Drag Me to Hell's Heroine is Punished for Being Born Poor

Dana, on your recommendation, I saw the scream-filled, sharply funny Drag Me to Hell this weekend, and I didn't think the protagonist was punished for being a striving woman. I thought she was punished for trying to raise up from her humble farm girl origins. (Spoilers ahead!)

As you said earlier, the heroine is Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), a lithe blonde with an exceptionally innocent face. She is a former fat farm girl with an alcoholic mother and a dead father, who is trying as hard as she can to distance herself from her upbringing by getting promoted at the bank and dating a wealthy, upper-class boyfriend, Clay (Justin Long). She is cursed by Mrs. Ganush, an ancient, decrepit gypsy who becomes infuriated when Christine will not extend the bank loan on her home.

While one could read the movie as punishing Christine "for choosing to prioritize her job over human relationships (i.e., for not being 'nice' to the old woman)," as you astutely noticed, Dana, another reading could be that Christine is damned to hell because she doesn't know her socio-economic place in the world. She barely speaks to her mother; she used to be fat and is clearly upset by her former physical imperfections; she wants to be more educated and is very ambitious. For these transgressions, her soul is eventually eaten by demons. Mrs. Ganush is a poverty stricken crone with a creepy yellow jalopy. When she tries to save her house from foreclosure, and resorts to begging, she is rebuffed by Christine, and dies shortly after cursing the heroine to hell.

The one wealthy character, Christine's boyfriend Clay, is unscathed by the curse (well, except for his girlfriend getting damned to hell and all). In fact, it's his money that even gives Christine a chance to beat the devil—he gives her $10,000 to pay a medium who has the potential to banish the demon forever. At the end of the movie, he and Christine are en route to his family's cabin in Santa Barbara, when she realizes she made a fatal mistake and demons suck her down to Hades. The last image of the film is Clay standing on the platform of the train station, with tears in his eyes. But, the Santa Barbara cabin is still intact, as is his soul.

Tags: Alison Lohman, class, Drag Me To Hell, horror movies, Lorna Raver, poverty, Sam Raimi

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Jessica Grose is the managing editor of Double X and the co-author of Love, Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages from Home. Click here to follow her on Twitter.

Comments

Finally, as you sit down to

By: patric548 | Wed, 07/29/2009 - 05:13

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Her punishment is...

By: wrongshore | Mon, 06/01/2009 - 22:43

To the extent that Raimi throws his heroine a rope that she fails to catch, it's bound up in the movie's discussion of shame, which at times becomes quite explicit. Christine is ashamed of her fat youth and hick origins. "You have shamed me," screeches the Gypsy woman as security guards escort her from the bank. "My father drank, and I was always so ashamed of him," says her boyfriend's otherwise icy mother, who's not inclined to like Christine until she fesses up to the shameful secret of her mother's alcoholism. Throughout the film, Christine is clearly ashamed of her decision to deny the Gypsy woman a loan extension -- even in the sanctum of the mystic who could save her, she dishonestly blames her boss for the loan decision.

Raimi has a lot of fun with Christine's character beats -- the moments that are more bound up in her character than in her fight against mystical evil. Instead of following a straightforward arc through her faults into redemption, she takes one step forward and two steps back. She deals with some of her problems -- she fesses up to making the call on the loan herself; she decides that she can't pawn the curse off on an unsuspecting victim. But you don't get points for not damning other people to hell. Christine never addresses her own shame or the shame she has cast upon the Gypsy woman. And it's off to hell she goes.

Drag Me to Hell

By: ylee777 | Mon, 06/01/2009 - 21:39

I don't think it's so much that the heroine is punished for being born poor, rather that the movie presented viewers with a fantasy that was denied. The film ramped up to the end where everything would have turned out just too perfect for her, she would have had the dream life with the big promotion, the loving boyfriend about to present her with a diamond engagement ring (who just happened to be wealthy and smart and cute), the comeuppance for the underhanded chauvinist co-worker, and the rest would have been very fairy tale.

I think the message is more about the fantasy life being just out of reach. And as the viewer, I found myself sort of rooting for her and wanting her to "get it all", to have been fat and poor and unsophisticated and still be able to have turned out to live in San Fran married to a smart, rich (but not snobby of course), devoted guy and with a career that she could be proud of. Then she could finally splurge on that expensive coat and indulge herself, to stop denying herself in order to be better in the future (recall her passing up the pastries in the window and denying herself at the beginning). She could then just finally live that perfect life she'd spent all that time sacrificing for (working extra for that account, not eating the pastry, practicing her "lose your regional accent" tapes). The end was a denial of this life for the character and also the viewer. I felt denied a fantasy ending to the movie that "ought" to have been, and insofar as viewers live vicariously through such characters, also felt denied living vicariously through her.

I thought it was like an reference to Tantalus, both for the heroine and for the viewers. I think the things that Christine desires were chosen because they are simple, conventional, everyday desires. They make for a neat and tidy image of what would make "the average" woman's life perfect in a sort of campy way. I suppose denying this artificial perfection is also a bit satisfying since it reveals that the fantasy is just that. This mix allows the film to not be so overtly political in my view.