Screen - Volume 23 Issue 3-4
Screen - Volume 23 Issue 3-4
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STATEMENT
This special double issue focuses on the power
relations involved in the activity of looking-at
films, photography, pin-ups and paintings. It is
predominantly feminist, and inaugurates a sustained attempt by the new Screen to argue through
issues of sexual politics, not only in the pages of the
journal but by the editorial board and in organised
SEFT activities. While we achieved many of our
aims in putting together this issue, we also
encountered difficulties.
A number of journals, particularly American,
have recently produced special feminist issues on
sexuality. Clearly, the subject is fashionable, but
apart from its evident saleability, there are historical and political reasons why Screen, in particular,
is taking it on board now. At this time feminist
theory and practice is organising and campaigning
around issues of pornography, rape and violence
against women, issues which explicitly raise questions of power relations in society, and in representation. Indeed, representation is seen as a crucial
area of struggle, and cinema in particular has been
a focus of political activity by certain tendencies in
the Women's Movement-the picketing of screenings of Dressed To Kill, for example. Feminist
theory and politics are meeting, not too happily, on
this ground - a political conjuncture which
provides the impetus for this issue.
Screen has been influential in carving out theories of cinematic representation, and in indicating
how they might be useful for feminist politics.
Now feminist politics poses problems for theory
from a number of directions, and it is this wider
social context that we want to engage with here and
in future issues. A concern with the social context
ISSUE
EDITORS: JOHN
CAUGHIE,
JANE
Editorial apolologies for an omission in Frank Krutnik's 'Desire, Transgression and James Af Cain'
(May/June 1981): a footnote acknowledging the
article's debt to Women In Film Noir (BFI, 1980),
specifically Pam Cook's 'Duplicity in Mildred Pierce'
and Claire Johnston's 'Double Indemnity', was
accidentally deleted.
INTRODUCTION
IN R E C E N T YEARS the criticism on women and film has surfaced
strategies for identifying the nature and presence of male dominated
vision in cinematic discourse. Psychoanalysis, in particular, has
provided a method and language for reading texts and locating their
patriarchal ideology. Such readings, however, have limited their scope to
the text and have not taken into account the film's impact on audience or
the stylistic devices through which the text is materialised. Furthermore,
they do not place their analyses within a broader consideration of the
film's existence as a product in the marketplace, its relationship to film
traditions and genres, and its interaction with other cultural practices.
In order to raise questions about the incompleteness of such readings,
we are proposing a two-part essay in which these critical issues will be
addressed. Part One will offer a serious reading of a film that remains
within the boundaries of the text. In particular, the reading will entertain a psychoanalytic examination of the narrative as a way of identifying
the sexual politics of the film. Part Two will place that reading in
dialogue with a consideration of the film's mode of production, its stylistic strategies, its cultural allusions, and, thereby, test the adequacy of
the reading for deciphering the position of women. Through structuring
our essay in this manner, we will address the question of how to read a
film so as to avoid treating it as a static, hermetic object and, rather, view
it as a dynamic system in interaction with its o'wn multiple codes and
with other cultural articulations.
We have chosen, specifically, to examine The Eyes of Laura Mars
(1978), directed by Irvin Kershner, because the film openly raises
Roland Barthes,
'Structural Analysis
of Narratives',
Image, Music, Text,
trans Stephen
Heath, New York,
Hill and Wang,
1977, p 124.
(Emphasis ours.)
Susan Lurie,
'Pornography and
The Dread of
Women: The Male
Sexual Dilemma',
Take Back The
Night, ed Laura
Lederer, New
York, William
Morrow, 1980, p
159. Lurie's
remarks on the
male fear of female
power are
reminiscent of the
earlier theories of
Karen Horney. See
Karen Horney,
'The Dread of
Woman', in
Feminine
Psychology, ed
Harold Kelman,
New York, W W
Norton & Co,
1967.
violence that inspired her work, now she experiences literal visions in
which she sees through the eyes of a male killer. What is intriguing about
this narrative configuration is not Laura's status as a psychic, which
seems a mere narrative ploy. Rather, what stands out is the connection
implied between Laura's work as a photographer and the act of homocide, her artistic vision and the murderer's point of view. Significantly,
the victims are all associated with Laura or her work, and include her
editor, her models, her manager and her husband. Furthermore, her
moments of second sight are linked to her photographic practice. After
her first episode (which comes as a kind of nightmare), she immediately
goes to her light box and examines a series of pictures, while playing
nervously with a pair of scissors. At another point, a psychic vision hits
her while she is developing prints, and then, while she is in the middle of
a photographic session. Even the dialogue seems to emphasise the ties
between her photographic enterprise and murder: 'Kill the shoot!' her
manager, Donald, screams as Laura finds herself unable to continue
work. Finally, when she is brought to the police station for questioning
about the murders, a detective, John Neville, points out the parallels
between her fashion compositions and unpublished crime snapshots.
The patriarchal
heroine: Laura Mars
moves from the
camera to the gun.
Thus, through its particular choice of narrative actions, the film literalises the notion of Laura's 'male' vision. Her work is not only influenced by
a patriarchal point of view, but her sight is literally taken over by that of a
man. At the moments of her psychic inspiration, her own female vision
is blinded-and she stumbles around her environment, bumping into
walls. In this respect, the film seems to operate as a kind of cautionary
tale for the male-oriented woman who, in adopting patriarchal attitudes,
cannot fail but to oppress her own sex, to engage symbolically in their
murder. By the end of the film, Laura has even taken in hand the killer's
gun-an object she has consistently refused to recognise as an extension
of her photographic lens. Laura's 'confusion' regarding gender identification seems encapsulated in a particular image of her manager, Donald,
who dresses up in her clothes one night to help throw police body guards
off her trail.
There is yet another aspect of the narrative and stylistic construction
of Laura Mars that makes it suggestive as a discourse on male/female
vision and it has to do with the moments in which Laura, herself, is
pursued. At these times, since she sees through the eyes of the killer, she
views herself in the third person, from behind, stalked from some hidden
vantage point. The first such occurrence takes place in her dockside
studio, when the killer chases her down a hall. As she runs into Donald's
arms for safety, she cries: 'I saw him looking at me.' The final instance of
this trope occurs at the end of the film when the killer is revealed to be
the policeman, John Neville.
Again what is provocative about this narrative/stylistic device is the
way it can be read to literalise an issue in the ideology of vision. In an
often-quoted section of Ways ofSeeing, John Berger states:
. . . men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch
themselves being looked at... The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the
surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object-and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.1
It is precisely this split consciousness of the male-oriented woman that
is dramatised in the vision of Laura Mars. When her sight is dominated
by the killer, she literally sees herself as an object, and her consciousness
functions both as the 'surveyor' and the 'surveyed'. Within the narrative, this can be read as the logical extension of her photographic work in
which she generates images of women designed to satisfy the male gaze.
Even the fact that Laura is symbolically 'punished' for her work seems
contained within a patriarchal ideology. In the same text, John Berger
talks of how female nude models were often posed holding a mirror. He
remarks:
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a
mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally
condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own
pleasure.*
In Laura Mars, of course, the mirror has been augmented by a camera,
John Berger, Ways ^ u t s n e t 0 0 s t a n c j s chastised for treating women as men have trained her
of Seeing, New
York, Penguin,
1977, p 47.
a n ob
.
.
J e c t of Sight.
male gaze. Through the figure of a central hero, the audience is led to
identify with a masculine perspective. As she writes:
The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusions
in which he articulates the look and creates the action.5
Thus, though women may be present in the film, it is the male characters (and, by extension the male audience) who are the 'active controllers
of the look', and who, therefore, dominate the narrative trajectory.6
Though in most classical films this dynamic is masked by codes of
seamless editing, in Laura Mars the control of the male gaze is brought
to the surface, as part of the actual plot. In an article on 'Myths of
Women in the Cinema', Claire Johnston terms women the 'pseudocenter of the filmic discourse' because they function only as signs of male
consciousness.7 Again, in Laura Mars this concept is literalised in the
figure of a photographer whose mind and body seem almost 'inhabited'
by a male double.
While emphasising male vision, the film also seems to enact a prohibition against female vision, another feature of sexist ideology. While man
is traditionally posited as the ideal spectator and woman positioned as
the object of his surveillance, she is never accorded an equal scopic
stance. Rather her vision must be entirely muted and passive, and she
must never actively return the look. Again, the plot of Laura Mars
articulates this repression. In the beginning of the film, Laura instructs
her male beauticians to highlight the models' eyes, to make them 'pop
out'. But once the murderer begins stabbing his victims' eyes, she
instructs her make-up artists to tone them down, to hide them with
waves of hair. Thus, within the film, women are symbolically warned
against looking, and their vision regarded as a clear and present threat to
man. It is as though the female look had the power to arouse some deepseated male anxiety, and to trigger some violent retaliatory response. In
this regard, one thinks of the shocking image of the eye being slashed in
Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou, and of Jean Vigo's critical question: 'When
we flinch from the screen image of a woman's eye sliced in half by a
razor, is it more dreadful than the spectacle of a cloud veiling a full
moon?'8
But on what is this apparent dread of woman based? And, moreover,
what is its relevance to The Eyes of Laura Mars ? Once again, it is the
very narrative of the film that invites us to examine the issue. For when
the identity of the murderer is revealed, the killer is portrayed as a
psychopath who offers us a tendentious monologue to 'explain' the roots
of his crime. Neville stands there before Laura and begins talking in the
third person, as though the biography he recounts pertains to Laura's
chauffeur, Tommy, on whom he is trying to pin the heinous deeds. He
talks of how 'his' mother was a hysterical woman, a hooker, who left him
in dirty diapers for days at a time, while 'she sold her ass in the streets of
the nation's capital'. Laura interrupts on several occasions, bewildered,
objecting: 'No, that's not Tommy's story.' Gradually, Neville's mono-
ibid.
Claire Johnston,
'Myths of Women
in the Cinema',
Women and the
Cinema, eds Karyn
Kay and Gerald
Peary, New York,
E P Dutton, 1977,
p 411.
10
logue shifts to the first person as he tells her how one day a man (who may
have been the child's father) appeared and slit the prostitute's throat as
punishment for her maternal negligence. Neville goes on: '/sat there and
watched the blood dry on her face until it was just about the color of your
hair.' 'Neville, you said " I " , ' Laura gasps. This confusion in person
continues later on as Neville puts a gun in Laura's hands and, in a
gesture of suicide, tries to force her to shoot him. He tells her: 'If you
love me, kill him...'.
Other narrative/stylistic details of-this sequence seem loaded with
significance and encourage the spectator's decoding. The final confrontation scene takes place, for example, against a background of mirrors,
with Neville's and Laura's reflections frequently divided into a triptych.
And at the crucial moment when Neville finally breaks down, he takes
his icepick and stabs his reflection three times in the eye.
This smorgasbord of Freudian symbolism is difficult for the viewer of
healthy semantic appetite to resist. Unlike the end of Psycho, where a
psychiatric explanation is offered dryly as a kind of closing convention,
in Laura Mars the scene addresses the audience with high drama and
pathos, and solicits their complicity. But what does the scene mean? And
can it be read to display any intelligence on the part of the film-makers
concerning psycho-sexual dynamics? On a certain level it can, for what
the scene tends to dramatise is the classical male fear of woman as linked
to the maternal figure. Furthermore, it posits that fear as a pathology and
views it as the potential cause of violence toward women.
In an insightful article on pornography, critic Susan Lurie sees male
brutality toward women (be it physical or symbolic) as an exorcism of
infantile castration fears. As she writes: 'the torture, rape, mutilation of
women... reverses the death threat associated with the castration men
fear from women.'9 But wherein does this danger lie?
In her explanation of this phenomenon, Lurie differs somewhat from
Freud. Whereas he sees male anxieties as stemming from the perception
of the female 'lack'-her disturbing absence of a penis-Lurie sees male
fears as derived from a sense of what females possess-of their power.
While desiring bodily and spiritual reunion with the mother, the male
child suspects that this will mean castration. As Lurie remarks:
____^__^^__
172, '
'
^^^____^__
10 ibid.,
U-J pp 162-163.
,^-, , , ,
i i ; ibid,
11
p 165.
12
Mulvey, op cit, p
7.
13
the vision of a deranged male sex killer, whose homicidal point of view
becomes identified with her art. The film even hints at the roots of such
misogyny in its characterisation of the murderer as a psychopath whose
savage acts are clearly compensatory for his fear of women. The film
then goes on to associate his hatred of females with the dynamics of
vision: with the dread of viewing the 'castrated' female body, and the
voyeuristic pleasure of seeing women sexually abused. Moreover,
through its choice of the killer's particular crime, the film alludes to
man's horror of the woman, who reverses the dynamics of vision, who
dares to look back.
Read in this fashion, The Eyes of Laura Mars appears to document a
psycho-sexual problem which afflicts the cinema as a scopic medium,
and especially the sensational horror/thriller genre. To borrow Roland
Barthes's language from the opening quote, we might say that such an
interpretation can, at least, raise such 'hopes' for the text. But following
Barthes's line of thought a bit further, we might question whether such a
generous exegesis is truly exhaustive, or whether it might mask certain
critical 'dangers'. It is for this reason that we have chosen not to take just
a monocular view of The Eyes of Laura Mars, but rather to see it in dual
focus in a gesture of binocular critical vision.
12
II.
During the last few years, an overlay of erstwhile mythic significance has
become a valuable selling tool (or so many producers and directors think) and
the result has been that a number of very small films have been invested with
a grandiose importance the weight of which they can hardly bear. Irvin
Kershner's The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) is a perfect example of this
ploy. At the center of the film is a very short, rather silly plot upon which is
hung great gobs of would-be-significance. Semioticians speak of a sign of
communication composed of two equal halves: the 'signifier' and the 'signified.' A film like Laura Mars is all signifiers that never connect with the
signifieds. Or to put it more poetically, full of sound and fury.
James Monaco, American Film Nowu
14
James Monaco,
American Film
Now, New York,
New American
Library, 1979,
p 275.
exploits its audience in the name of these issues, or does both at the same
time. A second analysis of the film is therefore necessary.
Laura Mars belongs to the Hollywood 'new wave' of films identified
with independent producers, featuring prestigious directors such as
Francis Ford Coppola, John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and others. This generation of producers and directors is reputed to have a larger measure of control over their works in
contrast to the forms of production characteristic of the old studio
system. Great involvement in financing has enabled directors to-have
more influence over subject matter and treatment of films, enabling
them to entertain a broad array of issues in ostensibly more direct
fashion. The 1968 lifting of the censorship code and the institution of a
rating system in the United States have further encouraged the representation of formerly taboo subjects as divorce, adultery, sexual relations,
social deviance, and violence in more explicit ways.
Yet a closer examination of the economic structures governing these
films exposes the illusory nature of independent production. Most
particularly, the tendency toward conglomeration in the '70s has made
the movie industry more dependent than ever on immediate and largescale profits and especially on the control of outside investors. The
nature of conglomeration is such that the production of film is only one
aspect of a network of merged but diversified industries. For example,
James Monaco describes how MCA, 'one of the first film conglomerates
to take shape... own several record companies, Spencer Gift stores, a
train manufacturer, a savings and loan association in Colorado, a computer service company, and three publishers: G. R.\Putnam's Sons,
Coward, MacCann, and Geohegan; and Berkley; as well as New Times
magazine.'15
The effects ofconglomeration have been mixed. Studios in danger ofdisappearance have been salvaged by the new system. The 'new corporation
men', according to Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, 'lacked the technical
knowledge that past producers shared. Their ignorance now distances
them from the film-makers. But it also makes them dependent on the
film-makers, on being offered ideas from directors, writers, and producers who are younger, who know the art and craft of film, and who know a
world outside the studio machine and have some instinctive sympathy
with the new cine-literate generation that comprises the majority of film
audiences.'16 But, as Monaco has also suggested, today film has become
more of a business than an industry with an emphasis on profit first, the
product second. The product can be as 'disparate as film and insurance,
records and sugar cane',17 and loss in one area can be compensated for in
another; however, the commitment to film is considerably lessened
under this system of financing and management.
Changes in Hollywood modes of production can be documented in the
diminished number of films produced, in the consequent emptiasis on
creating 'blockbusters', in the high-powered advertising strategies developed for ferreting out-audience response, in particular, the use of
consumer research methods similar to the hard sell tactics in other areas
13
15
ibid, p 34.
16
17
Monaco, American
Film Now, p 32.
14
18
Richard Combs,
'The Eyes of
Laura Mars',
Monthly Film
Bulletin, vol 45, no
538 (November,
1978), p 219.
15
Self-reflexivity:
Detective Neville at
an exhibition of
Laura Mars'
photography.
16
17
18
September 1982
This season takes a look at one of television's most popular and enduring
forms and asks: why is the police series constantly re-worked and
rejuvenated? What fascinates us about the police in fiction?
Police series have always adopted new realist forms, while maintaining their
own sets of conventions. Villains have always tended to be readily
recognizable-but the heroes have changed.
Included in this season are episodes from 'The Sweeney', 'Target', 'Softly,
Softly', 'Special Branch' and many others.
Further information from:
National Film Theatre, South Bank, London SE1. Box Office Tel: 928 3232
19
20
Girlfriends was
independently
produced, and then
distributed by
Warners.
It might be more
appropriate to see
Goodbar in relation
to Coma and The
Eyes of Laura Mars,'
with a much less
specifically
feminine address.
Rosalind Coward
discusses some of
these factors in a
more extended way
in 'Sexual
Liberation and the
Family' m/f 1978,
no l , p p 7-24.
I am indebted to
Jane Clarke's
unpublished work
on the woman's
picture.
This section is
informed by Janice
Winship's
unpublished work,
on Cosmopolitan.
AN U N M A R R I E D WOMAN is one of a number of'70s Hollywood films which could be read to address and construct, however
obliquely, changing conceptions of the appropriate modes of femininity
in contemporary Western culture. Films such as Alice Doesn't Live Here
Anymore (Scorsese, 1974), Three Women (Altman, 1977), Looking for Mr
Goodbar (Brooks, 1977), The Turning Point (Ross, 1978), Julia (Zinneman, 1978), Girlfriends (Weill, 1978), Old Boyfriends (Tewkesbury,
1979) can be loosely grouped together through their use of central female
protagonists.1 In the main)"they can be seen as aimed at a specifically
female audience, in a period where there has been increasing differentiation of target audiences.2
The existence, and construction, of this 'new' female audience can
only be properly understood in relation to a whole range of extra cinematic social, political and economic factors (for example, changing patterns
of women's employment and education; increasingly effective and available contraception; the fall in the birthrate, with changing patterns of
marriage and divorce; the impact of the Women's Liberation Movement
itself) whose interplay is too complex to be investigated here.3 The cinematic history of these films lies partly with the 'woman's pictures' of the
'30s, '40s and '50s, and later, with television soap-opera.4 Crucially, all
these texts can be read to be concerned with the conflicting demands on,
and contradictory and fragmented nature of, femininities constructed
within masculine hegemony (which is not to suggest that these texts are all
reducible to the same concerns, or can be compared with 'non-patriarchal'
femininities.) These '70s films have received a fairly mixed reception
from feminists and film critics concerned with sexual political issues,
ranging from angry rejection ('incorporation') to qualified welcome. I
would argue that they are of interest to those concerned with sexual
politics because they represent an address to, and the attempted construction of, a new audience-'Cosmo Girl'. White, youngish, heterosexual and an aspirant professional (Alice may wait tables, but she really
ADY
22
Rosalind Coward
'Underneath We're
Angry', Time Out,
February 27-March
5 1981, no 567,
PP 5-7.
7
Sue Clayton,
'Cherchez la
Femme', City
Limits, April
30-May 6 1982,
pp 44-45.
Polly Toynbee,
'Feminist Chic',
What's On in
London August 4,
1978; David
Ehrenstein,
'Melodrama and
the New Woman'
Film Comment
does contravene conventions of'social extensiveness' "associated historically with realism. However, perhaps more significantly, it does point
to the way in which Cosmo Girl originates within the concerns of the
Women's Movement, the extent to which much feminism is not explicitly anti-capitalist. As Elizabeth Cagan has argued, there is a place for
'the new woman' within capitalist social relations, even if this place is
contradictory for patriarchal discourses.1-1 It is significant that An
Unmarried Woman, like most of these films, seeks to address the
problem of how to live 'new' femininity in isolation from questions of
class and ethnicity through its choice of an 'unmarked'-white, middleclass-protagonist.13 More generally, however, it is clear that the film is
not a sexual political manifesto, nor is it made within a documentary
realist tradition. It also fails to analyse the power at stake in male/female
relationships. But as a successful film, it seems of interest precisely
because of the way in which it constructs femininity, sex, romance and
marriage as narratively meaningful.14
The question of the 'descent' into romanticism is considered in detail
in section three. Many of the critics concerned point to the heritage of
the woman's picture and the melodrama. The film itself rather coyly
makes this connection in the 'Where are all the wonderful women?'
(Joan Crawford, Bette Davis) scene. However, instead of functioning
dismissively, the reference to romantic fictions should surely be inflected to ask how, historically, romantic fictions can He understood to relate
to women's subordination, and what readings it is possible to make of
the particular romantic element of this film? I would argue that An
Unmarried Woman attempts to 'make sense' of contemporary heterosexual relationships by separating out marriage (Martin), sexual practice
(Charlie) and romance (Saul); that the move to the closure of romance is
made explicitly fictional; that this closure cannot be completed because
of the critique of marriage; and that the ambiguity of the film's ending is
necessitated by the failure to interrogate the power relations of heterosexuality which subtend marriage, sexual practice and romance.
September-October
1978, vol 14 no 5,
pp 59-62. Todd
Gitlin and Carol
Wolman, 'An
Unmarried
Woman', Film
Quarterly Fall
1978, vol 32 no 1,
pp 55-58.
10
I would
understand
women's
subordination as
an oppression
constituted around
a gender category
which is
complexly
articulated with
categories of class
and ethnicity.
Michele Barratt
provides a useful
discussion in
Women's
Oppression Today,
London, Verso,
1980, as does
Rosalind Coward,
'Socialism,
Feminism and
Socialist
Feminism', Gay
Left 1980, no 10,
pp 8-11.
I. An 'Unmarried' Woman
An Unmarried Woman offers, as its title, the description of a woman in
relation to the central heterosexual institution of marriage. This, we
might assume, is a film about a woman who is not married. The derogatory cultural term, with its connotations of'not-having-been-able-to-getmarried', is spinster - o r even old maid. So the more neutral 'unmarried'
seems immediately to suggest either that this is a position of choice, or
that there is still 'hope'.
The film opens, however, with the representation of a marriage and, I
would argue, a marriage that is represented as 'good'. This much is
signified by finding time for 'a quickie' after jogging (and an argument),
and before work. Similarly, the daughter is shown to be at ease with her
parents' sexual pleasure-'Did the earth move?' she asks casually as she
12
Elizabeth Cagan,
'The Selling of the
Women's
Alovement', Social
Policy, May/June
1978, vol 8,
pp4-12.
13
Norma if a? is the
obvious exception
here.
14
23
24
'progressive' text,
and Don
Macpherson and
Judith Williamson,
'A sense of
outrage', Time
Out, February 2026 1981, no 566,
pp 14-15, fora
discussion of
'repressive' film
criticism.
15
16
Laura Mulvey,
'Visual Pleasure
and Narrative
Cinema' Screen
Autumn 1975, vpl
16 no 3, pp 6-18.
comes in to find her mother looking sexually satisfied on the bed (in a
series of shots in which her naked thighs are always in frame), as her
father dresses. A later scene, set in the evening of the same day, again
shows the wife, Erica (Jill Clayburgh), as desirable to her husband,
although at this point, when she has come in from seeing her 'club', she
initially resists sex. Thus we have the primary establishment of the Jill
Clayburgh figure as a woman who is desired, and furthermore, as a
woman who can be sexually satisfied by her husband. This initiates the
central mode of differentiation of this character from all the other female
characters in the film.
So this movie, as becomes clear when Martin (Michael Murphy) tells
Erica that he has fallen in love with someone else, is about reluctantly
becoming unmarried. Its heroine, unlike that of say, Girlfriends or Looking for Mr Goodbar, is not someone who is unmarried, who might be
unwanted. The unhappiness of being unmarried is thus initially contrasted with the happiness, the normality, of being married. Furthermore, as
it is Martin who rejects Erica, the disruption that initiates the narrative
-Erica's voyage of self-discovery-is produced through masculine activity. Thus, although in the central part of the film, Erica has to consider
initiating sexual activity, this independence has been thrust upon her.
She is presented initially as both desirable, satisfiable and passive - a
victim.
I want later to argue that the film is partly interesting because its representation of heterosexual relations does involve a shift, a marginalisation
of marriage, but here want to stress that the construction of this 'independent woman' heroine as both 'desirable' and 'OK', as opposed to
'desirable but dangerous'15, or 'desirable but a mess', which is the condition of the credibility of this later shift, is achieved primarily through the
introduction of the character as a dependent woman. So although the film
does, to some extent, offer us representations of the oppression for a
woman of being single (both available to all men, and socially illegitimate) in a couple dominated world (the doctor's pass; the blind date;
going to a bar by herself) the poignancy of the representation is founded
on these experiences being exceptional for Erica. She has been constructed as both normal cinematically (she is an object of desire, and she does
not initiate action16) and normal ideologically-happily married.
It is within the play of these two forms of normality that we can most
usefully situate An Unmarried Woman. For if, as I have argued, the
introduction of Erica as married (possessed) is necessary to a representation of her as 'normal' (sexual, but not dangerous, threatening or
neurotic), at the same time, by the same movement, Erica's unmarrying
narratively legitimates the cynical tone of the film's discourses on
marriage. Before the break-up this is represented by the Club, and
Patti's taxing question to her mother: 'Name three (happily married
couples)'. Following the break-up, Erica too can criticise her marriage for it was a condition of ignorance, she did not know she was about to
'join the crowd'. She tells Martin that she was his hooker, displays anger
about her sex life with her therapist (never expanded on), and discusses
with Saul the problem of always having been 'Erica and Martin'. When
Jean, an artist (not normal), expresses surprise at Erica's separation:
'You seemed so normal,' Erica responds 'It's only the normal people
who get divorced nowadays. No one else bothers to get married.' So the
'problem' of the film is marriage, not heterosexual relations. We have a
shift in the institutional configuration of the ideological field or problematic of heterosexuality. Marriage is no longer central, although
femininity remains a condition which is 'neurotic' if uncoupled. And it
is this concern with a 'contemporary' heterosexuality which I wish to
consider, firstly in the construction of the heroine, and then in the
appearance of the hero, late in the narrative.
25
17
The
'unfemininity' of
the 'liberated
woman' is
discussed by
Helen Baehr in
'The "liberated
woman" in
television drama'
Women's Studies
International
Quarterly, 1980,
vol 3 no 1,
pp 29-39.
18
Steve Neale, in
Genre, British
Film Institute,
London, 1980,
p 59 points out
that Westerns, as a
genre, function
precisely to
'privilege, examine
and celebrate the
body of the male',
but that the erotic
component of this
look is consistently
rendered innocent,
as part of a relay
of looks at the
female body. It is
in this sense that I
use the term
'legitimate'.
displayed as erotic spectacle'. And this is how %ve as audience are invited
to watch, as the camera nudges round corners, or she emerges from
behind a potted plant, silhouetted against the long low windows in her
knickers and t-shirt", legitimated in our gaze by Erica's own fantasy. A
truly intimate voyeurism.
26
Intimacy and
exhibitionism: the
Szvan Lake solo.
1Q
Although I have
no space to discuss
the mise-en-scene in
class terms, I
would like to
comment on the
mode of Erica's
undress. She wears
white bikini
knickers, white
t-shirt and long
white socks at
several points in
the early part of
the film. It is
particularly the
girlish socks and
the whiteness of
all the garments
which connote a
nice clean
innocent (married)
sexuality.
- Roger Bromley
'Natural
Boundaries: The
Social Function of
Popular Fiction',
Red Letters 1978,
no 7, pp 34-60.
Jeanette is sleeping with a nineteen year old, Elaine drinks too much and
Sue tolerates her husband's infidelities to keep the marriage together-in
which only Erica is normal. Kept un-neurotic by a happy marriage,
displayed to the audience as an object of desire, 'the heroine' is distinguished from 'the women'.
27
21
Geoff Brown,
Financial Times,
August 11, 1975.
22
Patrick Gibbs,
Daily Telegraph,
May 2 5 , 1978.
David Robinson,
The Times, August
11, 1978.
24
25
Polly Toynbee op
cit.
26
T e d Whitehead,
The Spectator, July
19, 1978.
27
28
T h i s is not to
suggest that the
'cracks and
fissures' visible to
us now in the
reading of a 1950s
melodrama tell us
much about its
putative
'ideological
efTectivity' in the
decade. However
this critical work
has opened u p the
study of
melodrama.
Brothers'
romance...23
28
Impossible romance:
Erica and the 'rare'
Saul.
29
ROLAND BARTHES
Structuralism and after
Annette Lavers
In this study, the first to deal with the whole of Barthes's work,
Annette Lavers takes as her guiding principal his dual aspiration to
scientific discovery and to an increasingly sophisticated theory and
practice of the text. She relates the many themes and aspects of
Barthes's work to similar research in literary theory, and to the vital
intellectual developments of the last four decades, from the
existentialism and Marxism of the post-war years to structuralism
and its recent contestation.
314 pages
Hardback: 0 416 72380 2: 14.95
METHUEN
NEW I
Peter Wollen
New
Catalogue
of feminist films
out now
Free with SAE
from Cinema of Women
(COW Films)
27 Clerkenwell Close
London EC1 OAT
Micbble Banett&MarjMcIntosb
Rajmood Williams
Verso/NLB, 15 Greek
Street, London Wl
Radio On cost
80,000 and was
co-financed by the
British Film
Institute
Production Board
and Wim Wenders'
Production
Company Road
Movies. An
Unsuitable Job fora
Woman cost
775,000, raised
from three sources:
the National Film
Finance
Corporation (50%);
Goldcrest Films'
and Television
Limited-film
financiers based in
London (36%) and
Boyd's Companya British
independent
production
company (14%).
31
32
The casting of
Unsuitable Job
bows towards box
office appeal in the
choice of Billie
Whitelaw as
Elizabeth Learning,
but Pippa Guard
makes her screen
debut as the
heroine.
the wall like moths. Then I came across P D James. I knew it wasn't
exactly my kind of thing, but I thought I could do something with the
story.'
Many film critics have been quick to point out that Petit is himself a
critic turned director. In fact one of the most consistent components in
the embryonic construction of Petit as auteur has been that he knows
about film (like the Cahiers writers turned New Wave directors) and is
therefore well placed to take a stand on form and to comment on this
peculiarly British form of cultural production-the country house
mystery.
The James novel is also a suitable subject for the '80s on another front
-the central protagonist is a young woman doing 'a man's job'. The
novel raises a number of issues pertinent to contemporary feminist
concerns while also offering a film-maker the potential for an intriguing
new look at a well established genre. What Petit makes of the woman as
detective I want to discuss later. My point is that Unsuitable Job is a
calculated choice of subject, and that in the '80s independent filmmakers are having to make these calculations. There is increasing
pressure on the independent sector to go commercial.
The British Film Institute Production Board, a major producer of
independent films in this country, has in recent years been moving
towards larger budget feature length films, employing known actors and
actresses (Julie Christie in the forthcoming Gold, Janet Suzman in The
Draughtsman's Contract).* A theatrical release is being sought for both
films. The search for wider audiences for independent cinema is on and
Unsuitable Job shares this aspiration as well as a desire to distance itself
from mainstream British productions of the Agatha Christie type. This
poses the film an interesting dilemma, a productive confrontation. I
want to approach the film itself, as it has emerged from these economic
and cultural constraints, from two angles. The first is to look at the
changes Petit and his scriptwriters have made to the source material and
what these do to the heroine Cordelia Gray. The second is to sketch in
the perverse sexual mapping of the film's fictional world.
In P D James' novel Cordelia Gray is hired by a renowned scientist
Callender to investigate the motives behind the suicide by hanging of his
21-year-old son Mark. Cordelia becomes convinced that Mark was
murdered and resolves to find his killer. A fair amount of detection goes
on in the novel, and Cordelia is shown to be proficient at her job. She
interviews Mark's friends, traces a former nanny through a wreath sent
to Mark's funeral and builds up a picture of possible suspects. She's
quick to notice that Miss Learning, Calender's personal secretary,
quotes in full a passage from Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
whereas the suicide note left by Mark contained only a fragment of the
poem. Did Miss Learning fake the note?
The novel's Cordelia Gray initiates*^ series of discoveries. Her work is
conducted methodically, with only occasional resorts to intuition. She
has a vocation for detection. This is not how Cordelia's execution of her
job is represented in the film. There all her advances in knowledge are
the result of accidental or arbitrary events:
33
34
^
he is best known for his role as the Nazi archaeologist Belloq in Spiel4
The New Standard, berg's Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) and he will be revealed as the
ay
'
villain of this piece.) In the film Cordelia's stepping into Bernie's place is
~^~~~~^~
depicted as an unnatural act. It will catch her up in a structure of relationships she cannot fully comprehend or affect. The power lies in the
relationship between Callender father and son-a relationship she will
always stand outside despite her inheritance of Bernie's tools. She is
displaced by the Oedipal scenario.
These sexual political implications were picked up by Alexander
Walker in his review in the New Standard4:
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is nothing of the sort. For a crime that
needs intuition to solve it, not deduction, a woman is perfectly suitable. Is my
male chauvinism showing? Perhaps: but a film that calls attention to its
chief character's gender invites scrutiny on that score. And it's not often a
private eye is female. Poiret's little grey cells aren't much on tap in Christopher Petit's adaptation of Miss P D James' detective mystery
Masculine logic can take a rest. Heart wins over head in the solution -anddamn
the need actually to prove the case. So far, so womanly.
Walker is quick to generalise from this one representation of a woman to
a universal notion of the 'womanly', but he does have a point when he
writes that 'a film that calls attention to its chief character's gender
invites scrutiny on that score'. Most of us will be looking to see how a
woman will make out in this' 'male profession', but in this version the
title loses its ironic meaning.
Should we mourn the loss of P D James' positive heroine? The film
takes off from a fairly conventional story but is less interested in supplying a strong narrative drive than in establishing atmosphere-frequently
through its allusions to other films. Martin Schafer's shady but luminous cinematography (criticised in many reviews for being too dark and
murky) helps to create the film's noir world where appearances are
deceptive (the distinguished Callender is a killer; the steely Miss Learning hides tender feelings for her illegitimate child Mark); where sexuality is murderous; where the random, the arbitrary and the accidental are
potent forces. Major ellipses are introduced into the novel's cause and
effect trajectory, the sources of information are impossible to predict and
no strong point of view structure is centred in the main protagonist. This
unsettling of the narrative is not without purpose, however, as the film
does pursue one important aspect of the P D James' novel: the detective
falls in love with the corpse.
Cordelia Gray becomes obsessed with the dead Mark Callender in
both novel and film. There is a famous filmic precedent here. In Preminger's Laura (1945) Dana Andrews plays a detective sent to investigate
the brutal murder of a beautiful young woman. He lives in her apartment, fingers her clothes, sleeps in front of her portrait. (Aspects of this
scenario are repeated in Burt Reynold's recent Sharky'sMachine.) Finally
the heroine comes to live for Andrews in an ending which continues to
perturb film scholars.
35
Dangerous identification: Cordelia's obsession with Mark leads to aVe-enactment of his hanging.
This sense of
confusing
resemblance is
enhanced by the
casting of Pippa's
cousins Alex and
Dominic Guard as
Mark Callender
and Andrew Lunn
respectively.
36
37
Eroticism and pain: Cordelia strains for safety in her spectacular climb from the well.
How else could the scene in the well have been shot? After all it is a
pivotal moment in the James novel and had to be somehow included in
the narrative. My argument is that the incident is given a visual prominence through its framing and duration. In the novel Cordelia is strong in
her pursuit of knowledge and in her physical resourcefulness. Here the
film dwells on a strong side of Cordelia-her difficult climb, her refusal
to die-because this strength is amenable to a visual eroticisation in a
way her search for knowledge is not.
After the strong sexual charge of this scene the film hurries to its climax.
Cordelia escapes from the well and pursues her assailant, revealed as
Andrew Lunn-Callender's beloved assistant and surrogate son. In a
tense car chase Cordelia forces Lunn the usurper off the road and into
the river. Lunn's death by drowning (which avenges Mark's death by
hanging) is prefigured in his first encounter with Cordelia. She asks to
see Mark's former room, which Lunn now inhabits, and he nervously
knocks a toy car into the fish tank. Callender is distraught at Ljunn's
death and for Cordelia vengeance is complete-justice has been done.
But the film doesn't end here. The structure of its relationships exceeds
Cordelia's grasp and effectivity.
Callender has to die. The instrument of his death is Bernie Pryde's
38
September
THE FILMS OF
STEVE DVVOSKIN
For the past 15 years Steve
Dwoskin, a New Yorker living
In London since 1964, has forged
a unique body of work which
merges a personal and autobiographical'documentary'
cinema with the avant garde.
This complete retrspective of
THE MALL-LONDON SW1
. 01-9303647
Dwoskin's work is headlined by
the British premiere of his latest
feature OUTSIDE IN, and includes
THE SILENT CRY, BEHINDERT,
DEATH AND DEVIL, DYN AMO
and TIMES FOR, as well all his
short films, including CHINESE
CHECKERS, MOMENT and
TRIXI.
October November
ICA:NY
New York Video
As part of the iCA's major season
of New York art, performance,
music, dance and video and TV,
the ICA Cinematheque presents
two months of video and television in a unique programme,
bringing together some of the
best of New York's video programmes, never before seen in
Britain.
With artists' video, video rock,
an installation of breakfast TV
taped simultaneously from five
New York TV stations, and a
video projection juke box in the
bar featuring the current top
twenty video hits from
RockAMERICA, the full flavour
of the New York scene will invade
the ICA.
Includes video from the
KITCHEN, Dara Birnbaum,
Sanborn and Fitzgerald,Nam
June Paik, Glenn Branca, and
Dance Umbrella: New York,
the best NY dance videos.
MASCULINITY IN CRISIS?
PAM COOK ON TRAGEDY AND
IDENTIFICATION IN 'RAGING BULL'
39
40
Pleasure: Cinephilia
Like all New Hollywood cinema, Raging Bull is directed at a relatively
new audience of knowledgeable cinema-goers. TV has given wide exposure to cinema's history, creating a large popular audience clued-in to the
pleasures of recognising authorship, genre etc. This audience coincides
with an influx of producers and directors into the Hollywood industry
who have college educations in cinema studies. One of the characteristics
of New Hollywood that marks it off from classic Hollywood is that it's
produced and consumed by knowledgeable intellectuals. It sells itself on
the basis of its reflexivity, calling up classic Hollywood in order to differentiate itself from it. The 'modernity' of New Hollywood lies in the way
it plays on the known conventions of a past Hollywood to displace it,
while retaining the pleasures of homage to the past. Raging Bull is a good
example of New Hollywood's retrospective impulse. Director Martin
Scorsese is known as a cinephile. His anxiety about preserving the
cinema's past is manifested in his preservation of his work in the
Scorsese Archives, and one of his reasons for filming Raging Bull in
black and white (besides as a conscious reference to Warner Brothers
films of the '40s) was as a protest against the deterioration of colour
values. The film, which has a minimal story line, is a complex tapestry of
allusions in image and sound to a lost popular culture. It offers a challenge to the curiosity and the critical acumen of the cinephile spectator, a
come-on to those of us who are hooked on cinema. Jake La Motta's life
brushes against the history of cinema and popular music at certain
moments, drawing us in like a puzzle to a game we can never win.
(Losing the game is crucial to Raging Bull: Scorsese has said that he
wanted to differentiate the film from contemporary boxing pics in which
the hero wins through (e.g. Rocky II) by presenting a hero who loses
everything, who redeems himself through loss, recalling the '40s version
of the genre, and returning obsessively to On the Waterfront, to Brando's
performance as the reluctant working-class hero who becomes, in spite of
himself, an icon of working-class struggle.)
Then there is the film's visual pleasure: the excitement of a mise-enscene which alternates between Iong7reflective shots which allow us to
contemplate the scene in safety, at a distance, and explosions of rapid
montage which assault our eyes and ears, bringing us right into the ring
with the fighters. Sometimes we almost literally get a punch in the eye. I
j!
?!
42
don't like boxing; but the illusion of'being there', the risk involved, is a
real turn-on. The film moves and excites by making the past immediately present, by making us present in history. For women, perhaps,
this illusion of presence is doubly exciting, since we are generally represented as outside history. But the price of that pleasure is an identification with masculinity on its terms rather than our own.
The desired body destroyed: Jake La Motta at the beginning and end of his tragedy.
This fixation on the male body as object of desire has consequences for
the representation of the woman's body in the film. The spectator's look
at De Niro/Jake is direct, unmediated desire, but our access to Vickie/
Cathy Moriarty is mediated through Jake's desire for her. We see Vickie
entirely through Jake's eyes, literally, as the expression of his desire for
her is a prolonged eroticised gaze cut in with reverse shots of him looking
at her. The effect is to deflect the spectator's access to the woman's body,
confirming identification with the male hero as simultaneously desiring
subject and object of desire. Vickie's body is marked out as maternal
43
44
(even though she is only fifteen) in its mature fullness, and by the fact
that when Jake first sees and desires her she is with a group of the mob's
henchmen, the godfathers against whom he will increasingly turn his
aggression. Later in the film, a kiss exchanged between Tommy, head of
the mob, and Vickie provokes Jake into a jealous rage which is as much
an expression of his desire for Tommy as for her. So the film acts out a
scenario in which male desire for the mother's tody coincides with the
wish to kill the father. Moreover, the anxieties aroused by this double
transgression are displaced into male homosexual desire and the impulse
to punish the mother who initiated the forbidden desire. The film
constantly defers and delays Jake's sexual encounters with Vickie. The
scene of their first coupling, after a long, protracted sequence, takes
place in his parents' bed after they have kissed in front of a photograph of
Jake and his brother Joey playfully boxing. Vickie's body is framed by
Jake's look, by Joey's look, by the look of the camera in the home-movie
sequence, placing her further and further at a distance, until finally she
is eliminated altogether. But the maternal body returns in the film, in the
language Jake uses to insult other men ('Fuck your mother,' 'Your
mother takes it up the a s s ' . . . ) , curses which are homosexually turned
against his opponents (Jake threatens to 'fuck the ass' of one of them).
The sexual confusion at the heart ofRaging Bull docs, I think, put masculinity in crisis, raising the question of what it takes to be a man, and what
the alternatives to macho male sexuality might be. But precisely because
it is a masculine crisis defined entirely in terms of male Oedipal anxieties, desire circulates always around the phallus, returning to it obsessively, blocking off other avenues, alternative expressions of male desire,
in its stress on the tragic inevitability of the male Oedipal scenario.
Pleasure: Tragedy
The tragic structure of Raging Bull is, I think, fundamental to the way
the film resolves the hero's crisis. Tragedy is an ancient dramatic form
going back at least as far as Greek antiquity. History has radically transformed it since then, but it seems to retain a certain continuity of form
and function: through a process of emotional release or catharsis brought
about by identification with the suffering of the tragic protagonists,
tragedy teaches us something about the world and our place in it. The
function of tragedy remains important today, or takes on even more
importance because we are living through times of great social unrest
and change. Tragedy siphons off the pain and contradictions which are
the consequences of that change, teaching us that when things change
something may be gained, but we inevitably lose, and we should mourn
that loss. Tragedy resists the progress of history, giving us a perspective
on how it affects the lives of human beings caught up in it, and enabling
us to see certain truths about our own lives. This means it can be mobilised politically, to ask questions about the 'positive' aspects of progress,
but it can also be used to confirm our feeling that human beings are
inevitably the victims of social forces, over which they can never exert
control.
As Raymond Williams points out in Modem Tragedy, the Christian
tradition of tragedy differs from its secular forbears in two important
ways. It lacks the background of a social context against which the action
is played out, and it centres the dramatic struggle in an individual tragic
hero rather than in ruling families or collective groups. The Christian
tradition suggests that the outcome of the struggle, and the suffering of
the tragic hero is inevitable, and that our attitude to this inevitability
should be one of pity for the hero who suffered in our place. Tragedy
moves us to tears, rather than anger or thought. The tragic hero (sometimes, but not often, a heroine: Williams' sole example is Anna Karenina)
is compelled by internal and external forces outside his control to act in a
way which transgresses social or moral codes, for which he is punished.
Punishment and suffering are built into the tragic structure: the hero
batters against his fate until he finally redeems himself by accepting it.
The notion of the tragic hero suffering in our place is clearly very
important to Christian mythology, and without going into the religious
symbolism of Scorsese's work, the Christian version of tragedy seems
relevant to Raging Bull: the rise and fall of Jake La Motta (a traditional
narrative structure in classical Hollywood cinema) is close to that of
tragedy, which deals with the fall from grace of successful, powerful men
and women. However, Jake's fall is not simply a punishment for some
unknown crime or guilt, which is the explanation he offers in the film at
one point. He comes from the Italian-American immigrant community,
and therefore has the misfortune to be caught up in the American Dream
which offered success and power at the same time as it insisted on the
innate inferiority of the Italian immigrants, locating them as a source of
crime and corruption, and of many other un-American activities, such as
political unrest. The history of the Italian immigrant community in
America is littered with the martyrs of this victimisation: perhaps the
most memorable examples are Sacco and Vanzetti. In this context, Jake
La Motta appears as another victim-hero caught between his desire to
change the conditions of his existence by becoming a champion boxer,
and his powerlessness in the face of those who control those conditions.
Jake's violence and animal energy are the source of both his drive for
success and his resistance to exploitation, and as such they are validated.
But in the tragic scenario of Raging Bull their social context and motivation is displaced, so that we are left with the private pain of a single
individual whose suffering is caused by his innate guilt. Jake reaches
rock bottom when, totally isolated from family and friends and unable to
gather support from any source, he is thrown into prison on a charge of
allowing teenage prostitution in his club. In prison he finally rejects the
guilty self that motivated him to violence and social transgression ('I'm
not that guy...'), and when we next see him he is indeed a changed
man, humbler, resigned, but you might also say an empty husk.
Jake's story is about the breakdown of one man and the emergence of
another. But as in all tragedy, whatever the positive value placed on
45
46
change, and Scorsese has insisted that at the end of the film La Motta has
redeemed himself, the breakdown involves loss, and that loss is mourned.
Jake's anger and his animal violence stood for something: a resistance to
exploitation, a desire for freedom. Once the anger is gone and resignation takes its place, Jake becomes a pathetic creature, a lumbering animal
looking for forgiveness. In the tragic resolution of the film we're asked to
look with pity on this shell ofa man who has lost all the attributes necessary
to masculinity. Some ofus might want to celebrate that loss (schadenfreude,
pleasure in another's misfortunes, is built into tragedy), and there is, I
think, a sadistic pleasure in the spectator's pitying look at Jake at the end
of Raging Bull, partly explained by the space opened up for female desire
when the powerful male is brought low. But, as the sister of tragedy,
melodrama, tells us, there is no desire without the phallus (think of the
endings of Written on the Wind and All That Heaven Allows, where the
heroines are caught in the consequences of their desire to overthrow the
phallus) and though we may take it up we can only do so at the expense of
male castration. So where does it leave us? Our desire is folded in with
man's desire for himself, and like him, we mourn the loss of masculinity.
For Scorsese, it seems, the assimilation of the Italian immigrants into
American society is a negative blessing involving the loss of the integrity
and the unity of that community, and the breakdown of the traditional
Italian family. The film looks back to a time when those values were
current, a mythic past when primitive animal instinct formed the basis of
resistance to oppression and exploitation, pure energy as a principle of
change. In identifying that energy with masculine virility, and in continuing to locate feminine sexuality in its traditional place within the
family, as entirely maternal, it seems to me to be far from progressive,
bypassing the question of female desire, denying the value of many of the
changes that have taken place in the area of sexual politics, retreating
into retrograde romanticism and anti-intellectualism. But it does raise
crucial questions of desire, of the desires of feminist politics in relation to
male desires and masculine politics, of the mobilisation of aggression
and desire in the interests of politics.
These notes have emerged from a lecture on Raging Bull given at the National Film
Theatre in a series of lunchtime lectures organised by BFI Education.
Thanks to Jane Clarke, who encouraged me to write about my pleasure in a film we both
love.
'CHARIOTS OF FIRE',
IMAGES OF MEN
STEVE NEALE REFLECTS ON AN
OEDIPAL OLYMPICS
47
48
defined. Each of these issues and images cross one another, are woven as
representations and discourses across a plot in many ways so perfunctory
and banal, so stereotypical, as to be merely the pretext, the narrative
motivation, for a constant and varied stream of images of the male body
- i n motion, at rest; intense, relaxed, elated, despondent; semi-naked,
immaculately dressed. Such drama as is generated by the story and its
process of narration is centred almost obsessively around an Oedipal
problematic: the relationship between the son, on the one hand, and the
Father (in various guises) on the other.-.
Chariots of Fire opens with the words 'Let us praise famous men and
our fathers that begat us', spoken in a memorial service in a church set in
1978, and with images and accompanying theme music of a group of
athletes running on a beach in Kent in 1924. The athletes are watched
by a man and a young boy (father and son?). As the camera moves across
to show us the Carlton hotel, where the athletes are subsequently
revealed to be staying before their departure to Paris for the Olympics,
Aubrey Montagu's voice-over, in the form of a letter addressed to his
mother, moves the story further back in time to 1919, and the arrival of
Aubrey and Harold Abrahams at Cambridge. During registration,
Abrahams' status as a Jew, together with the prejudice that entails, is
established (as too is Abrahams' insistence that he is no longer a 'laddie').
At the Freshman's dinner, following hymn sung by the boys' choir, the
master of Caius college refers to those at the college who died during the
Great War: 'They died for England, and all that England stood for.'
After running round the square to confound the ancient axiom that it
cannot be done within the time it takes the college clock to strike twelve,
Abrahams' performance is commented upon by the two watching
professors: 'Perhaps they are God's children after all.' We then cut to the
Highlands, where Eric Liddell is starting off a children's running race.
On giving the prizes he comments in his speech upon how he was born
in China, how his father had told him of the wonders of Scotland and on
how 'I am and always will be a Scot.' Liddell is encouraged to run in a
race himself, which he wins. He is told by the head of the mission for
which he works to 'run, in God's name'. Cut back to Abrahams in his
rooms at Cambridge telling Aubrey that the portrait on the wall is a
portrait of his father, a man who 'worshipped this country.'
Twenty minutes or so into the film, and its themes, concerns, obsessions and repetitions are by now well established. The problems Liddell
and Abrahams suffer, the basis of the film's drama, can be defined in
terms of a series of potential or actual disjunctions between the instances
of race, religion, nation-and the father. It is the task of the narrative to
resolve these disjunctions, hence in the process to establish a stable identity for the two central characters, and hence too to find for each of them
a stable image of the father.
For Liddell, the problem is one of a disjunction between God and
country, dramatised in terms of his refusal to run the Olympic heats for
- the 100 yards on the Sabbath. Any potential disjunction between his
desire to run and his love of and duty towards God is resolved both easily
49
50
ibid, p 108.
~~""""~~"~~~
3
ibid, p 108-109.
^^^^
the Oedipal figure of father and son, and the act of running as that which
simultaneously embodies and incites male desire. The first instance of
the first of these motifs occurs in the credit sequence. The running on
the beach is watched by a man and a young boy. This Oedipal context,
the placing of the act of looking under the sign of the father-son relationship, continues most notably with the watching of Abrahams running
round the square by the masters of Caius and Trinity; the watching of
Liddell running against the French by Massabini; the subsequent
sequence in which Abrahams asks Massabini to act as his trainer (Massabini agrees eventually to come and see him run: 'So you will watch me.'
The whole sequence quite explicitly marks the relationship between
them in terms of a repressed erotic desire. Massabini tells Abrahams that
it is he who should do the asking: 'Are you married, Air Abrahams?...
How would you feel if she popped the question?'); the cross cut sequence
in which Abrahams, watched by Massabini, practices shortening his
stride length while Liddell trains in the Scottish hills watched through
binoculars by his trainer, Sandy McGrath; the watching of the final
Olympic races themselves by Lord Birkenhead and the Prince of Wales.
In these instances, running is marked as representing a desire oriented
around the image of the father-phallic authority, the object of male
identification.
A second motif links running, looking and the male body across instances of the look, not of the father, but of other young men, other athletes,
real or potential rivals for the father's love. In the sequence in which
Massabini comes to watch LiddelFs race against the French, his look at
Liddell running is intercut with Abrahams' look, Abrahams having
come to the meeting to watch Liddell for the first time too. Before the
heats in Paris, Abrahams, Aubrey Montagu and the others are shown
watching a newsreel of their American rivals, Paddock and Scholtz, in
action (a sequence followed by extended images of the American athletes
training, running and exercising/or us). At the end of Abrahams' victory
in the 100 yards, one particular shot quite explicitly links Liddell and
Abrahams across the instance of looking, as Abrahams poses for a photograph while Liddell crosses the frame in slow-motion to offer him his
congratulations. When Liddell wins, a close-up of Abrahams watching
him cross the tape is superimposed over the image of Liddell himself.
This particular motif is far from exhausted by these examples, for
there is another set of images and sequences, involving the same basic
components, which is at first sight both curiously insistent and apparently incidental. It can be read, however, as linking these components
both with the Oedipal motif (and indeed with the Oedipal theme that
structures the narrative in general) and also with resonances of a
(repressed) male homosexuality that pervade the film in general and the
relationship between Montagu and Abrahams in particular, h can
further be read in terms of the significance of patriarchal authority, not
only for the position, sexuality and desire of women, but also for that of
men.
This particular set of images and sequences concerns the look of the
51
52
SEFT
ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
Nominations for election to the positions of Chairperson, Treasurer and 18 Executive Committee
Notice is given of the 31st Annual General Meet- Members should be received at the Society's
ing of the Society for Education in Film and Tele- offices, 29 Old Compton Street, London Wl, no
vision, to be held in London on Saturday, later than October 8 1982. Nominees, proposers
December 4 1982.
and seconders must all be members of the Society.
1982
INCORPORATING SCREEN EDUCATION
INDIVIDUAL:
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53
AHAB, ISHMAEL...ANDMO
54
Introduction to
Richard T.
Jameson, 'Passer's
Way', Film
Comment, July/
August 1981, vol
17 no 4, p 18.
David Thomson,
'The Deaths in
Santa Barbara',
Sight & Sound,
Spring 1982, vol 51
no 2, pp 114-7.
Richard T.
Jameson, op cit,
p 18.
most visibly, but his wife, Mo, is alcoholic (whether as an escape from
him or from the world is uncertain), and his friend, Bone-an IvyLeaguer beach-bum cum yacht salesman cum gigolo-avoided the draft,
and is still distinguished by his ability to 'walk away'. (There goes
Richard Bone,' says Cutter, 'doing what he does best-walking away.')
Everything can be read as a symptom of the primal moment of Vietnam
(primal, precisely: there is no sense in the film of a past for the characters
before Vietnam). The excess, ambivalence and anxiety of film noir,
backed up by visual reference, investigative structure and plot ellipsis,
provides the generic correlative of an America once again post-war and
uncertain.
The generality of this kind of reading of reading can be complicated,
made more precise, by reference to other texts which invade the film: the
pageant (surely from Young Mr Lincoln}) provides America with its
legendary past ('Our glorious past,' sneers Cutter, 'Pioneers, Indians,
Mexicans...'); the white horse provides the film, and America, with
fairy-tales (but never the same fairy-tale twice: it enters in a dream-like
image, then Mo waits for her 'Prince Charming on his white horse' but
refuses Bone, then it is appropriated by J. J. Cord-the Mr Big of the
film noir investigation -as his seat of power, till finally Cutter mounts it,
a knight on his white charger galloping to death and glory). Most significantly and pervasively, there is Moby Dick: Cutter as a crippled,
obsessed Ahab; Bone as Ishmael, the one who survives to tell the tale
(this is explicit: he is greeted by Cutter as his Ishmael, who carried a
disease called 'Moby Dick'). And J.J. Cord as the great white whale, the
Cutter - the crippled, obsessed Ahab - finally gets his great white . . . horse.
55
56
57
Branded by male aggression, the. mutilated Cutter exhibits the ultimate fetish.
Herman Melville,
Moby Dick, New
York, New
American Library,
1962, p 129.
58
Like Cutter's, Ahab's wound draws the eye in fascination (it is only after
registering the scar that Ishmael notices that Ahab has an ivory leg). Like
Ahab's, Cutter's wound (which, like Ahab's runs 'from crown to sole')
takes on an uncertain provenance: Ahab's is rumoured to have 'come
upon him' 'not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at
sea'; Cutter's is assumed to have come upon him in Vietnam, but it is
never discussed, and Cutter, at one point, denies blithely (and unreliably) that he ever was in any war. In both cases, the force of the wound
seems 'elemental' rather than historic. It functions as a brand (Ahab is
compared to one branded by lightening) designating its bearer as someone who has been marked out. For Cutter, perhaps, it is the mark, not so
much of Vietnam, but of a monstrous and ludicrous male aggression (his
smashing of his neighbour's car, his shooting up of the teddy bear) faced
with a crippling impotence. The paradox of the castrating wound is that
it marks out power and impotence, setting him apart.
Against the standing of Cutter's castration, Bone is little more than a
foil, his body visually emphasised in its wholeness, but a fantasy body
which takes its meaning only from the nightmare of Cutter's. (The
. fantasy of the perfect body is brought almost to the point of parody by
constant reference to 'clean sport': tennis, polo, sailing.) It is to the misshapen Cutter that Mo is married, upsetting the dream of perfect
sexuality. Mo and Bone are the fantasy couple of the film, healthy lovers,
but Cutter stands behind their coupling, urging it on but infecting it,
making it impossible, and the relationship ends with Mo's incineration.
But Mo is also, in a sense, a cripple, her impairment represented by
alcoholism. It presents an interesting problem for cinema: how to represent a female cripple without deforming the woman's body. The answer
is easy: you internalise the deformity, preserving the female body intact.
But this isn't quite true. The fascination of Cutter's visible deformity
encourages us to forget that twice in the narrative the female body is
deformed in ways much more monstrous than Cutter's: the murder
victim, a high school majorette, is sodomised, her trachea crushed,
semen in her throat; Mo is burned to death. But what we see of the one is
a foot sticking out of a dust-bin, a garbage-man vomiting at the sight
which we do not see; and of the other, a body-bag in the mortuary,
opened and looked at (affectionately, for the first time) by Cutter but not
by us. The deformity of the female body is in the narrative, abstract and
unseen, the ultimate victims; the deformity of the male body is played
out visually, the mark of power.
Finally, why does Mo die? (More than that, why does her death threequarters of the way through the movie coincide with the unaccountable
evacuation from the narrative of Valerie, the other woman, the sister of
the murder victim who had joined Cutter and Bone in their revenge/
investigation/blackmail?) Mo dies to allow the boys to be redeemed as
men. Her look fixed them within their boys' games; under her look
Cutter could not mount his white charger as a finally whole body, and
. Bone could not have made his last stand. 'Mo would have liked this,'
says Cutter at one point in the final garden party where he and Bone are
59
60
Television
and the Riots
Howard lumber
Mew Technologies,
New Policies?
John Houkins
Scotch Reels:
Scotland in Cinema
and Television
Edited by Colin HcArthur
PUBLISHING
CHAIR OF DRAMA
Applications are invited for appointment
to the Chair of Drama in the School of
Humanities.
,
The programmes offered by the discipline of
Drama bring together training in the theory
and practice of drama as it relates to theatre,
film, television and radio. Selected students are
also prepared for professional careers in performance, management and direction. The
discipline has developed strong interests in
modern European drama, performance analysis
and theories of the drama in all media; and the
University expects that the person appointed
will both strengthen the discipline's activities in
these areas and further develop interests in the
history of drama, Asian drama, cinema studies
or other fields.
Ideally, applicants should have experience and
professional standing in the theoretical, practical and research aspects of drama to enable
them to move freely in both the university world
and the performing arts professions; but applications will be welcomed from candidates who
have major strengths in one or two of those
aspects rather than in all three.
61
Nancy Ai Henley,
Body Politics,
Englewood Clifls
NJ, Prentice-Hall,
1977.
HKf
Henley, op cit,
p 166.
63
64
Arnold
Schwarzenegger
demonstrates the
merits of the master
race, while (opposite)
Michelangelo's
Moses castrates with
a glance.
It may be, as is often said, that male'pin-ups more often than not do not
look at the viewer, but it is by no means the case that they never do.
When they do, what is crucial is the kind of look it is, something very
if
66
often determined by the set of the mouth that accompanies it. When the
female pin-up returns the viewer's gaze, it is usually some kind of smile,
inviting. The male pin-up, even at his most benign, still stares at the
viewer. Even Paul Newman's frank face-on to the camera or the Oh Boy!
coverboy's yearning gaze at us still seems to reach beyond the boundary
marked, when the photo was taken, by the camera, as if he wants to reach
beyond and through and establish himself. The female model's gaze
stops at that boundary, the male's looks right through it.
Freud noticed a similar sort of look on Michelangelo's statue of Moses
-though Moses is not looking at us but at the Jews' worship of the
Golden Calf. Since Freud, it is common to describe such a look as
'castrating' or 'penetrating'-yet to use such words to describe the look
of a man at a woman is revealing in ways that Freudians do not always
intend. What, after all, have women to fear from the threat of castration?
And why, come to that, should the possibility of penetration be necessarily fearful to women? It is clear that castration can only be a threat to
men, and more probable that it is the taboo of male anal eroticism that
causes masculine-defined men to construct penetration as frightening
and the concept of male (hetero)sexuality as 'taking' a woman that
constructs penetration as an act of violence. In looking at and dealing
with these castrating/penetrating looks, women are caught up in a
system that does not so much address them as work out aspects of the
construction of male sexuality in men's heads.
If the first instability of the male pin-up is the contradiction between
the fact of being looked at and the attempt of the model's look to deny it,
the second is the apparent address to women's sexuality and the actual
working out of male sexuality (and this may be one of the reasons why
male pin-ups notoriously don't 'work' for women). What is at stake is not
just male and female sexuality, but male and female power. The maintenance of power underpins further instabilities in the image of men as
sexual spectacle, in terms of the active/passive nexus of looking, the
emphasis on muscularity and the symbolic association of male power
and the phallus.
The idea of looking (staring) as power and being looked at as power lessness overlaps with ideas of activity/passivity. Thus to look is thought
of as active; whereas to be looked at is passive. In reality, this is not true.
The model prepares her- or himself to be looked at, the artist or photographer constructs the image to be looked at; and, on the other hand, the
image that the viewer looks at is not summoned up by his or her act of
looking but in collaboration with those who have put the image there.
Most of us probably experience looking and being looked at, in life as in
art, somewhere among these shifting relations of activity and passivity.
Yet it remains the case that images of men must disavow this element of
passivity if they are to be kept in line^with dominant ideas of masculinityas-activity.
For this reason images of men are often images of men doing something. When, before the full invention of cinematography, Eadweard
Muybridge took an enormous series of photographic sequences, each
one in the sequence taken a few seconds after the other, one of his intentions was to study the nature of movement. Muybridge photographed
sequences of naked male and female figures. In a study of these sequences, Linda Williams shows how, even in so 'scientific' an undertaking
and at such a comparatively 'primitive' stage in the development of
photography, Muybridge established a difference between the female
subjects, who are just there to be looked at, and the male subjects, who
are doing something (carrying a boulder, sawing wood, playing baseball)
which we can look in on.5 This distinction is maintained in the history-of
the pin-up, where time and again the image of the man is one caught in
the middle of an action, or associated, through images in the pictures,
with activity.
Even when not actually caught in an act, the male image still promises
activity by the way the body is posed. Even in an apparently relaxed,
supine pose, the model tightens and tautens his body so that the muscles
are emphasised, hence drawing attention to the body's potential for
action. More often, the male pin-up is not supine anyhow, but standing
taut ready for action.
Ready for action: a supine model tautens his muscles for Playgirl.
67
' Linda Williams,
'Film Body, an
Implantation of
Perversions',
Cineiracts, Winter
1981, vol 3 no 4,
pp 19-35.
68
6
Eric Hobsbawm:
'Man and Woman
in Socialist
Iconography',
History Workshop
Journal, no 6,
pp 121-138.
From savagery to the black bourgeoisie: a short Afro and modern jewel
jewellery.
71
Margaret Walters,
The Nude Male,
London,
Paddington Press,
1978.
See, for example,
Alison Heisch,
'Queen Elizabeth I
and the Persistence
of Patriarchy',
Feminist Review, no
4, pp 45-56.
72
The masculine
mystique: an erection
in the US gay
magazine Blueboy and
(opposite) Warner's
hysterically phallic
portrait of the young
Bogie.
it hidden from view for the last couple of centuries, and even the erect
penis often looks awkward, stuck on to the man's body as if it is not a part
of him.
Like so much else about masculinity, images of men, founded on such
multiple instabilities, are such a strain. Looked at but pretending not to
be, still yet asserting movement, phallic but weedy - there is seldom anything easy about such imagery. And the real trap at the heart of these
instabilities is that it is precisely straining that is held to be the great
good, what makes a man a man. Whether head held high reaching up for
an impossible transcendence or penjs jerking up in a hopeless assertion
of phallic mastery, men and women alike are asked to value the very
things that make masculinity such an unsatisfactory definition of being
human.
in*
'V-.'
'
'
74
I.
Sigmund Freud,
'Femininity*, The
Standard Edition of
the Complete
Psychological Words
of Sigmund Freud,
ed James Strachey,
London, The
Hogarth Press and
the Institute of
Psycho-analysis,
1964, p 113.
2
This is the
translation given in
a footnote in The
Standard Edition, p
113.
The effects of the appeal to this poem are subject to the work of overdetermination Freud isolated in the text of the dream. The sheer proliferation of heads and hats (and hence, through a metonymic slippage,
minds), which are presumed to have confronted this intimidating riddle
before Freud, confers on his discourse the weight of an intellectual
history, of a tradition of interrogation. Furthermore, the image of hieroglyphics strengthens the association made between femininity and the
enigmatic, the undecipherable, that which is 'other'. And yet Freud
practices a slight deception here, concealing what is elided by removing
the lines from their context, castrating, as it were, the stanza. For the
question over which Heine's heads brood is not the same as Freud's-it
is not 'What is Woman?', but instead, ' . . . what signifies Alan?' The
75
Heinrich Heine,
The North Sea,
trans Vernon
Watkins, New
York, New
Direction Books,
1951, p 77.
76
own enigma, she could not step back, could not achieve the necessary
distance of a second look.4
Thus, while the hieroglyphic is an indecipherable or at least enigmatic
language, it is also and at the same time potentially the most universally
understandable, comprehensible, appropriable of signs.5 And the
woman shares this contradictory status. But it is here that the analogy
slips. For hieroglyphic languages are not perfectly iconic. They would
not achieve the status of languages if they were-due to what Todorov
and Ducrot refer to as a certain non-generalisability of the iconic sign:
Now it is the impossibility of generalizing this principle of representation
that has introduced even into fundamentally morphemographic writing
systems such as Chinese, Egyptian, and Sumerian, the phonographic principle. We might almost conclude that every logography [thegraphic system of
language notation] grows out of the impossibility of a generalized
iconic representation; proper nouns and abstract notions (including
inflections) are then the ones that will be noted phonetically.6
The iconic system of representation is inherently deficient-it cannot
disengage itself from the 'real', from the concrete; it lacks the gap necessary for generalisability (for Saussure, this is the idea that, 'Signs which
are arbitrary realise better than others the ideal of the semiotic process.').
The woman, too, is defined by such an insufficiency. My insistence
upon the congruence between certain theories of the image and theories
of femininity is an attempi to dissect the episteme which assigns to the
woman a special place in cinematic representation while denying her
access to that system.
The cinematic apparatus inherits a theory of the image which is not
conceived outside of sexual specifications. And historically, there has
always been a certain imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman. The woman's relation to the camera and the
scopic regime is quite different from that of the male. As Noel Burch
points out, the early silent cinema, through its insistent inscription of
scenarios of voyeurism, conceives of its spectator's viewing pleasure in
terms of that of the Peeping Tom, behind the screen, reduplicating the
spectator's position in relation to the woman as screen.7 Spectatorial
desire, in contemporary film theory, is generally delineated as either
voyeurism or fetishism, as precisely a pleasure in seeing what is prohibited in relation to the female body. The image orchestrates a gaze, a
limit, and its pleasurable transgression. The woman's beauty, her very
desirability, becomes a function of certain practices of imaging - framing,
lighting, camera movement, angle. She is thus, as Laura Mulvey has
pointed out, more closely associated with the surface of the image than
its illusory depths, its constructed 3-cTimensional space which the man is
destined to inhabit and hence control.8 In Now Voyager, for instance, a
single image signals the momentous transformation of the Bette Davis
character from ugly spinster aunt to glamorous single woman. Charles
II.
V
Theories of female spectatorship are thus rare, and when they are
produced, seem inevitably to confront certain blockages in conceptualisation. The difficulties in thinking female spectatorship demand consideration. After all, even if it is admitted that the woman is frequently the
object of the voyeuristic or fetishistic gaze in the cinema, what is there to
prevent her from reversing the relation and appropriating the gaze for
her own pleasure? Precisely the fact that the reversal itself remains
locked within the same logic. The male striptease, the gigolo-both inevitably signify the mechanism of reversal itself, constituting themselves as
aberrations whose acknowledgment simply reinforces the dominant
system of aligning sexual difference with a subject/object dichotomy.
And an essential attribute of that dominant system is the matching of
male subjectivity with the agency of the look.
The supportive binary opposition at work here is not only that utilised
by Laura Mulvey-an opposition between passivity and activity, but
perhaps more importantly, an opposition between proximity and
distance in relation to the image.10 It is in this sense that the very logic
behind the structure of the gaze demands a sexual division. While the
distance between image and signified (or even referent) is theorised as
minimal, if not non-existent, that between the film and the spectator
must be maintained, even measured. One need only think of Noel
Burch's mapping of spectatorship as a perfect distance from the screen
77
Laura Mulvey,
'Visual Pleasure
and Narrative
Cinema', Screen,
Autumn 1975, vol
16 no 3, pp 12-13.
Charles AfTron,
Star Acting: Gish,
Garbo, Davis, New
York, E P Dutton,
1977, pp 281-282.
10
This argument
focuses on the
image to the
excusion of any
consideration of
the soundtrack
primarily because
it is the process of
imaging which
seems to constitute
the major
difficulty in
theorising female
spectatorship. The
image is also
popularly
understood as
metonymic
signifier for the
cinema as a whole
and for good
reason:
historically, sound
has been
subordinate to the
image within the
dominant classical
system. For more
on the image/
sound distinction
in relation to
sexual difference
see my article,
'The Voice in the
Cinema: The
Articulation of
Body and Space',
Yale French
Studies, no 60, pp
33-50.
78
11
Noel Burch,
Theory of Film
Practice, trans
Helen R Lane,
New York and
Washington,
Praeger
Publishers, 1973,
p35.
12
Christian Metz,
'The Imaginary
Signifier', Screen,
Summer 1975, vol
16 no 2,p 60.
1
ibid, p 61.
(two times the width of the image)-a point in space from which the
filmic discourse is most accessible."
But the most explicit representation of this opposition between proximity and distance is contained in Christian Metz's analysis of voyeuristic
desire in terms of a kind of social hierarchy of the senses: 'It is no accident that the main socially acceptable arts are based on the senses at a
distance, and that those which depend on the senses of contact are often
regarded as "minor" arts ( = culinary arts, art of perfumes, etc.).' l2 The
voyeur, according to Metz, must maintain a distance between himself
and the image-the cinephile needs the gap which represents for him the
very distance between desire and its object. In this sense, voyeurism is
theorised as a type of meta-desire:
If it is true of all desire that it depends on the infinite pursuit of its absent
object, voyeuristic desire, along with certain forms of sadism, is the only
desire whose principle of distance symbolically and spatially evokes this
fundamental rent.13
Yet even this status as meta-desire does not fully characterise the cinema
for it is a feature shared by other arts as well (painting, theatre, opera,
etc.). Metz thus adds another reinscription of this necessary distance.
What specifies the cinema is a further re-duplication of the lack which
prompts desire. The cinema is characterised by an illusory sensory plenitude (there is 'so much to see') and yet haunted by the absence of those
very objects which are there to be seen. Absence is an absolute and
irrecoverable distance. In other words, Noel Burch is quite right in
aligning spectatorial desire with a certain spatial configuration. The
viewer must not sit either too close or too far from the screen. The result
of both would be the same-he would lose the image of his desire.
It is precisely this opposition between proximity and distance, control
of the image and its loss, which locates the possibilities of spectatorship
within the problematic of sexual difference. For the female spectator
there is a certain over-presence of the image-she is the image. Given the
closeness of this relationship, the female spectator's desire can be
described only in terms of a kind of narcissism-the female look
demands a becoming. It thus appears to negate the very distance or gap
specified by Metz and Burch as the essential precondition for voyeurism.
From this perspective, it is important to note the constant recurrence of
the motif of proximity in feminist theories (especially those labelled 'new
French feminisms') which purport to describe a feminine specificity.
For Luce Irigaray, female anatomy is readable as a constant relation of
the self to itself, as an autoeroticism based on the embrace of the two lips
which allow the woman to touch herself without mediation. Furthermore, the very notion of property, and hence possession of something
which can be constituted as other, is antithetical to the woman: 'Nearness
however, is not foreign to woman, a nearness so close that any identification of one or the other, and therefore any form of property, is impossible. Woman enjoys a closeness with the other that is so near she cannot
possess it any more than she can possess herself.'14 Or, in the case of female 14
Luce Irigaray,
madness or delirium,"... women do not manage to articulate their mad'This Sex Which
ness: they suffer it directly in their b o d y . . . ' . " The distance necessary to
Is Not One', New
French Feminisms,
detach the signifiers of madness from the body in the construction of
ed Elaine Marks
even a discourse which exceeds the boundaries of sense is lacking. In the
and Isabelle de
words of Helene Cixous, 'More so than men who are coaxed toward
Courtivron,
16
Amherst, The
social success, toward sublimation, women are body.'
University of
This theme of the overwhelming presence-to-itself of the female body
Massachusetts
is elaborated by Sarah Kofman and Michele Montrelay as well. Kofman
Press, 1980, pp
104-105.
describes how Freudian psychoanalysis outlines a scenario whereby the
subject's passage from the mother to the father is simultaneous with a
passage from the senses to reason, nostalgia for the mother henceforth ''Irigaray,
'Women's Exile',
signifying a longing for a different positioning in relation to the sensory
Ideology and
or the somatic, and the degree of civilization measured by the very
Consciousness, no 1
(May 1977), p 74.
distance from the body.17 Similarly, Montrelay argues that while the
male has the possibility of displacing the first object of desire (the
16
mother), the female must become that object of desire:
Helene Cixous,
'The Laugh of the
Medusa', New
Recovering herself as maternal body (and also as phallus), the woman can no
longer repress, 'lose,' the first stake of representation
From now on,
anxiety, tied to the presence of this body, can only be insistent, continuous.
This body, so close, which she has to occupy, is an object in excess which must
be 'lost,' that is to say, repressed, in order to be symbolised. ' 8
French
Feminisms,
p257.
17
Sarah Kofman,
'Ex: The Woman's
Enigma', Enclitic,
vol IV no 2 (Fall
1980), p 20.
18
Michele
Montrelay,
'Inquiry into
Femininity', m/f,
no 1 (1978), p p
91-92.
19
Freud, 'Some
Psychological
Consequences of
the Anatomical
Distinction
Between the
Sexes', Sexuality
and the Psychology
of Love, ed Philip
Rieff, New York,
Collier Books,
1963, pp 187-188.
20
Freud,
'Femininity', op
cit, p 125.
79
80
21
Freud, 'Some
Psychological
Consequences...',
op cit, p 187.
22
Molly Haskell,
From Reverence to
Rape, Baltimore,
Penguin Books,
1 9 7 4 , p 154.
23
Irigaray,
'Women's Exile',
op cit, p 65.
24
Mulvey,
'Afterthoughts...
inspired by Duel
in the Sun',
Framework,
(Summer 1981), p
13.
bringing it into line with his expectations'.21 A second event, the threat
of castration, is necessary to prompt a rereading of the image, endowing
it with a meaning in relation to the boy's own subjectivity. It is in the
distance between the look and the threat that the boy's relation to knowledge of sexual difference is formulated. The boy, unlike the girl in
Freud's description, is capable of a re-vision of earlier events, a retrospective understanding which invests the events with a significance
which is in no way linked to an immediacy of sight. This gap between
the visible and the knowable, the very possibility of disowning what is
seen, prepares the ground for fetishism. In a sense, the male spectator is
destined to be a fetishist, balancing knowledge and belief.
The female, on the other hand, must find it extremely difficult, if not
impossible, to assume the position of fetishist. That body which is so
close continually reminds her of the castration which cannot be 'fetishised away'. The lack of a distance between seeing and understanding, the
mode of judging 'in a flash', is conducive to what might be termed as
'over-identification' with the image. The association of tears and 'wet
wasted afternoons' (in Molly Haskell's words)22 with genres specified as
feminine (the soap opera, the 'woman's picture') points very precisely to
this type of over-identification, this abolition of a distance, in short, this
inability to fetishise. The woman is constructed differently in relation to
processes of looking. For Irigaray, this dichotomy between distance and
proximity is described as the fact that:
The masculine can partly look at itself, speculate about itself, represent itself
and describe itself for whatsit is, whilst the feminine can try to speak to itself
through a new language, but cannot describe itself from outside or informal
terms, except by identifying itself with the masculine, thus by losing itself.2i
Irigaray goes even further: the woman always has a problematic relation
to the visible, to form, to structures of seeing. She is much more comfortable with, closer to, the sense of touch.
The pervasiveness, in theories of the feminine, of descriptions of such
a claustrophobic closeness, a deficiency in relation to structures of seeing
and the visible, must clearly have consequences for attempts to theorise
female spectatorship. And, in fact, the result is a tendency to view the
female spectator as the site of an oscillation between a feminine position
and a masculine position, invoking the metaphor of the transvestite.
Given the structures of cinematic narrative, the woman who identifies
with a female character must adopt a passive or masochistic position,
while identification with the active hero necessarily entails an acceptance
of what Laura Mulvey refers to as a certain 'masculinisation' of spectatorship.
. . . as desire is given cultural materiality in a text, for women (from childhood onwards) trans-sex identification is a habit that very easily becomes
second Nature. However, this Nature does not sit easily and shifts restlessly in its borrowed transvestite clothes.2*
The masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance.'Womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed. The masquerade's resistance to patriarchal positioning would therefore lie in its denial of the
production of femininity as closeness, as presence-to-itself, as, precisely,
81
25
Joan Riviere,
'Womanliness as a
Masquerade',
Psychoanalysis and
Female Sexuality,
ed Hendrik M
Ruitenbeek, New
Haven, College
and University
Press, 1966, p 213.
My analysis of the
concept of
masquerade differs
markedly from
that of Luce
Irigaray. See Ce
sexe qui n 'en esi pas
un (Paris: Les
Editions de
Minuit, 1977), pp
131-132. It also
diverges to a great
extent from the
very important
analysis of
' masquerade
presented by
Claire Johnston in
'Femininity and
the Masquerade:
Anne of the
Indies', Jacques
Tourneur London,
British Film
Institute, 1975, pp
36-44.1 am
indebted to her for
the reference to
Riviere's article.
82
26
Moustafa Safouan,
'Is the Oedipus
Complex
Universal?', m/f,
nos 5-6(1981), pp
84-85.
27
Montrelay, op cit,
p93.
28
Silvia Bovenschen,
'Is T h e r e a
Feminine
Aesthetic?', New
German Critique,
no 10 (Winter
1977), p 129.
29
Montrelay, op cit,
P 93.
III.
The first scene in Now Voyager depicts the Bette Davis character as
repressed, unattractive and undesirable or, in her own words, as the
spinster aunt of the family. ('Every family has one.') She has heavy eyebrows, keeps her hair bound tightly in a bun, and wears glasses, a drab
dress and heavy shoes. By the time of the shot discussed earlier, signalling her transformation into beauty, the glasses have disappeared, along
with the other signifiers of unattractiveness. Between these two
moments there is a scene in which the doctor who cures her actually
confiscates her glasses (as a part of the cure). The woman who wears
glasses constitutes one of the most intense visual cliches of the cinema.
The image is a heavily marked condensation of motifs concerned with
repressed sexuality, knowledge, visability and vision, intellectuality, and
desire. The woman with glasses signifies simultaneously intellectuality
and undesirability; but the moment she removes her glasses (a moment
which, it seems, must almost always be shown and which is itself linked
with a certain sensual quality), she is transformed into spectacle, the very
picture of desire. Now, it must be remembered that the cliche is a heavily
loaded moment of signification, a social knot of meaning. It is characterised-by an effect of ease and naturalness. Yet, the cliche has a binding
power so strong that it indicates a precise moment of ideological danger
or threat-in this case, the woman's appropriation of the gaze. Glasses
worn by a woman in the cinema do not generally signify a deficiency in
seeing but an active looking, or even simply the fact of seeing as opposed
to being seen. The intellectual woman looks and analyses, and in usurping the gaze she poses a threat to an entire system of representation. It is
as if the woman had forcefully moved to the other side of the specular.
The overdetermination of the image of the woman with glasses, its status
as a cliche, is a crucial aspect of the cinematic alignment of structures of
seeing and being seen with sexual difference. The cliche, in assuming an
immediacy of understanding, acts as a mechanism for the naturalisation
of sexual difference.
But the figure of the woman with glasses is only an extreme moment of
a more generalised logic. There is always a certain excessiveness, a difficulty associated with women who appropriate the gaze, who insist upon
looking. Linda Williams has demonstrated how, in. the genre of the
horror film, the woman's active looking is ultimately punished. And
what she sees, the monster, is only a mirror of herself-both woman and
monster are freakish in their difference-defined by either 'too much' or
'too little'.30 Just as the dominant narrative cinema repetitively inscribes
scenarios of voyeurism, internalising or narrativising theTilm-spectator
relationship (in films like Psycho, Rear Window, Peeping Tom), taboos in
seeing are insistently formulated in relation to the female spectator as
well. The man with binoculars is countered by the woman with glasses.
The gaze must be dissociated from mastery. In Leave Her to Heaven
(John Stahl, 1945), the female protagonist's (Gene Tierney's) excessive
desire and over-possessiveness are signalled from the very beginning of
the film by her intense and sustained stare at the major male character, a
stranger she first encounters on a train. The discomfort her look causes is
graphically depicted. The Gene Tierney character is ultimately revealed
to be the epitome of evil-killing her husband's crippled younger
brother, her unborn child and ultimately herself in an attempt to brand
her cousin as a murderess in order to insure her husband's future fidelity. In Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946), Joan Crawford's problematic status is a result of her continual attempts to assume the position of
spectator-fixing John Garfield with her gaze. Her transformation from
spectator to spectacle is signified repetitively by the gesture of removing
her glasses. Rosa, the character played by Bette Davis in Beyond the
Forest (King Vidor, 1949) walks to the station every day simply to watch
the train departing for Chicago. Her fascination with the train is a fascination with its phallic power to transport her to 'another place'. This
character is also specified as having a 'good eye'-she can shoot, both
pool and guns. In all three films the woman is constructed as the site of
83
30
Linda Williams,
'When the Woman
Looks...', in Revision: Feminist
Essays in Film
Analysis, ed Mary
Ann Doane, Pat
Mellencamp and
Linda Williams,
forthcoming.
84
31
Johnston, op cit, p
40.
IV. Out of the Cinema and into the Streets: The Censorship
of the Female Gaze
'Un Regard Oblique': a dirty joke at the expense of the woman's look.
This process of narrativising the negation of the female gaze in the classical Hollywood cinema finds its perfect encapsulation in a still photograph taken in 1948 by Robert Doisneau, 'Un Regard Oblique'. Just as
the Hollywood narratives discussed above purport to centre a female
protagonist, the photograph appears to give a certain prominence to a
woman's look. Yet, both the title of the photograph and its organisation
of space indicate that the real site of scopophiliac power is on the margins
of the frame. The man is not centred; in fact, he occupies a very narrow
space on the extreme right of the picture. Nevertheless, it is his gaze
85
32
86
34
Western J Naef,
Counterparts: Form
and Emotion in
Photographs, New
York, E P Dutton
and the
Metropolitan
Museum of Art,
1982, pp 48-49.
35
ibid.
From this perspective, the photograph lays bare the very mechanics of
the joke through its depiction of sexual exposure and a surreptitious act
of seeing (and desiring). Freud's description of the joke-work appears to
constitute a perfect analysis of the photograph's orchestration of the
gaze. There is a 'voice-off of the photographic discourse, however-a
component of the image which is beyond the frame of this little scenario
of voyeurism. On the far left-hand side of the photograph, behind the
wall holding the painting of the nude, is the barely detectable painting of
a woman imaged differently, in darkness -out of sight for the male,
blocked by his fetish. Yet, to point to this almost invisible alternative in
imaging is also only to reveal once again the analyst's own perpetual
desire to find a not-seen that might break the hold of representation. Or
to laugh last.
There is a sense in which the photograph's delineation of a sexual
politics of looking is almost uncanny. But, to counteract the very possibility of such a perception, the language of the art critic effects a naturalisation of this joke on the woman. The art-critical reception of the
picture emphasizes a natural but at the same time 'imaginative' relation
between photography and life, ultimately subordinating any formal relations to a referential ground: 'Doisneau's lines move from right to left,
directed by the man's glance; the woman's gaze creates a line of energy
like a hole in space
The creation of these relationships from life itself
is imagination in photography.'31 'Life itself, then, presents the
material for an 'artistic' organisation of vision along the lines of sexual
difference. Furthermore, the critic would have us believe that chance
events and arbitrary clicks of the shutter cannot be the agents of a generalised sexism because they are particular, unique-'Keitesz and Doisneau depend entirely upon our recognition that they were present at the
instant of the unique intersection of events.'35 Realism seems always to
reside in the streets and, indeed, the out-of-focus boy across the street, at
the centre of the photograph, appears to act as a guarantee of the 'chance'
nature of the event, its arbitrariness, in short-its realism. Thus, in the
discourse of the art critic the photograph, in capturing a moment, does
not construct it; the camera finds a naturally given series of subject and
object positions. What the critic does not consider are the conditions of
reception of photography as an art form, its situation within a much
larger network of representation. What is it that makes the photograph
not only readable but pleasurable-at the expense of the woman? The
critic does not ask what makes the photograph a negotiable item in a
market of signification.
V.
>
The photograph displays insistently, in microcosm, the structure of the
cinematic inscription of a sexual differentiation in modes of looking. Its
process of framing the female gaze repeats that of the cinematic narratives described above, from Leave Her to Heaven to Dark Victory. Films
play out scenarios of looking in order to outline the terms of their own
understanding. And given the divergence between masculine and feminine scenarios, those terms would seem to be explicitly negotiated as
markers of sexual difference. Both the theory of the image and its apparatus, the cinema, produce a position for the female spectator-a position
which is ultimately untenable because it lacks the attribute of distance so
necessary for an adequate reading of the image. The entire elaboration of
femininity as a closeness, a nearness, as present-to-itself is not the definition of an essence but the delineation of a place culturally assigned to the
woman. Above and beyond a simple adoption of the masculine position
in relation to the cinematic sign, the female spectator is given two
options: the masochism of over-identification or the narcissism entailed
in becoming one's own object of desire, in assuming the image in the
most radical way. The effectivity of masquerade lies precisely in its
potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and readable by the woman. Doisneau's photograph is not readable by the female
spectator-it can give her pleasure only in masochism. In order to 'get'
the joke, she must once again assume the position of transvestite.
It is quite tempting to foreclose entirely the possibility of female spectatorship, to repeat at the level of theory the gesture of the photograph,
given the history of a cinema which relies so heavily on voyeurism,
fetishism, and identification with an ego ideal conceivable only in
masculine terms. And, in fact, there has been a tendency to theorise
femininity and hence the feminine gaze as repressed, and in its
repression somehow irretrievable, the enigma constituted by Freud's
question. Yet, as Michel Foucault has demonstrated, the repressive
hypothesis on its own entails a very limited and simplistic notion of the
working of power.36 The 'no' of the father, the prohibition, is its only
technique. In theories of repression there is no sense of the productiveness and positivity of power. Femininity is produced very precisely as a
position within a network of power relations. And the growing insistence
upon the elaboration of a theory of female spectatorship is indicative of
the crucial necessity of understanding that position in order to dislocate
it.
This article is an expanded version of a paper presented at a symposium on recent film
theory at Yale University, February 1982, organised by Miriam Hansen and Donald
Crafton.
87
36
Michel Foucault,
The History of
Sexuality, trans
Robert Hurley,
New York:
Pantheon Books,
1978.
CIRCLES
is a feminist
distribution network
set up by women to promote
women's film, video and performance
work: to show the richness and diversity
as well as the threads which run through and
link much of the work. The catalogue includes contemporary
CIRCL
89
This working
paper is a followup to my article
'Towards a Feminist Erotica',
Camerawork,
March 1982, no
24, pp 14-19.
There I argued
that different contexts tend to produce identifiable
sexual discourses,
and by extension,
specific forms of
pleasure and response for the
reader. The point
was illustrated
with a comparison
of a 'soft-core'
pornographic
image to a fashion
advertisement for
swim wear.
90
think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that the fashion image
and the pornographic image are in the first instance produced within
quite distinct sets of social and economic circumstances. Those differences affect the way in which the image is constructed as a commodity,
as well as the pleasures it makes available.
A fashion advertisement in a magazine is, like any other, itself the sum
of a system of commodity exchanges: printing costs, hiring of props,
models' and copywriters' wages, etc. These transactions may affect the
reader in terms of a higher price for the. advertised product on the one
hand; or a reduction in the price of the advertising medium (the magazine), on the other. However, this system of exchanges is concealed from
the reader, since the advertisement never refers to the commodities
involved in its own production.
One of the jobs of the advertising agency is to invent or enhance use
values for the product. Within the space of the advertisement these use
values will be translated into intelligible meanings. Through the
creation of meaning, the advertisement works to simultaneously create
identities for both the product and the reader, who will be addressed as a
potential consumer. In order to engage the reader's attention, both text
and image must be capable of offering certain forms of interest and
pleasure. Crucially, for the image to fulfil its advertising function, it
must not offer satisfaction in its own right. The advertisement works to
displace satisfaction, promising fulfilment upon purchase of the
commodity, at which point the reader becomes a consumer. It then
articulates meaning and pleasure through a complex relationship which
it establishes between reader', advertising image and commodity. This
relationship is orchestrated by the overall marketing considerations,
which determine not only where the advertisement will appear, but also
where the commodity advertised will be distributed, retailed etc. These
marketing considerations establish the necessary conditions for consumption to take place.
Clearly, the pornographic image does not fulfil the same functions as a
fashion advertisement. It is not a promotional device to increase the sales
of a commodity. Where part of the pleasure offered by the advertisement
depends upon the future purchase of a commodity, the pleasure of
pornography is effected in the present conjunction of image and reader
made possible by a past purchase. Unlike the advertising image, the
pornographic image does not demand that the reader buy a specified
commodity as a guarantee of pleasure. The pornographic image is itself a
commodity, and it addresses the reader as an already positioned consumer-a satisfied (and satisfiable) customer.
91
2
David Bailey,
Trouble and Strife,
London, Thames
and Hudson, 1980.
Helmut Newton,
Sleepless Nights,
London, Quartet
Books, 1978.
John Hedgecoe,
Possessions,
London, Mitchell
Beazley, 1978.
Orgasmic suffocation:
an 'erotic'
photograph from
John Hedgecoe's
'Possessions'.
One of the reasons for the exemption of so-called 'Erotica' from legal
censorship is its location at the intersection of a number of different
92
An 'erotic
masterpiece' by Tim
Brown from the
October 1981
Camera.
93
Fashion Erotica
While certain conventions drawn from the system of fashion photography have influenced the representation of the 'erotic nude' as
photographic art, it can be argued equally that the codes and conventions
of'erotica' have influenced the construction of certain fashion images.
Rosetta Brooks has argued that photographers like Guy Bourdin and
Helmut Newton have applied the conventions of the erotic photograph
in order to 'make strange' or challenge some of the 'stereotypical' notions
of femininity and female sexuality which inform the dominant conventions of fashion photography. 'This emphasis upon* the alien and artificial qualities of the picture make a straightforward accusation of sexism
problematic... Newton manipulates existing stereotypes; their
alienness is accentuated.'5 In the same way as this style purports to disrupt the conventions of the art-nude, so it can be seen to make strange the
fashion image. Brooks suggests that this stylistic subversion is facilitated
by making the photographer's mediation of the image apparent. In so
doing, she argues, the photograph distanciates spectator from image,
rendering any simplistic notion of identification impossible. She continues:
Many of his (Newton's) more successful photographs hold a distanciated
engagement with the manipulative devices offashion photography and with
the process of mediation. Those alien features present in suppressed form in
fashion photography and current images of women are exposed and foregrounded. The image is presented as alien: a threat rather than an invitation. Stereotypes are presented as a falsity.6
Rosetta Brooks,
'Fashion: Double
Page Spread',
Camerawork, January/February,
1980.no 17, p 2.
ibid.
94
Not the girl next door: mediation and distanciation in cosmetics advertising.
The advertisement for the Revlon cosmetic range 'Formula 2' was target marketed by the Grey agency at a 'sophisticated' female readership.
The notion of sophistication is juxtaposed against that of'accessibility'.
In image terms 'accessible' images rely on a straightforward notion of
audience identification, supposedly inducing reactions of 'I want to be
like that'. The 'accessible' image will tend to use models who look like
the friendly, smiling girl next door. By comparison the sophisticated
image works to secure audience recognition of image as construct - image as image - without any immediate reference to the 'real' or
to personal identity. It uses the image of the woman as a vehicle to
deploy other kinds of codes and conventions. Often the 'sophisticated'
image foregrounds itself in a readily identifiable cultural system, for
example that of fine art painting, or in the case of Helmut Newton, avant
garde erotic photography. The image of woman is used as a complex
signifier to associate the advertised product with other aspects of the
cultural and ideological system: art, status, wealth, etc.
The 'sophisticated' appeal of the Formula 2 advertisement is constructed through a series of devices which mediate and distanciate the spectator's relation to the image: the grid over the face; the use of portrait
framing and pose; the figure's serenity, her acknowledgement of her tobe-looked-at-ness without recourse to the familiarity of a direct smile at
the spectator. The image is constructed as a 'classic' beauty, derived as
much from oil painting (with all its economic and ideological implications of rarity, cost, status, etc) as commercial 'packshot' photography.
95
'Subversive' sadism?
Fashion photography
by Hans Feurer in
the December 1981
Italian Vogue.
96
hair, lightly tanned skins and a total lack of body hair-with the exception of neatly topiaried pubic growth. With their luxurious locks and
toothy tanned looks, these models resemble nostalgic reappraisals of
Farrah Fawcett Majors: an image which the women's fashion market
abandoned in the mid-seventies. But the pleasure which this pornography offers its reader depends on this sense of sameness, identity and
repetition. The soft-core magazine is itself a fetish form, resistant to
change and stylistic innovation, which demands an amazing conservatism not only in the choice of model, but also in the poses and locations
deemed acceptable.
Such images are neither signed by name nor identifiable photographic
style. While most readers of soft porn will realise that the image is posed
and constructed 'for their pleasure', it works on a principle of disavowal:
'I know it's constructed, but nevertheless...' To facilitate this
disavowal, soft-core images tend to be made up, lit and tinted
naturalistically. Readers are offered a version of the model's sexuality
apparently unmediated by such devices as photographic innovation
(flash light, blur, solarisation etc). Work on the image is denied rather
than flaunted, as it might be in high fashion or erotic photography.
But the sexual codes which govern the representation of the soft porn
image may also appear in certain areas of the fashion market: for example, the advertisements which appeared in the mid-seventies for Janet
Reger underwear deploy the soft-focus vulnerability of contemporary
centrefolds. The position ofJanet Reger at the more expensive end of the
naughty nightie market is complicated by the fact that its merchandise is
bought by women, and byVmen for their female lovers. This differentiates the lingerie market from other aspects of women's fashion, and
perhaps can help to explain the persistence here of romanticised photographic imagery which has been outmoded or superseded in other
aspects of the trade.
97
All this would suggest that different notions of the pornographic are at
work in the construction of the female fashion image which can only be
understood in relation to a detailed analysis of the construction of.the
respective markets for both. The ways in which female sexuality will be
expressed are dependent not only on the context in which the image
appears, but also on the intended target market for that image. While the
deployment of sexual codes is continually subject to change and reorganisation, their alterations are far from arbitrary. An analysis of the representations of female sexuality could usefully attend not only to the range
of codes and conventions through which they are constructed, but also to
the economic and cultural rationales for their deployment.
98
99
100
of desire between its objects in the early part of the film, when the
father's friend eyes up CeBe's own girlfriends; and in the opposite direction, when CeBe watches from outside the house a displacement of the
primal scene played out between her mother and her father's friend.
CeBe visits her father at the prison, with her mother, and the visit is shot
not around husband and wife, but around father and daughter, who are
like lovers. CeBe's mother asks 'Aren't you pleased your father's coming
home?' and the child says 'Yes', in a piece of acting where all that is
spoken seems to be an awareness of simulation, of the act of acting.
Finally, the analyst to whom CeBe is taken says 'There's something you
haven't told me,' and he and CeBe look at each other in a silence which is
explained by the revelation of incest.
101
Mirror partners:
CeBe visits her father
in prison.
But this particular gap is not completely filled by the incest, for uncertainty is prolonged by the position of the analyst. He is played by
Raymond Burr, often identified with his TV part as the disabled detective in Ironside. On TV the character's disablement is used to signify
heroism and more subtly to evoke a sadistic delight in mutilation in the
viewer. This delight is transparently transferred to the film; a titter
accompanied the analyst's appearance, a comment on the incongruity of
finding an impotent in a position of authority. Burr's acting, more melodramatic than that of the others in the cast, reveals more, but does not
carry the weight of the unspoken. It is as if the incest is deflected from
being a complete truth by farce. The phallus, the signifier around whose
power the incest taboo operates, is mocked here in the person of the
analyst. But its presence is never shifted for long.
The phallus finds its centrality in this film in relations between men.
Out of the Blue returns to these again and again. The relation of CeBe's
102
Mirror partners:
CeBe's father with"
his friend Charlie.
Incest can never be fully narcissistic, nor can it avoid narcissism completely. CeBe's father can only make her a woman by getting another
man to fuck her, which establishes phallic continuity between the men at
the same time as it drives her out. The question of why he wants her to
be a woman clarifies the phallic essence of narcissism. For femininity is
the last stake in the game of having and not having the phallus, within
which narcissistic pleasure is taken.
Even CeBe's murder of her father, and of herself and her mother in the
lorry in the next scene, becomes a supplement to the structuring knowledge of the phallus. In killing the children in the bus, CeBe's father
displacedly killed the child CeBe and himself as her father, as he did in
the incest. The secret of sexual knowledge between him and CeBe is only
acknowledged at the end of the film. It both divides them utterly and
unites them in the continuous presence of the phallus. One of them has
to go, so that the other can narcissistically be both. CeBe kills her father
and takes his place as the phallus.
<
The only way to escape the sexual division, since it structures life
itself, is death. Death and narcissism belong to a phantasy of undifferentiated sexuality which closes offsexual difference. Death is a phantasy of
supreme sexuality, a final surfeit of phallic pleasure. The deaths at the
end of the movie stand for the ultimate narcissistic orgasm. Death takes
over at the end of Out of the Blue, but it, like the phallus, has been
present all along.
At the beginning of the film, CeBe says she wants to die because Sid
Vicious and Elvis are dead. Elvis' death is placed as the event immediately preceding the timespan of the film, and is the concern of its third
sequence, following the crash sequence and the shots of CeBe and her
mother. And the film begins and ends with CeBe in the lorry hammering
out slogans: Elvis Lives, Punk Rules, Disco Sucks. Punks in this film
take on the meaning of anarchy, like hippies in Easy Rider, although
punk does not display their visual specificity, or the specificity it had in
Britain. And the two forms of subversion are in conflict. CeBe confronts
an ageing hippie, who falls silent when she says 'Kill all hippies'. And
Hopper seems in this film to kill off the shorthand sign of subversion that
Easy Rider and he himself became, as if the film is his death wish. As
CeBe's father, he plays the most determining part in the structure of the
film, particularly as he also represents Elvis who does not appear. CeBe's
lament for Elvis' death at the beginning of the film is also a lament for
him in prison, as good as dead. They have both come premonitorily close
to death in the crash. The death of the children stands for the death of
CeBe, who should have been on the bus with them; but it also stands
through her for the death of her father, in their perfect incestuous union.
There is community between CeBe and her father, as there is between
CeBe, Elvis and the punks. She is identified with them, so they live on in
her when she signals her immortality in her omnipotent self-destruction.
This perfect repetition of anarchies, always moving towards selfimmolation, structures one level of the narcissistic unity of the film. But
Dennis Hopper the director, outlives Dennis Hopper the actor, and goes
104
'
105
Sigmund Freud,
'Three Essays on
Sexuality',
Collected Works
vol 7, London,
Hogarth Press,
1974, p 155.
On the special
relations of
fetishism and
drawing, and
voyeurism and film,
see Martin Briggs,
'Drawing: the
Master and the
Slave', ZG no 2,
1980.
106
V\\|atkn
Godard
Gorin
^
9
Com 0 '
Ivens
12TH-
HOLLYWOOD'S HOMOSEXUAL
WORLD
SIMON WATNEY EXPLORES SOME
RECENT 'GAY' SCENARIOS
107
108
Richard Dyer,
'Stereotyping', in
Gays and Film, ed
Richard Dyer,
London, British
Film Institute,
1977, p 31.
sider how different definitions of masculinity are constructed and reconstructed across genres and across modes of production. This requires an
understanding of the ways in which film constructs a 'regime of truth'
concerning gender relations, a regime which strategically selects and
recruits particular versions of gay social life and sexuality to the purposes
and advantage of a social system which is massively dependent on the
economic inequality between women and men, naturalised and regulated through the cultural codes of gendering. These codes continually
align gay men against the hierarchical forms of masculinity and. femininity, forms which are reinforced both by our various resemblances to,
and differences from, their prescriptive definitions. A series of recent
films have purported to expand the representation of homosexuality in
the direction of the actual multiplicity of subcultures which have
developed in the wake of the gay liberation movements of the early
1970s. I want to concentrate on two of these, Cruising and Making Love,
and to demonstrate how, despite the wide differences of sexual iconography and genres, both films continue to sustain the values of heterosexual gender relations, and are prevented from offering any real critique
ofthem.
109
CRUISING
In Cruising Al Pacino plays an undercover policeman, Steve Burns, who
is assigned to track down a killer busily slaying Pacino look-alikes. It is
ostensibly a cops-and-robbers movie, and belongs to^ a group of films
from the '70s which includes Mean Streets, The Warriors, and Serpico (in
which Pacino had already been subjected to a homosexual rape). These
all depict the social life of individual urban subcultures with maximum
exotic ethnicity, relying heavily on our partial incomprehension of particular customs and argot for realistic effect, and in order to show these
subcultures as 'foreign' and outside the Great American Way of Life. In
this manner they are prevented from offering any real political critique
of the unifying notion of the United States. They are also able to present
extremes of sex and violence, and poverty, in such a way that these are
seen as symptomatic of the individual subcultures rather than the results
of economic exploitation. Hence Cruising is set on the New York leatherbar scene, a picturesque gay underworld which parallels precinct consciousness with a territorialism defined by sexual desire. This is shown
as an infernal domain, and the film depicts 'in as much detail as a general
audience film will allow, scenes of fist-fucking, anal sex, and elaborate
sadomasochism'4. The effect of censorship in Britain only serves to collude with the sly Peeping-Tomism of the camerawork, which
contributes greatly to the film's overall mystification of its environment,
and the sexual activity which takes place.
Pacino is sent out into this 'gay world' in much the same way that the
US marines are sent out to face the aliens at the end of Close Encounters.
At least the film gets its iconography right, and we are spared the hilar-
Vito Russo,
'Warning: This
Film Could
Seriously Damage
Your Health', Gay
News, May 1 1980,
no 190.
pushed into the slot by the murderer, and the porn film cranking back
into an imitation oflife across the blood drenched screen. Are we intended to relate the flogging scene in the porn film to the killer's mentality,
to the 'world of gays', or perhaps ironically to Cruising itself? Given the
cinematic obsession with the aetiology (or 'causes') of homosexuality, the
former seems more likely.
It is precisely the casual, repetitive slippage from 'gay' to 'violence'
which is so offensive and dangerous in Cruising. What urgently needs to
be considered are the ways in which we are all recruited to sexual-fantasies by images which are both available and erotically charged in relation to our actual lived experience. Cruising depicts the organised society
of a group of men whose sexualised fantasies of theatrical power relationships are, in a crucial sense, voluntary. What is more, these relationships
are mutable. There is certainly no one-to-one relation between sexual
role-play and the hyper-maleness of the leather gender-identity. Indeed,
the leather subculture is both a response to the historical association of
homosexuality with 'effeminacy', as well as a subversion of the original
connotations of the style which it takes over, 'on approval' as it were,
from the world of heterosexual masculinity. Its contradiction lies in the
fact that to non-gays, and women in particular, it cannot easily be dissociated from the patriarchal significations of heterosexual experience.
In filmic terms however it merely permits an irresponsible ideological
movement from gay to violence to sudden death, as in Boris Szulzinger's
111
112
The Lonely Killers, and many other such films in which homosexuality
only features to 'explain' an otherwise gratuitous tendency to slaughter.
The infinitely potent image of victimisation-the objective experience
that all gay men experience and must somehow negotiate-is presented
in Cruising as if it stems naturally from the very fact of homosexual
desire, and is used as if it actually explained something fundamental
about homosexuality to non-gays. Cruising reinforces the view that
homosexuality is intrinsically a problem, something which requires
regulation and policing, in order to .protect the non-gay world from
moral 'pollution'.
For the makers of Cruising the gay scene is simply 'there', like Brooklyn, or Islington, or The Bronx. It is never recognised as a response to a
complex history and geography of legislative and social exclusions,
pushed into areas of economic devastation in most major cities, the signs
of which are once more read off as a 'natural' aspect of homosexuality
itself. This/j/^/ca/marginalisation of the 'gay world' also ensures that it
is never seen in direct overall confrontation with the dominant norms of
ideal American gender roles or householding patterns. It isn't at all clear
whether Pacino is actually having sex with other men in the course of his
investigation or how an ordinary policeman fits into a milieu of high
price bars.
And just as violence is viewed as a product of homosexuality rather
than something which is constantly directed at it, so cruising itself is
invested with the maximum of sinister and dubious connotations. This
is particularly obnoxious in a film about the violent murdering of gay
men. In the midst of all this Pacino is cast as the innocent abroad. At one
point he enquires in a shop about the back pocket colour-code of handkerchiefs, and reels out in a state of shock before the salesmen began to
get round to the really interesting ones! But whenever the film starts to
become aware of its own conflicting attitudes towards masculinity, we
are hastily deflected back into the safe discourses of sexual repression,
and the ever available moral panic evoked by homosexuality when it is
presented as a domain of pure sex. This is why New York gays organised
so speedily against the film's location shooting in and around Greenwich
Village, and why one demonstrator enquired of the city officials what
would happen if a producer tried to re-make The Birth of a Nation in
Harlem, using black extras. As I have suggested, the point of such objections cannot be established simply around notions of misrepresentation,
or stereotyping, but against the tendency to evaluate gay male subcultures through heterosexually defined definitions of gender which
they contest.
According to Cruising, homosexuality may be an alternative, but it is an
alternative which kills. It leads to the death of gay men who overstep the
threshold of traditional pictures of what it means to be gay, and to the
moral destruction of any heterosexual"exposed to its diabolic temptations
for too long. By confusing fantasy violence and its representation with
. the real thing, Cruising effectively closes down any consideration of the
continual struggle on the part of lesbians and gays to define our own
social relations and sexual pleasures. In this respect it does for gay men
what Looking For Mr Goodbar did for women. In that film violent death
was established as the just deserts for those who stray out after dark, a
woman's place, of course, being at home. Both films also go to great
lengths to establish the murderer's motives in relation to some repressed
and implicitly violent homosexuality, rather than to the neurosis which
all gendering becomes when pushed to extremes. In Looking For Mr
Goodbar, we see the heroine, Teresa, systematically destroyed by her
appalling macho catholic father, and a host of other male heterosexuals.
Yet it is a gay man who is hastily inserted to do the actual bumping off,
stabbing her as he fucks her 'in anum', while trying to prove his 'masculinity'. The first murder in Cruising is a notable-if bloodier-reprise
of this scene.
113
M A K I N G LOVE
While Cruising is set in the mythically simplified sexual underworld of
New York City, Making Love transports us to a geographically
unspecified middle class suburbia, a Lacoste labelled world of casual
affluence. And instead of cops-and-robbers, we are faced immediately
with the Eternal Triangle. Claire and Zack Elliott are happily househunting in the best traditions of upward social mobility. They are both
painfully 'nice', he a doctor and she a successful television executive. He
stays awake at night worrying about his patients. She wants to introduce
an inter-racial relationship into a soap-opera. This may be the scriptwriter's little joke, sincedespite a reported thirteen million dollar
cost-the film's production values, casting (Kate Jackson from Charlie's
Angels as Claire) and narrative (emphasising the abandoned wife's
position) are redolent of TV melodrama. It thus emerges as a 'Woman's
Film' with, as the advertisers put it, 'a gay look'5, as exemplified in the
poster campaign, using Richard Avedon's photography, and a slogan
which explicity addresses women: 'After eight happy years of marriage
Claire Elliott is discovering there's someone new in her husband's life.'
The adverts position us from within marriage, rather than from the
vantage point of Zack or Bart.
As the estate agent describes the Elliotts' ideal home, it's 'so traditional, so contemporary'. Much the same could be said of Making
Love. The Elliotts are traditional in so far as they like Gilbert and
Sullivan operas and want to call their (suspicion! clue!) still unconceived
child, Rupert, as in Brooke. In fact they have 'Culture' in much the same
way that Friedkin's sweaty leather-men have violence-by nature. They
are contemporary to the extent that they have problems. Unbeknown to
Claire, Zack is taking off on a series of totally unexplained car trips
around the local gay cruising spots. We cut back reassuringly to the pair
of them in bed. But what are they doing? Nothing more terrible than
watching An Affair To Remember on late-night TV and reeling out the
closing lines from memory along with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant.
114
115
'After eight happy years of marriage...': the model couple in Making Love.
nobody to turn to in the world but Zack. Her politics, such as they are,
apply exclusively to her work. Facing objections to her plan to launch a
major series of American plays on TV she insists that the public 'want
junk because we've taught them to want junk'. This may be snobbish
nonsense, but it is there to signify a 'social concern' on her part which
curiously has no application whatsoever in her own life. The only support the script can offer her is a Good Man, and a little baby Rupert.
Zack is similarly rescued from the 'misery' of being gay by yet another
Good Man. The moral line of Making Love thus runs as follows. Gay
men are 'nice' people who like old movies, and poetry, and fine wines,
and so on. But if you're a woman, watch out, because that's not enough.
It will not give you a baby. If you are a gay man however, you must do
your best to make up for your failings by finding another man and
becoming a couple. This is the problematic ofMaking Love, how to raise
the modern childless 'couple' to the former status of the 'family'. And
the magic salve, of course, is romantic love. The title song again makes
this point explicitly, in its simplistic claim that 'we're all the better for
each other'.
But in Making Love the process of Coming Out is presented strictly as
a private domestic issue, more like a confession that one prefers Monte-
116
that issues of morality should not be brought into play, but to note how
easy it is to displace the public issues of sexual categorisation away into
questions of individual and internal conflicts.
When Claire marries again and has a child, we see the romance barometer rising in Zack's partnership to 'compensate' for its childlessness.
Claire has baby Rupert, while Zack and his two-year lover have antiques.
Making Love uses gay men as an exemplary stick with which to drive
heterosexuals back into the marriage market and joint mortgage
industry. It exhorts gays to lock themselves away discreetly in what
Jacques Donzelot has described as a 'functional simulacrum' of traditional marriage6. Compared with this Sunday Bloody Sunday was positively revolutionary in its implication that, as Glenda Jackson's character
put it, 'there are times when nothing has to be better than anything',
meaning that she is better off on her own than in an unequal relationship. After a line like that we certainly wouldn't have heard any more
from her in Making Love.
One of the most unpleasant features of the film is its mobilisation of
the notion of sterility, the implication that homosexuality can only be
tolerated in the likeness of the 'warmth' of marriage, and that ultimately
a childless woman is a failure. This is the underlying text of Making
Love, its implicit critique of everything that the Women's and Gay
Movements have fought for in the last two decades. Yet the film
depends for its very existence on the collective struggles of countless
individuals and groups who have worked over the years to bring homosexuality out of the 'celluloid closet' as Vito Russo recently described it7.
This is the real irony of Making Love. It is a film which'not only denies
the actual inferior status of women and gays, but compounds that denial
by using an image of homosexuality in order to recruit us all back into
the 'decent' ways of monogamy and traditional gender roles.
CONCLUSION
The concept of'sexuality', which organises us all into distinct if highlygeneralised categories, according to our sexual pleaures, is only a little
older than the cinema. Film emerged in a period of immense moral panic
concerning the apparent discovery of a new and intrinsically degenerate
species of being in our midst - the homosexual - a previously undetected
and therefore all the more insidious threat to 'morality' and 'public
order'. It was also intensively developed as a competitive capitalist
industry around the ideology of'family entertainment', and the commercial need for 'mass' audiences. From its origins, as Michael Chanan has
pointed out8, film was also understood by the State and moral puritans as
an instrument for instruction, and a potentially dangerous 'corrupting'
influence. For this reason it has always been subject to intense "moral
scrutiny, especially from those who equate morality with sex. A
profound anxiety about homosexuality is thus deeply inscribed within
the entire history of motion pictures, an anxiety which compounds a fear
Jacques Donzelot,
The Policing of
Families, London,
Hutchinson, 1979,
p227.
Michael Chanan,
The Dream That
Kicks, London,
Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1980.
117
1
118
Mark Poster,
Critical Theory of
the Family,
London, Pluto,
1978.
10
Rosalind Coward,
'What Is
Pornography?',
Spare Rib, June
1982, no 119, pp
52-54.
An independently produced film like Frank Ripploh's autobiographical Taxi Zum Klo may be more sensitive to the actual complexities and
organisation of homosexual desire, but the relative ease with which the
central character adopts the signifiers of many different gay cultural
groups makes him no more 'representative' of gays than the leather-men
of Cruising or the Ivy League types who populate the gay scene in
Making Love. At least Taxi presents gay sex as a positive pleasure, even ifto
do so Ripploh ends up by looking rather like a one-man embodiment ofthe
kind of all-purpose gay-bar which I have discussed earlier. The film isalso
unable or unwilling to examine the basic conflicts in its central
relationship between Ripploh and his boyfriend, Bernd, who is represented as submissive and voyeuristic, with connotations of 'wifeliness'
which are frankly snobbish and implicitly misogynistic.
Taxi Zum Klo has a grainy low-budget look about it, which lends it a
certain quality of documentary 'authenticity' in relation to the chiaroscuro effects of Cruising, and the antiseptic cleanliness of Making Love.
But in its exhortations to 'be oneself it is finally no more radical than
either of them. It ends just where it should have begun, with the political
and practical consequences of the main character's dismissal as a teacher.
In Taxi this is seen as more or less inevitable, and in fact it is the film
itself which is the result. Ripploh never faces up to the consequences of
his Liberationist lifestyle politics. His cross-dressing character certainly
controls and transforms the signs of his masculinity. But masculinity is
Bernd and Frank (right) at the ball in Taxi Zum Klo: cross-dressing without consequences?
119
120
11
See Simon
Watney, 'On Gay
Liberation',
Politics and Power,
1981, no 4.
never really problematised, since it is never related to its deep determining sources (particularly economic dependence). The sight of a bearded
man dressed up in full regalia as Queen Victoria on this year's Gay Pride
March in London may well be a stunning demonstration of the cultural
and social origins, and mutability, of gender, but it does not begin to
confront iht fixity of gendering as experienced by most women and men,
gay or otherwise."
There is no such thing as 'gay film', apart from certain types of pornography which may be produced, distributed and consumed exclusively
by gay-identifying men. This, however, would be an extremely reductive and unhelpful definition. The cultural forms of male homosexuality
are too contradictory to support any single genre as such, and gay experience, as I have suggested, is always structured from elements in the
dominant heterosexual culture which precede the requirements and
perceptions of gay experience. The fact of homosexuality does not guarantee anything beyond the given alignments of sexuality, gender and
class within the social formation. What can be expected, and must be
demanded, is an end to films like Cruising, which wilfully position
homosexuality within a dense and mystifying field of associations with
terror, violence, self-hatred and psychological disorder, or the more
subtle surrender to monogamy and 'family life' advocated in Making
Love.
In many ways the recent Australian film, Gallipoli goes further in
showing sexuality as a system of regulative constraints, with its careful
depiction of conflicting values and expectations about masculinity and
male behaviour. Likewise the underrated La Cage Aux Folks, Deux,
contains at least one sequence of great relevance. Albin, the middle-aged
drag-queen lover of the 'butch' Renato, runs away in drag to Italy for
refuge from a gang of criminals. Hiding with Renato's family, Albin is
taken for a woman, and treated as such. S/he is made to work all day in
the fields with the other women of the household, and then to cook and
attend on the menfolk all evening. Although the sequence is also a
delicious send-up of the Italian way of life from a specifically French
point of view, it becomes clear to Albin for the first time in his life that
femininity is not merely a function of frocks. An altogether different film
which makes a similar point is Prince Of The City, which is concerned
with the ways in which a group of Italian-Americans struggle, as men,
against the same economic and class system, whether they are in the
police or the mafia. This extraordinary film problematises masculinity
in such a way that choices about work, family life, child-rearing, and so
on are related to one another in a network of dependencies and loyalties
which are social, moral, economic and sexual. Such films prefigure, in
their very different ways, the kinds of concerns to which a sexual political analysis of film should be addressing itself.
The questions we ought to ask of cinema concern the criteria which
operate within it to determine which social phenomena are felt to be
'intrinsically' in need of explanation, and which are not, and how these
criteria are derived from complex assumptions about audiences and
12
Michel Foucault,
'Histoire et
Homosexualite',
Masques: Revue des
Homosexualites,
Spring 1982, no
13, p 22 (author's
translation).
121
122
J24
125
126
f strategic dissensions and contradictions within experiences on abortion and mix its modes
(documentary, narrative, etc.) but its 'highly
contemporary feminist cultural politics. Such
dissensions may be summed up briefly by
circumscribed and predefined' subject matter
distinguishing between two extremes of cultural
permits the spectator to negotiate a position only
practice, one which tends to take processes of
in relation to a specific set of issues.
signification for granted and one which argues that The cinema of 'feminine writing' (the author's
the meaning production process is itself a site of
examples include Jeanne Dielman, Thriller, Lives
struggle, (p 17)
of the Performers) is also deconstructive,
challenging dominant forms of signification, but
It is these two 'extremes', or clusters of film
it further seeks to construct new forms, new
practices, which Kuhn elaborates in the final
pleasures. Its operations are therefore addressed
section of her book. The chapter 'Real Women'
to spectator-text relations, and thence to psychic
surveys films working in the documentary mode structures of subjectivity. There is an important
(documentary used in its most general and
link to be made here with the author's arguments
historically unspecific sense). A critique is gently about pornography: like the latter, this cinema is
advanced by stating the assumptions which
not just content but function, constructing an
sustain the direct appeal to the documented, non- address to a sexed/gendered spectator. Far from
fictional truth of letting the films' subjects speak being 'just' a cinema for women, it is an attempt
direct to the audience via the apparently neutral
to break up the ideological unity signified by the
vehicle of film representations. Then, in
term 'man' which masks the social privilege of
'Textual Politics' the author goes on to examine the masculine and negates the heterogeneity that
countercinema, films which do not merely opt
is labelled feminine. What patriarchy calls 'the
for one mode (documentary, for instance) against feminine' occupies a fundamentally radical and
others, but set out 'to challenge and subvert the
subversive place from which to erode the very
operations of dominant cinema' (p 157). From
fixity of the subjectivity in which film and other
here two positions develop. One is based on the
representations constantly strive to constitute
notion that 'all forms of illusionism are
us.6 The cinema of feminine writing offers far
ideologically implicated' and the other focuses on mor^e than 'an openness of address in
the 'forms of pleasure generated in the relations
combination with matters of expression in
of specularity set up by dominant cinema, classic relation to which spectators may place
Hollywood narrative in particular' (p 158). From themselves as women and/or feminists' (p 177).
the first derives the case for a 'deconstructive'
Indeed the limit of its address here to gender or
cinema using explicitly anti-realist and antipolitics restricts this text from articulating the
illusionist textual strategies. The second works
full potential of the feminine. If Annette KuhnV
on the question of gendered subjectivity and the valuable new study has a fault, it is that her
viewing process. Going beyond deconstruction,
claims for feminist cinema are too gently put. In
it attempts to invoke a specifically feminine film the present climate a mere record of the work of
language.
the 1970s, however necessary, is insufficient.
Feminist deconstructive cinema is itself
The political imperative is if possible even more
conscious of gender issues and consequently
urgent. The books we write cannot
different from other merely formalist strategies.
underestimate the crisis of feminism's continuing
It aims for both oppositional modes and
marginality nor its utterly revolutionary purpose.
oppositional contents. And while it may
distanciate and unfix the spectator by offering
6
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock make a similar
several points of view in different film modes,
case in relation to the visual arts in Old Mistresses:
like the tendentious text it ultimately seeks
Women, Art and Ideology, London, Routledge &
closure. Whose Choice? (London Women's Film KeganPaul, 1981.
Group 1976) may offer different voices and
REFLECTIONS ON EROS
PAM COOK REVIEWS 'AN EPIC POEM'
127
128
129
130
Left, how The Times revealed the slashed Venus. Right, role reversal in An Epic Poem.
132
133
134
REPRESENTATIONS AT WAR
WHOOSH!
GILLIAN SKIRROW READS 'A SEXUAL
FIX'
135
J36
ENTERTAMMENTS&NEWS
'DRESSED TO KILL'
A DISCUSSION BY GIOVANNA ASSELLE
AND BEHROZE GANDHY
137
138
Such films have one main attraction: they exist to voyeuristic mechanisms of the cinema and, in the
provide patrons, usually male, with opportunities of case of Blood Sisters, analysing the ways in which
seeing knives being stuck into women. That shower- women are oppressed in patriarchal society. His
bath scene in Psycho all those years ago still
frequent references to Hitchcock suggested a
provides this unlovely sub-genre of horror cinema familiarity with the historical dimension of his
with today's main bloodbath. In this case, it's a
film vocabulary and lent him credibility as a
feminist TV reporter (Lee Grant) whose
anti-chauvinist tirade against a male bully triggers 'serious' filmmaker. Indeed, some have argued
off a watching psychotic. Armed with a flick knife that De Palma's reworking of Hitchcock's
as long as his arm, he carves his way through the concerns added a 'political dimension':
scenery until he gets to her. ...Be it noted that
although Mr Ferman, our chief censor, still bans His insistence on the spectator as voyeur,
The Story of O in its entirety from our screens, continually underlined by his breakdown of screen
his Board passes this violent series of acts against space into frames within frames, derives directly
women. I'm not being too cynical, I think, to
from his most important influence, Hitchcock. But
conclude that if you're treated roughly and like it, even more than Hitchcock, De Palma is aware of
the way the lady known as 'O'did, you are
the political dimension of what often appears in
regarded as a dangerous example and banned; but if
Hitchcock as a purely moral problem.2
you endup with a knife in your guts, as the women
do in Visiting Hours, you are permitted to be on
view as an object of male titillation. Better a dead And Robin Wood saluted the director's films as
female than a deviant one-eh, Mr Ferman?1
one of the most interesting developments of
American cinema in the '70s, following 'the
This short comment marks a point of
seminal work of Psycho which definitively
convergence of two very different movements'
established two concepts crucial to the horror
attitudes toward the banning of images of
genre's subsequent development: the monster as
violence against women: feminist groups and the human psychotic/schizophrenic, and the
Mary Whitehouse lobby, which, though starting revelation of horror as existing at the heart of the
from opposite positions, appear (in the public
family'.3
eye) to reach similar conclusions, censorship and
When Dressed To Kill was released in the
banning. Although it isn't difficult to guess
United States in the summer of 1980, it was
which one has exerted more influence on the
hailed by David Denby in New York Magazine as
New Standard, the result is an apparently
'the first great American movie of the 80s', and
widespread consensus on the undesirability of
by Vincent Canby in the New York Times as 'a
such representations. While we share this
witty, romantic, psychological horror film' and
repugnance for these misogynist images, we feel
the work of'unmistakable talent'. The New
it is important to recognise their existence in
Yorker's Pauline Kael was ecstatic:
order to confront them. Silence is not a strategy.
But for the moment we'd like to leave the
Now, in his thirteenth feature film, he has become a
question of violence against women and examine true visual storyteller. He knows where to put the
the initial critical reactions to Dressed To Kill.
camera and how to make every move count, and his
The controversy around the film was heightened timing is so great that when he wants you to feel
by the fact that the film appealed to the aesthetic something he gets you every time. His thriller
technique, constantly refined, has become insidious,
sensibilities of several critics, who had fun
jewelled.
It's hardly possible to find a point at
spotting innumerable references to Hitchcock's
classics, skilful camera work and various
cinematic tricks. Like Carpenter's Halloween,
and possibly even more so, Dressed To Kill
1
seemed to counterbalance its gory and sinister
Alexander Walker, the Neu Standard, April 15,
1982.
content with the implication that this was after
2
Edinburgh International Film Festival News, August
all only an amusing game staged by a clever
1976.
movie brat. Moreover, Brian De Palma had
3
Robin Wood, 'American Cinema in the '70s:
previously acquired a considerable reputation as
Sisters', Movie 27/28, p 50.
a politically conscious film-maker, aware of the
4
Pauline Kael, 'Master Spy, Master Seducer', the
New Yorker, August 4, 1980.
5
ibid.
Liz Blake as the decoy in Dressed to Kill: 'the stylized expression of a blissfully dirty mind'?
139
140
in some sense reveals it, Hitchcock uses the process psychiatric hospital at the end of the film, Kael
of identification normally associated with
writes: 'This picture is such a unified, confident
ideological correctness and the recognition of
piece of work that De Palma can even make the
established morality and shows up its perverted side. image hazy and provide a stylized chorus out of
Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in
Bedlam-giving it away that something isn't
voyeurism, cinematic and non-cinematic. His heroes
really happening-and still you're terrified.'7
are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law -a
This, one could reply, is exactly where the
policeman (Vertigo), a dominant male possessing
money and power (Marnie)-but their erotic drives cheapness of the film's tricks resides. Dreams
lead them into compromised situations. The power and fantasy sequences are ideally suited to
to subject another person to the will sadistically or introduce any element capable of attracting an
audience without the restraints imposed by a
to the gaze voyeuristically is turned on to the
woman as the object of both
Hitchcock's skilful tight narrative structure. Interestingly, the film,
use of identification processes and liberal use of
whose plot could survive very well without
subjective camera from the point of view of the male them, begins and ends in a circular fashion with
protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his
such sequences, a female fantasy and a female
position, making them share his uneasy gaze. The
nightmare, both including soft-porn shower
audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation
scenes and attacks. Their inclusion in dream
within the screen scene and diegesis which parodies
sequences seems an attempt to justify their
his own in the cinema.6
existence by throwing a light of unreality,
humour and playfulness on them, provoking
What the Museum sequence lacks is a consistent
knowledgeable winks between the director and a
male point of view which would question
cinephile audience also catered to by the split
critically the relationship of the audience to the
screen sequences, the filmic references, etc.
camera and the act of looking. Where in Vertigo
While these devices have been praised by some
-specifically evoked in this particular sequence
critics,
others see in them a lack of moral concern
-James Stewart spies Kim Novak in a museum
comparing unfavourably with Hitchcock's work
and we see her through his eyes, De Palma's
-not on the level of Laura Mulvey's arguments
hommage multiplies the viewpoints (Kate's, the
about
how cinema constructs a point of view
stranger's, the spectator's).
which
either implicates an audience or doesn't The Museum sequence is followed by one in
but from a less interesting and more predictable
which Kate Miller is physically seduced by the
humanist perspective. George Morris writes in
stranger in the back of a cab. Again, there are
Film
Comment:
references to Hitchcock: Kate's cry (of pleasure,
surprise, dismay) blends with the noise of a car
There is plenty of terror in Dressed To Kill, but
horn in a reminder of The 39 Steps, and the pan
the aesthetic distance that separates De Palmafrom
on the building immediately afterwards evokes
Hitchcock can be measured by the absence of any
the first shot in Psycho. The sequence carries on
emotion approaching pity.^
the theme of voyeurism, underlined by the taxi
driver's look into the mirror. This time we are
(It's interesting to note how this conclusion runs
invited to identify with a male onlooker while
opposite to the remarks in the Edinburgh Film
watching the sex play in the cab, but the
Festival programme note mentioned earlier.)
identification is feeble and shortlived. The taxi
Closer examination of the underlying qualities
driver will disappear as quickly as he arrived on
which govern the structure of Dressed To Kill
the scene, reinforcing the fact that throughout
discovers more than the usual share of narcissism
the film there is no consistent point of view, no
which generally characterises De Palma's films.
fixed reference for identification. The spectator
He wrote and directed this one, and it is full of
is never implicated in the act of looking, never
made to feel uneasy and aware of his or her role
6
as accomplice in the action On the screen.
Laura Mulvey, lyisual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema', Screen Autumn 1975, vol 16 no 3, p 15.
Another argument in Kael's piece which we'd
' Kael, op cit.
like to contradict concerns De Palma's supposed
8
George Morris, Film Comment, September/October
directorial mastery in manipulating the audience. 1980, vol 16, no 5, p 54.
Referring to the nightmare sequence in the
141
Hommage to the shower bath murder: the first fantasy sequence in Dressed to Kill.
142
Peter Miller, one of his inventions and Liz Blake: 'I could build a woman out of me.'
11
13
143
144
Raymond Williams
and Michael
Orrom, Preface to
Film, Film Drama,
1954.
Raymond Williams,
Television:
Technology and
Cultural Form,
Fontana 1974.
Raymond Williams,
'A Lecture on
Realism', Screen
Spring 1977, vol
18, no 1, pp 61-74.
Raymond Williams,
Politics and Letters,
Verso 1981, p 228.
ibid, p 224.
ibid, p 227.
ibid, p 224.
Raymond Williams,
The Country and the
City, Chatto and
Windus, 1973.
did I have any objections in using the book in that way? Well, I saw the
rough cut without music, perhaps a couple of months before it was
shown at the London Film Festival, and they asked me if I could suggest
one or two other sentences either from The Country and the City or from
somewhere else, because they wanted something at the beginning and
the end which would try and draw it together. First it wasn't easy to find
any; second, there's a problem of language anyway, from the language of
that kind of book into the film, which is mainly using conversation, ordinary speech. So it ended by my saying that I would write, having seen
the rough cut, a piece for the beginning and the end; deliberately writing
it a different way, but to fit what was already the evident shape and seam
of the film: expressing my own ideas but also writing almost as it were
professionally to the shape of the film as it was.
How much did you have to do with the final shape? Were you involved in
any of those discussions?
No, the rough cut that I saw wasn't identical of course with the finally
edited version, but the basic shape was there-I mean the main order of
sequences, and above all the basic method of the film, of not having an
external narrative voice. All those decisions had been taken. There were
some differences, especially towards the end and there was the whole
problem of music which was still then very open and would obviously be
rather crucial and so there was some discussion and my wife also discussed i t - b u t simply having seen the rough cut and talking for what, half
an hour, an hour afterwards.
^
How do you feel about the way your texts were used in the film? Were you
satisfied with them?
I find that I'm always uneasy when I find people quoting things from
me; I prefer my own texts, you know, in the form in which they existed I don't take easily to detachment. I couldn't judge how much I thought
they helped to clarify and I thought one or two did more than others. I
was much happier in that sense with the one or two pieces I wrote for the
beginning and end because then I was responding to what was happening in the film. I did see a problem when Diana was trying to read the
one very difficult piece -
145
146
'This whole relation between work and learning': Diane Butts in metalwork class.
there was the sense of somebody struggling with these ideas, and I felt
that particularly too about that ferociously complicated last sentence
from Politics and Letters which goes up in text near the end of the film. It
seems to me such a difficult sentence, I mean it's hard enough in print.
Would you have liked the film to be markedly different?
Well no, it was their project. It was really interesting in the sense that I
haven't seen material before which had followed a group of people (in
this case, a family) through over time to that extent, and this seemed to
be the great interest of it. Particularly having caught the girl Diana at a
stage when you do see her turning from one person into another - from a
child into a young woman-this seemed to me extremely interesting.
Then there was a lot of interest in the fact that some of the material was
familiar within a documentary tradition-that is to say, the scene of the
strike. It was the sort of material that left documentary makers in the '30s
went and looked for. Now what interested me about the film - I've heard
this argument in Wales and elsewhere-is that that is at the beginning,
whereas in the whole thematic of left documentary of the '30s, it would
have been the climax. Collective militancy, very convincingly done,
both as represented and as lived, is the starting point after which all the
147
' Raymond Williams,
The Fight for
Manod, Chatto and
Windus, 1979.
In a way, I thought that So that you can live repeats what some people
have seen as the weakness of your novel The Fight for Manod9 which is
the absence of any force capable of resistance and the sadness that you are left
with. Do you see that as realism in the sense that it reflects the way things
actually are in the '80s?
You could answer that question at two levels. You could say, is it realistic in the sense of, 'Is that how it's going?'-I mean the repeated failure
under extraordinary provocation, to generate sufficient collective action.
At this ordinary realistic level, it's true, it's unarguable. One opportunity after another for collective action-even in an area with a long
tradition of militant organisation, like South Wales - has been, you could
say, missed, even at times rejected. So at the level of the naive version of
realism, you know, 'Does it happen in the world?' that I think is right.
But the second seems to be a much more interesting case, which is that
unless you realise that the problem of action is now within a changed set
of social relations, in which the obvious lines of action are not to be
simply recovered from some past repertory, where people know what the
forms of action are; that unless you realise that, you won't generate these
actions anyway. In other words, it's not simply saying empirically these
things have not happened; but saying there are genuine social causes
why they've not happened. And this has had to do with the area of
experience that's been included in the film and the ways in which these
areas have been relating or failing to relate to forms of struggle: the
emphasis in the film, first, on a woman growing into either available
work or into the difficulty of getting any kind of work at all, the role of
education, this whole relation between work and learning. What I've
been arguing is that until it's seen in that way, you cannot generate the
action. And that's not just at the empirical level that strong collective
action has not been taken, which is undoubtedly true, but there are reasons why this is so, and to discover the reasons and imaginatively realise
them is one of the ways of generating action, which you then can't mime
and say 'Well, we'll invent for fiction or documentary purposes some
such action because it will be upbeat rather than downbeat.'
But one of the things you 've talked about in relation to realism is the development of what you call 'subjunctive action''suggesting, trying out different
ways to go forward within the cultural forms. But the film doesn't do that,
does it?
I don't think even within the most extended version of documentary, it
148
10
I think it is, although you know one's very uneasy about these restrictive
notions of documentary, but I think the subjunctive action would necessarily be a matter of fiction. And you know I wrote The Fight for Manod
in one style at the same time as I was writing The Volunteers10 in another
and The Volunteers is precisely a subjunctive one, because not only is it
placed ahead in time, but it does presuppose actions which not only
haven't occurred because of the date, but haven't yet occurred because of
the stage of social development, of saying if these things happened, then
what would occur? And in The Fight for Manod-1 don't want to talk
about the novels rather than the film, but it might clarify the difference
-there was a very strong sense-after all this is what the whole plot was
aboutof something new about to happen, which people wanted to happen, and then of finding the very complicated blockages which prevented it happening, blockages at all sorts of levels, which seemed to me
the difference between a subjunctive action and simple futurism. You
know, futurism saying, here's this different situation and we simply leap
to it.
Do you think that the formal strategies of the film which are associated with
avant-garde film-making, might make it inaccessible to audiences that are
unfamiliar with these strategies?
I very much doubt it, actually; I think it's a thing to be tested out. One of
the interesting things about this film is the Cinema Action method of
working: they take their films around and have discussions afterwards at
showings.
I would have thought, you see, that the superb demotic style of Housing
Problems (Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton, 1935) all the documentary in
that tradition, is now more inaccessible-but this is just my guess about
where people's minds are. I think that at the technical level, the degree of
accommodation to what were not so long ago avant-garde techniques, is
very considerable; this has happened very fast through television. This is
very much a thing to test empirically, I think. I think the discussions
after the showing of this film will be at least as valuable as the film itself.
You have talked about it being formalist simply to look at the formal strategies of a film or a novelof the necessity to take into account the total situation, the context of production and distribution
Yes, what social relations it is built fjom and what it presupposes. Suppose you'd had a final sequence in which the people themselves were
reflecting on their situation, and you had something therefore which was
capable of more articulating, at least the questions. That, it seems to me,
still remains a perfectly possible strategy. It's still in the course of discus-
^-^^^^
" ' A Lecture on
eV""' P "''
___^^___^^_
There's another term that you've used, in relation to realism, which yon call
the fourth term, 'the consciously interpretative in relation to a particular
political viewpoint'";you distinguish between the Loach-Garnett-Allen TV
drama The Big Flame, in which the lessons are only learnt by successive
generations re-enacting the same struggles, and a Brechtian strategy which
claims that you can learn lessons through analysis. That second level of realism doesn't seem to be present in this film.
I think that's true. If you look at the way the feeling moves in that film, it
moves so much towards that particular family and particularly towards the
women in it. The whole stance is so, as it were, attentive/non-intrusive,
that the posing of questions, which would require a quite different
stance, would require a very sharp break of feeling, inside the film. I
don't just mean that it would be a different tack, because as I say there's
been discussion of the next film where you could include from the beginning a convention through a character which would allow that posing of
questions-certainly historical, social and political questions from a different position. With this one I have the feeling that the flow was so committed to just following these people, that it almost excluded the
analytic.
The film doesn 't seem to raise any questions of political or economic strategy.
But the argument is that until you've grasped a number of obstacles that
have been put in people's way, and the pressures on them, and understand it in that way from inside, then you can't generate the action. After
all, Shirley is a marvellously convincing model of an image on which the
left has quite properly based a lot of its feeling: she's the active woman
worker, trade unionist, advancing at every level yet still living this very
complete life in herself and in her community-and you see her running
into all kinds of trouble which don't follow at all from her actions, but
simply from the fact that larger forces have broken in. The argument as
I've heard it in Wales is, what's the relative importance of the inherited
pieties of the labour movement, that by militant action you can change
the world-which is obviously a general truth-and what happens in
relatively marginalised groups, in this case women workers, in a relatively marginalised economy, in this case South Wales? What happens
which puts pressure on and makes militancy difficult? There aren't answers-but the questions don't seem to me to be wrong, because this is
what one asks in South Wales now. I mean, it's what one asks in Britain
150
now. One wouldn't have projected a Britain with three million unemployed, and everything else that's been happening, in which there would
be so little, really effective, sustained levels of action. It's been dispersed,
it's been blocked, and it's very urgent really to know why. I don't think
the film can tell us why, but it's one of several explorations of why.
I agree that the film tries to understand Shirley's experience from her point of
view, which is I think quite unusual, but my conception of realism is that it
also has the power to explain, to help you to understand the total situation;
and I feel that the film just tries to understand Shirley, it doesn't try to
understand the total situation and it leaves out so many things that you need
to know in order to understand.
I think there's a genuine problem here because, first of all, I think the
film was made as it went along, you know, there's a long gap, and a sense
of them feeling their way into the situation. One of the criticisms in
South Wales-a very minority one-was that here are these people from
London coming in and looking in on it. Well of course at a most literal
. level it's true, but everything about the nature of the film-making is
opposite to that. You could even say at times, to a fault. I mean the thing
has been accepted very much on its own terms. Now then the problem is,
how do you explain in this broader sense?
If you contrast it again with the documentary tradition of the '30s, I was
talking to Cinema Action people about Housing Problems which I'd seen
again. In Housing Problems you've got a wonderful clarity of explanation, precisely because there'j more separation from the people being
observed, who are really objects of a social problem rather than people,
and second because there's great confidence in the relatively simple solution. The irony at the end of Housing Problems is that what they project
are the tower block horrors of post-war working class life-which after all
came in the same way from outside the class-solutions determined
beyond it. Now, you lose a lot I think if you lose that kind of control,
clarity, simplicity, singleness of direction, explanation. There were
times when I wanted So that you can live to be brought together in a different way and when it seemed to me that the things that were being suggested from the references to The Country and the City couldn't in any
sense wholly explain this set of problems. But I think their method was
this exploratory one, and I think it's interesting to see how far it worked.
I had a film made directly Irom The Country and the City, a television
film which Mike Dibb made, which is very close to the book although
it's highly selective from i t - i t takes a theme and then finds a practical,
visual embodiment of it. It provides a very direct comparison between
the type of documentary which says here is an intellectual argument,
how can we film it -which in that particular case meant saying instead of
the whole argument about the country h<Suse, let us find a country house,
look at its history and half the film was built round that-but there's no
continuity of people in it; and then So that you can live, where a set of
ideas is grafted onto what had begun and continues as observing a family
12
The themes that Cinema Action focus on are all themes to do with decline the libraries and so on-rather than ones which might explain in a wider
sense the things which are happening, like Gwyn Williams' recent article in
Marxism Today'2, which pointed to the rise of the Tories and the decline
of Labourism, and how that corresponds to the deproletarianisation of
Wales, or anything to do with Welsh nationalism -a whole political dimension which is left out of the film. It's simply recording the experience of loss
and decline.
It's very interesting that Gwyn, who is precisely that kind of explainer,
was very enthusiastic about the film. One of the comments I really look
forward to is that he's going to write about it, and for him to write about
it would be very significant, because where he starts from -where I think
most militants in South Wales whatever their position, whether they're
left Labour or Communist or New National Left or socialist republicans start from-is the position that something very important has been lost. I
mean, the depoliticisation is something that has happened -it's the problem. That decline is the problem. Now, of course, if you get a historian
of his learning analysing it then you get a much clearer picture-but I
think what he's feeling (I've just had this in a letter from him) is that this
was getting at imaginatively the position from which you start. Whereas
what the offical Labour Party in South Wales is assuming, is that all the
tradition is still there, that Wales is this solid Labour country with a
great proletarian tradition and can never be anything else. It is observably becoming something else, it is in a state of great confusion-and the
assertion of what sound like the positives, is actually the most negative
and hopeless kind of cover-up of what the real situation is. There is tremendous vitality and then you have to relate that to the sense of shock at
the referendum (against devolution in 1979), which was the great shock,
because the cultural vitality among the most active and articulate people
-among the writers and film/pop song makers, the intellectuals in a
general way-which before the referendum was broadly moving in a
radical and national direction, was so humiliated by the exposure of its
minority situation that a whole new thinking and kind of argument-had
to start.
I think the two things that have to be said are: one, that the radical left in
Britain has never been more vital or more theoretically informed or more
capable of doing all kinds of cultural work; and two, I also think there's
never been a greater distance between it and where most of the people
who are the objects of its concern, and subjects of its concern, ar5 living
and thinking. The distance is very great. Therefore, it is only by some
kind of received idea bf.vanguardism or some unreasonable reliance on
the persistence of traditional positions, that the old simply positive
Gwyn Williams,
'Mother Wales,
get off me back?',
Marxism Today,
December 1981,
pp 14-20.
151
points can go on being made. Often, as I say, they are a block to this
much sadder recognition of what the real shape of the problem is. Maybe
then you need different figures who are not only the people suffering at
the end of this process, but the people-however small a minority-who
are reactive and fighting about it. Maybe you need that, if you were to
tell the whole story.
152
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153
154
155
'It's so close, this life in the family': Diane, Roy and Shirley Butts.
156
1
Michael Chanan, 'So that you can live (For
Shirley)', Framework 18, 1982, pp 7-8.
2
Nicky Hamlyn, 'Dora, a Suitable Case for
Treatment', Undercut 3/4, March 1982, p 52.
3
Jo Imeson, Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1982, p
10.
157
158
The forward march of labour halted? The drum band in So that you can live.
160