By Elaina Funk
The Netflix show starring Drew Barrymore, Santa Clarita Diet, epitomizes ideas pertaining to the psychoanalytic approach of media, through its use of of the ID and the Ego being represented in the shows main character Sheila Hammond, through her journey being a southern Californian woman as well as undergoing an undead transformation. The psychoanalytic approach when discussing media pertains to the repressed desires of an individual that primarily comes out through their dreams, or in this case the media being consumed. In this paper, I will discuss and analyze episodes of Santa Clarita Diet, and argue how they visualize the repressed desires of the shows main character through a psychoanalytic approach, as well as how the main character is an embodiment of the constant battle between the ID and the Ego, as well as the use of Lacan’s Mirror Stage.
Taking a psychoanalytic approach means essentially to apply the understanding that humans act on repressed desires that typically take form in dreams. Two key concepts within this approach are the ID and the Ego, which are in constant battle with one another. The ID strives to satisfy those repressed desires, while the Ego is the true subject to the external world beyond the ID, and is oftentimes called the reason of the human mind. With the constant presence of the Ego, those desires typically manifest through our dreams as well as cultural texts. As mentioned by Sigmund Freud, our very civilization is attributed to the Ego in the sense that our repression of our shared biological drive for violence and sex is what keeps us from killing and raping all the time.1
Psychoanalysis derives from the need to manipulate and understand the complexities of the human mind. This strive was primarily seeked over the course of the early 20th century by politicians as well as advertisers for big companies to market themselves to the masses. During the second world war, this approach was used by powers in Europe (primarily the axis powers: Germany, Italy and Japan), in order to effectively communicate propaganda to the masses. After the second World War, this manipulation of the mind was used by corporations to drive populations to become consumers instead.
Santa Clarita Diet tells the tale of a real estate agent named Sheila Hammond who works along her husband, Joel, where they reside in a southern Californian city called Santa Clarita with their teenage daughter, Abby. One day, Sheila eats a piece of presumed bad meat that contains a virus that essentially kills her and makes her undead. What makes her different from what we would typically imagine a zombie, though is that she still functions and looks like a normal human being, but just had an uncontrollable desire for human flesh. Through this transformation, her personality changes drastically. She has more confidence, more energy, and isn't afraid to speak her mind no matter the repercussions. Through this all, she also has to deal with many other characters suspicious of Sheila, some of which get killed and eaten by Sheila due to being provoked. As seen here, The Santa Clarita Diet embodies many ideas of Psychoanalysis through the use of the ID and the Ego as well as those repressed desires of sex and violence coming out after her transformation.
Through this psychoanalytic tradition, a theme mentioned frequently is repressed desires. According to Jacques Lacan, these unconsciousness desires are not all the same at birth, but are shaped during what is known as ‘Lacan's Mirror Stage,’ which happens after a child is older than six months, and can recognize itself in a mirror. This separates what is known as the child’s one-ness with the mother, and enters a state called the fort-da, where the child enters the symbolic realm recognizing itself as both a subject and an object. With this context, I would argue that The Santa Clarita Diet employs this idea, Sheila's transformation being representative of this mirror stage.
Before her transformation, she was almost one with her job and didn't recognize her desires as a human being. Sheila mentions in the first episode that before her transformation, she had no energy to indulge in sex with her husband, or a matter of fact, had no energy to indulge in anything. Our protagonist also becomes far more self aware in how she acts and how others view her as well, being representative of a child recognizing itself as both an object and subject. It's worth mentioning that in the article ‘From the ego to the alter ego’ by Christina Sommerer that in some cases that the mirror is also representative of death, or in the case of the text being analyzed the literal death of our main character, but also the death of the past self she used to be before her repressed desires came out.
Santa Clarita Diet clearly embodies Sigmund Freud’s idea of the conflict between the Id and the Ego through our main character, where the Id represented by the zombie like virus and the Ego represented by the still very much human brain of Sheila. At the end of episode one, Sheila is approached by her neighbor, Dan, who makes some unwanted approaches on Sheila. At first, Sheila responds appropriately, until her Id, or in this case her uncontrollable desire to eat flesh, comes through as she bites off a chunk of her neighbor Dan, before rapidly devouring his body. As explained in an article by Gary Rosenshield, “The ego [has] been able to hold these contending passions in check, in effect, negotiating a compromise.” This is exactly the case for Sheila in the show. She is constantly in negotiation with herself during these moments in her life when contemplating on feasting and cannibalizing on other humans. In that brief moment before she bites into Dan’s arm of contemplation as well as the very moment when she commences in the action, is her Ego losing that negotiation to let her repressed desires of eating human flesh to shine through.
Sigmund Freud mentions that as humans, we all share a biological need to have sex and invoke violence, but that need is repressed and often manifests itself through our dreams as well as cultural texts.3 It is clear that Santa Clarita Diet embodies that need to have sex and invoke violence through not only literally though the main character needing this, but the fact that the violence and sex is seeked out through the audience as well.
Unpacking the previous statement by starting out discussing how shared biological desires are the primary needs of our main character. Sheila admits early into her transformation that sex with her husband has never been better. Not only does she have the energy to go on constantly, but also to her, feels much better than it did before. She also admits that violence satisfies her needs, now as a flesh eating undead woman. In a way, these repressed desires are shielded from her during her whole life as a normal woman, but once she transforms into her undead form, they come out more aggressively and up front, completely ignoring the Ego which is Sheilas human brain.. This is Sigmund Freud's idea of humans having shared biological desires that are repressed in order to gain a functioning civilization. Realizing that if everyone was like Sheila, so open about her desires of sex and violence, there would be little civilization and more dead guys named Dan embowled on the back patio.
Secondly, I want to also argue that seeing these graphic images of actually violent (but of course artificially manufactured with a little Hollywood magic) crime scenes, and openness to sexuality, this fulfills the audiences shared biological desires for those same things. When seeing graphic images of a person dismembered in a freezer, triggers some kind of negative pleasure which are those repressed desires being pushed forward. While one could justify this negative pleasure with the fact that these images are not exactly real, they still fulfill that need for experiencing violence, or at least witnessing it. As an audience, we thrive on watching these types of media that fulfill some kind of fantasy or need we didn't know we needed. Dipping a toe into the pond of Feminist Theory just as an example, we see this in a study discussed in class called Reading the Romance in which women who were buying romance novels were asked in a bookstore why they enjoyed these conventionally ‘trashy’ novels. Just by the act of reading or consuming these novels fulfilled an escapism fantasy whether its just for the consumer to be alone for a few moments, or some other kind of repressed sexual fantasy the reader might have.
Santa Clarita Diet touches on almost all the different elements presented with a psychoanalytic theory of consuming and analyzing media, even though they don't all necessarily agree with one another 100 percent. Touching on the continuous battle between the Id and the Ego represented with Sheila's conflicting personality during her undead transformation, to how we see Lacan’s mirror stage as her actual death and rebirth. I also mentioned how repressed biological needs and desires are shown not only through the main character themself, but also through the interests of the audience watching. In conclusion, Santa Clarita Diet embodies the psychoanalytic theory of media in many different ways than what was presented in this paper, but just goes to show there is much more than what meets the eye for a show about zombies.
Work Cited
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Marx, Nick. “2nd Wave Feminism Analysis” (Lecture, Colorado State University, Fort Collins,
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Rosenshield, Gary. “Freud, Lacan, and Romantic Psychoanalysis: Three Psychoanalytic
Approaches to Madness In..” Slavic & East European Journal 40, no. 1 (1996).
Sommerer, Christa, and Laurent Mignonneau. “From the Ego to the Alter Ego – Interacting with
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