Visual and Other

Pleasures
Laura Mulvey

palgrave
*
© Laura Mulvey 1989

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First published 1989

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Mulvey, Laura, 7947-
Visual and other pleasures.-(Language, discourse, society ).
1. Women. Portrayal by visual media
I. Title II. Series
305.4

11 10 9 8 7
OS 04 03 02 01
 5
Notes on Sirk and Melodrama*
• Presented as a paper for the SEFf weekend school Melodrama and published in Movie in 1977.

It has been suggested that the interest of Hollywood 1950s melodrama

lies primarily in the way that, by means of textual analysis, fissures and
contradictions can be shown to be undermining the films' ideological
coherence. 1 These contradictions, whether on the level of form or of
narrative incident, seem to save the films from belonging blindly to the
bourgeois ideology which produced them. This argument depends on
the premise that the project of this ideology is indeed to conjure up a
coherent picture of a world and conceal contradictions which in turn
conceal exploitation and oppression. A text which defies unity and
closure would then quite clearly be progressive. Although this line of
argument has been productive and revealing, there is a way in which it
has been trapped in a kind of Chinese box quite characteristic of
melodrama itself. Ideological contradiction is actually the overt
mainspring and specific content of melodrama, not a hidden, uncon-
scious thread to be picked up only by special critical processes. No
ideology can ever pretend to totality: it searches for safety-valves for its
own inconsistencies. And the 1950s melodrama works by touching on
sensitive areas of sexual repression and frustration; its excitement comes
from conflict, not between enemies, but between people tied by blood
or love.
Melodrama as a safety-valve for ideological contradictions centred on
sex and the family may lose its progressive attributes, but it acquires a
wider aesthetic and political significance. The workings of patriarchy,
and the mould of feminine unconscious it produces, have left women
largely without a voice, gagged and deprived of outlets (of a kind
supplied, for instance, either by male art or popular culture) in spite of
the crucial social and ideological functions women are called on to
perform. In the absence of any coherent culture of oppression, a simple
fact of recognition has aesthetic and political importance. There is a
dizzy satisfaction in witnessing the way that sexual difference under
patriarchy is fraught, explosive, and erupts dramatically into violence
within its own private stamping-ground, the family. While the Western
and the gangster film celebrate the ups and downs endured by men of
action, the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, like the tragedies of Euripides,
probing the pent-up emotion, bitterness and disillusion well known to
women, act as a corrective.

39
40 Visual and Other Pleasures

Roughly, there are two dramatic points of departure for melodrama.

One is coloured by a female protagonist's point of view which provides
a focus for identification. The other examines tensions in the family,
and between the sexes and generations; here, although women play an
important part, their point of view is not analysed and does not initiate
the drama. Helen Foley's article 'Sex and State in Ancient Greece'
analyses Greek drama in terms that illuminate the 'safety-
valve' function of Hollywood's family melodramas. She argues that
Aeschylus shows how overvaluation of virility under patriarchy causes
social and ideological problems which the drama comments on and
attempts to correct: 'male characters ... overly concerned with military
and political glory at the expense of domestic harmony and their own
children', and 'the emotional domestic sphere cannot be allowed direct
political power and the wife must subordinate herself to her husband
in marriage; but the maternal or domestic claims are nevertheless central
and inviolable, a crucial check on bellicose male-dominated democracy'. 2
For family life to survive, a compromise has to be reached, sexual
difference softened, and the male brought to see the value of domestic
life. As art and drama deal generously with male fantasy, a dramatic
rendering of women's frustrations, publicly acting out an adjustment of
balance in the male ego, is socially and ideologically beneficial. A positive
male figure who rejects rampant virility and opposes the unmitigated
power of the father achieves (at least by means of a 'happy end') the
reintegration of both sexes in family life. The phallocentric, misogynist
fantasies of patriarchal culture are shown here to be in contradiction
with the ideology of the family. These tensions are certainly present in
both the Hollywood Western and melodrama; both tend towards a
beneficial sacrifice of unrestrained masculine individualism in the
interests of civilisation, law and culture. Rafe in Home from the Hill re-
establishes the family and 'feminine' values on the grave of his over-
bearing father. But, as Sirk has pointed out, the strength of the
melodramatic form lies in the amount of dust the story raises along the
road, the cloud of overdetermined irreconcilables which put up a
resistance to being neatly settled, in the last five minutes, into a happy
end.
Sirk, in the two films on which he had virtual independence (both
produced by Albert Zugsmith), was able to tum his attention to the
'masculine' or family melodrama without conforming to a standard
happy end. He turns the conventions of melodrama sharply. Roger
Shumann in Tarnished Angels and Kyle Hadley in Written on the Wind
(both played by Robert Stack) are tortured and tom by the mystique of
masculinity, haunted by phallic obsessions and fear of impotence. Both
are suicidal, finally taking refuge in death. In these two films Sirk
provides an extremely rare epitaph, an insight into men as victims of
 Notes on Sirk and Melodrama 41

patriarchal society. He shows castration anxiety, not (as is common)

personified by a vengeful woman but presented dreadfully and without
mediation. In dealing with the male unconscious Sirk approaches
complexity near to the tragic. His Universal movies deal more specifically
with women, and work more dearly within melodramatic conventions.
Significantly, discussions of the difference between melodrama and
tragedy specify that while the tragic hero is conscious of his fate and
torn between conflicting forces, characters caught in the world of
melodrama are not allowed transcendent awareness or knowledge.

In tragedy, the conflict is within man; in melodrama, it is between

men, or between men and things. Tragedy is concerned with the
nature of man, melodrama with the habits of men (and things). A
habit normally reflects part of nature, and that part functions as if it
were the whole. In melodrama we accept the part for the whole; this
is a convention of the form. 3

Melodramatic characters act out contradiction to varying degrees and

gradually face impossible resolutions and probable defeats. However,
the implications and poignancy of a particular narrative cannot be
evoked wholly by limited characters with restricted dramatic functions -
they do not fully grasp the forces they are up against or their own
instinctive behaviour. It is here that the formal devices of Hollywood
melodrama, as analysed by Thomas Elsaesser, 4 provide a transcendent,
wordless commentary, giving abstract emotion spectacular form, contri-
buting a narrative level that provides the action with a specific coherence.
Mise en scene, rather than the undercutting of the actions and words of
the story level, provides a central point of orientation for the spectator.
Sirk allows a certain interaction between the spectator's reading of
mise en scene, and its presence within the diegesis, as though the
protagonists, from time to time, can read their dramatic situation with a
code similar to that used by the audience. Although this device uses
aesthetics as well as narrative to establish signs for characters on the
screen as for the spectator in the cinema, elements such as lighting or
camera movement still act as a privileged discourse for the spectator.
In the opening scene of All That Heaven Allows, Cary Oane Wyman)
looks at Ron (Rock Hudson) with the first inklings of desire. The emotion
is carried through into the second scene through the presence of the
autumn leaves he has given her, so that we, the spectators, share with
Cary his secret importance. The touch of nature he has left behind
marks the opening seconds of her preparation for what is to prove a
barren evening at the Country Club. The children comment on Cary's
red dress, interpreting it, as we do, as a sign of newly awakened interest
in life and love but mistaking its object as the impotent and decrepit
42 Visual and Other Pleasures

Harvey, her date and their preferred future stepfather. The camera does
not allow the spectator to make the same mistake, establishing in no
uncertain terms the formal detachment with which Cary sees Harvey,
in contrast to the way in which in the previous scene Ron had been
subtly extracted from the background and placed in close face-to-face
with Cary.
Lighting style clearly cannot be recognised within the diegesis, and
in All That Heaven Allows it illustrates the basic emotional division which
the film is actually about: Cary's world is divided between the cold,
hard light (blues and yellows) of loneliness, repression and oppression
and the warmer, softer light (red/orange) of hope, emotional freedom
and sexual satisfaction. In keeping with the pace and emotion generated
by a particular scene, Sirk occasionally changes lighting from one shot
to the next, for instance, in order to use the dramatic potential of an
intricate screen which dominates Cary's confrontation with her son
Ned.
Although it is impossible to better Rainer Werner Fassbinder's plot
synopsis of All That Heaven Allows, 5 it might be useful to bring out some
different emphases. The story-line is extremely simple, if not minimal
(concocted specifically to repeat the success of Magnificent Obsession) 6
and is told strictly from a woman's point of view, both in the sense of
world view (the film is structured around female desires and frustrations)
and point of identification (Cary, a widow with two college-age children
and a standard of life in keeping with her late husband's elevated social
and economic position). The narrative quickly establishes lack (her
world is sexually repressed and obsessed simultaneously, offering only
impotent elderly companionship - Harvey - or exploitative lechery -
Howard). She then discovers love and a potentially physically and
emotionally satisfying country way of life in Ron Kirby, her gardener
(whose resonance shifts from that of the socially unacceptable in the
Country Club world to that of the independent man in harmony with
nature out by the old mill where he grows trees). Cary's transgression
of the class barrier mirrors her more deeply shocking transgression of
sexual taboos in the eyes of her friends and children. Her discovery of
happiness is then reversed as she submits to pressure and gives Ron
up, resulting in a 'ffight into illness'. The doctor puts her on the road to
success through self-knowledge and a happy end, but, by an ironic deus
ex machina in reverse, their gratification is postponed by Ron's accident
(caused by his joy at seeing Cary in the distance). A hidden shadow is
cast implicitly over their perfect, joyful acceptance of love, although as
the shutters are opened in the morning, the cold, hard light of repression
is driven off the screen by the warm light of hope and satisfaction.
Jon Halliday points out the importance of the dichotomy between
contemporary New England society - the setting for the movie - and
 Notes on Sirk and Melodrama 43

'the home of Thoreau and Emerson' as lived by Ron. 'Hudson and his
trees are both America's past and America's ideals. They are ideals
which are now unattainable ... .' 7 The ftlm is thus posited on a
recognised contradiction within the American tradition. The contempor-
ary reality and the ideal can be reconciled only by Cary moving, as it
were, into the dream which, as though to underline its actual ephemeral
nature, is then broken at the end by Ron's accident. How can natural
man and woman re-establish the values of primitive economy and the
division of labour when the man is bedridden and incapable? How can
a mother of grown children overcome the taboo against her continued
sexual activity in 'civilised society', when the object of her desire is
reduced to child-like dependence on her ministrations?
In other films, particularly All I Desire, Imitation of Life and The Tarnished
Angels, Sirk ironises and complicates the theme of the continued sexuality
of mothers. The women perform professionally (from the depths of
Laverne's parachute jump in Tarnished Angels to the heights of Lora's
stardom in Imitation of Life) and attract the gaze of men and the curious
crowd. Their problems are approached with characteristically Sirkian
ambiguity as they try to brazen out their challenge to conformity as best
they can. Cary, on the other hand, has no heroic or exhibitionist
qualities, and the gaze and gossip of the town cause her agonies of
embarrassment. It is only very occasionally that the setting and the
narrative move away from Cary and, when they do, it is significant.
The gaze of Cary's friends at Sara's party is established in a scene before
Cary and Ron arrive. The camera takes in the prurient voyeurism which
turns the sexual association of a middle-aged woman with a younger
man into an act of public indecency (this view is then expressed and
caricatured by Howard's drunken assault on Cary).
Melodrama can be seen as having an ideological function in working
certain contradictions through to the surface and re-presenting them in
an aesthetic form. A simple difference, however, can be made between
the way that irreconcilable social and sexual dilemmas are finally resolved
in, for instance, Home from the Hill, and are not in, for example, All That
Heaven Allows. It is as though the fact of having a female point of
view dominating the narrative produces an excess which precludes
satisfaction. If the melodrama offers a fantasy escape for the identifying
women in the audience, the illusion is so strongly marked by recog-
nisable, real and familiar traps that escape is closer to a day-dream
than to fairy story. Hollywood ftlms made with a female audience in
mind tell a story of contradiction, not of reconciliation. Even if a heroine
resists society's overt pressures, its unconscious laws catch up with her
in the end.
44 Visual and Other Pleasures

Notes

1. Paul Willemen, 'Distanciation and Douglas Sirk', Screen, vol. 12, no. 2. Paul
Willemen, 'Towards an Analysis of the Sirkian System', Screen, vol. 13, no. 4.
Stephen Neale, 'Douglas Sirk', Framework, no. 5.
2. Helen Foley, 'Sex and State in Ancient Greece', Diacritics.
3. R. B. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1968).
4. Thomas Elsaesser, 'Tales of Sound and Fury', Monogram, no. 4.
5. R. W. Fassbinder, 'Six Films by Douglas Sirk', Halliday and Mulvey (eds)
Douglas Sirk, Edinburgh Film Festival Publication (Edinburgh, 1972).
6. Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1971).
7. Ibid.