This paper was written for a seminar on modernism and madness. The IMDB page for Clean, Shaven is here.

Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven is a film which challenges the viewer in every way imaginable, only to have him leave the movie theater puzzled by the ambiguity (and, doubtless, apologizing to his date for having taken her to another art film). It demands that the viewer piece together clues that, in the end, only add up to educated guesses or hypothetical situations. Madness pervades the film from the opening credits, in which the viewer is informed that it was a "DSM III" production, until the final scene, when Nicole tries to send a message to her dead father via the radio. Peter, the main character of the film, is identified as a schizophrenic, and various clues and cues suggest that he might also be a killer. In addition to all this, there is a growing theme of violence and gore that leaves the viewer feeling generally upset.

But beyond the gore and the viscera, what exactly is so disturbing about Clean, Shaven? It is my belief that when examined in a Lacanian context, the real discomfort comes from the viewer's response to, and visual identification with, Peter. Kerrigan shoots and styles the film in order to force the viewer into visually identifying with Peter. The greatest shock that the viewer receives is from seeing himself in someone who is definitely insane and quite possibly even a murderer.

Slavoj Zizek's discussion of Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window1 seems apposite to Clean, Shaven. Zizek describes the innate fear within man: the innate fear of his own unknown.

Paraphrasing the Lacanian reading of Freud's account of the father whose dead son appears in a dream, reproaching him with the cry 'Father, can't you see I'm burning?', we might say that the professor wakes in order to be able to continue his dream (of being a normal man just like everyone else), to escape the psychic reality of his desire. Awakened into everyday reality, he can say with relief, 'It was only a dream,' overlooking the crucial fact that it is precisely when he is awake that he is 'nothing but the consciousness of his dream' (Lacan). As in the parable of Zhuang-zhi and the butterfly (another Lacanian point of reference), what we have is not a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor dreaming that he is a murderer, but a murderer dreaming, in his everyday life, that he is a quiet, kind, decent, bourgeois professor.2

In both the Lang and the Kerrigan films, this technique is meant to achieve a defamiliarizing reaction from the viewer, inducing him to re-examine his own capacity for heinous acts on his way out of the movie theater. It may be ambitious to suggest that Kerrigan is actually hoping to distill some of the fear man has for the acts he knows he is capable of committing, but perhaps this is one of his aims of presenting madness in the way he does.

The first shot in the film is of water. The body of water in the frame is moving: it has waves, thus giving it a somewhat hypnotic quality. Much of the film takes place on Miscou Island, New Brunswick, a place surrounded by ocean, and water will play a significant role in this analysis of Clean, Shaven. Water has a primordial significance, as evolutionary theory suggests that all living things come from the water. Additionally, water is often described as a womb metaphor and thus, for many, water brings to mind this idea of the womb. While nobody consciously remembers the womb, the desire to return to it is a common theme and this shot establishes a comforting visual precedent for the film. All living things need the water. By focusing the camera on such a universal, non-controversial sight, the viewer begins to identify with the source of the gaze immediately. The next few shots are of trees, grounding the source of the as-yet-unidentified gaze still more with nature. Unbeknownst to him, the viewer is seeing the world through Peter's eyes; his world looks the same as the viewer's—at this point. Recall Lacan's theory of the mirror stage as formative. It has often been applied to the cinematic experience:

The dark theater encourages extreme visual concentration; the seats we sink into put us in a state of reduced motor activity; above all, the screen takes us to the mirror of our childhood, where we saw the reflection of a body (ours) and recognized ourselves in the features of an "other."

This is the core of the matter: the spectator constructs himself as a subject because the cinema reproduces an essential phase of the formation of the "ego"; watching pictures slowly compose themselves until they emerge as a whole, we follow the same path through which we saw ourselves whole and outside ourselves. It is clear...that the spectator should identify both with the actor on the screen (a projection of the spectator's ego) and with those people who give them life, that is, with the ego of which they are a projection. That identification always takes place with a subject, whether diegetic or extradiegetic, with an entity that roots its own identity in the ego (with the ideological consequences that this entails).3

Clean, Shaven, then, lulls the viewer into a false security with the comforting visuals it presents. The shock comes when he realizes that his visual identification is with Peter. The establishing shot of Peter presents him as powerless, cowering in the corner of a small room in what seems to be a mental institution. He is covering his ears, in an apparently unsuccessful attempt to block out unpleasant voices. The sounds at this point are disjointed and jarring, fleeting snatches of speech cut together with other sounds. The effect is to emulate what is going on in Peter's mind. The viewer is forced, like Peter, to try and make sense out of the chaotic; to try and find patterns where none may exist. Peter and the viewer become confederates, as they are basically armed with the same perceptual equipment and then presented with the same stimuli. In trying to find order in this aural chaos, the viewer might, in a sense, go mad. And with good reason.

Do you hear what he hears? Sound & Memory in Clean, Shaven

The credits of Clean, Shaven list twelve names under the category of "Additional Voices." Early in the film, snatches of conversation, as well as less identifiable sounds, are combined with visuals of the scenery rushing by. It is my belief that these are not just fictitious voices from which Peter cannot escape, but aural memories. For instance, one of the vocal snippets is a female voice saying "It is the finding of the court that...." It seems likely given Peter's situation that this is a memory of a psychiatric hearing. A few moments later, right before Peter returns home, a masculine voice says, "But you gotta remember, we all come from the same place." Perhaps he heard this speech the last time he came home; perhaps it is the memory of an acquaintance from his asylum days speaking about the significance of home. No matter what, the soundtrack is Peter's mind. Whether he is crazy or not, he has memories too.

Be they memories or hallucinations, escaping them is an entirely different matter. The fact that Peter cannot get away from these memories is a strong indication that he is not a normal man. He has no control of his unconscious: the memories are not just a stream, but a flooding river of consciousness. The memory-voices overlap and interrupt each other; Peter seems to have no filtering mechanisms. Whether voluntary or not, Peter's consciousness is an odd mix of constant re-experiences of the past and minimal participation in the present.

A few minutes later in the film, Peter sees an ad on a milk carton for a missing child. He takes out the torn photograph of Nicole to compare, and we hear the laughter and shrieking of a small child once he puts the photograph together. This is clearly meant to convey that Peter is experiencing a memory of the child he has lost. The viewer sees Peter's hands from the first person point of view and is hearing what is supposed to represent the soundtrack in his mind; in this shot, the viewer effectively becomes Peter and is supposed to identify with his feelings of loss about his child. At this point in the film the reasons behind his feelings are not explained and the loss is therefore felt as vague. Loss, being a universal emotion, evokes empathy from the viewer.

To further the experience of "becoming" the main character, extradiegetic sound is also used to supplement his imagination. In the library scene, fleeting sounds of children laughing, crying, and whispering are overlaid onto the first person point of view shots of Peter holding the picture books in which the children are performing those very actions. Peter's "mind" gives a soundtrack to the children's actions. The sounds stop when the book is closed.

No actual dialogue is used within the movie until more than ten minutes have elapsed, and it is significant that the first words are an apology spoken by a woman, "I'm sorry I was late." This seems almost like an apology by the director for the lack of coherent dialogue up to this point. Furthermore, the dialogue is spoken to Nicole, who despite being a child holds a lot of power in the film. Arguably, she holds the power of life and, eventually, death over her father. But what happens before that final blow-out?

And You Think We're Vicious Now: Violence in Clean, Shaven

Clean, Shaven's plot follows a trajectory of increasing violence. The violence swells from mere ambiguous auditory hints to an undeniable death in front of the audience's eyes. The first incidence of violence occurs off camera, and the viewer hears sounds of a beating. It is left ambiguous as to whether or not Peter actually kills or even hits the girl: if the soundtrack represents his memory, could he simply have been reminded of a similar situation? The camera lingers in the car during this first occurrence, so the violence is implied rather than explicit. The next example of violence is when Peter arrives at the Flagg motel. He slows down his car to gaze out the window at the little girl in the white dress, and hears someone say to her, "If you don't put that stick down, I'm going to tell your father!" The words "your" and "father" are distorted, echoed, and emphasized once they reach Peter's "ears." The way in which the words are presented causes them to linger in the viewer's mind, evoking the viewer's impression of his own father. Peter is driven by his need to be a father and he has almost certainly stopped the car to see if this little girl was Nicole. Perhaps he identifies with the mysterious father in question. The threat, however, implies violence, especially since the little girl is holding a long stick, which can be used to hurt and maim. The stick can be read as a phallus: a symbol of manhood and fatherhood.

The first incident of explicit violence occurs inside the Flagg motel. In the shower scene, Peter mutilates himself and then proceeds to shave himself. The contrast between a bizarre, horrifying experience and a normal one that many people identify with (either having shaved some part of their bodies, or having watched another person shave) leaves one with no other choice than to put themselves in the place of Peter, since he is the one that the viewer identifies with visually. The motif of water returns, as Peter returns to a state of quasi-normalcy by cleansing himself with water ("Shaven, clean"). The water is used as a mask to cover up and to forget the self-induced horror that has come before.

Most people have injured themselves while shaving, or fear doing this to themselves. The sequence in which Peter does this to himself deliberately carries this free-floating fear to a horrifying extreme. Peter here seems to be the embodiment of a part of ourselves that we fear. Could it not be said that we fear losing control over our minds or bodies, and harming ourselves? If the viewer identified with Peter earlier, now the viewer fears and hates him because of the identification: Peter has begun to represent the deep, dark part of the mind that we all try to control. But it only gets worse as the film progresses.

The violence swells when the same little girl who so entranced Peter during the "put down the stick" incident is found dead. Now the violence is neither ambiguous, nor confined to the madman. The camera, and by proxy, the viewer, is treated to many still shots of the dead child, covered with dirt, as the police photographer takes close-up pictures of her from different angles. The effect of the montage of still images is to dismember the victim, as she starts to look less like a child and more like separate, disconnected body parts.

The effects of insanity, perhaps, have spread to the point where they have become a danger to others (if Peter did in fact kill her). The girl is dead, but there is no blood on her, as McNally points out. Somehow this reduces the violence of the situation and introduces illogic into it. The camera lingers over the girl's body in the final shot of the scene after McNally turns her over and walks away, finally reducing her to something less than a human being. The viewer has no choice but to see her in the way the camera does: as an object, not a child. This has to be the same way that her killer saw her, whoever he (or she) may have been, for wouldn't a killer have to be unable to see his victim as a human being in order to murder? The audience, now, is seeing through the killer's eyes, although exactly whose eyes they are remains ambiguous.

The most disturbing sequences of Clean, Shaven are the ones in which Peter mutilates himself. The camera work in these scenes involves a mixture of extreme close ups, from the point of view of the mutilator. In addition to the viscera, the viewer visually identifies with the person ripping off his fingernail and cutting his scalp. The shock of placing oneself in this situation causes a great deal of discomfort. The shot of Peter ripping off his own fingernail and hardly even flinching is no bloodier than most horror films, but what makes it more unsettling is the viewpoint: the camera and Peter's eyes (out of the frame) share the same angle in focusing on his hands. Kerrigan forces the viewer to experience self-mutilation. Against his own will, the viewer recreates the act in his own mind, replacing Peter's hands with his own. Against his own will, he is driven mad.

The most extreme scene of violence, however, is not instigated by Peter. It is initiated by the detective McNally, who murders Peter in a move to regain his own masculinity. Not only does McNally shoot Peter even when he realizes Nicole is alive and in no danger, he shoots him multiple times. This is more than a case of mistaken identity or a cop (excuse me, he has a badge: detective) being trigger-happy. McNally meant to kill Peter, and his motives are unclear. Is it because he genuinely thought Nicole was in danger? For once, Kerrigan doesn't leave it ambiguous; once McNally saw Nicole, he shot Peter again. Is it because he needed to shoot someone to feel competent in his line of work again?

Again, the viewer's trust in what he has seen is thwarted when his expectations are not met. Or are they? McNally has, in a sense, become Peter. If we expect Peter to be a killer, and McNally becomes Peter and then kills, our expectations have been met. But if McNally becomes Peter, what has Peter become in the last moments of his life? Does he gain power?

Permutations on the Power Paradigm

The power structure of Clean, Shaven is in many ways atypical. In this film, women have an unusually fair share of power and agency. On the island of the film, it is only women who are shown gutting fish. In addition to their power over human and piscine mortality, the women sell the fish on the island, giving them economic power as well. Returning to the water imagery of the first shot, the fish come from the water. The women take what belongs in the water and gain power by selling it, disturbing the natural order of things. Both of the main female characters are shown as independent, seemingly without husbands or boyfriends. Nicole's adoptive mother is content with a tryst with McNally; Peter's mother Gladys seems to be a widow, although the absence of Peter's father is never explicitly explained.

The character who seems to hold the most power is Nicole. Prepubescent, she does not have sexual power; as a child, she represents Peter's manhood as well as a reminder of better times. Everyone's prerogative is that Nicole's identity be something other than it might otherwise be. That is, those who would otherwise have power over her see her identity as defined in terms of negative traits rather than positive ones. Her adoptive mother wants her, presumably, to be like her and not her biological family, as demonstrated by the book Nicole is seen filling out: "My birth mother is.... DEAD." The spot for "birth father" is blank because Nicole does not even know how to fill it out. Peter's mother does not want Nicole to end up like Peter. McNally's career depends on Nicole not ending up like the dead girl. Peter desperately wants Nicole to no longer be a grainy milk-carton image to him. Ironically, because of this concern that Nicole must not end up like the mysterious Dead Mother or like Peter, her every action becomes very important to all these characters. It is "safe" for Nicole to play alone, but when her father shows up and offers to play with her, the police begin to trail them both. Situations like this, of course, can only end in tragedy.

It is Nicole's point of view that brings the public sphere and the voice of reason into Peter's car and perhaps even into his mind. "You don't have a very nice car," she observes. He says nothing, but when she enters his car, the extradiegetic sounds stop. Is it because his memory-sounds stop, or because the presence of another character negates the film's tendency to "become" Peter? When Nicole turns on the radio, all we hear is static. The radio's broken, too. It really isn't a very nice car. This proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the sounds the audience has been hearing have been products of Peter's mind. Only Nicole has the power to articulate the extent of Peter's madness. She's a bit like the child who proclaims that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes: in a sense, she speaks the truth that everyone else has been too afraid to speak all along.

Peter's mother also wields a lot of power. The spaces inside her house are tiny; by comparison, Peter's car seems vast. Yet Peter seems much more vulnerable and exposed in her house than he does in his car. He stays silent. The ambient noises disappear, and the camera-as-Peter concentrates on small events, such as a tea kettle boiling. In the suffocating house, time slows down for him and things like the kettle whistling absorb his interest for what is, adjusted for the context of the 83-minute-long film's overall pace, a frighteningly long time. Peter's mother has the power to make him at least pretend to concentrate on her. She has robbed him of Nicole, the symbol of his manhood and adult sexuality. Since Nicole's mother is dead, Nicole is the only thing left to represent what was presumably a much happier time in his life, a time in which Peter was more fully a man. Gladys is the one who put Nicole up for adoption; she knows where Nicole is, but she is not telling. In essence, Gladys is castrating Peter. In a further example of the matriarchal economic structure of Miscou Island, she actually demands that he pay her to stay in her house. Peter does not seem to be independently wealthy, but the fact that she is taking what little money he does have simply because she can seems to be an example of petty posturing. When he does offer to give her the money, she is sitting outside, gutting a fish, further demonstrating the power that she holds over life and death, water and power.

Gladys even uses paradoxical speech to further trap Peter. From his point of view, the camera focuses on her face as she says, "I don't know if I can stand another summer like this. It's so unusual." If she has lived through other summers like this one, what makes it unusual? Her words set up a conundrum which traps the viewer in a sea of illogic. Indeed, Peter's relationship to her is never even verbally explained until right before he leaves her house: it is only when he leaves the space belonging to her that he may refer to her as "Mom." It becomes easy to see how one could have gone insane in this house. Gladys is master of the house, the food, and the language: there is no counterforce to check her power.

Her rules serve to further emasculate him, and he plays along. Does he play along because he is too scared to do otherwise, or because he hopes that complacency will bring about a reunion with his daughter? Space is fundamental to Clean, Shaven. Will moving into another person's owned space change his situation?

Ladies and Gentlemen, He is Floating in Space

Kerrigan's use of personal versus shared space in the film helps define Peter as a madman. When Peter is alone and in his own private space (i.e., the car), his actions are strange and inexplicable, but so long as he is removed from the context of the larger world, they don't need to make sense. It is in these contexts that the camera mimics Peter's own perspective. Yet when he ventures into public spaces and the viewer sees him from the objective third person "eye" of the camera, his actions become contrasted with those of the world at large and are juxtaposed with shots of the horrified reactions of onlookers. His actions start to seem strange, even sinister.

Peter's car is his castle. When the viewer sees him tape over the mirrors and put newspaper over the windows, one assumes he has some kind of rationale, even if it is not necessarily logical, in the real world. It seems as though he is insulating his private sphere from the frightening, mercurial public space just outside. Why would he want to do this? The scene in which he does this is placed right after the scene in which the little girl looks into the window, and, exiting his car, the viewer (who conveniently "stays" in the car) hears the sounds of a beating and a child screaming. I choose to read this in a more optimistic manner. Peter's quixotic hero-quest is to find his daughter. Any girl could be Nicole, or at least know where she is. Therefore, Peter got out of the car to chase the girl, but not with malicious intent, and ended up inadvertently witnessing the assault (or murder) of the girl. This would be a traumatic experience for anyone, but for an unbalanced man it provoked a response of fear and mistrust in the world. Somewhere during his foray into the mysterious world Outside, Peter acquired the things he put into the trunk of his car. The mistrust Peter acquired on the outside caused him to feel the need to insulate himself further inside his car, sealing off any "ins," and more importantly, making the mirrors dysfunctional. This is a sign of regression, if I may regress to the aforementioned Lacanian reading. "[Lacan is] led... to regard the function of the mirror-stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality—or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt."4

Within Peter, there is a division between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt: the inner Peter, who finds punching in his car window perfectly ordinary, and the outer Peter, who must interact with other human beings. Peter wants to disestablish the relation between himself and reality, while the viewer continues to identify with him. The mirror stage in the movie house mirrors the viewer's original mirror stage as Peter regresses back to a reversal of his own mirror stage. It's like a hall of mirrors.

Peter covers up the mirrors in his car so that he cannot see himself. The camera continues to provide a subjective, first person viewpoint; preventing the camera from "seeing" itself allows the viewer to continue to identify with Peter even while the viewer realizes that he is regressing. As the viewer regresses he, in some sense, experiences the madness along with Peter.

In the library, when the camera cuts back to show Peter banging his head against the bookshelf, the viewer begins to note the contrast between his actions and the other library patrons' reactions. It is not insignificant that Kerrigan chose a library for this scene. Libraries are places evocative of tranquility and solitude. Libraries are public places in which one can privately study. The shot of this particular library lacks study carrels or any other feature to separate the patrons from one another; it is an open, public space in which the people are left somewhat defenseless. In a library, one can construct a new ego through opening a book, and leave it just as easily by closing it. In this library as presented by Kerrigan, what one does is completely visible to the others; there is an implicit expectation that in this library, at least, one will conform to the norms of society. However, Peter does not, and it painfully illuminates the incongruity of his actions by contrasting them with the conduct of the others in the library.

Later in the film, in the scene in which Peter leans out of his car while it is moving, the public and the private converge again. Peter (and by proxy, the viewer) ventures out of the private space of his car while still moving. The camera focuses on the ground and the sky while he is performing this dangerous stunt, putting the viewer in this same exhilarating position. It makes it beautiful. The combination of the movement and the scenery creates within the viewer the same attraction that it must hold for Peter, even though outside of the mirrored theatre the reality principle tells us that leaning outside a speeding car is not a very smart thing to do. But in these few moments, the space belongs to Peter, until the truck full of toughs pulls up alongside him. Immediately the reactions of the "sane" are caught by the camera, as well, and suddenly what he is doing doesn't seem so whimsical by any stretch of the imagination. Their looks of abject horror and confusion cause Peter to move back into his sheltered little car. The viewer might feel the same embarrassment that Peter does, and again wonder if he might have the capacity to do the same foolhardy thing. After all, a person enough in control of his faculties to see a pretentious art movie would never go insane...right? Herewith the parable of McNally.

"I'm not a cop. I'm a detective!...Let's go have dinner!" Doubling in Clean, Shaven

McNally, the detective, is a man on a mission. The mission appears noble at first: he wants to catch whomever murdered the little girl at the Flagg motel. But McNally is not what he seems to be: a process of doubling takes place throughout the film, casting doubt on McNally's often contradictory actions and eventually, his "mission" itself. He wears a wedding ring, yet he asks Nicole's adoptive mother out on a date, on the pretext of concern for her adoptive daughter. The aforementioned date ends with sex in the illustrious Flagg motel. Whether or not this illicit interlude brings any benefit to Nicole is another question left unanswered by Kerrigan.

As the film progresses, his actions start to echo Peter's in an eerie way. During the scene in which McNally examines the evidence from the motel, he gets a splinter, mirroring the scenes in which Peter deliberately hurts himself. McNally got the splinter by caressing the piece of wood which was removed from the motel. It does not seem like police protocol to caress evidence, but McNally seems almost to be connecting with the piece of wood, imagining the damage it may have caused. The camera (through McNally's eyes) lingers on the wound. McNally winces with pain, but he does not immediately remove the splinter. It seems as though he savors the pain. For a few moments, the camera becomes McNally, who has already begun the process of becoming Peter in his reaction to self-induced pain.

In the coroner's office, we see McNally learning from an expert: it is analogous to Peter in the public spaces in which he has no control. McNally seems most confident in his lonely moments: when he's alone in the motel gathering evidence, when he's alone examining (or fondling) it, and so forth. But when he is in the professional space of another, his take-charge demeanor is gone. In the coroner's examining room, the viewer is reminded of the crime scene in which McNally first appears, in which he is in control of the situation. The same dead girl is central to that sequence, too, but in the first scene, she is not gutted as she is in the coroner scene. The fact that she is gutted is also vaguely reminiscent of the women on the island. They are portrayed as gutting fish, as having the power to give and to take away life. In the coroner's office, this girl is dead—she could have, in time, grown up to be another one of them. Now all she can do is give her body to help the males. As the wall on the examining room states, "This is the place where the dead help the living."

McNally is at the top of the power structure in the scene in which the girl is discovered. He spouts off observations and orders to the photographer, his subordinate, in a confident manner. In the coroner scene, not only must McNally defer control to the coroner, but he realizes he may have let a killer go. "This indicates she was beaten to death," the coroner states calmly. The camera cuts to McNally in his car, savagely beating his own steering wheel, in much the same manner as the little girl was beaten to death. Even if Peter did not kill the little girl, the idea has been planted in the audience's mind. McNally is taking on Peter's traits; if he now apes killing the girl, does that make Peter the murderer? Or is McNally pantomiming his own idea of Peter because he wants Peter to be the murderer?

McNally becomes impotent throughout the course of the film as he loses the ability to function as a detective (he is not a police officer). He cannot stop the robbery of the bar he is patronizing, even though he has a gun and the legal authority to use it. The other patrons know this, and glance at him questioningly when he does not act. He only fingers the gun and lowers his head at the gunman's command. His inability to use the gun is reminiscent of impotency. What has rendered him unable to use the phallus? Is it his gnawing fear that he let a particularly strange patron of the Flagg motel leave without having been questioned? His regret is another emotion with which viewers identify. At this point in the film, their identification begins to cross over. So does McNally's sanity.

After the robbery, the camera follows McNally as he tries to connect with water again, splashing cold water on his face in the private space of the bathroom. This is, of course, "tamed," "civilized" water, under control of the male; it is not the wild ocean which is usually identified with female mastery in Clean, Shaven. Perhaps because of this, it is only a temporary restoration of this man's ability to function in the world.

Yet this functionality is only temporary. McNally and Peter are on opposite trajectories of sanity. When Peter speaks to Nicole, he gains an agency that was not within him before. He has fulfilled his quixotic quest. His daughter is no longer a torn photograph or a murky composite drawing. Unlike the detective, who cannot competently solve a mystery even when it no longer matters (the girl is dead; what difference does it make now?), Peter has found his child—alive, to boot. He understands Nicole's isolation and allows her to speak the truth, informing both he and the audience that "[he doesn't have] a very nice car." The combination of Peter's detachment from reality and Nicole's status as a child who has not yet experienced the harshness of the world allows them to communicate and connect with each other in a way that they cannot with anyone else. For the short time that Peter is actually a parent to Nicole, he has the agency that McNally has been trying to regain. Significantly, they go to the ocean, in an attempted return to innocence that is also another return to the film's opening shot.

As McNally drives to the beach for his final confrontation with Peter, the audience hears sounds quite similar to those that have traditionally accompanied Peter. However, these sounds are McNally's police scanner. Or are they? McNally seems to have finally "caught" Peter's insanity. He seems unnaturally happy during the drive to the beach as he readies his gun. While Peter's mission is to restore himself to life in his daughter's eyes (since he has been dead to her for most of her childhood), McNally's has been to restore his own version of vigilante justice and order to the world after a girl's death. When seen in this light, which mission is more constructive? After McNally shoots Peter, he picks up Peter's rifle—another phallus—and shoots it into the air. The police reasoning behind this is obvious; McNally can claim that Peter shot first. But the shot is framed and lit similarly to the shot from earlier in the film, when Peter gets out of his car and points the same rifle, at the same angle, into the sky, but without shooting it. This may be symptomatic of Peter's asexuality (or maybe Peter just has more sense with firearms). McNally's identity has broken down and he has, in a sense, become Peter when he shoots the gun into the sky. It is with this action that McNally seems to have finally become Peter, not just by taking over the possession of his phallus but by actually using it. In doing this, has McNally taken the audience's place? Is it necessary for the insanity to be transferred to another character, since McNally kills Peter? Would this happen to anyone who came into possession of Peter's phallus? Does this transference of power necessitate transference of insanity?

Space and Sound United: "Daddy? Hello, Hello, Are You There?"

The film's final scene portrays Nicole on her adoptive mother's fishing boat, playing with the CB radio. "Hello, hello, Daddy, are you there?" she asks, over and over. She is sending off sounds to nowhere, out into space. Nicole has lost the power she had when her father was still alive. Now that her father is no longer a danger, will people still worry about her as they did? Her father has entered the great unknown void of space. The only thing she can do is speak into the void and hope for some kind of sign. It is significant that as Peter traveled through the land in a private space (the car), the film ends with Nicole in the private space of the boat, attempting to contact him. She is in a liminal state; while she is on the boat she is both in a constructed space and on water. When using the radio she is engaging sound. All three of these concepts are united for an unsettling ending. Does Nicole really believe that she can contact her father via the "transmitters" in his body? Has she fully accepted her father's logic, as her family had feared she would? If so, does this mean that yet another person in this film has gone insane? This would be a bleak vision indeed.

So Canada's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Now What?

If, as we have explored, the real madness in Clean, Shaven comes not from the characters' actions but our reactions to it, what can we take away from the film? Kerrigan, to some extent, has us experience Peter's madness so that we can react to it. By the end of the film, the viewer has not only become Peter but seen his own reaction to this most unromantic view of insanity. Perhaps Lodge Kerrigan's intent in making such a disturbingly immersive film is to have the audience reevaluate their impressions of the mentally ill. If one has experienced the same things that another is going through, empathy can occur. If we gain empathy towards the mentally ill, can we save the Peters, McNallys, and the Nicoles of Kerrigan's bleak world?

But that is a simple conclusion, and if there is anything Kerrigan is not, it is simple. To understand his aims we must look at the crossover in sanity that takes place between Peter and McNally. It cannot be a coincidence that the one authority figure in the film, the one who tries to contain and reason with madness, ends up insane himself. In most crime narratives, the good detective is duly rewarded for his hunch with a pack of donuts and the knowledge that he is in the right. In Clean, Shaven, the little part of McNally that is still rational may have won the battle, but lost the war. Kerrigan began the film such that the viewer identifies with one madman, and ends such that the viewer identifies with a different madman: one in a position of power. McNally is the only character in Clean, Shaven who has any position of authority; he is the voice of the law (even though he is a detective, not a cop). Is his eventual madness and incompetence caused by his futile attempt to control it? Everyone fears being wrong about their intuition; McNally's situation presents a worst-case scenario of this ambient fear. But not everyone tries to control forces that they have no understanding of. Perhaps McNally's slipping sanity is a statement on authority figures overstepping their boundaries. Is it a karmic punishment for trying to control something he is not meant to? But it has to be significant that the audience's faith in the authority figure is thwarted. The audience cannot trust the first figure of visual identification and then the second one goes mad. This has to be a statement about power structures, and trust, as well. If we cannot trust what is put before us, what is real? It is at this point that Clean, Shaven's audience manipulation needs to be examined at a still deeper level.

The audience sees the majority of the film through Peter's viewpoint—how reliable is it? How much of the film is reality? Could it be possible that every time the camera leaves Peter's point of view, we are digressing further into Peter's mind, experiencing his hallucinations or dreams, but only through an objective visual? Since Kerrigan has constructed the film such that the camera eclipses all viewpoints other than Peter's (and later, McNally's), we are forced to trust Peter's—but how much of Peter's world is real? For instance, while we later get an objective viewpoint of the car radio through Nicole, some of the ethereal girls Peter sees through his car window are never seen through an objective viewpoint. Does this mean that, outside of Peter's head, they do not exist? Could Nicole and McNally be phantoms? Could the entire film be a dream in the manner of Zizek's passage about The Woman in the Window? suppose Clean, Shaven is not a film about a schizophrenic at all, but a film about all of our worst nightmares: mostly kind, mostly ordinary, mostly decent people all asleep, dreaming that we are violent schizophrenics and not knowing whether we are murderers, too. Taken at this level, Clean, Shaven is a very profound statement on the subjectivity of reality, and instead of attempting to come up with a pat answer to the question, Kerrigan leaves us only with the more maddening Lacanian question of: Which reality, then, is real?

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