Camping it Up with The Bad Seed

After it becomes clear that Rhoda is a sociopathic killer, March goes to great lengths to explain why. Rather methodically, he delineates, through conversations among the novel’s adults, three theories that account for the cause of human “evil.” Monica Breedlove, Christine’s landlady and a strict Freudian, treats every aspect of human behavior as a clash between id and superego. Reginald Tasker, a crime writer, believes human behavior is shaped by a confluence of factors, including developmental issues and mental illness. Richard Bravo, Christine’s war-journalist father (who is deceased in the novel, but a character in the film) believes violence is caused by environment, especially poverty. Christine believes—especially after discovering that she is the daughter of a famous female serial killer—that her daughter’s behavior is genetic, and that mind and environment are of far less consequence than an inborn tendency to violence. The novel and film present these theories with equal weight and to the literate reader of the 1950s, who was well versed in popularized Freud, as well as the cultural critiques of Jacob Riis, Jane Addams, Franz Boas, and Ruth Benedict, The Bad Seed set off a vibrant debate about the genesis of human wickedness.  

March seems to come down on the side of genetics, but the way he characterizes the individual presentation of evil informs the other accounts. He is, after all, concerned with how to identify evil before it strikes and describes this trait in Rhoda as “being so cool, so impersonal about things that bother others.” Throughout the novel he makes clear that the trait of the “bad seed” consigns humans to lack warmth, empathy, curiosity. As Christine and her husband reckon with just how bad their little girl is, they take to calling it “the Rhoda reaction.” 

Under cover of a frightening gothic tale exposing the horror lurking beneath the facade of post-war suburban tranquility, March also explored the realm of international politics. No reader in the 1950s could entertain a discussion of how human beings can inflict horrific suffering on others without being constantly mindful of the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima. 

March’s biography testifies to his near-obsession with evil and why it assumed such world-historical form. As a soldier during World War I he was enmeshed in the horrors of war and suffered several nervous breakdowns, as well as continued bouts of hysteria throughout his life. He was also withdrawn and guarded in relationships—being a deeply closeted homosexual didn’t help—and wary of all human interaction. 

In the early 1930s, as an employee of the Waterman Steamship Corporation, March lived in Germany and saw the rise of Nazism firsthand. In his letters home he compared Hitler’s thugs to the KKK and noted the rise of virulent anti-Semitism, book burning, and the formation of the first concentration camps. He even detailed how the German political situation was pitting family members against one another. Certainly, as the author of Company K , a noted pacifist novel published in 1933 that is considered a classic of U.S. war fiction, March understood intimately the dangers posed by Nazism. The genius of The Bad Seed is that March transferred his observations about the Third Reich to a horror story of the idealized American family—replete with the perfect, obedient child who, in both novel and film, bears an uncanny resemblance to the members of Hitler Youth. In The Bad Seed, March emphasizes the parallel by describing Rhoda’s hair in Teutonic fashion as “plaited precisely in two narrow braids which were looped back into two hangsman-nooses.” 

While some critics in 1954 saw The Bad Seed as a good psychological thriller, many took it seriously as veiled social criticism. The critic for the New York Herald Tribune noted that, “It is possible to read The Bad Seed as an allegory of our violent times, as a commentary on the bewilderment and helplessness of all men and women of average good will who find themselves face to face with pure evil, which is incomprehensible.” In light of World War II and all it uncovered, how else was The Bad Seed to be interpreted?  

So what has happened since 1954? How did William March’s somber, frightening, historically informed meditation on evil become a joke? In part it is due to the fact that, in an era when the longstanding mockery of suburban culture has culminated in American Beauty and “Desperate Housewives,” the film’s seriousness now reads as melodrama. But it is also because the immediacy of the Holocaust and Hiroshima has faded and been replaced by new horrors: the carnage of Vietnam; the murderous regimes in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Chile; the genocide in Rwanda; and the current war in Iraq have become commonplace. Meliorated by passive television coverage and an increasingly knee-jerk nationalism, the U.S. public has become increasingly inured to horrors around the world. 

“Evil” has been and still is a bipartisan word. You won’t catch Bush describing Henry Kissinger’s decision to carpet bomb Cambodia as “evil,” likewise the Reagan administration’s appalling support of Pinochet’s large-scale, state-sponsored murders. While there was some outcry over these events, by and large “the Rhoda reaction” was and continues to be the operational mode for too many Americans. Bush’s invocation of “evil” heralded a sea change in our political discourse. 

Yet the worst aspect of the “Rhoda reaction” is not the lack of empathy for human suffering—we can all understand how humans deaden themselves to avoid dealing with pain—but rather the lack of curiosity that goes along with it. We, as a nation, have become appallingly incurious. 

But there is still the question of why Rhoda and The Bad Seed have become such staples of camp. Writers such as Susan Sontag in her famous “Notes on Camp” argued that camp is a homosexual sensibility that grapples with political realities by making them ironic, in a sense, de-fanging them. Sontag did not subscribe to the idea that camp itself was political; she assigned it an almost completely aesthetic quality. The British artist Philip Core perhaps had a more comprehensive explanation of camp, calling it “the lie that tells the truth.” Indeed, this is the essence of the political and social critique of gay male camp—to expose the absurd formalities, the idiocies, and injustices of mainstream culture. Perhaps, this is how the journey of little Rhoda from serious cultural signifier to camp heroine makes the most sense. It’s possible to say that we’ve all become Rhoda, but it’s also possible to see the embrace of The Bad Seed as a commentary on how dismal and disenfranchised much of the mainstream political culture in the U.S. has become. 

So let’s continue to camp up dear little Rhoda—the pain really is almost too hard to bear. Until humans of all nations can discuss, without relying on religious abstractions, the harsh reality of what we are doing and why, we will live in a world that eludes comprehension. But that doesn’t absolve us from continuing to try.