seen as an advancement in both feminist ideals and righteous, humanizing, portrayals of not only women but African-American and black characters as well. Whether it is intentional or not, Stanley echoes an agreement in her journal article when she says “the image of the conjure woman in Eve’s Bayou serves several narrative and structural purposes…The very nature of African American women’s literature is the writer’s desire to script those things that ‘reflect the community–the cultural ways of knowing as well as the ways of framing knowledge in literature’” (Stanley 152). Meaning that the film is not just a film, but another chapter in a communicative and generational dialogue that “establishes a link with the social, historical, and political life of a people” (152). Through the power of cinematography, religious superstitions are visualized in the snappily edited black and white clairvoyant visions and dreams that certain characters like Mozelle experience, allowing the audience to peer into the mind of individuals who they may initially mistake for being mentally ill. This blurs the lines between the christianity that dominates western thought and other religiosity and reproposes them as an inevitable human attempt at healing when Mozelle says “nobody leaves this world without great pain..if there is not a divine reason for it..” before trailing off in uncertainty as people do not necessarily find answers for all their pain and misery but they may know comfort and peace again. This was the primary meta narrative transpiring under the film’s skin. While the Grand narrative explores the complexity of a human being’s emotions and desires as all melodramas do “focus on the physical plight and material conditions that repress or control the protagonist’s desires and emotions” (Doughty and Etherington 349).
Eve’s Bayou advances the melodrama genre by interweaving discourse about religion, sex, flaw, and temptation, through its micro narratives which bleed into the grand and meta culminating in its innovative contribution to the dialogue within the human race’s collective social consciousness.
Work Cited
-Stanley, Tarshia L. “The Three Faces in Eve’s Bayou: Recalling the Conjure Woman in Contemporary Black Cinema.” Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture, edited by Sharon R. Sherman and Mikel J. Koven, University Press of Colorado, 2007, pp. 149–65. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt4cgnbm.11. Accessed 5 May 2024.
-Doughty, Ruth. Etherington, Christine. Chapter 10 “Rituals, Conventions, Archetypes, and Formulas”. Understanding Film Theory. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Pp. 331-367.
-Doughty, Ruth. Etherington, Christine. Chapter 6 “Psychoanalysis (part one) basic concepts”. Understanding Film Theory. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Pp. 107-125.