by
James Rose
Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure (2015) is, like its mermaid protagonists, Golden (Michalina Olszańska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), a peculiar hybrid: part Horror, part Musical, it is an adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid that has been fused with biographical experiences from the director’s teenage years, all integrated into the landscape of 1980’s Poland. Combined, The Lure emerges as a coming-of-age narrative that charts Golden and Silver’s transition from teenage girls to young women through increasingly mature first experiences – the “first shot of vodka, first cigarette, first sexual disappointment and first important feeling for a boy.” It is these first attractions and sexual awakenings that form the film’s dramatic core; while Golden, the more aggressive of the two, engages in active seduction, lesbian sex, and savage assaults on men, Silver falls in love with Mietek (Jakub Gierszał), the drummer at the strip club where the mermaids have found themselves living and working. While this affection is reciprocated, the couple cannot physically consummate their love – not necessarily because of the complexities of interspecies sex but more because Silver is not fully a woman, for her body is a hybrid of a female torso and a fish’s tail. There is a further peculiarity about Silver’s body – when out of water she has human legs but between them is only a smooth curve of flesh that is, crudely, described as being “smooth as Barbie dolls.” It is only when she is in water that her human legs transform into the distinctive tail and her reproductive organs are revealed.
While she appears, then, to have reproductive capabilities, Silver’s body nonetheless disturbs Mietek: in an attempt to seduce him, Silver lies naked in a bath, her tail hanging over its side, asking him to “Put it in.” Mietek walks over to the bath and sits on its edge and responds: “No offence, but you’ll always be a fish to me, an animal, that is. I can’t do this, no matter how much I’d like to.” Silver nods in agreement, looking down at her tail. This shot is pivotal for both Silver and her narrative arc, for it is an instance of understanding and also one of choice. Before Mietek can respond to Silver’s request for sex, she recognises his reluctance and asks, “You want me to be a girl?” It would seem from his response that it does not matter; whether she is human or mermaid, for Mietek she will never be human, she will always be something Other, an amalgam of woman and animal; she is not of his world nor can she ever be, she will always be a fish.
Figure 1: Silver makes her choice
Despite Mietek’s response, Silver decides to undergo a dramatic and bloody transformation in order to secure his love. Lying upon what appears to be an autopsy table filled with ice, she has her tail completely cut off and replaced with human legs. As she undergoes the operation, Silver sings but in the moment that her tail is fully severed and removed she is immediately rendered mute: the act of becoming human, as Golden had warned her, is also an act of surrendering what she fundamentally is, a siren whose power lies not just in her beauty but also in her song. The operation acts then as a symbolic castration, for the severing of her tail (and her natural reproductive organs) is also the severing of her vocal chords. In becoming a woman to satisfy Mietek’s desires, she is now unable to sing, unable to speak, losing not just her voice but also losing the power and agency she once had as a mermaid. This, in itself, functions in a wider discourse around the historic loss of voice or the sustained silencing experienced by women: Silver’s singular voice is lost in the service of satisfying Mietek, the archetypal white heterosexual male. Her desire to meet his standards and cater to his needs means that Silver has to lose a sense of herself and give up, forever, what it is that makes her so unique. In doing so, Silver rejects both her own nature and Nature, for her tail is symbolic of the wild, the primal, the energy and power of the sea. By giving it up she becomes controlled, perceived as normal and without agency and power.
Figure 2: Silver’s transplant
Moments of Intimacy
Recovering from the operation in Mietek’s apartment, Silver once again tries to seduce him: she lifts her pale pink dress, stopping just below her ribs to reveal her new human legs and, more importantly, her new female genitals. In doing so, she also exposes the stitched joint of the transplant, a deep red wound that curves with the flow of her stomach, reaching around her sides in a blossoming bruise. Having paused and allowed Mietek to look upon her new body, she continues to take the dress off, pulling it over her head to reveal herself fully to him. Mietek responds by taking off his jacket and t-shirt.
Figure 3: Silver reveals herself as ‘Woman’
Their sex is filmed with some delicacy, their soft skin bathed in an equally soft, warm light; a single sustained shot in close up draws attention to their gaze upon each other while still revealing Silver’s breasts. Crucially, it is her face and her chest the camera looks upon; of Mietek only his face is seen and that is obscured and made diffuse by his bleached blonde hair. He pauses after penetrating her and then moves back and forth briefly before withdrawing. He staggers backward, wet blood smeared across his stomach, staining his boxer shorts, dripping from his fingers. Physically, the blood on Mietek’s stomach is from the wound around Silver’s midriff, symbolically it is the blood from the breaking of her hymen, the blood that marks her entry out of virginity and into womanhood. Regardless, the blood and, by extension, Silver’s new body, continues to disturb Mietek. His response is compounded by the cut back to Silver: the camera has pulled back slightly, now framing her to include her breasts and the hideous wound across her midriff: sex and sexuality are juxtaposed with the site of the surgical wound, draining her body of what was only moments ago the sensual and the erotic, a deep red reminder of the sacrifice she has made and what she has lost in order to try secure this moment of love and intimacy.
Figure 4: The sacrificial scar
Silver’s sexual experiences with Mietek are in sharp contrast to Golden’s sexual encounter with Militia Lieutenant Milicjantka Porucznik Mo (Katarzyna Herman): lying upon Mo’s bed, Golden seductively pours a glass of water over her legs and, as she transforms, Mo is further aroused, running one hand down the length of Golden’s tail as the other caresses her neck. Golden writhes beneath this touch, her teeth transforming into layers of sharp barbs, arching her back, straining to kiss Mo. In these moments of intimacy, both Mo and Golden accept each other for what they are, their very difference bringing them together and making them so attractive and seductive to each other. They embrace each other’s difference, physically and metaphorically. Golden can, literally, be herself with Mo.
Golden’s sexual liaison with Mo also directs further contrastive attention to the attempted sex between Silver and Mietek: Mo’s look of fascination as Golden’s legs transform into a tail and her caressing of both the scales and Golden’s human skin suggest that Mo perceives her to be a person of great beauty and that this beauty emerges from Golden’s hybridity – she is attractive because of what she is, not what Mo wants her to be. Inherent to this is the act of touching. Mo touches and caresses the entirety of Golden, perceiving no difference between the sensuality of her human flesh and the coarse repetition of her scales. Both are beautiful, both are seductive to the extent that Mo consistently touches and stokes the mermaid’s body during their lovemaking. In contrast, Mietek can only bring himself to touch that which is perceivably human. When he sits on the side of the bath, he does not attempt to touch Silver’s tail, he seems to actively avoid it, leaning across the bath in order to avoid contact. Even in the moments before they attempt to have sex, when Mietek takes hold of Silver as she approaches him, he places his hands, seemingly deliberately, above the wound; he will only touch the human parts, only her torso and her chest for they are, for Mietek at least, recognisably woman, tangibly human. The wound that winds around Silver’s midriff is transformed into a marker by Mietek’s touch, a congealing line that makes blatant the point at which hybridity occurred, the point at which human skin dissipates into hard, layered fish scales, where human becomes animal, becomes fish.
Mietek’s refusal to touch below the surgical wound also suggests that – for him – the transplanted legs and reproductive organs are no different to Silver’s fish tail in that they are not biologically Silver’s, they are taken from someone else and attached to her body. In his unwillingness to touch these legs, Mietek frames the transplant as inhuman, just as much as the fish tail; both are different body parts, both render Silver as a hybrid, part human, part fish or part human self and part other human. The transplanted legs, despite their mobility function and sexual possibilities, have only achieved the appearance of human instead of making her human.
A subtle undercurrent to these scenes of intimacy are the power relations inherent to them: both Mo and Mietek lie on top of their respective mermaid partners, bearing down upon them as they engage in their lovemaking. Both also withdraw from their partners but for different reasons: Mo moves back to allow for greater and varied intimacy, while Mietek withdraws in horror. With Mo and Golden, power is balanced, even when Golden attempts to exert herself over Mo by trying to bite open her neck – as Golden’s teeth graze her throat, Mo holds her state-issue handgun to Golden’s temple. Should Golden bite, both will die and so the power balance is re-established. In contrast Mietek is rendered powerless by his anxieties around Silver’s body. To negate this fear of her, he consistently positions her as a fish, an animal, a living creature that exists below man, despite Silver being a fantastical creature of mythology.
Figure 5: Power balance between Golden and Mo
As the film draws to a close, both mermaids enter fully into womanhood by manifesting their adult self: despite her tremendous sacrifice, Mietek leaves Silver for another woman. Seeing a chance to restore Silver, Golden reminds her that if she kills the one she loves before they marry another, her tail and voice will be restored; otherwise she will turn to sea foam. But, even as Silver watches Mietek marry, she cannot kill him, her gaze still glazed with love regardless of his rejection. In what seems to be an attempt to try and win him back, she dances with him as the sun rises only to dissipate into sea foam. Enraged, Golden leaps onto him and without hesitation rips out his throat, all in front of the wedding guests. Feral and bloodied, Golden jumps into the sea only to turn and look upon them all, once more, with disgust. In the end, innocence has been corrupted, used and betrayed, its loss irreplaceable; it would seem it does not take long for such a quality to be contaminated by the human world. That is, perhaps, why Golden returns to the sea because, in doing so, there is no opportunity for human corruption. It is also her world, a space in which she can be her true self: confident, primal, powerful.
James Rose is an independent film academic who specialises in Horror and Science Fiction Film and Television. His first authored book, Beyond Hammer: British Horror Cinema since 1970 was published by Auteur in 2009. Since then he has continued to author books and has been widely published in a range of international peer-reviewed edited collections including Future Folk Horror (Lexington Books) and Lost Souls of Horror and Gothic (McFarland) alongside publications with the British Film Institute, Senses of Cinema, Offscreen and Studies in Comics. He has previously published for Horror Homeroom on Pearl and Blood Quantum.
Related: See Sara McCartney’s two-part essay, The Rise of the Girl-Monster, Part 1 and (especially, as it takes up The Lure) The Return of the Girl-Monster, Part 2.
